00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, Helen Andrews, who has a very provocative take on boomers.
00:00:06.000She has an anti-boomer book out and it's a fun conversation, but she's very serious.
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00:00:21.000Helen Andrews is a very smart person, and she goes through a methodical cross-examination of the boomer generation, baby boomers, and she thinks they're to blame for basically everything.
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00:01:00.000His 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.
00:01:09.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:21.000I'm very excited to talk to you about a new book that is coming out this month from my dear friend, a great American, and one of my top mentors, Jim Holden.
00:01:30.000He's a best-selling author, a member of the Turning Point Endowment, and a very clear thinker.
00:01:36.000Selling in an Anxious World is Jim's fifth book on selling strategies and best practices.
00:01:41.000This time, Jim brings together research science and observation to identify the leading cause of declining business-to-business sales, also known as corporate culture.
00:01:51.000I had the great honor of contributing to a chapter of Selling in an Anxious World through my work with Turning Point.
00:01:57.000I'm in a unique position to observe academic culture within our colleges and relate it to the corporate world, particularly its impact on company culture.
00:02:06.000In today's world, good company culture requires vigilant protection, which is why this book is so timely and a must-read for business people, sellers, patriots, and Christians.
00:02:16.000Selling in an Anxious World combines research from extensive deal reviews, examples from Jim's personal life, and Bible references to shine a light on culture, presenting an unconventional guide to solving an unconventional problem.
00:02:29.000You'll get quick access to whatever topics are important to you through chapter summaries and reference guides.
00:02:34.000Jim Holden's book is not like any other business book out there.
00:03:45.000No, the motivation for the book arose from looking around at my generation and seeing how tough things were for us, just on a lot of levels compared to how things were when the boomers were our age.
00:03:59.000I see a lot of millennials who feel frustrated economically.
00:04:23.000Why is it that the boomers screwed this up so terribly?
00:04:26.000There's good boomers, but on average, why is it?
00:04:29.000Do you think it might be because of their World War II parents that kind of just wanted peace and prosperity for them after the horror of the Depression and the war?
00:04:47.000If you, as the boomers' parents, had gone through the Great Depression and World War II, all you would want is to give your children the easy life that you never had.
00:04:56.000And the greatest generation succeeded in that.
00:04:59.000The problem is the boomers then got the idea that great prosperity and social cohesion and an easy life where everything's just handed to you is the natural order of things, is the natural state of affairs.
00:05:11.000They just assumed everything would always be as easy as their parents made it for them.
00:05:22.000How was it when they were growing up versus today?
00:05:24.000Can you give us some numbers and some detail just from how easy it was to buy a home, go to college, save money?
00:05:32.000Can you talk in specifics so that some of our younger listeners can realize that their parents had a completely different set of circumstances that they were entering into?
00:05:43.000Yeah, I'm sure your younger listeners will be astonished to learn that most people could graduate college in those days with no debt at all.
00:05:52.000You could basically pay down a semester's tuition with a part-time job, you know, a part-time work study, sweeping floors a couple afternoons a week at the chemistry lab, and you would be able to pay for college that way, as opposed to what our generation has, which is graduating with a degree and five figures worth of debt.
00:06:11.000Another difference that's been a massive social revolution is that when the boomers were growing up, about three quarters of households were single earner households.
00:06:22.000You had one breadwinner and the other parent stayed home.
00:06:25.000Today, a larger proportion of women with children under the age of five work full-time than ever before in history.
00:06:36.000And about two-thirds of households are dual-earner households.
00:06:40.000And for millennials, a lot of that isn't just that the woman in the household wants to go out and work because she feels like she wants to do that to be fulfilled.
00:06:48.000They feel like they need two incomes just to make ends meet.
00:06:53.000A lot of millennial couples would love to be one-earner households if they could, but they feel like they just can't afford it.
00:06:58.000So that's another huge revolution that you just can't have a middle-class lifestyle on one income anymore.
00:07:30.000So basically, you need a second income.
