March 3, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We've got to wake up the masses to what the issues are because, you know, you kind of get back to your life and you think, hey, you know, things are like they always were. | ||
| You know, we're still watching our favorite TV shows. | ||
| We're still watching the Cowboys and the Chiefs and the Super Bowls coming. | ||
| And we're still going to go to the lake this summer and kind of, you know, everything's like it was. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| We've got a generation in trouble here, and we can't put our head in the sand. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the host of Dr. Phil, and author of the new book, We've Got Issues, How You Can Stand Strong for America's Soul and Sanity. | ||
| Dr. Phil McGraw, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| So glad to be here. | ||
| People who haven't been listening last few minutes know how glad I am to be here. | ||
| We had some technical difficulties. | ||
| Let's see if we can work it through. | ||
| I actually want to start the show on a bit of a personal note because when I was a struggling stand-up comic in New York City, early 2000s, I didn't have 20 cents in my pocket and just life was just out of whack and not quite going right. | ||
| Somehow I started watching your weekly appearances on Oprah. | ||
| I think they were on Fridays, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| And you were basically just like, get over your shit, get your stuff together. | ||
| And it kind of got through to me. | ||
| And I don't even really remember what a lot of my stuff was, but you kind of helped me get on the right path. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I'm happy to tell you, thank you. | |
| And here we are. | ||
| So it worked, I suppose it worked. | ||
| It's funny how life works, isn't it? | ||
| Comes full circle. | ||
| It really is, it really is. | ||
| Why don't we start just, I mean, everybody knows who you are, but you want to give like a one minute Dr. Phil life recap for the people who don't, and then we'll get into some of the more pressing issues of the day. | ||
| Well, you know, I started doing Oprah, that's when I met you because I was, I had a company called Courtroom Sciences, which we did trial work, all kinds of litigation support work. | ||
| And that's how I met her. | ||
| She had been sued in the Mad Cow case in Amarillo for over $3 billion. | ||
| And so they brought me and my company in to help with that case. | ||
| We did jury selection, trial strategy, all kinds of graphics, witness prep, and all different kinds of things. | ||
| And that's how I met her. | ||
| In fact, we lived together in a bed and breakfast up in Amarillo for several months. | ||
| A new sister I never wanted, but I got to know Oprah really, really well. | ||
| And she ultimately got me to come on to her show. | ||
| And then it turned into every Tuesday, actually, is what it was. | ||
| And I did that for about five years. | ||
| And right after I started doing it, she said, listen, if you ever want to do your own show, just tell me and we'll work it out. | ||
| And I never did go to her and say, I want to do my own show. | ||
| And then one day, I was walking through the building at Harpo, and she said, hey, dummy, come in here. | ||
| I said, okay. | ||
| I came in, and she said, hey, it's time. | ||
| You know, 80% of our mail is for you, and one day a week's not enough anymore. | ||
| You need to do your own show. | ||
| And so we actually launched the show the next year, and I did a 21-year run at CBS, Paramount, out in LA. | ||
| Then decided I wanted to do my own network, so that's where I am now, in Dallas. | ||
| We've just launched, well, actually we'll launch on February 26th, Merit Street Media, 24-hour, 7-day-a-week network, and the anchor of it will be Dr. Phil Primetime, and we're going to have news, 24-hour, 7-day-a-week network. | ||
| We'll have four hours a day of news, then my show and a lot of other original programming. | ||
| Couldn't be more excited! | ||
| What would you say the thrust of the network is? | ||
| I mean, obviously, there's a lot of networks out there, a lot of news out there. | ||
| So what's going to make this unique? | ||
| Well, you know, I think what I think is going to make it unique is it's all going to kind of follow the value system that I've tried to develop over the last 25 years on the air, which I think has resonated. | ||
| I think it's what made my show number one in the genre for so long, and that is Creating a value system that is really family-oriented and very straight, like you say. | ||
| I just kind of tell people the truth as I see it. | ||
| And I'm not the repository of all knowledge, and if what I say won't stand up to challenge, then hit the eject button and move on. | ||
| But I think people in this country are sick to death of spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. | ||
