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April 7, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:07:50
How Radicals Erode Reality | Dr. Phil McGraw
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I mean, Ben, I love this country.
I stand up when the flag goes by.
I put my hand over my heart when they play the national anthem.
I get tired of people apologizing for America.
But I love it enough to admit that we've got issues that we need to focus on and work on and change.
We're not number one in science.
We're not number one in math.
We're not number one in reading.
There are a lot of things that are making us less competitive as every day goes by.
And I'm worried that maybe it's that 70 or 80 percent in the middle that is afraid to speak up and is just kind of defaulting to those with the loudest mouth.
And that really bothers me.
Dr. Phil McGraw is a psychologist whose indelible impact on psychology, media, and the public's approach to personal and familial issues is unparalleled.
With an illustrious career that has seamlessly bridged the realms of psychology, legal consulting, and television, Dr. Phil has become a pivotal figure in American culture, guiding countless individuals through life's multifaceted challenges with his wisdom and expertise.
Before Dr. Phil became a television mainstay, he founded Courtroom Sciences, Inc., a pioneering trial science firm that leveraged forensic psychology in the legal arena, collaborating with premier lawyers globally on some of the most significant cases in jurisprudence.
His innovative work at CSI not only revolutionized trial consulting, but also inspired the hit CBS series Bull, reflecting Dr. Phil's early professional life.
Moving from the courtroom to the TV studio, Dr. Phil launched his daytime TV show in the early 2000s.
The show quickly ascended to the top of the viewership ratings, maintaining its position as the number one or number two daytime TV show throughout its run, culminating in its 21st and final season in 2023.
Dr. Phil's departure from daytime TV was not a bow from the medium, but a pivot to a new chapter.
In early 2023, he announced his retirement from daytime TV, saying, quote, I'm retiring from daytime TV.
I'm not retiring from TV.
True to his word, Dr. Phil is now appearing on his nightly program, Dr. Phil Primetime, on his own network, Merritt Street Media.
Dr. Phil's contributions to television and psychology have been recognized with 31 Emmy nominations, two Emmy Awards as an executive producer, induction into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame in 2015, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 2020.
Beyond television, Dr. Phil has dominated the literary world with nine No.
1 New York Times bestsellers and has ventured into digital media with his podcasts, Phil in the Blanks and Mystery and Murder, Analysis by Dr. Phil, which have both topped the charts.
An entrepreneur at heart, Dr. Phil, alongside his son Jay, developed Doctor on Demand, a revolutionary telemedicine platform that has transformed access to medical and psychiatric care.
Their philanthropic efforts, particularly through When Georgia Smiled, a Robin McGraw and Dr. Phil Foundation, have made significant impacts on child and family welfare and domestic violence prevention.
As we sit down with Dr. Phil today, our conversation will navigate the essential and evolving role of fatherhood in the modern age, informed by Dr. Phil's comprehensive background in psychology and his acute observations of family dynamics in America.
We'll explore the challenges fathers face in balancing tradition with the demands of the contemporary world, the impact of societal changes on parenting, and the core values that seem to be eroding in today's culture.
Join us for an enriching discussion that promises to delve deep into the essence of fatherhood,
the art of parenting, and the societal shifts that have reshaped these roles,
seen through the lens of one of America's most influential figures in psychology and media.
Dr. Phil, thanks so much for the time.
So you have a brand new book out.
It's called We've Got Issues, which, um, yes, but why don't we discuss the issues that you're actually talking about in We've Got Issues.
You talk about the problems with the country and how to solve them.
So what do you think are the biggest problems facing the country right now?
Well, right now, I think, um, I think families under attack for one thing.
And, uh, by that, I mean, A lot of the core values that I believe have made this the country that everybody wants to be in, obviously, because there's sure a lot of people trying to get here.
And I think this attack is in part the unintended consequences of technology, for example, the unintended consequences of really rapid change.
And I think some of it Uh, is that we've got factions, uh, in this country.
I call them, uh, I call it the tyranny of the fringe that are trying to hijack the narrative, um, in America by redefining things that, uh, we have always held to be true.
Not just because, uh, I hate when people say, well, why do you do that?
Well, because, uh, but because of.
Facts, history, science, biology, just things that you can empirically define and look to as some type of truth.
And I think when these core values come under attack, you start getting a lot of confusion, you start getting people trying to Make up realities just because that's what they wish was the fact.
And I think it creates a lot of erosion of reality for people.
I see it happening at the family level, I see it happening in the educational system, I see it happening in K through 12, and I see it happening in our universities.
And that's really bothersome to me because I look at where we stand on the global scene, and I think this is a great country, and I love America.
I mean, Ben, I love this country.
I stand up when the flag goes by.
I put my hand over my heart when they play the national anthem.
I get tired of people apologizing for America, but I love it enough to admit that we've got issues that we need to focus on and work on and change.
But, you know, we're not number one in science.
We're not number one in math.
We're not number one in reading.
There are a lot of things that are making us less competitive as every day goes by.
And I'm worried that maybe it's that 70 or 80 percent in the middle that is afraid to speak up and is just kind of defaulting to those with the loudest mouth.
And that really bothers me.
So you mentioned a lot of things there.
The thing that you started with, though, is family.
And obviously we've seen familial breakdown in the United States over the course of the
last 60 years, not just in terms of fatherlessness, which has become just the way things are currently
done unfortunately, predominantly.
There's still two parent households.
I believe the majority of families are two-parent households, but not by much.
Brand new children, depending on your community, are maybe born most of the time in a household with no father present.
But I think there's something else that's deeper going on with regard to American family, and that is the shift from family as a place where duty is learned.
To a place that is therapeutic in nature, that family is just about love as opposed to about duty, because for virtually all of human history, family units were about the duties that you owe to each other, that parents owe to children, the duty of respect that children owe to parents, the duties that you owe to your brothers and sisters to take care of them and make sure that they're taken care of and that they're safe.
