What Happened To The Education System? - Dr Phil

it seems like you're throwing yourself into the thick of it here you're pushing back against a lot of ideas that are very popular in your industry of mainstream media does it feel like a bit of a war zone uh sometimes it does uh it seems like um the more common sensical I get the more I rattle people's cages but that's okay I'm used to it I saw a study recently of Illinois public schools in 2022 that found zero students p the state math proficiency test at 53 Public Schools almost all of whom are majority black and at one school which is a prep school designed to prepare students for their Medical Careers the per student spendings $47,000 for reading it's only 30 schools and only one out of 10 kids or less can do math at a grade level in 930 schools which is more than a quarter of all of the schools in the state what do you think's happening with Academia well that's a complex question that uh requires a complex answer but I can tell you the result of it is as a country we're certainly not leading uh academically the way we have in the past whether it's math science reading uh whatever we're just simply not uh leading the charge and I can add to what you said by saying that nationally uh over 30% of fifth grade ERS can't read at the most basic level uh 30% of eighth graders can't read at the most basic level but what's happening is they're continuing to get passed on to the next grade and the next grade and the next grade and that's happening I guess because they get paid for passing the kids moving on to the next grade uh but I mean if you're not reading on GR on grade level at the third or fourth grade your chance of dropping out before you graduate goes up uh like four times normal um and if if and there are some groups that goes up six times normal so if we can't at least get these kids reading we're in a lot of trouble educationally in this country and it doesn't seem like anybody's got a good plan to do anything about it because it's being acknowledged um kind of superficially but nobody does anything about it well kids are going to school unless there's some secret attendance rate changes that I've not seen kids are attending you know from whatever it is 9:00 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. they are in classrooms with a teacher and the teacher is saying things to them I don't understand what is happening if basic reading and math competence isn't being met well a lot of these school systems have adopted programs of of teaching subject matters that just simply didn't work and there was no empirical data to suggest that it would work but yet they spent millions and millions of dollars on these teaching programs that just simply don't work uh but they've embraced them they've spent money on them they put time into them uh but they're not yielding the results what what are these what are these programs what are they well they're programs that they buy commercially somebody comes up and they said okay we're going to you know we're going to take this approach to teaching reading you know whether it's phonetics here or it's another word structure here or it's a it's a math approach here and you have to look at this stuff uh to see okay we have a competency level when we start then you get to the other end and you say all right let's check competency and see how much they've gained in terms of Competency on an objective test not one administered by the vendor but on an objective test how much competency have they gained how much have they mastered uh the subject matter and if it's if it's not a substantial increase then they need to do something different and when you talk about Illinois and they're using the state test and it's not showing uh competency with these kids you can't continue to do the same thing and you know there are a lot of these programs out there that just simply aren't showing competency from state to state um and they need to change they need to do something different now one of the things that I'm concerned about is when covid hit uh there were some really bad decisions made that created bad results mentally emotionally developmentally socially educationally um that those gaps have not been closed some progress has been made but not near enough to close that Gap so if they weren't doing great to begin with and then they shut the schools down for two years and cre create a gap and that Gap hasn't been closed now you've got kids that are going to really be frustrated in being behind a curriculum and so they wind up being demotivated and I think it was a bad decision to shut it down the way they shut it down I said so at the time I say so now and I think we're going to pay the price for that this generation is going to be behind uh for their entire life life if something doesn't happen to close the gap yeah you say that trends that we're seeing aren't the result of society's Natural Evolution but they've been unquestioningly designed to undermine our society in general and the family unit in particular if that's right who is designing them well it depends on which area you're talking about uh let's talk about for example uh both un unintended consequences and intended consequences um I think for example if we recognize that right now um we're seeing a generation that is dealing with the internet the technology of the smartphone the technology of um you know iPads and access to information that a generation ago simply wasn't there now some of this is by Design some of it is unintended consequences um for example I started the Dr Phil show in 2002 uh I started being on television uh several years before that but when I started the Dr Phil show the first text message had never been sent there just there weren't any text messages it wasn't a thing they didn't do that now think how much things have changed since then because about 089 uh it's like big airplanes flew over the United States and just dropped smartphones on this society and I think that was the biggest change uh in in the human race since the Industrial Revolution think about what happened with the Industrial Revolution up until that point we were very much an Agricultural Society right we farmed we made we we grew the foods that we ate and that was the cycle and so like 95% of society uh was agricultural okay then you move forward 25 years and maybe it's dropped now but then when the Industrial Revolution hit everything got mechanized people moved into the City and a lot of changes took place nothing has changed the human race like that until the Advent of the internet and the smartphone and when that smartphone hit and we're walking around with computers in our hands what happened everybody