Dr. Phil McGraw and Joe Rogan dissect the opioid crisis, exposing how Medicare/Medicaid’s funding models incentivize overprescribing—including misdiagnosed ADHD—while acknowledging antipsychotics’ role in severe mental illness. They debate deception detection via behavioral cues, like Jussie Smollett’s case, where Dr. Phil links hoaxes to systemic discrimination. Rogan contrasts his podcast’s unconstrained curiosity with Dr. Phil’s structured TV format, highlighting how fighters like John Jones and Mike Tyson evolved through adversity, not trophies. Both agree resilience stems from facing reality, not shielding from failure, while embracing strengths over weaknesses—like Tyson’s shift from combat to mentoring his daughter’s tennis career—reveals character’s true potential. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, seriously, this girl comes on with her mother, and her mother actually brings her on, of course, and she's a train wreck, and we work with her, and we send her to this ranch for like four months, right?
She goes for a long time, and Makes a complete turnaround.
Does really a great job.
They say she's become a leader.
She's working with all these girls, doing a great job.
And then she graduates.
And I remember this last shot when we do this piece at the ranch.
She jumps up on this fence and is smiling and everything and waving and all.
One night home with her mother.
One night home.
And her mother's finding people that are trashing her, the mother, on these social media platforms.
Her mother tracks them down, backs into who they are, gets their phone numbers, calls them up, yelling into the phone, calling them names and stuff, gets the daughter involved.
One night, crashes.
So they come back for a follow-up, like, I don't know, a month or two later.
And when they come, I say, okay, we're going to have them back.
They walk out.
I have the audience completely empty.
I have nobody there to play to.
I mean, 250 chairs, empty, nobody in the house but me, the mother, and the daughter.
We're just here to talk and keep things rolling, right?
And they were dumbstruck.
There was nobody there to showboat for or play to, and that was like a 15-minute interview.
They had nothing to say.
And off they go, and then this phrase that got turned into a, you know, whatever, a meme or whatever they call it, it just went crazy, and what, she was nominated for a Grammy or something?
I'm serious!
So I take no credit or blame.
You know, I just did what I could and haven't seen her since.
I wish everybody well.
Maybe she'll turn – maybe it'll grow her up and she'll turn something positive out, but I hope so.
Well, that's a very good attitude, a very healthy attitude for you.
But it is – when something goes viral like that, something strange that for whatever reason, it catches and takes off, it's – It doesn't make any sense.
Well, they had to be, and what I hope now, that this, even though this certainly is...
A quirk.
What I hope now is that she's surrounded by mature people with business heads on their shoulders and development people that will actually guide this in a way that it's not 15 minutes.
And, you know, and I was actually very impressed with her that she actually went to the White House to talk about prison reform for people that are unjustly accused and have been in jail for too long for things that they didn't do.
And that's something she's actually passionate about.
Yeah, and I know Kim, and she's actually a very nice girl, very smart, and as I say, they've done some very brilliant branding, and it's certainly paid off.
I mean, it has to be a lot of responsibility to try to give people advice and try to straighten their life out and show them the flaws and the errors that they're making.
People ask me sometimes, they say, you know, Dr. Field, do you think problems are as simple as you make them out to be?
And the truth is, I don't think problems are simple at all.
In fact, I think problems are really, most of the time, pretty complex.
They're pretty layered.
They have a lot of different origins.
And they're oftentimes comorbid.
A lot of things exist together.
So I don't think problems are simple at all.
But the solutions are often simple, don't you think?
It's kind of like the old joke, you go to the doctor and you say, this hurts.
And he says, well, then don't do that anymore.
A lot of times it's very simple in that somebody will have a complex thing that comes from childhood or maybe it's a drug background or they've had trauma in their life.
But the solution is change your behavior.
I mean, stop rewarding bad behavior.
Choose a different path in life.
Just behave your way to success.
Sometimes the solutions are very simple even though the problems are very complex because at some point you have to stop focusing on why and start focusing on what.
Instead of why it happened, what am I going to do to change it?
Nobody does anything in pattern if they don't get a payoff.
And if you can identify, that's why insight's so important.
That's why I think it's the number one outcome to whether somebody's going to respond to a talking therapy, for example.
If somebody can identify what their payoff is, where they really can figure out I'm doing this repeatedly and my payoff is I don't have to work or I don't get held accountable for this or I'm escaping accountability over here or I get attention or sympathy.
If they can figure out what their payoff is and they can then control that, whether it's for themselves or their kids or whatever, if you control the currency, then you can control the behavior.
Yeah, it just seems that people have this comfort in their patterns.
And even if their patterns are self-destructive, even if it's drug abuse or alcoholism, the comfort in those patterns, falling into those patterns, it seems very compelling to a lot of people.
I mean, a payoff for taking heroin is you get high.
And so you're high for a while.
That's not a positive payoff, but it's a payoff.
