The PROBLEM with Capitalism - Smarter Every Day 316

Can you manufacture something completely in America? That is still the question.

In the first video on this topic, I explained how we tried to make a simple barbecue grill scrubber completely in America, and depending on who you ask, we either succeeded or we failed miserably. This started off as an engineering challenge for me, because my parents were auto workers, and I wanted to make something in America because that was important to me. But what I learned was way bigger than that. I learned about systemic challenges in our capitalistic system if you have no ethics applied. I learned about things like monopsony, which is a fancy word that we'll go into later. There are systemic level issues in the whole manufacturing thing in America that are important to understand, because if you don't understand them, you will trade short-term gains for long-term freedom and self-reliance. This little project has taught me so much because I thought I was just going to try to flip on some manufacturing capacity here in Alabama, but it's so much bigger than that. It's like kicking a hornet's nest, because now I understand the whole system has a problem, and other people are recognizing that as well.

Today, on Smarter Every Day, we're going to dive into these issues and try to understand more about the importance of self-reliance and manufacturing in your local area. Let's go get smarter every day.

This is my buddy John Youngblood. This product idea was his. My contribution was just wanting to manufacture a thing in America. And when we released this video together after we partnered up, we were overwhelmed with the response. People just wanting to talk about how interesting the project was. Other people who had experienced manufacturing woes and wanted to illustrate their issues. It was a fascinating thing. We even got to kind of look at ourselves from the outside looking in, because PBS NewsHour, that's Paul Solman. He came down to Alabama and made a piece on our little scrubber project, which was really cool to see yourself from the outside perspective. It was pretty fun.

Another thing is a lot of people said, well, did it work? Are you selling a lot of grill scrubbers? And I'll just put it this way, there are enough grill scrubbers out in the wild now that bears are starting to steal them off people's porches. At least we have one video from a guy named Matthew. I'll show you that later. It's a very interesting video.

At the end of that last video, I showed you this, a wire bristle grill brush. And I said this: when they put a sticker on here, it says something like, stop using this if bristles are found on the grill, replace after one year of use recommended. That person is just trying to sell you a grill scrubber. They don't care about you like I care about you. 13.4 million. That is how many wire bristle grill brushes have been recalled since I said that statement in the earlier video. That is a big, big number. And the reason the Consumer Product Safety Commission in America issued these two large recalls is because those bristles can come off on your grill, and then you can put your food on the grill, and then the wire will get stuck to your food. You ingest it, and you have a surgical emergency to get it out. It's a pretty big deal.

But here's the thing. I'm not just interested in talking about this because I want to sell you a grill brush. I do want you to buy a Smarter Scrubber. I'll tell you that at the end of the video. But what I'm really interested in is what are the systemic forces in our economy that makes that the norm? Almost every product I have eventually becomes a crappier version of itself, and I hate that. This is what happens when you push capitalism to the max and you prioritize profits over people. Profit is a very important component to the world economy. And today we're going to talk about the nuance of how that can be used and what happens when you take it too far.

Okay. I was trying to figure out how to explain all the macro issues in this video, and I did the brainstorming thing, but ultimately, I think it makes sense to make this simpler—because if you understand the micro engineering and production issues that we had, you can understand the big problems on the macro scale. So here's how we're going to break this down.

The first part of this video is going to be about the knob. The knob is the part on the back of the Smarter Scrubber right there that holds the head to the handle. We had an issue with that. We're going to talk about that in the first part of the video.

The second part of the video, we're going to look at the chain mail itself. This seems like a pretty simple thing. It is not. We are going to learn all about that.

And the third thing is we are going to look at a laser machine that we made. So, so this little thing right here, this etching on the back of the handle. Let me focus on my hand here. That etching is done with a laser and it's pretty hard to do. We did something really cool that I think you're going to like. So let's go all the way back here and let's start at part one, the knob.

In the last video at the end of the video, a weird thing happened. We got what we were told were American-made knobs to our warehouse, and when we looked at the box, it's right there on the side. It says Made in Costa Rica. Obviously, that does not meet the requirements of this project to make something completely in America. So I knew at that moment in time, at some point in the future, I was going to have to create another mold to injection mold a plastic part.

Okay, real quick, an injection mold is when you take a piece of metal and you cut out a fancy shape in it. That's the shape of the part you want. And you have another piece that has the other side of the part. And you push them together under a lot of force, and you inject molten plastic into that void between the two parts. And then after it solidifies, you pull them apart and you pull out the part you want. Now, this is a really smart way to make a lot of parts very quickly. In the first go-around, it took years for me to to get to the point where I could do that, because I didn't want to do the mold in China. So I knew doing one of these molds in America had to happen, but I needed it to happen really, really fast because we had a ton of back orders. We had sold more scrubbers than we had parts to give to people, so it was critical. Like, this is a really big deal.

So now you may be a person that's heard things like, oh, 3D printing is the future, right? Yeah, we can 3D print anything. Here's the problem though. You can't 3D print parts at scale fast enough. You can't do it. So if you're actually going to make production parts, you really need to be thinking about injection molding. That's just the way it goes.

