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Aug. 16, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
36:52
DIGITAL HERMITS: A Dire Generational Warning with California Teacher of the Year, Jeremy Adams
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Confusing Freedom With Purpose 00:11:15
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Jeremy Adams joins us, author of Hollowed Out, very interesting conversation about the next generation.
It's one of the most important issues happening in America.
So listen to the entire episode if you can, and I think you'll learn a lot about the damage that is being done to this generation.
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This is a topic I care deeply about, and there's a new book out called Hollowed Out by Jeremy Adams, a warning about America's next generation.
This is one of the most important topics happening right now in America.
It's not political at all.
It's cultural.
It's spiritual.
If we do not address this issue correctly and honestly, then you're going to have a generation that is so unrecognizable, that has so many problems.
And the older generation, the boomer generation, and Gen X is going to say, what happened here?
You have to listen carefully.
There is a massive crisis happening right now with young people.
And it's not just one issue.
It's multiple.
Jeremy Adams is Teacher of the Year in California and has just published this book, which again is Hollowed Out, a warning about America's Next Generation.
And he joins us right now.
Jeremy, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Charlie, thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
So, Jeremy, a lot of different ways we could start here, but let's just start this way.
Tell us about your book and why you decided to write it.
Yeah, well, I've been a teacher for almost 25 years now.
And one of the really interesting and unique things about being a teacher is that you start to see things in the classroom that the broader society takes a while to figure out.
And having taught for 25 years, I'll tell you in the last five to seven years, there have been some profoundly disturbing changes in the way that my students spend their time, in the way that they look at the country, in their value system, in the way that they look at adulthood.
And this book is really essentially a battle cry.
It's me waving my hands in the abyss saying, hey, other adults in America, we have a profound problem here with our young people.
And I was, I couldn't agree with you more.
This is not a political issue.
It is a cultural, spiritual, and moral issue.
Our children are literally being hollowed out of the values and the behaviors that typically give life its meaning and its purpose.
So tell me, what are you seeing?
What is that warning?
What is the canary in the coal mine?
Yeah.
The problem is that our young people literally are living their lives untethered to adult values, adult responsibilities, adult morals.
They spend their time in a way that you and I, and I know you're a bit younger than I am.
I'm sorry to say.
But they literally spend nine to 10 hours a day on their cell phone.
That's right.
And think about that.
When you spend nine or 10 hours a day on your cell phone, that means you're not dating.
You're not going out.
That's right.
You don't have intensive friendships.
You're not reading.
And nowadays, literally, the attention span of our young people has been destroyed.
I don't know if you saw this, Charlie, but a few days ago or a few weeks ago, our friends at Netflix realized that teenagers were reading the subtitles and they thought, oh, this is great.
Now the young people are reading.
No, no, no, no.
They were reading the subtitles because they didn't want to miss anything in the scene and they wanted to go right back to their cell phones.
Okay.
So we're talking about a generation that is not only more lonely and more isolated, but you know, it's interesting because our friends on the left, you know, if they want to insult the book, they'll say, well, you know, every old person is a curmudgeon and a crank and they think the next generation is going to hell.
No, what I'm seeing in my classroom is that my students who I care very deeply about are the most unhappy people in American history.
They are depressed.
They are isolated.
Look at the data.
Even the New York Times is doing articles about how young women are going to the ER.
They're literally going to emergency rooms because their mental health is in crisis.
Look at the self-harm.
Look at the rates of suicide.
And of course, it makes sense, Charlie.
They don't have the kind of connective tissue that typically gives life its meaning.
They don't have intensive friendships.
They don't go to church.
They don't have meals with their parents.
And, you know, as you've pointed out before, these problems were here before COVID, you know, and COVID, oh my goodness, just put them on steroids.
I mean, amplified them and made them worse.
I mean, I couldn't, I mean, I enthusiastically agree with this, and we talk about it all the time.
I don't feel as if I'm taken seriously when I talk about this with adults.
They just kind of scoff it off.
It is the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted, least married, least dating, most anti-social generation in history.
You're in the classroom.
You are dealing with these kids at a fundamental age.
Boy, there's so many questions I have on this.
So let me just do this.
How bad is it actually?
Okay, so some people agree, they say, okay, but they'll just grow out of it.
It's not that, you know, they'll just kind of eventually become adults.
