The Grill Brush That Explains the Whole Broken Economy

They optimized nearly every good thing you ever loved into a worse version of itself, on purpose, and sold it to you as efficiency. A four-dollar grill brush is where I finally saw the whole machine.

I want to start a new series with this one, because it is a different beast from the two I just wrapped. The economic arc (“It Was Never a Dream”) was about how the middle class got dismantled. The cyber arc (“They Didn't Break Signal”) was about how trust gets stolen. This new one, Building Anyway, is about the thing I actually do with my hands when I am not writing: trying to make a real, durable, physical object in a country that has largely forgotten how, and out of a bank account that Chapter 7 emptied.

So this is not a review of a YouTube video. It is one builder taking notes while another builder gets his teeth kicked in by the same machine.

I Don't Have a Hobby. I Have a Thesis on Wheels.

Here is the part that makes this personal instead of theoretical.

We founded 3D Nomadic to design better nomadic habitats on wheels, the way they should have been built all along: with large-format 3D printing, advanced materials, and automotive-grade practices instead of the staple-gun-and-hope construction the RV industry runs on. The current plans for our next build is a full-width XXL flatbed truck camper I have been engineering for six months, is the proof of concept. It is not a conventional RV. That is the entire point.

Why does that industry deserve the shade? Because it is a perfect fossil of the problem. As I told Venture Capital Post last year, the RV business is a roughly 19-billion-dollar industry that pumps out over 300,000 units a year, nearly 90% of them from one corner of northeastern Indiana, and it is still hamstrung by outdated production and a commodity-focused mindset. Standard RVs are not designed or built for full-time living. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on homes on wheels that were never meant to survive the abuse, and then they gut them.

So I did not watch Destin's video as entertainment. I watched it as a guy holding the exact same rope, wondering if it will hold my weight.

Watch the full breakdown: Smarter Every Day, “The PROBLEM with Capitalism”

Four Years to Build a Grill Brush

Sit with that timeline for a second. Four years. For a brush.

The brush itself is genuinely clever: welded stainless steel chainmail over food-grade silicone, so no wire bristles snap off into your dinner. But the story is not the brush. The story is everything that fought him on the way to making it here.

• The knob he was told was American showed up in a box stamped “Made in Costa Rica.” When he went to injection-mold his own, a company called Mantle printed him a tool-steel mold using metal 3D printing, and turned around in about a week what normally takes far longer. Then the little metal insert that threads into that knob turned out to be foreign too, and a US supplier could not tool up for months, so a channel called Titans of CNC bailed him out on a Swiss screw machine until a North Carolina shop could finally make the insert domestically.
• The chainmail he sourced “from India” was really Chinese, drop-shipped and relabeled. He never sold a single scrubber with it. A Canadian company, MailleTec, called out of the blue and became his answer, weaving mesh from US melt wire.

I want to flag the metal-3D-printing bit specifically, because that is my literal world. The future Destin bumped into (print the hard, high-tolerance mold, then run cheap fast parts off it) is the same bet I am making on a much bigger scale. It works. The engineering is not what is broken.

Here is what is broken.

The Word for What's Wrong Is “Enshittification”

Destin, being a gentleman on a family channel, softens the term to “encrappification.” I am not going to. The word is enshittification, it was coined by the writer Cory Doctorow, and it has since been named a word of the year by people who study language for a living. It deserves to be said plainly, because the plain version is the accurate one.

Doctorow's original target was digital platforms, but the shape maps cleanly onto physical goods. It goes like this: a company makes something genuinely good, captures the market, and then the mission quietly flips. Quality stops being the promise and becomes a cost to cut. The product you loved slowly turns into a worse, cheaper, meaner version of itself, priced the same or higher, because at that point you are captured and they no longer have to earn you.

Destin built a little physical toy to show this, a slider he calls a profit prioritization “perambulator,” and the money quote is where the slider bottoms out. There is a zone he calls the profit crotch: the maximum money you can extract right up to the line where you start actively harming people. Push a hair past it, and you pop through the other side.

You do not have to imagine what “through the other side” looks like. You can read the recall notices:

• In early 2026 the CPSC and manufacturers pulled roughly 13.4 million wire-bristle grill brushes off the market: about 3.2 million from Weber and about 10.2 million from Nexgrill, the latter manufactured in China.
• Then in July, another 1.7 million Cuisinart brushes made by Conair.