So when we got to looking at this part from Costa Rica, we're like, all right, well, we're basically going to reverse engineer this thing. It was what's called an insert mold. So it had a metal part that was inserted into the mold. And then the injection molding puts the plastic around that. Now that's a pretty cool way to do it. But the problem with that is it's very difficult because you actually have to insert that part in there when the mold cavity is open. That's hard to do. Labor intensive, all the things.

So when I talked to Ted from the company called Mantle at the end of the last video, I just basically asked him straight up, Ted, will you help us make this knob? I was wondering if you'd be willing to work with me to make another mold using your technology for this knob? That'd be great. We print stuff like that all the time. We can do all types of geometry. That would be a shoe-in for our technology. And we could do it a lot faster than you would normally as well. Will you please help me? I will do my best. I'll do my best. And boy, did he help. He even came up with a good design for the knob. Ted said, instead of having this metal insert that actually gets molded into the part. What if we just make a knob that has a hole in the top, a hex hole? You take this thing right here. You injection mold a plastic part, and then you drop that down in there, and then you push it in place and it clicks in there. That is a genius idea, because we no longer have to drop a metal part in between the mold cavity every time. We can just straight pull an injection mold part and we can. We're off to the races, right? It's great.

One of the reasons that Americans get whipped in the manufacturing game is because we don't have the ability to make injection molds as quickly as the Chinese or some other places, right? Well, Ted, the CEO of Mantle, has a technology that can help change that equation. He has a metal 3D printing technology that will lay down this paste, and then a CNC router kind of thing will come along and it'll burr the outside. And that allows you to hold very tight tolerances on your metal 3D print. They then put it in an oven and they cure it and out pops a metal part that's as hard as tool steel. And that's a really big deal, because now the intricate geometry of the injection mold, you can 3D print it. So that's awesome. You're leveraging the 3D printing software and technology to get you to a metal part that can then get you to plastic injection molding. This is the future.

So Ted agreed. We actually collaborated with Chris Robson, our original injection molder, with some engineers at Mantle. We designed a mold cavity that would fit the need for our part. Then we had that thing made at Mantle, and they shipped it out to us. You still need a tool and die person to make the mold work. Once you have the cavities, but that cavity part is so hard because that's the intricate, very high tolerance geometry. When it arrived here in Alabama, Chris Robson still dressed the mold. You still have to put it in the injection mold assembly. We did that and we were making parts. So whereas the injection mold journey I had to go on to make these parts took years. The, the turnaround time on the knob was just a week. It was awesome.

So Chris Robson was the injection molder that was retiring. We actually ended up buying his injection molding machine so he could go retire. And we are now operating those in-house. We are doing the injection molding now. We're getting more vertically aligned on our supply chain. It sounds like we fixed the knob, right? We did not. It's more complicated than that.

You remember the metal insert I told you about? So the company said, yes, we have these in hand. They're made in America. I was like, great, that's awesome. I need thousands of them. They said, okay, cool. Oh, wait, the ones we have in hand aren't made in America. They're made from overseas. I said, no, sorry. This little insert right here, I have to have one made in America. Can you please tool up and make it? And they said, no, we can't do that for like months. And I was like, are you serious? We have a backorder. We have to make a lot of them now. And so I did what any self-respecting redneck would do. This is a CNC lathe that can make parts like that. So what I did is I sourced some 303 stainless steel hex bar. I got a hex collet that would work on this CNC lathe. And the most important part of this, my buddy Rob, who knows how to program CNC lathes, I got him involved, and we started trying to figure out if we could make these here in my garage. All right. Turns out we can. There it is. What was the cycle time? Two minutes, 11 seconds? Yup. Now you just have to find it. Where is it? The only problem is it's a very long cycle time, and it ends up looking kind of wonky. So instead of having, like, a nice clean shape with all these teeth on it and stuff like that, we get these really weird barbs and edges and it just doesn't work very well. I could have done these OD features as well. I've just got to grind the tool just like groove it. Yeah. When you're parting off through threads, it will actually deform. So you're actually working the thread. Well, you end up pushing the thread down into the hole. I see. So like on this part, the only reason I can screw this bolt all the way through it right now is because I've already run a tap by hand, just back through the hole to get rid of that burr right there, so we can't. So because we have this CNC lathe that only has one side operation basically—so we can automate it. You could automate it. But in order to get it done in one shot, you would have to put like a little ID grooving tool and actually relieve cut the backside of the part before you part it off. You have to go in there and turn around and groove back in the other direction, just enough so that when you're tapping through, you're not. You're tapping in the empty space. And then, of course, you'd have to like, put an air cylinder on something like that and automate pushing it for the bar stop. I at this point realized that I was in over my head, but I still had all these back orders that we wanted to ship out. People wanted their scrubbers. So I called in a favor with another YouTube channel. There's a channel called the Titans of CNC. And what's really cool about the Titans is they are experts at CNC machining. And I heard that they had a special type of machine called a screw machine, sometimes called Swiss machines, and I wanted to go out and see if they would help me. So they decided yes, they would help me get through the gap until I could get the American-made threaded inserts in hand.

