Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every Day) just put out a follow-up to his “can you make a grill scrubber entirely in America?” project, and it’s worth your time: Still Trying to Make it in America . It’s a great engineering story, and an unusually honest one about how hard reshoring actually is. What follows isn’t a rebuttal — it’s the two layers I think the video stops just short of.

Destin Sandlin’s second grill-scrubber video is a genuinely good piece of engineering storytelling. He walks through three real manufacturing problems — a knob, chain mail, a laser etcher — and solves each one on camera in America. Then he asks the question the whole project was built around: can you make a product in America and be competitive in the market? His answer is “unequivocally yes.”

I don’t think his own case proves that. It proves something narrower and more interesting, and getting the difference right matters more than the scrubber does.

The number he uses to brag is the number that gives it away

Late in the video, John mentions that a normal e-commerce product converts visitors to buyers at about 3%, and the Smarter Scrubber runs around 8%. He offers this as evidence the product is special. But he immediately explains why the number is high: people aren’t stumbling onto it, they’re arriving already sold. Somebody told them about it, or they watched the video, and they came to the site to buy the thing they’d already decided to buy.

That 8% isn’t a product metric. It’s a platform metric. It’s what happens when your customer acquisition cost is roughly zero because your marketing is a 4-million-subscriber YouTube channel that people watch for fun. The single hardest, most expensive problem in almost every real business — getting a stranger to find out you exist and trust you enough to pay — was solved for him years before the scrubber existed, and solved for free.

Strip that away and the picture changes completely. A normal founder trying to do exactly what Destin did has to buy every one of those customers, can’t charge a story-driven premium because there’s no story wrapped around the product, and can’t run at a loss through years of back orders and iteration. Destin could. He self-financed years of prototyping, bought out a retiring molder’s injection machine, bought two lasers, funded a custom 16-position robotic laser cell, ran a CNC lathe in his garage, and flew to Texas — and he never once tells us what all of that cost. It is comfortably into six figures of capital before you count the years of his own labor. The whole video is an argument that reshoring is viable, delivered by a man who never discloses the size of the subsidy that made his version of it viable.

And some of that subsidy wasn’t even money. When his metal-insert supplier wouldn’t tool up in time, Titans of CNC bailed him out at a live event, for free, as a favor between YouTubers. Mantle collaborated on the mold. Those doors open because of the platform too. A machinist in Ohio with the same problem and no audience gets a quote and a lead time, not a rescue.

So the honest version of his conclusion is: a person with a large pre-sold audience, patient capital, free customer acquisition, and access to favors can manufacture a premium product in America and be competitive. That’s true. It’s also survivorship bias with the survivor doing the narrating. We’re watching the one guy who had every tailwind, and we don’t see the thousand people without a channel who tried the same thing and quietly went under. Starting any business is brutal. Starting one while voluntarily banning yourself from the cheapest inputs on earth is harder still. He absorbed that penalty with an asset almost no one else has.

And then he stops one layer short

Here’s the part that, for a blog like this one, is the real omission. Destin builds a whole toy — the “profit prioritization Perambulator” — to explain why nearly every product you’ve ever loved decays into a crappier version of itself. He borrows Cory Doctorow’s word for it, softens it to “encrappification,” and lands on a diagnosis: short-term thinking, greed, “they’re not good people.” It’s an ethical explanation. Bad actors keep choosing extraction over quality.

But look at what he’s actually describing. This isn’t a few bad apples scattered randomly. It’s a near-universal directional pressure — almost every product drifts the same way, toward extraction, over time. A random distribution of good and bad people doesn’t produce a one-way ratchet. A one-way ratchet is the signature of an incentive gradient, and you have to ask what’s tilting the floor.

The tilt is monetary. Under a currency that loses value every year, time preference is structurally raised for everyone at once. A dollar of profit today is worth measurably more than a dollar five years from now, so the rational move is always to pull profit forward and defer investment — to strip the alloy, skip the QC, offshore the tooling, and not spend three years apprenticing the tool-and-die wizard whose knowledge dies with him (a loss Destin himself mourns, without connecting it to the incentive that caused it). Cheap, abundant credit compounds this: it makes financial engineering — the debt-load-and-extract playbook — more profitable than making good things. Quarterly return pressure on public companies is the same force wearing a suit. “Short-term thinking” isn’t a character flaw people keep freely choosing. It’s the equilibrium behavior that soft money selects for. It is what a rising discount rate looks like at the scale of a whole economy.