| Everywhere you tune in, There's some facts in there, but it's mostly an agenda that's being pushed on people. | ||
| And I think they're underestimating the viewer. | ||
| I think people want to just tell me what happened, let me make up my mind about whether it's good news or bad news, how it relates to me, what it means for my family. | ||
| And I think family in America is really under attack. | ||
| I think this country is under attack and somebody needs to stand up and push back against some of this craziness. | ||
| And that's what this network is going to be all about. | ||
| We're going to be very fact-based, very empirically based, and embracing the science. | ||
| And that's what I do, and that's what this network is going to do. | ||
| Do you remember a moment when it all started to go awry? | ||
| Not only just with things not being fact-based, but the sort of emotions over everything else, and I guess since I've seen you deal with so many young people who are out of whack, when they sort of just lost their ability to see things clearly. | ||
| You know, Dave, that is such a smart question because If you look back across time and look at the human experience, when we had the Industrial Revolution, everything changed. | ||
| Back in the 1800s, we were 95% an agrarian economy. | ||
| Everybody worked on the farm, right? | ||
| It was agriculture. | ||
| That's what we did. | ||
| And then it started to change a bit. | ||
| And then, now, it's like 1%. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because everything got mechanized. | ||
| The Industrial Revolution changed everything. | ||
| It went from 95% to 1%. | ||
| 1% of people work on farms right now, and those are mechanized. | ||
| And the biggest change that's happened to the human race since the Industrial Revolution happened in 08-09. | ||
| And that's when it was like big, it seems like big airplanes flew over the country and dropped smartphones. | ||
| And think about it. | ||
| Everybody started walking around with a computer in their hand. | ||
| And enough computing power, particularly you look at these iPads and all, there's more computing power in this iPad I'm holding right now than we had when we did the moon shot, when we put a man on the moon. | ||
| And what happened is everybody went from going through life like this to going through life like this. | ||
| And young people stopped living their lives and started watching people live their lives. | ||
| And here's the problem. | ||
| The lives they were watching being lived were fictions, fantasies, produced and created, and they were comparing their life to those fantasy lives And as a result, they started feeling inferior. | ||
| And their self-esteem went down. | ||
| And it started interfering with family dynamics. | ||
| People stopped having dinner together. | ||
| They stopped talking to each other. | ||
| They were all on those phones watching what was going on. | ||
| It changed the world. | ||
| And look, technology's great. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| But there were unintended consequences that changed how people lived their lives. | ||
| At 16, I remember when I was 15 years, 364 days old, I was standing outside the DMV waiting to get my driver's license. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| They don't even get their driver's licenses at 16 anymore. | ||
| They date later. | ||
| They have sex later. | ||
| They get all of these things that we used to see as big developmental watersheds. | ||
| They're slow to do those things. | ||
| And sure enough, it was about that time that we saw spikes in depression, anxiety, and loneliness higher than at any time since they've been keeping records, because they stopped living and started watching people live. | ||
| It changed everything. | ||
| That's when I think this world started going crazy. | ||
| And, if I can ramble some more... | ||
| Seriously, what happened is some of these crazy ideas, conspiracy theories and weird ideas, it used to be you could be maybe on a farm in Nebraska or something and have some weird idea. | ||
| It would spread as far as people you ran into. | ||
| But now with the internet, it gets oxygen so it can spread all over the country. | ||
| This stuff didn't used to have such legs because it didn't have enough oxygen to breathe and spread. | ||
| Now you can get on the internet and sell all kinds of crap. | ||
| We've got 10,000 cults operating in the United States because of the internet. | ||
| So you're talking about a whole bunch of things that I focus on this show. | ||
| I mean, social media was supposed to make us more social, and it actually made us more anti-social. | ||
| But the truth is, everyone watching this right now either has this thing in their pocket or they're watching on this thing. | ||
| So what do you do to fight that? | ||
| Because I'm not anti-technology either. | ||
