'Life Lessons' with a Patriot, Friend, and Mentor— Dr. Bob
In a very special Sunday Bonus episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, we're bringing you a crossposted episode of 'Life Lessons with Dr. Bob' — a podcast hosted by a very special friend of Charlie's and an incredibly generous supporter of Turning Point USA, Dr. Robert J. Shillman, aka: Dr. Bob. He and Charlie walk through how they each got to where they are today, detailing their respective paths towards success, and how conservative principles and western values helped them along the way. They also discuss CRT, Diversity & Inclusion as a business practice, and how the America that each of them grew up in is fundamentally changed in the past 10 years, begging the question — who or what is to blame? Finally, Charlie and Dr. Bob conclude the conversation with an important discussion on capitalism and free markets and how America needs to embrace a market economy if it wants to survive. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Life Paths and Entrepreneurial Spirit00:12:41
Hey, everybody.
A bonus episode for you this week and a conversation I had with someone I've known for about a decade.
And he's been a very generous financial supporter of Turning Point USA.
And he has a podcast.
He's one of America's most impressive entrepreneurs.
And it's Dr. Bob.
He has a new YouTube channel and also podcast called Life Lessons with Dr. Bob.
I think you'll really enjoy listening to his conversations.
He has a lot of wisdom to share about the state of our country, about a lot of different things.
It's Life Lessons with Dr. Bob.
Freedom Needs Its Fighters.
You guys can also check it out on Apple Podcast.
It's Dr. Bob Shillman.
You can look up his biography.
It's pretty impressive.
He's the founder and CEO of one of America's most successful companies.
And you guys can give him a subscription on the podcast app.
You just type in Life Lessons with Dr. Bob, and you'll be able to subscribe.
And my episode is the second one there as well.
So we're reposting it here, and I think you'll really enjoy it.
We talk about a lot of different things and we dive deep.
And I think it's really great.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved with Turning Point USA Today.
Turning Point USA, we are fighting hard to win the American Culture War at tpusa.com, starting high school and college chapters all across the country.
No advertisers on this episode.
So just enjoy my conversation with Dr. Bob Shillman, Life Lessons with Dr. Bob, and get involved with Turning Point USA Today.
Come to our young women's leadership summit at tpusa.com/slash ywls and our student action summit tpusa.com slash SAS.
All right, here's Dr. Bob from Life Lessons with Dr. Bob.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Tonight, our guest is Charlie Kirk.
Charlie is the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA.
It's the largest and most influential conservative youth activist organization in the country, starting with nothing but enthusiasm, energy, and purpose in 2012.
And in just nine years, he has built Turning Point USA to be a powerhouse of conservatism with now more than 2,000 chapters on college and high school campuses around the country and 250,000, a quarter of a million members.
And guess what?
He's only 27 years old.
Now, how did a 17-year-old kid who finished high school but who never graduated from college reach this remarkable achievement?
Well, I read a little bit about it and I'll tell you the intro.
It all started with an essay that he wrote as a senior in high school that described the liberal bias in textbooks.
So how, Charlie, did that essay lead you to where you are today, to the behead, to the head of a large conservative activist organization?
Great to be here, Dr. Bob.
And I just want to say thank you for backing us throughout the years.
You're a great friend and mentor.
So I'm super thrilled we're able to do this conversation so that people can learn from you.
Yeah, I wrote that essay when I was a senior in high school, and I came across an AP, which means advanced placement textbook, economics textbook, that was called Paul Krugman's Economics for the AP.
And Paul Krugman is an economist for the New York Times, who's been wrong about basically everything for the last 30 years.
And I opened it up and it was one chapter after the other of why private property needs to be put into question, why collectivization of property is actually more efficient, more of kind of the Cass-Sunstein model of organizing society.
And there was one chapter in particular that was wrong.
It was wrong in its interpretation of history and wrong in what it was trying to teach the readers.
And it was teaching students that the 1980s was not a period of economic growth.
It was a period when the middle class suffered and that poor people got poorer.
And Dr. Bob, you know, you're entitled to your own opinion.
You're not entitled to your own facts.
You know, the 1980s, that thanks to Ronald Reagan and tax cuts and deregulation, that the economy soared.
And so I challenged this to my teacher and kind of wrote it up.
And this was when Andrew Breitbart was still alive, right before he died, like a month before he died.
Breitbart.com took that essay and was the first essay I ever wrote.
I was, I just sent to them as a tip and they said, why don't you try to write this?
And it ended up going totally viral.
It was published on hundreds of websites.
I ended up going on Fox News over it.
And all of a sudden, I kind of realized, hey, this is what it feels like to be an activist.
You know why?
Because the enemies that I made because of that.
My teacher, administrator, and principal, superintendent, head of instruction, they hated the fact that I would go and expose the fact that they are teaching this garbage in these classrooms.
And so from there, I kind of got the itch, you could say, to try to do something to save this country.
And that led that article in Breitbart, led to an interview on Fox News.
That's right.
For a high school senior.
That's right.
Pretty good.
So I was on Fox News in the morning at like 6 a.m.
Then I went back to class and it was all over the internet.
And this was pre-Twitter.
It was still kind of getting online.
And my teachers were saying, did I see you on television this morning?
And that was the beginning stages of kind of what became Turning Point USA.
And I got to thinking kind of the entrepreneur in me kicked in.
I said, there must be millions of other young people experiencing exactly what I saw in that textbook.
