Dixon & Vining Hour 2 (010224)

If you're listening to sports, mixed with pop culture, sprinkled with celebrity interviews, then your earbuds are enjoying the rich eyes and show podcast. None other than Jordan Love of the Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, Chamere Gibbs. It is great to see you, Brian Dawkins. And there he is. Justin Jefferson, Kyle Brant.

Wow, Jody Foster is on the show. I missed that one. To Clarie Starlius in your sandwich. Should I start Craig Jennings? I don't know. These stuff against the Vikings. Let's see. This is what I'm talking about. It's a really cool hang here. The Rich Eizen Show. Follow and listen on your favorite platform. Welcome back to Dixon and Vining. I'm Brian Dawson, CEO of 18-19 news. Hopefully you are unbelievably incredibly amazingly wonderfully and all of those other adjectives and adverbs familiar.

With 1890 news and the great work we're doing over there, if I don't say so myself, but, you know, it's, we are our goal at 1890 news is to inform, investigate, celebrate. We inform the people of Alabama about what's going on in the state and why it matters. We investigate corruption. You may not know this, but Alabama is one of the most politically corrupt states in the nation. So it's a target rich environment.

And we celebrate, we celebrate the things about the state that are good, true and beautiful that often go overlooked by the left leaning media outlets of record in the state. And so, yeah, we're real news, real journalism. We have real reporters that are out there beating the pavement, pressing the flesh, asking real questions of real people about things that really matter. And we're bringing that to you so that you can participate in your civic duties in an informed fashion. And if you like that, if you appreciate that, if you hear our newscasts, you read our news, you get our newsletter, you

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We need citizen supported news, news organizations, media serves that who funds them and we are funded by the people. So we are a news outlet for the people. Please go to 18, 19 news.com and sign up to become a member today. So, all right, enough of all that. Well, hey, let me just add a little bit. Sure. I love, you know, so I put in my plug too. Yeah, 18, 19 has done great, great work in the state. I think it's been a game changer for our state. The kind of things you guys have reported on.

Uh, the honesty and integrity with which you do your journalistic work, which is so often lacking. And you know, as, as you so often point out, I mean, Alabama's got a very conservative culture in many ways, but our politics does not really reflect that. And, uh, I think you guys are trying to close that gap and, uh, bring politics more in alignment with.

what the people of Alabama really want, which we may have a lot of politicians who run on that kind of platform, but then they don't govern that way when we elect them. And I think that is a big problem. And I think you guys have exposed that. You guys have done such great work for our state. Such a huge service. Thank you, Pastor. Well, we can continue to dive into our immigration conversation. I'd really like to continue to drill down into the

What is it about our ruling elite, specifically on the Republican side? I mean, we can sit and make fun of Democrats all day. I think that's another big problem that we have is we're like the Democrats, the Democrats. It's like, yeah, no duh. The Democrats are what they are. Why is it though that when the Republicans get power, I don't know, like why do we have John Thune is our Senate majority leader instead of Rick Scott? Why is it that we have a Republican super majority in the state of Alabama and nothing conservative ever happens unless, you know,

Uh, there's just this huge effort by the people in over 10 years of, you know, saying you want school choice. Finally, they, they cave. Well, no, as a, you know, a Republican super majority state with the most conservative people in the, the nation living here. Um, they should just be doing conservative things without any, you know, any pressure, like instead they're trying to, you know, uh, since this, uh, existing and current, um,

administration uh... if you will the the uh... speaker of the house in the last speaker of the house he had magma cut you down a thing you'll let better uh... they both had the same political consultant who's a guy named steve rayby who's basically a democrat and he's running the speaker of the house's office in a republican super majority state uh... in the things with with that they do with this power is they pushed uh... uh... a gas tax increase

uh... medical marijuana and then repeated pushes huge pushes for gambling this is what republic not exactly the key planks that it's a bit left no no it's not and so this is what you get so i'm really big on criticizing republicans bad republicans more than i am it's like yeah no they want to cut kids generals off obviously bad that doesn't need a lot of talking about obviously bad i guess it makes for good radio uh... but if you really want to get something done we need to clean up our own backyard and so i guess we spent a lot of time doing that in on that note