| But this thing has become so ubiquitous in society and broken so many brains that it seems like we are unable to deal with it, I suppose, in a mature way, even as you and I as adults, much less the 15-year-old that's handed the world and said, okay, have at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, I'm glad there's technology. | ||
| I mean, but we gotta start using it rather than abusing it. | ||
| Kids don't even know what a library anymore, what it is anymore. | ||
| It's a big building with books in it, for those who don't know. | ||
| Because you can go on Google or these search engines and instantly you can pull something up. | ||
| But what they don't know is that everything they read on Google is not necessarily correct. | ||
| Because nobody's vetting that stuff. | ||
| And let me tell you, it's getting ready to get a hell of a lot worse. | ||
| Because this AI and deep fakes. | ||
| I saw an ad the other day of me selling some product, and it was me talking in my voice with my countenance, and I've never heard of this product. | ||
| I don't know what it is, never heard of it, but yet it was me in my voice talking. | ||
| What's gonna happen with the election coming up? | ||
| When it gets too late to be rebutted, I think we're going to see candidates saying crazy things, making admissions that they're not really making, changing positions they're not really changing in enough time to get to the voters, but not in enough time for them to say, hey, that's not me. | ||
| I think we're moving into a dangerous, dangerous time because AI and deep fakes are going to have a lot of misuse. | ||
| So I think we've just got to inspire people. | ||
| To start becoming more critical thinkers, verifying things through known outlets, and that's going to take a whole effort to get people to start thinking differently and acting differently. | ||
| And that's one of the things that I'm talking about. | ||
| And think about how much things have changed since I started. | ||
| When I started doing the Dr. Phil Show, not even just when I started Oprah, when I started doing the Dr. Phil Show, the first text message had never been sent. | ||
| There were no social media platforms. | ||
| The internet was not ubiquitous, and then I had to start adapting to that because cyberbullying didn't exist, and all of a sudden I had to start figuring out how do we inoculate kids to cyberbullying. | ||
| I've had to go before Congress and testify about adding funds to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to deal with cyberbullying because kids were hanging themselves in their closets back in their bedroom because they couldn't escape the bullies the way you used to when you could at least go home and be safe. | ||
| So everything is changing across time and somebody's got to talk about this. | ||
| I did a show last week about sextortion because young men are getting suckered into sending nude photos to what they think is some young girl that they have never had an interaction with sends them what they think is a nude photo. | ||
| So they say, well, I'm not going to blow this. | ||
| They send one back and boom, somebody says, hey, I'm not a 14 year old naked girl. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But now I've got your picture and you pay me ten thousand, twenty five thousand dollars or I'm sending your picture to your parents, your pastor, everybody in your contact list. | ||
| I've got your school yearbook. | ||
| I'm gonna humiliate you if you don't pay. | ||
| And some of these kids immediately commit suicide because they're so humiliated. | ||
| To some extent, do you miss the old days of doing the show and dealing with problems that were a little more granule or at least a little more connected with people in their own body, their own problems, their own families, kind of the simple stuff before, say, that 2008, 2009 threshold? | ||
| You know, it was a simpler time, but I'll tell you what, I certainly don't get bored because about the time I think, man, I've seen it all, I open up a show book and go, no, I haven't. | ||
| Because they're very creative. | ||
| And now, as I say, I'm going to have to figure out how to deal. | ||
| I talked to a woman yesterday on the show that was in a love scam. | ||
| And spent several hundred thousand dollars. | ||
| And I said, you know, tell me how they conned you on this. | ||
| And she said, I actually spoke to him. | ||
| And I said, well, I understand. | ||
| She said, no, no, you don't understand. | ||
| I'm talking live on Skype. | ||
| I actually talked. | ||
| And it was a deep fake. | ||
| They had stolen some good looking guy's information off of Facebook. | ||
| Created a deep fake, and she was actually speaking to the guy. | ||
| I mean, who wouldn't fall for it? | ||
| And it was an elderly woman, lonely, husband had died, and here's somebody that says, hey, I love you, baby. | ||
| Help me get home, and we'll be rich together. | ||
| And sure enough, took her for every penny she had. | ||
| So you have two words in the title of the book, or in the subtitle actually, that I use on this show all the time. | ||
