Who's Even Creating Things Anymore?

When "Made in America" just means uploading a YouTube video

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: here we are now, entertainers.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Nashville Hot Chicken

This week, a buddy of mine put out some new music, and a bunch of loose singles into one EP (with another one coming soon). Luke was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist/pianist of the band I played in for six years in my twenties (Farewell Flight).

We don’t talk so much anymore, just cause of kids and families and distance between Baltimore and Nashville, but I love him all the same. We went through things that most friends will never go through during some of the most formative years of our lives. We slept on strangers’ floors beside each other, ate dumpster pizza together, passed wine from the same bottle, split Camel Blues, took punches to the face, hated each other, loved each other, held each other in the depths of pain and depression, promised we’d never leave each other and then eventually did.

I’m just so happy that he’s making music again because he’s one of my favorite people on earth and I miss him and can’t wait to see him again soon.

And for that, I’m grateful.

Course 2

The Main: American-Made BBQ

This past week, one of my favorite podcasts, Search Engine, aired an episode called “The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber.” The entire hour is dedicated to one man’s search to create a product in America, from American made parts. Start to finish, from metal stamping to screw fabrication to assembly and distribution.

Their product? A grill scrubber, that long-handled brush used to get gunk and grime off a grill grate. On the cleaning end of things, most scrubbers feature straight metal bristles, small sharp things that work well at cleaning a grill until they don’t, sometimes ending up in your food, throats, and insides. To solve this problem, theirs– the Smart Scrubber– would feature a unique chainmail design on the scrubbing head, allowing for all the cleaning and none of the metal ingestion. The whole project is co-piloted by Destin Sandlin, an engineer turned YouTuber, whose Smarter Every Day channel has almost 12 million subscribers.

He figured, as maybe you would, it’s a BBQ scrubber– not an iPhone or Rivian or Garmin GPS watch. How hard could it be to make it in America? Turns out– very. Because everything these days is made overseas. This is no surprise to anyone; we as Westerners love buying stuff. Consumption demands cheaper prices and cheaper prices demand cheaper labor and in the end we get cheaper products and that’s how we ended up in the time of Temu.

For a variety of reasons, manufacturing has receded like a riptide from American shores over the past quarter century. Things are still designed here, dreams are still given the green light, but after that, everything else happens in China, where those dreams will immediately be copied and sold off to the lowest bidder. That’s just how it goes.

But what if you just wanted to make something in America? Not just textiles, but actual manufacturing done with parts. Top to bottom, price be damned, we’re hiring good ol’ American workers and making manufacturing great again? Well, you would be a fool. Your dream would be valid, but the execution would be impossible.

Because we just don’t make things anymore. Physical things, yes. But the act of making, of creating, of building– it’s slowly dying off.

There was a line in the very beginning of that podcast that hooked me right in, mainly because I had been thinking about this exact thing for the past two years.

Sandlin, the aforementioned engineer, said this:

“I identify as an engineer and I don’t really like to be called a YouTuber.” When asked why not, he replied: “When I was in school, people wanted to be engineers, baseball players, pilots. And there’s this new generation that just wants to be YouTubers and I’m so sad about that. There’s this whole wave of YouTubers who became YouTubers as a result of doing something before. They had a life, they had a job and this was just ‘oh by the way, I’m gonna upload this thing.’ It’s kind of flipped on its head and I don’t know if it’s good for society.”

That right there is my Roman Empire. I think about this probably once a day.

When YouTube or even Instagram Reels first started, the content was a mix of comedy, home videos, Homestar Runner clones, and DIY tutorials. Nobody really knew what they were doing besides uploading videos of their hobbies and life and some underground internet culture to YouTube. All those things still exist there, except the entire ecosystem has been highly refined, to where the video productions are smooth and slick and have a certain rhythm to them, punctuated by ads at just the right places. MrBeast, the de facto king of content on the channel, perfected that style over the past decade, to the tune of billions of dollars and nearly 400 million subscribers.

Others, mostly the male teenagers who watched and popularized channels like MrBeast, saw the potential of YouTube and within a period of a few short years, a gold rush was on. Money and fame weren’t beholden to a geographic location like Hollywood. You didn’t need to be a nepo baby to land a starring role or have high SAT scores to attend your choice of college. You didn’t even have to leave your own bedroom, as gamers and Twitch streamers would soon prove.

You just needed a camera and a skill and you were off the races. Today, a YouTuber or influencer is routinely in the top five results of “what do you want to be when you grow up” surveys for boys and girls.