Roughly 15 million tools, sold cheap for years, that can shed a metal bristle into your food and land you in surgery. That is not a freak defect. That is the predictable output of a product optimized down to the profit crotch and shoved through it, because the disposable version prints money and the people writing the checks do not eat off your grill.

Monopsony: The Word That Should Actually Scare You

Everyone knows monopoly: one seller, no competition, they set the price. Fewer people know its mirror image, and the mirror image is what actually shut Destin down.

Monopsony is one buyer. One dominant customer with so much purchasing power that suppliers have nowhere else to go. There is a single American factory that makes the specific mesh Destin needed, and its most important customer had surged its orders and consumed the factory's entire capacity. So a small American maker trying to do the right thing could not buy American mesh at any price, because one giant had already bought all of it. That is why he ended up ordering from overseas in a panic.

Now, Destin bleeped that buyer's name in the video, and I want to be straight with you: I went looking, and it is not public. I am not going to invent one. Regular readers know my rule from the gas-prices piece: I am not here to allege a villain in a smoke-filled room. I am describing architecture.

And the architecture is the scary part, not the name. When a single buyer can commandeer a nation's entire supply of something, the small, ethical, local producer does not get outcompeted in a fair fight. They get starved out of the raw materials before they ever reach a customer. You do not need a conspiracy for that. You just need consolidation and a purchase order big enough.

The Part That's Actually My Day Job: The Knowledge Chain

Destin got invited to something called the Hill and Valley Forum, a room full of Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley people with real money, and he told them the thing I have been trying to say from my own corner of the world for years.

Automate all you want. Put a robot on every line. But at the end of that robot arm is an end effector, a gripper or a stamping die, and a human being in the tool-and-die trade made that. The robot is downstream of a skill. And here is the move China ran, brilliantly and ruthlessly: it did not just undercut American prices, it undercut the continuation of the skill. Quote a 60,000-dollar die at 15,000 long enough and the American shops that teach the next generation quietly die off. Break the knowledge chain and you win permanently, because the machines are useless without the wizards who program and tool them.

Destin drove it home with something that stuck a knife in me: a man named Roger who appeared in his first manufacturing video died between filming and release, and a chunk of irreplaceable tool-and-die knowledge went with him. His advice to that room of billionaires was blunt. Find the wizard at your company who knows the secret sauce, and give them an apprentice, now.

This is the same lesson from my last two series, except this time it is wearing work boots. In the cyber posts I kept hammering one point: the human is the load-bearing part of every system, the perimeter that actually gets attacked. Here it is not a metaphor. The human who knows how to cut a die is the load-bearing part of American manufacturing, and we are letting that knowledge retire without a successor, because an apprentice is a cost this quarter and the catastrophe of losing the skill lands three quarters from now, on someone else's watch.

And no, before anyone asks: the AI I build with all day cannot yet be the wizard. It can pattern-match a mold beautifully. It cannot hold thirty years of hard-won judgment about how steel actually behaves when you part off through a thread. Automate the arm. Apprentice the human. Do both or you get neither.

This Is Just Leveragism With a Handle

If you have read this blog for the last few weeks, you already feel where this locks in.

I spent most of my career inside the software industry, including years at HCL, selling the model I later named in these pages: the slow conversion of owning into renting. You do not buy the software, you subscribe. You do not own the movie, you license it until the platform yanks it. I have sat in the meetings where lock-in gets called “stickiness.”

Enshittification is that exact engine bolted onto physical goods. On the software side it moves you from ownership to access. On the goods side it moves you from durable to disposable. Same logic underneath: once you are captured, quality is a cost to be trimmed, not a promise to be kept. A grill brush you are quietly expected to replace every single year is a subscription with extra steps and a metal splinter.

My whole SasquatchRV bet, the reprintable and repairable one, is a refusal to be captured. That is not nostalgia. That is a threat model.

The Hopeful Part Is Also the Practical Part

Here is what saves this from being another doom essay, and it comes straight out of Destin's own video.