Your argument is not that.
Tell me why.
Well, yeah, I mean, what's interesting is if you look at the things that have just happened very recently, I mean, you look at marriage rates, historic lows, you look at our birth rate at historic lows.
When you look at why people don't have kids, there was a study that came out a few weeks ago about how Gen Zers are more interested in having a dog than they are in having children.
And it's not just so, so I'm not making this stuff up.
Again, the data supports you 100%.
100%.
It does.
And this is not, first of all, I'm not a boomer.
I want to be clear.
I'm way too young to be a boomer.
Are you a Gen Xer?
I'm a proud Gen Xer.
Thank you very much.
The most ignored generation.
I have a whole thesis on Gen Xer.
I think Gen X is going to save us.
I really do.
Thank you.
Read the book.
I completely agree with you, Charlie.
We are completely ignored.
We get no love because the millennials and the boomers are screaming at each other.
But I digress.
At any rate, though, I'm a public school teacher, right?
So it's really not my business who you vote for.
And it's really not my business if you're religious or not.
But what bothers me, Charlie, and this is what's so bad, is we have a young generation that is completely ignorant about American history, completely ignorant about where, I mean, I am a bleeding heart American romantic.
I believe that the creation of the United States of America in 1776 and 1787 was literally an act of human evolution when it comes to civilization.
And the people in my classroom are the healthiest, wealthiest, most fortunate human beings to ever exist.
And as a teacher, I want them to understand where did these institutions and these values come from?
What made you wealthy?
What made you free?
Why is it that people all over the world do the most important voting not with their fingers, but with their feet?
They want to come here.
Why is that?
And young people really don't know.
And the other thing that they really don't know about, again, it's none of my religion, none of my business what religion they are, but young people don't know anything about religion.
I mean, the level of ignorance, I mean, it's just kind of a bunch of tropes about how it's judgmental, and religious people are very stiff and they, you know, they don't want to accept me and they're not very empathetic and tolerant.
I mean, all those kind of axioms that you hear.
But I remember a few years ago, a disturbing story, I was talking about Easter, and I teach, you know, kind of the advanced classes, and only half of my students even knew what the resurrection was, much less what Easter was.
I mean, they thought Easter was about, you know, putting on your swimsuit and, you know, dying some eggs.
So it is bad.
And as you said, the data supports it.
So your book hollowed out, it's kind of in some ways a warning in your own description, right?
And I'm sure we can get into solutions here, but it's a lot more complex than that, than just kind of a couple solutions here and there.
But I want to read one thing from the preview.
You reveal why students have rejected wisdom, culture, and institutions of Western civilization.
Why have they rejected them?
Yeah.
So here's the big theory of the book.
And I hope people will still go read the book anyhow.
But I think that we have a generation that has fundamentally misunderstood individual liberty, right?
So when we think of the liberty of kind of the classical liberal Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg Address, we think of individual liberty as a vehicle for living a meaningful life, right?
I am free to worship whatever God I want.
I am free to be whatever political party I am want.
I can't free to say whatever I want to say, love whoever I love, live wherever I want to live.
That's the winning recipe of a meaningful existence.
And this is what is so extraordinary about America: we're not subjects of a king, right?
We're not forced to worship at a certain church.
We don't believe in limiting associations.
And yet, I think we have an entire generation that has confused the freedom of or freedom to do something with the freedom from something.
So a lot of young people now see freedom as, well, hey, I don't have to commit to marriage because it makes demands of me.
I don't have to be a parent.
That makes demands of me.
And by the way, why would I ever go to church?
Talk about a bunch of people who just want to limit my freedom and judge me and want to tell me that I'm always bad.
So your thesis, and it's brilliant, is that this generation wants freedom from responsibility.
Yes, I think that there's essentially a cult of radical individualism.
I'm not talking about the good individualism in the marketplace and becoming your own unique person.
I'm talking about an individualism that makes it so that you are unmoored.
You are unattached to the traditional things that give life its meaning and its purpose, Charlie.
I mean, I don't want to wax poetic in front of thousands of people here, but I mean, I'll tell you right now, my life is hard because I try and be a good Christian every day and I fail.
I try and be a great father every day and I fail.
I try and be a great teacher, a great husband, a great friend.
But even though those ties bind me, they also define me and make my life meaningful.