00:07:32.000And also that doesn't factor in just some of the niceties of existence, like saving money, going on a vacation, you know, just basic things that you need to survive.
00:07:42.000And so I think that's a really important argument that is played into this.
00:08:03.000Because the boomers economy was full of a lot more stable jobs where you could assume that once you've landed the gig, you'd be able to have it for an extended period of time.
00:08:14.000A millennial in the workforce is looking at a lot more of a gig economy and temporary positions.
00:08:20.000And it's just really hard to do any long-term planning or to invest in the system when all of your job opportunities are temporary in that way and impermanent.
00:08:30.000So, no, just the economy looks a lot different today than it did when we're growing up.
00:08:36.000It's not a matter of work ethic on anybody's part.
00:08:38.000Yeah, that is a commonly leveled criticism where boomers will say, We worked a lot harder than you did back then.
00:08:46.000Now, of course, it's not necessarily factoring in technology too.
00:08:51.000For example, just something that happened to me yesterday.
00:08:54.000I was talking to my pastor as we were driving from Thousand Oaks to San Juan Capistrano.
00:09:00.000And about an hour into the drive, we were using Google Maps or Apple Maps or some sort of tech company that was monitoring us and trying to sell stuff to us.
00:09:07.000And I turned to him and I said, So, how did you do this back in the 70s?
00:09:10.000And he's like, Well, we had stacks of maps and we had to pull over and do this.
00:09:14.000I said, Wait, so just curious, how often did you have to ask people around, go get a pay phone?
00:09:22.000He said, Oh, 40% of the time, if I had to go outside of my local area, I'd have to factor in 30 minutes to go find where I was going.
00:09:28.000Now, it might seem inconsequential, but over a course of a decade, look at all that lost productivity time, right?
00:09:34.000Just from that one example of finding where you are.
00:09:37.000And so, it's actually irrelevant if you worked, you had to work harder because you didn't know where you were going half the time and because GPS and things like that.
00:09:46.000And so, can you can you add to that of how the economy has changed so dramatically, but human needs have not?
00:09:53.000So, human needs of building a family, having connection, having children, that's actually the same needs in the 70s, but it's harder now to satisfy human needs for a variety of different reasons.
00:10:05.000And now, a generation, there's a lot of boomer criticism towards millennials.
00:10:14.000I love your example of the maps, Charlie, because that's one thing I try to do in the book is to keep things concrete.
00:10:20.000Because I could throw a lot of statistics at you about the difference in the economy then versus now, but it's a lot easier when you have something that you can, you know, look at with your own two eyes.
00:10:28.000Another concrete example is teen jobs.
00:10:32.000There used to be entire sectors of the economy that were dominated by high schoolers having after school jobs or summer jobs.
00:10:40.000They would be the people selling you your coffee at the cafe.
00:10:51.000And all, and those jobs are now filled by grown adults, you know, grown working, working men and women.
00:10:57.000The problem is that the reason those jobs used to be filled by teenagers is that they're very insecure and they don't pay a lot of money.
00:11:04.000So, a teenager doesn't need a job that's going to give him enough to live on, and he doesn't need a job that he can count on having five, 10 years from now.
00:11:11.000So, the fact that adults are filling those jobs now is actually a bad sign.
00:11:18.000It's a symptom that you have grown adults filling jobs that are more optimized for somebody who's just a teenager.
00:11:26.000But the disappearance of teens from the workforce is something that people can see.
00:11:29.000People who've been around for 10 years can remember.
00:11:34.000In our fast-paced world, it's tough to make reading a priority.
00:11:38.000At thinker.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
00:11:47.000Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
00:12:58.000And it's not because I necessarily didn't want one.
00:13:01.000However, in our local community, if you were in a middle class or upper middle class family, you know what you did over the summer?
00:13:09.000You did intense athletics or you did something highly specialized, right?
00:13:14.000And so this is a new phenomenon that started to set in.
00:13:17.000AAU basketball, travel football, seven-on-seven football, marching band camps, all these different sorts of things were made almost impossible for you to go get a summer job.