And if you get high and so you don't get a job and you don't take care of your kids, that's a payoff that you're not doing things that you need to do that you should be accountable for.
It's a pathological payoff, but it's a payoff nonetheless.
And so that does reward you even though it's a pathological payoff.
It's a pathological thing.
You call it a reward.
But if you can identify that where they say, look, I'm not doing what I need to do and I need to stop rewarding myself in that way and hold myself – I need to be there for my kid.
I tell my kid I'm going to be there every day and I don't show up because I'm high on drugs, then I need to stop doing it.
I need to not let myself get away with that and instead require myself to show up for the kid when I say I do, say I will.
You know, it's hard to say because I think sometimes our most productive guests are the ones that don't get it.
Because the mail we get, they'll say, oh wow, that guy didn't get it or that woman didn't get it, but I saw myself in them and I'll never say that again.
I saw them being such a right fighter or I saw them being so hard-headed or so oppositional and I heard them say things I've said and And they left and didn't get it.
I got it.
I'll never do that again.
So sometimes those that don't get it at all while they're there are the ones that are the best teaching tools for the millions of people that are home watching.
Yeah, and sometimes the story that we might have is maybe extreme where you say, I don't do all six things they're doing, but I do two of them.
And they are in sharp relief to me.
So I get that.
I ain't gonna do that anymore.
So, I mean, that's where I think you get a payoff.
And, you know, people go and find these things on the internet.
I mean, last year, you know, we have a channel where we put up, you know, different clips and divorce shows or parenting shows or whatever.
And we had over 2 billion views, you know, last year of people just going and finding that information and looking at it.
So, I know people are seeking the information out and looking at it beyond the show itself, so they must be seeking information, and we just don't have a good distribution system for mental health in America, so I think they're hungry for it and they look for it.
Well, there's so many people out there that are trying to do better.
They're trying to get their lives in order.
And shows like yours and just advice shows, people that are giving out inspiration and knowledge, it's such an important thing for people, especially for people that didn't grow up with wise parents or maybe a good support system around them.
I grew up with an alcoholic father, and it was a pretty violent home, and he was a really bad alcoholic.
And I know having grown up in that, you wind up with what I call a damaged personal truth, and you feel second class.
The problem that kids make, because I know I did it and I see others do it, is you compare your personal truth, what you know about yourself and how you really live and what's really going on, you compare your personal truth to everybody else's social mask.
Because you go to school and you know, well, I know that last night the windows got kicked out of my house.
I know that the utilities got turned off.
And I know there was a big fight in my kitchen last night.
And the kid sitting next to me, he's got on a shirt that's all ironed and his face is all bright and clean.
And, you know, he looks like he's just got it all together.
And you compare yourself to that person, that kid, and you feel like you're second class.
And the problem with that is we generate the results in life we think we deserve.
So if you think you're damaged, you think you're second class, you will generate results that you think a second class person deserves.
So if you don't fix your personal truth...
Then you'll spend the rest of your life saying, well, those really good results, those belong for somebody else.
It's not for me.
That's for somebody else.
And you'll settle for second best, and you won't get what you might otherwise generate for yourself if you don't fix your personal truth.
And so I think a lot of people are struggling looking for a way to kind of get out of feeling not good about themselves and damage self-esteem, damage self-worth, and they really don't know where to go.
And that's why I do the show.
Look, I'm not under the misapprehension that we're doing eight-minute cures up there.
I mean, come on.
We're not doing that.
But I think if you can point people in the right direction, if you can raise their awareness, you can get them thinking about it.
You can create a narrative where they at least say, you know, how do I feel about myself?
I mean, is there stuff I need to resolve?
I mean, what am I saying to myself?
If you can get them thinking about that, then, you know, maybe you've done something.
Yeah, you know, Tony Robbins once said once that it's incremental changes over the long haul, and the way you have to look at it is if these two boats are going in a parallel direction and one of them just shifts five degrees, over the course of time, this boat is going to be in a far different place than the other boat that's going the same way it was always going.
Yeah, and the important thing to realize as well is the next year is going to go by whether you're doing something about your life or not.
I mean, we're sitting here right now at the end of February, and the next...
Ten months are going to go by whether somebody is working to make change or whether they're not.
And they may think, you know, oh my God, I'm so far overweight, I'll never get it under control, or I'm so behind in my bills, or I'm so, you know, just depressed, or everything is so out of control.
Well, you know what?
You make those incremental changes and then, you know, pretty soon in December you go, hey, I'm way better off than I was at the end of February.
So, shit, you made little changes and they all added up.
And if you don't, by the end of the year, you're just in deeper.
You've got to have somebody, whether it's yourself or a friend or somebody that's going to say, look, did you do what you said you were going to do by this time?
And if you don't, hold your feet to the fire.
Because...
I mean, just sitting around dreaming, someday, you know, someday I'm going to get a different job.
Someday I'm going to change this.
