This week, Dr. Phil is joined by his good friend and former co-worker, Amy Poehler. They talk about how Amy went from being a complete train wreck to being a multi-millionaire, and how she did it. They also talk about Amy's new album, and Amy s new album which is out now. And Amy talks about why it s so hard to grow up when you re surrounded by people with a lot of heads on their shoulders and a million dollars at the same time, and why you should just stop being crazy and grow up! Don t forget to check out the rest of the show on Apple Podcasts and wherever else you get your news and information, you can find us there! Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with what s going on in the world of celebrity news and culture! You can also become a patron patron of the podcast and get 10% off the first month with discount code: PODCAST10 at checkout! Thanks so much for listening and supporting the podcast, it means a lot to us! Timestamps: 5:00 - Amy and Amy's song 8:30 - How do you feel about it? 9:15 - How to grow a career? 11:40 - What do you want to grow? 14:00- What s your advice for someone else? 16:00 17:20 - What would you do with money? 18:15- How to stop being a train wreck? 19: How to turn your life around? 21:30- What are you gonna turn it into a positive thing? 22: What s the best thing you can you do? 23: How can I grow up? 25:10 - What s my advice for me? 26:00 How do I grow a positive attitude? 27:00 Can you be a better person? 29:00 Do you have a problem? 30:00 What s a good thing I m going to turn something positive out of this next time? 35:00 My advice? 36:00 Would you like to see someone else do it better? 31:00 Is there a better one? 37: Is there something you re going to get your shit together? 38:00 I m not going to have it better than that? 39:00 Are you going to be better than this?
00:00:47.000You know, seriously, this girl comes on with her mother, and her mother actually brings her on, of course, and she's a train wreck, and we work with her, and we send her to this ranch for like four months, right?
00:01:02.000She goes for a long time, and Makes a complete turnaround.
00:01:33.000And her mother's finding people that are trashing her, the mother, on these social media platforms.
00:01:39.000Her mother tracks them down, backs into who they are, gets their phone numbers, calls them up, yelling into the phone, calling them names and stuff, gets the daughter involved.
00:02:31.000And off they go, and then this phrase that got turned into a, you know, whatever, a meme or whatever they call it, it just went crazy, and what, she was nominated for a Grammy or something?
00:03:02.000Maybe she'll turn – maybe it'll grow her up and she'll turn something positive out, but I hope so.
00:03:06.000Well, that's a very good attitude, a very healthy attitude for you.
00:03:08.000But it is – when something goes viral like that, something strange that for whatever reason, it catches and takes off, it's – It doesn't make any sense.
00:04:44.000What I hope now is that she's surrounded by mature people with business heads on their shoulders and development people that will actually guide this in a way that it's not 15 minutes.
00:05:20.000And, you know, and I was actually very impressed with her that she actually went to the White House to talk about prison reform for people that are unjustly accused and have been in jail for too long for things that they didn't do.
00:05:35.000Yeah, and I know Kim, and she's actually a very nice girl, very smart, and as I say, they've done some very brilliant branding, and it's certainly paid off.
00:05:45.000It's just so fascinating when something catches like that girl.
00:05:48.000What is her name, the Catch Me Outside girl?
00:06:24.000I mean, it has to be a lot of responsibility to try to give people advice and try to straighten their life out and show them the flaws and the errors that they're making.
00:07:02.000So I don't think problems are simple at all.
00:07:06.000But the solutions are often simple, don't you think?
00:07:10.000It's kind of like the old joke, you go to the doctor and you say, this hurts.
00:07:14.000And he says, well, then don't do that anymore.
00:07:17.000A lot of times it's very simple in that somebody will have a complex thing that comes from childhood or maybe it's a drug background or they've had trauma in their life.
00:07:28.000But the solution is change your behavior.
00:07:39.000Sometimes the solutions are very simple even though the problems are very complex because at some point you have to stop focusing on why and start focusing on what.