went from walking around like this to walking around like this and young people stopped living their lives and started watching other people live their lives and something happened when that occurred they started comparing their lives to the lives they were watching lived out on the internet on social media platforms and so they started comparing themselves what they didn't realize is the lives they were watching were fiction they were fantasies these influencers that we have and I I can't tell you how many I've had on that say yeah I'll post things up say okay I'm going to wear this I'm going to wear that I'm going to the NBA Allstar game tonight and I'm doing this I'm doing that they put all those clothes on they take all those videos they post them all up then they take those clothes off they take them back to the store and get a refund because they couldn't afford to buy them to begin with they aren't going to the NBA NBA Allstar game to be to start with that's just all a fiction so the kids sitting home watching like you know who am I'm nothing I'm not going to any All-Star game I don't have those kind of clothes and so their self-esteem takes a beating and they're comparing it to somebody that's doing the same damn thing they're doing which is sitting home in a bean bag eating Cheetos they're doing the same thing as the other person is but they don't know that because they're 16 so their self-esteem takes a beating their self-worth takes a beating and they don't have friends because they're watching lives lived instead of living their own you know the average teenager has like one or less really good friend because their lives are being lived virtually okay so you know that's maybe an unintended consequence you said okay so who is it that's got these conspiracies that are after us well let's look at the social media companies for example uh people know that their kids spend too much time on social media what they don't know is that those are driven by algorithms and those algorithms are feeding these children content that is designed to upset them they're not giving them content they want to see they're not giving them content that uplifts them they're giving them content that upsets them mentally and emotionally why because that gets them clicking more and the more they click the longer they're on the longer they're on the more ads they can run by them the more ads they run by them the more shared rev they have so there have been studies done where they'll put a 13-year-old girl up because it meets the requirements and they'll just put her name up and within minutes she's getting toxic content about losing weight or doing this or doing that they'll put the same profile up and in the description they'll say weight loss and the amount of toxic content that algorithm feeds her goes up six times eight times 10 times as much she starts getting feedback about 400 calorie diets she starts getting anorexia sites she starts getting all kinds of things fed at her and she starts click click click because it's making her anxious and upset now that is by Design and there's no consideration for the welfare of the child who they know it creates anxiety it creates depression and it gets the kid hooked in and now they're addicted to the content they're addicted to the phone it pulls them away from their family and the longer they're on there the more susceptible they are to Predators the more susceptible they are to these other influences and you that's eroding the overall fiber of the family so all of these things combined uh you've got people that they start dating later they start driving later they all of the things that we did at a younger age when I was 15 uh years old 355 days and 23 hours I was down to DMV waiting to get my driver's license now they're not in any big hurry because they're not really engaged in the world that's not a good thing yeah it seems like most of the information that people get on the internet at the moment is built not to teach them about the world or tell them anything that's true but to just be the most viral mimetically absorbable messaging that they can and what you see with this is messages that are the most viral are the ones that go the furthest not the ones that are the most accurate a good example of this would be uh America is a bad country it's it's uniquely cursed or toxic or or malign in some way and you put a really interesting study up about patriotism on the decline and that's just falling through the floor it's like a tiny a tiny amount compared it's like half less than half of what it was only a short while ago yeah and that's shocking uh I mean that's that's shocking and and that's troubling to me because I love this country I mean I really do is it perfect of course not I mean we we've got things we need to work on but I I love this country and I love it enough to acknowledge that there are problems with it um but there are things that we need we need to acknowledge them in order to work on them uh but there are things that you put on your to-do list it's not things that you reject the entire American experiment because it's not perfect it's just things you put on your to-do list things that you want to do a better job of um but you I've said that I think a lot of these Elite universities right now are not teaching critical thinking um you you've got a lot of this ideology that is it sounds to me a lot like socialism sounds to me a lot like Marxism um teaching that we're that we're going to be successful when we have a quality of outcome that's insane you're not going to you're never going to have a quality of outcome because you have different uh qualities of input you have some people that work hard you have some people that don't you have some people that are smart and talented you have some people that aren't you have different levels of input you're going to have different quality of outcome and when you've got universities that are teaching which seems to me to be astoundingly hypocritical you you've got Elite universities that are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for an Elite Education and then they're teaching that there should be a quality of outcome well if that's true why am I paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars for an Elite Education if we're all supposed to come out the same then what the hell I need to be paying you all this for uh I can just go hang out on a corner and we're all going to get the same thing what do I need to be paying you this for well the universities definitely seem to be good at teaching students to be victims or that getting their feelings hurt by words and being injured by something that someone said to you should