Well, someday ain't a day of the week.
You know, there's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Look on your calendar.
Someday's not on there.
So you've got to say, okay, I'm going to take this small step by here, this small step by there, this small step by there, and then pretty soon, you know, we don't leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Over all the years you've been doing your show, you've developed a real community, right?
I mean, you really have made an impact.
If you stop and think about all the people that your show has touched, and all the people that have listened to your advice, and all the people that have taken that advice, and made those little incremental changes in their lives, and set those goals, and held themselves accountable, that's a pretty significant thing.
Everybody has a philosophy about it, and I'm not saying that mine's any better than anybody else's, but I do have a philosophy about it, and I'm very slow to medication.
I mean, I think you use medication for biochemical replacement.
I mean, if for some reason your body is not making enough of something it needs, then maybe you support it short-term biochemically.
But, you know, I look at depression...
There's a lot of ways you can break it up, but I look at it like, is it exogenous depression or endogenous depression?
I mean, is it coming from the inside out or the outside in?
Is it because you're reacting to something?
I see a lot of depressed people that In a sense, it makes sense.
I mean, you look at their life and you say, well, if you're not down about this, you should be.
I mean, you've lost your job.
You've gotten a divorce.
Your health is in the shitter.
I mean, you should be down about this.
It's external things.
So you don't need a pill.
I mean, put somebody in a chemical straitjacket because their life's falling apart.
I mean, if you've gotten a divorce, lost your job, your health's in bad shape, your kids are alienated from you, and you're saying, I'm fine.
Then you're not in touch with reality.
You should be bothered by that.
And I think to give somebody a pill, to mask your feelings about that, just keeps you off task.
Pain's a good motivator.
I grew up in Texas and Oklahoma.
And I don't know if you've ever done this, but I used to spend my summers in the thriving metropolis of Mundy, Texas.
You ever heard of Mundy, Texas?
It's M-U-N. It's a U, not an O. M-U-N-D-A-Y. It's got like 2,000 people in it.
But in the summers, it would get hot in Mundy, Texas.
When I say hot, I mean you look out in the backyard and your dog burst into flames.
That's what I'm talking about.
So we would be going to the swimming pool or something, barefooted.
And you get halfway across an asphalt road, and you look down, and you're, I mean, like, holy shit, I mean, your feet are just on fire.
So what are you going to do?
I mean, that is painful.
You're going to do one of two things.
You're either going to make a U-turn and get your ass back over to the side of the road and get in the grass, or you're going to run to the other side and get off the road and get in the grass.
But you're not going to stand there in the middle of the road and melt yourself down to the knees.
If you're in pain, it's going to motivate you to move, to change something, and to mask that with drugs, to dull that pain with drugs is not necessarily a good thing.
And I wish more people thought that way, particularly more doctors.
You know, I have so many friends that have gone to a doctor because they're not feeling so good, and they're almost immediately wanting to throw them on something.
Well, I think it's part of the narrative now, and I think with social media, with the internet, not just social media, but with the internet, I think there's just a lot more in the nomenclature, and there's a lot more awareness about it.
But I think it was just as prevalent in the 50s and 60s as it was now.
But in the 50s and 60s, there wasn't a psychologist on every corner.
Well, back then, you had to have a PhD or an MD as a psychiatrist to see patients.
Now they have marriage and family therapists.
They have licensed social workers.
They have different levels.
Where you can do independent practice.
So that's broadened the number of people that can provide services.
And some people think that's a good thing.
Some people think it's not.
I generally think it's a good thing because I think – Fifty-eight percent of our rural markets today have no psychiatrist available and something like 50 or roughly have no mental health professional available at all.
None.
So there's just nobody available to help people in the outlying areas.
I think the more people you can get into the profession, so long as there's a degree of competency, is better.
But, you know, I think it's always been prevalent.
I just think people didn't talk about it very much.
It's just something they swallowed or they took to church or, you know.
When you see, you know, all these folks that are on medication today, I mean, how many of these people do you think legitimately should be on medication?
You know, I can't answer that in terms, I mean, I'm sure there's research of people, how many people are on medication, but in my personal experience, Most of the people that I see on medications, in my opinion, don't need most of the medications they're on.
Now, that's just anecdotal.
That's my opinion.
You asked me to hand you a research survey or study to support that.
I can't hand it to you or I can't point you to one.
I can just tell you, after 45 years in this experience...
I see people that are on medication, they've usually seen someone for six or eight minutes and said, you know, I'm really feeling kind of down or blue.
Here's some Prozac, here's this, here's that.
They give it to them and they don't even really ask why.
And they just give it to them because medicine has become a high volume business.
And that's not necessarily the doctor's fault.
I mean, the way that it's now funded and Medicare and Medicaid, you've got to turn them and burn them.
Or you can't stay in business.
And so it's a high-volume business.
And so they throw pills at them because they don't have an hour to sit down or don't take an hour to sit down and talk about it and say, well, let's find out what's going on.
