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Jan. 2, 2026 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
33:44
The One Trick You Can Use to Avoid Failing Like 90% of People | Dr. Phil McGraw
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dr phil mcgraw
I think the numbers are so bad because a lot of people, they do it in fun.
You know, they don't take it real seriously.
But the numbers are by the end of the first week, about a quarter of the people have broken their New Year's resolution, whatever it was.
By the end of the month, 40% have broken them.
By the middle of February, 80 to 90% have given up the ghost.
It's like you're all, and I'll tell you why, even if they take it seriously, here's why.
Willpower is a myth, it's a con.
Willpower is a joke because it's emotionally fueled.
Willpower is emotionally fueled.
So you're all jacked up today, January 2nd, and you're going to do it.
You're going to do it.
But you put those jogging shoes out on the front porch and the damn things just won't jog.
You know, you're all jacked up.
But then first week of February, it's cold, the wind's blowing, it's warm in bed, and you just don't get up and get out there.
dave rubin
That's the gimmick.
What's the gimmick?
Yeah.
So what's the gimmick you have to use or the trick you have to use to kind of defeat that so that you keep going?
I'm Dave Rubin.
This is the Rubin Report.
And I assure you, people, we are kicking the new year off in style.
Joining me today is legendary television star and host of The Real Story with Dr. Phil, my friend Dr. Phil.
What's up, Doc?
dr phil mcgraw
Happy New Year.
dave rubin
Happy New Year, my friend.
How are you?
dr phil mcgraw
I'm good.
So you're kicking this off with me.
I'm flattered.
dave rubin
Well, that's a lot of pressure, but I thought, you know, so many people went so completely insane in 2025 that I had to set the table properly for 2026.
And it was Dr. Phil.
dr phil mcgraw
Hey, we're going to calm everything down and get everybody excited and on the right track, right?
Sanity, sanity, sanity.
Well, that's the hope.
dave rubin
And actually, one of the things that I discussed with my team before we went off for the Christmas and New Year break is how can we bring some sanity back to the country?
Because I think, you know, we're going to roll into the midterm elections.
You know, I have a general feeling that there's going to be a little bit more terrorism.
I mean, there's just weird stuff in the ether right now.
So let's start with that.
I mean, how do you set up your year before we get into all the cultural and stuff happening in the country?
I mean, how does Dr. Phil, your businesses, your show, your family, how do you look at every new year that comes around?
dr phil mcgraw
Well, you know, I'm not a big one for New Year's resolutions.
And we'll talk about that maybe in a minute.
And I'm not a big fan of them because they don't work for 85, 86% of the people, but they can.
But I'm in favor of any time somebody wants to sit down and say, hey, let's call time out and take stock.
Let's look where we've been and let's look where we're going.
And I think you learn from where you've been, but you got to focus on where you're going.
There's a reason the rearview mirror is this big and the windshield is this big.
It's huge.
There's a reason it's like a hundred to one ratio because you need to look where you're going instead of where you've been.
You learn from it, but you got to focus going forward.
And so anytime people take stock and say, okay, let's make a plan, because I think that if you're going to break psychology down to some fundamental principles, I think you start with be who you are on purpose.
I mean, don't just be a limbing and kind of ride the river of life.
You got to be who you are on purpose.
And so here we are January 2nd.
Let's take stock and say, okay, what do I really want this year?
What's important to me?
What's important to my family?
What's important to my community?
What's important to this country?
Let's consciously decide that and move towards it with purpose, with intention.
If people would just be who they are on purpose, own it, and live with intentionality, we would solve a whole lot of problems in this country.
I really believe that.
If you live with intention, I think we'd solve a whole lot of problems.
dave rubin
Do you think that modernity is the distraction to intention in that we are slammed with news and social media and the rest of it that we don't have a moment in many cases to do that sort of that relook at everything and figure out what our intention is?
dr phil mcgraw
Boy, I couldn't.
That's so well said, David, really, because we're so overstimulated.