be a big deal yeah and they're medicalizing those feelings you know we used to get our feelings hurt so okay sticks and stones will break my bones words will never hurt me but now they've medicalized that so when they say okay this professor asked me to write a paper that's contrary to my value system and I'm offended so I've now entered the offended sweep stakes and I'm telling you that that's mentally and emotionally hurt me so it's like the intentional infliction of emotional distress you go file that complaint with the Dean's office they've now got to deal with that and so we've had more professors fired in disciplined in the last several years than we've had since the McCarthy era because the students have learned how to word all of this in such a way that it has to be dealt with because if a student um commits suicide or hurts themselves in some way and the university didn't deal with it now they have a liability problem so professors are getting caught up in that now some of them are jerks uh you know some professors do jerky things and probably need to be but not as many as we're seeing now yeah it's very interesting what happens when the bar stool gets flipped upside down so typically in society what you want is someone's reputation and their status to be associated with their competence and this is because people who are competent are valuable because they can do things and not the whole gamut of all of the different things that people can do that is constrained by your ability to do something in reality you can't fake being more competent than you are because people will just say well show me show me this degree of competence but if status is afforded to the people who are the biggest victims you can fake there is a bottomless pit of how low you can go with claiming victimhood well this is the degree of psychological distress that I've gone through this is the amount of trauma that I've suffered this is the amount of whatever it is two things happen there first off it create creates a very dangerous slippery slope status game because people can continue to just one up each other and make claims that aren't ever checked in the real world and the second thing is people who actually do go through difficult times they they're part of a larger group of people most of whom are made up of those that haven't actually been through something that justifies it you are lumping in together people who've been through really difficult times with people who just want to feel special yeah and and it is a race I mean you you you described it I mean people are truly in a victimhood mindset and it's kind of like well I can outdo you because I have this status I'm I I have this claim that I can make I came from this this background or I have this ethnicity or I have this in my uh in in my family background or whatever and if if you start considering this and you start changing your yard stick um you're in a lot of trouble because I I can tell you if if we start lowering standards and there are some schools that grade someone on math for example uh based on their willingness to learn it their interest in learning it what what does that even mean well I I've had an interesting conversation about that recently um there was a professor that I I I won't name I'll let him do that if he wants to uh but he was talking about teaching black students and he is black uh Standard English and he caught all kinds of hell for it because they said he was being oppressive and he said no no I'm not wanting to replace the way they communicate I'm wanting to add to it you know they can talk in the way that they are are in their neighborhoods and in the way they've been brought up I just want to add a layer on that because if they go out into the world and they try to compete for jobs they're going to need to speak the language of where they go and he caught hell for that and then they were talking about relative math scoring and they were saying you you have to grade them on their interest in learning it if if they don't care about it then you can't grade them on the same standard is someone that's interested in it um well that is absurd to me and I look I don't want to get on an airliner and be flown by a pilot where they lowered the standard because they didn't have the background to master the skill set I don't want to have brain surgery by someone who they lowered the standard for anatomy and physiology courses because they didn't get the proper background to prepare them for it and they just fired an NYU Professor after 20 or 30 years because the students were whining that the course was too hard I don't want to be operated on by these this was a Premed course I don't want to be operated on by someone who complained that the course was too hard so they fired the professor and brought in some hack that didn't require them to know everything they needed to know about brain structure so now uh they're a resident and they're going to do brain surgery on me no thank you uh I don't want to do I don't want somebody fighting a fire at my house that they lowered the standard on firefighting techniques because they didn't have all the opportunities as a child I'm sorry that's just not how you get by In This World the problem is that Academia and the qualifications and the standards that people are brought to in Academia are malleable they can continue to be moved the a the B the C all of this stuff can be positioned around to retrofit the desire the motivation the skill set the ability of the school the problem is when you get into the real world that bridge either stays up or it doesn't and that plane either stays in the sky or it doesn't and that brain surgery is either a success or It Isn't So yeah you can continue to manipulate the standards to which students are being held up until the point at which they get into the real world and as you say you end up with some pretty some pretty squarely outcomes yeah and the problem with that is these kids are being taught that it is relative it's not relative you get out into the competitive world it's like you know I grew up in athletics it didn't matter who your parents were it didn't matter what neighborhood you came from they were interested in who could jump highest who could run fastest and who could knock somebody on their ass that's what they were interested in they didn't care about anything else it didn't it didn't matter um that's what and that's why that's what I loved about Athletics it it didn't matter how much money you had or who your parents were it just mattered who could get the job done on a given day and that was a real equalizer for me because we were really poor and when I stepped onto that field it did