What is it about specifically neoconservatives that make us think that we can export America to the third world and that we can import the third world to America and it's just going to work fine? Yeah, that's a great question because that has been what America has done now for really a generation. If not more, we have tried to

Uh, export what we have to places that really don't want it or where it really doesn't fit, particularly the Middle East. And we have imported a lot of people who have no intention of assimilating into our culture. And, and it's really important to understand, you know, some, I'm a pastor. I'm interested in what the Bible says. If you go look at what the law of Moses, for example, says,

which I think has a great deal of political wisdom for us even today. It does talk about, has quite a bit to say about immigration. And certainly there was this expectation that Israel as the people of God would be a generous nation and that because their way of life would be so full of wisdom that people would be drawn to and people would want to come live there. But it's really, really clear in the Torah that when immigrants come in, they're expected to assimilate.

And that's just a principle that throughout the history of the world, and even in much of the world today, if you immigrate to a nation, you are expected to assimilate to their way of life. If the host nation has been generous and compassionate enough to allow you in, you've got this obligation to make sure that you fit in in appropriate ways.

We're not having that right now, really, in a lot of ways. So that is an issue. You cannot import people who have no intention of assimilating or may not even be capable of assimilating. That creates all kinds of problems, and we're seeing that.

schools that are overrun with students who don't speak English and teachers don't speak their language. And so what do you think happens in the classroom? Not a whole lot of learning takes place. And the American kids, whose parents are paying taxes to support the school and all that, they're the ones who are most hurt by this. So people will sometimes want to frame this in terms of compassion. But with compassion, you can't get tunnel vision and just lock in on compassion towards say,

the person who's come here from somewhere else, what about compassion for our own people, our own countrymen? If anything, I would say we ought to have, we have to be compassionate towards them and perhaps even a way that outranks the compassion we would have towards somebody who comes from the outside because they are our fellow citizens.

So that's something that's really, really important. I think there's a lot of confusion about these issues. There's a lot of very, very sloppy poor thinking about a lot of these issues. And I think it's important to bring as much clarity as we can. But if you import the third world, you're going to end up with third world problems. You're going to turn your own nation into a third world country.

if you try to export what we have to people who don't want it. So that's kind of been our strategy, import and invade. We import people who will not assimilate. We invade nations and try to do nation building with people who really don't want what we have to offer and don't have the kind of worldview and religious faith that would even sustain it. It's a losing effort in both directions. Yeah. And what I think is interesting is that it comes from this idea that we are a propositional nation. We talked about that.

I have you define what that means, but kind of in simple forms, it's a nation of ideas. Well, historically, nations have always been a people in a place. A certain people group occupying a certain place and their customs and their heritage and their moors and their ways and their language and their God and all of these things they had in common. And they shared a common past that would create a common future based off all of those things I just listed.

Well now it's, well you just gotta believe in freedom. Did you memorize the 50 capitals and say the Statue of Liberty thing? Alright, come on in.

Well, let me go one step further. If America is just a propositional nation, then people could become Americans right where they are. They wouldn't even have to move. Well, we're going to start sending money. They can do that. We probably already are. Yeah. It's probably too late for that. What was President Trump's line? Something like, I hope we don't discover life on other planets because Congress would start sending them money right away. Yeah. So if all America is, if what makes you an American is believing a set of propositions,

and it's not a people in a place, if it's just the propositions, then you don't have to move anywhere to become an American. You can become an American right where you are. But obviously that's not. So I would say it's propositions people in place. It's all three together. America, no question, we have been formed deeply by certain propositions. And as I talked about earlier with fruit that grows on a certain kind of tree, like if you take the basic propositions that you have in the Declaration of Independence, that you have in the US Constitution,