We don't have time to be pensive, to be reflective, to sit down and just have some quiet time.
We're so overstimulated with, you know, we used to look at news at 5 o'clock in the evening when you got home from work and 6 o'clock news.
Now we're bombarded with a constant stream.
And we honest to God need to put those devices down.
Look, nobody's going to get off their phones.
Nobody's going to get off their iPads or their computers.
That would be an unrealistic goal.
We could sit here and talk about it all day long.
Nobody's going to do that.
But you can balance this out.
96% of kids between 10 and 15 years of age are on social media.
And seven out of 10 of them are bombarded with harmful content, either misogynistic or they're talking to them about eating disorders.
They're giving them anxiety-inducing, depression-inducing content.
Seven out of 10, but yet we don't make it top of our to-do list with our teens and preteens.
And that's just kind of an American phenomena, by the way.
One out of seven of them are groomed.
They're actually groomed by predators on the internet.
And half of them, one out of two, are bullied.
So we're just sitting by letting this happen.
That's what I mean by living with intention.
We've got to say, look, and it's not just adults lecturing kids.
Kids need to understand they're being manipulated.
They'll rebel against that if we make them understand it.
But we do need to put it down and have some quiet time.
Even if you wake up 15 minutes early or you make an appointment with yourself during the day to reflect on, am I doing what I want to do or am I doing what I'm being manipulated into doing, what I'm assigned to do?
I think that's a, it sounds like a small thing, but I think it has big consequences if we do it.
dave rubin
You know, you'll probably appreciate this, but on my last live stream before leaving for Christmas, I said to my audience, look, we've got a whole bunch of stuff that we pre-taped, which, you know, I like to think I'm making some valuable content.
But really what it's about is that I have to stay in the algorithm, as you know.
Otherwise, if you take two weeks off and put nothing else up, you're basically cooked for January.
And it's not till February until my own audience will see my show.
But I said that to the backdrop of, I hope you guys take some time off.
I hope you will be with your family and friends.
We are putting some stuff up.
I like what we're doing.
I know you guys do too.
But all of this stuff should not always be top of mind.
There's something else that we should be thinking about, like intent for your life.
dr phil mcgraw
Well, they can take a break, but you and I can't.
Because we are governed by an algorithm.
We have to keep feeding the monster, but they can take a break.
We just have to keep putting the content out there so we're there when they want us and when they need us.
So those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
And, you know, people will come back and find you after the break because they rely on you for sanity because you talk common sense and you give them the facts and let them make up their own mind.
You encourage critical thinking.
And that's what I love about you.
And I think that's what America loves about you.
dave rubin
Well, I appreciate that.
You said 85% of people don't follow through with the New Year's resolution.
Is that just because in some sense it's become a gimmick?
You know, I'm pretty good about taking stock throughout the year and trying to shift and change as I see where the weaknesses are or that sort of thing.
But that it's too gimmicky in some sense.
So everyone could be like, all right, I'm going to drink less or I'm going to this, that, the other thing.
But, you know, it basically lasts, you know, they always say that the first three days at the gym in January and then it's empty in February.
dr phil mcgraw
Yeah.
The only exercise you're going to get in the first month of the year at the gym is walking from the parking place you had to find three blocks away because everybody's in there.
But I think the numbers are so bad because a lot of people, they do it in fun.
You know, they don't take it real seriously.
But the numbers are by the end of the first week, about a quarter of the people have broken their New Year's resolution, whatever it was.
By the end of the month, 40% have broken them.
By the middle of February, 80 to 90% have given up the ghost.
It's like you're all, I'll tell you why, even if they take it seriously, here's why.
Willpower is a myth.
It's a con.
Willpower is a joke because it's emotionally fueled.
Willpower is emotionally fueled.
So you're all jacked up today, January 2nd, and you're going to do it.
You're going to do it.
But you put those jogging shoes out on the front porch and the damn things just won't jog.
You know, you're all jacked up.
But then first week of February, it's cold.
The wind's blowing.