And that was just one isolated incident of Dr. Bob of teachers that would go out of their way towards framing Marxism in a positive way and kind of the beginning stages of what was wokeism all the way back in 2012.
And that led you to becoming an activist.
Now, I know you did try to get into the Air Force Academy.
You slide at West Point.
For some reason, they turned you down.
And that was probably a good thing.
I was a professor for many years.
Nevertheless, when my children were graduating high school, I suggested to them that they not go to college because college for most people is a waste of time.
It's a waste of four years and it's a waste of money.
Now, of course, college is necessary for certain specialties.
If you're going to be a doctor, a lawyer, many things, an architect, you have to learn.
But colleges are, in many cases, a fraud.
They stretch it out for four years.
What generally you could learn that trade or that profession in two years.
Totally.
I told my kids, I said, if you want, I'll give you the exact same amount of money that tuition and living expenses will cost.
I'll front that to you and go out and do something, start a business or build a career.
You're smart enough.
You can learn what's necessary by doing.
You don't need to go to college.
So I think it was, it was very lucky that they turned you down because you wouldn't be here today if you spent time four years.
Oh, I totally agree.
And it would have been four years plus five years military service.
Right.
So I would just be getting out right now.
And who knows, maybe I would be in some Afghanistan debacle after that whole humiliation.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
And that's my lesson to young people: my whole life was about going to West Point.
I was an Eagle Scout football basketball captain, good grades, you know, member of the community, got every letter of recommendation you could imagine, got my congressional nomination.
But when it came for appointment to the academy, I didn't get in.
And it was crushing at the time.
And I couldn't quite process it or understand it.
And I was kind of left with this decision: what do I do?
And simultaneously, that kind of essay was written right near that denial letter.
And I realized that there was a much more important path than I was supposed to be on.
Now, did your parents pressure you in any way?
Usually, of course, American parents want their kids to go to college.
That's in their training.
So tell us about your parents.
They definitely wanted me to go.
There was definitely pressure, but they were very understanding of the circumstances and understanding of like, hey, it's your life now.
You can make what decisions you want.
And they were definitely under the belief that, hey, college is probably a better choice for you.
But they deserve a great amount of credit, Dr. Bob.
There was no shaming.
There was no kind of ridiculing, which would happen in some families.
Sure.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the Wheeling, Arlington Heights area.
And where I came from, the kids that were addicted to drugs were treated much better than the kids that didn't go to college in the sense that if you didn't go to college, there was kind of like a social stigma to you.
And there probably still is.
Totally.
And so my parents decided like, hey, they were going to do the difficult thing, which was they were going to tell their neighbors that, you know, Charlie's actually not going to college this year.
That's a tough thing.
Be proud of it.
Be proud of it.
He's going on his own.
That's right.
He's going on his own.
He's going to figure this out.
And, you know, from the beginning, Dr. Bob, there were so many people that were negative and naysayers, but there were a couple people.
There were a couple of neighbors that stepped up and supported us early on that were conservative, not in, you know, massive numbers, but definitely helped us get going.
But large in part, you pinpointed it perfectly.
One of the reasons why students go to college is because of parental social pressure.
Right.
I'm going to, turns out my kids, despite the fact that I advise them not to go to college, they felt the social pressure to go to college and they did.
And I frankly don't.
And they're not using their education now.
They're doing something else.
But here's another story.
When I started my company, Cognix, back in 1981, a number of people, I tried to recruit smart engineers and I found this fellow who turns out to be brilliant.
And I rarely, I was teaching at MIT, got my PhD at MIT.
So I know what brilliance is, and I rarely use that.
Brilliant.
Name is Bill Silver.
And he joined the company for the summer to help me program things.
We had about three or four employees.
And at the end of the summer, he told me, he said, Dr. Bob, I'm going to stay here.
I'm going to drop out of a doctoral program at MIT.
And I spoke to his professors before I hired him, and they said he was the smartest student they ever had.
So he was a doctoral candidate at MIT.
And he says, I'm going to stay with Cognix.
I went home that night.
And Friday night, I usually return to my parents and I had dinner with them.
And they said, what's happening with the company?
I said, oh, very good news.
Bill Silver decided to drop out of college and join the company.
They said, that's terrible.
Don't do that.
Let him finish college.
And I said to them, college, life has various paths to it.
If opportunity arises, and the reason many people go to college is to look for opportunity and to be available for opportunity.
If the opportunity comes before you finish college, grab the opportunity.
Oh, I couldn't agree more.
You just met Mikey, who's here.
He's 19 years old.
So I'll tell you about Mikey.
I met Mikey after speaking at a church up in Thousand Oaks, California.
His father actually is my pastor.
And so he was driving me, really impressive kid, had his act together.
And I said, hey, what do you want to do with your life?
He said, I'm going to go to college to study political science.
I said, why?
And he said, well, to go get a job in politics.
I said, come work for me.
And he was like, well, don't I have to go to college to do that?
I said, no, you don't.
And to his parents' credit, they said, yeah, go move to Phoenix.
Go get your own apartment.
So now he has no debt, earning a good wage, you know, meeting some of the coolest people in the world, learning everything.
Politicians.
And politicians doing what he thought wanted to do at 19.
All of his peers are wearing masks, being forced to get vaccines on college campuses, not sure what they want to do with their life.
The Door to Political Science00:03:01
And they're doing it from their basement.
That's why they're not even getting a real college education.
Opportunity is there, just like Bill Silver.
Take it.