| Soul and sanity. | ||
| And I always tell people it seems like we're more in a spiritual battle at the moment than a political battle. | ||
| Everyone thinks it's a political battle between these two old timers. | ||
| I don't really think that is what it's about. | ||
| It's about that sort of loss of truth and what the algorithms have done to us and the confusion over social media. | ||
| But can you talk about those two words a little bit? | ||
| Soul and sanity. | ||
| What does soul mean to you first? | ||
| Well, I'll have to say what it doesn't mean. | ||
| And I don't talk politics. | ||
| And I'll tell you why. | ||
| I don't know a damn thing about it. | ||
| Well, that doesn't stop anybody on CNN. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I just started to say, I think most of the people that talk about it don't know a damn thing about either. | ||
| At least I'm honest about it. | ||
| I don't know anything about politics. | ||
| And I'm not being, you know, that's not false humility. | ||
| I really don't know anything about politics. | ||
| I can read a bill like anybody else, and most people don't read the bills they talk about either. | ||
| But I really don't want to bog myself down in the geopolitical aspects of what's going on. | ||
| I don't want to get into the gridlock of Washington. | ||
| I think what I'm focused on are the cultural issues. | ||
| And it's the culture that determines the outcome of the society, and somebody much smarter than I said that probably over a hundred years ago. | ||
| And that's what I'm interested in. | ||
| And when I say the soul of America, I'm talking about the real core Of what defines this country, the core values that we don't think about every day, but are at the center of what defines America, the morality, the North Star that drives us in the direction that we've been driven for 250 years. | ||
| And I think the backbone of America is the family unit, and it's under attack. | ||
| Some of its unintended consequences by this technology we've been talking about, where nobody has dinner together anymore, and if they're in a car riding together, they're all on their phones or video games or whatever, instead of talking to each other and learning each other. | ||
| I saw a study the other day that said most young people, teenagers, 16, 17, 18, have less, on average, have less than one good friend. | ||
| They've got tens of thousands of likes and clicks and followers, but they have less than one good friend on average. | ||
| And that's what I mean by the soul of America. | ||
| What's made us a great shining example on the hill that everybody wants to come be part of is eroding, because we're not interacting anymore. | ||
| We're not embracing those values anymore. | ||
| And I want people to get back to that. | ||
| And the sanity is, look, in this book, and I'll send you a copy of it, maybe on a long flight you can look at it somewhere, but I think we're under attack from what I call the tyranny of the fringe. | ||
| It's not even the minorities, it's the fringe, way out on the edges. | ||
| We've got these People that I don't even think speak for who they say they're speaking for. | ||
| They're the ones that are way out on the edge, taking radical positions that don't represent the main thought of the group they say they represent, that are driving these bizarre agendas. | ||
| And we've got to come together and push back against that. | ||
| They take these radical positions and they flat out lie. | ||
| They've written articles about me where they say, oh, Dr. Phil has now become a safe place for right-wing haters. | ||
| Oh, I've been there. | ||
| I've been there. | ||
| Oh man, they go down through this article and say, he had on this right-wing hater, this right-wing hater, this right-wing hater. | ||
| And what they don't mention is sitting right across from them was their left-wing counterpart. | ||
| They actually lie by telling half of the story, because they don't want free speech, they want their speech. | ||
| And so they're going to try to label me a hater and cancel me. | ||
| You're going to find that a lot harder to do than you think, because I don't have the need to be loved by strangers, and I'm just going to keep coming. | ||
| I don't give a shit what you say. | ||
| Well, I have a couple of things to say to that. | ||
| First off, I think you'll appreciate the fact that my best friend on this planet, we met the first day we were four years old, first day of kindergarten, and now we're both 47 years old. | ||
| So that goes to the friend part. | ||
| And by the way, that then connects you to a whole bunch of stuff because you're connected to something that you remember from a long time ago. | ||
| But as far as who you interview thing, Me and Jordan Peterson, who I know you're familiar with, and Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell were once on the cover of the Sunday New York Times saying that we were the leaders of the alt-right because we've talked to some of these people. | ||