It's warm in bed and you just don't get up and get out there.
That's just a good thing.
dave rubin
So what's the gimmick?
What's the gimmick?
Yeah.
So what's the gimmick you have to use or the trick you have to use to kind of defeat that so that you keep going?
dr phil mcgraw
I'm so glad you asked because it's so doable if people will just do it.
Here's the thing.
You have to set up your environment to support you when you don't want to do it.
It's easy to do when you want to.
It's easy to do when you're emotionally excited about it.
What you have to do is structure your world to push you through it when you don't feel like it.
Hell, anybody can do it when they're all pumped up and stimulated.
You've got to set up your environment to support your compliance when you don't feel like it.
You've got to set your schedule up.
You've got to have accountability where you've got to look somebody in the eye and confess that you didn't do it if you didn't do it.
So, you know, people come home from, they're going to be on a diet.
They're going to exercise.
So they come home.
They park the car in the garage.
Where's the garage door open to?
It opens to the kitchen in most of the homes.
They'll eat more calories grazing their way through the kitchen to the bedroom to change into their exercise clothes than they'll eat the whole rest of the day.
So, you know what?
Change your environment.
Don't go through the kitchen.
Park the car, go back out through the garage door and come in the front doors.
Don't go through the grazing patch.
Just simply changing that.
People eat junk food.
So you know what?
Get rid of it.
If you, it's 11 o'clock at night and you're hungry and you go in the kitchen and there's a sack of cookies there, you'll eat them.
But will you get dressed, get in your car, and drive to the convenience store to get them?
No, you're less likely to do that than you are if you set your environment up to support you.
Get rid of the junk foods and fill it up with foods that you can eat.
You don't ever need to be hungry, but we don't set our environment up to support us when we don't have the willpower.
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Are you kind of surprised that being in the business of common sense, as you said before, is a good business to be in?
Like, you know, I mentioned to you the first time we met a couple of years ago, I remember watching you on Oprah when I was kind of struggling with some things, and you just were just so, it was so obvious what you were saying.
And I mean that with respect.
It was just like obvious truths that nobody says.
And yet here we are now, 20-something years later, and those things are still as needed, maybe more.
dr phil mcgraw
Yeah, you know, I know a lot of 75-cent words.
I just try not to use it.
It just seems to me, I really don't just play a doctor on TV.
I actually did go to school and get several degrees, and I know a lot of big words to tell people about ergs and meta-ergs and all the motivational terms and all.
But the simple fact is, if people understand what you're saying, they will embrace it and use it.
If you give them tools that they can use to change their life today, then they will actually do that.
You know, it's it's not, it's, it's not always easy, but you will either find a way or you will find an excuse.
You're going to find one of the two.
You're either going to find a way or you're going to find an excuse.
And one of the biggest things that people are confused about is to say, I got to break this bad habit.
We don't break habits.
That's a myth.
That's another myth.
We don't break habits.
What we do is replace one set of behaviors with a new set of behaviors that are incompatible with the first set of behaviors.
So you've got to come up or you'll go back to the old things that you didn't want to do.
So you've got to target a behavior and replace it with new behaviors that crowd that out, and that becomes the norm.
There are simple things that if people learn, they can affect change across time.
And little changes each and every day add up to big results.
And hey, you know, we're sitting here January 2nd.
January and February are going to go by whether you're doing something about your goals or whether you're not.
So you might as well make even small changes over the next 60 days.
And then you wake up March 1st and go, hey, wow, that didn't seem like a lot, but it added up to some big changes, either by saving money or eating more healthy, losing some weight, setting some financial goals, whatever it is.
Little changes, you don't have to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
You can do this a little bit at a time and it adds up.
dave rubin
How much of the problem that people feel they have around all of that is that they're not surrounded with people that are supportive of that.
I mean, I can tell you here in my studio, my team, I'm right now at 49 years old.
I'll be 50 in 2026, but I'm in the best shape I've been in in 20 years.