Okay, we're in Texas at Titans of CNC, at a thing called Boomtastic, and there's a lot of people lining up to see what's going on. And here's Dave who organized all this for me. What's up, Dave? How you doin’ brother? Thank you. Yeah. Machines you can walk inside of. Oh my gosh. If you saw how I was making stuff. Dude, that's a stock feeder. Oh, this is the nano. Yeah, I've seen this. Are those them? Are you the guy that programmed it? I'm Destin. Yeah. Oh, nice to meet you, dude. What's your what's your time? What's your cycle time? About 40 seconds right now. 40. Yeah. That's good. Trying to get it a little bit quicker. But he only programmed it for like a day or two ago— I mean, come on. Oh yeah, dude, you had no time to do it. Is it doing it right now? So it's going to roll tap it. Okay. So you are doing roll tapping. Is that a conveyor belt? How does the part feed out? Right after this tool it’s going to shoot it out. There it is. That may bet the slowest part about it. Tyson, I'm so proud of you, dude. Thank you. That's so good, dude. Tyson is Titan's son, and he is incredible and incredibly smart. He programmed this machine in a very short amount of time to bail us out here. And they made one in brass here and videoed it so we can see what's going on. So first thing they do is they're parting off the front face of the stock. Then they come in and they drill a hole in the center. And then they deburr that. After that they come back over and they do the outer profile of this. This is incredible. Look at all those tools. Then they come back over and you can see there's another little feature there. Not really sure what that is. Remember, this thing's a hexagon. There's a mill 90 degrees so they can make the hex flats on the side. And then this dynamic handoff to the other chuck or the other spindle is incredible... come back over and they're they're cutting out the backside there and then tapping it. Watch this. Forward spinning, backwards spinning. Isn't that amazing? Anyway, they come back and then they deburr that thread. That's what we couldn't do here. And then after that's done the part's done. They drop it off in this little conveyor belt and it's incredibly awesome. And so as the show is going on, we're just slowly accumulating these threaded inserts. And I took a whole bunch of plastic injection molded parts that we had made out there. And people that went to the show were actually helping us do American manufacturing on the spot. I see what you're doing. You're putting us to work without us knowing. Right. Exactly. Oh, I'm being very clear about what I'm doing. Congratulations, you’re an American Manufacturer! They were inserting the metal threaded insert into the injection molded part, and we had a final knob assembly ready to ship off with every individual scrubber. Big thanks to Titans of CNC. They bailed us out. They totally bailed us out. You kept John from having a heart attack. Thank you guys.

But while that was happening, the company that actually makes that insert in engineering, they tooled up and they really got to where they could produce it fast. And these are in America now. That's right. They're made in North Carolina. North Carolina. Big deal. So now the knob is 100% made in America. And John, what do you say to a person that has a Costa Rican knob that has the zinc coating? This is stainless steel, right? That's right, that's right. So, yeah, if you have the original Costa Rican knob that we thought were from Mississippi, just, uh, we'll sell these at cost. We'll put a link on the website and or a listing with the Smarter Scrubber. Just go to the scrubber page and it'll be right there with it. And you can put one in your cart, check out and we'll ship it to you. So you can have an American knob with a stainless thread insert.

The two things that I learned from trying to make this little knob in America is that, number one, things are changing. Back in the day, we CNC'd this whole mold to make it work. Today you can use metal 3D printing technology to make the mold even faster. And that's awesome. That's a really big deal. Makes your turnaround time on the mold so much quicker. The second thing is: cycle time is everything. If you have metal parts and you're doing CNC, you can do it in your garage, but onesies, twosies, that's not going to do it. You've got to have something that will go fast. And if you do that, you can save time, save money, make more parts. It's a big deal. That cycle time being driven down to as low as you can make it is very important. And that is exactly why 3D printing plastic is not the way, because the cycle times are too high. You want injection molding for the cycle times that are low. You want dedicated CNC setups to make your cycle times low on the metal parts, and again, leverage metal 3D printing technology where you can.

So one addendum to this whole knob section is this project has started to resonate with a lot of people in places I didn't expect. I was invited to a big thing called the Hill and Valley Forum. It's people on Capitol Hill and people in Silicon Valley. They're working together to try to think about the future of manufacturing and just the economic trajectory of America. I actually got to go on stage, and there were a lot of really influential people there with a lot of money. And one of the things I really wanted to tell them is you don't just flip a switch with money and start up the tool and die industry in America again. It's a thing that you have to like, there's a knowledge chain there. This is how I said it. So AI is fantastic, but I have a really weird view that might, you might disagree with me. So you, you automate with robots, right? But at the end of that robot arm to pick up this bottle, you have what you have an end effector that is made by somebody in tool and die. Or if you have a progressive stamp tool, that is a tool and die person, right? So when we made the video about the Smarter Scrubber, between the moment I filmed the video and the moment I released the video, a man named Roger that was in the video died, and with him died. A lot of tool and die knowledge. So the thing that China has done brilliantly is they've undercut the continuation of the tool and die skilled trade in America. They're undercutting the tool. They're saying, hey, yeah, it costs $60,000 to make the tool in America. We'll do it for 15 [thousand]. So if they can break the intellect chain, they beat us. And I think that's brilliant and we're stupid for letting that happen. And so I think, I think if I was your company right now, whatever you do, I would figure out who the wizard is or the person at your company that knows the secret sauce and give them an apprentice and just keep that knowledge continuity going because I think that's very important. AI is great. It's going to change so many things, but ultimately it's going to be stamping and injection molding, and we need to make the tools to do that. And my guess is you don't have somebody in your company that's passing that knowledge on. And if you don't, you need to feel urgency to do that.