And it seems as though family, being the central institution of society, as we've moved away from a duty-based vision of family, toward a therapeutic vision of family, where it's all about
just the love that you feel for one another, which isn't about duty, it's about the feelings
that you can engender in each other, that that's been a really tragic turn for the family. Well,
I think it's been a tragic turn in that, as you say, the absence of the father has been a
really big issue.
Thank you.
And I think when you look at the impact of the single-parent family, in terms of where those children wind up educationally, where they wind up criminally, where they wind up in replicating that pattern in their own life, the numbers are not good.
And we know, for example, if a woman has children and she has a non-biological male in the home, just a boyfriend living in the home, or someone, the likelihood of sexual or physical abuse goes up 33 times normal.
So, the interesting thing about the passage of time, Ben, is you don't have to speculate, you can measure.
And with the passage of time and seeing this happen so much compared to the 60s, for example, just over the last 50 or 60 years, we've seen this change.
That passage of time allows us to measure, and so we know that the vulnerability of these children across time has gone up so much when you have non-biological males in the household.
And when you talk about duty in the home, the most powerful role model in any child's life is the same sex parent.
The second most powerful model is the other sex parent.
They're the ones that are modeling responsibility.
They're the ones that are modeling the moral compass, the ethical codes, the work ethic, all the things that prepare these children for the next level of life.
And now there's this push that I guess we're supposed to co-parent with teachers.
We're supposed to co-parent with the schools and who know absolutely nothing about your child and have an agenda that you may not have chosen at all, but they're down there talking about these things.
And, you know, I don't think they're accosting these children when they come through the door of the school in wholesale fashion, pushing these agendas on them.
But if it's happening at all, it's happening too much.
They need to be educating the children Not installing values that they need to be getting at home.
At this point, over 30% of 5th graders can't read a simple sentence.
Almost as many 8th graders can't read a sentence.
19% of high school graduates can't read a prescription label or the instructions that come with a prescription.
But yet they keep getting moved along in the educational system because that's where the money is.
You know, they talk about pronouns.
They don't even know what a pronoun is.
How about we teach them what a pronoun is before we start talking to them about which ones they want to use?
That kind of thing really bothers me.
You know, when you talk about the fringes, hijacking all these discussions, what you talk about here is pure common sense, and it feels like these are 80-20 propositions at best.
I mean, they may be 90-10 propositions that say the family is important, that that parents have the responsibility, the chief
responsibility of inculcating values, that the educational system is supposed to be there to
teach you a skill set and hopefully to install in you a feeling of citizenship that
traditionally that's what education did.
These are all 80, 20, 90, 10 propositions, but it feels like these have now become captured.
by a political class who are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of power off the back of fringe arguments.
How much of that do you think is just because the power of online in our lives has become so great
that everybody just needs to get outside and touch some grass?
Oh my God, Ben, I don't know how much time we have today, but I don't know that it's enough to describe
how much I think this has changed.
I'll tell you, the industrial revolution, and of course there've been, however you want to define it,
there's been maybe three or four industrial revolutions, but I think the advent of the smartphone,
which came along in 08, 09, when it was like planes flew over the country
and dropped these smartphones on everybody.
And look, great benefits to technology, right?
I mean, the fingertip Kids don't know what a library is anymore, and it's a big building with books in it, by the way, if you're listening to this.
But the ability to not just Google something and believe what you read, but there's Scholastic Google.
You know, you can actually access real research that's peer-reviewed and replicated.
There are benefits to the technology.
There's no question about that.
But I mentioned the unintended benefits to this, and I always think, and I don't remember who actually said it, it was someone much smarter than I, that said you can measure the value of certain things by how much of Your being, your efforts, your energy, your time, it absorbs from you in exchange for what you get from it.
And when you apply that to these cell phones, iPads, computers, they take anywhere from 40, 60, 70 hours a week out of certainly our young people's lives.
And what happened is when these things were dropped, and they're so powerful, you know, we think about these phones, there's as much computing power in this phone or an iPad, more than we had when we put a man on the moon.
We didn't have that much, and we're walking around with that in our hands.
And what happened is these kids stopped living their lives and started watching people live their lives.
And Ben, the lives they were watching lived were produced.
They weren't real.
I've had influencers come on the show and confess to me, the life that I'm putting, that's made me an influencer, the life that I'm putting on the air, on social media, is a fiction.
You probably know this, but there's a place in Santa Monica that has a fake private jet fuselage.
That you can go rent for 15 minutes at a time, and these influencers go and they'll put on all their ski clothes and say, well, I'm on a private jet headed to Aspen for a big ski vacation, and then they quick change and put on stuff like they're headed to Cancun for the weekend, and they'll shoot up a year's worth of different seasons, and then they go shoot all of this stuff surrounding it, like this is their Their famous life.
And these kids watch that and go, man, what a loser am I?
I don't have a life like that.
So their self-worth is damaged.
Their self-image is damaged.
They're comparing their reality to this fictional life.
And sure enough, in 08, 09, 10, we saw the highest levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness in our young people since records have started being kept.
And it just kept getting worse.
And then COVID hits, and when COVID hits, it spikes even more.
And what really bothers me is the same people that keep those records, the same people that monitor that level of mental and emotional illness among our young people, are the same ones that shut the schools down And when they shut it down for a couple of weeks, I said, okay, I get it.
They got to get their bearings.
But when they shut them down for a year and then 18 months and then two years in some parts of the country, I said publicly at the time, the mismanagement of COVID, the mismanagement of this quarantine is going to exact a higher toll on our young people than the virus ever could possibly.
And people talked, they labeled me as some kind of looney tune, some kind of heretic.
And then when that all came true, I've been watching my phone, been watching my email.
