The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber
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What is the problem with manufacturing in America?
Okay, so we're going to start at the problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but first of all, can you introduce yourself? Can you say your name and what you do?
Who is Destin Sandlin and what is his background?
Yeah, my name is Destin Sandlin. I'm an engineer. I have a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day, but I identify as an engineer, and I don't really like being called a YouTuber. How come? I don't know. I think... When I was in school, people wanted to be, I don't know, engineers, baseball players, pilots. Yes. And there's this new generation of people that want to be YouTubers. Yes. And I feel so sad about that. I really am because... There was this whole generation of, I say generation, it's like little g, there's this whole wave of YouTubers that became YouTubers as a result of they did something before. Like they had a life, they had a job, they had a thing, and this was just, oh, by the way, I'm going to upload this thing.
Yes.
Yeah.
And we are, like, appropriately, the thing that I wanted to talk to you about today mainly is an engineering problem that you were trying to solve. Is it fair to characterize it that way? Absolutely, yes. The engineering problem would be this. Destin and a collaborator would invent something, an innovative new kind of barbecue scrubber.
What innovative grill scrubber is being developed?
They'd take that invention, and instead of doing the normal thing, sending their design to be manufactured outside of America, they'd attempt to make it here with American workers. How hard could that be? I mean, it wasn't an iPhone or a laptop. It was a barbecue scrubber. But Destin, of course, would run into all kinds of interesting problems. And he'd start to understand the deeper reasons why it's so hard these days to build new things in America. Before we get to the interesting problems Destin would encounter, I actually want to start the story before those problems ever existed. I want Destin to tell the story of how he learned to make stuff. What it was like growing up in Morgan County, Alabama, where that just seemed to be what everybody did.
I'm the son of blue collar workers. Both of my parents worked in auto manufacturing. They made rack and pinion gears. And I can remember going to see my mom work and she pushed CV joints into rubber boots at a plant. What's a CV joint? You know, on a wheel, you have a wheel that's touching the asphalt. Yes. But your drive train's way up in the middle of the car. So there's this joint in between the drive train and the wheel that has to transmit that torque and that power down to the wheel. And my mom, she's small, I can remember seeing her pick up these seven-pound huge hunks of metal and push it into this rubber boot. And I remember thinking, my mom does this every day on third shift? This is incredible. And I just had no, you're a kid, you don't know.
Your parents go to work and they come home and you don't realize how many sacrifices they're making. But my mom's hands like literally hurt. She didn't do that all day, every day. That was just, it was so physically taxing. They would only let people do that for a short period of time. But anyway, my parents worked like that. And your feeling as a kid watching her was just like, wow.
Why is it difficult to make products entirely in America?
Oh, I thought, so my parents would come home and their clothes would smell like cutting oil. And it smelled like work. It smelled like this is how you earn a living for your family. And so fast forward, I didn't understand anything that was happening with global politics and economics and all this stuff, but NAFTA happened and CAFTA. Central American Free Trade Agreement. All these things happened slowly and we watched it from afar. And I can remember my parents like, hey, we're shutting the plant down. My mom and dad just barely got out, but they were able to get a retirement from General Motors. So I remember thinking manufacturing is important. People I knew, their parents made stuff. Yeah. And slowly all that went away. and I didn't understand why.
How and why that all went away, that's not actually today's story, but nobody really argues that it did. When Destin was growing up in the 80s, there were about 19 million American manufacturing jobs. Millions of those jobs began evaporating in the 2000s, around when Destin's parents retired. They hit a low of 11 million in 2010. Destin watched that sharp downhill graph in his hometown.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the problem with manufacturing in America?
0:25–0:32
2
Who is Destin Sandlin and what is his background?
0:32–1:54
3
What innovative grill scrubber is being developed?
1:54–3:47
4
Why is it difficult to make products entirely in America?
3:47–10:19
5
How did the pandemic inspire a project for face shields?
10:19–14:03
6
What challenges did Destin face in manufacturing?
14:03–16:44
7
What is the significance of the chain mail grill scrubber?
16:44–20:49
8
How does Destin approach the design process?
20:49–55:49