It is time to talk about this section, which is the chain mail. Now, the story of this chain mail is fascinating. And just to remind you, in the end of the last video, I tried to buy chain mail supplied from not China. I tried to go to India. The person in India that supplied it to us basically bought it from China and drop shipped it to us and pretended that it was from India. So this is chain mail that we haven't used in any assembly yet. This is from India. Dude, look at that. That's not from India. That's Chinese. Is that Chinese? Long story short, I was lied to. John was lied to. We were irritated by that. I want to make something abundantly clear. We have never sold a grill scrubber with Chinese chain mail on it. When we received that Chinese chain mail from India, we put it in a box and we put it in the corner of the warehouse and we're like, we're not going to sell that. That's against the whole premise of the project. We're trying to make it in America.

So the question is, well, where's our chain mail coming from? So we are the victim of something that I recently learned about. It's a big fancy word. It's called a monopsony. Okay. This is why we are having a hard time sourcing chain mail in America. And I need to explain this because I recently learned about this at the Hill and Valley Forum. I learned a lot of things there. It's kind of like a monopoly, only backwards. A monopoly is there's only one person that can make the thing. A monopsony is there's only one person that buys the thing, and this is what it does. It kind of flips the whole economy on its head. So this is what happened. We wanted to buy chain mail in America. There is one factory in America that makes the specific type of chain mail we want, and that one factory has a contract with [censored]. Okay? They said, well, we have this surge of work from [censored]. Because they are our most important customer. We have this surge of work from [censored]. So we're going to, we're going to do that. We only have enough manufacturing capacity to supply them. Sorry. What do you do if you're in my situation? You panic. That's what you do. That's why we ordered the chain mail from India.

Here's the deal though: we didn't use it. The reason we didn't use it is because immediately after that video dropped, we got a voicemail from a company in Canada. Now, this company has been making chain mail for years, and their story is very interesting. And it involves China as well. Okay, so I'm on a Zoom call with Mason up at MailleTec in Canada. How's it going, Mason? Good. How are you? Doing well, man. It's my understanding that you were working with an American company for many, many years. And then that American company, you were making some chain mail for them for a product, and then that company went to China to increase the profit margin. Is that what happened? Yeah, that's the short of it. And it's certainly accurate. Yeah. We had built up with them from, you know, a couple hundred units a week or a month to thousands and thousands a month, almost 10 [thousand]. And then one day they just decided it was the end of that. They went from ordering full-on to ordering nothing in the space of a couple of days. That's a big deal. That's a huge deal. It was— It was one of the worst days I've had as a business owner, for sure. Followed shortly by laying people off and all of that. We were recovering from that, but we still weren't back to full strength when we were talking to you guys. The way you initially approached this, you said, hey, we can make chain mail from American wire. And that was appealing to us because at the time, we couldn't get chain mail fast enough from the single American source that we had. And so your call was timed perfectly, because it's my understanding not many people can make chain mail, right? Yeah, there's a handful of companies in the world. To the best of my knowledge, there's three in North America and only two that make the size you need. Yeah, exactly.

So John and I made a decision. We said we're going to split up our orders, and we are going to start buying chain mail from Canada. Now is the time when internet commenters will race to the comment section and say, oh, Destin's a hypocrite because he is okay with this chain mail being made in Canada, which is technically North America, but for some reason he's not okay with this knob being made in Costa Rica and Central America, which is also kind of North America, right? What is the difference in these two things? And why am I sleeping well at night knowing I'm doing this? But I didn't sleep well at night knowing that I was doing this. And the answer is, I know the people that are doing this. We've talked. I know the conditions under which they're working. I know they're not being exploited. In fact, I know this is providing for their families and they are not being taken advantage of. I don't know that that's true here. I know that yes, whoever put that insert into that injection molding machine, their families are being provided for, but I don't know they're not being exploited. With every other component of the scrubber, we know the person we got them from, but we don't know that with the knobs. Do we even know the knobs were made in Costa Rica? For all we know, they were made in China and put in a box and labeled Made in Costa Rica to get around some kind of tariff thing. I think one is more sustainable and it's more kind to people. One is just about money and profit. These are two very different things. The reality is, ultimately, I want to manufacture this wire here in Alabama. It's a very hard thing to do. We're still working on beating that and we're involving the Canadians with that because they're the experts. And so any solution we get to here is probably going to involve Mason and the team up there. So to be incredibly clear, we've never sold any chain mail made in China. We are selling 100% US scrubbers made in America. Everything you see here, 100% made in America. The one exception is when we can't get enough chain mail, we have it woven in Canada from US melt wire. So the scrubbers are made in here and we keep the Canadian and the USA chain mail physically separate. These are the Canadian chain mail heads that are already built up and these are the American chain mail heads. So you can see these are USA and these are Canadian.

