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00:01:18.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:42.000This 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.
00:01:52.000This is one of the most important topics happening right now in America.
00:02:00.000If 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.
00:02:10.000And the older generation, the boomer generation, and Gen X is going to say, what happened here?
00:02:25.000Jeremy 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.
00:02:42.000So, Jeremy, a lot of different ways we could start here, but let's just start this way.
00:02:46.000Tell us about your book and why you decided to write it.
00:02:49.000Yeah, well, I've been a teacher for almost 25 years now.
00:02:52.000And 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.
00:03:02.000And 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.
00:03:16.000And this book is really essentially a battle cry.
00:03:19.000It's me waving my hands in the abyss saying, hey, other adults in America, we have a profound problem here with our young people.
00:03:26.000And I was, I couldn't agree with you more.
00:04:12.000And nowadays, literally, the attention span of our young people has been destroyed.
00:04:17.000I 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.
00:04:27.000They 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.
00:04:33.000So 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.
00:04:48.000No, 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.
00:05:21.000They don't have meals with their parents.
00:05:23.000And, 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.
00:05:32.000I mean, amplified them and made them worse.
00:05:36.000I mean, I couldn't, I mean, I enthusiastically agree with this, and we talk about it all the time.
00:05:40.000I don't feel as if I'm taken seriously when I talk about this with adults.
00:06:16.000Well, 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.
00:06:28.000When 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.
00:06:38.000And it's not just so, so I'm not making this stuff up.
00:07:09.000At any rate, though, I'm a public school teacher, right?
00:07:11.000So it's really not my business who you vote for.
00:07:13.000And it's really not my business if you're religious or not.
00:07:16.000But 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.
00:07:29.000I 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.
00:07:39.000And the people in my classroom are the healthiest, wealthiest, most fortunate human beings to ever exist.
00:07:47.000And as a teacher, I want them to understand where did these institutions and these values come from?
00:08:04.000And 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.
00:08:11.000I 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.
00:08:22.000I mean, all those kind of axioms that you hear.
00:08:25.000But 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.
00:08:37.000I mean, they thought Easter was about, you know, putting on your swimsuit and, you know, dying some eggs.
00:09:13.000And I hope people will still go read the book anyhow.
00:09:15.000But I think that we have a generation that has fundamentally misunderstood individual liberty, right?
00:09:20.000So 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?
00:09:31.000I am free to worship whatever God I want.
00:09:33.000I am free to be whatever political party I am want.
00:09:35.000I can't free to say whatever I want to say, love whoever I love, live wherever I want to live.
00:09:41.000That's the winning recipe of a meaningful existence.
00:09:44.000And this is what is so extraordinary about America: we're not subjects of a king, right?
00:09:48.000We're not forced to worship at a certain church.
00:09:51.000We don't believe in limiting associations.
00:09:55.000And yet, I think we have an entire generation that has confused the freedom of or freedom to do something with the freedom from something.
00:10:03.000So 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.
00:10:12.000And by the way, why would I ever go to church?
00:10:14.000Talk 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.
00:10:21.000So your thesis, and it's brilliant, is that this generation wants freedom from responsibility.
00:10:26.000Yes, I think that there's essentially a cult of radical individualism.
00:10:31.000I'm not talking about the good individualism in the marketplace and becoming your own unique person.
00:10:35.000I'm talking about an individualism that makes it so that you are unmoored.
00:10:39.000You are unattached to the traditional things that give life its meaning and its purpose, Charlie.
00:10:44.000I 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.
00:10:52.000I try and be a great father every day and I fail.
00:10:55.000I try and be a great teacher, a great husband, a great friend.
00:10:58.000But even though those ties bind me, they also define me and make my life meaningful.
00:11:04.000I 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.
00:11:15.000I mean, imagine, you know, a life without intense family and friendship and faith.
00:11:20.000And I mean, don't even get me started.
00:11:24.000Don'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.
00:11:34.000And imagine a generation where that is missing as well.
00:11:37.000So, Jeremy, I want to ask you: so, you've been doing this for 20, 25 years, you said?
00:11:51.000Average junior or senior in high school in 2000, average in 2010, average 2015, and then average now.
00:11:58.000The reason I'm asking is because your detractors or your critics will say, oh, these kids go out of it.
00:12:04.000But 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?