other founding documents that have shaped our history and made us into the people that we are, you find that those statements are deeply rooted in Western civilization, what is also known as Christendom, in this largely Christianized civilization that basically, I mean, all of Western civilization is that way, a very imperfect and yet very real

outgrowth or outworking of the gospel. Jesus told two parables about the kingdom in Matthew 13. One was the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of seeds. But then when it's planted, it grows into the largest of all trees. So he's talking about the, you could say the extensive growth of the kingdom. But then he also talked about how the kingdom of God is like leaven that's worked into a whole batch of dough and transforms it. And that you could say is the intensive growth of the kingdom.

the influence, the transformative power of the kingdom on human life. And yes, everywhere the gospel goes, everywhere where the seed of the gospel of the kingdom is planted, it transforms the culture. It transforms the way people live. It transforms what they value. It transforms the way in which they see and interpret the world and the way they act in the world.

So the kinds of things that we have enjoyed as Americans, we've got to understand these are our roots. This is our heritage. This is where it comes from. So we have certain propositions that have definitely shaped who we are, but you don't have a nation without a people and a place.

And so one thing that I like to point out is that Americans are not just people who are, say, transplanted Europeans. A new kind of civilization, a new kind of nation was formed here. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as an American, and now there is.

And we're very much shaped by the Obviously that heritage that I was just talking about by the place in which we live the opportunities that were here by the story like if you look in American history what it took to basically carve a civilization out of the wilderness You know I like to point out that when those first colonists when those first settlers got here There were no jobs

There was lots of work, but there were no jobs, and so they got to work, and they built a civilization out of the wilderness. When you think about what America was when they first got here and what it is today,

the amount of energy, ingenuity, creativity, incredibly intensive labor, what it took to build this nation and make it what it is, it is just astounding. So yeah, so America shaped by certain propositions, but we're not a propositional nation because there's really no such thing. That would be very, I mean, Gnostic is one word I would

I would use, but you can't really have a nation that's just that's solely built out of propositions. You got to have a people, you got to have a place. Those people have a history. They've got a place that they come to be attached to. There's a kind of kinship bond that we share as Americans. Yep. That's really good. Well, we're going to hit another break. We'll come back and we're going to jump into the H1B

uh... visa conversation that they exploded on twitter over the holidays uh... and uh... a conversation i had with the congressmen not from alabama and talking about immigration and this guy's supposed to be conservative in his statement was who's gonna make the tacos that was his defense of why we need a great anyway now that's a dead serious we're gonna talk about that on the other side of this break well uh... dixon binding will be back all right welcome back to the show everybody

Brian Dawson filling in for Dixon and Vining joined by my co-host for the rest of this morning, Pastor Rich Lusk of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham down off 119. We are continuing to plow into this big immigration conversation. And it is the most time I've ever spent getting to a point because the point I really wanted to talk about was H1B visas and we're now an hour and a half in and I have not gotten there.

But I think it's making for great content. I want to remind you guys, if you want to call in and join the conversation, give us your thoughts on the H1B visa stuff. Why is it that the government, specifically under Democrats, just opens the border? What do you think the motivations are? Do you think it's to gain votes? Do you think it's for cheap labor? Do you think it's to destroy basically our kind of Western European heritage?

kind of white replacement, I guess, is what they would call that. What do you think? What do you think? I'm loved to hear your thoughts, 205-545-9950. Give us a call, tell us what you think. Let us know you're listening. And so yeah, so real quick, between now and the next break, I'm going to tell a story that

It just shows what we're up against from the government doing what it's supposed to be doing. And again, they have so much pressure. And again, it's businesses that put pressure on politicians with money, but it's people who put pressure on politicians for votes. I just did a podcast. You can go to my podcast. If you go to YouTube and just put 18, 19 podcasts, it'll come up. I did a monologue on kind of defining what is populism.

