Dr. Phil McGraw and Joe Rogan warn America’s cultural decline fuels rising anxiety, with 130 million struggling to read basics and fentanyl—70M lethal counterfeit pills monthly from Mexico—threatening even accidental ingestion. They critique remote learning’s pandemic fallout, slashed literacy, and LA’s shelter chaos, contrasting Austin’s job-training success while debating cancel culture’s absurdity, like a masked teacher’s prosthetic breasts. Tech’s dual-edged impact—from cyberbullying to Musk’s Twitter gamble—underscores deeper fractures, yet Dr. Phil insists unity over polarization, praising rational dialogue as the antidote to societal fragmentation. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, every year in the summer, we kind of work to reinvent ourselves about how we can tell our stories better and all that sort of thing.
And we really focus on what our viewers are asking about.
And I have to tell you, this year the questions really changed.
You know, we still deal with human functioning, you know, marriage and family and all that.
But in addition to that, the questions we got over the summer this year started really changing.
Like, are we going to make it?
Are we going to survive?
Are we safe?
Are our kids safe?
Are they safe in school?
What are they being taught in school?
Should we be going down there and seeing what they're teaching them?
What's happening as far as values in this country?
I mean, people started asking different questions, and so I changed everything.
I used to have that studio audience out in the bleachers out there.
I moved everybody on stage and we're just having a focus group every day.
I got like 110 people up there in a focus group and letting them talk and ask questions because they're really concerned.
And I just said, I can't take it anymore.
I'm going to start talking about the social issues along with everything else because if you even took psychology in high school or you took Psych 101, One of the first fundamental principles you learned was you don't reward bad behavior.
All of a sudden, we're paying people not to work more than they get if they work.
And then we say...
What happened to the supply chain?
Well, you paid everybody not to work.
That's what happened to the supply chain.
And I'm stunned that we're running this country In so many areas where we're just violating the most fundamental psychological principles that you could ever imagine.
And I'm watching that happen and I say, I just can't be silent about this anymore.
I think it's been happening gradually, but like everything, you know, it's like if you start rolling a rock downhill, it starts getting faster and faster and faster.
And I think it's happened for a lot of reasons, but I think we've got a whole generation of kids that are really smart, by the way.
These kids are smart.
But I think they've started living on their devices.
It's kind of like along about 2007 or 8, it seems like airplanes flew over the country and just started dropping smartphones, and everybody's head went from here to here.
I mean, think about it.
When you look Go anywhere.
Go to the mall.
Go just anywhere there's a group.
And what do you see in their hands?
You see a device.
We didn't grow up with devices.
When I started Dr. Phil 21 years ago, the first text hadn't been sent.
There were no social media platforms.
None of that stuff was going on.
Technology's great.
Listen, I love technology.
But we've got generations that started Living virtually.
They're watching people live their lives instead of living their own lives.
And that changed the metrics on everything.
Think about that.
TikTok, Instagram, all of this.
You're watching other people live their lives instead of living your own.
But there's something else that I think has come along with it, and we've got a generation of what I call concierge parents that are running interference for their kids.
And look, the way you learn about yourself, the way you make attributions To yourself, about yourself is the same way you make attributions about other people.
You have people that you have opinions of, right?
You know, you got people, friends or staff, that you watch what they do and you say, he or she is a go-to person.
I know what they do.
I can count on them.
They're gonna be there every time.
They're gonna show up on time.
They're gonna get everything ready.
They're gonna be buttoned up.
They're like clockwork, right?
And you attribute that to them because you watch what they do.
If they're problem solvers, you know, hey, go get Becky in here.
Go get Jeff in here.
They are problem solvers.
You know that because you've watched them do it and you make that attribution to them.
That's the same way we learn about ourselves.
You watch ourselves master certain tasks, overcome certain things.
And if we're cheated out of that experience, we don't learn that about ourselves.
And if you've got parents that are out there smoothing out all the bumps for you, then you don't learn that you can smooth out your own bumps.
You don't learn that you can overcome obstacles.
You don't learn that you can master your environment.
And so as a result, you don't have the self-esteem.
You don't have the self-worth.
You don't make the attributions that, hey, I can do this shit.
And when you don't believe you can do this shit, then you start saying, well, I don't want a meritocracy.
I want everybody to just kind of go along the same.
And so we started seeing in the universities You start seeing kids that are complaining that something the professor said hurt their feelings.
It upset them.
So they start going to the dean.
They start going to the department head and saying, that professor said things that upset me.
And we've had more professors disciplined, suspended, or dismissed In the last 10 or 15 years than we've had since McCarthyism.
Because kids are going in there and saying, that hurt my feelings.
He offended me and said things that were offensive.
And so they complain about it and they get listened to.
And so the professors, and some of them are assholes, I'm sure.
Some of them are offensive by any standard.
But it's out of control.
And these kids are sensitive to the point when I was in college, when campuses were where you went to hear the other side, right?
That's how you rounded things out.
There was a speaker coming that was totally on the other side than you were on anything, science or whatever.
You went to listen to them because you thought, I'm going to learn how to shoot this full of holes.
Now anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of students think it's okay to shout down somebody you disagree with.
To protest and run them off campus.
You don't listen to them.
You get rid of them.
You don't want to hear it.
You don't want to see it.
You don't want to have anything to do with it.
They protest and yell them down.
What's that about?
They don't want to hear it.
And I think that we're coddling this whole generation, and when they get out of school and get into the world, Where that's not going to happen, they're going to be competitive, we're going to have a real problem.
Because in a global economy, we're going to fall behind.
And we are behind right now.
People say, well, we lead the world in math and Science and reading.
No, we don't.
We don't lead it.
I wrote down where we are, but we're not anywhere near the top.
We're 13th in reading, we're 18th in science, we're 37th in math in the world today.
So do you think this is coming from parents coddling their children, helicopter parents, those children going off to universities, universities instilling these ideas in them that they should be able to shout down ideas that they don't agree with and that everything should be comfortable and everyone should have everything they want and desire without any work.
And then they go out into the workforce and they invade corporations with these same attitudes and become activists and...
Well, you hear some professors that venture to say, you know, we're not getting or turning out the best and the brightest for this whole variety of reasons.
That means we're not competitive.
And if we're not competitive, If we're not turning out the best and the brightest because we're caving, because we've got quotas to fill, or for whatever reason, then we're just, where's that going to leave us?
And this wasn't caused by the pandemic.
It was exacerbated by the pandemic and you know as I say you're not you're not going to get kids that have a lot of self-confidence that have a lot of self-worth that have made these attributions and right now the millennial generation is the loneliest Most emotionally impacted out
of all the generations right now.
They are lonely.
They don't have friends.
Followers aren't friends.
And if you haven't gotten out in the world and you don't have the confidence to get out there, you're not going to do well.
One of the things that disturbs me the most about it is that I don't see a way to turn it around, other than some sort of a disaster where people are forced to come together.
Like, I remember the shift in the country after 9-11, and the only thing that I felt positive about was like, wow, all of a sudden America feels united.