matter anymore uh everybody was the same you all started out the same and that was a great equalizer and I and I think that's great and these kids who don't have they don't show up having had the same experiences to get them ready uh for admission to that school uh if you're going to fix that problem you need to go back at the beginning and fix that from prek forward uh they might be in a neighborhood where the tax base is really low so they don't get good schools they don't get good resources they don't good get good teachers that's where you need to fix that you don't lower the standards when they get there you go help those kids from the beginning so when they show up they are competitive you know all these schools have dropped the SAT now because they say it's racially biased the research says that's not true the research says that at is an opportunity for those gifted kids in the Inner City Independent of their grades to show that they in fact are gifted and it's the one thing that can lift them out of that and put them into that school because it shows their native intelligence but the schools won't reimplement it because they will be judged if they do and they're more interested in virtue signaling than they are actually helping those underprivileged kids that's the one thing that can poal them right back into that school even if they don't have the grades they have the native intelligence the the motivation and the learning ability uh but they won't use the SAT because they're virtue signaling and it's on the no good list well it tells you everything you need to know that the SATs have been stopped but legacy admissions haven't right and research is very clear the SAT helps those underprivileged kids because it identifies those that have the brain power to jump up to that level what's the problem with inclusive language well it's gotten to the point of being ridiculous um that it there's um there there are some of these you you you can't um they're trying to so hard to not offend the victim class so we can't say women anymore we've got to say bodies with vaginas you can't say hip hip hoay anymore uh because it could offend people with a hip injury you're kidding that's not that's not a thing that's not a thing it is a thing that's not a thing you can't have an admissions office at some universities now you have to call it office of enrollment management why because if you say admissions office that suggests somebody's going to be rejected so it's now has to be called uh office of enrollment management you can't now say you you can't now say rapist or murder suspect supect or convicted murderer you have to say justice involved person so you weren't raped you were involved with a Justice involved person Injustice involved person perhaps Justice this is wild you can't say you can't say minority anymore you have to say historically excluded I imagine the research for this book must have just been thrilling going through oh oh my God uh bodies with vaginas birthing people um here's a good one for you okay here's a good one for you nibbling like the edge of a biscuit no nibbling is a gender neutral term for your nieces and nephews it's it sounds like sibling but it's nibbling um and lunch and learn you used to Brown Bag can't Brown Bag anymore it's lunch and learn I don't even know what that is but no M no matter what it is that how just how widespread is this because we I've seen these articles I've seen these pieces about the insane new word that we we they're menstruating people or the the humans with smaller feet or whatever it is that you need to kind of repurpose but just how widespread is this are the isolated incidents what how big of a problem is it well um it's pretty widespread in universities and Fortune 500 corporations you know that's the problem uh Chris you get into um you know I'm I spent 21 years on the air at CBS and I'm still involved with CBS I have uh a prime time show on Thursday nights at 9 o' um so help me Todd we've got another one in pre-production now um for their Paramount plus we've got um uh other dramas and and all that we work on with them and um they air a lot of my library episodes uh still so I'm I'm still in business with them but uh you they have language police I mean it's words you can't say words you need to say um they sign their letters with pronouns um it's the things that you you you can no longer say America is the land of opportunity you can no longer say the most qualified person should get the job because because those trigger people that might not be the most qualified so you can't upset them uh and this is pretty rampant in major corporations and universities U just like trigger warnings and you know you you asked me earlier you said well you know who is it that's pushing this well I'm telling you who's pushing it it's it's it's it's virtue signaling corporations and univers ities um and they're the ones that are shaping um the minds of our young people and hiring them with expectations I I I I know a university Professor that got a 90-day suspension I believe without pay uh because he was talking to a student that came up with a or was discussing a project and the the project design and he said no that's kind of lame I don't think we should do that the fact that he used the word lame got suspended for 90 days it makes me so uncomfortable because I again I've read these news articles online but it almost feels like fiction it feels like some crazy outlier event that's not a big deal and I don't know anybody that's been a part of this and yet you've been exposed to them you've had conversations with them you've seen it firsthand in your own industry and I guess you know my two worlds have been promoting nightclubs and doing a podcast they may be the two final frontiers of free speech because no one on the front door of a nightclub or on a podcast really cares all that much about trigger warnings so to me it hasn't entered my sphere it almost seems like a fantasy and yet you're saying that it's happening in the real world well I think it's something like 80% of the universities have in engaged in trigger warnings but you're not involved in it because you're entrepreneurial uh you work for you and you don't hold yourself to that ridiculous yard stick that ridiculous standard um and when you're entrepreneurial you're focused on results not virtue signaling and that's a that's a great place to be Chris uh I know I've been entrepreneurial all my life so um but if you're in a if you're in a corporation um and you got a bunch of board members and all that are really interested in signaling that they're really dialed in it it starts spreading and the universities are teaching this to our