Is there a reason?
Like I said, if this guy's got...
Five parts of his life that have gone down, or a woman who's got three or four areas of her life that have really gone down in quality.
Then they should be having poor mood.
So why mask that?
Let's come up with an action plan and change it.
So most of the people I see on medication, not all, but most of the people I see are on too many medications in too high a dose or either don't need it at all.
It seems like more people are treating this, you know, air quotes, depression issue as if it's a medical disorder like diabetes or something where you need medication.
And then you have wastebasket diagnosis like ADD and ADHD, where what used to be a spoiled brat It's now ADD or ADHD, so they start prescribing these neocortical stimulants like Ritalin.
And if you give a kid that does not need a neocortical stimulant a stimulant, you're really going to throw them off the charts now because you've got a normally active brain that you're now making hyperactive.
So You're creating a problem that didn't exist before you gave them the medication because you didn't do the proper diagnosis.
And who knows where these kids are going to be 20, 30 years from now.
I mean, we're just looking at...
This rash of people being treated for these ailments, air quotes, and then we're not seeing how this all turns out in the long run and how much damage we're doing to these people.
And in fairness, on the other end of the continuum, I have seen some people that are clearly psychotic, schizophrenic, delusional, that without medication are absolutely impossible to manage.
But if you put them on antipsychotics, so you can lower their delusional behavior, their hallucinatory behavior, so you can now have a meaningful conversation with them, so they can respond to talking therapies.
It makes all the difference in the world.
And without those antipsychotics, you would be lost without them.
So there are some medications for some disorders that are absolute miracles that without them you wouldn't be able to do the work you need to do to get the person back where they need to be.
But, you know, Mostly when you talk to people about it thoughtfully, they agree with what I'm saying.
I mean, most people will agree that you need to be thoughtful about prescribing medications and that medications are too readily administered.
I mean, that's certainly what we've seen in the opioid epidemic right now.
Opioids are so readily prescribed right now that there are enough opioid prescriptions for every man, woman and child in America to have their own bottle.
And if you renew that prescription one time, One time.
If you are taking those opioids at the seven-day mark, your chance of being addicted at one year is one in 12. And if you renew it at, if you're still taking them at 30 days, your likelihood of being addicted is one in three.
And these things are getting written with way too high a pill count.
And so the addictions, we're seeing a whole different kind of addiction now coming out of the suburbs.
And they take them for a while, and they're very expensive.
And after they take them for a while, heroin's cheaper.
So they dump the opioids and start taking heroin.
So you're seeing soccer mom heroin addicts.
That you weren't seeing 10 years ago because they get started on prescription opioids and then they can't afford them or finally the doctor cuts them off but they're addicted and so they start taking heroin because it's cheaper.
The problem that I think people have is they think, because a doctor gave me this, because it's on a prescription pad, that this is safe.
Your body doesn't know whether you got that in the back alley or you got it from a doctor.
It still has the same addictive quality.
And I think it is at an epidemic level.
And I've testified before Congress about this.
I think there are several levels of accountability at the manufacturing level and at the prescription level and at the educational level so people understand.
I think everybody has to take part of it and I'm doing everything I can to raise the awareness about it as well.
they're very much aware that this has become a serious, serious problem because the cost, as you see the lost labor in the workforce is in the billions of dollars.
You see the demands on the health care system that this is creating, young mothers with children and babies born addicted to these opioids.
I mean, the numbers are just going through the roof.
So, I mean, it's putting a strain financially on the health care system that it just can't stand.
So you start costing money and it starts getting politicians' attention.
So they start saying, okay, now we've got to start doing something.
And so they get it.
They get that there's a problem. - What could they do though?
Yeah, and they're starting to shut down some of these – they had some of these pill clinics and pain clinics in Florida where you could go in without an x-ray, without an MRI, and just say you had back pain and there was a doctor there that would give you a 90-count prescription on the spot, no questions asked, 90. And you're out the door and you go down the street to the next one.
My interest has been, you know, saying there are a lot of people getting their information on the internet by getting clips of the show and that sort of thing.
And it's clear to me That is, the population is changing.
I'm an old guy, but younger people are getting their information in different ways.
They're going to the internet, and the digital menu has got to be readily available, and you can reach a lot of people that way that you wouldn't reach the other way.
There's a whole population that's not going to watch broadcast television during the day.
And there's a whole population that's watching broadcast television during the day that maybe isn't in the digital space.
And if I can get a crossover between the two and you can get a bigger audience to spread your message, then that's what you're doing.
My goal is to spread the message and get what I think is important to say out there.
So, I mean, I'll shout it from the rooftops if I think that's effective.
I want to do anything that's scalable to get the message out there.
And to me, I'm doing some different things in the podcast than I'm doing on the show.
On the show, I've got a fact pattern in front of me.
I've got a story.
I've got a family.