Like, there were so many people driving down the street with American flags on their cars.
I mean, it was almost more than there were not in Los Angeles, which is a very liberal place.
And I remember thinking, maybe things like this are important just to sort of snap people back To a healthier baseline.
To put people back and to give them a perspective.
Like, we are really all in this together.
And if something like that does happen and it unites people and they get together and they realize, hey, we're all working together towards a goal.
We want to keep our families safe.
We want to keep the world safe.
We want to be able to pursue our dreams and do what we want to do.
And if something comes along that stops that, we have to kind of unite together to make sure we put everything back on track.
I worry that it has to be like a war or a natural disaster, something huge.
Because I think as long as you allow people to keep going, there's so much momentum in society going in the direction that we're going.
People that want an equality of outcome.
People that want a redistribution of wealth.
But some people are waking up telling me...
I saw a quote from Bono, of all people, that I read yesterday.
See if you can find this, where he was talking about it when he was young.
He thought that the world's problems could be solved by a redistribution of wealth, but now he realizes that healthy commerce is the way to a better society.
You know, there's every cliche in the world, it works great till you run out of other people's money, you know, all of those quotes.
It doesn't work, and I've encountered those people in debates that think it does.
I've had people in the focus group situation that say, They shouldn't be prosecuting shoplifting because they're just going in there and taking what's rightfully theirs.
What the hell are you talking about?
They said, well, these corporations aren't paying enough, they're not paying a living wage, so they're just going in and taking what's rightfully theirs.
And I'm saying, well, so, okay, if You're wanting equal outcome.
No, no, I'm just wanting equal opportunity.
No, no, you're wanting equal outcome because you're saying everybody should just help themselves so they all can live.
What if one person spent 15 years going to college and working their butt off To acquire what I call consequential knowledge.
And the other person was sitting home in a beanbag eating Cheetos for 15 years.
You think they should have the same outcome.
Well, yeah, that's a right.
Everybody has a right to a reasonable life.
Well, go read The Little Red Hen.
I mean, did they not go over that in grade school?
I've worked a lot in rehab, and I don't mean drug rehab.
I'm talking about whatever it is.
If you have a head injury, if you have someone that's injured on the job and they're having to re-educate their body, spinal injury or whatever, If you don't require that person to do everything they can do every single time they face a task, you're cheating them because they'll never get to the next level.
I mean, if a paraplegic takes 11 minutes to get across a room to flip a light switch and you don't require them to do that, Then they'll never do it in 10 minutes, 9 minutes, 6 minutes, and then where they can actually do it.
Now if they can't do it, they can't do it.
But you need to require them to do everything they can do for themselves before you help them to do it.
And we should always help them to do it, but you should let them do as much as they can do.
And that's the same way with everybody in the world.
They should do everything they're able to do.
And if we have people on the government dole That aren't doing everything they can do to help themselves, whether they're among the homeless population or the drug population or the mentally ill population, whatever.
I'm totally understanding that you help people, but you give them a hand up, not a hand out.
There's a big difference.
And we're just not doing that.
You've got to require people to do everything they can do to help themselves.
So they, again, observe themselves doing more and more.
And they have pride in what they achieve and what they accomplish.
But it seems like, especially when you're talking about, like, the homeless population, you would need so many people to work with those people because you're talking about a psychological shift, a way of viewing the world with discipline and accountability.
That you're not going to just get people to adopt on their own.
Very few people will.
Most people will do the very least that they have to do.
And if there's programs and different ways they can acquire money and food, they'll just stay in whatever state they're at.
I was watching this video today of a guy who's in Hollywood who built a house on the street.
He built a small house, and they were talking to all the people in the neighborhood about it, and they had the cops come and visit him, and they offered to take him to a shelter, and he's like, no, I don't want to go.
And they go, okay, and they just leave him there.
So this guy's built a structure.
On wheels.
It's like a small shed, but a wooden house.
Because he said that every time he had a tent, they took the tent away.
And I don't care how flat you make a pancake, it's got two sides.
And the side where he says, I don't want to go to a shelter.
If you go to a shelter, what do you do with all your stuff?
Because there's nowhere inside that shelter to take all of your stuff.
And he has things.
And he might have an animal.
And that animal he's attached to.
And you can't take that animal in the shelter.
And you can't take your things in the shelter.
And if you can't take your animal and your things in the shelter, they're not going to go.
If they leave their things on the street, they'll be gone when they come out the next morning.
So a shelter's not always the answer.
So you've got to have empathy for those people.
And he may be trying to do the best he can, but you've got to create alternatives where he says, okay, look, if he's industrial enough that he's built a house on wheels and they're pirating electrical, some of them from service poles, some of them have 10-man tents, and they've got flower beds in front of them.
Now, if that guy's got that much initiative, and he could use that in other ways, find him a place where he can do that, where he can not be obstructing traffic, not be in front of somebody's business, be in an area where he can build that house, and then maybe he can inspire somebody else to do the same thing, and then maybe it starts to snowball.
You work with what you have.
I'm not saying these people can start running their own business tomorrow.
But build on what you have.
But you don't just say, well, so he's what they refer to as experiencing homelessness.
Find something that you can build on.
These people don't want to be homeless.
They want to have a better standard of living.
But once they become homeless, it's like inertia is the tendency for bodies at rest to stay at rest, and it's hard to get them moving.
But you say it would take so many.
You can find leaders within those groups that can help the next level below, and they can be helped by the next level above.
But it seems like one of the first things that has to happen is you can't tolerate people just camping on the streets.
Just like you can't tolerate people littering.
Because it's not much difference.
You're interfering with all the other people that are following society's rules.
And society's rules are there to preserve everybody and keep the world cleaner and a better place.
So as soon as you allow someone to violate those rules because they're down and out, and then you have more, and then they compound, and then you have thousands of tents.
Now you have a problem that's almost insurmountable.
And then you have a whole industry that's based around that problem because you have hundreds of people that work for the city that get paid six-figure salaries and they're not fixing anything.
They get paid for the homeless, and some of them are making a quarter million dollars a year.
We looked it up.
It's wild.
The budget goes up every year.
The problem doesn't go away.
There's no incentive to fix the problem because if the problem gets fixed, then those jobs go away.
And they had it set up where you have to be clean to go into these places.
And they offered them counseling.
But Austin's a smaller place.
You know, there's only a million people in this city.
And, you know, I talked to the mayor about it before they fixed the problem.
And it was his number one initiative.
He's like, he goes, before I leave office, I have to fix this.
And he goes, and I think we can because there's only about 2,000 homeless people.
He goes, when you get to the place where LA is, where you're dealing with like 100,000 homeless people, it's almost impossible.
He goes, but right now we're like at the tipping point and we can fix it.
But it is kind of fixed.
There's still some homeless people, but if you go around Austin, you don't see the tents here that you see in LA. Well, is that out of sight, out of mind?
But don't you think there's a massive amount Of energy and effort that has to be taken for each individual to change the way they view the world, to acquire discipline, to acquire initiative, to clean their act up, to stop doing meth and heroin, and try to get their life to a place where they're living a meaningful, rewarding life.