Okay. It's time to talk about the laser. Okay. This is our warehouse. These are scrubbers that are fully assembled right through these doors in here. You can see they are being assembled right now. Let me just show you that. What's up? Everybody wave. Hello. Making scrubbers. All right, so they're making scrubbers. So what I want to talk about right now is the handle. Now, that stainless steel handle, we get those from TNC Stamping. Okay. You'll remember that from the earlier video. We're using what's called station tooling. We basically cut this piece of metal out of a stainless steel plate. We then stamp it with station tooling. Now we have looked into ways to do what's called a progressive stamp die. But the geometry requirements that we have just don't make that feasible. So we're still using station tooling. And then after that we laze them. Now the laser process has been a whole thing. So we have two locations on the scrubber that we laze. The first one is the handle itself. We put Smarter Scrubber on there. Let me get that lanyard out of the way. We put Smarter Scrubber on there. But we also have this other section here where we do Made in the USA. And this one says chain mail made in Canada from USA wire. If it's a USA chain mail scrubber then we say chain mail USA. But the act of lazing these things on there was a technical challenge. We first started doing it with Chris Robson. He was doing them one at a time and that was great. We were contracting him to do it, but we quickly figured out that that was going to be our bottleneck. So we bought two lasers and we started doing it in-house. We would laze three at a time, one of the scrubber, you know, the handle part. We'd laze that on one machine and we would laze the Made in USA on the other machine. That was great, but it was still our bottleneck. So I asked John, I was like, John, this is my dream. Can we please make a machine, like an automatic machine that will laze this, an automatic laser machine? John, let me do it. He agreed. David Linderman and I started looking at what we could do, and we tried to design a way that we could laze these handles quicker, and we figured out if we bought a 16 position indexing rotary stage, that we could rotate, and we could present three scrubbers at any time to the laser heads. This thing is awesome. The big challenge with how to do this is how do you hold the scrubber so that you could present this to the laser and then present that to the laser. So they're on two different sides of the scrubber head. And mechanically we had to do like mechanical engineering and figure out how to do that. So we ended up making these plastic posts, I call them shuttles. And we figured out a way to lay it out in CAD so that we could hold these scrubbers up and present three handles at any one time to one set— or to one laser head. And then David came up with the idea of cleverly positioning another laser head so that we could hit both sides on one rotation of our laser indexing machine, which is really cool. We then worked with a company called Modern Machine Integrators. A guy named David Bronner took the information that David Linderman and I had figured out, and he made it a reality. But the day this thing rolled into the warehouse was such a big day. Of course, the one piece that I made on this thing is the one we're having problems with right now, the 3D printed shuttle. We've been using this thing for a couple of months now, and it's been a game changer. I want to show you how it works. Hey, Roger's the expert on the laser. Justin runs it sometimes too. You cool with the microphone? Not really. Not really. We're just jealous. I'm going to give him a show. Yeah. How us southern boys talk. So you start off by loading three blanks. So you've got two computers here. This is the machine controller. Yeah, that's the control screen. And this is the laser controller. It's got an auto-cycle. Oh, so once it has three parts present. There are three sensors in here. See, they're red right now. But when you get three parts on there, they turn green. Okay. And that tells the laser table it can spin. But you have to be clear of the light screen too. You have to be behind this. Yes. That's a safety switch. If anything's poked past this point, nothing works. Okay, okay. So you've got a laser for the USA, is it this button right here? Yes. So you have the USA laser, and then you also have the logo laser. Two different computers. Two different computers. You're running two different lasers. Yes. And then when it gets back there and detects that there are three handles back there at the laser, it'll start firing. So I think this next rotation will start firing. Is it firing? It's firing. Okay. We've e-stopped the machine and I'm going to try to put this camera in here so that you can see this laser doing the logo and that laser right there doing the Made in America part. We have this solid aluminum barrier between the operator and both lasers. And the idea there is we don't want laser energy to come out the front side of the machine at all, and everything on the sides is opaque so that the operator's safe at all times. I know this is a pretty simple machine in terms of industrial scale stuff, but it's really cool that we were able to fund the creation of this. And it's a thing that we have now. It's really neat. It's like pushing forward manufacturing. And I like it. It's a simple machine. It's automated, it's really cool, and there's a human operator that loads it and unloads it. Yeah, we could get a robot to do that. With the volumes that we're doing right now, we don't need to do that. So I think it's pretty cool.