I haven't seen anybody say, hey, sorry, we said all that, because it's all come true now.
I haven't gotten any of those messages.
But the fact of the matter is, it cost millions of years of life for these young people.
Because it disrupted their emotional development, their social development, their educational attainment.
So they'll achieve less in life, they'll get lesser jobs, they'll have lesser insurance, they'll have slower diagnosis, later intervention.
I mean, they'll have years of life shaved off at the far end.
So it's had a terrible impact on these children, and I'm not sure that—and there are some efforts being made to close that gap, and some gap has been closed, but not near enough.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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You know, one of the things that you talk about when you're talking about the rise of
social media and the gap between the sort of fiction that's been created on social
media for kids and what kids are actually likely to experience, that also manifests
as a hatred for the meritocracy.
Because the truth is that in any sort of meritocracy, the people who ride to the top are not the
people who are faking it at some sort of fuselage in Santa Monica.
I mean, the way that you rose to the top or the way that somebody like me, like that is
Tens of thousands of hours of hard work and things that people never see.
They see the success at the very end of the story, but they never see the fact that, you know, for me personally, that involved me driving to, you know, meetings in the middle of Temecula selling books out of the back of my car at the very beginning of my career with my wife.
And if we got 10 books sold at 20 bucks a pop, that was like an amazing, amazing day, right?
I mean, that's, you know, nobody ever sees that part of it.
And the truth is that that journey is the fulfilling journey.
That if you go immediately to the top, that's actually not particularly fulfilling.
It's all the work that you put in to get to the top of the meritocracy that's actually quite fulfilling.
And the meritocracy also happens to be the only system ever devised by man that has positive externalities, that actually helps other people.
Because when merits worry his people, when you're talking about the smartest people or the strongest people or the wisest people, when those people end up at the top of the heap, that has good effects on everybody else.
Because any other system, Whether it's based on race, whether it's based on class, it's going to have negative effects.
It's stealing from people who are more meritorious and who have good effects on those around them.
But when you have young people and what they see is people who are instantaneously at the top of the heap, and then they say, well, there's no way that I can get there.
There's no way that I'm going to be on a jet to Aspen next year or on the way to Cancun.
Instead, what they start to do is they rebel against the entire system as they perceive it, even though the system itself, as they perceive it, is false.
It's not real.
Yeah, and here's the thing.
This is, from a psychological standpoint, one of the things that bothers me is when we see what you just described happening, and we see parents who are smoothing out the bumps in the road for their kids, and I think we've got way too many concierge parents who are filling out the college applications for the child, they're racing up there and trying to resolve conflicts if the child has them, and We're seeing all of this kind of petitioning for equality of outcome.
I'm okay.
We can talk about equality of opportunity.
We don't have that either.
We can talk about that in a minute, but this equality of outcome that is being taught and espoused in the schools, what happens is we have these kids being heated out of the opportunity to observe themselves overcoming these obstacles.
When a kid goes out there and does a good job and overcomes a hurdle, overcomes an obstacle, they're able to say, hey, I did that.
I overcame that.
And I saw myself do that.
So they attribute to themselves the ability to handle that, the ability to do that.
You observed yourself selling books out of the back of your car.
Robin and I have been married 47 years, and when we got married, if it wasn't for two-for-one burger bucks, one of us would have starved.
So you go through that, and you don't realize you have a bad deal of time.
It's not like it was trauma.
I'm not whining about it now.
We were fine.
We had a good time.
But you observe yourself going through that and say, hey, I've never been afraid of being poor because I can do poor.
I've seen me do poor.
I know I can do it.
Long as I've got a good pair of tennis shoes and a ball that bounces, I'm okay.
So I don't fear it.
But I know that about myself because I've seen me do it.
And so many kids are cheated out of that because you've got all of these people out there saying, hey, We should have a quality of outcome.
So, I read that to be, alright, if you're home in a beanbag eating Cheetos, and then somebody else is working 12-14 hours a day, at the end of the month, you should be in the same place.
You should have the same outcome.
That's insanity.
But that's what's being taught in our schools.
And I'm not saying that just in a anecdotal sort of way, the number of university professors that are left-leaning, liberal, everybody should come out the same, versus those that are
Really honor a meritocracy and hard work.
The ratio is so out of balance.
I'm really concerned.
That's what I mean when I say We got issues.
Yeah, the social engineers obviously have taken control of the train and it's a really major problem when you mentioned parenting here I want to get your thoughts on parenting one of the best ways to parent because obviously I have I have four kids they range in age from 10 years old to 10 months old and I One of the hardest things as a parent of young kids is to let them fail.
It's really, really, really difficult.
But the truth is that unless you let them fail, they never learn to succeed because they actually achieve a sort of learned helplessness in which they're waiting for me to come in and solve their problems.
And it's very difficult as a parent to watch your kids struggle and cry over a math problem and have a really difficult time.
But the minute you step in, It's one of the greatest gifts you can give them is allowing them to master a certain skill set, a certain challenge.
at any point in the future.
You have to actually let them sit there and struggle and cry.
And it's really rough as a parent, but it may be the most important thing
that you can do as a parent, it seems to me.
It's one of the greatest gifts you can give them is allowing them to master a certain skill set,
a certain challenge.
And look, I don't, everything is a balance, right?
I think if a child is getting relentlessly bullied, if they're being targeted in some way, a little bit of that is not necessarily bad either.
A child needs to understand, hey, I can be picked on and I came back from it, I'm okay.
They could have a teacher that's unfair and you can look at it and say, yeah, they really are unfair.
But you just have to buck up and get through it.
That's okay.
But if you have a child that is really being isolated and targeted, you need to let them know, hey, you're not alone.
I got your back and I'm here with you.
So, you know, it's everything in balance.
It's the parents that rush in And don't let the child scrape their knee.
