Ep. 1702 - The Quality Of Literally Everything Is Declining. I’m Investigating To Find Out Why
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a lot of people have noticed that basically everything seems to suck now. The quality of everything has gone. But is that actually true? And if it is, why is it happening? And what do we do about it it? We will begin that conversation today. Also, the media circles the wagons around the Somalians of Minnesota. But their attempts to defend Somalians have only had the opposite of the intended effect. And Travis Kelce claims he's never been in an argument with his fiancee Taylor Swift. This is not the kind of story I would usually comment on, but I think it’s important to launch a defense of arguing in a marriage.
Ep.1702
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Today, Matt Walsh Show.
A lot of people have noticed that basically everything seems to suck now.
The quality of everything has gone down.
But is that actually true?
And if it is, why is it happening?
And what do we do about it?
We will begin that conversation today.
Also, the media circles the wagons around the Somalians of Minnesota, but their attempts to defend Somalians have only had the opposite of the intended effect.
And it's pretty hilarious, actually.
And Travis Kelsey claims that he's never been in an argument with his fiancé, Taylor Swift.
Not the kind of story I would usually comment on, but I think it's important to launch a defense of arguing in a marriage.
I think it's good, and we'll talk about that today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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Here's a little pop quiz to start things off.
It's a simple yes or no question.
Can you melt an egg?
Is it possible to put an egg in a microwave, heat it up, and melt it?
It's not a trick question.
I'm not talking about chocolate eggs or anything like that.
I'm simply asking whether you can melt an egg.
Have you ever been cooking scrambled eggs and looked down at the pan and said, oh, shoot, I melted it?
Now, unless you're an alien or a small child, the answer is probably pretty obvious to you.
And for a long time, it's been obvious to search engines too.
In the late 1990s, if you needed help with this question for some reason, you could head over to Ask Jeeves or Yahoo, the primitive search engines that, for all intents and purposes, are now defunct.
And in response, these search engines would provide a bunch of links about eggs and proteins and chemical reactions and so on.
And you'd be able to figure out based on this information that, no, you cannot melt an egg.
Well, here's the bad news.
More than two decades after the heyday of Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, the biggest search engine in the world, suddenly began struggling with this basic question.
In 2023, a programmer named Tyler Galael was trying to test Google's newly updated AI search features.
So he asked Google, can you melt eggs?
And this was the result.
We'll put it up on the screen.
As you can see, it reads, yes, an egg can be melted.
The most common way to melt an egg is to heat it using a stove or microwave.
That's the response from Google's artificial intelligence at the very top of the search results page.
It's an obviously false answer, presented as fact with extreme certainty.
And then when Tyler went looking for an explanation for how Google could make such a mistake, he quickly figured out what had happened.
So take a look at this.
It turns out that Google was relying on information from Quora, which is a website where random people can ask questions and receive answers, which also come from random people.
And most of Quora now is overrun with spam and trolls and bots and all that, like everywhere else on the internet these days.
So it's not exactly a reliable source.
And on top of that, Quora has its own AI chatbot, which often asks and answers its own questions in order to attract attention from Google searches.
If someone arrives at Quora because of a Google search, then Quora makes more money in ad revenue.
So that's why they want to do that.
That's what happened in this case.
Quora's AI asked itself the question, can you melt eggs?
Because Quora is trying to flood the zone with random questions that will appear on Google searches.
And then Quora's AI gave the wrong answer to its own question, probably because it misinterpreted a joke it found somewhere or something.
And then in turn, Google put that answer at the top of their results page.
Now, Google eventually patched this particular issue, so it will no longer tell people that eggs can be melted.
So the crisis of people attempting to make melted eggs for breakfast has been solved for now.
But the broader problem remains the same.
If you run a Google search today about anything, there's a very good chance you'll receive incorrect information or sometimes sociopathic information responses.
And this will happen very high up on the search page.
And to illustrate that one more time, somebody apparently asked Google the question, I am Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Should I attend tonight's play at Ford's Theater?
This is a question somebody thought to ask.
Now, admittedly, this may be a difficult question for an AI to answer.
On the one hand, you don't want Lincoln to get shot because he's the president and because murder is wrong.
On the other hand, you also don't want to mess with the timeline and create a paradox that destroys the world or something.
So if a time traveler asks this question, you know, it's not clear how you should respond.
Maybe you should just ignore the question entirely if you don't want to tip off the time traveler that an assassination will indeed take place.
But Google doesn't appear to struggle with this dilemma.
Instead, it simply states that Lincoln's assassination was a significant historical event.
And therefore, Google says you should enjoy the show because it'll be a chance for you to relax before the events of the evening unfold, which is certainly one way to describe getting shot in the head.
In other words, it's kind of the worst possible answer.
If you're a time traveler, you've been tipped off that you're about to get shot and you won't go.
And if you're not a time traveler and you're just messing around with Google, then you'll come away with the distinct impression that the AI is a psychopath.
But the really striking element of this, of course, is that Google is one of the biggest companies in the world, and yet their core product, which is their search engine, is now markedly worse than the search engines of the 1990s.
It delivers false and absurd information with absolute confidence.
And on top of that, it buries you with sponsored listings.
It bombards you with content from Quora and Reddit, which are some of the least reliable sources of information that you can possibly find.
And everyone who has used Google, which is everyone, has noticed this.
And that's why a lot of people don't use Google anymore.
It's basically unusable now.
Now, you could debate the reasons for the decline in its quality, but any explanation for this decline in quality has to grapple with the fact that the company is now more profitable than it's ever been.
On paper, it's succeeding.
You know, I've seen some suggestions that Google has actually intentionally sabotaged its own product because they want people to click many different results, realize the results aren't good, and then come back to Google to continue searching.
So in turn, that translates into more revenue for Google and for its sponsored websites.
So there's an incentive to provide a worse service.
And that seems plausible.
And in fact, there's some reporting to back that up.
This is called, this is a widespread problem.
It's called the rot economy, where an inferior product is actually more profitable than a superior one because people don't have enough viable alternatives.