00:13:26.000Not impossible, but the system was actually designed that way.
00:13:30.000The system was designed because all of a sudden we were able to have an economy with cheap labor that was brought in from across the world or just jobs that weren't that stable, technology, displacement, all of that.
00:13:41.000And my parents, and I don't blame them for this, but their vision for me and for our generation was: I want your 14, 15, 16, and 17-year-old summers not to be used being a lifeguard or working at a local coffee shop.
00:13:55.000I want you to become highly specialized and really, really good at something you enjoy.
00:14:00.000And I saw so many people at Yale when I was an undergraduate who had had exactly your experience.
00:14:06.000They wanted to devote their summers to a really intense internship or something that was going to put them ahead.
00:14:10.000But I got to tell you, you could really tell the difference between the people who had had a job and those who reached the age of 22, 23 and had never worked a day in their lives.
00:14:20.000I mean, it may not build skills the way advanced athletics would, but it teaches you things like showing up on time, just being a grown adult.
00:14:28.000I don't think anybody should reach the age of 23, never having held any kind of a job.
00:14:34.000I mean, and I look back and I don't, I wouldn't trade the memories and the experiences that I had, but I can't help but think, you know, what skill set I wouldn't have had by the age of 18 if I wasn't in the local movie theater.
00:14:45.000But the interesting thing, though, is our local economy never had a demand for it, right?
00:14:49.000And so the local economy never was like going through high school lunchrooms being saying, we have openings at the movie theater.
00:15:07.000There's obviously huge negatives to that, but that's the decision that was made.
00:15:11.000And then the upper middle class suburban parents, they also had this in their mind where they're like, I don't want my kid to have to go work at a movie theater.
00:15:20.000Like I want him to go become LeBron James, right?
00:15:38.000Can you talk about how some of them who were rebellious, kind of a little bit of the hippie generation, you know, peace, love, rock and roll.
00:15:46.000And then some of them self-corrected, some of them never self-corrected.
00:15:53.000Can you talk about that, about how their a little bit of rebellion has translated into what you call their great disappointment?
00:16:02.000You're absolutely right that some people have sold out, but the boomers are a generation that were the rebels in the 60s and then they grew up a little bit and then they sold out, but they would never admit it.
00:16:23.000And that's so annoying to millennials because millennials have only ever known boomers in positions of authority as parents, as teachers, as administrators.
00:16:32.000So from our perspective, it's ridiculous for them to keep, you know, acting as if they're the plucky outsiders, you know, sticking it to the man.
00:16:40.000No, you are the man, which is why if you want to understand the boomers, you can't just look at the 60s.
00:16:47.000You have to look at the decade when they were most in power and finally reaching the summit of their professions, which is the 90s.
00:16:54.000I mean, the quintessential baby boomer is Bill Clinton.
00:17:27.000And certainly Bill Clinton embodies that.
00:17:30.000And so Bill Clinton, yes, absolutely did.
00:17:34.000He did have this mystique to him that I think was intentionally done through political theatrics, where it was almost like I'm still the weed-smoking anti-war hippie of the 60s, right?
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00:21:10.000And we talked about this at our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
00:21:13.000I told everyone to take a social media Sabbath at least once a week and get off of this stuff because it is dehumanizing us in more ways than one.
00:21:21.000Additionally, I will say that, you know, Eric Weinstein had a really good thought experiment, and I don't agree with Eric on a lot of stuff, but I think he's really interesting, where Eric Weinstein said, take out all the screens in a room and tell me what is different in that room technologically than if you were in the 1970s.
00:21:40.000Outside of all the screens, and then he asked the next question, are those screens making us happier, healthier, and closer to what human beings actually need and the connection we need?
00:21:58.000I know she's on the United States Supreme Court and I know she's very, very far left.
00:22:03.000What is the empty promise of Sonia Sotomayor?
00:22:07.000When she was nominated by Obama, she was meant to be the people's justice, you know, the way Diana was the people's princess, that she would be somebody accessible, somebody like the rest of us who can talk in a common language.