I mean, how many people struggle with that on a daily basis?
You need coaching and counseling, and you need slow, incremental steps towards acquiring a self-sufficient mentality.
That's a very, very difficult thing to get people to accept en masse.
The problem that I see with the approach to it now is the exit ramps out of that life are not aggressively enough.
They're not being pursued aggressively enough.
It's just like, what are we going to do with these people today?
Let's put them in a camping area, let's put them in a hotel, let's get them off the street, or let's get rid of the rules that say they can't camp.
Well, okay, that's just warehousing.
What are you doing to help this person become self-sufficient?
Are you finding them a job?
Are you creating a contingency where if they do A, they get B, if they do B, they get C? Or do you have somebody saying, hey, listen, housing is a human right.
Well, okay.
Let's just, for argument's sake, say that's a human right.
I'm not saying you agree with that.
I'm not saying I agree with that.
Let's just, for argument's sake, say that's right.
All right.
What's the contingency to then say, okay, now what are you going to do next?
What are you going to do to get a job?
What are you going to do to get off drugs?
What are you going to do?
Are you going to go to therapy?
Are you going to get job training?
What are you going to do?
And you say it's going to take a lot of manpower to do that?
Well, we got a lot of manpower doing not shit now.
They can do that.
I mean, let's make sure they're training people and hold them accountable for how many people they're getting off the street into jobs that are self-sufficient.
We're not holding them accountable.
They need to be held accountable for are they reducing the population or are they not?
They see it on TV. They see it, you know, on some site.
What they don't get is the smell that these people are living in and the neighborhoods around it.
It's really...
It's a terrible way to live, and it's a terrible thing to ask people that have businesses where they're having to live adjacent to that.
It's not working for anybody.
It's not working for those in the tents.
It's not working for those adjacent to where they're doing that.
So the Austin mayor He put a standard.
You've got to be clean, and you've got to keep your area clean, your room clean, all that.
That's a step up, right?
At least it's not rancid and horrible.
He's requiring more, and if they enforce that, that's a step up.
Now these people will start to have a sense of A personal pride and dignity that they may not have had if they were in one of these areas that's so terrible, then it's less of a leap to say, let's start talking about job interviews at entry level and see if you can get them back into that.
And so you've got to help that in some way so they can actually have the focus and the mindset to contribute something to an employer somewhere.
And that's not easy.
And we're not helping this Right now in the school system, we've got a silent epidemic going on right now, and it was exacerbated by the pandemic because It's amazing how many people in America right now.
I just had a woman on recently that works nationally with the education programs.
And she says 130 million Americans can't read at the most basic level.
And I said define basic level for me.
And she said basic level is they can't read A prescription label.
They can't read a simple story to their children at bedtime.
So now, 44 to 64 is a C. 64 to 84 is a B. 84 to 100 is an A. You've got to drop below 24 to get an F. Now that's how they're closing the gap and pushing them on to the next grade.
So if you can make an average of 30, you get a D, that's passing, you move on to the next level.
I mean, if you were a real conspiracy theorist, and you really wanted to believe that there was someone that was trying to destroy America from within, slowly, This would be the way to do it.
All the things we talked about.
Make it easy for people to be homeless.
Make people think that the world owes them something.
The quality of outcome is the desired result.
Everyone who's wealthy is evil.
If you think there's something wrong with the world, throw soup at a painting and glue yourself to the wall.
I mean, the stuff that we're reinforcing and the way that it's happening so rapidly I mean, you're older than me.
Has there ever been a time in your life where you thought that America could get to the point where it's at now?
And further to that point, I've got to say that you get to a point where you start getting scared about whether or not this is something we can come back from.
And I'm an incurable optimist.
And I really do believe that if people will stop arguing And decide, look, I'm not here to win an argument.
I'm here to solve a problem.
If people will just take that attitude, we can really change some things that are going on here.
Because I'm an incurable optimist, and I do think we can solve this problem.
And we've got a lot of Kids right now that are experiencing anxiety, depression, and homelessness at the highest levels that we've had since we started keeping records of this kind of thing, which is not that long ago.
It's not like since the 1700s we've just been keeping these records.
I think they really started keeping good records in the Maybe since 12, 10, 12, somewhere back in there.
But these are the highest levels that we've seen.
And the pandemic didn't cause that.
But it really spiked it because these kids were out of school and they got really scared of the pandemic.
They lost loved ones.
They were afraid of this invisible monster out there.
We're gonna have to deal with that.
and we're going to have to deal with the fact that they lost a lot of time and a lot of learning that put them further behind than we already were.
And we need, you said something's got to happen for people to come together.
We need to come together for these kids.
We need to come together and recognize that we're about to lose a generation here, and we can fix this, But we've got to stop trying to win an argument about who's got the right to talk about curriculum and who does.
We need to solve the problem.
Look, I'm politically agnostic.
You know, I say the pandemic was mishandled.
I think it was mishandled.
I said it was mishandled at the beginning, publicly.
And listen, this spanned the Trump administration, the Biden administration.
So this is a bipartisan problem.
I'm not...
I don't know enough about politics to talk politics.
I don't want to know enough about it.
I'm talking about the culture.
And when I talk to people about negotiating, which I do a lot, the first thing I always tell people is, the first thing you should do is, let's talk about what we agree on.
If we're on two sides of a table like this and we're negotiating, let's talk about what we agree on first.
Because, you know, if you really spend time to do that, you're sometimes surprised at how little you really disagree on.
If you get the left and the right and talk about what we agree on, everybody would agree we want America to be the number one country in the world.
We want to be the leading superpower, the leading educational power, the leading in technology, everything, right?
Everybody would agree to that.
We want to be the healthiest country.
We want to be the best leaders.
Everybody would agree on that.
Everybody would agree we want our children to have a better life than we have.
Everybody would agree that we want safety for our kids.
Advances in medicine.
There's so many things we can agree on.
And then when we say, let's talk about what we don't agree on, the next step you'd say is, how can I get the other side as much of what they want as I possibly can?
That should be the second thing you should focus on because oftentimes you find we have different currencies.
You might value different things than I do, so I might be able to give you everything you want.
It's not likely to happen, but there's a lot I can give you because you value different things than I do, and I value different things than you do.
We might be able to really help each other get what we want.
And it narrows down to very little sometimes that we really disagree on and have to compromise on.
But you can't do that if you're really focused on winning an argument and being a right fighter instead of saying, let's solve the problem.
We can't come out of this room until we solve the problem.
And it's hard to do that if you're...
Kind of agreeing just with what your side beats the drum on versus this side beats the drum on instead of being commonsensical and saying, how do we solve this problem?
Yeah, I think very few people are able to argue without attaching themselves to ideas.
So if their idea, when they have an argument about something, if you say something that they agree with, instead of accepting that you say something they agree with, they want to fight against it because they just want to be right.
You know, very few people are good at ideas Being discussed in arguments.
Because the argument becomes very personal.
Like, they think about their own self-worth and they attach it to being the winner of the argument.