And it's partly because my whole team here, we're constantly challenging each other with what kind of workout we did, what we're eating for lunch, what are we doing all the time.
And so it's created a culture around that, where when we occasionally fall off the wagon and go for the fast food, it's like, ah, here I did it.
Let me just tell you about it.
And we'll get back to it tomorrow.
dr phil mcgraw
Listen, you guys are setting up your environment to support your goals.
If you surround yourself with like-minded people, and so you're all pushing the rock up the hill at the same time, it's so much easier.
I mean, just think about somebody that's an alcoholic and they're trying to stay sober, and they surround themselves with sober people.
How much easier is it to stay sober versus being around a bunch of people that are saying, Hey, let's go to Happy Hour.
Hey, let's have a little drink at lunch, or they're drinking in their office or whatever.
Temptation, temptation, temptation.
If you're an alcoholic, you don't go get a job as a bartender.
That's just stupid.
That's just stupid.
So you're surrounding yourself with people that want to be healthy.
They eat healthy.
They live healthy.
They adopt habits and behaviors that are consistent with those goals.
That's what I mean.
You're structuring your environment.
There's probably days that you don't feel like being healthy.
You don't feel like eating right.
But you've got people around you.
You probably couldn't find an Oreo if you patted everybody down.
dave rubin
But what's the least healthy thing?
What's the least healthy thing we got in here?
Find the least healthy thing.
Let's see what we got.
It's all health.
dr phil mcgraw
It's all health.
dave rubin
There's going to be something in there.
Let me ask you this while he hunts for our least healthy snack.
What do you make, moving aside from the sort of personal, individual part of it, as you look at 26 and kind of what's going to happen and everything else, sort of politically, culturally, et cetera, what's your sort of prognosis of where we're going to be at?
Oh, and I've been given what's the least healthy thing.
I don't know what these are, Barbie smart sweets.
They look like some kind of gummy bear with who's in charge over there.
unidentified
All right.
dr phil mcgraw
Yeah, that's probably petroleum and sugar.
unidentified
I have no idea.
dave rubin
I'll deal with him after the show.
But what are you looking for sort of politically and culturally this year?
dr phil mcgraw
We're going to miss that guy.
He's going to be on the curve eating gummies.
You know, listen, I'm like you.
I know at the end of the year, we had the terrible shooting down in Australia, and it's just anti-Semitism going to the highest level.
And I hate those kind of things.
But in spite of that, I continue to be the incurable optimist.
And I hope people, when I say that we need to be who we are on purpose and live with intention, we need to stop letting legacy media tell us who we are, what we believe, and what defines our culture.
I don't think we're nearly as divided as we're being told we are.
And I'll tell you something that, you know, I spent a lot of time in the litigation arena, spent a lot of time negotiating with people.
And I had a rule anytime I was negotiating against someone, the rule I always followed is I said, okay, as we sit down here, first thing I'd like to do is talk about everything that we agree on.
And there's plenty of time to get to what we disagree on.
There's plenty of time to get what we need to problem solve.
But first, let's talk about everything that we have in common and everything we agree on.
And I always found that that list was a lot longer than everybody thought when they showed up ready to do battle.
And I think if we can get people to start talking again, if we can get people to realize we all want some of the really big same things.
Look, everybody wants a healthy America.
We all want our children to grow up healthy and happy.
We all want them to have green grass when they become adults.
We want them to have clean water.
We want them to be safe.
We want them to be prosperous.
We can all agree on some really macro issues.
We might disagree about what's the best way to get there.
But if we recognize that we all want the same things and we just disagree on methodologies, but it opens up the conversation and it opens up the dialogue.
And that's what I hope we could all resolve to say, you know what, I'm going to make it my mission to open up a dialogue with somebody that I wouldn't necessarily talk to or did necessarily talk to in 2025.
Maybe it's at church.
Maybe it's at a neighborhood barbecue.
Maybe it's at the mall and the food court.
I'm going to find the person that looks least likely for me to relate to and just say, hey, how's your day?