00:22:19.000The way that has actually worked out is just her projecting her own personal psychodrama onto the rest of us.
00:22:27.000She really is somebody who exemplifies the boomer vice of holding victimhood as the highest value.
00:22:35.000And whoever is the biggest victim has the most credibility in any conversation.
00:22:40.000More than any other Supreme Court justice, Sodomayor puts into her opinions kind of psychological stories.
00:22:48.000You know, it's not about cold, rational argument for her.
00:22:51.000It's about how various decisions make her feel or make other people feel.
00:22:57.000And to me, that's just not what constitutional law is supposed to be about.
00:23:01.000So by, you know, a lot of boomers have a therapeutic mindset.
00:23:05.000It's about making everybody feel more self-actualized and self-confident.
00:23:08.000And that's bad enough, you know, if you're going to have that kind of persona as a celebrity.
00:23:13.000But to bring that attitude and that approach to a Supreme Court opinion, to me, is just, that's a step down.
00:23:23.000That's not what constitutional law should be.
00:23:27.000And she definitely has ruled strangely on many, many things just through her own kind of personal dialogue.
00:23:34.000Next is civil rights activist Al Sharpton.
00:23:37.000You're being very generous calling him a civil rights activist, by the way.
00:23:40.000I think that is a generous description.
00:23:43.000He's a liar and not a good guy, but tell us why he had the fail promise of the boomers.
00:23:50.000One of the greatest scams that the baby boom generation ever pulled off was convincing the rest of us that they were responsible for the civil rights revolution.
00:24:01.000You know, they act as if Dr. King was a baby boomer.
00:24:16.000But they try and borrow that sort of moral authority of the great civil rights era, when in reality, boomers are more responsible for the dark, bad race relations of the 1970s.
00:24:29.000And Al Sharpton is a perfect example of that.
00:24:31.000He talks as if he's some SCLC preacher, you know, at the Selma march or something in the 1960s, when really he's a hustler and a con artist.
00:24:42.000And his assuming the mantle of Dr. King and the great 1960s civil rights leaders is just completely false.
00:24:48.000But it's something that a lot of boomers do.
00:24:50.000They pretend that they're the civil rights generation.
00:24:53.000I can't remember her name, but I want to say it was Tamley or the woman that made up the internet.
00:25:32.000And although, to be fair to Aaron Sorkin, he also had Peggy Noonan as a consultant as well.
00:25:38.000He really tried to have conservatives in the writer's room on that show so it wouldn't be completely lopsided.
00:25:45.000I don't think he quite succeeded in making the show politically even-handed, but he did his best.
00:25:51.000And like Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin is somebody whose tragedy is not so much any flaw of his, but it's how he has been received.
00:26:02.000The West Wing is a TV show and it's entertaining, but it's a fantasy.
00:26:08.000The trouble comes along when people watch that show and confuse it with reality.
00:26:14.000I live in Washington, D.C., and I think people outside the district would be shocked at how many people who work in politics now and who hold positions of power are West Wing obsessives, who got into politics because they watched the West Wing, who see themselves as actors in their own little West Wing episode.
00:26:32.000And that's just extremely disturbing to me that people who hold actual power today are still thinking in terms of this boomer fantasy show.
00:26:42.000Well, even worse, the millennials now getting in politics think they're in house of cards.
00:26:46.000So now we got a whole different level of, you know, insanity running our country.
00:27:10.000Like a lot of the boomers that I look at, he has very good intentions.
00:27:14.000The problem is that Jeffrey Sachs, starting about a decade ago, got the idea that we couldn't just reduce poverty, but that if people listened to him, we could eliminate it.
00:27:28.000He really, really told the United Nations and people in the White House that if only you gave him lots of money and did exactly what he said, we could eradicate poverty in Africa, which, of course, is a ludicrous, ludicrous goal.
00:27:45.000But it's a good example of boomer hubris, that they take a good idea and then just take it too far because they have this sense of themselves as having godlike power to reshape the world.
00:27:55.000It's a bit of arrogance, however well-intentioned.