His business partner John does the money side, and John made a bet that runs exactly opposite to the extraction instinct. Instead of squeezing maximum margin out of each unit, he is choosing to keep the price reasonable, sell more of them, and grow the total profit by growing the area under the curve. Classic, honest profit optimization, with quality and community left intact.

And it is working. Their conversion rate runs around 8%, where a normal product is happy with 3%. Why? Because people are not stumbling onto it. They are going looking for it, because someone they trust told them it was the real thing built to last. Word of mouth is the market quietly rewarding “made right.” That is not charity. That is a business model, and it is proof that the answer to “can you make a quality product in America and still compete” is, unequivocally, yes.

I Refuse to Leave You in the Dark

Same as always, I split this into the structural fixes that actually move the needle and the personal moves that just help you survive the week. Do not confuse the two.

The levee (what we should be demanding):

• Enforce against buyer power, not just seller power. Monopsony should get the same antitrust scrutiny monopoly does. One customer starving a supply chain is a market failure, not a success story.
• Treat manufacturing knowledge as public infrastructure. Fund apprenticeships, not just factories. A subsidized plant with nobody left who can cut the die is a very expensive empty building.
• Right to repair, everywhere. Tractors, phones, cars, and yes, campers. If you bought it, you get to fix it and own it.
• Reward durability over the lowest sticker. Procurement and tax policy should stop punishing the company that builds the thing to last once and rewarding the one that sells it to you five times.

The sandbags (what you can do Monday):

• When you find a maker doing it right, buy it once and tell three people. You are the 8%. Word of mouth is the only marketing extraction cannot buy.
• Buy the durable thing once instead of the disposable thing five times. Cheaper over a decade, and every purchase starves the model that counts on you coming back.
• Spend local where the skill lives: the machinist, the welder, the injection molder, the person who still knows how.
• Learn to make or fix one real thing. A skill is the one asset nobody can meter, subscribe you to, or recall.

Be clear-eyed, though. Apps and habits and clever shopping are sandbags. They help you personally. They do not rebuild the levee. Only organized people do that.

Why I'm Telling You This

I am not a manufacturing economist. I am a broke, fused-spine, late-diagnosed AuDHD guy who sold the software version of this extraction model for a living, and who is now trying to build the physical antidote to it out of recycled plastic, in a country that has half-forgotten how to make things.

That is exactly why Destin's closing line went through me like a bristle through a burger. He set out thinking this was an engineering problem. It is not. It is an ethics problem. Engineering problems get solved by smart people in a garage. Ethics problems only get solved when enough people refuse the default.

So watch the video. Then go build something anyway, and get loud with me.

Sources & Further Reading

• Smarter Every Day: “The PROBLEM with Capitalism” (video), the source for the knob, chainmail, laser, “profit crotch” perambulator, monopsony story, and the tool-and-die knowledge-chain argument from the Hill and Valley Forum.
• Cory Doctorow: originator of the term enshittification. Start with his own writing on the “enshittification” of platforms for the software-side version this post extends to physical goods.
• U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission: the 2026 wire-bristle grill brush recalls, Weber (~3.2M), Nexgrill (~10.2M, made in China), and Conair/Cuisinart (~1.7M).
• Venture Capital Post: “Transforming the Mobile Habitat: 3D Nomadic Offers Personalized Solutions for Mobile Living”, the source for the 3D Nomadic figures and my own quotes on the RV industry.
• Background reading: monopsony (a single dominant buyer setting terms because sellers have no alternative) and its antitrust implications; the companies Destin credits by name in the video, Mantle (metal 3D-printed tooling), MailleTec (Canadian chainmail from US melt wire), and Titans of CNC.

Sourcing note: the grill-brush journey, the “profit crotch” framing, and the knowledge-chain argument all come from Destin's video, in his words, retold in mine. Every hard number (the ~13.4M and ~1.7M recalls, the 3D Nomadic figures) was cross-checked against the CPSC and the VCPost interview before I published. On the bleeped monopsony buyer: Destin censored the name, I could not confirm it from any public source, and I refuse to guess at a real company's identity in print. The mechanism is the point, not the target. Verify anything you plan to repeat.

Connect with Casey

If this resonated, or if there's a topic you want me to take on next, reach out. I read everything.

Casey writes about economic policy, nomadic life, cybersecurity, and navigating the world as a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult. New posts drop on my professional website.