| So I'm with you, man. | ||
| I am past giving a shit. | ||
| On all that stuff, but what do you make of the people that folded in the face of this? | ||
| So, you know, I know we can always make fun of Gen Z and all the young people that are confused about all this stuff, but what about the adults that were supposed to stand up and say the types of things that you've been saying for many decades and not hand the world to these people, to the fringe people? | ||
| Well, you know, I think there's a lot of pressure and I did something this summer that really opened my eyes. | ||
| I like to think I'm pretty much in tune with what people are thinking and how they're thinking. | ||
| About the time I think I'm pretty smart, I find out how much I don't know. | ||
| I was going to give a talk at one of these billionaire retreats at a ski resort in the summer, where they get all these rich folk together and have these retreats. | ||
| I was invited to come be a keynote speaker at one of these things. | ||
| And I knew that they were all pretty conservative and thought a lot like I did. | ||
| And I thought, well, you know, this is going to be like preaching to the choir. | ||
| You know, I'm going to go up there and talk for 45 minutes. | ||
| They're going to give me a golf clap and say thanks and I'll leave. | ||
| And I thought, you know, what the hell? | ||
| I'll go do it. | ||
| So I go up to do this. | ||
| And two and a half hours later, I finally said, hey, I gotta stop. | ||
| I'm about to wet my pants. | ||
| And what I found is that I was right. | ||
| They did agree with a lot of what I was saying, but they didn't know why. | ||
| Like, I was talking about, you know, our kids are spending too much time on social media. | ||
| And it's causing them to get depressed and have low self-esteem, etc. | ||
| And they agreed with that, but they didn't know why. | ||
| And when I started explaining to them that these algorithms are targeting them with content that upsets them, not content that interests them, but content That gets them agitated and upset because that makes them start clicking and clicking harder and clicking harder and clicking harder. | ||
| And if it's somebody that says, I need to lose weight, then before you know it, they're feeding them pro-anorexia sites, 400 calorie diets, all these things that are really bad for their health. | ||
| And they're targeting them for that sort of thing. | ||
| Then they started going, wait a minute, you're telling me that they're exploiting my daughter's 14 year old daughter's mental health, knowing that it upsets her, knowing that it creates anxiety, knowing that it damages her mental health. | ||
| And they're doing that purposely. | ||
| So she will click more and they get more ad money. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah. | ||
| And I'm looking out there, and they're writing on napkins, they're writing on each other, they're taking notes. | ||
| They wanted to know how to fight back against their friends that are pushing on them. | ||
| I think a lot of people folded because they didn't have the facts to fight back. | ||
| And I want to give them the facts to fight back with. | ||
| What do you make when you talk about the tyranny of the fringe? | ||
| I think the big one for most people these days is the gender confusion and that so many kids are going through this. | ||
| It seems like it disproportionately affects young girls that, you know, quote-unquote transition to boys. | ||
| What do you make about the social contagion part of that? | ||
| Because obviously you're talking about social media, but that there's a pressure, there's a pressure part of it that never existed in the old days. | ||
| You might have just been a tom girl and grown up and maybe, I suppose you probably would end up be a lesbian, maybe, but maybe you weren't. | ||
| There are girls that act kind of boyish and then they marry guys, but that this thing has just been fed and fed and fed. | ||
| Well, one of the things that bothers me is when you look at this, Gender-affirming care, that's like the names they give these bills in Washington, D.C., which just kill me, the Fiscal Responsibility Act. | ||
| They call it the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and then they go in with $34 trillion debt and decide to add another $7 trillion on top of it or something. | ||
| Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| Yeah, Inflation Reduction Act, yeah. | ||
| Three hundred economists signed a letter that said this isn't going to have anything to do with inflation, but they still call it that and put it out there. | ||
| Gender-affirming care is really interesting. | ||
| What they're actually talking about is sex change operations and hormonal treatment that Some of these chemicals are what they use to chemically castrate chronic pedophiles in prison, and they're giving them to early teens to arrest their development. | ||