Don't let the child fail the test because they didn't do the work, they didn't prepare.
It's the parent that says, we've got to have trophies and a pizza party at the end of an 0 and 14 basketball season.
And I coach some of those, so I know.
Because I would coach at the Y, and you'd have the 12 to 14 age bracket or the 8 to 10.
And when you come in at the 8 level, You know, you're playing those that are two years old or you're going to get beat every game for a while and they need to learn, hey, that's okay.
Next year we'll win half the games and the next year we'll win them all because we'll be the older kids.
They learn that you've got to develop the skills.
You've got to let them take those lumps.
And what you have to tell yourself is, hey, this is me letting them get a thick skin.
This is me letting them observe themselves fail and get back up.
And they can't observe themselves getting up if they never fall down.
And so you so cheat them out of it.
And I think parents are so cheating their child.
And let me tell you something, they're not doing that for the child.
They're doing that to make themselves feel better.
That's just like the mother that enables the kid on drugs and she says, oh, well, I do give him money or I do let him stay at the house when he's doing drugs because I love him so much.
No, you're doing that so you don't feel anxious about where he is that night.
You're giving him money to put poison in his veins so you sleep better.
Not because you're concerned about him.
You're doing it so you feel better about who you are.
That's what enabling's all about.
And we've got a lot of parents enabling their children to make themselves feel better.
They're not doing it for the child, they're doing it for themselves.
They just don't recognize that, and they hate it when I tell them that, but it's the truth.
I mean, you see so much of it these days, and especially, again, exacerbated by social media.
So parents who are treating their own parenting as sort of an Instagram or TikTok exercise where most frequently now you'll see a parent who
will take a little boy and says, well you're a little girl, and then they take pictures of
themselves on TikTok and put videos up of themselves. Look how tolerant and wonderful and
diverse our family is. Avoiding the simple fact which is that boys are boys and girls are girls and
that that's not solving anybody's problem. It's just about you making yourself more popular
on the social media networks. I mean, you want to do tremendous damage to a child, exacerbate the
child's confusion. What children are looking for all the time is some semblance of stability.
And we are, as a society, removing every semblance of stability. We're removing both parents
in the home. We're suggesting that one parent is enough, if even one parent. We're removing the
idea that That adults, as a general rule, have wisdom to impart to kids, that they actually have rules.
What kids are looking for is rules and truths and realities about life.
And what parents are doing is running away from those as though that's some sort of imposition on the child.
There's this famous story about Rousseau after he wrote the book Émile, which was supposedly about the education of a child who basically learned his way by running around the forest
where a woman came up to Rousseau and says, well, Jean-Jacques, your book is amazing.
I've been raising my kid like that.
And Rousseau apparently looked at her and said, are you a fool?
How could you possibly raise your kid like that?
You can't release your kids into the wilderness and then expect them to live.
That's not the way any of this works.
It's really giving your power away.
And it's astounding to me that people are so influenced by strangers, people they don't know
on these social media platforms.
And how shocked would they be if they knew how many of those aren't even real people?
I asked a group the other day, what do you understand about bots?
And they said, well, I understand that they're like fake accounts, and sometimes people put them up to drive an issue.
I said, well, how many would you consider to be in a bot army?
They said, oh, I think thousands.
I said, really?
Would it surprise you to know that these bot farms have millions and millions of these fake accounts that they can deploy at any one time, and that some of them are 8, 10, 12-year-old accounts that look so real because they befriend each other on these accounts.
They have this matrix where they have pictures and friends, but when you drill down, would it surprise you to know that you're behaving in a way to please a very small group of people that have created these fake bot armies to influence your behavior?
And they're stunned, but But they still do it.
It's like I'm being attacked on the internet as though the internet is a real place.
It's not the town square, which is what it's designed to be, but that's not how it works.
You know, I put out videos of which some of them now have been taken down because they say they violate community principles, and they took down the one where I criticized our elite universities.
I said they're fostering intellectual rot when you have these organizations that are supporting Hamas, that You've got them supporting murderers.
I mean, this is a terrorist group!
And you have these elite universities with dozens of groups, with hundreds and hundreds of kids.
When did they stop teaching critical thinking?
I just don't understand how they don't teach...
I see this banner, Gays for Palestine.
Are you kidding me?
Why don't you take that banner and walk across the border into Gaza and see how far you get?
But yet they don't understand that.
It's like, I'm stunned that we're not teaching critical thinking among our young people.
And I think that a lot of what you're talking about here is exactly the sort of call and response that you see on the internet.
That if you say the slogan, then Millions of bots or people who are supposedly like-minded will come and cheer for you and then you do it again and you get more engagement.
The best way to get engagement is to continue appealing to these very specific subgroups of people and to continue hitting it over and over and over.
And as you see the engagement increasing, it creates this incentive structure where you can say things that literally make no sense.
Or he can say things that you know nothing about and you get cheers for it.
I mean, there's a very funny video from my friend Ami Horowitz where he actually went to some of these universities and he said, do you agree with from the river to the sea Palestine will be free?
And so many people say, sure, yes.
And he said, okay, which river and which sea?
And they couldn't name either the river or the sea because they literally have no idea what they're talking about.
They just know that if they do the call, then they get the response.
It also happens to be the truth that a lot of these social media platforms, TikTok being the most obvious one, are actually gamed by America's foreign enemies.
I mean, China obviously owns TikTok, ByteDance is in charge of TikTok.
And the way that you can tell that they are weaponizing TikTok is by the simple fact that TikTok in China is teaching kids math problems, and TikTok in the United States is teaching people how to be increasingly insane.
And so what this does raise the question of is whether, you know, the United States and the government, we're seeing in the state of Florida, we're seeing in the state of Texas as well, and some other states, How heavily should the U.S.
government, particularly states, be restricting access, particularly for minors, to outlets like TikTok, like Instagram, like social media?