Do it.
And he said to his parents, who also were pressuring him, telling him it's a mistake.
And he looked at them.
He had the brains at that age, as you did, to say to his parents, Cognix is here now.
MIT will still be there.
That is exactly right.
Right.
If it doesn't work out, I can go back to MIT, but Cognix won't be here.
This opportunity won't be here.
That's right.
So it takes very special people, a very special person, because we offered jobs to another fellow, and he'd be a millionaire today based on stock options we give.
And he said at the end of the summer, he said, well, it was great working here, but I'm going to go in the Peace Corps.
So the, you know, opportunity knocks, you got to answer the door.
Door.
That's right.
If you want to live a life of adventure.
And that's the thing is that not everybody does.
If you want to go along to get along, then do what everybody else is doing.
You're going to do the knock on the door.
That's right.
Oh, it could be scary.
Who knows?
Oh, it's very scary because it's uncertainty, right?
There's pressure.
There's unpredictability.
You know this from starting an amazing company from nothing.
You got to be willing to hire people, fire people, manage people, work weekends, not sleep for weeks.
And in your case, because you have taken the conservative side, you can make enemies.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about that.
Here's what the left says about you.
Wikipedia quotes the New York Times as a horror show.
Oh, Wikipedia is a horror show.
Okay.
But here it quotes the New York Times as saying this.
By mixing and matching and twisting facts, Mr. Kirk has come to exemplify a new breed of political agitator that has flourished since the 2016 election of President Trump by walking the line between mainstream conservative opinion and outright disinformation.
Now, when they use the term agitator, I think they meant it in the negative.
I see it as a positive.
Thank you.
Because what an agitator does is questions what is happening and if it's wrong, tries to make it right, agitating for change.
You are an agitator and I'm using that in the most positive sense.
And I consider the New York Times taking time to write that piece, which was on 1A of the New York Times when they published that above the fold as a compliment.
They don't go after just any sort of schlep on the side of the street.
No, they're going to go after people that are doing something hopefully very significant.
And you notice when you read that, they don't give any sort of evidence.
No, never.
And they use this kind of interesting language, twisting and mixing and matching.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Because they won't outright say I'm lying, right?
Instead, they use these other terms.
Yeah, that's correct.
Right.
Because they're trying to create the impression that they're twisting, mixing, maxing, disinformation.
It's very cryptic.
Disinformation.
Yeah.
So tell me straight up, New York Times, what do you think?
And they won't do it.
They won't do that.
Now, tell us where TPUSA is now and then describe the other three organizations that you've recently started.
Building a Faith-Based Liberty Coalition00:02:51
Absolutely.
We are bigger than ever, just from an organizational standpoint.
Our budget is in excess of $45 million.
We have no debt.
We have over 60,000 grassroots donors, people that chip in $5, $10, $20.
We're going to hit 100,000 grassroots donors by the end of this year.
We've been blown away by that, Dr. Bob, of how many small dollar donors that have been.
That's so important.
And it keeps the organization alive in perpetuity.
As you said, 250,000 active members, well over 200 full-time people on staff and growing, which is extraordinary.
And so we're in great shape and we're doing very well.
We also have Turning Point Action, which has been around for a couple of years, 501c4, social welfare organization that's also allowed to do politics and also able to help in political campaigns.
And we've been doing a lot with that.
So we've been involved in the recall newsom type effort.
And I know this will probably be airing after all of that, but that's something that we were involved in.
We've also been very involved or we're very involved in a lot of the state legislative races across the country, which are very important in Arizona and Pennsylvania and Georgia, involved in school board races from our 501c4.
And then, of course, involved in congressional and senatorial races as well.
We also started Turning Point Academy, which is a project of Turning Point USA, which is to try to advance pro-American curriculum in high schools across the country.
And yeah, that's just some of our new projects that we have coming.
But we really have this beautiful combination of our 501c3, Turning Point USA, not political at all, educational and cultural in its mission, and then Turning Point Action, which of course allows us to do politics.
And what about Turning Point Faith?
And Turning Point Faith is a new program that we just launched, which is really exciting, which is try to build a coalition of liberty for liberty of people of all different faith backgrounds.
Because, you know, Dr. Bob, if we're serious about what is the last entity that hasn't been totally corrupted by the left, right?
They've taken over the corporations.
They've taken over the tech companies.
They've taken over everything.
The American churches, they're ready to rock.
And you know this, especially when it comes to both of our love of Israel.
It is the American evangelicals that support Israel, that defend Israel.
And so Turning Point Faith, we have 32 full-time people that have been hired in this division of this organization to try and find pastors and find churches and give them the support they need and the resources they need and the training they need to speak out on these critical issues.
That is fantastic because people still look to their pastors for guidance.
And that's such an important point.
So Pew Research did a study a couple of years ago.
They said, who are the most important counselors in America when consequential decisions are being made?
For example, voting, marriage, financial decisions.
Number one was religious official.
Diversity as Business Strength00:07:50
Number two was boss.
You know what number three was?
Spouse.
Not that the spouses are unimportant, but someone will trust a religious official and their boss, even above their spouse, when it comes to these very intimate decisions.
Great to hit those points.
Let's talk about diversity.
Of course, it's a very big deal these days.
We're going to be talking more about that critical race theory.
But even 10 years ago, when I was running the company, we had something every month called Ask the President, where people could come, have pizza.
Usually about 100 of my employees would show up, probably for the pizza more than for asking the question.