| I think that what's happening is they're denying a contagion effect, but the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Endocrine Society, The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association have all signed off in support of gender-affirming care. | ||
| Now, I don't know of any other condition or treatment that they have ever signed off on, maybe the vaccines, that they've ever signed off on with less information about long-term impact in the history of medicine. | ||
| But they've all signed off on this. | ||
| And in Europe, Finland, Sweden, the UK, they've stopped doing it. | ||
| I cited study after study after study where they've tracked hundreds of subjects that they've done this suppression treatment with and said, Didn't work, didn't solve the comorbid conditions that go along with it, so they've just stopped doing it, but yet all of our medical associations are signing off on it, and they're denying that there's a contagion effect. | ||
| With girls, this has gone up hundreds of percent in the last few years, but yet they deny contagion effect. | ||
| That's just absolutely not true, and look, People can do what they want to do. | ||
| But when you're talking about children, the first thing is do no harm. | ||
| And they have no evidence that they are doing no harm. | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| They don't have evidence that they're doing no harm. | ||
| And that's the standard to which they should hold themselves. | ||
| And I don't think history's going to be kind. | ||
| Well, not if the right side wins, I suppose, right? | ||
| I mean, not if we get things back in order. | ||
| I think a lot of these people are going to be looked at as butchers. | ||
| Well, I think if you track these people long term, if you look at what's happened in Europe, the suicidal rate, the detransition rates are going to suggest that history's not going to be kind But of course, the AMA says, hey, it's good. | ||
| Of course, they are the group that suggested smoking to control your anxiety at one time, so this is an advocacy group. | ||
| I don't think they're necessarily following the science, and I think they should. | ||
| Let's shift for a second because you mentioned you're not particularly political, but I've seen you host a bunch of different debates with all sorts of people, some people that I'm friends with and that I know, talking about race and some of the political issues of the day and gender and a whole bunch more. | ||
| And I wonder, do you think that fundamentally, That this is just about ideas that people either got right or wrong, or do you think fundamentally people are wired differently? | ||
| When you see people that kind of accept facts for facts and reality as it is, versus someone else that sees something just purely from their own perspective. | ||
| Do you think that's just like an idea confusion, or do you think it's people, we're all wired differently? | ||
| Some of us run hot, some run cold. | ||
| Some, you know, a whole series of things. | ||
| You know, I think some people have been trained in critical thinking. | ||
| And I think others want to be accepted. | ||
| And I think that if you get into identity politics, I think a lot of people start with one idea and they say, you know, I can support this idea. | ||
| But then they don't realize that there's a whole agenda that this group supports. | ||
| And it's like, OK, I agreed with this one thing. | ||
| But now I find out that they're doing all of this other stuff. | ||
| They have all these other points on their agenda. | ||
| And now I've kind of signed on. | ||
| And if I resist that, or I ask about it, I'm going to get targeted. | ||
| And they're going to be calling my job, my church. | ||
| They're going to assassinate my character on the internet. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are saying, look, this is just trouble I don't want. | ||
| And I think that makes it just easier not to push back. | ||
| And, you know, someone, not me, I've repeated this, but I'm not the first one that said it. | ||
| I would rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question. | ||
| And right now, that's where we are. | ||
| We have answers that we can't question, or we're labeled racist or phobic or haters, and people are saying, look, I just want to live my life. | ||
| But that's gotten to prove, it's gotten to prove very expensive in terms of our culture, our society, our schools. | ||
| And I think people have to find the resolve to say, I'm not gonna be silent just so other people aren't upset. | ||
| I gotta be willing to push back. | ||
| Do you think any of the answers come from our institutions and from our systems, or do you think that's all just reverting back to doing the family thing right and a community right and everything else? | ||