Well, we know that there is a certain age group now that report that they get 100% of their news from TikTok.
Now, listen, I spend a lot of time doing Uh, work in the litigation arena.
Um, I did trial science work where we did assistance in jury selection and trial strategies and witness prep and, uh, time in the courtroom.
And one thing I learned for sure.
Uh, I would see lawyers up in front of the bench, trying to arguing real hard to get a piece of evidence in and they wouldn't get it in and they would come back and say, well, we didn't get it in, but the jury knows we've got something really powerful and that registered with them.
They know it didn't.
Juries make decisions on what they see and hear, not on what they don't see and hear.
That is a simple truth.
And when we see so many of our young people getting their news, getting their information, all from a controlled source, they make their decisions based on what they see and hear, not on what they don't see and hear.
So we know that that propaganda that's being pushed on them We see so many of these young people that go on, and toxic information, the algorithm feeds to them because they click more when they're emotionally involved, emotionally upset, than they do if it's a box of warm puppies.
And there has been There have been studies done, very simple studies, where if you add just even two words to the name of an account, like Lauren Loseweight was one of the studies that I mentioned in the book, the amount of toxic information that was pumped to her just by adding Loseweight to the title of her account
Went up 12-fold within the first few minutes because they say, okay, she started getting 400-calorie diets, 700-calorie diets, anorexia sites pumped her way.
And they say, well, we don't mean to upset them or get their mental health in jeopardy.
Yes, you do.
Because it gets more clicks.
The algorithm has no conscience.
The algorithm has one job, and that's to get more clicks for more ad money.
It doesn't care who it hurts.
It has no conscience.
And the only conscience is who's putting that algorithm in play.
And the profit motive overrides the moral compass.
And so kids are in jeopardy when they do that.
And when you've got China, They restrict the amount of time kids can be on there, and they're teaching math, science, that sort of thing, which is why we're 34th in science, 16th in math, 9th in reading.
And those numbers change and move day to day, so fact check me and you might get a different number from a different organization.
But suffice it to say, we ain't number one, and guess who is?
It's the ones who are focusing on academic achievement and not us.
And we need to be restricting that and making certain that we're focusing on preparing these people for the next level of life.
When you go to college and they don't teach, they don't call out toxic masculinity, they say masculinity is toxic.
Ambition, entrepreneurship, driving towards a goal.
Those things are gauche.
Oh no, you don't want to be talking about that.
That's not good.
Those are the kind of things that I really fear are heading us down a path that's not going to bode well in the future.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
First, we all spend way too much time on our phones, and all the while, your phone carrier is collecting data on your activity.
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Thank you.
You know, it seems to me that you mentioned this right at the top, that the pace of technological change is screwing with the brain in ways that we have never seen in human history before.
Just the way that everybody is glued to their phone.
You can't go into a subway and everybody isn't glued to their phone.
You can't be around a dinner table and half the family is attached to their phone.
And that's leaving aside what's about to happen with AI, which has become so insanely sophisticated, that it can essentially mimic very high-level
function for human activities.
And so, I've talked to a lot of folks who are experts in AI, people who have developed
a lot of these AI systems, and they're talking about the capabilities of these AI systems.
They say basically what's publicly available right now is a fraction of what exactly they're
is a fraction of what exactly they're developing behind closed doors.
developing behind closed doors.
That within just a few years, you're going to have what they call generalizable AI, meaning
That within just a few years, you're going to have what they call generalizable AI, meaning
that you're no longer going to even have to type in various prompts.
that you're no longer going to even have to type in various prompts.
You're going to type in one prompt, like solve cancer, and it's just going to iterate.
You're going to type in one prompt like solve cancer and it's just going to iterate.
It's going to know which questions to ask next in order to get to an end.
It's going to know which questions to ask next in order to get to an end.
And that could come with an amazing good, but could also come with tremendous evil,
which is if we're worried about the innervation of the population right now, given our access
to phones, given the fact that we don't think that we need to learn a skill set because
the technology can do it for us.
What happens to human beings when their entire sense of purpose is robbed from them by AIs
that are capable of doing things better and faster?
It seems to me that a lot of the things that develop the human brain are going to go away
and we're not even going to realize what the cost of those are until way too late.
Nobody my age, for example, knows how to do, unfortunately, simple calculation anymore, because everybody, when they were growing up, had a calculator.
What happens when no one knows how to read anymore?
Because, legitimately, there's no reason to read a bunch of books in order to get the information.
You just give the AI a prompt, and it spits out what you quote-unquote need to know.
Well, I'll give you a great example of that already happening.
How many phone numbers do you know?
I know almost no phone numbers because all I've got to do is just say, you know, call Robin, call Ben, call so-and-so.
I don't know the numbers because they're stored.
They're in there.
That's just a very rudimentary example of technology taking that away.
I used to know all these phone numbers.
My kids' phone numbers, my wife's phone numbers, my friends' phone numbers.
But when I didn't need to do that anymore, that atrophied, and I don't have that in my memory anymore.
Phone numbers were designed seven digits because human memory comfortably remembers seven digits, particularly if they're broken up three and four.
And that's just a function of human memory.
And now, that has atrophied because we are able to just click it.
And when you start adding in deep fakes, With AI.
I have seen myself in ads, me speaking in ads for products I've never even heard of.
And we send cease and desist letters and all and, you know, so that corporation will disappear and it'll pop up across the street with a new name the next day.
Same product, maybe different product.
And it's like stomping ants at a picnic.
I mean, you can't get rid of them already.
What's going to happen on the eve of election When it's too late to effectively respond, and they have a deep, fake, I mean, scarily looking replica of a candidate saying, hey, something's happened, I'm withdrawing here, or I confess to some horrible crime, don't vote for me, it would be a waste of your vote.