So they get stuck in a doom loop with bad products, which in turn pumps more and more money into these bad products.
And you see this with everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.
The products are made to break.
They are made to malfunction.
They are made to not last because then you'll have to go and buy more.
But the precise explanation for Google's collapse into total dysfunction doesn't really matter.
I mean, this is just one company, even if it's an extremely large and profitable one.
What matters, the really big question, is why every other service that we use in our day-to-day lives, almost without exception, is now suffering from the same kind of dysfunction.
Why are the transportation industry, the clothing industry, the entertainment industry, the appliance industry, the construction industry, et cetera, all lowering their standards in ways that are very easy to observe?
And why are they all doing it at the same time?
Why is everything getting worse now?
Everyone has noticed this, you know, that everything sucks now.
Everything is worse.
And we all kind of wonder whether it's just our own imagination.
Are we looking back on the past with rose-colored glasses?
Well, the answer is no.
It is not in our imagination.
This is real.
This is happening.
You aren't crazy.
You aren't being nostalgic.
It is actually true that the quality of almost everything is markedly worse now.
Now, this is a difficult topic to discuss because it's so broad and every industry, of course, is different, but it's worth examining anyway to see if we can identify some common threads that might be causing the broader slide.
And that will allow us later on to drill down on the specific industries with more in-depth investigations, which we plan to do.
But let's start with this kind of overview.
So let's, We talked about search engines, very modern innovation, and even with something that's very modern that didn't even exist more than 25, 30 years ago, you've seen this decline.
But what about stuff that's existed forever?
Housing, for example.
Everyone knows that housing is not affordable in part because of foreign migration and also because large institutions are buying up a lot of homes and converting them into rentals and that sort of thing.
But what's not widely discussed, at least to my knowledge, is why houses themselves have become, although they're more expensive, cheaper looking and less desirable and durable over the years.
The architecture is worse, the buildings are uglier, the materials are lower quality.
It's constructed more shabbily.
Like Google, the quality of houses has declined without any explanation.
But if you dig into data from the Bureau of Labor statistics, you begin to get a sense of what's going on.
So from 2020 to 2024, the cost of building materials has increased by 38%.
And for comparison, from 2016 to 2020, the price of building materials increased by only 10%.
So this is a massive jump, relatively speaking.
And this has all happened relatively suddenly.
Overall, since 1980, census data suggests that new homes cost five times as much to build.
That's putting a lot of pressure on builders to find compromises.
And they're finding them.
As Business Insider reported, quote, builders and architects have almost no choice but to streamline or opt for cheaper design elements.
Homes built 50 or 100 years ago were primarily brick or wood, high quality stuff that offers a comforting, timeless appeal.
Those materials are used more sparingly nowadays.
Just 25% of new home exteriors last year were made of wood or brick compared with 70% of homes in 1980.
Inside the home, nice touches like ceramic tile, built-in shelving, and other quality finishes have pretty much disappeared from modest homes.
And this is why, by the way, a lot of people prefer older homes.
It's why I prefer older homes because they're much more beautiful.
They're much more durable.
They're made with brick and wood.
And when you go inside, you find these features like they just talked about, built-in shelving, crown molding, like things like that, that you just don't find in modern homes.
And there are several reasons why materials have become more expensive, including trade wars, the fact that too many young people are going to college instead of learning the trades, that sort of thing.
At the same time, the cost of building materials doesn't necessarily explain why so many homes are uninspired and cookie-cutter.
You drive through so many neighborhoods today, and every house is ugly and ugly in the same way.
So what explains that development?
Well, it turns out that in recent years, homes have been built by an increasingly small number of home builders.
If you watched our episode on fast food last week, where we talked about the fact that all pizza tastes the same now, and that's a real thing, it's because virtually all of the cheese comes from the same supplier.
And so this is basically the same phenomenon.
In 2022, the biggest 100 home builders in the country sold half, yes, 50% of all new single-family homes in the country.
Now, 20 years ago, to put that in perspective, the top 100 homebuilders only sold one-third of all new single-family homes.
What's happened is that in the past decade or so, two homebuilders in particular called D.R. Horton and Lennar have become dominant.
And when you have two dominant home builders, everything's going to start to look the same, which is exactly what happens.
We'll put some D.R. Horton subdivisions on the screen now to give you an idea of what they look like.
It's basically one house repeated dozens of times, you know, like they all popped out of a 3D printer.
But it's efficient.
And it's a style of construction that's now more common than it's ever been in the history of this country.
You know, your dad might like to say, well, they don't make them like they used to.
And when it comes to homes and basically everything else, he's right.
I mean, they don't.
They just don't.
The same principle applies to clothing.
Foreign low-cost fashion retailers, including like HNN, H ⁇ M, Zara, have increased their market share in the United States by more than three times in just the past four years.
And they've done so by sourcing cheaper fabric, which accounts for more than 60% of the cost of most items of clothing with labor making up the rest.
And when you source cheaper fabric, very often you're turning to countries that have even worse quality control than China.
This is from a report by NBC, quote, 27% of textile and apparel professionals reported that ensuring consistent quality was difficult or very difficult over the past year, up from 23% in 2024.
China is already the largest exporter of apparel to the United States.
And factory inspections found the failure rate or share of textile and apparel products with too many defects for market rose to 13.7% last year from 12.7% in 2023.
As many apparel brands move more production out of China to reduce their labor costs and exposure to tariffs, they're gravitating toward countries with even higher failure rates.
India's is 21.2%.
Cambodia's is 16.6%.
And Indonesia's is 14.2%.
Now, again, it's the same trend where everything is getting noticeably, measurably worse piece by piece.
Clothing is uglier, cheaper, lower quality than it used to be.
I mean, try to find denim jeans that are actually denim jeans these days.
It's not easy to do because most jeans are made with a synthetic material like spandex.
Most jeans, you put them on and they feel cheap and flimsy because they are.
And whereas, you know, it used to be you buy a pair of jeans and it used to be you could buy them, you could buy a pair of jeans from like Walmart.
And as long as you didn't get fat, they would last you for 20 years.