What is the history of populism in Alabama and what about this meteoric rise of populism onto the national stage? Uh, and, um, really kind of break this down that, um, politicians need money to get elected and they use the money that they get elected with to make commercials to reach the people to fool the people into thinking that they care about them and, and that they care about what they care about. Okay. That's that is the ploy here. Okay.

And so again, what happens every four years in Alabama, um, these big corporations in the state find their guy, the them and the lobbying groups that represent them, give that guy's campaign a bunch of money and then he makes a commercial. You've all seen the commercial. Okay. It's the guy has got the shotgun over his shoulder and he's got the church steeple in the back with the John Deere tractor.

He's like, hey, my name's Bill. I love Jesus babies in the Constitution. You're like, man, Bill loves Jesus babies and the Constitution. I'm voting for Bill. Well, then Bill gets down to Montgomery and it turns out he does not love Jesus babies or the Constitution. Um, and, and he, and he, and he, and he votes as though he doesn't. And so, um, point being, this is the game that's played is that, uh, in order to please the people with money, uh, you have to get elected, nor do you get elected. You have to fool the people.

Uh, but then you have people who are true believers that are actually elected, uh, by the people and then serve the people and you see wisdom in that. You see someone like coach Tupperville going in and making the stands that he does. He is a populist nationalist hero. Okay. So the people love him because he serves them, uh, and he does so with courage and he will never ever have to worry about winning an election again.

for the rest of his days because he served the people genuinely. Not just took a bunch of money from corporations to fool them into electing him so that he could go sell them down the river in DC. Anyway, my point in this is when you get, I was with some different people in Congress

Uh, out of thing down in the panhandle of Florida at this nice little resort and a businessman friend of mine who is very concerned about the immigration problem in the state, um, sat down with a couple of these congressmen. One of them, I would say is a good guy. He is a, um, uh, a, a good, uh, populist who loves the people and isn't it for the right reasons. And this other guy, I thought that was the case. And so as we sit down and we're discussing, um, immigration,

the good congressman is is pumping out all these different ideas in this other congressman that i thought was a good guy was like nope that's never gonna work we tried that it's never gonna work it's not it's just all this negativity about like trying to come up with a creative solution uh... to put a stop to this and what was the most bizarre thing to me is that the conversation literally devolved into he said these words i mean if we if if we stop them from coming in i mean who's gonna make the tacos

I mean, the cuisine is so good. I mean, who's going to replace that? And it's like, really? That's, that's the argument. And again, it's, it's not just the tacos. It's who's going to do all these other jobs. Well, last time I checked, America was built by Americans, everything from Hoover dams, which requires high engineering to the labor and everything in between. We did that without the help of

uh... you know mass immigration whether it's you know high-skilled intelligence engineering labor or it's uh... you know whatever so there's my story as you can hear the music coming to a rise it's time to hit another break we're gonna come back and actually dive into the h1b visa thing this is dixon inviting will be back loving the music deejay steve killing it this is the dixon inviting show i am brian dawson filling in uh... with my uh... co-host a steamed co-host pastor rich luske

of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. We are covering all of the things pertaining to immigration. We've waxed philosophical theological, cultural, and all of the above. And I just want to dive into the topic that I've kind of been teasing out for the last hour and a half that I wanted to dive into. And it's this huge conversation that exploded over the holidays on Twitter about the H1B visa program.