Which is exactly why sound money is the actual lever under everything he’s pointing at. When the unit of account holds its value, the penalty on the future disappears, time preference falls, and long-term thinking stops being a luxury and becomes the default rational strategy. You don’t have to moralize businesses into building durable products and training apprentices; you stop punishing them for it. Jeff Booth’s whole argument is that technology is relentlessly deflationary and honest money would let us keep those gains instead of inflating them away — the same mechanism, viewed from the price side.

An engineer already drove this road to the end

Let me put this the way one engineer would say it to another, since I’m one too, and since Destin keeps framing the whole saga as an engineering project that turned into an ethics project. If it’s really an ethics-and-systems problem, the move isn’t to invent a hand-drawn Perambulator from scratch — it’s to go read the engineer who already thought it all the way through. That’s Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller spent his life on Destin’s exact question: how to do more with less, how to design systems that serve people instead of extracting from them. And he didn’t stop at “be less greedy.” He went to the money. His diagnosis was that fiat currency had severed money from real wealth, and that wealth is energy — not gold, not paper, but the actual capacity to do work. In Critical Path he proposed a global energy-accounting system in which costing would be expressed in kilowatt-hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Asked once how you’d end international conflict without violence, he answered that you’d wire the planet into one energy grid, and that our new economic basis wouldn’t be gold or dollars — it would be kilowatt-hours.

That’s the missing half of Destin’s video, delivered by a fellow engineer decades early. Fuller understood that if you want people to stop cheapening the alloy and skipping the QC, you don’t lecture them into virtue — you fix the measuring stick. Tie money to something real and conserved, and the short-term games stop paying.

Fuller never got to build it; the tools didn’t exist yet. They do now. Bitcoin is the first money actually anchored to energy — its proof-of-work spends real-world kilowatt-hours to settle the ledger, and its supply is fixed rather than something a central bank can conjure into existence. It’s the first working version of the thing he was reaching for: money you can’t fake, denominated in work you can’t skip. That is precisely the tool that would hand the machinist in Ohio the patience Destin’s audience handed him for free.

And notice how neatly this closes the loop. How did Destin get to think long-term when everyone else can’t? His platform gave him patient capital and free demand — a private pocket of hard-money-like patience carved out inside a soft-money world. His two blind spots are the same blind spot. He mistook a structural monetary problem for a personal ethical one, and he mistook his own audience-granted immunity from that structure for a strategy anyone could copy.

So here’s my challenge to him, engineer to engineer: you’ve already done the hard part, which is noticing that the system produces bad outcomes even when the people in it aren’t villains. That’s the exact intuition that leads to the root cause. Don’t stop at “encrappification” and “be less greedy” — that’s the symptom. Follow the incentive gradient down one more level, to the money itself, the way you followed the knob down to the tool-and-die knowledge chain. The tools you’d cross-examine here aren’t lathes; they’re arguments. Read Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard) on how sound money lowers time preference, Lyn Alden (Broken Money) on how the plumbing of the monetary system actually works and why it centralizes, and Robert Breedlove’s inverview series with Michael Saylor (MIT engineer) on treating money as an engineering and energy problem rather than a political one. It’s the same investigative instinct that made the scrubber videos great, pointed at the layer underneath all of it.

And if you ever want to talk it through with someone who’s an engineer too and has spent years chasing exactly this thread, I’m genuinely up for it. I think you’d take to this stuff fast — it’s an engineering problem wearing an economics costume.

To be clear, though

None of this is a knock on him for using what he built. He earned that audience over a decade of making excellent, honest videos, and there is nothing illegitimate about deploying an asset you built to do something you believe in. It’s genuinely good that he did it. There is now injection molding happening in Alabama that wasn’t happening before, jobs and knowledge in his community that didn’t exist, and a product that doesn’t send wire bristles into people’s food. He is doing things instead of just talking, and he’ll keep making neat things — that instinct is worth celebrating regardless of the platform question.

The point isn’t that he cheated. It’s that his case can’t carry the weight of the universal claim he hangs on it, and that the real lesson is hiding in the two things he doesn’t say: that his audience quietly subsidized the patience, and that the reason everyone else lacks that patience isn’t a shortage of ethics — it’s the money. Fix the money, and you don’t need four million subscribers to afford the long view.

Links & references

• The video: Smarter Every Day — Still Trying to Make it in America
• Cory Doctorow’s original “enshittification” essay: Tiktok’s enshittification (Pluralistic, Jan 2023)
• The product itself, sold direct through JJ George: SmarterScrubber.com
• Buckminster Fuller’s energy-money argument is laid out in Critical Path (1981) — the “kilowatt-hours as the basis of wealth” idea runs throughout.
• Jeff Booth makes the deflation-alignment case in The Price of Tomorrow (2020).