Break bread with somebody.
Talk to somebody.
Get out of your bubble.
Get out of your silo.
Get out of your echo chamber and talk to somebody else and listen and maybe start out that way and say, hey, I think we disagree on some things, but can we make a list of what we do agree on?
And then maybe next time we'll talk about something we disagree on.
But I think if we can just get people to start saying, hey, quit telling me how I think and feel, I'm going to start asking questions and listening.
I think it would make a huge difference in a real grassroots way.
dave rubin
You mentioned the mainstream media when you started there.
And why do you think they've been so unable or unwilling to shift?
Because I think most people hear what you just say right there.
It's what you and I try to do on our shows all the time.
And obviously it's working to some extent online.
Why do you think they're so unable or unwilling to change the direction that they seem to consistently be going in?
dr phil mcgraw
I think they've gotten into a comfort zone, Dave.
I think there's a certain mindset and they suffer from confirmation bias.
And for people listening and watching, just real quickly, confirmation bias is when you seek out and you only hear things that confirm what you already believe.
And actually, when you bring people contradictory factual evidence and they're suffering from confirmation bias, it actually makes them dig in even more because it creates such dissonance and threat to them, they actually dig in even more.
But I think the reason they've done it is I think a lot of people got into identity politics by agreeing with one idea.
And then before long, they kind of signed off on the whole slate and they quit questioning what was happening.
And then it got to the point where you're not permitted to question anymore.
If you start asking questions, okay, you're a doubter and we're going to put you on the naughty list.
And I think that's where cancel culture came from.
I think we just got into such a closed mindset that people suffer from confirmation bias.
And I've heard a lot of people say, you're not going to convince anybody in America of anything anymore, ever, because they're so entrenched.
And I don't believe that.
I think we can, but I think it starts neighbor to neighbor.
I know it's corny to talk about talking over the back fence anymore.
But maybe we need to get corny.
Maybe we need to start just one conversation at a time and we take our power back from this legacy media.
And I think we can do that.
I think we get off the phones.
We get off.
People don't realize that so much of what they're seeing on these devices are robots that are programmed to start a zeitgeist that they get swept up in.
And the only way you can defeat that is to look somebody in the eye and know that they're a real person and have a real conversation.
And we can do that if we just will.
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I suppose it's slightly ironic that we have these conversations online and yet that's the obvious answer, right?
Like that's kind of the strange catch-22 we've all been put in.
Are you well, you said you're an optimist and I definitely get that.
How do you feel about sort of where we'll be politically?
You know, I mentioned to you last time that I had you on at the Trump MSG rally.
What I love that you said was that you said you would have been at the Kamala rally too, but they just didn't invite you.
It's not like you were this hardcore MAGA person, but you just speak to people.
And well, obviously we've got midterms rolling in this year, and I think you'd prefer the Republicans stay in charge for a series of reasons.
I mean, what do you think we can do to angle people towards a more sensible politics?
dr phil mcgraw
I think, again, I think it's critical thinking.
I think they have to look at, let's look at what's happened on climate change, for example.
And listen, when the climate people talk about their climate objectives, I'm right there with them.
Let me tell you, I want to have a good planet.
I want to have, like I said, green grass and clean water and all of that.
But let's look at the results.
We have spent trillions of dollars.
And climate change has become a religion.
And you are, it's heresy to even ask questions about it.
But the good thing about the passage of time is you don't have to speculate.
You can measure.
And enough time has passed now that we know that trillions of dollars have been spent and there hadn't been one iota of change, not one damn bit, not none, nothing, zip zero, not in yet.
So I agree with the objectives, but what they're doing, the plan, the schematic, the big strategy has done nothing but put us trillions of dollars in debt.
So I just want people to be critical thinkers and look and say, you know, what they're peddling, you know, I'm famous for saying, how's that working for you?
Well, how is that working for you?
You didn't work in for shit.
So, you know what?
Let's start asking questions and coming up with a different strategy.
But listen, I'm not anti-climate.
100%.