I mean, it could change the election on the eve of an election so fast, it'd make your head spin.
We're already there.
And that worries me a lot.
And AI has passed a bar exam in one of the states.
It's pretty scary technology.
And what I believe is we've got to focus On the human aspects of our culture, the human aspects of our family, maybe it'll get to the point that it can replicate that, but I'm the incurable optimist, and I think if my lawyers tell me the best way to fight AI is to get your content out there better than anybody else could,
And then everything becomes a cheap knockoff.
And I feel that way about families.
I feel that way about our society.
We need to do a better job than those that are trying to rob us of it can do with their theories and their new ideas about what will make this world tick.
But, you know, I put out 10 principles for a healthy society and We've got issues, how you can stand strong for America's soul and sanity.
And the number one on the list is be who you are on purpose.
We've got to live with intention.
I mean, just waking up and letting the world tell us what to think, let the world tell us how to behave.
We've got to be who we are on purpose.
We've got to live with intention and we have to own it.
We've got to be big enough to own what we believe.
You know, speak the truth and own what we believe.
And the number of people that are afraid to speak their mind now is triple what it was in 1950.
I think one of the things that speaks to a lot of this is, again, to get back to that sort of touch grass sentiment, it seems to me that the thing that we've lost more than anything else over the course of my lifetime is just interconnection with other human beings in normal settings.
This has gone completely away.
We're all working remote, for example, so you don't even have contact with people at the office.
We no longer go to church.
I mean, church-going in the United States has declined extraordinarily over the course of the last half century,
which means that you don't actually see people on a weekly basis, even, who you consider to be friends and family.
Family units have fragmented to the extent that we think of the nuclear family, if that, as the only form of family, as opposed to kinship networks, which used to be the way that virtually all societies worked.
I'm very lucky.
You know, I live in an Orthodox Jewish community.
Because of our laws, because of our rules, you can't drive and you can't use technology one day a week.
So that means that we are all together, hundreds of us, In the same place, once a week for 25 hours.
I live within walking distance of my parents.
I live within walking distance of my wife's parents.
I live within walking distance of one of my sisters and the other is about a mile and a half away.
And so that means that we are constantly interfacing with normal everyday human beings who actually have our best interests at heart.
And that does lead you to actually recommit to things that matter, but as all of the areas of commonality go away,
those areas of commonality can't be built across broad distances by virtue signaling on Twitter. The
only way you can actually build commonality of interest and actual duty is at the extremely
local level, and that starts inside the family and that broadens out to your local community. If
you don't have family, you don't have local community, you got nothing. Yeah, you know, I've
got two boys and they're both grown and married and have children. So I have four
grandchildren and I feel so blessed that I am able to interact with both of our boys at least three or
four times a week.
I was very nefarious about this.
I planned it that way because they're in professions that intersect.
I figured a way to worm my way in so we can intersect a lot, even if it's just talking about a business thing.
That really spawned some common activities, whether it's playing golf or getting together over music or things like that.
I tell you, it's the greatest blessing of my life to have commonality with my sons on a regular basis.
You know, sometimes it is with technology.
I'll pick up the phone and they send me a cartoon, something that they saw that they thought was funny or something that happened with the grandkids or whatever, and then we get together and spend time and have dinner and there's no replacement for it.
There's nothing that you can do technologically that Substitutes or them coming in the door and giving you a hug and handing you a grandkid or whatever and just spending time together.
There is nothing that replaces that and nothing that ever can replace that.
You know, actually our executive producer, Justin, toured in a band with your son, Jordan.
He told us about how you interfaced with them and how you reacted to the fact
that they were pursuing music.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about that because apparently you're the cool dad.
This is what I hear from my producer.
Oh my God, you wouldn't get that from my kid.
I listen to 60s, they say, hey, your oldies are getting old.
But yeah, my son Jordan, you wouldn't think, but he's got more tattoos than you could shake a stick at, which I have none, by the way.
But you know, you meet your kids where they are, and my other son has zero, but My youngest son, Jordan, has lots, and he's very talented, very gifted, and he doesn't let us come very often, because, you know, parents come watch you, but he let us come when he was performing at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl and places like that, which is really great, because I've seen him play at
The Roxy when there's 10 people out there and like you say, you're selling books out of the back of your car and he's out there playing to the ushers and stuff like that early on and then the next thing, you know, years have gone by.
15 years ago by and he's at Madison Square Garden and he's touring with the Jonas Brothers and
all that and it's it's just been great fun and I'm so proud to see him do it and have supported it.
I made a deal I said okay look I can support your music 100% if you go to college.
At the time, I thought it was really important for him.
And he said, okay, I'll do that.
And he kept his end and I kept my end.
And so it's one of the smartest things I did.
I'll pat myself on the back about this.
He came to me one time when he was a junior in high school and said, what do you want for Christmas?
You're the worst person to buy for because if you want something, it's usually like a tennis racket or tennis shoes and you just go get it.
I don't know what to get you.
And I said, okay, I'll tell you what I want.
I want you to give me an hour a week, one-on-one to talk about anything I want to talk about.
And he said, done.
I said, no, no, no.
I want you to think about this because this is a big commitment and I'm going to hold you to it.
And I said, so you go sleep on it and come back and think about it because we're going to actually do it.
And he did and came back and said, yeah, I want to do it.
And I bet out of 52 weeks, we probably got 40 of them in and then stuff got in the way.
But that was a time that we talked about Everything from how to change the oil in a car, checking accounts, why sports car insurance was more than sedan insurance, everything you could imagine.
You know, mowing the lawn, cleaning, just everything that they don't teach anymore.
It's just like you say, out touching the grass.
And it was so funny, after about three weeks, He started coming around saying, when are we going to do our hour?
And he really got interested.
We started talking about stuff really candidly about life experiences.