kids so a question I've always had is how much of what we're seeing internally is coordination it's part of some grand plan to try and take down America America or to undo the will of the people or to confuse them or to make them feel like victims or narcissists or whatever it might be how much of it is that and how much of it is just cowardice from people who don't want to lose their job just normal job anxiety oh well this is the new meta this is the new meme that everybody needs to follow this is toxic Compassion or performative empathy and this is what I need to do in order to be able to keep my job I don't want to lose my job so I'll just comply how much of it is coordination do you think and how much of it is job anxiety well I I think these these Fringe activists uh are very coordinated I think they use bot armies I think they U scare people and threaten people and I think a lot of people are like hey it's a lot easier to just don't say anything it's a lot easier to just keep my mouth shut keep my head down and go on but I tell you what I think that um that pendulum is starting to swing back the other way and if you wonder if people are really buying into all of this you can look and see how they vote when they can vote silently like with their wallet uh you saw what happened at Target when they had the tuck friendly um clothing for children I mean up right there for children to walk by you saw what happened with Bud Light uh when they push the CH transgender and I think most people um are like hey Live and Let Live if this person is transgender and that's what they want to do who am I to say what they should or shouldn't do but when you start pushing the agenda and say it's not enough that you're okay with what I do I need you to stand up and announce that you endorse this it's not enough that you just Live and Let Live you got to stand up and tell everybody that you endorse what I'm doing then they're they're pushing to the point that people are going to say enough is enough and too much is too much you don't get to tell me what I'm supposed to do I I don't I don't need you to endorse what I'm doing and don't demand that I endorse what you're doing and I think that a lot of these activists do not speak for who they say they represent present because I've had a lot of people in these groups that say they're not talking for me this sounds perilously close to what Jordan Peterson was warning everybody about six seven eight years ago even well it it is in that he was saying that the Canadian government is requiring that you use this language and he was saying I will not be compelled by the government to say what you're going to tell me I'm I should say and that's not happening here and it's even worse I think because we do have freedom of speech with the First Amendment we're muzzling each other th I mean this I feel like I'm mean George Orwell's 1984 sometimes when I'm seeing us requiring each other to use certain language and certain words we're doing it to each other it's not the government coming in and stepping on our rights it's we're we're musling each other we're requiring each other to do certain things rather than allowing people to do what they want to do what about the dangers of of rewriting as well well you know they I've heard that referred to is woke washing and I've seen some of the books like Huckleberry Finn who have which have been Rewritten um and um it changes the meaning of the books so much that it it they they changed the book so much that the meaning of the book has changed and the whole my reading of the book was that it was a commentary on racism at the time I mean even when it was written it was it would certainly be a a a criticism of of racism by today's standards it was a criticism of it at the time and but they're going to take that out how are how is a reader a child that's reading that book a teen that's reading that book going to learn the lesson in the book if you take it out I I I don't understand that I I I I don't get that um it it doesn't make sense to me and I I see them uh tearing down statues and changing the names on some of the schools because these people owned slaves well you have to now say enslaved person um 250 years ago well you know what that's something that I refer to in the book is presentism not my term I I learned it from someone else um and that very simply is taking today's standards mores and folkways and applying it to something that happened 250 years ago as though 250 years ago they were supposed to say two centuries in the future this is going to be different so I need to forell the Future and hold myself to that standard was that abominable Behavior yes of course it was abominable Behavior was it was it our proudest moment in American history of course it was it was terrible the way these people were treated and and abused and sold it was it was horrible do we want to hide that from our our our children growing up now and learning the history of America you can't hide that how are they going to learn that is the lesson right that that is the lesson I mean the they're they're tearing down statues of of people that crafted the Declaration of Independence they they're tearing down Lincoln who wrote the uh U it it's more than I can take sometimes um but presentism is like let's say there's a street in your neighborhood and the speed limit is is 20 so you drive through through their 20 for days and days and days for months and months and months and then they come along and say well we're going to change it to 10 well you think there's a lot of kids have moved in neighborhood we're going to change it to 10 so they come and give you a retroactive ticket for driving 10 over you well wait a minute the speed limit was 10 at the time was 20 at the time well it's 10 now so we're giving you retroactive tickets cuz you were driving 20 but it was 20 when I was doing 20 I know but it's 10 now you should have known we were going to change it to 10 so we're ticketing you for driving 20 when it was 20 that's what they're doing now it's like we're going to criticize you and tear down your statue because you were doing what was acceptable at the time because it is not acceptable now I yeah judging judging the people of Yesterday by the standards of today especially when the standards are moving unbeliev believably quickly is never going to be a good idea no one is able to live up to in fact very few people are able to live up to the standards of today from today you know there's even I have seen a lot of conversations online that people from the trans Community the LGBT community talking about some of the different ways that it can be confusing to understand pronouns or it can be I understand