They want to use ad hominem attacks, insults, and trying to figure out a way to verbally joust with you to the point where they're successful.
When people start assassinating character, it's because their ideas won't withstand challenge.
This cancel culture bullshit, cancel culture should be council culture.
If you say something that's offensive to my values, I should counsel with you about it, not cancel you, not get everybody to hate you.
You know, you see somebody that says something on Twitter or says something in an interview that is offensive to some group, and all of a sudden you start reading the messages they get.
It's like, I hope you get ass cancer and die, you son of a bitch.
I'll cut your throat.
I'll come to your house and kill your children.
Are you kidding me?
It's like, boycott this person, boycott this company.
Where did we get to this?
Now they're canceling each other.
It should be council culture, not cancel culture.
Let's sit down and talk about it.
Let me educate you.
Maybe you don't understand.
Maybe when you do, you won't agree, but let's talk about this.
I think it's people having the ability to discuss things without any social interaction.
They're not looking at each other.
They're not feeling the other person's emotions and feelings.
They're not looking into their eyes.
It's a very inhumane way for people to communicate.
It's very sterilized and you can assassinate a person's character or attack them or say horrible, insulting and threatening things and you don't feel any response.
Well, that's the way things are supposed to be held.
That's the way things are supposed to be done.
When you really want to solve a problem, you got to let both people talk and you got to figure out who's right and who's wrong.
And that's why censorship is so dangerous.
Because the correct answer to censorship, like this whole Kanye West thing.
You know, Kanye West is being canceled by all these organizations and they're removed.
The best way to handle Kanye West is the way Lex Friedman did.
Have a conversation with him and correct all the things that he's saying that you think are wrong or that you think are generalizing or you think that you think are misrepresentative of the truth.
But that's not the world we live in today.
The world we live in today, we want to erase people if we don't agree with them.
And then the problem with that is it scares people into communicating freely because they're worried that they're going to be erased next.
So they'll conform.
You're forcing people to conform to a very particular way of thinking.
It reinforces these ideas that you, you know, you have to be a part of this one particular group of ideas and thoughts.
According to linguistist experts, the origin of this phrase derives from the late 1800s vaudeville era, a popular style of entertainment that included jugglers, comedians, singers, and more.
The peanut gallery was the cheapest section of seats, usually occupied by people with limited means.
They note that in the past, cheap balcony seats were often reserved for or largely made up of African American patrons.
Thus, since the phrase implies the opinions expressed by those from the gallery were unsolicited, unwarranted, and unhelpful, the phrase also co-notes something negative about those giving them purported to be African Americans.
Because I know like in the Congo, the entire country has the electrical infrastructure of a city the size of Austin for millions and millions of people, which is why they're so vulnerable to natural disaster and they don't have dams and they don't have electrical pumps and I always thought of first,
second, third world having to do with infrastructure and technology and support systems and all that sort of thing.
I think that's where people have sat around and said, what can I be offended about today?
As opposed to saying, what can I do to contribute to unity?
What can I do to come together and work things out, make things better?
That's just not constructive to me.
Now, if there's something that somebody's doing, you know, we've done shows on hate crimes.
I mean, where people are attacking people purely because they're Asian or Jewish or whatever in L.A. and I get it.
That's okay.
That's not where you're looking for something.
It's where you're sitting in the line at a fast food restaurant and somebody rear ends your car and starts mocking you for being Asian, which is what happened.
This wonderful family we had on the show, they wound up in a parking lot rolling on the ground getting the shit beat out of them by some guy.
Okay, that's not looking for something to be offended about.
It was purely because they were Asian.
And maybe that's not the right I don't know.
They were from the Philippines, as I recall.
So Filipino, I guess.
I get that.
They're being attacked, and those attacks are on the vertical upswing.
That's not looking for something to be offended about.
That's traumatizing to them.
But picking out words to get offended about, I mean, I'm not going to get offended about ball jokes or somebody, but say, well, but you've not been oppressed.
You've not, okay, I get it, but you don't have to be offended just because you can.
Well, that's one of the things that social media has amplified.
Social media has amplified recreational outrage and virtue signaling.
And the fact that if you call out these things, you're somehow better than people that are ignoring them.
If you call out these ableist terms like blindsided or whatever one you want to focus on that's ridiculous, it makes you better than the people that don't.
I just think the momentum and the way the country's going and this problem that people have with social media, because people are very addicted to social media, and I think social media definitely exacerbates the problem.
And some people are recognizing it and they're trying to step away from it.
And even the tech companies, they're showing you your screen time to try to let you know, give you a little indication, like, hey, maybe you're obsessing, maybe you're addicted to this, maybe take some time, go for a walk in the park, do something different.
I'm optimistic.
Because I know a lot of people that are exceptional.
I know a lot of people that are inspirational.
I know a lot of people that are truly extraordinary human beings who really help the world and just their mere presence and the way they live their life is inspiring and it opens up a lot of people's eyes to possibilities.
But I'm also a realist when it comes to human nature.
I like to do a lot of difficult things and one of the things that I know about difficult things is it's very hard to get people to embrace being uncomfortable and suffering and struggle.
I mean like physical suffering and physical struggling.
People, they seek comfort and they seek to avoid these uncomfortable moments, but That's the only way you grow.
You grow through being uncomfortable.
You grow physically through difficult workouts.
You grow mentally through psychological struggle, through intellectual struggle, through complicated things that you have to work your way through.
And there's so many people out there that avoid those things.
It's easy to avoid those things.
And there's a pattern of avoiding those things.
A pattern of just being complacent, being lazy, You know, finding some sort of a distraction, whether it's video games or television or social media.
And it's very hard for people to break out of that.
I know there's a lot of people that want to, though.
Well, just across the border, just south of San Diego in October of 21, they busted a drug lab That was turning out 70 million counterfeit pills a month.
One lab.
70 million counterfeit pills a month.
Now, we don't know that they were all going to come to America, but we know a shitload of them were going to come to America.
And the DEA's estimate is that 40% of them Are laced with lethal levels of fentanyl.
And what these kids need to understand, and I want people to understand this, and I don't care if you stop listening to Joe and I talk right now and go call your kid or go call your grandkids or your friend's kids.
The chance of them, first off, all these pills you're buying on Snapchat, 100% of them are counterfeit.
Put this one up, and the reason they put it in there is because it's so highly addictive.
But they're not smart, or they don't care if they're killing a certain percentage of their customers.
But here's the deal.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin, 100 times stronger than morphine.
So if you bite into this, you're dead when you hit the ground.
And so she took a quarter of it.
Boom.
Gone.
And their estimate is that 40% of these pills that they're getting have lethal doses of fentanyl.
And the ones that don't, Have enough in it that you are addicted like that.
So they come back for more and more and more and more.
And now there are conspiracy theorists, including a former DEA guy, that believes that China He is manufacturing this stuff, synthesizing this stuff, sending it to the Sinaloa Cartel, who's flooding it into America, and they're just trying to poison or drug Americans.
It's just another attack.
He believes it's a terrorist attack.