And we also took questions anonymously.
And one of the questions from one of my employees was, Dr. Bob, when are we going to have more diversity?
And, you know, I thought about it very quickly and came to the conclusion that we'll have more diversity when that's what my customers want.
That's a great question.
Right now, my customers haven't asked for diversity.
They're asking for the highest tech, highest capable, most efficient, reliable products at fair prices.
And that requires hard work and brains and competency.
And that's why the company has, for 40 years, been based on merit.
It's a meritocracy.
We hire irrespective of everything else.
We don't care as long as you can write code or balance the books.
As long as you love your profession and you're going to do it really well with high ethics, we'll hire you.
So I would think that diversity will happen by its very nature.
If we just close our eyes to the nature of the person other than their skill set, then what are we doing wrong?
But now that's not the case.
Now, organizations are being forced by some of the largest fund managers in the country who own all these companies.
You know, most public companies, the stock is held by large funds.
And those fund managers are writing letters and pressuring corporations on this issue of diversity and inclusion and equity.
And I'd like your feelings about that.
What do you feel is important or not important about diversity?
Yeah, I mean, I will, I'll probably be committing a thought crime here, but I don't think diversity is a strength.
I think that diversity of thought can be a strength.
But when you're trying to build a successful enterprise, unity is your strength.
Unity, not difference.
Uniformity.
You want everybody to sign up for the mission of the company.
Whether it be a company or a military operation or a sports team, this idea that discord or diversity is somehow going to be your defining characteristic or strength.
It could be an element of who you are.
I'm not saying anything, you know, that you should be outrageously hateful or any of that.
Of course not.
But it's become this kind of incantation, hasn't it, Dr. Buff?
Diversity is our strength.
Very strength.
Why is it our strength?
Right.
And if you read letters from the president in annual reports, public companies file annual reports, there's always a letter from the president or the chairman.
And you will find ever since, I think, five years ago, the first sentence is about diversity.
We have a diverse workforce.
We have this.
Well, you know, investors, I don't think the investors care about that.
Okay.
What they care about is, is the company doing well?
Am I going to get my dividends?
Is the stock going up?
Yes.
That's what the investors stand for.
And as public companies, we're owned by these people.
We're owned by their shareholders.
And we owe it to them.
Certainly we owe it to them to run a straightforward, ethical organization that doesn't discriminate unduly against any particular race or people or sex or whatever.
But the first thing we got to serve is our customers and they want quality.
Yeah.
And so if you have a room and you look around the room and you have 20 coders, you know, people that can code that are all Asian, you didn't pick them because they were Asian.
You picked them because they were good at coding.
Exactly.
Because you need the efficiency.
You want to cutthroat business.
And I just want to be very clear here because some people are going to try to cut up what I said is that if you look at how a business needs to be run, the obligation and the duty is not to some sort of esoteric bumper sticker, which is what the activists have done.
Instead, it's about fulfilling the mandate to your shareholders or to your employees or to your customers, the most important thing, right?
Which is what keeps the entire enterprise going.
What's happened, though, is you have these social revolutionaries that have taken over the HR departments of these major funds.
Let's take Goldman Sachs, for example, that have no idea how capital flows work.
They are 100 years removed from the founding of that company.
And they come in after they go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, or Berkeley thinking like, well, yeah, it's just so easy to make money.
The hard thing is diversity.
And we need all these mandates.
And they look at Goldman Sachs as this kind of sandbox to try to revolutionize the world.
And we're starting to see that do real damage to our country.
Now, you see the push for diversity everywhere except in sports.
It's more interesting.
You know, I don't understand why they aren't held to the same standard.
How many short people are on in the NBA?
Right?
We need diversity, not only of color, I suppose, but diversity of height.
Yes.
How many skinny people are in football teams?
Well, and this is why I believe the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement is against the American creed and against what makes America an exceptional nation.
Because deep down, we love celebrating winning and success in America.
We love the people that can go 100 jeopardy rounds, you know, straight.
We love the Olympic athletes that could break the untouchable Olympic record.
We love the celebration of impossibility.
And that only happens when you prioritize competency, meritocracy, consciousness, reason, not kind of silly melanin contents in people's skin.
And so, but sports is the great example here, Dr. Bob, because deep down, no one wants to see a bunch of five foot eight people play for the Los Angeles Lakers.
But that's what would happen.
It would be really boring, actually.
Well, we would have to adjust the height of the basket to the average height of the player.
And LeBron James should have to have his hands handcuffed when he plays.
That's right.
That's only fair.
That's right, because he's too good.
Right.
And then I have to hear him lecture us that it's a racist country.
It's a terrible country.
The NBA is at least 80 to 85% black, maybe more.
And there's no racial quota there, nor should there be because it should be a competition of competencies.
Like everything else.
Everything should be held to that standard.
That's right.
And that was an American ideal.
Well, winning and giving prizes to people who win is not only useful for the person who won, it's useful and helpful to the people who can see that if you work hard, if you play hard, if you exercise, maybe you can do it.
I totally agree.
And this is being destroyed in America.
No more applauding for the people who are successful because it makes the other people feel bad.
And this is so important.
And you just said prizes in economics, we call this word incentives.
Incentives is what drive human behavior, right?
And so if you think you're going to get a $200, $500 ticket, you're not going to drive in the HOV lane by yourself because that's an incentive not to do that.
Disincentive, right?
And so the same is this for honor roll.
Incentives and National Decline00:06:17
Why study?