I mean, I think at the end of the day, when we talk about the things that kind of fill our lives with the possibilities of joy, those things are just not there for an entire generation of young people.
A Generation In Misery 00:06:43
I mean, imagine, you know, a life without intense family and friendship and faith.
And I mean, don't even get me started.
I teach American civics.
I've taught civics for 20 years.
Don't even get me started on how the view of the country and our history has changed because a love of country supplies a lot of meaning and purpose in people's lives and it always has.
And imagine a generation where that is missing as well.
So, Jeremy, I want to ask you: so, you've been doing this for 20, 25 years, you said?
Is that right?
Yep.
Okay.
So that would mean your first year of teaching was 1997, more or less, right?
98.
Yep.
98.
Okay.
So just let's take a sample year.
Average junior or senior in high school in 2000, average in 2010, average 2015, and then average now.
The reason I'm asking is because your detractors or your critics will say, oh, these kids go out of it.
But no, you have a couple decade sample size where you could, would you say that the average student in the year 2000, 2010 were marginally within the same issues worldview, and then you saw it just go off a cliff?
Can you expand on that, please?
Yes, that is such a great question.
Thank you for pointing that out.
Is if you look at students from, you know, 1998 to 2010, you know, roughly, roughly the same experience.
But in the last 10 to 12 years, there has been a radical change.
I mean, I could go on and on, but I mean, so many things.
Number one is students used to, when we talk about politics, you know, students used to say, well, my mom says this, or my dad says this, or my grandparents say this.
Charlie, nobody talks about their parents anymore.
Nobody talks about their grandparents anymore.
They don't care about it.
People don't eat, well, and they don't talk to them.
You know, people don't eat meals with families anymore.
I remember about five or six years ago, I mentioned the phrase, the family dinner, and my students looked at me like I was on something.
Like, what are you talking about?
I said, you know, you know, you sit down with your two parents and, you know, you sit down and eat a meal.
They're like, we don't do that.
Most of my students, because I live in an impoverished area, most of them have a single parent.
They're working multiple jobs.
When they get their dinner, they go to their room and sit on the couch.
The kids, they go to their room.
I mean, let's be honest, when the students talk about politics nowadays, they are more likely to quote somebody on Twitter or TikTok than they are their own parents.
But the big, big, big seismic change, and this is the big one.
Cell phones, the technology has changed everything.
It is a, there is a chasm, a grand canyon between, you said 2015, about 2014, 2015, and today, everything changed.
I mean, if you think about it this way, if you were an alien and you came down and you looked at kids in the year 2010, and then you came back in the year 2022, you would think that we had evolved to look down all the time, that we now have something that's evolved into our hands.
The attention spans are zero.
I mean, one of the most disturbing things that I saw last year was that a student at the end of the year said, Mr. Adams, you know, you keep recommending all these great movies for every unit.
Like, you know, I was teaching World War II, and I'm like, when you get older, you got to watch Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan.
And they're like, we don't watch movies.
And I said, well, why not?
And they're like, well, we can't pay attention to them.
We can't sit there for two hours.
There's no way.
And not only that, by the way, but when you talk about anxiety, I mean, think about this, Charlie.
When you and I were growing up, if we had a bad day at school and you got in a fight with your friend or a teacher was a jerk to you or you're just stressed out, you know what?
You go home and you get 16 hours away from it.
Our kids are on all the time.
You know, and when they're having a fight with a friend, it follows them home.
They're on their devices nine or 10 hours a day.
And again, the pandemic made this so much worse.
It added on average four or five hours a day of being on their devices.
So these kids, I mean, imagine being a boxer and you go into the ring.
And when you go back to your corner, imagine there's nobody there, right?
There is no family dinner.
There is no church service.
There are no adults.
There's nobody to give you water, say it's okay.
And the next day, they're going back into the ring.
No wonder they're stressed out of their minds.
I want to just re-emphasize this point.
I've said it before.
If you give your child a cell phone, it's like giving them digital heroin.
You have no idea how damaging these things are.
And parents, they might mean well.
And our next top, our whole next segment is going to be about parents because that's a huge component here.
It's the most medicated generation in history who says they have anxiety, but these phones right here are overheating our primitive brains.
We are not designed, I believe by the Lord, to be staring at a screen 10 hours a day.
You cannot handle it.