00:07:49.000Instead of why it happened, what am I going to do to change it?
00:07:51.000So sometimes the solutions are pretty simple.
00:07:53.000But implementing those solutions, it's often very difficult for people to change their lives, change their patterns.
00:08:04.000Nobody does anything in pattern if they don't get a payoff.
00:08:09.000And if you can identify, that's why insight's so important.
00:08:15.000That's why I think it's the number one outcome to whether somebody's going to respond to a talking therapy, for example.
00:08:22.000If somebody can identify what their payoff is, where they really can figure out I'm doing this repeatedly and my payoff is I don't have to work or I don't get held accountable for this or I'm escaping accountability over here or I get attention or sympathy.
00:08:42.000If they can figure out what their payoff is and they can then control that, whether it's for themselves or their kids or whatever, if you control the currency, then you can control the behavior.
00:08:53.000Yeah, it just seems that people have this comfort in their patterns.
00:09:00.000And even if their patterns are self-destructive, even if it's drug abuse or alcoholism, the comfort in those patterns, falling into those patterns, it seems very compelling to a lot of people.
00:09:12.000Yeah, and payoffs don't necessarily mean that it's a positive payoff.
00:09:21.000That's not a positive payoff, but it's a payoff.
00:09:23.000And if you get high and so you don't get a job and you don't take care of your kids, that's a payoff that you're not doing things that you need to do that you should be accountable for.
00:09:38.000It's a pathological payoff, but it's a payoff nonetheless.
00:09:41.000And so that does reward you even though it's a pathological payoff.
00:09:51.000But if you can identify that where they say, look, I'm not doing what I need to do and I need to stop rewarding myself in that way and hold myself – I need to be there for my kid.
00:10:02.000I tell my kid I'm going to be there every day and I don't show up because I'm high on drugs, then I need to stop doing it.
00:10:09.000I need to not let myself get away with that and instead require myself to show up for the kid when I say I do, say I will.
00:10:18.000And then you see what's in the kid's eyes.
00:10:29.000How many people just listened and try for a little bit and then bail?
00:10:33.000You know, it's hard to say because I think sometimes our most productive guests are the ones that don't get it.
00:10:44.000Because the mail we get, they'll say, oh wow, that guy didn't get it or that woman didn't get it, but I saw myself in them and I'll never say that again.
00:10:57.000I saw them being such a right fighter or I saw them being so hard-headed or so oppositional and I heard them say things I've said and And they left and didn't get it.
00:11:15.000So sometimes those that don't get it at all while they're there are the ones that are the best teaching tools for the millions of people that are home watching.
00:11:25.000When you watch people fail and you go, oh, okay, I see that in myself.
00:11:29.000I just got to not do what that guy's doing.
00:11:31.000And then also you see the stubborn pig-headedness that some people have where they won't listen to advice.
00:11:36.000And you could clearly see how they're ruining their lives by not being honest.
00:11:42.000Yeah, and sometimes the story that we might have is maybe extreme where you say, I don't do all six things they're doing, but I do two of them.
00:11:56.000So, I mean, that's where I think you get a payoff.
00:11:59.000And, you know, people go and find these things on the internet.
00:12:04.000I mean, last year, you know, we have a channel where we put up, you know, different clips and divorce shows or parenting shows or whatever.
00:12:11.000And we had over 2 billion views, you know, last year of people just going and finding that information and looking at it.
00:12:19.000So, I know people are seeking the information out and looking at it beyond the show itself, so they must be seeking information, and we just don't have a good distribution system for mental health in America, so I think they're hungry for it and they look for it.
00:12:35.000Well, there's so many people out there that are trying to do better.
00:12:38.000They're trying to get their lives in order.
00:12:40.000And shows like yours and just advice shows, people that are giving out inspiration and knowledge, it's such an important thing for people, especially for people that didn't grow up with wise parents or maybe a good support system around them.