The camera is the easy part, but what about those skills?

When I was growing up in the nineties, it was just assumed that you’d find a skill that would eventually net you a career that could eventually buy a house and a car and support a family. For me, that was obviously through baseball or another sport, as it was with every other kid in America at the time. That, or a marine biologist on account of Free Willy and Voyage of the Mimi.

We all said we wanted to be those things, but we all kind of knew it wasn’t going to happen. My dad worked a union job in a factory his whole life, so I kind of assumed that’s how things would end up. Maybe not in a factory, but a nine to five job of some sort. In the meantime though, I still did things. Skateboarding, fishing, camping, scavenging, an absurd amount of reading and writing, listening to music, playing music, and diving deep into things that interested me. I wasted plenty of time, for sure. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater dominated an entire semester of college and I don’t think I regret it.

Other friends learned instruments, spending hours in their rooms playing guitar. Some worked on cars while others worked on farms. Even our parents worked outside of work. If the lawnmower broke, you found a part and fixed it. If a deck needed to be built, you bought the lumber and hammered some nails. If a fire kept you warm in the winter, you chopped wood.

Now, everything is replaceable or solvable at the touch of a screen. If a coffee maker breaks, you buy a new one. If the TV goes out, you throw it out. Cars are made to crumple, engines are turned into computers. Even if you don’t want to, you have to, because nothing is built to last, most things don’t have spare parts, and the entire repair process is cost prohibitive. Hell, at this point, they actively block you from repairing your possessions. An entire “right to repair” movement started because John Deere firewalled farmers from fixing their own tractors, a totalitarian diktat if there ever was one in the world of agriculture. Electric cars are the future, but are also disappearing the past: you can’t even jump start another person’s car with a modern day hybrid.

Working with hands has gone out of fashion, but we have more free time than ever, so of course we’d take that time to learn new skills. Or not.

Instead, we sit down at the end of the day to watch just one Instagram reel or one YouTube video or one Tiktok dance. Then we’re sucked in. All of it is interesting– kids doing parkour off buildings, fly fishing trout out of a backwoods stream, someone cooking a meal that looks both easy and amazing. It’s all inspiring in the moment, all this entertainment, all these incredible skills shown off in these short bursts of content across these still-new platforms.

Clearly, much time was taken to perfect these skills. Hours upon hours of practice. Weeks and years where nobody saw. All of that is good and great, and I think their skills should be shared with the world, whether that’s juggling skills or trick shots or building Rube Goldberg contraptions. The supply side has been well stocked with experts who have built skills before or without iPhones.

But what about the demand side? Today, the average teenager spends nearly 9 hours a day on their phone. That’s a whole bunch of demand, almost a full-time job of time each week spent observing, but not doing.

Yes, there are still kids out there doing incredible things with their time. Experts and geniuses are being born every day. In certain corners of the world, discipline and mastery still exist. But the pool has shrunk because the world of valuable work has weakened and our attention has been shifted to consuming instead of creating.

We’re taking everything in, but putting nothing out. For a while, this was fine. The skills built in the pre-iPhone era were enough to carry us through the first decade of creator content. But you may have seen the shift in content, starting a few years ago. Skills aren’t rewarded anymore. Long-form videos have been replaced by short bursts of mindless nonsense. Even on YouTube, the cuts are quick and often. Casey Neistat, the godfather of YouTube vlogging, will rarely let a camera shot run past 4 seconds in his videos (though he will sometimes use long shots when needed). Neistat employs cinematic and storytelling techniques that are quite skillful in their presentation, a talent he honed over years of shooting and editing. Now, that formula has been taken and applied and watered down to its most banal levels– shock challenges, gaming streams, and things that my kids find hilarious but are straight-up drivel.

Look, I understand there will always be junk media. Our great-grandparents said the same thing about radio, our grandparents said the same thing about comic books, our parents said the same things about video games. I say the same thing about YouTube and Instagram. But all those other things were sort of self-contained within a designated room in the house, under the covers with a flashlight, or at an arcade at the local mall. They were junk food with borders.

Now, it’s with us at all times. Absolute freedom and absolute bondage all in one. Learning a skill– dedicating time and practice and consistency to something– it isn’t easy. Nobody naturally wants to push past the discomfort and enter into discipline, because discipline requires hard work. It’s why I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon instead of last Tuesday when I should have been writing it. The thing is, before the internet was in our hands, we’d just have to be bored, so we chose to hone a skill. Now, it’s just the default, at all times.