I've got an individual that's got a specific fact pattern.
I'm dealing with that fact pattern.
In the podcast, I'm not solving a problem.
I don't have somebody there that has a problem for me to solve.
I'm just talking to people that I find interesting and And I'm able to talk to them about whatever I want to talk to them about and discuss things like you and I are talking about right now.
I think what we've been talking about Is an important discussion.
And I welcome the opportunity to have that discussion.
And I don't have time to do that when I'm talking about somebody who's sitting there saying, you know, I think my kid is on the precipice of overdosing or is really in trouble, and I've got to focus on that.
I don't have time to pontificate about such things as the opioid epidemic or the philosophy of pills versus therapy and things of that nature.
Because I have to give all my attention to the story in front of me.
In a podcast environment like we're doing now, I can talk about things that I think people need to hear.
I think if they don't, they don't have to listen, but if they're interested, it's there.
I like it being more freeform and me being able to talk about things.
I've been talking about what makes people a champion.
Like I talked to Tony Romo right after the Super Bowl about, you know, he came from Eastern Illinois University.
So I got, what, nine students or something?
There's a little bit of university.
And he turns out to be Quarterback of America's team for 14 years, set all kinds of records and then goes to the booth and becomes the number one color analyst in television.
I mean, champion, champion, champion.
Why?
What do you attribute that to?
I like asking those questions and hearing people talk.
What do you say to young people about that?
What made you a champion?
Are you going to let your kids play football?
With all this CTE and stuff, what do you say?
I like having those kind of conversations.
I did the same thing with Shaq and Charles Barkley and different people.
He says he wasn't the kind of swagger sort of person that came in cocky like he was going to own the field and own the game.
But inside, he said he had this absolute drive that if he didn't win...
He couldn't live with it.
It's like if somebody thought, like he played a game, somebody beat them, beat him, that just the idea that that person went home thinking that they were better than him, that they could beat him, that he just couldn't eat, I didn't sleep, I think, until he got back and owned it again and got back to it.
He said it's just drive to win.
And so he would – I mean, he said he would be out at 1 o'clock in the morning in the dome throwing a pass that route got intercepted.
He got jumped on that route.
And he'd be trying to figure out why on Thursday in practice he saw what he needed to see.
Why didn't he see it on Sunday?
And he would analyze and analyze and analyze until he could get there, until he could do it, until he could win it.
Well, it's like when you're talking about depression, about that bad feelings will motivate you to change.
If you're in a bad feeling, if you're in a bad state in your life, that pain is an amazing motivator.
Even though it feels terrible at the time, it can propel you to a new and better life because you don't ever want to experience that again and make you grow and be a better person.
That's why I would imagine you move towards doing a podcast where it's less restrictive and more open-ended and you can kind of do whatever you want.
But that's pretty cool that out of all these years of doing that and giving out advice, you still find this passion to make it better and to do it from a different angle.
She got sued for a couple billion dollars, and I represented her in that case, and that's how we met.
And so, I mean, I had Pam on, and we both worked a lot in deception detection and interrogation techniques and stuff, and So just, and it came right at a time when, you know, Jussie Smollett is in the news about, is he telling the truth or is he not telling the truth?
There are some things that you can tell people to watch for, but one of the things you do if there's somebody that you suspect is you increase their cognitive load during the interrogation, and there's no way you can prepare for that.
Because if you really want to know for sure if somebody is guilty or innocent, you need to invest a lot of time.
You need to get a baseline on what they normally look like, talk like, feel like.
And then knowing that baseline, you then need to compare how they're behaving on TV.
So just walking by the screen and seeing it, you might see things that would ordinarily be lie behaviors that could just be part of their personality.
So if you're going to really make a judgment, you've got to put a lot of time in and figure it out.
And what you should do before you decide you're going to be a human lie detector is do your homework and you ought to try to figure it out objectively before you figure it out behaviorally.
I mean, you ought to do your investigation, find out if somebody took the money and, you know, find out where they were and, you know, look for fingerprints and do this and do that.
I mean, you ought to really objectively figure it out before you rely on these things.
And so unless you get a baseline and get one-on-one with them and spend a lot of time, then you can't be really certain that you know whether they're telling the truth or whether they're not.
Yeah, I heard a cop once say that when people are guilty, they tend to plead and cry, and then when they're not guilty, they tend to get angry when they're accused.
People that are wrongly accused are generally irate from the beginning till the end.
I mean, every case is different, but if you're wrongly accused, that person is going to be pissed off from the minute you accuse them till the end.
They're self-righteous.
Like, I didn't do this, and you're saying I did, and screw you.
And they don't take a step back.
And when you see people, they do these convincing statements, and they're pleading for you to believe them.
And any time somebody says, now, in all honesty...
Usually, the next thing out of their mouth's a lie.
Like, they say to you, now, Joe, honestly, as opposed to everything else you've been telling me, why are we bracketing this one out as honest?
