This is Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Matthews Podcast. More what you
hear Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive. You know doctor Phil c McGraw from not
only his best selling books, but also his hit television show Doctor Phil.
He's got a new creation out that is as timely as as if taken from
today's headlines. It's called We Got Issues, How you Can Stand Strong for
America's soul and sanity. Greetings, Doctor Phil. Well, hello, it's
so good to talk to you. I love Tulsa and Oklahoma City. I've
lived in both cities. A fantastic I didn't know that, but you got
to reattach my ground where our doctor Phil, where we seem to be living
in an age where right is wrong, up is down, left is right,
and everybody just gets to do whatever they want to do when they want
to do it. Well, boy, I couldn't have said it better.
You are so right. And that's what I mean when I say we've got
issues. I think that we've got certain factions in this country right now.
I call it the tyranny of the friends that's pushing narratives that have lost all
contact, no common sense whatsoever. When you've got people that are just rewriting
history, rewriting science, rewriting biology, rewriting everything that we know to be
verifiably factually true. Then you've got somebody, as my grandmother used to say,
you've quit preaching and gone to meddling. Now you're meddling with the very
facts of life. And it's time that we stet up and say, look,
enough's enough and too much is too much. We're going to start being
heard instead of just letting you dominate the narrative in the conversation. And you
know, I think it started with the proliferation of the Internet, because you
might have some guys or whatever with some kind of wacky theory or something,
and if they were hanging around the barn up in Kansas or something, you'd
go with eight or ten of them. They maybe go out in the woods
and talk about it. But now you get on the Internet, it gets
oxygen and it can spread and spread and spread, and people want to belong
to something, and so they jump on the bandwagon, and before you know
it, you got a bunch of people running around talking nonsense. Where you're
talking to doctor Phil this new book, we've got issues, How you can
stand strong for America's soul and sanity and doctor phil this isn't about politics.
This is about culture, isn't it. It's not at all about politics.
And that's for two reasons. Number one, I don't know enough about politics
to talk about politics. And number two, it is about it begins with
family. I think every culture has a backbone in the family unit. And
I think the family in America is under attack. Some of it is unintended
content sequences of like technology, and some of it is by design, where
people are trying to rewrite how things work and break down the family unit,
and that is so wrong. Church membership right now, for example, has
dropped below fifty percent for the first time in our country's history, and I
think that is damaging the family. I think the fact that everybody is on
their phone, everybody's head down looking at a screen instead of looking at each
other. You'll see a family together out to dinner, befour of them around
a table, and three of the four are on their phone instead of actually
engaging and talking to each other. And this can't continue on. We had
I think the biggest change in society since the Industrial Revolution, and I know
there have been like four industrial revolutions that have occurred, the mechanization, and
then you go on all the way through technology. But I think this is
the biggest change. We used to be like ninety five percent agricultural, now
we're one percent because everything got mechanized. This is the biggest change since then.
And a year after smartphones dropped, we saw the biggest spike in depression,
anxiety, loneliness, suicidality among our young people since records were being kept,
and it's just continued to get worse because they're not living their lives.
They're watching other people live their lives, and they're comparing themselves, and those
lives they're comparing to are fictions, they're not reality, and by comparison,
they're going to lose every time. And I tell parents all the time,
you're not going to be the only voice in your child's ear, so you
better make sure you are the best voice in your child's ear, because they're
getting bombarded from so many different angles. Now. I don't have a dog
in that fight, doctor Phil. I don't. My wife and I are
childless, but I can't imagine having to deal with that in this day and
age. One of the things we try to do is an exercises. At
the end of the day, we put the phones down and try to talk
about how our days were without interruption for a good forty five minutes, maybe
an hour, even before we sit down to dinner, just to communicate.
And finally, amusingly enough, I just bought a new car and dealing with
the salesman. I didn't bring my phone with me on purpose, and they
wanted to do all of the negotiating with texts. They would go back to
the sales manager and then text me an offer, and then I wanted me
to text it back. They wanted to text me a form to fill out
for all the credit checks they do on you. And I said, I
didn't bring my phone. We're going to have to talk one on one about
this, you know, like we used to. But they don't know how
to do that. Yeah, they don't want to look you in the eye.
It's easier to lie on text, yes, just to look you in
the eyeline. So what to do about this, this cultural problem? Doctor
Phil? Well, you know, I hate people that criticize and complain but
then don't have an alternative. And this is a very prescriptive book, you
know, I set forth for example. Ten principles for a healthy society,
and I'll give you a few examples. You know. Number one is you've
got to be who you are on purpose, and that means you've got to
consciously decide what's important to you, what you want to invest in, where
you want to put your time, what your values are, because you have
to live with intention. And right now, we have too many people that
are just kind of going with the flow, just kind of whatever you wake
up and whatever the world serves you up that day, that's what you're going
to react to. And we can't do that anymore. We've got people that
are attacking the core of our country. And I also talk in there about
the fact that we need to we need to choose which voices we listen to.
And you don't give attention to a voice just because it's the loudest.
You can't do that. Just because somebody's yelling the loudest doesn't mean they deserve
the most attention. We've got to choose who we listen to, who we
pay attention to. And you've got to decide that you're going to support a
meritocracy in this country. Look, this country was built on hard work and
talent and people bringing something that was added value. But now our colleges and
universities are teaching a quality of outcome, not a quality of opportunity Lee,
They're teaching a quality of outcome where everybody winds up the same, whether you
work hard or you don't, whether you get an education or you don't,
whether you work hard at your job or you don't, everybody comes out the
same. That does work. That's called Marxism, that's called socialism. It's
been tried, it didn't work. We've got several hundred thousand corpses to prove
it. But yet all of a sudden, that's the news, that's the
new thought of the day. So we're going to pretend that everybody comes out
the same. Doesn't work that way. So I talk about these things that
are very prescriptive, but it involves people saying, Hey, I'm proud of
this country, I'm proud to be an American, and I'm going to fight
for our country. And you cannot not choose. Not choosing is a choice.
You got to decide where you come down on these issues, and you've
got to push back on the things that you consider important. Philip C.
McGrath PhD. Doctor Phil. You know him his new books, We've Got
Issues, and it is out everywhere you get books, How you Can Stand
Strong for America's Soul and Sanity? Real quick, doctor Phil. I know
you've got a new television project in the works. April second. We're launching
Merritt Street Media. And that name was not chosen at random, as you
can guess from what I've been saying. And we'll launch on April second,
and you won't be able to get out of the way of it. We
will be on every cable system, we will be on streamers, we will
be on terrestrial television. Everywhere you can get a television signal, you will
find Merritt Street Media and my show will be the anchor in primetime. We're
going to have four hours of news every day where we just report the facts
and let people decide what they think about it. Lots of different programming options
there throughout twenty four hours, seven days a week, and I think people
are going to find this is a destination network that you can turn on in
the morning and just leave on all day. We've Got Issues, as the
book, Doctor Phil, How you Can Stand Strong for America's Soul insanity.
Thank you for joining us, Hey, thanks for letting me talk to you.
I love Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee
Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live
weekday afternoons from five to seven and Iheartsmedia presentation