And he knew that I was homeless when I was 14 for several months in Kansas City.
And he said, I want to know about this.
I want to know how you do that.
Because I'd never talked about that much.
He knew it from Robin, and we talked about those things, and it was the greatest time.
And every once in a while now, he'll bring up, he said, We talked about this back there and we talked about mechanical things and financial things and all sorts of stuff that they just don't teach anymore.
You know what you're talking about there is something that one of the great lies I think that's been told to parents that there's such a thing as quality time as opposed to quantity time.
The reality is that what was smart about that is that you said quantity of time, meaning it's an hour.
It's not we're going to have a good conversation a week.
It's that we're going to spend an hour, and whether the conversation is good or bad, it's going to be an hour.
And this is something in my own life that I've really tried to do is just maximize the amount of time that I spend with my kids.
I brag about the idea that I've sort of designed my days such that my kids For their part, believe I don't have a job.
That doesn't mean I don't.
I definitely have a job and I'm definitely working all the hours where I'm not with the kids.
But it does mean that when I get up in the morning, I'm with the kids until they go to school.
I try to pick them up from school and then I try to spend as much time as I can between that and bedtime with the kids.
And there really is no substitute for that because you just don't know when a great conversation is going to happen.
And it turns out that sometimes it's not even the great conversations that matter to your kids.
It turns out that sometimes it's just you sitting there and doing Legos with them or Or helping them with their homework or having them sit on your lap.
I mean, that's the stuff I remember about doing with my dad who spent an extraordinary amount of time with me when I was a kid and continues to today, actually.
I mean, again, my parents live around the corner.
They're at our house pretty much every day and that's a wonderful blessing.
I think that the destruction of that time, the taking up of that sort of time, with the nonsense that is things like social media,
is it's such a destructive force because minutes are not fungible.
It's not as though you can take a minute and split it 10 different ways.
The minute is going to be used in one way or the other way.
It's a zero sum game.
And so you can either spend that with your family doing things that are meaningful,
or you can spend that browsing Instagram and screwing your family
by not spending the time with them.
I tell parents all the time, Talk to your children about things that don't matter.
They say, well, what do you mean?
And I said, yeah, you see these TV shows and they take people in the ER.
What's the first thing they say?
They say, start an IV with Ringer's Lactate.
Nobody knows what that means, but I tell them what it means is they're just getting a vein open so when they figure out what they do need, they've got a vein open so they can give it to them.
They're just getting it open with saline so when they figure it out, they're ready.
It's the same way with kids.
Talk to them about things that don't matter, but when it comes time to talk about things that do, That pathway is open and it doesn't feel so awkward because the first time you sit down and talk to your children is something that's really difficult.
It's going to be awkward.
It's going to be tough.
You want to have practiced this a lot.
That needs to be a well-worn path when it comes time for them to say, hey, I need to talk to you about something.
I did something really stupid.
They need to know they can come to you and you're not going to blow up.
You're not going to come unhinged.
You may not like it, But they know they can talk to you about it.
They can predict what your response is going to be.
And I think that's why sometimes it is quantity, it's not quality.
Sometimes it's just shooting baskets out back or something, and that's when they're likely to come up with something you need to hear, or you can disclose something they need to hear.
That also means you have to be really, I think for me with my own kids, you have to be really tuned into what your kids are interested in.
I think one of the mistakes that parents make is, well, I'm interested in X, therefore my kids should be interested in that same thing.
My kids all have a variety of interests, and they're very different interests.
My son, for example, it's nothing but machines and space and specs.
I mean, I literally had to get him an encyclopedia of submarines so that he can learn what the specs are on military submarines.
He's seven.
And he'll sit there asking me, like, what's the difference between a typhoon class and an Ohio class summary?
I don't know what the hell the difference is between a typhoon class and an Ohio class summary.
But now I have to look it up.
Because that's what he wants to know.
And I may not even be interested in that thing.
But by showing that I'm interested in the thing that he's interested in, now he knows that I'm with him.
It's not even about, you know, this idea of showing emotional sympathy as much as it is the idea of, I'm interested in what you have to say.
And that's the way you treat your kids like future adults.
Yeah, for sure.
And look, if they feel your passion for what they're interested in, if they feel like you're interested in them, that's the greatest gift you can give them.
Because they think you get up 10 minutes before them and let the sun out every morning.
And I don't care how much they roll their eyes when you're telling them something, I hear parents all the time say, my kids just don't listen.
Well, they may not look like they're listening, but I can tell you what, they're always watching.
They're always watching what you do, where you invest your time, where you do what you do, and how you react to them.
And if your children want to make you laugh, laugh.
If your children want to get you engaged, engage.
What a gift it is!
I can't tell you how many parents I meet that would give their front seat in hell for their child to want them involved in their life as adults, but they're just not because they were never involved as young people when they were kids.
And that's what I mean when I say I am optimistic.
We can turn this around.
We're losing this fight in America right now by default.
We just need to, when I say be who you are on purpose, if you're a dad, be a dad on purpose.
Be a dad with passion.
Be a dad because it's something that you chose and you're going to do it well.
You're going to excel at it.
You're going to, and when people come with some narrative, some new science like You know, here, we made something up, and we're peddling that.
You need to talk to your kids about that.
They need to know where you stand.
They need to know what you embrace.
And church membership in this country has dropped below 50% for the first time in our country's history.
And people that don't ever go to church, divorce rates 70% higher than those who do.
I mean, there are all these Kind of spin-off benefits from these sorts of things.
It's just family time.
And I think one of the reasons it's dropped off is because the birth rates dropped so low.
Birth rates like 1.6 now.
We need 2.1 to sustain our infrastructure.
We've got to start, when I say be who you are on purpose, we're families.
Be a family on purpose.
Be a member of the family on purpose.
Call your parents.
