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Okay, so here's my theory. The death of the U.S. auto industry was a bigger deal than, I think we realized, maybe a harbinger, hopefully not, but perhaps a harbinger of, like, what happens to the country going forward.

So Detroit dies, and people are like, oh, Detroit's such a mess. My wife is from there, so I've been there a lot.

And, but you never thought, like, that would happen to the rest of the country.

Oh, no, we're going similar ways.

We are. That's exactly right.

Yeah, I live in the greater Toledo area, and that's baby Detroit.

Toledo, exactly, home of champion spark plugs.

Yeah.

Yeah, no longer. So I guess the question is if we want to prevent this from spreading with the cancer that it clearly is, I think it's important to know the cause of it.

So why did the auto industry, which was the most important non-defense industry we had, why did it die?

I would say largely regulation and the nature of trying to find more profit and where you ship things.

It was a lack of pride in having a workforce in the future tomorrow. And those are the two things I would stick with.

Because since, you know, in my opinion, I've been a car guy for a long time. Wait, you didn't mention the unions. Everyone blames the unions for the destruction of Detroit.

I think that's a secondary symptom. I mean, that's a big thing, but I think culturally it has to do more with where we're going on what happened. I mean, the automotive industry right now, if you look at new cars, I don't own a new car. The newest vehicle I own is early 2000s. Really?

The newest. Yeah. And honestly, I've been thinking like that's... And you're a professional car guy

and you have no you... Yeah, no, I work on all my own stuff from exotics to building race cars,

helping students building airplanes to vintage stuff. Like, I know automotive history. And honestly,

kind of the sweet spot for cars to daily drive are the 1980s and 1990s.

What?

We've just gotten worse since then.

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