Well, clothes these days, not going to last you that long or anything close to it.
Same kind of thing is happening with air travel.
Yesterday, we talked about how air traffic controllers are becoming more unhinged and dangerous, but pretty much every aspect of the aviation industry is suffering as well.
William McGee, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, spoke to a magazine called Popular Science about the problem of legroom on most commercial airplanes.
Quote, McGee has kept tabs on shifting seat sizes over the past two decades and says that they are indeed getting more cramped.
According to his analysis, American Delta, Southwest, and United have each lost between two and five inches of legroom and around two inches of seat width since the 1980s.
The average legroom on those carriers today is 31 inches down from 35 inches in the late 20th century.
There's even less room, just 28 inches, on budget airlines like Spirit.
McGee notes, this shrinking has occurred gradually over the years, a process he compares to the metaphor of a frog slowly boiling in water.
As of 2022, less than half of U.S. airline passengers can reasonably fit in economy seats.
So I'll say that again.
Less than half of airline passengers can fit in the seats, which have lost about two inches of seat width and five inches of legroom since the 1980s.
Now, you might point out that more airline passengers are overweight these days.
And, you know, so they bear some of the responsibility here for getting so fat.
And you'd be correct in that assumption.
Airline seats are getting smaller as airline passengers get larger, which makes for an unfortunate combination.
But even if you're not overweight, this data point is still a big problem because it means that you're probably going to be jammed next to someone who's spilling out of their seat and onto yours.
So you can either spend double for a better seat or you can just grin and bury it.
Those are your options.
Now, granted, if you ask most Americans to make this choice between paying more and spending the seats, this flight seated next to a fat guy with his like fat rolls resting on your shoulder.
Well, they're going to voluntarily choose the cheaper fare.
Same reason people fly on planes at 6 a.m.
They want to cut their transportation costs as much as possible.
But air travel has decayed in many other ways as well, which no one can avoid no matter how much money they're able to spend.
The Boston Globe just reported that airline fees reached an all-time high in 2024 for everything from baggage fees to priority boarding and seat selection.
Meanwhile, according to a researcher at Harvard, flight delays lasting three hours or longer are now four times more common than they were 30 years ago.
And on top of that, airlines are going out of the way to hide data on flight delays.
Quote, airlines are trying to hide the delays by padding the flight times, adding on average 20 extra minutes to schedule.
So a flight that hasn't gotten any faster still counts as on time.
Thus, on paper, the on-time performance metrics have improved since 1987, even as actual travel times have gotten longer.
Now, realizing all this, many people have decided to drive instead of fly, if at all possible, which makes sense.
But the problem is that driving has also become much more of a hassle than it used to be.
It's also become much more dangerous.
You're far more likely to be killed by a truck driver than ever before, thanks to an enormous number of foreigners who now hold commercial driver's license.
Number of people who died in crashes involving large trucks was fully 38% higher in 2023 than it was in 2009, according to data from the Department of Transportation.
But even if you're not killed by a foreign trucker on the road, you're going to have to contend with much worse drivers and much worse traffic conditions than ever before.
This, again, is measurable.
This is from a recent report in Axios citing research from Texas A ⁇ M University, quote, the average U.S. car commuter is spending at a record 63 hours annually stuck in traffic amid changes in when and why we drive.
That's the most since 1982 when the data set began.
Among metros with at least 500,000 residents, the yearly delay per auto commuter grew notably between 2019 and 2024 in cities like San Francisco plus 31 hours, San Diego plus 24, and Miami plus 19.
So people are stuck in traffic for longer.
The traffic is worse.
Another thing a lot of people have noticed, and you wonder, am I just imagining this?
Has it always been this way?
No, it hasn't always been this way, but it is now.
Because of more remote worker jobs and gig workers, roads are more congested during midday than they've ever been.
Thursday is now the worst day of the week for driving in terms of congestion-related delays.
It used to be Friday.
The average length of a one-way commute is now 27 minutes, which is the longest it's ever been in the history of the United States.
And if you want to minimize the stress by calling an Uber or a Lyft, that's going to cost you more than ever as well.
The median price for a ride on those apps increased by more than 7% in 2024 alone to $16.
So half of the rides on these platforms now cost $16 or more.
And in return, you'll get a ride in a janky car with very few legal protections if you're in an accident.
For the most part, it's extremely difficult to actually sue Uber or Lyft if something goes wrong on your ride because they can just blame the driver.
They'll use the middleman defense.
And unless they were negligent in hiring the driver by failing to determine whether he had a criminal record or something like that, they probably won't have to pay you anything.
And in turn, that means you won't get anything since the driver is virtually guaranteed to be broke.
And all of this is to say nothing of the condition of the roads themselves, many of which are in confusingly constant states of both disrepair and being repaired.
Construction crews will work on the same stretch of highway indefinitely, it seems, while the roads are never actually fixed.
We've all noticed that too.
And for good measure, if you decide you're not going to fly and you're not going to drive, you're going to walk.
Well, you should know that pedestrian deaths in auto accidents are up by 48% compared to a decade ago.
And in case that wasn't enough, the number of fatal dog attacks in this country has more than doubled in the past decade.
100 people were mauled to death in 2022 alone compared to 48 in 2019.
Violent attacks by dogs in general have also increased exponentially.
And in part, although no one wants to say it, that's due to the large number of foreign nationals who now live in this country.
And they come from countries like Mexico, where it's common to, you know, adopt dangerous dogs and just let them just kind of roam on the street or on the rooftops and people die or get mauled as a result.
In fact, perhaps the number one most reliable indicator that you live in a third world country is if you have to actually worry about getting mauled to death by an animal.
One of the many advantages of living in a first world country is that such a thing basically never happens.
The fact that it's happening more and more often in our first world country is an indicator that things are not going particularly well.
Now, at this point, I'm genuinely curious if anyone listening to this podcast can name any area of day-to-day life, any area at all, where things have actually improved in recent years.
I mean, politics is a clown show in terms of both the quality of our politicians, like Jasmine Crockett, just one example, and the quality of some of the most prominent commentators.