00:12:21.000Is if you look at students from, you know, 1998 to 2010, you know, roughly, roughly the same experience.
00:12:27.000But in the last 10 to 12 years, there has been a radical change.
00:12:32.000I mean, I could go on and on, but I mean, so many things.
00:12:35.000Number 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.
00:12:42.000Charlie, nobody talks about their parents anymore.
00:12:44.000Nobody talks about their grandparents anymore.
00:13:13.000I 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.
00:13:21.000But the big, big, big seismic change, and this is the big one.
00:13:27.000Cell phones, the technology has changed everything.
00:13:31.000It is a, there is a chasm, a grand canyon between, you said 2015, about 2014, 2015, and today, everything changed.
00:13:40.000I 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.
00:13:56.000I 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.
00:14:04.000Like, 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.
00:14:08.000And they're like, we don't watch movies.
00:14:16.000And not only that, by the way, but when you talk about anxiety, I mean, think about this, Charlie.
00:14:21.000When 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?
00:14:28.000You go home and you get 16 hours away from it.
00:15:16.000And our next top, our whole next segment is going to be about parents because that's a huge component here.
00:15:23.000It's the most medicated generation in history who says they have anxiety, but these phones right here are overheating our primitive brains.
00:15:32.000We are not designed, I believe by the Lord, to be staring at a screen 10 hours a day.
00:15:40.000And 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.
00:15:50.000They're addicted to substances and they don't believe in anything.
00:15:54.000And parents, you give your kid a smartphone before age 18.
00:15:58.000It's the same or worse than giving them a form of digital heroin.
00:16:01.000I have not come to that conclusion lightly.
00:17:43.000No, 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.
00:17:50.000So it's not a socioeconomic question, right?
00:17:53.000Because the socioeconomics remain the same because you have a control here, but it stopped happening.
00:17:59.000So it's not as if it's a wealthy versus poor thing.
00:18:01.000Why have parents basically abdicated their responsibility or their role?
00:18:07.000I believe it's the worst generation of parents in the history of parenting.
00:18:12.000I could prove it through a lot of different things.
00:18:28.000I haven't been a perfect parent either.
00:18:30.000I am guilty of one of these people who gave my children devices before they absolutely should have.
00:18:36.000And 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.
00:18:44.000I mean, there's an entire industry of self-help about, oh, it's easy to lose weight.
00:18:52.000This 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.
00:18:59.000And we are either improved or depraved by the examples in front of us.
00:19:04.000And 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.
00:19:23.000I think that we have a fetish in this country with childhood and elevating childhood values and elevating childhood behavior.
00:19:30.000I 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.
00:19:38.000Don't tell me to go read my book or do the work.
00:19:41.000Trust me, no, I don't need to be lectured by a child.
00:19:45.000We actually have to stand up and be the adults again.
00:19:48.000I mean, at the end of the day, we have to model adulthood for young people.
00:19:53.000And, you know, I think, Charlie, I think of liberty as kind of like a license.
00:19:57.000You know, we have a whole generation of young people who have been given the car keys without getting the license first.
00:20:04.000Same thing, they've been given the liberty without the values of how to live that liberty well.
00:20:08.000And that's that's the magical recipe of America.
00:20:12.000This is what conservatism has always understood.
00:20:14.000And 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.
00:20:25.000And there are no new values, there is no new wisdom.
00:20:29.000We have to bestow it and model it for each generation.
00:20:32.000And we haven't done it for this one, and it's hollowing them out.
00:20:35.000But do you think parents are noticing this or making the proper interventions?
00:20:48.000But, 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.
00:21:02.000I do, you know, with the technology, I think I do have some hope.
00:21:05.000When 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.
00:21:17.000But as far as the technology, I do feel that we're starting, the message is getting through for sure.
00:21:22.000So you're right here, often friendless and depressed, they eat alone, study alone, and even socialize alone.
00:21:57.000And if you want to kind of extrapolate from that, look at that as a nation.
00:22:00.000I 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.
00:22:06.000And yet young people have a darker, more cynical view of America than they ever have.
00:22:10.000But as far as solutions are concerned, there are no shortcuts.
00:22:14.000And 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.
00:22:27.000I think we have a whole generation that thought, you know, I can be a friend to my child as a teacher.