00:12:59.000I grew up with an alcoholic father, and it was a pretty violent home, and he was a really bad alcoholic.
00:13:08.000And I know having grown up in that, you wind up with what I call a damaged personal truth, and you feel second class.
00:13:24.000The problem that kids make, because I know I did it and I see others do it, is you compare your personal truth, what you know about yourself and how you really live and what's really going on,
00:13:39.000you compare your personal truth to everybody else's social mask.
00:13:45.000Because you go to school and you know, well, I know that last night the windows got kicked out of my house.
00:13:52.000I know that the utilities got turned off.
00:13:54.000And I know there was a big fight in my kitchen last night.
00:13:58.000And the kid sitting next to me, he's got on a shirt that's all ironed and his face is all bright and clean.
00:14:05.000And, you know, he looks like he's just got it all together.
00:14:08.000And you compare yourself to that person, that kid, and you feel like you're second class.
00:14:14.000And the problem with that is we generate the results in life we think we deserve.
00:14:20.000So if you think you're damaged, you think you're second class, you will generate results that you think a second class person deserves.
00:14:30.000So if you don't fix your personal truth...
00:14:34.000Then you'll spend the rest of your life saying, well, those really good results, those belong for somebody else.
00:14:42.000And you'll settle for second best, and you won't get what you might otherwise generate for yourself if you don't fix your personal truth.
00:14:51.000And so I think a lot of people are struggling looking for a way to kind of get out of feeling not good about themselves and damage self-esteem, damage self-worth, and they really don't know where to go.
00:15:29.000If you can get them thinking about that, then, you know, maybe you've done something.
00:15:32.000Yeah, you know, Tony Robbins once said once that it's incremental changes over the long haul, and the way you have to look at it is if these two boats are going in a parallel direction and one of them just shifts five degrees, over the course of time, this boat is going to be in a far different place than the other boat that's going the same way it was always going.
00:15:49.000Yeah, and the important thing to realize as well is the next year is going to go by whether you're doing something about your life or not.
00:15:57.000I mean, we're sitting here right now at the end of February, and the next...
00:16:05.000Ten months are going to go by whether somebody is working to make change or whether they're not.
00:16:11.000And they may think, you know, oh my God, I'm so far overweight, I'll never get it under control, or I'm so behind in my bills, or I'm so, you know, just depressed, or everything is so out of control.
00:16:26.000You make those incremental changes and then, you know, pretty soon in December you go, hey, I'm way better off than I was at the end of February.
00:16:36.000So, shit, you made little changes and they all added up.
00:16:39.000And if you don't, by the end of the year, you're just in deeper.
00:17:05.000You've got to have somebody, whether it's yourself or a friend or somebody that's going to say, look, did you do what you said you were going to do by this time?
00:17:14.000And if you don't, hold your feet to the fire.
00:17:31.000So you've got to say, okay, I'm going to take this small step by here, this small step by there, this small step by there, and then pretty soon, you know, we don't leap tall buildings in a single bound.
00:17:44.000Over all the years you've been doing your show, you've developed a real community, right?
00:17:48.000I mean, you really have made an impact.
00:17:51.000If you stop and think about all the people that your show has touched, and all the people that have listened to your advice, and all the people that have taken that advice, and made those little incremental changes in their lives, and set those goals, and held themselves accountable, that's a pretty significant thing.
00:18:17.000I mean, having depression or anxiety or whatever, to me, should have no more stigma than having a knee injury or kidney infection or diabetes.
00:18:49.000I mean, it's not something that you should be ashamed of.
00:18:53.000When you're talking to someone that maybe has depression, do you try to get them to exercise first?
00:18:59.000Do you try to get them to visit a psychiatrist immediately and get on medication?
00:19:04.000Do you take it on a case-by-case basis?
00:19:06.000Well, I do, but you have to approach it.
00:19:09.000Everybody has a philosophy about it, and I'm not saying that mine's any better than anybody else's, but I do have a philosophy about it, and I'm very slow to medication.