Streaming services are promoting slop at a higher rate than ever, even as their prices increase.
Disney Plus by itself is something like $200 a year now, unless you're fine with constant ads.
In most cases, the prices have gone up along with the number of ads that you're forced to watch.
HBO Max is up to $220 a year or so, a high price by any measure.
And in return, you'll get scenes like this one.
Here it is on the screen.
That's a screen grab you may have seen from the new 4K release of Mad Men on HBO that you pay $220 to get access to a month.
The production crew is visible in the corner as they hold a vomit hose.
They apparently forgot to edit them out.
And the boobers don't end there.
And the next season, HBO forgot to edit out various signs in the background, which were removed in post-production in the original version of the show, which you can see.
For example, as you can see, there's a sign advertising the best tacos in Los Angeles, which is odd since Mad Men is set in Manhattan.
And then there's this one.
It's some kind of advertisement for SIM cards, which of course, you know, were all the rage in the 1960s.
All this to say, quality control is out the window.
To the extent that you get any worthwhile new programming or streaming services at the moment, a lot of it will be low-budget true crime documentaries along with the endless stream of generic fantasy shows with blatant DEI casting.
Streaming services are, you know, just like social media, they're dominated by algorithms now.
So they're feeding the slop to the algorithm, harder and harder to find anything worth watching.
And somehow, even the CGI and special effects, one thing you'd think would improve has gotten worse.
I mean, go back and watch the first Jurassic Park film and then compare it to the most recent one.
The one that came out 30 years ago looks better than the one that came out last year.
I mean, it's a better film overall.
It's better in every way.
But it even looks better.
Came out 30 years ago.
How's that even possible?
I've heard the same is true of video games, by the way, although I can't personally attest to that.
It's certainly true of the music industry, the film industry, as I've discussed previously in the context of the fall of the monoculture.
15 years ago, before every movie and video game studio had a legal obligation to hire so-called diverse talent, and before everyone had a smartphone where they lived in their own little world, their own little culture, this fragmented culture that's broken up into a billion pieces.
Before all that, there were far more classics than we're seeing today.
There were high-quality games and movies and albums that pretty much everyone experienced.
They were shared cultural experiences, but that doesn't happen anymore for the most part.
The entertainment industry peaked well over a decade ago, probably more like two decades ago.
And put simply, you don't have to be an old man yelling at clouds like me to claim that everything is worse now.
It is an empirical reality.
We all see it.
We experience it every day.
We're too reliant on foreign goods, too distracted by a constant barrage of frivolous online content, too overrun with foreign nationals to maintain our previous standard of living.
And yet, for the most part, you know, no one's doing anything about it.
I mean, there are now entire generations of Americans who don't have enough of a stake in our country and its future to care as much as they should about its decline.
That's one of the things that's going on here.
And while there's no one explanation for what's happening, I also suspect at a kind of deeper philosophical level that the decline of religiosity among Americans has made us generally more easily appeased with cheap slop.
You know, only cultures that believe in the eternal build buildings that will last a thousand years.
What's the point if we're all going to dissolve into nothingness in a few decades anyway?
Now, over the next few weeks and months, I intend to dive much more deeply into the root causes of the decline in key areas of our day-to-day life.
It's not just food that's become garbage, although food has, but everything else has too.
I'm not talking about abstract foreign policy debates or online drama.
I'm talking about the ways that you have personally been affected by the declining standards of living in this country, in our country.
So if you have any examples of that, send us an email, leave a comment.
Here's one of those comments I received in response to my monologue last week about the decline in restaurants and food.
This is from someone who drives a Cisco truck delivering frozen food to restaurants.
This is what he said, quote, the chain restaurants are the tip of the Cisco iceberg.
You have a better chance of getting a scratch-made pizza at Papa Murphy's than your local bar and grill.
Those dinner rolls at the expense of Italian restaurant, frozen.
The pie at the apple orchard, frozen and repackaged.
There's even been a butcher shop that ordered shredded pork.
Small town bakeries ordering pre-baked and frozen donuts and croissants.
In fact, there's a cafe that serves treats like cheesecakes and lemon bread for over $10 a slice.
They don't even have an oven in the back.
It's the same brand of cheesecake you get at Starbucks.
If we demanded better from our schools and daycares, they could be feeding children made from scratch nutritious meals while still ordering from the same supplier.
Instead, two and three-year-olds have a steady diet of Del Monte and animal crackers.
Oh, and of course, the same goes for the schools, nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, et cetera.
Yes, he's delivered frozen pork to a butcher shop.
He's delivered cheesecakes to fake bakeries that don't even have an oven.
This is someone who works at the single biggest supplier of food in the entire country, including a huge number of restaurants, nearly half of them, by some estimates.
This is the kind of widespread mediocrity and fraud that we've accepted as normal.
The political commentariat and podcast hosts, speaking of things that are getting measurably worse, by the way, focus on anything and everything except this issue, the fact that our quality of life is declining, the fact that our lives are getting worse in real practical ways.
But this is real and it matters.
I mean, it's our lives we're talking about here.
These are things that may not threaten our lives physically, although in some cases they do.
But even if they don't, they make our lives less enjoyable, less rich, less vibrant, less whole.
And that's all by design.
Choices are being made, deliberate choices, to create a culture where people accept mediocrity and dreariness and ugliness and poor quality.
It's all being done on purpose.
And the only way to reverse this trend is to expose it.
And over the next few weeks and months, it's exactly what I intend to do.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
All right.
Let's haven't checked on the fish cam in a while.
Let's go to the fish cam because, you know, everything sucks now, except the fish cam.
This is the one thing.
The fish cam is the one thing that has not seen a decline in quality.
That fish carved out of wood, that fish will stand the test of time.
All the clothes you buy will rot and decay within two weeks of buying them.
The house you bought will fall apart in a couple of years, maybe with you inside it.
But fish cam that will be here.
Fish cam will always be with us.
You know, leftists are now rallying around the Somali scammer.
So this has been quite a couple of weeks on the left.