00:22:33.000But the problem is that those relationships are predicated on a ground of equality, that, you know, friendship is about, you know, we're equals.
00:22:41.000Well, parenthood and teaching are not like that.
00:22:51.000And 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.
00:22:59.000I 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.
00:23:07.000But all of the problems of civil society, the poverty, the violence, the lack of traditional behavior, that all ends up in the school.
00:23:18.000And we teachers have to handle all of it in the classroom.
00:23:21.000And it makes it profoundly hard to do our jobs.
00:23:23.000And I think that we have to get back to actually seeing teachers as academic positions and parents as moral positions, not friendly positions.
00:25:37.000Yeah, 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.
00:25:51.000And 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.
00:25:59.000You know, you see this, and it's, and like I said, it really is down to the parents.
00:26:03.000I 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.
00:26:11.000Is you know, you sit there in silence.
00:26:13.000I mean, let me let me tell you a quick story about this.
00:26:15.000So, 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.
00:26:23.000We got two minutes till the bell rings.
00:26:24.000You know, do whatever you want to do, you know, the class would erupt, right?
00:26:28.000And kids would just talk and talk and talk and talk.
00:27:46.000Because it, well, I mean, I think we all know.
00:27:48.000I 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.
00:27:53.000I mean, the kids didn't turn on their cameras.
00:28:18.000And like, we're trying to wake this kid up through Zoom.
00:28:20.000And 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.
00:28:31.000But 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.
00:28:41.000And I'm afraid that's what's going to happen to a whole generation.
00:28:43.000I mean, that's my answer: it's pleasant.
00:28:45.000It's more easy to work that way, of course.
00:28:49.000Jeremy Adams, the book is called Hollowed Out.
00:28:52.000Digital Hermits of a Sort Unfamiliar to an Older Generation.
00:28:55.000They have little interest in marriage and family.
00:28:57.000They largely dismiss and are shockingly ignorant of religion.
00:29:00.000They sneer at patriotism, sympathize with riots and vandalism, and regard American society and civilization as so radically flawed that it must be dismantled.
00:29:10.000Often friendless and depressed, they eat alone, study alone, and even socialize alone.
00:29:14.000Okay, we're going to talk about: is there any good news here, Jeremy?
00:29:16.000Which 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?
00:29:37.000If you're renting or have a friend or family member, that is, right now is the time to make the move to homeownership.
00:29:41.000My good buddies, Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakian at Sierra Pacific Mortgage have helped so many people to make that leap from renting and owning.
00:29:48.000I know what you're saying, oh, Charlie, rates are too high.
00:29:52.000The problem is, though, why are you giving all of your money to rent when you could be building equity with lots of programs that offer first-time buyers assistance with little to no down payment needed?
00:30:02.000I encourage you to visit andrewandtodd.com right now.
00:31:58.000Even 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.
00:32:08.000I 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.
00:32:19.000And 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.
00:32:34.000And 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?
00:32:50.000Okay, I mean, literally, that was, you know, those are our founding documents.
00:32:54.000When we talk about American exceptionalism, I know people like to laugh at that term, but I'm sorry.
00:32:59.000We 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.
00:33:11.000And that's something that has to be renewed.
00:33:12.000And so, you know, they actually do have a thoroughly American view of justice and what's possible.
00:33:18.000They 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.
00:33:24.000So, battle plan for parents, what's the big takeaways?
00:34:24.000You have got to also put yourself back into the moral and spiritual space of our young people.
00:34:30.000If we allow them to peddle in this kind of soft nihilism that says there is no right, there is no wrong.
00:34:36.000All countries are equally just, that I'm okay, you're okay.
00:34:39.000And the worst people are the judgmental people.
00:34:42.000If 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.
00:34:54.000Because let me tell you right now, you're not middle-aged yet, Charlie.
00:34:58.000And 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.
00:35:06.000Yeah, I mean, 30 seconds, I guess, remaining, but some of that's curriculum, isn't it, though?
00:35:09.000I mean, post-modernism, post-structuralist, these teachers are being taught to teach that stuff, aren't they?
00:35:14.000You know, I would disagree a little bit with that.
00:35:55.000Very important conversation, everybody.
00:35:57.000And this is something we're going to keep on hammering.
00:35:59.000If 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.
00:36:16.000Anxiety and depression are usually extrapolations of the imagination gone wrong.