00:19:21.000I mean, I think you use medication for biochemical replacement.
00:19:27.000I mean, if for some reason your body is not making enough of something it needs, then maybe you support it short-term biochemically.
00:19:37.000But, you know, I look at depression...
00:19:43.000There's a lot of ways you can break it up, but I look at it like, is it exogenous depression or endogenous depression?
00:19:50.000I mean, is it coming from the inside out or the outside in?
00:19:54.000Is it because you're reacting to something?
00:19:56.000I see a lot of depressed people that In a sense, it makes sense.
00:20:02.000I mean, you look at their life and you say, well, if you're not down about this, you should be.
00:21:04.000A mental illness, it's just a realistic reaction to a bad spot in their life.
00:21:10.000Yeah, that's such a good way of putting it, too, that if you weren't in a bad state looking at this, there might be something wrong with you.
00:21:18.000I mean, if you've gotten a divorce, lost your job, your health's in bad shape, your kids are alienated from you, and you're saying, I'm fine.
00:21:29.000Then you're not in touch with reality.
00:22:39.000You're either going to make a U-turn and get your ass back over to the side of the road and get in the grass, or you're going to run to the other side and get off the road and get in the grass.
00:22:48.000But you're not going to stand there in the middle of the road and melt yourself down to the knees.
00:22:59.000If you're in pain, it's going to motivate you to move, to change something, and to mask that with drugs, to dull that pain with drugs is not necessarily a good thing.
00:23:12.000And I wish more people thought that way, particularly more doctors.
00:23:15.000You know, I have so many friends that have gone to a doctor because they're not feeling so good, and they're almost immediately wanting to throw them on something.
00:23:32.000I don't really remember it being a thing when I was a kid that was discussed the way it's discussed now.
00:23:38.000Now it's discussed the way people discuss all sorts of other ailments.
00:23:43.000Is it just an awareness thing, or is it just people are thinking about it now in different terms?
00:23:48.000Well, I think it's part of the narrative now, and I think with social media, with the internet, not just social media, but with the internet, I think there's just a lot more in the nomenclature, and there's a lot more awareness about it.
00:24:05.000But I think it was just as prevalent in the 50s and 60s as it was now.
00:24:09.000But in the 50s and 60s, there wasn't a psychologist on every corner.
00:24:45.000I generally think it's a good thing because I think – Fifty-eight percent of our rural markets today have no psychiatrist available and something like 50 or roughly have no mental health professional available at all.
00:25:07.000So there's just nobody available to help people in the outlying areas.
00:25:14.000I think the more people you can get into the profession, so long as there's a degree of competency, is better.
00:25:21.000But, you know, I think it's always been prevalent.
00:25:23.000I just think people didn't talk about it very much.
00:25:25.000It's just something they swallowed or they took to church or, you know.
00:25:30.000When you see, you know, all these folks that are on medication today, I mean, how many of these people do you think legitimately should be on medication?
00:25:39.000I mean, is it something you can assess?
00:25:43.000You know, I can't answer that in terms, I mean, I'm sure there's research of people, how many people are on medication, but in my personal experience, Most of the people that I see on medications,
00:26:01.000in my opinion, don't need most of the medications they're on.
00:26:09.000You asked me to hand you a research survey or study to support that.
00:26:13.000I can't hand it to you or I can't point you to one.
00:26:16.000I can just tell you, after 45 years in this experience...
00:26:20.000I see people that are on medication, they've usually seen someone for six or eight minutes and said, you know, I'm really feeling kind of down or blue.
00:26:33.000Here's some Prozac, here's this, here's that.
00:26:36.000They give it to them and they don't even really ask why.
00:26:41.000And they just give it to them because medicine has become a high volume business.
00:26:48.000And that's not necessarily the doctor's fault.
00:26:50.000I mean, the way that it's now funded and Medicare and Medicaid, you've got to turn them and burn them.