Right.
Why read the book?
And in Oregon, the state law has changed about the requirements for graduating high school.
That's right.
It no longer requires proficiency in mathematics.
And I'm not talking about calculus here.
We're talking about basic math.
Graduating with a high school diploma does not require competency in mathematics nor reading or writing.
So you will be able to grad, people in Oregon will be able to get a high school diploma while they're illiterate, illiterate.
So what does a high school diploma then mean?
What does it mean if there's no standards?
It means that you're able to be an activist.
You showed up.
You showed up.
That's right.
Just like participation charges.
Participation charges.
And that's what we really started with 10 years ago.
That's right.
And this moves on to critical race theory.
And I didn't know what it was, so I had to look it up.
CRT.
The theory says that racism is a part of everyday life in America because racism is in the DNA of every white American, a white American, whether they know it or not.
Yes.
They are automatically racist.
This is being taught in our schools that America is fundamentally flawed from 1619 or whatever date they want, it became racist.
Now, if that's the case, how did Barack Obama get to be president for eight years?
You know, I'm struck by this.
Or why did more blacks come through legal immigration since 1980 than ever came through the slave trade?
Why do so many blacks want to come to this country if it's so racist and awful and colonialistic?
You see, the presupposition they come from is it's actually brilliant in one sense.
You can never prove it wrong because they state something that can never be proven right or proven wrong.
It's everywhere.
Well, what is everywhere?
The air?
No, no, no.
Racism.
And so then you call them out for it.
I do this all the time.
Well, prove it to me.
Well, you can't see it because you're white.
Oh, so your entire operational thesis is that we're operating.
We have something in our systems in our DNA that's everywhere.
You can't tell me where it is, but if you would be able to tell me where it is, I can't find it because of my skin color.
They say yes.
This is how this is absurd and insane.
And what it is, and you know this, Dr. Bob, is that it's a deconstructionist philosophy.
It's how can we disassemble the parts of America the quickest?
And they found the way to do that through race.
And if they can't point it out, how could we possibly fix it if it were there?
That's right.
It's like, oh, you have a tumor, but I'm not going to tell you where it is.
Where it is.
Right.
It might be in your kidney.
And you're flawed and you're labeled.
So we have gone a long way from measuring people, as Martin Luther King said, by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.
We've gone a long way.
And I believe this started with President Obama.
And we are now, America is now at a tipping point.
I agree with you.
We, Americans, America has to decide if we're going to go back to the America that we loved of freedom, free expression, and rights for everyone, right?
No discrimination in law.
The outcome might turn out differently, but everyone should have the shot at whatever they want.
We're either going to tip back there or we're going to go where President Obama said we would go to fundamentally.
He said this before he was inaugurated.
He said a few, he said, in a matter of a week, whatever it was, we are going to fundamentally change the United States of America.
And I think that's what is happening now.
That's right.
Fundamental shift.
And this is the question, isn't it?
Is that, do Americans still want the country that we once enjoyed, or do we want to go into this fundamental transformational direction?
And it's an open question.
It's a question of are we willing to fight for it?
Are we willing to do something about it?
Are the parents that are seeing what's happening to their kids willing to intercede and actually, you know, intervene, I should say, and stop this line of nonsense that's been happening?
But, you know, Dr. Bob, I totally agree because I grew up in an America born in 93, right?
Where I saw both sides of this.
I grew up in an America in 04, 05, 06, where no one cared about skin color.
It was about meritocracy, how hard you worked.
It was waking up early, staying up late.
And then I saw it change in front of my very eyes.
And you did too, Dr. Bob, obviously.
I mean, you've seen the country change.
But from my generational perspective, as 27, I feel like I've lived in two different countries in one lifetime.
Absolutely.
And it broke right quickly.
Quickly.
It broke exactly when I turned 15 years old in 2008 when Barack Obama got elected.
We have never had worse race relations in my time.
You know, maybe in Jim Crow of the Civil War, they were worse, but never, they were fine until Barack Obama pointed these things, pointed us in a totally different direction.
Totally agree with you.
I'd like to ask you, tell me about your family and your character, the traits that got you to be where you are today, got you to be at 27, heading a substantial organization with substantial cash flows in and out, hiring people.
How many employees did you say?
200 plus.
200 plus employees at 27 years old.
I didn't do that.
I started the.
No, you built something way bigger than that.
Yeah, but I started way later and it took 40 years, 40 years for the company to be what it is today with maybe 2,500 employees.
So tell us, and it's not secrets of success, but tell us about the family that you grew up in and how they motivated you.
And then the parts of your character that helped you to get you to where you are today.
Risk, Time, and Big Dreams00:05:50
Yeah, the first thing is my parents were very hardworking growing up.
When I mean hardworking, I mean my dad would take three days off a year, right?
Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day.
What kind of business was he at?
Architecture.
And, you know, building buildings and also developing very difficult business, obviously, once 2008 hit and, you know, that kind of whole market got uprooted.
But I grew up seeing my dad always be there for every single sporting event, every be there, be there for anything I needed.
But he'd come home for dinner, then he'd go back to work till one o'clock in the morning.
And then he'd wake up at 7 a.m.
You know what it's like to build a business.
And so that was the culture I was raised in.
And I was also, you know, obviously I'm very, you know, active and I have trouble sitting still.
And my parents, to their great credit, you know, anytime anyone would be like, oh, Charlie has trouble sitting still in class, they're like, you know what?