Or if they invoke the deity, I swear to God, God as my witness.
And, you know, I don't know whether – I have not done what I said you need to do with Jussie Smollett, but I do know when he went to the set at Fox, he said, you all know me.
I swear to God, I didn't do this.
And there were like three or four of those kind of statements in like two or three sentences there.
The times that I've seen, I don't watch that show a lot, but the times I've seen him on there singing, and assuming it is his voice and he's singing, extremely talented young man.
Yeah, various levels of crazy, obviously not all deceptive, but some of the most brilliant actors are just completely out of their mind, and that's one of the reasons why they're so good at acting.
Look, my friend Wayne Fetterman had a bit that he did about it on stage, and he's like, guess what?
It's not fucking normal to be able to just cry.
He goes, you could just cry and pretend something's wrong and cry?
Yeah, and he's telling me about friends that have been killed, and he's been in some sticky situations a few times.
I'm just fascinated by...
By people and what they like to do.
You know, I'm fascinated by athletes.
I'm fascinated by physicists.
I've just always been very, very curious.
And I've always recognized that everyone thinks about things differently and that I could take a little bit of something from everybody.
Whether it's from a book or it's from having a conversation with someone, I can gain a little bit of experience, a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of insight.
And what you're talking about when you're interviewing all these athletes, you know, I think people tend to write off athletic pursuits as being entirely physical, and they're not.
I mean, I think this is an easy way for people to look at it that don't engage, or they've never really thought about playing anything at a very high level, that it requires some intense thinking.
It might not require...
Mathematics or a large vocabulary, but understanding what's required, understanding when and how to execute, understanding how to keep your shit together under pressure, those are all intensely intellectual aspects of any really high-end athletic pursuit.
Yeah, that knows they can handle it better than anybody else.
You know, and it's a lot of times it's people that are entirely confident that they've done the work.
You know, there's a haunting thing that happens with athletes where you're not sure if you did enough.
And in fighters, it's a very dangerous inclination because it leads you to overtrain.
And you have to be very careful about that.
Because with a fighter, you only can learn so much during your training camp.
Like say, once you get into training camp, you got eight weeks, depending on who you are.
Some guys like to do a little longer.
But the average is maybe eight.
Twelve weeks is a long camp.
You already have to know how to fight by the time you get to camp.
So what you're really doing is just kind of working on specific movements where you're dealing with one kind of fighter and then getting your body in shape.
Getting your body conditioned, getting your mind ready, preparing everything, cutting your body weight down so you can weigh in and have a good amount of...
You've got to have enough vitality.
You can't drain yourself.
So there's this complicated dance that goes on.
And that haunting thing of did I do enough can cause fighters to screw themselves over by overtraining.
So you have to have enough confidence to know that you've done enough as well as enough You have to know you've done enough, but know you haven't done too much.
This is a really strange dance.
This weekend is a giant UFC. Big UFC. Two big title fights between four of the very best fighters in the world.
That is one of the most interesting aspects of the fight game to me.
One, watching these guys stare each other down at the weigh-in, where they get a look at each other and they know 24 hours from now they're going to war.
And just see, is there just a smell of doubt?
Is there anything?
Is there anything in there?
And just knowing that this is probably one of the most difficult things in all of athletics, and that these guys are going to...
They're going to apply their trade in one of the most complicated things.
It's a battle of physical, mental, of mindset, of will, of conditioning and discipline.
And then it's also, there's a lot of random shit that happens.
When you get to a certain level of success, like, you know, John Jones has one loss in his record and it's by disqualification in a fight that he was destroying the guy.
And he was hitting the guy with, it's a really dumb rule, but when you throw elbows, you're not allowed to throw a 12 to 6 elbow, meaning coming straight down.
The only reason that exists is because when mixed martial arts was first being, It was first being sanctioned by athletic commissions.
The people that were in the athletic commission had some nervous fears.
They had seen those late night TV shows where karate guys are breaking bricks with their elbow driving straight down.
They thought they could kill somebody if they did that.
So let's not have...
We'll eliminate that strike.
It's a dumb move.
And Jon Jones hit this guy with a couple, 12 to 6 elbows, and he was disqualified.
In a fight, he was just...
Just destroying the guy.
So for a guy like that, who has this staggering resume of achievement, he's widely considered to be the greatest light heavyweight champion of all time.
If not, he's definitely in the running of the greatest fighter ever of all time.
For a guy like that, he's confident to the point of, you know, he's...
He's not trying to just beat this guy, although he's going to beat this guy.
He's trying to go down in history as one of the greatest of all time, or the greatest of all time.
So for a guy like that, it doesn't matter what you do.
He had Customato training him when he was at his very best.
And then Kevin Rooney, who worked with Customato and Mike, trained him after that.
And then they eventually parted ways.
And that was before the Buster Douglas fight.
Remember, he had guys in his corner that didn't even have an end swell.