00:27:00.000And so they throw pills at them because they don't have an hour to sit down or don't take an hour to sit down and talk about it and say, well, let's find out what's going on.
00:27:25.000Let's come up with an action plan and change it.
00:27:28.000So most of the people I see on medication, not all, but most of the people I see are on too many medications in too high a dose or either don't need it at all.
00:27:40.000And I'm really bothered by polypharmacy.
00:27:52.000It seems like more people are treating this, you know, air quotes, depression issue as if it's a medical disorder like diabetes or something where you need medication.
00:28:02.000Yeah, and look, for a lot of people it works.
00:28:06.000I mean, you give people a mood elevator and they say, hey, I feel better.
00:28:10.000And then maybe they change their life.
00:28:12.000Maybe they move their life into a more positive direction.
00:28:16.000Because one of the things about depression, for example, you use that as an example, is you get what's referred to as psychomotor retardation.
00:28:24.000There's a lessening in activity level.
00:28:29.000And I think old sayings get to be old sayings because they're profound, like you're not going to get a hit if you're not swinging.
00:28:36.000Well, if you're depressed and so you think slower, less actively, you behave less actively, Your chance of getting rewarded goes down,
00:29:36.000Yeah, I know people that have been on things since they were five years old, and they're in their 40s.
00:29:42.000And then you have wastebasket diagnosis like ADD and ADHD, where what used to be a spoiled brat It's now ADD or ADHD, so they start prescribing these neocortical stimulants like Ritalin.
00:30:00.000And if you give a kid that does not need a neocortical stimulant a stimulant, you're really going to throw them off the charts now because you've got a normally active brain that you're now making hyperactive.
00:30:16.000So You're creating a problem that didn't exist before you gave them the medication because you didn't do the proper diagnosis.
00:30:23.000Yeah, I had my old neighbor had a situation like that.
00:30:26.000They had a kid, and the kid just had a lot of energy, and they weren't paying attention to him.
00:30:43.000This rash of people being treated for these ailments, air quotes, and then we're not seeing how this all turns out in the long run and how much damage we're doing to these people.
00:30:53.000And in fairness, on the other end of the continuum, I have seen some people that are clearly psychotic, schizophrenic, delusional, that without medication are absolutely impossible to manage.
00:31:12.000But if you put them on antipsychotics, so you can lower their delusional behavior, their hallucinatory behavior, so you can now have a meaningful conversation with them, so they can respond to talking therapies.
00:31:30.000It makes all the difference in the world.
00:31:31.000And without those antipsychotics, you would be lost without them.
00:31:36.000So there are some medications for some disorders that are absolute miracles that without them you wouldn't be able to do the work you need to do to get the person back where they need to be.
00:31:57.000But, you know, Mostly when you talk to people about it thoughtfully, they agree with what I'm saying.
00:32:09.000I mean, most people will agree that you need to be thoughtful about prescribing medications and that medications are too readily administered.
00:32:20.000I mean, that's certainly what we've seen in the opioid epidemic right now.
00:32:25.000Opioids are so readily prescribed right now that there are enough opioid prescriptions for every man, woman and child in America to have their own bottle.
00:32:36.000And if you renew that prescription one time, One time.
00:32:42.000If you are taking those opioids at the seven-day mark, your chance of being addicted at one year is one in 12. And if you renew it at, if you're still taking them at 30 days, your likelihood of being addicted is one in three.
00:33:29.000That you weren't seeing 10 years ago because they get started on prescription opioids and then they can't afford them or finally the doctor cuts them off but they're addicted and so they start taking heroin because it's cheaper.
00:33:41.000Now this is obviously a very disturbing pattern but where do you see this going?
00:33:45.000Like when you look at the future I mean it looks bleak in that regard.
00:33:48.000I mean I've known several people that have had real problems with pills.