That'll be end up being a positive.
No, like medication counselors.
I want to tell you that same story.
Please.
It was the third grade in, or second grade, one of the two.
And we're learning how to print letters.
And Mrs. Kershaw, that was her name, went to the blackboard, said, class, here's how you make the letter A. You one line, lift the pen, another line, and a third line, three lines, and here's how you do it.
And then she says, okay, I want everybody to do that.
And she walked around the room.
And I remember this.
I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but I can remember what happened when I was in the third grade.
I said, oh, I can make it without lifting the pen.
And it's much faster.
And she came over to me and pushed me.
Teachers could do that at the time and it's fine.
You know, I didn't go home and complain.
Didn't call a lawyer.
She said, Mr. Shillman, you make it this way.
And I kept on doing.
So it's clear that I had the seeds of entrepreneurship.
That's right.
I want to do it my way.
I'm creative.
And it's a shame that our educational system doesn't recognize this.
That's right.
They want everybody to be the same and sit with your hands folded or whatever.
Same thing happened with my son, Barney.
We were getting letters and calls from the school.
Barney can't sit still.
And they advised us to put him on ADD medication, Ritland, or whatever.
And we took him to a variety of experts.
And one older, very experienced child psychologist said, well, in my day, we called that normal.
The way he acted.
I was right on the edge of that, Doctor.
I don't know how old your sons are, but I was, I was, my teachers were like, he can't sit still.
There's something wrong with him.
That's called drive.
That's exactly right.
And hopefully charter schools or private schools recognize these kinds of kids and treat them differently.
Them all over here, because they are going to be special.
They're the change makers.
They're the change makers.
I, I didn't care what the teacher's role was, his dr Bob's role yes, and the other thing.
So I I I, I.
So i'm not surprised that you had that same trait, and so you when when, when we first started turning point and my parents instilled this in me as well, which was that entrepreneurial approach too, which is, take risks, think big I was always taught that this country was a place to be able to do impossible things.
And I, you know, young people ask me all the time, Charlie, how'd you start this?
I started it.
You know, one of the things that, you know, I always laugh, and I don't mean to insult anyone watching this when people say, yeah, I went to college to study entrepreneurship.
That's funny.
I'm often asked, or I was years ago, asked to give lectures at very famous institutions to give lectures on entrepreneurship.
And I would go and I would tell them about my story.
But in the back of my mind, what I really wanted to say is, if you're sitting here, you're not an entrepreneur.
That's the whole point.
Right.
If you're sitting here, and so people say, well, Charlie, what are the steps?
I say, steps.
I said, you think I had a plan when I started?
I had a skill and a passion.
That was it.
And I kind of, you just kind of start.
They say, well, did you have a detailed business plan?
What are you talking about?
A detailed business plan.
I said, you know, I might have had like a pitch deck two years later to go raise some money from somebody.
Not initially.
No, I mean, initially, and even, you know, this as a creator, you're always changing things, right?
You're looking at it.
You have to be flexible.
It's one of the things.
You have to be ready to change.
You have to be agile.
People say, is there a five-year plan?
No.
And even today at Cognix, one-year business plan.
One year.
We try to be, and we're big enough.
We can plan for one year.
We have enough customers.
We can do that.
But five years, who knows what's going to happen in technology in two years?
And it's going to change how you do it.
Totally.
Totally.
Oh, who knew that COVID is going to come?
That's right.
So, you know, it's important to plan, but it's important to plan for the near term and be flexible, ready to change your actions and change your plan.
That's right.
And then also the other thing, you know, taught, you know, growing up through sports and other ways was perseverance as well, which is a very important thing, which, you know, that's a tough thing to instill in somebody other than if you have parents that are willing to tell you no and willing after you lose a sports game, be like, yeah, well, you should.
Try out or not.
Yeah, exactly.
And all of a sudden that instills in you this kind of hunger to want to be the best.
And because you know this starting something from nothing, you know, there's a lot of opposition that will come your way.
And I just don't mean opposition people that take you down.
That comes after success.
I mean that opposition in your own head, right?
Can I do this?
You know, is this really the right idea?
You know, should I be doing something else?
And so those are some of the values that I was raised with.
Perseverance is one of the things that I value most highly.
Overcoming Internal Opposition00:15:48
And it is very rare in our country.
Yes.
Because television movies show you a crime is solved in one hour or you can build a house and it shows you building.
And everything happens quickly.
And real things don't happen.
The only thing that happens quickly are mistakes and destruction can happen quickly.
I totally agree.
Building something, whether it's career or a house or building a business takes time.
It takes time and dedication and overcoming those barriers.
Now, you mentioned that your father was very hardworking.
Yes.
And I see a commonality in the people that I've met who were very successful in business or in the trade like you are in public speaking.
They came from families where the father, where they met, the father was home for dinner, but always hardworking.
It's true in my house.
We never had a new car.
We only had a bottle of soda once a week and it was a Sunday lunch, one bottle of soda.
And you know what?
I didn't feel like I was underprivileged.
I didn't feel poor because all my friends in that neighborhood were the same.
And I believe that's very important.
I think that, you know, this tendency to force communities to have low-income housing called affordable housing, of course, called affordable housing next to mansions, it makes no sense at all.
It's disaster.
It makes the people who are living in low-income housing, they can't afford the same clothes or the bicycles or whatever.
They're going to feel depressed and disagree.
They're resentful.
Resentful.
We're living here and yet we don't really live the same way.