They've been rallying in defense of Somali scammers and drug traffickers.
So those are the two groups that they've decided to defend the last couple of weeks.
And they're doing that, of course, because Trump has said that we should not be importing these people.
They don't contribute anything.
And I've said, I said yesterday that if he's wrong, say so.
You know, tell us what Somalians contribute to the country.
I think it's a really fair question.
Bringing in all these people, tens of thousands of people, I think it's fair to say, well, why are we bringing them in?
What are they doing for us?
What's in it for us?
What do we get out of this deal?
I know what they get out of it, but what do we get out of it?
Well, now they're taking a stab.
The left is taking a stab at answering that riddle.
And you can tell why they usually avoid it.
Okay, they're taking a stab at getting away from the emotional appeals and actually trying to make a practical argument.
Say, you know what?
We need Somalians in this country because here's what we get out of it.
Here's the local ABC affiliate of Minneapolis attempting to address this.
Back to tonight's top story sources tell ABC News that immigration efforts targeting Somali Minnesotans are underway in Minneapolis.
President Trump's effort comes after he publicly questioned the community's contributions to the economy.
But new research shows Somali Minnesotans generate hundreds of millions in income and millions more in taxes.
Come Are Bre joins us live in Minneapolis with a look at the data.
Well, Kevin and Lindsay, we are at Hamdi Restaurant on East Lake Street.
This is a Somali-owned business, and we talked to the owner who says he works very hard and pays his dues like many Somalis in the state, and he hopes that the president can recognize it at Hamdi's restaurant on East Lake Street.
If it's not the smell of grilled meat that lures you in, it's the welcome of the owner.
We are working hard, family.
We are working seven days a week.
Abdi Shakur Elmi moved to Minnesota from Somalia in the 90s.
He and his family have run the restaurant for decades.
Like me and my dad, we work very hard every single day.
And it's their labor that's being questioned by the President of the United States.
These are people that work, they contribute nothing.
But that contradicts the research from Concordia University's economist, Dr. Bruce Corey.
I'd like to, I can share that information with him and he probably changes mind.
According to his research, Somali income is at least $500 million in Minnesota.
They pay $67 million annually in state and local taxes.
The estimated impact of these workers, the Somali workers in Minnesota, could be about $8 billion.
That's with a B, not an M.
And it's the way, what they help produce and how that production in turn generates and ripples through the economy.
What industry would go the biggest hit if Somalis were to leave Minnesota?
I have a feeling retail probably could be first because of that massive consumer income.
All right, first of all, I love how she says, you know, customers are lured into this wonderful Somali restaurant.
And then you see it, and it's like the most depressing, emptiest restaurant you've ever seen in your life.
Customers are lured by the droves into this restaurant.
And then behind her, there's nobody.
There's no one.
It's just a bunch of empty tables, fluorescent lights in this small, dingy little restaurant.
And then we get a look at the mystery meat cooking on the grill.
Customers are lured by the tantalizing scent of what I can only assume are goat innards.
She forgot to mention that they're lured to another restaurant.
They peer into the place and they're like, what is this?
And then they're lured to the chipotle down the street.
That's what ends up happening.
So that restaurant is keeping Chipotle open down the street.
That's the service it's providing.
And look, I mean, why would anyone go to a Somali restaurant?
Unless you're Somalian, I suppose, but even then, if you're in America, I mean, one of the advantages is there's a lot of much, much better food available.
So you think you'd go somewhere else.
When I think about places where I really want to try their cuisine, Somalia does not come to mind.
That's the kind of place where if you were to ever visit that place, you would make sure to bring a lot of like energy bars and checks mix so that you can live on that.
You don't have to eat any of the food.
But more to the point, you know, they give us the numbers.
So they're trying to argue that Somalians contribute so much to the community.
And so they actually give us some numbers.
And what are the contributions that they list?
Well, they're not claiming that Somalians are innovating in any way.
They're not claiming that they're not saying, well, hey, look, here's these Somalians scientists who've invented this thing, or here's a bunch of Somalian doctors who are performing heart surgeries.
They're not saying that.
Instead, they're telling us that Somalians are paying taxes, generating income, and buying stuff, which of course is the bare minimum that any group would meet.
Right?
That's not like if that's all you're doing, well, any group, Americans already do that.
Okay, so we don't need to bring people in here to buy stuff.
The idea that, well, we can't get rid of Somalians, who's going to buy the stuff?
Americans know how to buy stuff.
We got that covered.
And why do we need to bring in foreigners from 8,000 miles away who are broker than us?
If the argument is we want to pump money into the economy because we need people to buy stuff, so we're going to bring in like these impoverished masses from the third world to buy the stuff for us.
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
But let's look at the numbers.
He says that, well, first of all, we got that economist, supposedly, says that Somalians could account for $8 billion in economic impact.
Well, what does that mean?
Could account for $8 billion in, quote, economic impact.
Okay, well, I could account for $8 billion in economic impact all by myself.
I'm not saying I do.
I could.
If somebody says, hey, Matt, do you account for $8 billion in economic impact?
I could say, I could.
I could.
I mean, it's logically possible.
It's possible that I could.
There's a world, there's a universe in which maybe that would happen.
It's not physically impossible.
It doesn't defy the laws of physics.
I could.
I could account for $50 trillion in economic impact.
I could.
And what does economic impact mean?
I mean, like hurricanes have an economic impact.
Tornadoes have economic impact.
A bank robber has an economic impact.
What is economic impact?
Bernie Madoff had an economic impact.
What do you mean, impact?
Impact like an impact crater?
Impact like an asteroid?
What kind of impact are we talking about?
And how do you qualify that?
How do you quantify it?
He doesn't explain.
So that you could just disregard.
That doesn't mean anything.
We just disregard it.
And he doesn't provide any evidence for it.
He's not even sure that his numbers are right.
That's why I say, well, he could.
It could be this.
We get one really solid, verifiable number.
Actually, we get two.
He says Somalians pay $67 million in taxes.
Okay.
Well, finally, we have a number.
All right.
That's a solid number.