Okay. Behind me sits a redneck masterpiece. You're going to love it. A long time ago, I read a book called Seven Eves, and in that book they had this device called the Perambulator. It took a bunch of parameters and it balanced them so a satellite swarm in orbit could be controlled. I'm going to modify the Perambulator a bit for profit prioritization. I think you're really going to enjoy that. But first we need to hone in on what we're trying to do with this video. The whole premise here is, can we make a product in America and be competitive in the market, right? And to do this we've looked at several components of the scrubber here: We looked at the knob, we talked about that. We talked about chain mail. Now, you might give me an asterisk on the chain mail because we're making it in Canada. We're also making it in America. So I would argue we get the check mark here because we know how to make it in America. But we think it's important for there to be two places in North America that the West can make chain mail. So we're choosing to go to Canada. We like working with those guys. Thank you, Canada. The third thing we did is we worked on the laser machine. So these close-up views of these three individual problems gives you an idea of how hard it is to manufacture something in America. But what I want to do now is zoom out, like big picture. I want you to look at the systemic problems that might be happening with capitalism, and we just want to talk about that. So I'm ready to reveal this. Are you excited about this? I am. I love this thing. Voila. The profit perambu— No. The profit prioritization Perambulator, I think that's what I call it. Let's look at this thing and let's just start to play and explore. This thing is really fun. And you'll notice we have a lot of shapes and stuff going on. So let's look down here. This is a star, and the star represents product quality. You have five-star reviews and stuff. So that is a measure of how good the product is. Up here, of course, we have profit, because we are working within the context of capitalism. Profit is not always a bad thing. It gets a bad rap sometimes, but profit is a really good signal that you can use to make decisions in the marketplace. So profit's good. Another thing down here is we have a person. Now this might be a stretch. I thought about making this the worker. I thought about making this the customer. But for now let's just call this societal good. You have a good society and people are happy when that person's happy. You'll also notice that we have this triangle, which is pretty interesting. The triangle represents a business. Everything inside the dotted triangle is a viable business. Everything outside the dotted triangle is a business that has failed. You'll see this green trapezoid here? Now that represents what I would say is like where I grew up. You had a healthy middle class. The middle class existed in a place where the workers were happy, quality was good in general, profits were not out of control. It was a good time. So the green trapezoid represents like a good balance. Let's say it that way. Okay. If we look over here to this side, you can see that we've got these three little squares, quality, profit, people, and we can reprioritize them. And the position of these little things corresponds to where we are on our business graph here, okay? Like we move a thing, this moves. Okay? So let's start. Let's say that I, an engineer—engineers are known to be a little weird. I like making things, right? I like making things from really cool materials. So if I were to run the company, I would say, you know what, John? I think we really need to make this out of a super alloy, niobium or “Fantastalloid”. We need to do something that will never break because I like really high quality stuff. So what I might do if I were in control of things is I might say, you know what? We're going to take the quality of the product and we're going to run it to the max. We're going to run it to the max. And I would immediately run myself out of business because I would not make a profit. Look at this. No profit. The business is outside of the dotted line. We are no longer a viable business. I would do that because I think—I mean, if I could still feed my family. I think super alloys are cool. All right. So let's look at another CEO. This is a second CEO. This person's like the best person to work for in the world. He really likes the fact that you like to fish. And he really wants you to afford that new bass boat. So he pays you a lot of money. He's like, you know what? I really like my buddy here. I want this guy to make a lot of money. So he starts paying you more than you perhaps might need to be paid. And he's like, you know what, I also really want you to compete in that bass tournament. I'm going to let you off at about one o'clock every day. Pretty soon things are out of whack and you are no longer a viable business. He did not take the time to balance things. Of course, these are absurd examples, but you get the idea.

Okay, now we have the third CEO. Now this person is all about the money. This person has started a business that makes a grill scrubber, for example. And he's got a product that's viable. It's a good balance between quality and people, but like it's not making a lot of profit. But then this person that gets in the director's chair says, you know what? We really need to make more money. And the way I think we can do that is instead of using this 304 stainless steel or 303 (or whatever it is)... instead of using that, I think we can use a lower quality alloy that we can source from overseas. And what we'll do is we'll just make our profit go up. And look at that. Our quality went down, went further away from that, but our profit went up. That's good, right? Okay. So we’re— we’re right here in the sweet spot. People still love us. Everything's great. But if you look at this, there's still profit to be had in the system here. Look at this gap here. So what we could do is we've got these workers here. What if we paid the workers less? In fact, let's not even hire permanent workers anymore. Let's hire contract employees, give them no future in the company, just temporary workers. Yeah, let's do that. So let's just push our profits up even higher. Yeah, we can start exploiting people. Look at that. Oh, man. Look. Now our quality and our people, they're meh. But still, look at our profit, man. We are so much—man, this is great. The shareholder value is going through the roof. This is fantastic. But can we do more? Are there more things we can do? I know— Let's just move the whole operation overseas. Let's quit doing this long-term thinking thing. Let's think short-term. And look at that. Oh, man alive. Look at all this profit we have made. We have run right up into a maximum profit business that has what I will call wedged itself up into the profit crotch. This is the most profit you can get out of a company without poking through the other side and ticking people off. And this is why almost every product you have that you've loved has eventually become a crappier version of itself. Because what happens—this was written about by a guy named Cory Doctorow. He has a word that I'm not going to say here, but I'll just call it encrappification. The encrappification of a digital product, in his case, is what he was explaining. But I think it applies to physical products as well. What happens is: at some point you capture the market, and then the game just becomes profit extraction. The motivation changes, and you no longer care about how good the quality of the product is or the people or how it affects your community even. You just want to maximize profit. And that's how you end up making things that hurt people. Or that just aren't good. That's why a lot of times we don't have good options in stores. It's because the minimum viable product that will extract profit from me is produced and put in front of me, and as long as I continue buying it, the cycle continues. But let's say that this Scrooge McDuck of a CEO goes a little too far and says, you know what? There's even more profit to be had here. What if I can make my manufacturing processes even cheaper? I don't even know the glue or how they're melting that in. What if we just don't do quality control or whatever? I don't even know how it happened. Boom. Suddenly you pop right through the profit crotch and you poke out the other side. And congratulations, you just made a grill scrubber that hurts people. And you have to withdraw millions of scrubbers from product shelves because you are hurting people. That is a real thing that happens.