That's right.
I think it's a total mistake.
And when the politicians use the term affordable housing, you know, I think every housing is affordable.
You just got to be able to afford it.
That's right.
Right?
Whether it's a $5 million home or $100,000 home, it's all affordable housing.
But forcing the mixture between those kinds of different strata of the economy, I think is harmful.
And it does create a group of people that can be mobilized for their grievances, which create activists and potential voters.
I'd like to talk a minute and hear your views on capitalism.
First, I'll give you mine, because I clearly am a capitalist and I've benefited from the capitalistic system, as have all my employees and as have all my customers and as have all my shareholders benefited from capitalism.
The left thinks that capitalists are greedy.
Well, capitalists, successful ones, certainly have more money than people who are poorer, right?
Than or people who are less successful.
And what happens when you go to work, whether you're mowing a lawn or whether you're selling computer systems, what's happening is you're delivering goods or services to the customer.
And what are you getting back?
You're getting back pieces of paper.
So you worked hard to deliver those goods or services.
You contributed to society by delivering goods or services.
And all you got back were these pieces of paper or a number in your bank account.
It was wired to you.
Yes.
Now, income tax is a tax that taxes people for producing goods and services.
In reality, you want people, the nation, society should want people, should incentivize people to create as many goods and services as possible.
Who cares if they get these pieces of paper or dollars?
Now, we all have to pay taxes and raise taxes, but the better tax is a tax on the money when it's spent, because then the person who produced those goods and services gets the dollars, then buys products for his own self, for his own consumption.
And that is sort of taking away from, it's not punishing society, but he's taking it for his, he or she is taking it for his own benefit.
And if you're going to tax, that's a better tax.
We don't want to place a disincentive on people for working.
Yes.
And yet that's exactly what an income tax is.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And markets are the best way to organize a society economically.
It has lifted more people out of poverty.
It has given people the opportunity entrepreneurially to start something from nothing.
And at the lie of the anti-capitalist critique, the whole thing, if you had to reduce it down to one thing, they think that if someone gets rich, therefore somebody got poor.
When in reality, that trade happened in most cases voluntarily and both people benefited tremendously.
Benefited.
And people's standard of living goes up.
And all of a sudden, you have abundance and you have choices.
And then products get better.
And if you don't like a product, you can compete against that.
And you could take a risk in the marketplace to be able to maybe create a better widget or go up against this company that might look really big, but they're actually kind of inefficient and they might be able to be disrupted.
And at the heart of all of this is entrepreneurship, which is really the small guy with a big vision that wants to take a risk to be able to benefit people so that he can get something out of it.
This goes back to our conversation of incentives.
If all of a sudden people don't have incentives to go take risks, well, then you're not going to see new products.
Well, right to that point, let's talk about computers, which I know something about.
The largest computer company in the world about 20 years ago, 30 years ago, was IBM.
And the second largest was digital equipment.
And an entrepreneur called Steve Jobs said, you know, we can make computers cheaper and we can give them many people will want computers.
And there's a famous RAND study that was done on how many computers, how many people would buy computers and how many needs would be computers.
And they said there's a need for 200 computers in the country.
There's no, no, no person, no individual is ever going to want a computer.
And in a matter of years, IBM is no longer the largest computer maker in the world.
Digital equipment went out of business.
And it's because of the free market that allowed a kid who didn't go to college, by the way, is another story.
He didn't go to college.
Wonderful idea, came out with the personal computer and wham, changed the world.
And free markets allows for that.
If the government was in charge of who's going to make computers and what you're going to do, we would have no innovation, none.
That's right.
And the prices would be extraordinarily high and the distribution of the good would be incredibly inefficient.
And at the core of all that, though, is private property.
That really is the core.
Am I able to keep what I earn?
And can I go to a judge and say that my idea for this computer is mine and not that other guy's?
That really is the core of Western civilization economically, is that you cannot have markets without private property.
And that's something that the American system protects.
And the tax system in most countries is getting to be confiscatory.
That's right.
And the argument is about fairness.
Well, the rich aren't paying their fair share.
Tell me how much of my money should you be allowed to take to be fair?
It's my money.
I earned it.
That's right.
Right?
What are you talking about?
Fair.
You shouldn't take any of my money.
That's what's fair.
That's right.
Well, and then what is the number unfair?
It is by definition a subjective term.
And besides, in America, as I understand it, more than 50% of Americans who are eligible to pay tax don't pay tax.
That's right.
And then don't pay tax.
Not to mention, some of the biggest companies get loopholes too.
I mean, you have Amazon that almost pays no taxes, and they're able to do that through a variety of different loopholes and all this.
And so there's an incredible crony component to a lot of this as well, when people that are producing real things probably pay upwards of 60 to 65% at times in state, local, federal sales tax.
And in California, not only do we have to pay an income tax, but after you've paid the income tax, you have after tax dollars, then you have to pay 15, 16% sales tax, which is property tax.
It's becoming overly, overly burdensome.
Yes.
And that's why many people are leaving California for states like Texas and Florida that have no income tax.
And Nevada.
But look, it's important.
Taxes are important.
I've never objected to paying taxes.
As a matter of fact, my father, again, poor, but wise, he said, Robert, don't spend your time trying to pay less tax.
Spend your time trying to make more money.
That's good wisdom.
And that is great wisdom because again, making money is a measure of how much you've contributed to society.
That's right.
And let's talk about the wealth gap.