What is the H1B visa? I'm not going to sit and pull out all the legal documents that explain this thing and fine tune detail. That's not my, you know, my, um, But what I will do is tell you kind of the effects of it and kind of some personal experience that I've had in my life with it and it's essentially

uh... the the idea the purpose behind the h1 bb said is uh... is that the the the tech billionaires in the tech companies believe that there is uh... extreme uh... engineering uh... talent in some of these uh... other countries be it india or elsewhere where they can go in and find these people who have a culture of uh...

you know, educational rigor that, you know, mixed with probably certain genetic predispositions of the Indian people that make them high caliber engineers. And in order to bring the best and brightest to America so that we can compete in a global market, which again, I will, that's a whole nother derailing thing, we have to get the best and brightest. And that's how it's pitched to us. Guys, if we're going to be a world leader, a leader on the world stage, if we're going to

be a superpower, we have to have the best and brightest. This is America. We're a melting pot, okay? And so we have to bring these people into our nation and basically replace the existing engineers that we have. Well, they're saying, well, there's a deficit of engineers. Well, that's not how the H1B visa program started, okay? Maybe that is the case now and we're going to get into it probably for the next two hours. Talk about this. Why have we gotten into the place where Americans

aren't producing high level engineers anymore. It's, you know, in Vivek, Ramaswami, and others are coming out saying, well, Americans are lazy now. Well, what produced the laziness? Okay. You know, and then furthermore, basically guys I know who are in engineering that maybe could compete at that level.

uh... or those i've talked to that no people in that situation uh... for the last twenty years now you weren't getting a position if you were white you just weren't okay the the dei practices and affirmative action and everything else uh... it was disincentivized and so maybe other people who who have the talents and abilities to do that are incentivized to go in that direction anymore because they know they're not gonna get that job they're gonna pick someone else over them and so now all of a sudden with that culture that we've created in our nation we have uh... a shortage

of high skilled labor at the place of these engineers in these tech companies. And so we have to go into third world countries with these high performing people. And it's like, well, if they have all these high performing people, why are they a third world country? Anywho, that's another story for maybe next hour. But let me tell you a story. Sit down by the campfire. And I'm going to tell you guys a story about Brian Dawson's life. I love Smores. Yes, indeed, in a cigar.

But they don't go together. You have to do one before the other. That's true. That would be bad. So my dad, OK, my dad, my family is from West Monroe, Louisiana in Gloucester, Mississippi is where the Dawson's hail from. My dad grew up in the deep south back when poor people were skinny. He hunted for food. They had a garden. That's how they ate. And again, back when poor people were skinny, think about that. I said something there. We have the fattest poor people I've ever seen just a thought.

Um, but back when poor people were skinny, that's how he grew up. And he was very, um, blue collar, background poor, uh, got into, um, tech engineering, basically, uh, from the floor. And so he was working on the warehouse floor. Uh, you know, the, the companies, Texas instruments and then later Cessna, uh, in Wichita, Kansas, um, saw something in him. And so they made him an engineer. He did not go to college.

But that was how they actually liked to train their engineers back then is these people who worked on the floor and saw these things that showed a propensity to be able to move up. They made them. My dad was an inspection engineer and specifically at Cessna. And he did that was in the engineering inspection engineering field for like 25, 26 years, 20 of which was at Cessna, again, in Wichita.

uh... leading up to two thousand eight he was making a hundred twenty is a guy with no college education is making a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year had unbelievable benefits was going to get the with the watch at thirty years in the pension and all that stuff and as the market crashed in two thousand eight um... they brought in uh... they made a policy that said well no uh... sessna now only uh... has uh... degree engineers we can only have degree engineers

That's really weird, like all these engineers, all these inspection guys that you brought from the floor that you trained that are doing a phenomenal job.

So no, we can only have engineers that have degrees. And so we're going to bring some of those in. OK, who are they? Oh, it's a bunch of people from East India that are working for half as much. And high-skilled labor, unbelievably qualified. These guys that have been doing it for 30 years, not qualified, these guys were bringing in from East India qualified. Did he have to train his replacement? He had to train his freaking replacement. So the unqualified guy had to train the qualified guy on how to take his job.