I mean, his eye was swelling up and they didn't even have ice to put on it.
Yeah, there was a lot of factors.
But also, you know, when I talked to Mike on the podcast, one of the things was, and this was just him sort of coming to grips with the fact that He never really had a childhood.
His childhood was from the time he was 12 years old.
Custom model took him in, was hypnotizing him and teaching him how to fight.
Teaching him how to fight and hypnotizing him to be a machine.
He was literally saying to him, you don't exist.
The task exists.
The job at hand exists.
And you're going to go out there and you're going to get the job done.
And he was telling this to a 13-year-old that never experienced love.
He just was abandoned and homeless and this is the only way he ever got any sort of positive reinforcement in his life is by destroying people.
Yeah, I think the psychological aspect of fighting is one of the more intriguing parts of it to me.
For me, it's like probably one of the reasons why I got interested in psyche in the first place and the way people think about things and weakness, like real weakness.
Weakness can get exposed in a variety of different ways, but in competition is when you really see it.
We see it in sports, and I saw it when I talked to Emmett.
He's been a friend of mine for a long time.
I was talking to him about his psychology as he goes into a football game, and he says he plays a movie in his mind of the entire game before he plays it.
Because in a football game, you're going to have 11 or 12 possessions during the game.
Throughout the football game, you're going to get that ball 11 or 12 times.
I'm going to carry that ball three or four times per possession.
He knows which plays he's going to run.
He would run them through his head.
He would see it.
He would know who was going to be there to tackle him.
He would run everything through his head.
He's one of those guys that wants the ball when the clock's running out.
I have this theory that situations do not make heroes.
Situations expose heroes.
And I saw that in Katrina, the hurricane that so devastated that one neighborhood.
What ward was it?
Is it the Ninth Ward?
I forget which ward it was that got so wiped out.
When Katrina hit New Orleans, and there was a guy down there that had been really quiet.
Nobody had ever heard anything out of him.
He was an older guy, lived in a house, stayed to himself.
And that night, when the water was at rooftop level, I mean, he swam rooftop to rooftop and saved six, seven, eight people, got him out of there, and he didn't make it out.
But he got seven or eight people out of there.
And you go back and you check his history, and he was a military hero.
He just sat quietly in his home.
And when the situation came about, it revealed who he was.
And I think that's what happens.
I think if you've got a hero, they just sit there, sit there, sit there until a situation reveals who they are.
I don't think it makes them a hero.
I think it reveals that they're heroes.
And I think that's what happens to people.
They are who they are until they get – and then the opportunity comes along and they're going to show you who that is.
They may show you they're a coward.
Or they may show you that they've got the focus to hang, or they may show you that they're a hero, but life circumstances are going to come along and they're going to show you who somebody is.
No, I think we learn about ourselves, and everybody talks about self-esteem and self-worth, but nobody ever talks about what it really is or how we get it.
And I think about it in terms of self-attribution, because You know how you form opinions of other people.
Like, if you look at this guy, and maybe you work with this guy, and so you watch him across a couple of years, and maybe this guy shows up to work every day, and he's there 15 minutes early, and he unlocks the place, gets everything ready, puts the coffee on, has his desk ready, he's all buttoned up, and man, when the bell rings, he's ready to go.
And you just learn that this guy's buttoned up, ready to go, dependable, never misses, he's always there.
So you attribute certain traits and characteristics to him based on your observations of him and your experience of him.
Based on that, you assign certain traits and characteristics to him.
But I say that's exactly the same way we form our own self-image and our own level of self-worth.
We watch ourselves go through life, and we watch how we handle certain circumstances and situations.
And that's why I say overindulgence is one of the most insidious forms of child abuse known to parenting.
It's not the worst, it's just insidious.
Because if you overindulge your children and do everything for them, you never let them observe themselves master their environment.
You never let them step back and say, wow, I did that!
I built this!
I overcame that!
I handled this!
I did that!
And so that's the same way we make our own self-image and level of self-worth.
We watch ourselves overcome the third grade.
We watch ourselves stand up to a bully.
We watch ourselves handle a test with information that intimidated us.
Or we watch ourselves make it onto the Little League baseball team and actually get a hit when we needed to.
Or we watch ourselves get onto the debate team and actually argue something successfully, whether it's academic or athletic or musical, We watch ourselves do it, and so we go back and say, hey, I did that.
I attribute to myself the ability.
I can hang.
I can do this.
I can rise to the occasion.
Or...
We watch ourselves fold like a pup tent in a windstorm and say, you know, I can't hang.
I don't have it.
And we make those attributions to ourselves and so we shrink from the challenge for the rest of our lives until, like you said, it's hard to overcome that and something pushes you up until you finally observe yourself overcome something.
And I think that's how we form our level of self-esteem and our identity about who we are.
And I don't think most people think about that.
They look back and say, okay, how did I get to be Joe Rogan as I sit in that chair?
You have a self-image.