All of a sudden, the wealth gap is a discussion for a very active discussion in America.
Now, some people, I think that Elon Musk is either he or Jeff Bezos, they vie for the richest person in the world.
And they have their, it's paper money, of course.
It's their stock in their company.
But the value is extreme.
It's very high.
It's in the billions, maybe $50 billion.
And people say, oh, that's ridiculous.
What can they do with it?
Well, that's up to them.
In my view, and people who talk about the wealth gap will say, look, you have these people who are multi, multi-billionaires and other people living on $50,000 or whatever it is.
I never worried about the gap.
I think it's wonderful that people make as much money as possible.
They've earned it.
Okay.
They're not selling cocaine to kids.
They've earned this money in legal ways.
Their stock went up because people bid the stock up.
But what is certainly of concern to society is the safety net.
Are there people, we call them poor, but poverty, and we define poverty differently every year, by the way.
It's a fluctuating definition.
Poverty in our country would be middle class in most other countries.
Okay.
In my view, poverty in this country means you have an iPhone 7 and you don't have a 50-inch flat screen which is only 40-inch.
So what's important is that there be no hunger, that there be adequate health care.
That's what's important.
So we should worry about where the baseline is.
That's more important than the difference between poor and rich.
Yeah.
And the distance or the gap is not the right focus.
It should be how quickly can people move up to social mobility.
So don't throw rocks at the top of the building.
Fix the elevator, right?
I mean, are you stuck in a government-run school by some teacher union thug that doesn't give you the access to be able to read or write?
And if you kind of look at it, the people that complain the most about wealth inequality are actually the ones implementing the policies that make it the hardest for people to move up and actually get into a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle.
And so instead they're distracting people about like, well, look at this sort of gap.
Like, okay, you know, whatever.
And then what in reality, it's like, wait a second, you are implementing a series of economic policies and also a series of educational policies in particular and crime.
We can't forget about crime.
So you have in Compton, for example, or inner city Chicago, you get shot on the way to school.
Your property values go down then when crime goes up.
And it's hard then for some of these families to break out of that.
But we must defund the police.
Well, that, I mean, the most absurd and ridiculous measure and effort anywhere.
But this is all smokescreen.
They're trying to focus on a couple people like Bezos, who I'm not a fan of because it's politics and Elon Musk, who is whatever, to try to focus all on that.
When in reality, it's, wait a second, are you able to go to school?
Can you go shopping without worrying?
Yes.
Can the kids in inner city Baltimore read?
Five schools in inner city Baltimore you looked at, almost all black, not one kid in fifth grade could read or write a grade level.
Not one kid.
And that's all because of the public sector teacher unions and what they've done to the educational system.
And nothing that the left is talking about is going to cure that.
That's right.
Whether you can give a high school diploma to somebody who is illiterate is not going to cure illiteracy.
That's right.
The way to cure literacy is to have standards and to enforce the teachers to teach properly or replace them.
And matter of fact, have competition.
Schools, I think that.
Parents should have vouchers and they can spend them wherever they want.
Their kids should go to school wherever those vouchers, including homeschooling.
The goal is to have an educated populace.
And the way to do that, I believe, is through the free market.
I agree.
And to have private school systems now where parents are paying, I don't know if you're not yet a parent, $40,000 for kindergarten.
$40,000.
And that's on top of the property taxes that they're paying for for the public school system.
And there's another note I want to mention on this, Dr. Bob, which doesn't get mentioned as much, which is if they really are complaining a lot about why Bezos and Elon Musk are getting wealthier, a lot of it has to do with our monetary policy as well, is that when we open up cheap money or if we spend $6 trillion in Washington, D.C., what does that do to the purchasing power of a $50,000 a year family, right?
What would that do to someone like your father?
And saved.
Absolutely right.
And so that's what I mean.
People don't understand.
Oh, great.
The government's going to print up money.
What that means is the money you have is going to be worth less.
And that means people complain prices are going up.
It's not prices going up.
Money is less valuable.
It takes more dollars to buy that same gallon of gasoline, right?
It takes more because the dollars are worth less.
And that is a tax on the middle class.
It really is.
Absolutely right.
No one wants to talk about it.
Everybody has to buy gasoline, for example.
And the tax on gasoline and the high price on gasoline, everyone has to pay rich or poor.
The rich can absorb that.
The middle class and the poor can't.
So we're seeing inflation happening.
I think it's going to be much worse in the next few years under the Democrats.
And it's mainly fueled by the giveaway of money, the printing of money.
That's right.
In hopes that that will fix things.
And it does the opposite.
It does the opposite.
And I like what President Trump said when he was running for president, when he was either in Chicago or Detroit, one of these horrible cities that have extremely high poverty, extremely high crime rate, which have been run for decades by the Democrats.
And he said to the people, what have you got to lose voting for me?
Right?
Yep.
It's not, you're already at the bottom.
There's the basement.
What have you got to lose?
And that's why he won.
Wealth Gap vs. Economic Reality00:00:55
And instead, they want to focus on the wealth gap when to make people angry.
That's right.
And it's the wealthy, it's their fault.
They took your money.
And there's 500 murders a year in Chicago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I want to thank you, Charlie.
First of all, I want to thank you for coming to my home and spending time with me.
But I want to thank you even much more for what you are doing, investing your energy, your life into building an organization that has the potential to change the direction of our country.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Dr. Bob, for all that you've done to support us.
And your story is remarkable.
I learned a lot here.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
It's always freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.