and they saved a ton of money doing it. And so that's really my challenge and my problem with the H1B visa program is that what it's doing is it's, so in order to pay skilled labor in America, you actually have to pay them. But if you can go get some guy from the Poon job over here and lock him up to where he's working 16 hours a day,

seven days a week, and he doesn't have any other options, and he can't leave to go work at another company because the conditions of his H1B visa state that he has to stay at this company, and if he's not at this company anymore, he has to go back to his country. There's no competing. You don't have to offer him benefits. It's just being not in the Poon job anymore is the benefit, okay? And so you can't tell me

that that doesn't play into it, that you can get employees for cheaper, much cheaper, and work them like rented mules, okay, and then turn around and call Americans fat and lazy, and we're just not producing people. So anyway, I feel like Peter Griffin and Family Guy, and he goes, you know what really grinds my gears? That grinds my gears, Rich. Any thoughts? Yeah, well, so, I mean, I'm...

to get into the details of the H1B1 program would be way outside of my wheelhouse. But... The Bible doesn't talk about it? Well, not directly. It does apply to it for sure. Well, I want to circle back around to that. But I think what you described, and this is kind of the globalization of the workforce. Global homo. I think this is part of a much larger issue.

And there's a lot of ways to describe that larger issue. I'll put it this way. How do you measure the success or the health of a nation? And I think the main way that we have decided to do that is through gross national product. It's economics. It's economics.

And so it's all about the money. This is the financial bottom line. I would want to take a much different way of evaluating the success or health of our nation. I would ask questions like this.

Are your families mostly intact and function? Do you have an economy where a family can be adequately provided for, can live a middle class life on one income? So dad can go out and work and mom can raise the children. We had that for a long time.

all kinds of factors went into losing that. But now that's one thing that a lot of people complain about is that we now live in a two-income economy where you can't make it off just one income. It wasn't that long ago that you could.

And, and, and I think that, that would be a much better way of measuring the success and the health of our nation. Do we have intact families? Do we have, can you live a middle class life and do it on when income where the man and the woman can sort of play their distinctive roles in the life of the family to me? That's far, far, far more important than whether your GDP goes up or down. Yeah. Your GMP goes up or down.

So I think, I think we've allowed the wrong kind of metrics to determine a lot of policy. Yeah. And so I see the H1B1 discussion is way downstream from a lot of other things. Now I can say a few things about that specifically. I think if H1B1 was only used to get very unique and elite talent and bring it here, I think you can make a really good case for it. Now I would still ask the question, hey, you know, we're harming these other nations.

these other nations probably need this talent that we're taking. Think about what the NBA does. I don't really follow the NBA, but I know they've got a lot of foreign players. I don't know exactly what goes into bringing those players over and how that works.

That's what they do because they say, hey, we want to win. And if we can go find a foreign player who's better than anybody else we have, then we'll plug him in and maybe we can win a championship that way. So if you had some really elite engineers, like think about what we did during World War II, where we actually had some of the best German engineers helped us defeat Germany. Some of the very best engineers helped us develop

more sophisticated weaponry, including the nuclear bomb and all of that. We sort of cherry picked those really elite engineers and helped with our space and rocket program later on and helped us get to the moon. So there's all kinds of stuff like that. I think if it was just that, I think if it's just about this very rare elite talent,

I think you can maybe make a case for it. But I think what this most recent debate has been about is largely about the abuse of the program. And it's the kind of thing that you described with your dad, where what people are coming in on the H1B1 visa and they're doing so not because they have some unique or rare or elite talent, but just because they are cheaper labor. And so it really does hurt the American worker. And that is a problem. That is an abuse of the system. That's not what is originally intended to do.

That's a problem. This is what I found interesting. And this was happening right at Christmas. We were talking about this off the air a few minutes ago. I have a right at Christmas and I wasn't really looking at Twitter and that kind of thing. So I didn't really follow the debate. I just kind of saw the aftermath of it because it was right there kind of at the, you know, the peak of the holiday season, which by the way, we are still in the Christmas season. This is the ninth day of Christmas. So Mary, ninth day of Christmas, Brian. And I love the fact that we still got these Christmas lights here in the studio.