| To me, it's like we're not gonna get any real answers or any real retribution, let's say, on COVID. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of things that the government clearly is lying to us about that I don't think will be resolved that maybe, and that's why I would say it's more of a spiritual war, you just have to disconnect and figure out how to live your life the right way. | ||
| Well, I've been very much quoted as saying that I think some of our elite universities are doing nothing but creating intellectual rot. | ||
| in our young people right now. | ||
| They're not teaching critical thinking. | ||
| For God's sakes, we've got universities that are sponsoring anti-semitic groups on campus. | ||
| I mean, at first they were saying they were pro-Palestinian. | ||
| Now they're actually, they don't even go through that charade. | ||
| They're now just saying they're pro-Hamas. | ||
| And I saw a deal the other day that said Gaze for Palestine. | ||
| I tell you what, take that banner and walk into Gaza and see how that goes. | ||
| Gaze for Palestine is a little different than Palestine for gays. | ||
| Yeah, you're not going to have a very nice walk through the Gaza Strip with that banner. | ||
| They don't even teach them. | ||
| Look, they would kill you in a heartbeat. | ||
| They would throw you off of a building over there. | ||
| I had the son of one of the co-founders of Hamas on the show, and he said, they would kill you before you got out of your car. | ||
| And you're supporting these people? | ||
| You're rallying these people? | ||
| And a lot of what bothers me, and this is what I mean about culture, not political, is how much our lives are impacted by the government, but not people we elected. | ||
| I'm talking about bureaucrats that have too much power and too much control. | ||
| We saw that happen with COVID. | ||
| And let me tell you what I mean, if you want me to. | ||
| I'm talking too much. | ||
| Hey, you're being interviewed, man. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, all right. | ||
| Look, I said that we saw a spike in 08, 09, and 10 of the highest levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness we've ever seen. | ||
| Who keeps those records? | ||
| Well, the Department of Education, CDC, some of these agencies, not with elected heads, but with appointed heads. | ||
| Now, I point that out because they're the ones that do those measures. | ||
| They're the ones that have those numbers and report the fact that our young people are really struggling mental health-wise. | ||
| So we know they have that information. | ||
| Those are the same people That when COVID hit, shut down the schools. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, they shut down the schools. | ||
| And at first they said, we're going to shut down the schools for a couple of weeks while we get our bearings. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, OK, I get it. | ||
| You know, this is a new strain of something. | ||
| They got to figure this out. | ||
| So they'll take a couple of weeks and figure this out. | ||
| OK, then a couple of weeks turns into a couple of months and then it turns into a year. | ||
| Then it turns into 18 months. | ||
| Then it turns in Now, who shut this down for two years? | ||
| The same people that have the numbers that say our young people are in a mental health crisis with high levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. | ||
| The same people that know they need to be engaged at school. | ||
| The same people that know that half of our referrals for child abuse and molestation come from mandated reporters at school. | ||
| And we're going to shut that down and abandon these kids and lock them up with their abusers at home. | ||
| And sure enough, referrals dropped as much as 50% nationwide because mandated reporters didn't have their eyes on these kids anymore. | ||
| And so, these kids who are already depressed and anxious and need this interaction at school, need the competition of school, need the socialization of school, they yank that out from under them and leave them isolated and at home for two years. | ||
| And what do they say? | ||
| They say, well, we did the best we could with what we had. | ||
| No, you didn't! | ||
| No, you didn't. | ||
| You knew what you were doing and you knew they weren't at risk from that virus, but you had a new hammer and everything looked like a nail and you shut it all down and left them out there twisting in the wind. | ||
| And that's what drives me crazy. | ||
| So tell me how we get out of it. | ||
| How do we get out of that? | ||
| We have a, we have, I mean, you're basically describing the deep state of that. | ||
| There's this perpetual thing that has information on us that seemingly can lock us down. | ||
| I'm afraid that they're going to do it again. | ||
| That people, everyone right now, it's cool to be like, ah, you know, I wasn't really for it, but they'll come back and say, oh, it's 10 times as deadly. | ||
| And, or, or it's something else altogether and people will fall for all the same things again. | ||