that it's challenging too I get it wrong as well it's said look if you person who is supposed to be the Arbiter of truth right now gets it wrong there's no surprise that people would have gotten this wrong previously the thing that's interesting are the trend that I think seems new genuinely novel and new is how cemented people are in their beliefs how much less open they seem to be about changing their mind that if they have a belief that is intrinsic to their sense of self they hold on to it tightly they do not want to change it if they do that's admitting failure and let like destru C and they can't deal with it how much truth do you think there is in saying that people are less openminded now than they were before Oh I think they're very entrenched I think it's confirmation bias they look for what they look for what reinforces their existing belief and they are really closed off to new information um and and you you said it very well when you said it's it's changing so fast it's hard to keep up with it now um if I'm doing a show that uh has to do with the lgbtq uh Community um I have researchers that check the glossery for what is preferred or acceptable now even if I did it a month ago because it may have changed and look I I want to be respect respectful I mean if if this is if this is the language system they have I I I want to be respectful in describing it I I even said in the book I was I said I'm going to try and describe this the way I think they look at this now and I'm not setting up a paper tiger I'm I'm going to try and give you as real an explanation of how I think they descri cribe sex versus gender Now versus what they did before and if I'm wrong go to this website and check it to get it because I'm not I'm not trying to say this wrong but in this day and time what they try to do is catch we used to say catch somebody red-handed now we say catch somebody with the wrong word in their mouth it's not it's not what they really feel it's just catch a misspeaking and jump on that bandwagon and they they really get they really alienate a lot of real allies if they catch somebody saying something the wrong way uh it might be somebody that's actually a huge supporter that just out of ignorance said something the wrong way or misspoke um and I I think it is hard to keep up sometimes uh with what's acceptable terminology I mean I try to do it just out of respect and maybe I get it wrong sometimes maybe I don't I don't know I try well I suppose again the problem here is that if there is status associated with being a victim there is an incentive for somebody to find victimhood even where there isn't any and I guess the other side is that people know that most people are trying their best most of the time I think I I fundamentally believe that most people are good the issue is I don't think the people that are enforcing these rules are particularly good so they use their own theory of mind which is deep down I don't think I'm a good person deep down I know that the things that I say publicly and the things that I believe privately are the same thing they understand that they're playing this game they understand that it's narcissistic and manipulative and aggressive and malign and all the rest of it and they then Port that same theory of Mind onto everybody else that means that when when someone messes up out of good faith they don't see it in good faith oh here's the The Smoking Gun that tells us that Dr Phil is the racist transphobic bigot homophobic Zionist whatever that we always knew that he was and this is proof of it it's like is it that or is it just that language is imprecise no I think some of it's even worse I think some of it is larous because if they can catch someone like me using a wrong word or saying something that they can say okay this runs a foul of the the current ideology then that's like gold because if they can jump on my coattail uh if they catch Joe Blow saying it wrong that's not much good they catch me saying it wrong you're gonna get a lot of headlines how nervous does this make you feel you know you've spoken about this I asked you right at the top you're in the mid midst of it right you are patient zero for mainstream media there is a lot of it around you lots of plays lots of notoriety associated with it what's that like what's personally what's that like for you on a daily basis to be walking on EG eggshells well I don't walk on eggshells I you know I've said before there's good news and bad news uh when you're dealing with me um the good news is if if I'm involved in something it's likely to get a lot of attention the bad news is if I'm involved in something it's likely to get a lot of attention so that that's why I mean really if if they can get if they can get me in a headline um then they get a lot of mileage out of it so it can be you know Dr Phil's Gardener has a wreck I mean my Gardener can have a wreck 30 miles from my house and it won't be uh Bob Jenkins has a wreck it'll be Dr Phil's Garder has a wreck I could have been in Europe at the time but it'll the headline will be and I swear I could I could stop on Sunset to get a kitten out of traffic and it the headline will be Dr Phil arrogantly blocks traffic on Sunset uh because they just get mileage out of it so I've learned a long time ago that you you can't make everybody happy so you might as well do what you truly believe and as long as I know in my heart who who I am and what my intentions are somebody prostituting that just doesn't bother me I don't I don't think there's anything particularly new about that I think yes may maybe this has been amped up a little bit but the news has always been in the clickbait business they've just got better at it it's a case they have it's a case of headlines whatever the most aggressive fear stoking limic hijacking wordage that they can come up with that's what they're going to go for and that's the way that that's the way that it's always been and I don't know what to I'll I'll butcher the saying but it is the true the uh a lie travels around the world while the truth is still lacing up its shoes it's something like that yeah um and there's actually been a study about that I think MIT did it uh and it it actually measured this and a lie travels six times faster than the truth and the reason for that is a lot is simple and quick and black and white and the truth is never that clean it's never that quick it's more complicated so a lie is good clickbait it's a clean headline and so it travels real quick have you heard of brandolini's law it's also called the asymmetry principle it says it says that it takes far less energy to produce than to refute it therefore the world is filled with unrefuted