And especially when you have the neuro associations that are still being developed for a 13, 14, and 15-year-old, that's why our generation is killing themselves more than ever before.
They're addicted to substances and they don't believe in anything.
And parents, you give your kid a smartphone before age 18.
It's the same or worse than giving them a form of digital heroin.
I have not come to that conclusion lightly.
I see it firsthand every single day.
And Jeremy, you say it a little differently.
I'm a little bit more blunt to it, but it has changed everything.
You pinpointed the year.
The year iPhones were widely distributed was 14 and 15 when the cost went down and they went everywhere.
It has created a generation in misery.
Parents, take those phones away.
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So, Jeremy, what role do parents play in this?
Because you've seen this devolution, but have you taught in the same community for the last 20 years?
Is that right?
I've same school.
I actually teach at the high school where I went.
So I've spent 28 years of the year.
So you know the community well.
No, I'm asking for a reason because you say that these kids don't talk to their parents anymore and there's a disconnect and parents aren't parenting.
So it's not a socioeconomic question, right?
Because the socioeconomics remain the same because you have a control here, but it stopped happening.
Parenting Is Not Friendship 00:10:02
So it's not as if it's a wealthy versus poor thing.
Why have parents basically abdicated their responsibility or their role?
I believe it's the worst generation of parents in the history of parenting.
I could prove it through a lot of different things.
Am I wrong here?
Or do parents just not understand the severity of this?
You can be right about both things there.
If I'm going to be perfectly honest with you and your audience, I wrote Hollowed Out 95% because of the things I was seeing as a teacher.
But you know what?
I haven't been a perfect parent either.
I am guilty of one of these people who gave my children devices before they absolutely should have.
And here's the thing: if anybody wants a panacea, if anybody thinks that there's some magical elixir out there, you know, we love shortcuts in this country.
I mean, there's an entire industry of self-help about, oh, it's easy to lose weight.
It's easy to be rich.
Guess what?
It's not easy to raise another human being.
And here's why.
This is what the ancient Greeks, this is what everybody throughout time and eternity has known, which is that as human beings, we learn by example.
And we are either improved or depraved by the examples in front of us.
And so what we have done by giving our children these phones is we have displaced the connective tissue of adulthood and replaced the, you know, the toxicity of these phones instead.
I mean, think about it this way.
You know, I can't believe I actually have to say this, or you have to say this, but you know what?
You actually have to raise children.
I think that we have a fetish in this country with childhood and elevating childhood values and elevating childhood behavior.
I mean, one of the things I hate all the time is when we start talking about politics and they're like, well, the young people understand these things more than we do.
No, they don't.
They don't know.
Don't tell me to go read my book or do the work.
Trust me, no, I don't need to be lectured by a child.
We actually have to stand up and be the adults again.
I mean, at the end of the day, we have to model adulthood for young people.
And, you know, I think, Charlie, I think of liberty as kind of like a license.
You know, we have a whole generation of young people who have been given the car keys without getting the license first.
Same thing, they've been given the liberty without the values of how to live that liberty well.
And that's that's the magical recipe of America.
This is what conservatism has always understood.
And I'm probably in a different place politically than most of your audience, but conservatism understands that if you're going to have a free people, you have got to teach them how to use that freedom in a meaningful way.
And there are no new values, there is no new wisdom.
We have to bestow it and model it for each generation.
And we haven't done it for this one, and it's hollowing them out.
But do you think parents are noticing this or making the proper interventions?
You know what?
I think I'm detecting a little bit of a seismic change.
And I'm not saying my book is the reason.
I wish it was.
But, you know, when you start to talk to teachers and you start to hear other parents, you know, there is, I think, a movement to really take the phones away from the classroom, to really delay when we start to give children these phones and how we use them.
I do, you know, with the technology, I think I do have some hope.
When it comes to, you know, reintroducing religion into the home, when it comes to kind of the way that we talk about the country, I frankly haven't seen much movement there from my quarter of the country.
But as far as the technology, I do feel that we're starting, the message is getting through for sure.
So you're right here, often friendless and depressed, they eat alone, study alone, and even socialize alone.
Let's talk about solutions then.
How do you turn a generation that is the unhappiest generation in history?
Which, again, it is so at odds with a lot of what Marx would say.
Marx would say that access to material kind of satisfaction would then make you be able to satisfy your needs and your desires.