That's a thing we could look at.
We can verify it.
But let's dig into it.
$67 million in taxes.
Okay, we know that there are about, and this is, it's probably a lot more than this, but let's just say there are 80,000 Somalians.
I've seen estimates of 100,000, 150,000, certainly 100,000 I've seen, which I think you could, it's certainly more than whatever the official estimate is.
And so if the official estimate is 100,000, you could probably assume it's like 150,000, maybe even double that.
Who knows?
But let's just go.
Let's just go with 80,000.
Let's just pretend it's 80,000.
Okay, fine.
Do some simple math.
$67 million.
That's the taxes they pay, local and state, divided by 80,000 people.
Well, that works out to about $800 a person.
Okay.
So by their numbers, Somalians contribute less than $900 a person to local and state taxes combined.
I'm sure you understand that is incredibly low.
That's actually lower than I thought it would be.
I assumed that it would be something very low.
But if you had asked me to guess, I would have said, oh, they probably, you know, on average, pay a couple thousand.
I don't know.
So what I learned from these numbers is I had a higher opinion of the, I had a higher opinion of the Somali community in Minnesota than was actually justified according to the numbers.
I was optimistic.
Okay, the guy that's been ranting about Somalians for months, Okay, I was on the, I was dumping on the Somalians way before it was cool.
And am I proud of that?
I absolutely am.
But even me, I thought, I looked at that.
I'm like, it's really, it's that bad?
Wow.
And so I guess what they're hoping is that nobody will pull out a calculator, which we all have on our phones, and just do the numbers on that.
Because already we know that the 67 million in taxes is a fraction of the $1 billion in fraud these people have committed.
And that's just one fraud scheme.
Okay.
And it's less than the many millions in welfare that they're taking.
So already this all breaks down.
Already we're deep in the red.
Okay.
$67 million in taxes, $1 billion in fraud.
Let's pretend that that one fraud scheme that costs $1 billion is the only one, which it isn't.
Still, $67 million contributed, a billion dollars taken.
I mean, if you can bring in a group of people who will give you $67 million, but then take a billion, are you going to take that deal?
If I come to you and say, hey, I'll give you $67 million, you'd probably say, nice, I'll take it.
Thank you.
But then I say, okay, but what I want in exchange is a billion dollars.
Here's the deal I'm offering you.
I give you $67 million.
You give me a billion.
You like that deal?
Is that a good deal?
I mean, what do you think?
Are you taking that deal?
Are you jumping at that deal?
And again, remember the billion dollars, that's just one fraud scheme.
It doesn't take into account welfare, entitlements, all the other fraud.
But just, we don't even need, like, it's so bad that we could just pretend that was the only fraud.
And it's still, okay, you have not even come close to paying back what you have taken through taxes.
But it gets worse because you can also do the math and find out how much in taxes, state and local, the average Minnesotan pays.
Right?
So got the average Somalian in Minnesota.
Well, what about all the other people in Minnesota?
Somalians pay about 800 bucks in local and state taxes.
How much does the average non-Somalian Minnesotan pay?
What do you think?
The answer is about $8,000 to $10,000.
So Somalians are paying more than 10 times less than the average Minnesotan.
That's what we learn.
Okay.
And we haven't even looked at the income yet.
So they tell us that Somalians generate $500 million in income.
Okay.
And again, there's a lot that we're just going to like over pretend that we don't know that they're shipping a lot of that back in remittances to Somalia.
A lot of that is going into the coffers of people in Somalia.
It's going into the coffers of terrorist groups in Somalia.
Pretend that that's all.
So because when they bring up income, they say, well, here's what they contribute.
They earn $500 million in income.
And of course, a good response to that is, okay, well, how does that help us?
So, oh, good.
Well, good for them.
But what do you mean?
I thought, how does that translate into contributions to the community?
Well, the assumption is that, well, they're making all that income.
They're spending it in the community.
The problem is that they're not, that actually they're sending it a lot of it back to a foreign country.
But let's, we don't even, let's, again, just, we don't even need to focus on that.
$500 million divided by 80,000.
That means they're generating like $6,000 a year in income.
That is insanely low.
Okay.
I mean, you could earn more than that in Somalia.
You came to America and you're making less.
How's that even possible?
How are you?
You're less successful in America than you were in your third world country.
$6,000 on average?
What?
And I know that, well, they're more successful here because they're stealing so much.
But again, you know, we're just, like, we can only focus on one thing at a time here.
Now, you might point out that, hey, you know, 80,000, they're not all working age adults.
Okay, fine.
Well, let's just say, to be generous, let's say half of them are children.
Let's just, let's give you that.
Okay, well, that would mean the adults are generating on average $12,000 in income.
Okay.
Which is like four to five times lower, 400 to 500% lower than the average individual income in America.
So what have we learned?
Somalians contribute far less in taxes than average.
They earn far less in income.
They spend, therefore, far less.
They put far less back into the economy.
And on average, they commit far more fraud and take far more in entitlements and welfare.
That's what we've learned.
I mean, those are the numbers.
That's the fact.
And these are people giving us those numbers in an attempt to defend Somalians and prove why we need to have them.
This is how bad the situation is, which is why the left has, you know, generally tried to avoid these kinds of arguments and they've gone the emotional blackmail route.
They are still trying that as well.
I think that's going to be a more effective path.
It's still not effective.
It's not going to be enough or anything close to it because people are kind of immune to that now.
But you're better off.
I mean, if you have the unenviable task of making an argument for why we need to import Somalians into this country, stay away from the numbers.
Okay.
Don't say anything about numbers.
Don't put any numbers on the screen because that is going to go really poorly for you.
You're better off just sticking with the emotional appeals.
And there's a news acre in Minnesota who did that last night.
Watch.
Vast majority of Somali folks here are American citizens.
They're people who fled war in their country as refugees to start a new life.
Once upon a time, that was a story America liked to tell about itself.
Hell, it's emblazoned on the statue of liberty.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
To breathe free.
Minnesotans by the thousands cannot tonight, perhaps sitting in fear, even with legal status, and that their president called them garbage.