And it's interesting.
He has a demo that he does.
He just takes a...
A little packet of sweetener and dumps it in his hand.
And he says, that much fentanyl is enough to kill 500 people.
It's just staggering.
And we've got to get this message out to the kids.
Don't do it.
Those pills look exactly like the pills that you get at the pharmacy.
And what they're doing now, Joe, is they're putting them in these pastel colors.
I think I sent you some of those, Jamie, in the pastel colors.
They're making them look like These candies that the kids get.
And kids are gonna see these things around and pick them up and think they're like sweet tarts or whatever and bite into them.
If I was a parent I would go to the store and buy every kind of candy I could find, and as soon as my kids came home from trick-or-treating, I would take their pumpkin and dump it into the trash and then fill it back up with candy I knew was good and hand it back to them.
I wouldn't let them take a single piece of candy from trick-or-treating because you don't know what's in there.
I think the fact that they are making these things in pastel colors make children vulnerable to picking these things up.
You want to argue over the word targeting?
If a child picks up something that, you know, I said that young girl that I was talking about took three quarters of a pill, or one quarter of a pill, And three-quarters of it was left in her drawer.
If she has a younger sister or something that sees that, picks it up, and it looks like candy and eats it, she's gone.
My point is, if you're in school and you're studying for finals and you're not a drug addict and you think, well, one pill's not going to hurt, that's no longer true.
You may be thinking, I'll get some Adderall, get me through my finals.
Today on CNN, they said they arrested some, it was either CNN or Fox, one of the two, they arrested some 14-year-olds coming across the border and they had a couple of thousand pills on them.
And who knows where it came from?
Who knows what else is in it?
And that will find its way to the market, a fair amount of it, through street dealers and the rest of it through social media.
It's dangerous.
You couldn't hold a gun on me and get me to take something I bought on the internet.
And I just think people need to be aware of it.
And if you think that it's an overreaction, an overstatement...
Yeah, it really comes down to we have big enough problems that affect all Americans that those, you were saying, is it going to take something major for us to say, you know what, we're all in this together, and I think those things are here, I just don't think they're being acknowledged.
Because if I have somebody come on the show to me, they know I can't bring that child back.
They know I can't stop their suffering.
They come on as a cautionary tale.
They say, I don't want my child's loss to be in vain.
I'm here to tell this story because I want to save some lives.
That's why they're there.
That's why they're talking through their tears and giving a voice to their loss because they don't want somebody else to be there tomorrow.
And they don't care.
They're not there saying...
I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican, I'm left, I'm right.
They're there saying, I'm a parent and I don't want anybody's child to die from this.
And we have enough of those things that I think we need to pay attention to and every mother Every mother bonds over that.
They understand the pain of that.
And I really hope people hear us talking about it.
Well, I'm sure people will hear it, and I think the message is getting out slowly, but it's just not being magnified enough.
I mean, the crisis that we faced during COVID-19 was magnified to the point of hysteria.
To the point where they're counting people dying of all sorts of diseases and calling them COVID deaths and elevating the amount of people that died to the point where people are absolutely terrified of it.
If they had applied a similar attention to this, I think we could at least put a dent in it.
But in terms of what the DEA is doing, in terms of what law enforcement's doing, I mean, they need more resources.
They need more help to try to stop this shit from coming in.
Run of pediatrics as they grow up and what affects them in later years, what happens early that affects them in later years.
And he's a brilliant, brilliant scientist.
And he says what's happened with He'd be a great, interesting guy for you to talk to.
I've interviewed him three or four times.
He says that what's happened with the handling of the pandemic is going to amount to millions of years of lives lost with these kids that are in school now.
Well, what he's talking about is that because of the educational gap That's been created by the pandemic because of the social developmental gap that's been created with the competitive gap that's been created, developmental, competitive, educational, that this generation is going to lag behind.
And like, for example, if you're not reading on grade level at the end of the third grade, your likelihood of dropping out is four times normal.
And the reason for that is, for the first, second, and third grade, you're learning to read.
From the fourth grade on, you're reading to learn.
So, if you haven't learned to read in those first three years, you now don't have the tool to read to learn and so you start falling further and further behind and so your likelihood of throwing up your hands in frustration falling further behind each year and ultimately dropping out and if you're low socioeconomic It's
six times normal.
But he's saying that these kids that got so little And lost so much in math, reading, and science during the pandemic with this remote learning, which was a disaster, that they're going to have less educational attainment, which means they're going to get lesser jobs.
Lesser jobs are more dangerous jobs because they're more manual labor.
They're doing construction work, things where you can get injured.
They're going to have lesser insurance.
And so you get less treatment, slower diagnosis, more injuries, and other factors, but as that obtains, that will take years off their life at the end.
They might develop cancer, but because they have poor insurance, it might be slower to get it diagnosed, lesser treatment, so it advances further and takes years off their life.
They get injured, stressed, trauma, and so it may take You know, two years, three years, four years off of each kid's life.
And we've got 57 million kids in the public school system right now.
Because they were saying about Los Angeles, people were criticizing the response to the pandemic in terms of remote schooling and making kids wear masks.
They were saying that math scores went up.
And I didn't understand how that could be possible.
I haven't heard anything like that about any school system in Los Angeles, which was particularly draconian in their response.
People were arguing about this on Twitter because some pundit was talking about the response to the pandemic and how it affected school kids and, you know, all the...
Can I say peanut gallery?
They were chiming in, and they were saying that scores were actually, Los Angeles scores were going up.
Yeah, in every one of them, in every county, there's a decline, a very noticeable decline from 2019 to 2022. So what the fuck are these people talking about?
I haven't done any testing on Fetterman or President Biden, but it seems to me that President Biden is not at his best and that Federman is not at his best.
But why did they think that they could put him out there on a huge stage like that?
There's interviews before that showed this, where he used a teleprompter during interviews, where when he was asked questions, he was allowed to look at a screen and read his responses off, and even then he struggled.
He struggled to form coherent sentences while having the responses to each individual question laid out for him in a way that he could read.
And this is not against the guy.
I don't know anything about this guy.
I really don't.
I just know he's the Democrat candidate.
But what you're seeing is a guy who's got a problem with his brain.
That guy should be rehabilitating.
He shouldn't be getting forced into an incredibly high-stress job in a public display where, you know, it's humiliating.
Well, stress is the worst possible thing that you can do when you're trying to recover from some kind of brain event like this.
I don't know what kind of stroke he had.
I don't know what part of the brain it was in.
But I can tell you, you want to give the brain an opportunity to recover and And I don't know what his age is, but there's something called neuroplasticity.
And that doesn't go up with age, it goes down.
And you need to have time to recover and let different parts of the brain take over for parts of the brain that maybe have been impaired.
And I don't know how severe it was.
I don't know what part of the brain it was in.
But it can't be good to be putting him in this kind of situation.
I mean, he's 80. And he does make a lot of gaffes.
I hope I'm that well at 80. But I don't know that I would...
I don't want that much stress of a job at 80. At 80 I hope I'm out fishing or something.