Call your siblings.
Start engaging as a family.
This is a book that I think, if you read this book I've written and 30 days afterwards, your neighbors don't look at you and say, what happened?
You've changed how you're being in this world.
Then I wasted my time.
This is a book that's going to change the way people be in this world.
And that's what I think we need to do to get this country back where it needs to be.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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You know, obviously you're not just great at your job and a good dad and have an amazing family, but also you've built this massive business and I think a lot of people right now are looking around the United States and they've lost all hope that there's upward mobility in America, which to me is the most bizarre lost hope of all time.
Every single person I know who is extraordinarily wealthy started off as not extraordinarily wealthy.
And obviously that's true for me, that's true for you, that's true for pretty much everybody
that I know who's extraordinarily wealthy.
This is why it drives me absolutely up a wall when I hear politicians talk about the classes,
the upper class, the middle class.
No one is permanently in those classes in the United States.
This isn't Britain in 1812.
That's not the way that this works.
You're not boarding into a landed estate and then you live the rest of your life in the
landed estate with the downstairs maid who's taking care of all of your needs.
The truth is many people in this country started as the downstairs maid and ended up at the
top of the estate.
What is your sort of view on what needs to be inculcated in America's young people with
regard to the ability to prosper in business and what do they need to do to get from point
A to point B?
Well, they need to reject this narrative that...
I've started this new network, Merritt Street Media.
As you know, we launch April 2nd, so a week from today, actually.
I've been shooting shows in anticipation of our launch.
I try to get some ahead.
I've done shows on quiet quitting and lazy girl jobs.
All of these young people are saying, The statistics say we're going to be the first generation that aren't going to do as well as our parents.
We're not going to be able to own a home.
We're not going to be able to prosper.
So what's the point?
I mean, we're just kind of going to ride along.
There's even this phenomenon now called doom spending.
It's like, there's no hope.
There's no future.
So just blow all your money now.
I mean, They act as though stupidity were a virtue.
Are you kidding me?
If everybody thinks that, I look at it like being at a NASCAR race and everybody else is in the pits.
And you got an open track.
If everybody wants to think that, be the one who gets it and says, if everybody wants to pull off the track, I got an open running.
If everybody wants to be a quiet quitter and do only the least little bit you can to get by, How easy is it to distinguish yourself?
How easy is it to stand out against the crowd?
This is a player's game now.
Everybody needs to step back and say, if I'm the one that says, I'm going to work.
I'm going to get consequential knowledge.
That is knowledge I have where I can't be replaced by noon tomorrow, whether it's a computer repairman or a plumber or a brain surgeon or whatever.
I'm going to find that for me, and I'm going to distinguish myself.
There's never been a better opportunity in America than right now.
uh to be a success because you've got a bunch of people that are listening to this oh hey it's it's we want a quality of outcome so chill everybody's going to wind up the same well we've tried that they called it socialism Didn't work.
Got hundreds of thousands of corpses to prove that.
If everybody wants to, if a bunch of people want to be thinking that, man, it just gives you greater opportunity, less competition.
I hope everybody rejects that, but until they do, if you're one of the first that does, what a great opportunity for you.
You know, people say, you know, Dr. Phil, why are you starting a new network at your age?
I mean, you don't have to work.
You could be out playing golf, doing anything.
If you live without passion, what's the point?
Man, I got a passion for what I'm doing.
Just like you do.
I watch you all the time.
I subscribe to the Daily Wire.
I follow you all the time.
You don't do this for anything other than passion.
It's very apparent in what you do.
Can you imagine living without passion?
That would be terrible.
I'm fueled by passion.
That's what I want to do.
Find your passion and chase it.
I mean, that's what I tell people they need to do.
So, final question for you, because I know you have to run.
You seem congenitally optimistic.
When you look at the state of the country, how optimistic should we be that people turn it around, figure it out, and get back on track?
We have the ability.
If it was like, okay, we got to push a thousand pound rock up a muddy hill, I'd say, well, you know, it's not too much going to happen.
But we have the ability, Ben.
We have the moral compass in this country.
We just need to decide we're not going to pay the most attention to the loudest voice.
We need to be the people that say, look, I know facts.
I know the truth.
It may not be popular right now.
But it will be there when everything else just evaporates and goes.
When people come and tell me there are more than two sexes, yeah, you know, that might be kind of the popular idea of today.
But you know what?
There are two sexes.
And there were 500 years ago, there will be 500 years from now.
And I don't tell people how to live their lives unless they ask me.
And when they ask me, I tell them.
But I don't stop cars on the highway and say, you need to do this.
I really don't.
I'm the last one at a party to give advice.
People be talking around, well, he should this, he should that.
I answer questions, but I truly believe that we have the heart, we have the soul to turn this around.
And the reason I wrote this book is I wanted to give people the facts to push back against these people that are trying to hijack the narrative.
I want to be able to say, hey, let me tell you, that's not right.
You know, there are four or five European countries that have done massive studies on gender-affirming care compared to psychotherapy, and they quit doing it because there was no difference in outcome between the two.
So why are we still doing it?
I mean, here are the studies.
Read them.
Make up your own mind.
There aren't enough people that know that, that know this has been tested, and that there was no difference in outcome between Psychotherapy versus surgery, hormonal treatments or whatever.
And why we're still doing it when there have been robust studies that show that you can get to the same place without altering the person's chemistry or anatomy.
Uh, and we're still doing it.
I want them to have information like that so they can push back.
People just need to be armed and then have the strength of their convictions, and I believe we can do that.
Well, Dr. Phil, really appreciate the time.
The brand new book is We've Got Issues, How You Can Stand Strong for America's Soul, and Sandy, go pick up a copy today.
Dr. Phil, appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben.
been I'll see you soon.
Associate producer is Jake Paula.
Editing is by Jim Nickell.
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