yeah I believe it what about I believe it talk to me about family I know this is something that's very important to you is there actually an attack on family at the moment you know I I I think there is and I'm so sensitive to it because I think family is the backbone of America I I think the family unit is is the backbone of America and if families are strong and by strong I mean there are good family relationships ship kids have a good relationship with their parents they stay in contact they they have I mean while they're together they have meals together they communicate together um I I'll give you a tragic example of this which will speak volumes um there's something going around right now called sextortion and most people won't know what that mean you probably do no no even me the terminally online guy doesn't know what this is well this and AI has you know I told you I'm going to have to start dealing with AI as things evolve what's happening is these these people are generating images some of them they may have stolen from somewhere and some of them they generate uh completely made up and they get online and start talking to a young man and they send him this image of a girl they talk to him like they're a 14 or 15 year old girl oh it's like it's like AI catfishing yes exactly they send him a picture they start talking to him and say you know I like you so much I want to send you a picture so they send him a nude photo and it's like I I've shown you mine you show me yours i' I've shown you my body you show me yours and he's like well I'm not going to blow this so he does he he sends her one back the second they get it they write back and say I am not a 14-year-old girl and I now have a naked picture of you and I'm going to send it to your parents all the people in your contact list your pastor I've got your school year book I'm going to send this to everybody and humiliate you if you don't send me $110,000 right now and I did three or four stories about that last week and one of of them uh killed himself in an hour and 40 minutes he panicked and thought Oh my God I'm I I'm going to humiliate my parents and myself he killed himself almost immediately another one killed himself in a matter of a few days uh they it was just horrible I mean just absolutely horrible why because there was a time when families were so tight that if something happened to one of them it happened to all of them and you would go to your family W with anything and you it was all together and now there's we the relationships are so distant they don't feel it anymore and these kids felt alone they felt they couldn't do it and then we had a few examples there who did go to their parents and say hey I screwed up big time uh here's what happened and so they parents said well that don't even talk to him anymore just cut them off and and of course the answer to that if you get caught in that trap is it was an AI generated picture all you got to do is say that's not me I wish that was me please send it to everybody I don't care and hang up and I mean you you're out of it but uh kids don't think that way and they panic and that's because they don't have that relationship with their parents with their family I always tell parents talk to your kids about things that don't matter so that line is open when it comes time to talk about things that do you got to do that you got to have it where you can talk about anything does this suggest that family is under attack though is this not just a a natural consequence Downstream of there's more things to distract people they can watch Netflix or play video games or or go on social media how much of this is an actual purposeful attack there are six billion views of the hashtags toxic parent toxic family toxic mother on social media platforms right now six billion views of them pedaling no contact toxic parent toxic family yeah it's under attack people are out there selling that sort of mentality and these are people that don't know come here from go sium about family Dynamics or how to heal a family or anything about keeping a relationship open or what the consequences are if you cut off your family and if you do and it's two years later and you're now alone and lost and depressed let me ask you where those people will be then you w't be able to find them in two weeks with a flashlight because they're gone they don't know squat about nothing they're just on there spewing out blah blah blah blah blah give me some white pills then what are the what are the pr principles that people can use to rely on to be more resilient there's a lot of bad outcomes at the moment that we've gone through what are the ways that people can fight back well that's because you ask questions about problems that's why we've gone through bad outcomes ask me something happy like the one you just ask of course um uh number one be who you are on purpose um that yeah I I talk in the book about 10 principles of a healthy society and number one is be who you are on purpose look you don't want to be reactive to society don't just get up and whatever comes your way on the Internet or at work or your friends don't be a sheep be who you are on purpose and that means you got a star in your own life and I don't care you know people say well that's easy for you to say Dr Phil you've had your own TV show for 25 years so yeah it's easy to start in your own life I don't care if you're a plumber or a teacher or an architect or an accountant or whatever star in your own life you've got people in your life you've got children you've got friends You' got parents you've got a church you've got a team you play on what star in your own life and that that means you've got to decide what's important to you and that I'm not telling you about being selfish it's not selfish to take care of yourself because you can't give away what you don't have if you don't take care of yourself if you don't love yourself if you don't nurture yourself you can't love and nurture other people so if you let yourself get emotionally bankrupt then you have nothing to give to other people so be who you are on purpose don't let the internet program you don't let some IDE ology program you choose who you want to be and what you think is important that is that to me is is so critical and I I think you you pair that up with the thought that make all choose all behaviors based on results and all thoughts based on rationality and rationality means is this thought based on fact is it does it get me what I want does it protect and prolong my life I mean there there are just simple tests that you can ask yourself is is this really something that that makes sense easy questions you can ask yourself when you're