But I think when I hear people spin certain things like that from my standpoint that has in the past assessed cognitive functioning I just shake my head and say What are you talking about?
I don't want to be one of those people that criticizes and doesn't offer a solution.
That's what I do.
I'm not a professional educator, but I do have an opinion and people can shoot it full of holes if they want to.
We've got a gap.
I don't think anybody would disagree that we have a gap.
And the only way to close that gap is to put in the extra work.
And the only way to put in the extra work is to put in the time.
And what's going to have to happen is we're going to have to change the school calendar.
And the kids are going to have to go to school during the summer, and they're going to have to have very concentrated focus protocol on reading and math and science.
And if I was a kid, I would hate to hear what I'm saying because I lived for summer, waited to get out of there so we could go do nothing.
Yeah.
But I also remember after three or four weeks we were kind of bored to death.
But they're going to have to just put in the time.
And there's a big problem right now because there's a huge shortage of teachers.
And they're dropping out.
Teachers aren't continuing to teach as long as they have in the past.
We don't pay them enough.
To teach, and it's hard to recruit teachers.
There are fewer teachers enrolling in education when they go in for their bachelor's degrees.
Some states, like Arizona, are doing these stopgap measures where you don't have to have a teaching credential to go in and teach.
You can just go in and teach.
They're just getting anybody, not just anybody, but they're getting people in there.
Their theory is they're bringing in experts from computer technology and bringing in people from Microsoft and different areas to teach with their special knowledge.
But I have a hard time thinking that somebody making seven figures at Microsoft is going to stop that and come teach for An average of four or five dollars an hour when you compute a teacher's time in the classroom.
That's insane if it was actual breasts that were that large.
Like, how did that happen?
But if that's rubber prosthetic breasts that a biological male is strapping on like a Halloween costume and going in and teaching kids while wearing a mask, that's crazy.
What's fascinating, too, is that it's a small percentage of the population that's engaging in this sort of activity, and they're shifting culture because people have this fear of going against them.
It's not the majority of people think that this makes sense.
The other one was they them and this one girl was she he they This is this is the kind of logic that a person would throw Soup on an incredibly valuable piece of art and then glue themselves to a wall to make a statement You could be everything you want to be, kids.
Well, my question, I guess, for anyone that would be watching this is, is there a point That would be too far.
Is there a point where the transgender community or the school or anybody would agree that something has gone too far, that now the children's interest has been violated, that it doesn't make common sense?
I think the people want to be able to choose how they want to be represented, how they identify, and they should have full freedom to do that in any way, shape, or form.
Non-binary, he, she, they, they, them, all norms should be cast out.
I believe that There have to be people on both sides of that issue who would say, is this in the best interest of this segment of the population?
That can't be good positioning in trying to get people to say, look, we're going to take this seriously.
We're going to respect the transgender community.
We're going to respect that they're wanting to be respected and have their rights protected and to fit into the mainstream and flow with what's going on.
And to do something like this kind of example, I think.
I can't believe that there aren't people on both sides of that issue would say, this isn't helping the discourse.
That this is turning it into a...
It's making it about this one person and detracts from the dialogue about saying is there some common ground here that everybody can live with, be who they want to be, and move on.
That just doesn't make sense.
And that's what I worry sometimes about taking such a militant approach of trying to win an argument instead of solve a problem.
A real leadership in this country where someone stands out and says things like that and then offers up logical, rational solutions that maybe can affect and change the way people view these things.
We don't have anybody like that.
It's certainly not Biden.
And it's certainly not Kamala Harris or anyone else that's running the government currently.
And it's not Trump either.
I don't know who the hell it is.
But we don't have We don't just not have a good leader in terms of economic policy and energy policy.
We don't have a good leader in terms of the tone of the nation.
One of the things that I loved about Obama was when that guy talked, you go, well, that's a statesman.
That's a...
A brilliant, articulate man who represents the best qualities of what we'd expect from the United States.
Like, that guy's measured, and he's very calm, and when he talks, you go, well, that's a great president.
If you listen to the FBI and you listen to their negotiators, if somebody's taken hostages, they will tell you That the number one predictor of whether somebody is going to release their hostages or not is if they believe that you have heard and understood why they took those hostages to begin with.
Particularly if it's for political, ideological reasons or whatever.
You can come in there and what do you want?
But until they believe that you actually understand Why they took them to begin with.
They want to be heard.
They want to be seen.
They want to be understood.
And once they believe you get it, your chances of ever getting them out of there alive go way, way up.
And that's something that very few people, even when they're saying things to people, they don't think about how the other person is receiving that.
One of the things that people love to say to people, they love to say, shut the fuck up.
No one hears shut the fuck up and wants to shut the fuck up.
But if you tell someone, the way you're talking to me right now makes me not want to listen to you because you're being insulting and you're expressing something in a way that makes me think that you don't care about me, so why should I care about you?
That makes people pause.
And if they're rational, maybe they'll say, okay, you tell me what you think and I'll tell you what I think.
And let's try to find some sort of comfortable middle ground.
Let's try to find things that we do agree on.
And we have to teach people to think and talk like that.
If you've got six or seven talking points and you're going to spit them out no matter what the hell they say, yeah, you can come back right quick.
But if you're going to really listen to what they have to say and weigh it, take it apart, unpack that, and then respond, you've got to hear what they had to say.
And you've got to do it with minimal ego, which is very difficult for people.
Because as we were saying before, people attach themselves to winning an argument.
And whatever their position is, they identify with that.
That's a part of them.
And if you pick apart their argument, you're actually picking apart a part of their being.
And that's how they defend it.
They defend it as if almost like their life depends on it.
You can't be married to an idea.
It can't be a thing that you can't let go of.
It has to be just an idea.
You might agree with that idea and believe in that idea, or you might be educated by someone's perspective that's counter to that idea that makes you reassess.
You've got to be open to that, just as a human being.
You said something really smart in there, because I was listening.
You said something really smart in there, and it goes even beyond what you said.
You said you can't be married to an idea.
You sure as hell can't be married to an idea or a group who has ideas, some of which you may like and some of which you don't like, because you've got to be willing to say, you know what?
You have some really good points here, and I can agree with those, and we can move a little closer together here.
And I hate it when people say, but, because but means, forget everything I just said, I'm going to now tell you what I really think.
Like, hey, that was a great point, but...
But means that wasn't really a great point.
Now I'm going to tell you what I really think about what you said.
If people will really decide, look, I have some things that if we can agree with what each other is saying,
independent of everything that's behind it, And just talk about right now, what's between us right now, then we could maybe come up with a whole new point of view that doesn't have anything to do with your party, your party, anybody's party.
People are going to listen to what you and I have been talking about today.
And some people are going to listen to it and say, hey, you know, these are two friends talking and they've kind of gone through some stuff and And then there are going to be people that are going to sit down, and they're going to transcribe this, and they're going to try to find ways to pick at it, attack it, and then there will be headlines tomorrow.
It does good for them because it gets them to, you know, there's a lot of people listening, right?
And a lot of people that are listening, they disagree and they don't have a voice.