I've got a three-year-old, a four-year-old, a three-year-old grandchild.
I want them to run in a park with green grass and jump in a stream and a brook and pull fish out of clean water.
100%.
But let's find something that works instead of turning it into a religion where we can't ask questions about it.
You've got to be able to have a debate.
dave rubin
If it is a religion, they took Greta Thunberg and they converted her from climate to Hamas, which is a strange little operation that happened over there.
But let's not do Greta Thunberg at the beginning of the year.
Let me ask you one other thing.
More than anything else, what excites you when you're waking up or when something comes across your desk that you're going to do on your show?
I mean, what's the stuff that really gets you going?
Now, obviously, you've been doing the self-help stuff forever.
You've brought a lot of sanity to a lot of people.
But when you see something like what's like, ah, now that's what I want to go after today.
dr phil mcgraw
You know, if when my producers bring me something, the top line on the sheet is a topic and describing what it is.
And the second paragraph is entitled Takeaway.
And it's just what it says.
It says, if we do this show, what is the takeaway for the viewer?
And because I don't want to do voyeuristic television.
I want to do something that when people watch this and they get through, there's something they can use.
I mean, it's television you can use.
And I'm so glad you asked that because I think family, the family unit, is the backbone of society.
And I think family's under attack in America.
And so anytime I can talk about things that I think fortify the family in this transient society where devices are raising our kids instead of parents raising our kids, anytime I can talk about things that I think when people finish, they go, you know what?
We can do something different this week at our house and it's going to make our family stronger, then I feel like I've done a good thing.
Dave, I saw a study recently.
I'll send it to you if you want to see it.
That said parents are spending more time with their children now than they have since the 70s.
And that's significant because we weren't a double-income society in the 70s.
Right, right.
Both parents weren't working all the time.
And so that seemed like a good thing.
But then the result of it was right now, the more time parents are spending with their children, the worse the children are doing.
There's more anxiety, more depression, more loneliness.
Wow.
So it seems like the current parenting model is toxic.
And why is that?
Because we've got concierge parents.
We've got parents that are smoothing all the bumps out for their children.
They're letting the kids be entitled.
They're not allowing the children to fall and scrape their knee.
They're not allowing the children to handle their relationships with teachers that maybe don't think they're precious.
They're helicopter parents that are smoothing out all of the rough spots in the child's life.
So the child never has an opportunity to observe themselves overcoming obstacles in their lives.
And so they don't prepare, they're not prepared for the next level of life where they have to be more independent, more self-reliant.
So they're crippling these children.
It's kind of like during COVID when everybody went through wiping all the germs off of everything for two years and then put them back out in the world and they were immunocompromised because their immune system had gotten lazy because they weren't exposed to any germs.
Then they got back out in the world.
We had a horrible cold and flu season for about 18 months.
Kids have to learn by observing themselves and then attributing to themselves competencies that they can rely on.
And so if I can talk to parents about that and get them to change, then I go home thinking, you know what?
I did something good today.
I woke these parents up and say, you're doing this to make yourself feel better, not to make your child better prepared.
And if I could rattle them up and get them to say, okay, I need to let, you don't need to raise them like free-range chickens.
I'm not saying put them on the subway and send them to Central Park at 9:30 at night.
That's not what I'm saying.
But there's a lot of people.
dave rubin
Not with this new mayor, but that's a whole other thing.
dr phil mcgraw
We got to have another conversation about that.
dave rubin
Well, Doc, I love chatting with you always.
And my challenge to you will be the same thing that I will challenge myself this year, which is make it the year for normal people, for sanity, for common sense, and the rest of it, because I suspect we are going to need it.
So our work is cut out for us.
dr phil mcgraw
Well, there's an old saying that everybody in the world's crazy except me and thee, and ain't you sure about thee?
So we got to hang here, man.
dave rubin
So here we go.
Thanks, Dr. Phil.
dr phil mcgraw
Talk to you soon, Dave.
Thanks for having me on.
dave rubin
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