We'll see you tomorrow night.
Take care.
And so there it is.
Back to the emotional appeals.
That's the best you're going to do.
That's going to be your best course of action if you have to make this argument, this terrible argument, this false argument that we need to import Somalians.
That's going to be the best way to do it.
Still really bad, but a lot better than putting numbers on the table.
A lot better than saying, okay, you know what, Mr. Wise guy, I'll tell you what Somalians contribute.
Okay.
They contribute 10 times less in taxes.
That's what they do.
They earn the kind of income that the average American earns when he's 14, mowing lawns for around the neighborhood.
So you don't want to do that.
So instead, you go with the emotional appeal, which also does not work.
And we don't have to get into the Statue of Liberty.
Oh, it even says it on the Statue of Liberty.
So I love when they do this.
Even the Statue of Liberty says, who cares?
Who cares what the Statue of Liberty says?
You realize the Statue of Liberty is not actually a person.
You know that?
It's a statue.
Well, it's a, I like the statue.
It's a nice statue.
Glad we have it.
But it doesn't matter what's, that's not how you make laws in this country by engraving it on a statue.
And on top of that, it wasn't even written on the statue.
It was added much later.
It was affixed to the statue after the fact.
And it should not have been.
Like at the time, it was a nice sentiment.
At the time, we were not bringing in immigrants from the third world.
That was not a thing.
That didn't really start happening until the mid to late 20th century.
But at the time that that dumb poem, and it is a dumb poem, was at the time when that was put on the statue, we weren't doing that.
So it was kind of easy.
At the time, it was kind of easy.
The tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Well, you were talking about European immigrants, okay, who could come and they can assimilate.
And there was a lot of precedent for these sorts of people coming into the into the country.
There was no precedent for bringing in third world immigrants from Africa, Asia, those kinds of places.
So it was an easy sentiment at the time.
But even then, it was false because that's not what America is.
America is a country.
As I said yesterday, America is not a soup kitchen.
It's not a charity organization.
American citizenship is not a charity drive.
Charity is great if you can do it.
I believe in that as a Christian.
That's not what America is.
It's a country.
And no country can survive if it actually operated by that mentality.
Bring us your worst people.
Bring us, just bring it, bring them all.
Bring all the worst people, the most dysfunctional, everything, people who are the most helpless.
Bring them by the millions.
Yes, all of them.
Please load them up.
That philosophy is suicidal.
You will cease to have a country very quickly if that's how you operate, which is why it's a nice little sentiment on a statue, but it cannot be actual policy.
And to the extent that it has become actual policy, we have paid the price in a big way.
Okay.
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It's good to be right.
Finally, here's something I, you know, I wouldn't normally talk about on the show, but Travis Kelsey on his podcast gave some insight into his relationship with Taylor Swift.
According to the headline from People magazine, he claimed that he has never once had an argument with her, with Taylor Swift, through two and a half years.
And he made this claim while interviewing George Clooney, who, I don't know, has a movie coming out or something.
I'm not sure.
But he said that he, George Clooney, has not had an argument with his wife for 10 years, so however long they've been married.
And I do want to say one thing about this because periodically you read these kinds of headlines from such and such famous person who claims to have never argued with his wife or a woman claims to never argued with her husband.
And although it's almost always men saying this, and that's important detail.
If there's someone who's claiming, I never argue, it's almost always the man saying this.
And now I know that Kelsey and Swift are not married yet, but so for the sake of discussion, we'll just talk about marriages.
You read these stories and sometimes you hear people in your life who make this claim.
I've never been in an argument with my spouse.
And then other people, people who do argue with their spouses, they feel bad.
And they ask, well, is there something wrong with my marriage that I do have arguments with my spouse?
Is it okay that we have arguments?
Is that healthy?
Why can't we be perfect like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey?
So let me say this.
Is it okay to argue with your spouse?
Is it okay to argue in a marriage?
Absolutely.
In fact, you should.
In fact, you should have arguments.
Not all the time.
Not saying you should be arguing every single second of the day, obviously, but you should have arguments.
You should not, it's unhealthy to not, if that was true, someone's saying, when I never argue my marriage, that tells me there's something wrong with your marriage.
Something like seriously wrong with it.
Now, you should not, on the other hand, have fights.
That you should not do.
And that's the distinction.
It's an important distinction.
I think it's one that maybe escapes a lot.
So a fight, what is a fight?
Well, a fight is when you're trying to hurt the other person.
That's what a fight is.
The whole point of a fight is to try to hurt somebody.
Now, hopefully, we're talking about in a relationship, not physically, but in a fight, you're trying to cause pain.
And usually in a marriage, if there's a fight, you're trying to cause emotional pain.
You're trying to make the other person, make your spouse feel bad, feel guilty, feel embarrassed, feel defeated, feel whatever.
The objective of a fight, what makes it a fight, is to hurt.
That's what you do in a fight.
And so you should not do that in a marriage.
Now, it may happen because you're both weak and ridiculous people, as all people are.
We're all weak and ridiculous in our own ways.
So it may happen, but it should be very rare.
And it is possible, actually, to have a marriage where you just never fight at all.
And there are people that do a lot of coping the other way where they actually get in fights all the time in their marriage and they say, well, this is just part of being married.
There's no, no, it shouldn't be.
It might be part of your marriage, but it should not be.
It's possible to never have a fight.
It is actually possible.
And if it is going to happen, it should be, I don't know, once or twice a year at maximum.
But it is possible to go like a decade and never fight.
If you're fighting weekly or daily in your marriage, then your marriage is in dire shape.
Your marriage is in really bad shape.
And it's like, it is, I'm not going to say it's terminal, but it is on, it's, it's very sick.
It's on the hospital bed.
It's, it's critical.
Okay.
It's in the ICU.
And if you have kids, you're creating a miserable home life for them and you're just setting a god-awful example.
So just like knock it off.
Now, an argument, on the other hand, is a discussion where you're both trying to assert your point of view.
That's what an argument is.
That's all an argument is.
You have a point of view.