That's a great thing. Glad those haven't been taken down yet. Cause they celebrate 12 days. They celebrate still days of Christmas here. That's right. That's right for sure. But one thing that was interesting is you had Elon Musk and Vivek, you know, who were sort of pushing this H1B1 program is like, this is great. We can take the best talent in that kind of thing. There was a lot of pushback. Unbelievable. Unbelievable pushback. Some of it maybe.

You know, some of it probably was racist. But I mean, there's a lot of pushback. But what was interesting is that Musk was very responsive to that. And I found this very interesting because people kind of were joking, or not joking, but I think really trying to insult Trump, maybe, or insult Musk. But basically talking about how oh, Musk is really running things and that kind of thing. I think that was kind of emerging as the narrative from the left is that

who's really running the country. Let's kind of hide the fact that Biden hasn't really been running the country the last four years. Who's going to really run the country when Trump is president? Is it going to be Musk who's really running?

almost as if to sort of pit them against each other and kind of create this rivalry. And I'm glad they don't seem to have fallen for that. But actually, what I found interesting is that this billionaire, the wealthiest man in the world, was incredibly responsive to a bunch of Twitter accounts that pushed back. And to me, that's like, it's a new day. It's a new ball game. And his response, I think he listened. And it seemed to me it was a pretty reasonable response. And it made me think, OK, these guys are willing to listen. They're sort of willing to play ball.

They're willing to take that into account, and that's a good thing. Yeah, I agree. Well, we've got to hit another break, and then on the other side, we've got Kyle from Hoover on the line. We're going to come back, take his call, and then continue this conversation. This is Dixon and Vining. We'll be back. All right. Welcome back to the Dixon and Vining Show. I am Brian Dawson, CEO of 1819 News, guest hosting for the incredible, unbelievably talented Dixon and Vining.

uh... joined by my co-host rich lusque, pastor rich lusque of trinity Presbyterian church uh... in Birmingham and uh... we have Kyle on the line from Hoover, we're going to bring him in and let him join the conversation Kyle, thanks so much for coming on. How are you doing today? Doing great, thanks Brian and Rich. I hope you are doing great. I hope you're new here. It started awesome as well. Oh yeah, thank you.

You know, and it was funny because both of y'all made a great point about the H1B1 and it is very intricate and it's hard to kind of nail it down. But I wanted to come play a little bit of devil's advocate and see what you get and get y'all's opinion. You know, I actually have a friend who he was trying to start a business and I wanted to emphasize that he tried because all he wanted to do was open like, you know, a little bakery, a little sweet bakery shop.

And he had to go through all these hoops of taxes, licensing and everything else. Well, when it came to the workers, he couldn't get anybody to come work because they were like, I want, you know, at least $70,000 a year. And he's like, we're just making cookies and we're just doing this. That's all I want to do is make cookies and do all this. Well, the problem was the people he did hire that want to be there didn't want to do anything. They thought this was beneath them, but it's like, I got to have something and they were apathetic.

So it's like, I thought to myself, I'm like, you know, I do agree, not all Americans are lazy. We're not all fat. There are people out there that really want to work. And there are some companies like what your dad dealt with where, hey, he's a good worker. He's loyal, but they're just going the route of these other people over here are cheaper. And you get what you get, but you're not going to get the same, probably not going to get the same work ethic as what your dad put in. But how many companies are out there are just like, I'm done. I'm done dealing with this.

You know, the worker is oppressed mentality and the corporations are evil and you guys are nothing but a bunch of money hungry people and we deserve all of it. And it's like, how many of American companies are just like, you know, we're tired of this crap. We just want to make a product and we're trying to do it. And if these people are willing to come in and do the work and do it for cheaper, can we really fault them? Don't we do that every day? Don't we go buy insurance because it's cheaper than the other insurance we had?