And I want to show you kind of how we started. Let me adjust the Perambulator here. So John and I, when we started doing this scrubber, we kind of started here. We had a super high quality product. It was really good. People really enjoy it. This is where we're at, but we've made process optimization decisions that is now changing the profit game. And so we're looking at this big picture question, right? Let's go talk to John at JJ George, which is where we sell the Smarter Scrubber from. Let's go see what John has to say about the decisions in the near future. Okay. John obviously is the business part of all this. He knows the business side. I just do the engineering stuff— so we can make these things cheaper now. That's right, that's right. That means more profit, right? Yes, yes. And we didn't know that originally when we got into this. We kind of got forced into buying out the injection molding company, but we weren't forced, but our, Chris who had helped us a ton was retiring and we wound up buying his machines and luckily he helped us use his knowledge. But in doing that, we really saved a lot of money that we didn't know we could save. And then so there was that, and then there was the laser machine. And then Destin has an idea to make this laser machine, which I had serious doubts about.

I loved it, man. I was excited about the laser machine. I was like, I don't know, I don't know. And the guys weren't sure about it. And because we're doing them on lasers and they were pretty fast. We just load it. We had a system. And so we get this machine. We didn't know if it was going to work, and we get this thing in here and we're doing them three times as fast. And that is awesome. Yeah. Thank you for letting me do it.

So, so what do you do with the profit— yacht, right? It's yacht time. You're going to buy a yacht for yourself. Well, it's between a yacht or, or we can just make the scrubber cheaper and sell more of them in the long run. And I think, and I think that's also another path to the yacht by staying in business. But, anyway. Yes.

So, so when we look at the long-term, of course, if Destin's making videos, we're going to sell a lot of products, but that's not going to last forever. I can't, I can't make Smarter Every Day the chain mail grill scrubber channel. I just don't want to do that. Right. It's not, yeah, it's not fair. And this is a product that it's a good product. We're going to have it at a good price and we just need to run it like a normal business. We need to pay for advertising and make a quality product at a good price. And I think the rest will take care of itself.

I have noticed that most people come about figuring this thing out because somebody tells them about it. And we can tell too. We can look at the analytics and, you know, a normal product is a 3% conversion rate's pretty good. And the scrubber has run at about 8% over time. So that means 8% of the people coming to the website are buying a scrubber, which is insanely high. But that also means that people are looking for the scrubber. So somebody told them about it and they are coming to look for it when, when they buy it.

Okay, so my model isn't perfect because John explained that our profits were going up even though we didn't sacrifice the quality or our community. In fact, we were able to help somebody retire. But I want to look more closely at what John's doing because this is fascinating. We're getting back into like school microeconomics. And I think it's fascinating. Like, I'm getting to live this. You learn something in school and then you live it. It's very different.

This is the supply and demand curve. And so the supply is here. Okay. So as the price goes up, more people want to produce the thing, right? This is the demand curve. As the price goes down, more people want to buy the thing. The situation we find ourselves in is crazy because these companies literally said, we're going to decrease the supply of grill scrubbers on the market because we're going to recall them. And when we do that, the price goes up. So like the natural price in the market for grill scrubbers went up. But not only that, now more people need grill scrubbers and so that pushes the demand this way. So the price is just going up. So it was here. And like now it's here. That is crazy.

But but what John is saying is opposite to that. So if the market can now bear with a bigger price, and if you haven't priced grill scrubbers in a while, do so. It's going up. John's saying this: He's making a different bet. He's got a different curve in mind. This is the profit optimization curve. Something I didn't know about. But what he's saying is he's saying, okay, well the way this works is there is a price that we were operating at. So we were at a high price here. We were making profit here. Right. But overall, like you could sell more scrubbers at a lower price. And ultimately that will mean a higher profit overall. So you sell more quantity at a lower price, and that means the area under the curve goes up. So this is profit optimization, right? This is doing it right.

The fact that I asked the question, can you make a product in America and be competitive in the market? That is insane. Why was I even to the point where I could ask that question? But I think looking at this now, understanding the types of decisions that John's making now, the answer is unequivocally yes. Like, not only is it a thing that's possible, it's a thing more people should be doing. And the reason we got into this in the first place is if we go back to this thing and we start to look at it and think about it, the natural progression of just extracting as much as you can without regard to quality or your community, the natural progression is to send the means of production somewhere else and basically gut your local community and their ability to produce things. And so I think what I've learned through this whole thing, I wanted to know if I could make something in America because I'm an engineer, and I thought this was a technical problem. It's not a technical problem. This is an ethical problem. If greed takes over and you have people at the top that, I want to use strong language. They're not good people. Ultimately, that trickles down in a way that trickle-down economics that I was promised when I was in school doesn't. You trickle the encrappification down to all of society and it's horrible. So what really needs to change is this short-term thinking where I just gut my local community in the name of profit. We need to change that and start thinking about long-term. What does it look like to have an injection molder in my community? What does it look like to just have a good product on the shelf where I live? That's the kind of thing we need to think about. That long-term thinking looks like it's foolish in the short-term, but it's not. John is thinking about how to make more money, and he's doing it with classical profit optimization economics now, and all we had to do was stop thinking in the short-term.