Don’t want to learn that difficult chord progression to master the guitar? Just scroll Instagram and tell yourself you’re being inspired by Chappell Roan performing at a community college in 2019. Don’t want to take a night class on cooking so you can save money and eat healthier? Just turn on one of the 34,000 shows that you have to catch up on, or dive into fan theories on Reddit. Don’t want to write a Substack because only three people read it? Just go prank people and make a YouTube channel.

Go be an influencer, make mediocre but watchable content in 15-second bursts that you know nobody will care about in five years. Anything but the hard work, anything but the 10,000 hours to master a skill.

Don’t get me wrong, those 10,000 hours of work are being put in. For some people, YouTubing is their destiny, what they were put on earth to do, MrBeast being the perfect example. To be truly successful on those platforms, you really need to put in work. Kids are doing that work, but it’s often because it’s the most logical path, what society has said is the most rewarding. They’re learning how to shill themselves for money that will never make them happy, to reward companies that will never care about them, to leave a legacy that nobody will remember.

I’m not even blaming them for it. They’ve been born into a world that shuns creativity, that force feeds them curated content by way of algorithm. They’ve been told that to be a good worker, you must learn to code or do STEM or balance a spreadsheet, not read poetry or write stories or paint what their soul sees or build and fix things with their hands. The human desire to construct and create is there, it always will be, but when the tools that are given are a phone and a camera and the end goal is money, you’re going to end up with a whole generation of YouTuber boys and OnlyFan girls.

That’s what’s being made in America.

As with any gold rush, the streams of content will soon be stripped bare. It’s already reached a saturation point. As someone with a moderate presence on YouTube, I can tell you that the payout structure is becoming more diluted with each passing year. Ennui, especially in young men, is reaching a breaking point. Loneliness is at an all-time high because the cart of convenience has gotten far ahead of the work horse.

I prefer to take an optimistic route in all of this, hoping that the turnaround will come sooner than later. I hope this for myself, as someone who has forgotten what it’s like to be excited about learning something new, to feel work with my hands, to build something to be proud of. I’m tired of taking the easy way out, because endless convenience is just not rewarding.

In the same way, I want my kids to know what it’s like to knead dough, to dig dirt and plant a flower and watch it bloom, to take a block of wood and craft a walking stick or bookshelf or backyard fence from it. I want their favorite reel to be one they shot on film, the notes they write to be handwritten in ink, and their favorite post to be the one they put in the corner of their own kids’ treehouse.

That’s what I hope for anyway. In reality, they’ll probably just make a million dollars by outlasting a thousand other people in a month-long stay in a supermarket.

At least they won’t go hungry.

A house that someone designed once

Course 3

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

This past week was a nice, consistent week. Got a couple strength sessions in at the gym, a few runs, including an uptempo 10-mile long run on a perfect Saturday morning. Also played pick-up basketball for the first time in about 8 years. My body paid for that, because of course I have no chill and can’t get shown up by a bunch of twenty-somethings. That resulted in a big ol’ blister on my foot and some sore muscles, but it was fun to do something a bit different.

Also went to the funeral of my friends’ father, Ace Sarich, who I wrote about in this post. It was good seeing some old friends and hearing all the tales from his life, which was rich and full beyond measure. Almost every story about him involved running, from his time training with Seal Team 2 to finishing the JFK 50 Miler with his daughter (a race which I also signed up for a couple weeks ago). Rest in peace, Ace.

Other things I wrote or edited this week:

• Diadora Gara Carbon 2: Bellisima on Race Day // Shoe Review for Believe in the Run

• Our Insiders’ Guide to the Boston Marathon // Overhauled our guide to the Boston Marathon, lots of good tips in here if you’re running Boston next month

• Altra and And Wander Trail Collab Dials Up the Heat // Latest collab with Altra, this time with Japanese outdoor brand and wander (cue my unending disdain for brands who insist on lowercase lettering for the names, looking at you adidas)

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this week’s episode here.

I also interviewed Dave Dombrow and Kevin Fallon, founders of Speedland, a trail footwear brand. Had a good dive into shoe design and development and how things for work for a small brand getting off the ground. You can listen to that episode here.

Ingredients List

The shelves are bare this week, will be back next week with some of my favorite things! Though I do have to say, this Puma ad for their new Go Wild campaign overlaid with an alt version of Afroman’s “Because I Got High” is some old school creative advertising at it best. We were at Puma HQ a few weeks ago and heard how they had hired him to re-record the song for the campaign, so I was interested to see how it turned out. Turns out, it’s incredible.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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