thinking something is this is this factual have I verified this or is this something I'm telling myself um does it get me what I want does it protect and prolong my life these are things that you that that you can ask yourself so choose your behaviors based on people always teasing me about saying how's that working for you that's a pretty damn good question to be asking you if you're doing something how how's it working for you if it ain't working change what you're doing I love the I love the idea of focusing on solving problems rather than winning arguments I see so much so much of the discourse online is all about winning arguments rather than solving problems here's a really interesting example something I noticed on Twitter which is very rarely do you ever see someone ConEd a point and say oh actually that's that's really interesting that you said that I'd never seen that that I didn't I didn't see that before and there's two two reasons first one being that admitting defeat online is tantamount to destruction it's embarrassing it's lame you're supposed to have this perfectly robust walled off Fortress of whatever your philosophical worldview is and the second one is that most of the rhetoric is so adversarial and mean and cutting and sardonic that who entering into that type of an exchange wants to admit that they're wrong it's so you've just taken the piss out of me for a full thread of of tweets I'm not going to say oh yeah good one Dr Phil thanks for really resetting my worldview I'm going to say no you just called me a name before so I'm going to call you a name and I'm not going to believe what you say yeah and and I'll I'll challenge you to look at my threads and responses because I'll have people call me everything but decent and uh they get some good ones on there and those are usually the ones I respond to if if I respond and I don't sit and typ of myself I have somebody I tell I say all right write this down because I type like uh so I have my guy and I'll say all right take this down um and I tell them first off hey thank you for caring enough to share your thoughts because it took time for you to respond and um I disagree with a lot of what you said but I I hear you and I I I hope you'll consider this and fact check me and if if there are some things I said that are not factual then come back to me with it and let's let's talk about that uh because I had somebody the other day said oh I I thought you were really into facts and now I see you saying this I mean like I'll never I'll never follow you again and I said well hey thanks for saying that you didn't have to respond at all you could have just cut me off but please fact check me and send me what it is that I'm wrong about and if I am I'll correct it and and tell you and let's keep this dialogue open and um he hasn't responded yet um because when I when when I'm doing something on a show um I'll figure out what I'm going to say and do and I have what we call a brain room and these are college professors I've hired from around the country and they're all over the political spectrum and I'll have them research something and they'll send all of that to me and then I'll work out the points I'm going to make and and I'll send that back to them and say is this supportable and they'll say well yes no or maybe and I'll get down to what there's absolute empirical support for and then when I do the actual show I send the transcript to them to check and make sure I didn't conflate two things that weren't meant to be or whatever and if I've said something that is not what was intended or is not supportable it comes out so they check it before I do it and then I check the they check the points I intend to make and then they check the transcript afterwards and then it goes to air so I triple check things with a research room before I ever say it and that book has been scrubbed top side and bottom let me tell you because I want to let me tell you I want to be the place that deals with facts I I and if it's an opinion I say so I say all right now I'm there aren't this isn't one that lends itself to facts this is just opinion so I'm going to give you mine take it for what you will I identify it if it's that way otherwise I I give them the empirical data what do you mean when you say do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable what you said earlier about I wonder how many people are just kind of biting their tongue because they don't want to take the Heat and I say I don't think we can do that I think we it's time we got to speak up Dr Phil ladies and gentlemen I really appreciate you coming on I very much respect the fact that you're going through all of these hurdles in an effort to try and be balanced I think it's uh in some ways sad that you need to do that just to protect yourself from being caught out in the wrong the wrong uh statement and also given the fact that you reach millions and millions and millions of people it's also important because if we're struggling with information and the quality of information then the people who reach the most people should be trying to communicate it in the most accurate way possible so yeah it's a a very impressive way to live out your philosophy well you know I think if people are going to honor me with their time I I owe it to them to do my homework and U so I you know I'm gonna I'm going to do the best I can and I won't always get it right and when I do I'll correct it and hopefully catch it before it goes out and if not I'll I'll say so so uh I I really enjoyed this conversation you asked some U uh challenging questions Chris so I I really appreciate it I appreciate you too thank you Dr you have to you have to come up and see us sometime and um I'll be down your way pretty soon I've got some I got a lot of friends down there Ron White and Joe Rogan and some other guys down there that I hang with so uh come through we'll do barbecue we can play pickle ball we can do all of the Austin things all right good deal if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast of for the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give him a watch

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 176,068

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Chris Williamson modern wisdom, modern wisdom podcast, chriswillx, Chris Williamson Modern Wisdom Podcast, Dr Phil, Dr Phil Chris Williamson, Chris Williamson Dr Phil, Dr Phil education, Dr Phil on education, Dr Phil show, Dr Phil show education, Dr Phil show kids, Dr Phil on the state of education, Dr Phil Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Dr Phil

Id: lVmq-91ntAQ

Length: 66min 30sec (3990 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024