| So, so what's the inoculation there? | ||
| I'm just waiting for the next one to come around the corner. | ||
| And, you know, by the way, I didn't say this after the fact. | ||
| I said this at the time. | ||
| When this first started, I went on the air publicly multiple times and said that the damage that will happen psychologically, mentally and emotionally, will exceed the damage from the virus itself. | ||
| And they all said I was a Crazy man, I was a heretic. | ||
| And when that all came true, how many of them you think said, hey, we want you to come on so we can apologize? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| I'm not vaxxed. | ||
| I was getting kicked out of TV stations and everything else. | ||
| And I was in crazy LA and couldn't go to restaurants and all the rest of it. | ||
| And yeah, you don't get the apologies, but I suspect you'd be in a different line of work if you were looking for the apology, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't have the need to be loved by strangers. | ||
| So that works out just fine for me. | ||
| But I am concerned what's going to happen when it occurs again and they start playing this same game again. | ||
| But we've done some things to close the educational gap. | ||
| We're still way behind. | ||
| And our pediatric epidemiologist suggests that we may have lost as much as 15 million years of life lost. | ||
| Because of what happened there, because there'll be more dropouts, they'll get less sophisticated jobs, which means poorer health care, which means slower diagnosis, less quality care, so diseases will kick in earlier in their lives and they won't have the life expectancy that they would have if they'd gotten better education, better health care, earlier detection, better treatment. | ||
| All of those things are problems. | ||
| Now, we've closed the gap some, but we're still behind in math, we're still behind in science, we're still behind in English, and we're not doing enough to close that gap. | ||
| We've got to bring in tutors, teachers, programs to close those gaps so these kids aren't left behind. | ||
| I got one more for you, Dr. Phil, which is, so seeing that the problems and the issues that you've been talking about for decades now have scaled up and they're algorithmically charged and everything else because of this thing, what gives you hope that we can actually get on the other side of this and get back to some of the things you write about in the book? | ||
| Well, we've got to wake up the masses to what the issues are, because, you know, you kind of get back to your life and you think, hey, You know, things are like they always were, you know, we're still watching our favorite TV shows, we're still watching the Cowboys and the Chiefs and the Super Bowls coming, and we're still going to go to the lake this summer, and kind of, you know, everything's like it was. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| We've got a generation in trouble here, and we can't put our head in the sand. | ||
| We've got to say, look, you're electing the people that are precipitating these problems, It starts from the bottom of the ticket up. | ||
| You can go in and say, who am I going to vote for for president? | ||
| You know, you got to, you got to start from the bottom of the ticket up and say, you know, if you're concerned that, you know, some lady over two blocks over got, uh, mauled by a couple of pit bulls that were running around without anybody, uh, having one, at least you're under control. | ||
| And you better look and see if the dog catcher's doing their job. | ||
| Start paying attention from the bottom of the ticket up if you're concerned that you've got judges that are not holding people in jail when they should. | ||
| You've got DAs that aren't prosecuting. | ||
| You've got to find out who that you have a chance to vote on is doing the job you want and who's not. | ||
| Your vote can count if you will actually pay attention to how they're doing the job you're electing them to do. | ||
| The biggest con out there is, hey, just vote. | ||
| No, don't just vote. | ||
| Make an informed vote. | ||
| Find out who's doing the job you want and who isn't. | ||
| I don't care if you think it's Republican or Democrat. | ||
| Find out who's doing the job you want and vote your conscience about whether they're doing what you think should be done in your community and vote from the bottom up. | ||
| Dr. Phil, I thank you for your time. | ||
| The book is We've Got Issues, and I suspect this could be like a 10-volume set because the issues ain't going anywhere, so I look forward to doing this again. | ||
| It's like the old Encyclopedia Britannica, right? | ||
| Just get all 26 of them. | ||
| We've Got Issues. | ||
| Thanks, Dr. Phil. | ||
| It was great talking to you. | ||
| Dave, it's great talking to you. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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