I feel things about this. I will say this. I ended the last video with a pitch to try to convince people to buy this thing. Now I have data. I understand what people feel when they have one because now we've sold them. So I'll do another pitch, but it's going to be shorter. I'm going to try to tell you why I genuinely think The Smarter Scrubber will be good for your life. But I first want to acknowledge how crazy this story got. The goal was to make something in America. It got much bigger than that. I started to understand why American capitalism does what it does sometimes and pushes the means of production somewhere else. I really enjoyed getting to learn that. And thank you to everybody that bought one after the first video, because you taught me that and it's really fun. So I'm going to try to convince you in two different ways.

First of all, I just want to acknowledge this might be a negative way, but I do want to acknowledge that at the beginning of this video, I told you there were 13.4 million wire bristle grill brushes that had been recalled in America. And if you are using a wire bristle grill brush on your grill, please stop. You don't have to get The Smarter Scrubber. Just don't use these wire bristle grill brushes. Okay. So whether it's like balled up aluminum foil or an onion or a piece of wood, just don't use the wire bristles. Okay. Since I started this video, another 1.7 million wire bristle grill brushes have been recalled. Like I started filming this a month ago and so it's still happening. So you need something else, okay? Do something else.

This is why I want to make the case for The Smarter Scrubber. There's this thing that this guy named C.S. Lewis talks about. He says the place that God wants you— that's just too much. I'll just say it— Okay: the place that a human needs to be is they need to build a cathedral. This is way too much. Look at the cathedral and be like, man, I'm just really glad that cathedral exists. Okay? I don't care that I built it. That's kind of where I'm at with this. I don't care that I made this. What I do care about is that we are injection molding in America, and I care that the, you know, the guys at TNC Stamping are making this handle. I care that somebody in Wisconsin is making that sticker. And I just really care that people are making this chain mail and it's all happening. And my community is getting better for it. Okay. So this helps society. Okay. You have a good option on the market.

Another thing I want to say is that I think this is the highest quality grill scrubber you can buy with money today. I mean that. And I'm not just saying it because I made it. Because people on the internet, in the comments, a lot of people have a problem with the price. And if you look, these are people that haven't purchased it. People that have purchased this thing and they hold it in their hands, they no longer complain about price. They know that this is a medieval weapon, and they can do harm to anybody that would threaten their family if they need to.

Another thing is we've sold a lot of these things now so we know what people think about them. I asked people that had the Smarter Scrubber, like, what do you think about it? And a lot of people sent me some videos and they said different things they like about it. So I live on the Georgia coast and everything down here rusts, but there is no rust on this thing. Up here in British Columbia, Canada. My dad got one. I got one and I got one for my brother. This is how I like to use it. Take the handle off. That can really get into the edges and the grooves really nicely. It doesn't get caught on my back hair. Thanks, Destin, for making this in America. Makes me proud. We have a video of a bear stealing one off of somebody's porch. I think that's awesome. I want to tell you that it's bear proof, but we didn't find it afterwards. So we don't know if it's bear proof. I'm assuming it's bear proof and it smelled good. That's why the bear went for it. One of the things I like about it is that you can take this thing off and you can use it like on your cast iron. Oh, I dropped the American-made knob. You can use this on the cast iron in your sink. You can also spray it off with a water hose. You can clean it with a water hose. You can throw it in the dishwasher. It's a really high quality tool. And I think once you get it in your hands, you're really going to understand it.

Question comes up a lot is can you use it on a hot grill? The silicone is rated at 300 something degrees. So yeah, you can use it on a hot grill. Don't melt it. Like use common sense. Another thing that people said is they said, hey, the grill is flat and that chain mail is flat. And so I can only get the top of the grill. Well, this is my fault. I wasn't clear about this when I explained it earlier. That's why I designed this little radius right here, because you can tilt it up on its edge and you can get in between those grill grates and it works really well. And if you have any of those little burnt danglies off the rails, that's what this front part's for. You rock it up and you can hook underneath there and you can just pop them right off. So this thing will clean your grill. It's very, very sturdy. Like this is stainless steel. The threads are stainless steel. This is not the typical thing you buy in the store. As an American consumer, it's nothing like this. This is built so that hopefully you'll end up giving this to your kids. Okay.

How did I do on the pitch? If you are interested in getting a Smarter Scrubber, you can do that at SmarterScrubber.com. We sell direct to consumer through JJ George. We're shipping all over the world now, so check to see if your country is supported. And we would be grateful if you would consider this. We do not sell on Amazon for reasons we outlined in the first video, just through JJ George. We have inventory. We hope to be able to fulfill this really quick. If we do run out, we'll put on back order on there and we now have the means of production in-house. So hopefully we can get them out to you really, really quick. I am grateful for your consideration, and I'm grateful that you guys are going along on this little ride with us. It's really interesting. Anyway, that's it. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Thank you for considering going to SmarterScrubber.com. Have a good one. Bye.

Okay. And if you look really—[lightning strike] Whoa. Whoa. That hit like outside. Okay. I think we're good. I think we're still going.