That's why I understand those articles.
What I don't understand is when people take things out of context or they abbreviate, they chop it up and take a slice of it and misrepresent the entirety.
of the conversation, where you're trying to find solutions and you're trying to work through things and look at it from all sorts of different sides and say, what do we do?
How do we do this?
What's the problem?
These are problems.
What causes these problems?
And some people have differing opinions on that and they don't have a voice right now.
And the problem with Writing something is that it's a very singular voice, and you get to write only the things that you think are going to be suitable to this argument that you're trying to make.
There might be somebody that might be an advocate.
And sometimes it isn't what they say.
It may be what they don't say.
Like, you might have said something about the big boob thing.
And somebody will say, well, when he said that, Dr. Phil didn't say A, B, or C. And so he's blah, blah.
So they may dog on you or dog on me when, in fact, they're alienating or running off somebody that's not their enemy at all.
I see them do that all the time.
I've seen them do it in the homeless situation with people I've had on the show that I happen to know Are very compassionate about those experiencing homelessness, very compassionate about trying to find answers here in Austin.
And they pick one sentence they said and just tear their ass up.
And they just really alienate a big ally that could help them a lot.
Like if you tell me that LA's school district just knocked it out of the park, you better have some numbers to support that if you expect me to stand up and salute it.
While looking at those charts, that steep downward decline from 2019 to 2021, it seems like the pandemic in terms of the educational system in particular was mishandled by everybody.
And if you're saying that L.A. did a good job in bumping it up past what other people have done since then, that's okay, but that doesn't mean that they haven't mishandled the pandemic as well.
And if they're telling themselves that all of those kids in the L.A. school district are right there where they need to be, that's just not telling themselves the truth.
And it's also not serving the best interest of the students, which is to try to, like, a good narrative would be, we've made some progress, but clearly there's been a sharp decline in averages of scores, and we need to do something to bring it back to baseline and elevate it past where it was in particular, because it wasn't substantial already.
You were talking about the decline in scores over the past decade or so already.
They're not trained in how to engage those kids remotely.
The kids don't know how to learn remotely.
And think about where you've got three or four kids in a one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia or Chicago or Dallas or somewhere, and they've got a crummy Wi-Fi connection and one device.
It's so hard to get them engaged already when you're making them sit in the classroom.
When they're sitting alone in their room and they're bored and lonely and they just want to go play with their friends and they're not even allowed to do that.
What country, what cities rather, or what states did the best in education during the pandemic?
Is there any data on that?
Did anybody handle it the best?
Was there any examples of students that didn't decline or didn't decline as much as others?
Is there anybody that they're pointing to?
I haven't heard anyone's argument on the right or the left that we did it right.
Whether it's Florida or Texas or New York or anywhere.
I haven't heard anyone say this was the correct response to doing that.
I've heard economically.
Right.
Economically, Florida and some of the states that let things open, they had substantially lower rates of attrition in terms of people moving out of the states, in terms of businesses closing.
There's definitely states that handled that better, and those are the states that people are moving to.
But in terms of education, I haven't heard any examples of someone who did it in a way that people are applauding or pointing to an example of how this is how we should handle this in the future because this state did it the right way.
They earned higher scores this year in NAEP tests than those in Los Angeles, but saw more declines.
Across Florida, 8th grade scores fell, but students scored an average of 241 out of a possible 500 in 4th grade math above the national public school average of 235, and an average of 225 in 4th grade reading above the national average of 216. Mr. Diaz said, maintaining the optimum of in-person learning contributed to the proficiency levels in Florida, especially for lower performing students, and enabled the state to close achievement gaps between subgroups and students.
You'd have seen tremendous differences in those categories for our students had there been another governor and other lockdown policies put in place.
So they're using that data to point that in-school learning in Florida showed less of a decline.
It says Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. said the decision in his state to open districts for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020 was enthusiastically received by families at the time.
Yeah.
It said students in Miami-Dade and Hillsborough County schools earned higher scores on this year's NAEP test than those in Los Angeles.
But also saw declines.
I mean, I think just everybody's struggling during the pandemic.
Parents, they ask me a lot, how do I know if my kid's getting bullied?
Well, you need to ask yourself two questions.
How do you know if your kid's getting bullied?
And how do you know if your kid's a bully?
Because kids are bullying kids, so some parent needs to know that their kid's doing the bullying.
You've got to ask those two things.
And the answer to that question, how do you know if your kid's getting bullied?
Every parent has a baseline for their child, right?
You know how your child behaves.
Their certain level of interaction, participation, certain moods, certain verbalizations, certain interest in activities.
You got to watch that baseline and if they depart from that baseline, That's when you need to pay attention.
Now, kids are up and down, so I'm not talking about if they're a little moody on Tuesday versus Monday.
But if they start not wanting to go to school, they start withdrawing from everything, they start regressing in their behavior, things they used to be competent at, all of a sudden they're not competent anymore, they get clingy, whiny.
Lots of stomach aches.
Don't want to go to school.
They just start really falling off that baseline across time.
That's when you want to really pay attention because they very well may be getting bullied.
And if your child, you start hearing them make jokes at other people's expense, somebody that was around is all of a sudden excluded, they start showing up with things you didn't buy them, you know, book bags or any paraphernalia from school or whatever, your child might be bullying somebody.
And you need to find out on either end because I did a show just last week.
A girl was a terrific young woman involved in elite hockey, girls hockey.
I mean national ranked team elite hockey.
And the bullying started on day one.
She killed herself on day five.
It went that fast.
And this was not an unstable girl.
She was a rock star athlete, and they all turned on her.
They dug into it and as soon as it happened, some of the other members on the team, because all the messages had been erased, but as it was happening, some of the other members on the team We screenshotted those and kept them and sent them to the parents and said, here's what happened.
And they have them.
And so a lot of those girls have now been suspended from the leagues and all this league play and everything because they were a nationally ranked team.
And they would have never known if those girls hadn't screenshotted those messages that they were sending around to everybody and send them to the parents.
They'd have never known.
But those girls came forward and said, here's what happened.
There was an instance in one of my daughters when she was 10 where one of the friends of her friend was getting bullied by this one girl, and they got copies of the text messages and gave it to the mom, and the mom didn't want to believe it.
And they had to say to the mom, like, look, here's real clear evidence of horrible things your kid is saying to this other kid.
And this mother was sort of delusional and just didn't want to think that her kid was capable of this.
But they had it right there.
They're like, look, this is how this girl behaves.
Then the kids sort of ostracized her.
I mean, she was 10 at the time, and I think she's kind of come around.
But there's...
People like getting an effect from other people.
And when people are angry at people, especially young kids, they'll formulate sentences in a way that can have the most impact and be the most mean possible.
Especially if they see that kind of talk in their house.
Like maybe if the parents are insulting and scream at each other and say horrible things to each other.
And parents, I don't care how much you think your child's a little princess, deal with the facts.
As parents, we need to deal with the facts.
As voters, we need to deal with facts.
I'm watching all this right now.
Both parties are saying, hey, get out and vote.