You have a level of confidence, an ego strength, a level of self-worth.
That's attributable to things you've watched yourself do or not do, achieve, not achieve, overcome, or whatever throughout your life.
And I think to know yourself, you have to know what those things are.
It was a Short period of time, but they took students into class where they put the steps of learning the information so close together that there was never a failure experience.
It would say, like, the War of 1812 happened in 1812. Then the next thing would say, the War of 1812 happened in blank.
You fill in 1812. I mean, come on.
A potted plant could get that.
So they would put it together, and they would teach the information, and they would teach it to criteria where you mastered the information, you had it 100%.
And they said, wow, this is great.
Everybody learned it.
So everybody made 100. Everybody got the information.
They truly did learn it.
There was no question about it.
They learned the information.
And so they did great.
And then they took them out of that program and put them back in the regular classroom.
And the first time they came to questions they didn't know the answer to, the first time they didn't get 100, they came apart like a cheap suit.
They panicked.
They didn't know how to handle adversity.
They didn't know how to handle it when they didn't have the right answers.
They didn't learn how to not be perfect.
And so they scrapped the whole program because they said, you can't do this because that's not the way life is.
And if, I mean, you're not teaching them how the real world works.
You might as well teach them to go on red and stop on green and then give them the keys and put them out in life because that's not the way it works.
And those kids were absolutely screwed up when they got into a truly competitive environment.
You know, I read that story not long ago when these students, I think it was at UCLA in law school, complained and got a professor Either disciplined or fired because he required them to take a counter-argument over something controversial like Ferguson.
He said, I know that you're all on this point of view.
Now I want you to prepare an argument for the other side.
And they all said, that's upsetting to us.
We just can't do it.
And they went to the administration and complained.
Wow, that's crazy, because you may have to, as a lawyer, you may have to represent someone who's done something you don't agree with, if that's what you want to do for a living, right?
Well, there's a movement going on in this country right now, the social justice movement, and it leans in that direction, that people don't want to look at things for how they are.
They want to look at things for how they want them to be.
I had a joke in one of my specials, two specials ago, about, there was a story about a woman who was guarding the White House.
She was the lone guard at one of the doors of the White House, and some crazy man broke in and knocked her to the ground and just ran through the White House, and he was running around inside the White House for like three minutes before they finally, some off-duty Secret Service agent, tackled this guy.
I'm like, what the fuck is going on?
This guy's running through the White House to tackle this guy.
And the joke was that people think that a woman can do everything a man can do.
I go, a woman can do everything a man can do.
Is that true?
And some woman in the crowd at the comic store was like, yes!
I go, well, that doesn't make any fucking sense.
Here's why it doesn't make any sense.
Because a man can't do everything a man can do.
I go, look, I've met Shaquille O'Neal, and his dick is where my face is.
And if the White House is experiencing a Shaq attack, I'm the wrong person to save the world, because he's just going to run right over me.
I go, but if my wife and kid were guarding the White House, guess what?
I'm getting in.
I love my family, but if it's between me and...
There's no way they're going to be able to stop me.
I love them to death, but I'm a man, and they're women.
And if there's a woman guarding the White House, I don't care who she is.
I'll fuck her up.
It's not going to happen.
This is crazy.
But someone had this idea that they would...
a very physical job.
You should have a giant man with a violent temper and he should be armed.
Okay?
Because this is the guy that's keeping bad people from the fucking president.
If everyone has a chance to work at CERN, everyone has a chance to work at the Large Hadron Collider, including people that have no idea about physics, we're going to have a real time making these equations work.
Once you do something and you're good at it, you can accept not being good at other things.
It's much easier.
If you find a thing that you're good at, whether it's gymnastics or singing or painting, whatever the fuck it is, if you can find a thing that you're good at, it'll give you a feeling of self-worth and you won't need to be good at everything.
You can accept and you can enjoy other people being good at things as well.
And I just think if you're in your life and you don't have something that you're passionate about, I mean, and I don't mean that in a cliche way.
If there's not something where you wake up every day and there's nothing in your life that you're excited to do, man, you need to go back to the drawing board.
Because if all you're doing is just grinding it out and You get up every day, go to a job you don't like, do tasks you don't care to do, and come home to a home you don't want to come home to and wait to get up and do it again the next day, you're burning daylight.
What the hell existence is that?
I don't understand that.
Find something.
I don't care if it's gardening or music or art or athletics or something.
Yeah, and I think it's one of the most important things to do when you're a parent is to try to expose your kid to as many different things as possible to find those things for them.
But I took them turkey hunting, duck hunting, deer hunting, skiing, snow skiing, camping.
I did it all.
And to see what they liked.
Let them pick.
And boy, when you don't know what you're doing, As a dad, that's a bitch.
I mean, just little things, like you go camping and you don't realize that setting your tent up on the side of a hill, even if it's like 8 or 10 degrees, is a bad idea.