00:28:05.000She first became famous in the 1990s PC wars.
00:28:10.000That was kind of the first time when the rest of America got really obsessed with what was on college curricula and the disappearance of great books from our universities.
00:28:20.000And she was on the right side of those battles.
00:28:22.000She was, and she's Italian, Camille Paglia is, and hence very combative.
00:28:28.000You know, she's loud, she's brash, she takes no prisoners.
00:29:17.000So you write also, worst of all, millennials seem intent on making the boomers' same mistakes.
00:29:23.000And we've gone through the different downfalls of all of these people, from Aaron Sorkin to Jeffrey Sachs to Camille Paglia to Sotomayor Sharpton and Steve Jobs.
00:29:35.000What are these mistakes millennials are making in real time?
00:29:38.000And how do we just get the message out for millennials to stop making these mistakes?
00:29:42.000I was finishing the manuscript for this book over the summer and watching cities around the country burn.
00:29:51.000And you had a lot of people asking, is this the 1960s all over again?
00:29:55.000And I thought, in a lot of ways, yeah, because millennials have been taught by their boomer teachers that the summit of American history, the high point of our trajectory as a nation, was the 1960s.
00:30:10.000And nothing's more noble than going out into the street and rioting for a good cause.
00:30:16.000So millennials have been taught that the 1960s were the best decade.
00:30:20.000And so we took to the streets to have a 1960s of our own.
00:30:26.000But that's a lot of the things the boomers could get away with then, millennials can't get away with now.
00:30:35.000In the 1960s, the boomers could go into the streets and riot and have street protests like Chicago 68 and then graduate from street protest and have a nice suburban job waiting for them on the other side.
00:30:48.000And their acting out in the streets would not cause any lasting damage to the social fabric because the social fabric was still so strong back in those days.
00:30:57.000Today, America is just a lot less resilient.
00:31:01.000The institutions that the boomers relied on, like the family and communities, are just weaker than they used to be.
00:31:08.000So millennials are reenacting the boomer drama of the 60s, which is a bad idea in itself.
00:31:17.000You know, you should forge your own history.
00:31:22.000But it's also dangerous in addition to being just kind of lame because America is less resilient socially than it was then.
00:31:30.000So acting out now is a lot riskier and is probably going to damage the country a lot more than the 1960s did then.
00:31:40.000Yeah, I've always said that the way history was portrayed to me and to my friends was that the most noble thing you could do is replicate the civil rights marches of the 1960s or that sort of movement.
00:31:54.000And you saw this in how so many people were quick to not go to a protest because they actually believed what it was fighting for, not go to a protest because they actually thought it would do anything.
00:32:16.000You go to the protest to get the sign.
00:32:18.000You hold it right, head up in the air with a peace sign, the perfect caption that says, we will end racism, RIP George Floyd, with, you know, maybe like a black heart or something.
00:32:33.000Of course, the black tile came before that.
00:32:35.000And that picture, as soon as you got the picture, you're like, okay, I can go home now.
00:32:49.000And I want to advertise that to the whole world.
00:32:52.000Oh, it's all, and it's also superficial.
00:32:54.000I remember in college, people would get together on a Saturday night and want to chalk something on the quad and would actually have to brainstorm something to protest because they didn't have one off the top of their heads.
00:34:50.000One of the most obnoxious things the boomers have done is refuse to exit the stage when it's their time.
00:34:59.000You know, they're just clinging to power and they won't let go.
00:35:03.000And they really, because they are so demographically numerous, they're able to make the country revolve around them because they're the most numerous voters, the most numerous buyers.
00:35:13.000So everybody wants to get their dollars and their votes.
00:35:16.000And that has led the following generations to kind of get stalled.
00:35:20.000You see, you talk to a lot of Gen X people who aren't making the progress in their careers that they want to because there are too many boomers up at the high levels of their organizations and they can't move on.
00:35:30.000So I think a gracious exit is probably the best thing that the boomers can do for civilization now.
00:35:36.000Graduate, be grandparents, you know, be happy in retirement.