It's the opposite.
Everyone has everything, and yet they feel as if they have nothing.
There's this massive spiritual darkness.
How do you solve it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And if you want to kind of extrapolate from that, look at that as a nation.
I mean, you could say that we are freer and wealthier than we've ever been, more tolerant, more pluralistic than any point in American history.
And yet young people have a darker, more cynical view of America than they ever have.
But as far as solutions are concerned, there are no shortcuts.
And I think at the end of the day, the adult, you know, we have to, especially when it comes to parenting and being teachers, we have to stop mistaking parenting and teaching with friendship.
I think we have a whole generation that thought, you know, I can be a friend to my child as a teacher.
I want to be your friend.
But the problem is that those relationships are predicated on a ground of equality, that, you know, friendship is about, you know, we're equals.
Well, parenthood and teaching are not like that.
Don't befriend.
I mean, you can be friendly as a teacher, and I feel like I'm friendly.
I'm nice to my students, but I'm not your pal.
I'm not your buddy.
I'm your teacher.
And that's the other thing in our schools is that, you know, I think a lot of the public doesn't understand how many things we teachers are now responsible for.
I know it's, I know, we bash, it's very easy to bash on teachers and say, well, look, all of our students are turning on the country and they can't read and they're illiterate.
I get that and I'm sensitive to that.
But all of the problems of civil society, the poverty, the violence, the lack of traditional behavior, that all ends up in the school.
And we teachers have to handle all of it in the classroom.
And it makes it profoundly hard to do our jobs.
And I think that we have to get back to actually seeing teachers as academic positions and parents as moral positions, not friendly positions.
Yeah.
And so, and you've said this, that, okay, they're no longer having dinner together, right?
Yeah.
But that's parents that dictate those terms.
What changed with parents then?
Why do they not want to have dinner with their kids?
I think a few things are happening.
And I think this is a class distinction.
I think for a lot of my poorer students, their parents are working two or three jobs.
I mean, they are working all the time.
You said that changed, though, over the decades, right?
With the controlled variables, right, right, right, right.
So, those are the poor kids.
But some of the wealthier students I have, because I have a mix here where I teach, is that a lot of parents are working.
They're on trips.
Sometimes they are so busy that they're going from soccer practice to football practice.
Let me give you a statistic about this that's, I think, disturbing.
We now spend more money eating out as a country than we do on groceries.
And that really shows you how we've kind of decided to spend our time.
And not only that, I mean, this is a totally other discussion, but they're also very unhealthy.
I mean, this is an overweight generation.
I don't know if you saw that study the other day that blame climate change for obesity.
I would say that maybe processed foods and sugar and energy drinks and not exercising has a little bit more to do with it.
Yeah, I would say so.
I want to read a question here we got here, Jeremy.
And again, for those of you listening, very, very wise here.
Again, it's not a political issue.
It's just a ticking time bum.
Hollowed out, a warning about America's generation by Jeremy Adams.
We got this question here: freedom at charliekirk.com.
Dear Charlie, approximately eight years ago, I took wife and kids to a family dinner.
I would always take away everybody's cell phone and pile them up on a corner of the table.
A waiter remarked to me that in his seven years of being a waiter, I was the only second parent he saw do this.
My wife and I were shocked.
That was a wake-up call for me.
And so it comes down to a lot of the parents, right?
So let me ask you this.
So, and I love the thesis here when you describe your book: Do teachers have a front row seat to America's decline?
In some ways, you are the canary in the coal mine, you're the harbinger, you're the warning of things to come.
I mean, so let me ask it this way: how does this generation mature?
What does this look like 10 years from now, absent immediate intervention?
You're trying to say it's really bad.
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm trying to say that, you know, when you look at, you know, essentially the relationships and the institutions that build a civil society, I mean, Aristotle understood that the first family, the first political unit you're ever born into is the family.
And when we look at the amount of, you know, family time that young people are spending with their actual family, it is, it's less.
You know, you see this, and it's, and like I said, it really is down to the parents.
I love that question from your audience member because, you know, you go to a restaurant and you'll see a family, and we, my home family, we've been guilty of this and we are working on it.
Is you know, you sit there in silence.
I mean, let me let me tell you a quick story about this.