All we care is that you get out and vote.
No, that's not right.
That's not what they really mean.
What they really mean is, we want you to get out and vote without thinking about what's been going on.
What I say to people is, I don't want you to just get out and vote.
I want you to do some homework and get out and vote.
Ask yourself, and people should vote.
I hate that people go in and vote, like, for the top of the ticket.
Like, we're in midterms, so there's like senators and governors.
That's where all the money's been spent.
So they get in and check senator or governor, and they check one of those boxes, and then they just kind of go down the ticket.
That's not what you should do.
Your quality of your life is impacted a lot by your local races.
Like dog catcher.
I don't even know where you have dog catcher anymore.
What are they called?
Animal control?
If you've got people in your neighborhood getting mauled by pit bulls or something, where's the dog catcher?
Why are these pit bulls?
If you've got somebody local that's not doing their job, you should find that out and vote their dead ass out of office.
If you've got a judge who's not putting violent criminals behind bars, vote their ass off the bench.
If you've got a water commissioner that's not cleaning the water, if you've got county commissioners that aren't doing their job, find out and vote them in or out.
They work for you.
If you had an employee you would do a performance review before you decided to give them a raise or not, that's what people should do.
These parties are saying, all we care is that you vote.
Yeah, that's right.
They just don't want you to check before you vote.
You need to check and see if they've done what they said they would do and if they're doing what you value.
And it matters these local positions that you don't take seriously.
That's what affects your quality of life.
That's where it starts.
Then vote for the governor doesn't affect your life much.
You need to find out locally who's doing their job.
I think so many people are so committed to their party, so committed to their ideology that all they want, they think, well, maybe this part, they're not good at this, but at least they're on my side.
How frustrating is it for you, because you have this show that's based around having discussions, common sense, and sort of getting to the bottom of things, and you're very good at it, but it seems like the wheels are off the wagon, and it's just, it doesn't, do you feel like, do you feel frustrated at times?
But that just makes me feel like I need to do a better job.
And I read these letters and it said, you're my last hope.
I'm like, well, shit, why didn't you call me first?
Why didn't you call me the first time you saw something wrong?
Why not then?
But, you know, I have a friend that Has a problem with a daughter that was in college up north, and they tried to get some help, and they went and sat for five hours at the hospital, waited, and nobody came.
Went the next day, waited six hours, social worker came in, filled out a few little forms, and then said to be back, came back.
Nothing.
And didn't want to bother me, but then Colin said, hey, I hate to bother you, but I'm really worried.
And so I said, well, you know, come out here and let's get this done.
And, you know, I got DNA tests and brain scans and all kinds of stuff and found out what was going on.
You know, we got a plan and a program and everything's underway at this point.
Most people, this is a very affluent guy and a very intelligent daughter.
It's hard for people out there to know, what are you going to, just go on the internet and look up mental health and find a psychologist or whatever?
They don't know.
What to do and it's hard sometimes to find your way through the maze and so I do think over the last 20 years I've been delivering common sense usable information to people's house houses every day for free that gives them kind of a road map through this stuff and I think it has had an impact on a lot of people and I think it's lessened some of the stigma About mental health.
I don't think I've revolutionized the country on mental health, but I think it's made a dent, maybe, in that it's okay to talk about some of this stuff.
I taught them some of the questions to ask when I get in front of somebody.
But yeah, sometimes I really get frustrated because it kind of goes in one ear and out the other.
But I just resolve to keep charging at Machine Gun Nest.
We're still dealing with the same family and dynamics and all.
And this year, because some of the questions have changed, they're dealing with some of these issues like school shooters, school curriculums, internet bullying, things like that.
There are different challenges and that's revitalized me.
And I was very excited to start this season because I think we've lost our way as a society.
I think we've lost our way.
But I don't think people say, oh, it's the worst it's ever been.
Well, did you forget about the Civil War?
I mean, shit, it's been worse than this.
We killed a couple hundred thousand of each other in the Civil War.
This has been a lot worse than this.
We can fix this.
We can fix this, and I don't care what people say.
I'm bringing both sides of these issues, and I'm telling the stories through families and its impact, and I think it's working.
I feel good about it, and our audience feels good about it, so I like what I'm doing.
I like what we're doing this season, and we're still dealing with the same family values that we've always dealt with.
I like the fact that you are adjusting things, too.
Like you said, well, let's change this into sort of a town hall type deal, a focus group, and let's reach out and talk to people and try to get more opinions.
I was at dinner with these friends in Dallas last night, Jamie Ribbon and his wife Darcy, and he was telling me that, was it Moore's Law, that everything compresses and doubles up and everything.
And he was talking recently about how long it would take to fill up Lake Michigan if it was empty.
If you started with like a half an ounce of water or something like that, then how long do you think it would be?
It was like at 10 years it would like be damp a little maybe.
And at like 40 years there'd be some puddles.
And at 60 years, there would be like four feet of water.
And at 70 years, all of the gain is in the last five years.
And then it would be full.
And that's what's happening right now.
We have so much information that it's doubling up so fast.
God only knows when your daughter and Jay's daughter are...
21, what in the world is going to be going on?
Because if you take everything we know now and double it up four times between now and then, we won't even recognize the world.
And so that's the positive, the ability to—and it's going to be in medicine and diagnostics and all that sort of stuff.
Now, how we're going to pay for all these people that live to 150, I don't know.
But that's the positive, and the negative is what we've talked about.
Bullied to death, and the predators on the internet, and the scams, and all that kind of stuff.
Predators used to be the guy in the raincoat standing by the schoolyard.
Hey, little kid, you want some candy?
Now, they're in the chat rooms.
We don't even know what they call those anymore.
They're wherever the kids go, and they've learned their patterns, and they know what their favorite What songs are, what their favorite interests are, what their jargon is.
They can mimic a 14-year-old just as well as anything and they prey upon them.
That's the downside.
And the fact that they post pictures and stuff that are there forever.
And you tell them and tell them and tell them and they still You know, that predator will steal a picture off the dark net of some 14-year-old guy and send it to the girl, and the girl reciprocates.
Now he's got that, and now they do sextortion and say, you do more, or I'll show this to all your family.
The downside is horrific.
So that's the biggest—technology and the Internet's the biggest change.
Well, hopefully to encourage people to do what we're talking about here and actually communicate and exchange ideas and not just insult each other and keyboard bully.
You know, I just hope people take away from what we're talking about what you said in the beginning without having to have some catastrophic nuclear strike or something.
We are all in this together.
And we need to remember that.
And I remember I was born and raised a Baptist and then I switched later in life to a different religion.
But this pastor used to talk about How, you know, God talks to him and all that stuff.
And I remember I was like 12 years old and I said, oh, he never talked to me.
And he said, well, you better listen really hard or he might do something to get your attention.
And I thought, oh, shit.
I want to really start listening so he doesn't have to do something dramatic to get my attention.
I really hope we wake up before something happens to really get our attention to remind us that we are all Americans.
Do we need to get shock therapy or can we all just say, you know what, enough's enough and too much is too much.