Catherine Rampell

You know, I get that they don't want to put a target on their back, but the whole point of these industry groups is that they are supposed to represent the collective interest of

of businesses whether in you know a particular sector or like you said you know chamber or business roundtable nationwide and they're supposed to like shield some of the individual companies from from being a target and even they are pretty mum very mum all right last topic last bad sign about the state of affairs and our failing competition against china uh and the way that donald trump's failing our economy the pioneering american maker of roomba

Yeah, I feel like Roomba is a nice, tidy little allegory of how both parties have completely failed business, in particular manufacturers, for that matter.

So Roomba is this sort of iconic American company in that

I think it was the last of the domestically made robot vacuum makers in the United States, which is like a pretty niche thing.

You know, I don't know if it's of strategic.

Yeah.

I just mean, like, I don't know if it's of strategic interest for us to have a U.S.

robot vacuum company.

But apparently politicians have, you know, think otherwise.

They think we should be making everything here, including tube socks.

Yeah.

So this company was started by MIT grads in the 90s.

I believe they had their big hit.

It was robotic experts.

They had their big hit with Roomba.

The company is called iRobot.

They had their big hit with Roomba in the early 2000s.

And there were all of these viral videos of cats and babies riding around on these little robots.

By the 2020s, they were facing more intense competition.