So, as a teacher, about 10 years ago, or more than that, if you ended the day early and said, Okay, kids, you know, we're done with the lecture.
We got two minutes till the bell rings.
You know, do whatever you want to do, you know, the class would erupt, right?
And kids would just talk and talk and talk and talk.
And they'd be gossiping and flirting.
Same with parties.
You go to a teenage party, people are loud, they're getting rowdy.
Let me tell you something.
Nowadays, if you in class early, silence, Charlie.
Silence.
Nobody is engaging.
I went to a teenage party a few years ago to pick up my daughter, and I walk into the room.
I expect them to be, you know, yelling and whatever.
Everybody's in there on the couch looking at their phones.
The adults have got to remove it.
Again, if the adults are not going to be the adults, at the end of the day, you're going to have an infantile society.
I mean, you're talking about what does this look like 10 years from now?
We're looking at the fact that they don't want to commit to things.
They don't particularly think that the country is worth defending or revitalizing.
And most of all, their attention spans are dead.
I mean, again, reading is a gateway skill.
If you can't read, if you can't pay attention, you can't master.
Well, I mean, I'm just going to be honest, though.
I mean, hiring and dealing with some Generation Z, they don't know anything.
I mean, I don't care where they went to college.
I mean, again, some Generation Z is going to get mad.
We got some wonderful Gen Z people, but it's really bad.
I mean, and I also, have you noticed at all also?
I think this is interesting.
And you've seen all these articles about how after the pandemic, a lot of them don't want to come back to work.
You know, I want, I want to stay.
Why is that?
Because it, well, I mean, I think we all know.
I mean, why did the students, why did so many of the students, you know, we could have a whole nother day talking about what teaching was like during COVID.
I mean, the kids didn't turn on their cameras.
Okay.
They literally were scrolling and playing Call of Duty while teachers were lecturing.
Stop Renting Start Owning 00:03:10
You had to accept work for forever.
I mean, I actually had a day where, you know, you have a class of 35 people and maybe two or three have their cameras on, right?
And there's one day where I'm lecturing them, going, you know, going on and on.
All of a sudden, what do I hear, Charlie?
Yep.
Like the kid had fallen asleep.
And like, we're trying to wake this kid up through Zoom.
And so, I mean, if you could stay in your pajamas all day and pass class and, you know, play Call of Duty all day, I mean, and engage in pajama learning, you do it too.
I mean, they're kids.
But at the end of the day, the problem is that the majesty of education and the power of getting, you know, into a place where you have strong knowledge and skills, that's not happening.
And I'm afraid that's what's going to happen to a whole generation.
I mean, that's my answer: it's pleasant.
It's more easy to work that way, of course.
Jeremy Adams, the book is called Hollowed Out.
I love this right here.
Digital Hermits of a Sort Unfamiliar to an Older Generation.
They have little interest in marriage and family.
They largely dismiss and are shockingly ignorant of religion.
They sneer at patriotism, sympathize with riots and vandalism, and regard American society and civilization as so radically flawed that it must be dismantled.
Often friendless and depressed, they eat alone, study alone, and even socialize alone.
Okay, we're going to talk about: is there any good news here, Jeremy?
Which is, is it possible that they're so depressed and so awful, they might actually latch on to something that is rooted in goodness, truth, and beauty if they'd even believe in such constructs of postmodern America?
We shall see.
Look, rents are going way too high.
The rent is too high.
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I know what you're saying, oh, Charlie, rates are too high.
Listen, you could always refinance.
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Again, you might say, Charlie, now's the worst time to buy.
That's not true.
Okay.
Property values are going to go up.
And if you're renting, you're getting poorer.
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Start putting your hard-earned money into a home.
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Restoring Physical Belief 00:05:41
They're wonderful people, enthusiastic.
They send me scripture.
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Stop renting.
Start buying.
They're wonderful people.
AndrewandTodd.com.
Okay, so Jeremy, is there any part of the book that we haven't discussed yet that you want to make sure our audience is aware of?
Any themes or arguments or a thesis within it?
Yeah, I just want to be very clear.
And I don't think it contradicts anything we've talked about, is that I don't blame our young people at all.
I mean, this is 100%.
The adults have got to get their act together in our civil society.
And you asked this question right before break.
You know, what's good about our kids?
There's a lot that's great about our kids.
I mean, let me just be clear.