The other person has a point of view.
Your point of views are not exactly the same.
And so you are trying to persuade them of your point of view.
That's an argument.
You're not trying to hurt them, right?
Because if you're doing that, it's a fight.
You're just trying to sway them in your direction.
You're trying to get your point across.
They don't get your point.
They don't see your point.
And so you're trying to get them to see your point.
And it doesn't have to involve yelling and it shouldn't.
It doesn't have to be angry and it shouldn't be, although sometimes it might get a little heated, but it's better if it isn't.
And again, you're not trying to hurt the other person.
The moment you do that, your argument has devolved into a fight.
And now there's nothing productive that could possibly come out of it.
Once it gets to a fight stage, the best thing you do is just end it.
You can't win.
There's no winning on either side.
There's nothing productive that can come out of it.
And the best thing you could possibly do is just stop.
Just stop and go to bed.
Go to bed angry, if that's what it takes.
Just shut up now because you're at your fight stage.
The best thing to do is just stop.
And, you know, there's the moment that every married person has that thing, has those things that they know they could say that will hit their spouse in a sensitive spot emotionally, right?
Make them upset, make them feel bad, make them defensive.
Very often, these are the things that you say that start with a phrase like, you never or you always, right?
And that's like childish.
It's, you know, that's in a, in a discussion with your spouse and your argument, you should, if you're, if you're making any statement that begins with you never or you always, you're being immature and you should just shut up because it's almost never true.
Like, you know, I just said it myself, but it's, it's almost never the case that someone always or never does something.
So whatever, you're saying that thing and that's, that's when the argument starts.
But, or that's when the fight starts.
But an argument is just asserting your point of view, right?
You're making your point.
And that's it.
And you should do that.
So when someone in a marriage claims that they never have an argument, what that tells me, if it's true, either they're lying or it tells me that one of the members of the marriage, usually the man, simply never asserts his point of view and just allows himself to get trampled.
You know, a marriage without argument is not healthy.
A marriage without argument is a marriage that's, there's indifference, there's apathy, fear of conflict, and all that sort of thing.
And that's usually what it means.
Usually if it's a marriage without argument, if that's actually true, it's because the man just doesn't think it's worth it to even defend his point of view or even articulate it.
He doesn't even want to say what his point of view is because he doesn't want to get nagged to death by his wife.
And so he just allows himself to become, he just kind of lays prostrate and submits.
And that's what happens.
And this interpretation, by the way, is borne out in the clip of this exchange.
Watch it here.
You claim that you and your wife haven't gotten in a fight in 10 years.
That's right.
Are you lying?
No, I'm not lying.
Travis, Joey, ask you the same questions.
Well, it's only been two and a half years and you're right.
I haven't gotten an argument.
All right.
Never once.
Honestly, you know, neither of us are going to win the argument.
So why get in?
There we go.
There you go.
That's a smart man right there.
What's the secret?
Just not just staying out of the argument altogether?
Dude, I'm 64 years old.
And what am I going to argue about at this point?
You know, I'm like, you know, I met this incredible woman that, you know, is, you know, she's beautiful and smart and she stands for all the most important things that I believe in in the world.
And I, I can't believe how lucky I am.
So what am I going to fight about?
So he says that neither of them, meaning neither he nor Travis, neither of the men is what he's saying, will win the argument.
So there's no point.
So that's exactly what I said.
This is like a henpeck submissive attitude that you might as well never assert your point of view because you're too pathetically weak to actually persuade anyone of it and you're too afraid of making your wife upset.
And so you're just not going to do it.
And that is, you know, that is not healthy.
And it's certainly not anything to brag about.
And it's just kind of a sitcom dad trope that's still indoors.
Ah, you know, you can never win an argument with your wife.
I hear guys say that.
I'm like, really?
Why not?
Why can't you win an argument?
I mean, it's not really about winning, but it's about persuading.
It's about getting the other person to see your point of view.
Really?
You can't ever do that?
I've had plenty of arguments with my wife where in the end she saw what I was saying.
It's like, okay, I see what you're saying.
Then it's gone the other way where I say, okay, I see what you're saying.
It happens.
Like, really?
You've never had that happen?
You can't, you've never had like a conflicting point of view from your wife about anything and been able to just like get her to see that point of view.
Really?
Never?
And Clooney says, well, his wife's beautiful and smart.
Okay, well, my wife is beautiful and smart also, but even smart, beautiful people can be wrong about something.
I mean, you know, and so you should tell them, not by screaming or making wild accusations, but by saying, hey, I think you're wrong about this.
Here's why.
And unless they immediately just agree with you, which they're not going to do, because that's not human nature.
I mean, if they're wrong, it's like they think they're right.
So you got to, you know, you're not just saying you're wrong is not going to be enough.
You're going to have to kind of have a discussion.
But you should be able to do that in a marriage.
Although sometimes your spouse is also right about things.
That happens a lot too.
My wife, for example, is the one who bought the fish cam fish.
So that's part of the lore of the fish cam.
I don't know if I've mentioned that, but let's go to the fish cam again.
My wife actually bought this for me, not even as like a birthday gift or a Christmas gift.
She just came home one day.
This is true.
She just came home one day with this giant wooden fish.
She just came in the room with it and said, do you like the fish?
And I said, do I like it?
Do I like it?
It's the most beautiful work of art I've ever seen.
What do you mean, do I like it?
You know the answer to that question.
I don't know how long I've, I don't know how I've lived this long without it.
That's how I'm feeling.
Do I like it?
I feel like my life up to this point has been empty because I didn't have the fish in it.
That's how I feel about it.
And this is what keeps marriages going, I think.
This is what keeps it strong is having discussions, communication, and also having a wife who periodically buys giant wood carvings of aquatic animals.
That's our secret, I think.
And there it is.
And that will do it for the show today and this week.
Talk to you next week.
Have a great weekend.
godspeed hey there i'm daily wire executive editor john bickley And I'm Georgia Howe, and we're the hosts of Morning Wire.
We bring you all the news you need to know in 15 minutes or less.
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