Yeah. And so I think these are two different conversations though, Kyle. So the H1B visa is like your super high level engineering talent in Vivek is saying that we don't produce that anymore, which I think is total crap. We've disincentivized people who may have the upbringing and rigor and education and like, you know, good luck if you're white getting into Harvard, Yale, MIT, any of these places. Good luck, right? They just don't do it. And so these decisions that have been held at these higher levels

They've hamstrung our ability to produce this type of top talent. And I think that's where the problem is. And I understand Elon and Vivek saying, look, we don't have time to fix that and then get the fruits of the fix. Well, if you show me how you're going to fix it, then we might be able to have a conversation. The other side of it is 100% kind of entry level skill, which is what you're talking about with like a bakery and trying to find people that work 100% correct.

And again, it goes back to the culture that we've created because we don't believe in anything, right? Imagine having a Protestant work ethic that was taught in a public school system. Well, God forbid, you know, and so, yeah, our public school system is producing basically morons that can't read, that have no values, that believe all kinds of Marxist gobbledygook and everything else, which would go right into that whole, you know, proletariat revolt thinking of, you know, down with the businesses that employ me.

All of that stuff is 100, you're 100% correct on everything you're saying. I just think that there are two separate conversations. But if the root of all of it goes back to this idea of pedagogy and how do we create people that will work at the low level jobs and be sufficient for those business owners? And how do we create the type of people in this country? Because again, look at what we've built in this nation from skyscrapers to the Hoover Dam. We didn't import

engineers or laborers for that. We did that. So we can produce that. We've now just created a pedagogical system or education system in our culture of how we raise children that's antithetical to that. And so we need to go back and fix that, kind of fix the trees and the orchard so that the orchard begins to produce that fruit. And in the meantime, maybe there is some type of an immigration solution

uh... that they could do it but yeah i think i think that's great yeah kyle's a great question yeah and i i i just and i just want to thank you guys thank you so much for filling in but also you know i like i said who knows what the future hold only god knows and i'm just giving it to him

and going on and living my life. I think that's all you really can do. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I think you're right, Brian. The question Kyle is asking is less H1B1 and more like who will make the tacos? Who's going to make the tacos? Who will make the cookies? Yeah. And I do think we have a big problem culturally with Americans who don't want to work. There's a real sense of entitlement. They want a lot of pay, a lot of vacation and not a very stressful job.

And you can't have that. You simply cannot have that. Americans have gotten soft and lazy. I mean, I've seen quite a bit of that myself. And so I do think that there is something to that. So I think maybe Vivek or whoever it was went to for and sort of insulting the American workforce. But I do think that we have a problem here.

But this is where we have to be willing to do the hard work. Investing in the American people means doing what it takes to rebuild that work ethic, rebuild American families, the American educational system, and really help people recover that work ethic that we have lost.

And there's not really a way forward apart from that. So we got to be willing to do that kind of hard work and recognize it's probably going to take a while to actually do it. It's not going to happen overnight. You're not going to fix this right away. Absolutely. Well, more on this conversation. I think we could probably run the rest of the show out on this conversation, even some of the books that we're going to recommend as we go over our 2024 books and what we're going to read in 2025.

around this conversation as well. When we come back, we've got Albert from Ruffner Mountain. We're going to be taking his call. This is the Dixon and Vining Show. We'll be back. Hey, my name is Mandy Woodruff Santos, career expert and host of the podcast Brown Ambition. Brown Ambition is conversations about wealth building. Being rich really helps. You should be rich.

Entrepreneurship, women of color are the fastest growing entrepreneur in the country, whatever, it's fine. And being surrounded by sister friends. Mandy mentioned your name on the podcast. You have made it. I was like, oh my God, I have made it.

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Wow, Jody Foster's on the show, I missed that one! To Clarie Starlius in your same way, should I start Craig Jennings? I don't know, but he's tough against the Vikings. Let's see, this is what I'm talking about. It's a really cool hang here. The Rich Eyes in Show. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.