They're pleasant to be around.
I mean, they're funny.
They're actually very optimistic.
Even though they kind of have this mental health crisis, when you look at what they're interested in, they do have this profound ability to think that the world is changeable.
I mean, I guarantee your audience probably doesn't like their kind of environmentalism, but their environmentalism is a belief that we can change the world for the better.
They don't think in small terms.
They are ambitious.
And the other thing I would say, and this is really important, and this is in the book, what drives me loony about my students, but also makes me hopeful, is that on one hand, they are the least patriotic generation in American history, and yet they have a thoroughly American view of justice.
And when they're tearing down statues, I want to say, folks, this belief in equality before the law, this belief in individual liberty, this belief in ubiquitous due process rights, this belief in the 14th Amendment and Martin Luther King's dream, where do you think that came from?
Okay, I mean, literally, that was, you know, those are our founding documents.
When we talk about American exceptionalism, I know people like to laugh at that term, but I'm sorry.
We are the first country in the history of the world to take these classical liberal ideas and actually make it into a reality, to pluck it from the clouds of theory and to make it into an actual civil society.
And that's something that has to be renewed.
And so, you know, they actually do have a thoroughly American view of justice and what's possible.
They just kind of don't make that connection between where that sense of justice came from and what it's going to take to renew it.
So, battle plan for parents, what's the big takeaways?
What are the action steps?
Yeah, the biggest takeaway is you have got to put yourself back into the physical place of your children.
What does that mean?
That means taking away their phones.
That means family dinner.
That means being involved in school.
That means, number one, talking to them.
The studies are very clear.
Conversations, even if you're talking about silly stuff, actually talking to your students every day is the number one thing you can do.
You have to understand one of the worst things about the COVID lockdown was a lot of our young people forgot how to engage.
The kind of membrane that connects families and connects communities were destroyed.
Young people aren't going to football games and you ask them why, and they say, well, because it's awkward.
I might have to have a conversation with an adult.
They don't like to look you in the eyes as much anymore.
So we've got to put ourselves back into the physical spaces.
But the other thing I would say, and this, I cannot underestimate this enough.
I mean, imagine that my words are italicized, underlined, and bold, and with an exclamation point.
Okay.
You have got to also put yourself back into the moral and spiritual space of our young people.
If we allow them to peddle in this kind of soft nihilism that says there is no right, there is no wrong.
All countries are equally just, that I'm okay, you're okay.
And the worst people are the judgmental people.
If that's the value system that we're going to bestow upon this generation, then they are not going to have the virtues and the values and the moral metal, which allows them to get through the difficult storms of life.
Because let me tell you right now, you're not middle-aged yet, Charlie.
You're still young.
It just gets harder.
And if you don't believe that there's a kind of moral fortitude that's necessary to get through life, then you're not going to get through it very well.
Yeah, I mean, 30 seconds, I guess, remaining, but some of that's curriculum, isn't it, though?
I mean, post-modernism, post-structuralist, these teachers are being taught to teach that stuff, aren't they?
You know, I would disagree a little bit with that.
Yes, I mean, a little bit.
You're not wrong on that.
But that, you know, where that seeps through?
That's all in their memes.
That's through their social media, the kind of moral relativism.
America's bad.
I mean, we all know what the tech industry does.
We all know that these algorithms, if you see something and you like it, you're going to watch it over and over and over again.
If you see all of this stuff, you know, hours a day, you're going to start to buy into it.
Jeremy, thank you for joining us.
Hollowed out.
A warning about America's next generation, Jeremy Adams.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it.
Email is freedom at charliekirk.com.
Subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
Take out your podcast app.
Type in Charlie Kirk Show.
Very important conversation, everybody.
And this is something we're going to keep on hammering.
If you have kids who say they're depressed or they say they're anxious, they say they need Xanax, they say they need Zolof, they need benzodiazepans, slow down, monitor their screen time, get them down to dopamine zero, no more music, no more flashy screens, have them read books, fiction especially.
Anxiety and depression are usually extrapolations of the imagination gone wrong.
These kids are largely not depressed.
Their brains are overcooked by a device that we have no idea what's actually doing to them.
Something we're going to keep on talking about.
And by the way, have them in actual conversation, spend time in nature, and challenge a child to stop being comfortable.
Comfort actually might kill you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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