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