00:33:53.000The problem that I think people have is they think, because a doctor gave me this, because it's on a prescription pad, that this is safe.
00:34:01.000Your body doesn't know whether you got that in the back alley or you got it from a doctor.
00:34:07.000It still has the same addictive quality.
00:34:09.000And I think it is at an epidemic level.
00:34:11.000And I've testified before Congress about this.
00:34:16.000I think there are several levels of accountability at the manufacturing level and at the prescription level and at the educational level so people understand.
00:34:26.000I think everybody has to take part of it and I'm doing everything I can to raise the awareness about it as well.
00:34:32.000When you testified before Congress, what was the reaction?
00:34:35.000They're very much aware that this has become a serious, serious problem because the cost, as you see the lost Labor in the workforce is in the billions of dollars.
00:35:26.000It seems like once that genie's out of the bottle...
00:35:30.000Well, clearly, you've got to start educating people and the manufacturers have to be required to start labeling this much more clearly.
00:35:43.000Physicians have to be much more conservative in prescribing.
00:35:50.000You know, I just had this shoulder surgery and I took like one One opioid, one pill they gave me in the hospital.
00:36:02.000And after that, you can manage it with like Tylenol or something.
00:36:08.000Because the surgeons now are so good with the arthroscopic surgeries and stuff.
00:36:12.000It's so much less of an insult to the body that with ice and Tylenol and stuff, you can manage it if you just kind of focus on it a little bit.
00:36:25.000And I'm not saying if you've had surgery and you're having organic pain, for God's sakes, get ahead of the pain and stay ahead.
00:36:33.000But as soon as you can get off of it, get off of it.
00:36:37.000Yeah, and understand what's happening.
00:36:38.000Yeah, there's no sense in being like macho.
00:36:40.000We don't need a leather strap between your teeth to go have some surgery.
00:36:43.000I mean, shit, if it hurts, take the pill, get past it, but realize...
00:36:48.000The minute you can get away from that, you need to get away from it.
00:36:51.000But, you know, they don't need to give you a 30-day supply.
00:36:54.000They need to give you three or four days, and then you've got to go see your doctor again, and if it's still a problem, discuss it.
00:37:02.000I mean, that's what I think needs to happen, is just be a lot more conservative about what you're giving.
00:37:07.000The problem is these pharmaceutical companies make so much money.
00:37:13.000They've got private jets and yachts to pay for.
00:37:15.000Yeah, and they're starting to shut down some of these – they had some of these pill clinics and pain clinics in Florida where you could go in without an x-ray, without an MRI, and just say you had back pain and there was a doctor there that would give you a 90-count prescription on the spot,
00:37:31.000no questions asked, 90. And you're out the door and you go down the street to the next one.
00:37:54.000When you've been doing your show as long as you've been doing it, and I'm sure you've made a ton of loot, what makes you want to do a podcast?
00:38:06.000My interest has been, you know, saying there are a lot of people getting their information on the internet by getting clips of the show and that sort of thing.
00:38:20.000And it's clear to me That is, the population is changing.
00:38:26.000I'm an old guy, but younger people are getting their information in different ways.
00:38:32.000They're going to the internet, and the digital menu has got to be readily available, and you can reach a lot of people that way that you wouldn't reach the other way.
00:39:41.000In the podcast, I'm not solving a problem.
00:39:44.000I don't have somebody there that has a problem for me to solve.
00:39:49.000I'm just talking to people that I find interesting and And I'm able to talk to them about whatever I want to talk to them about and discuss things like you and I are talking about right now.
00:39:58.000I think what we've been talking about Is an important discussion.
00:40:04.000And I welcome the opportunity to have that discussion.
00:40:08.000And I don't have time to do that when I'm talking about somebody who's sitting there saying, you know, I think my kid is on the precipice of overdosing or is really in trouble, and I've got to focus on that.
00:40:21.000I don't have time to pontificate about such things as the opioid epidemic or the philosophy of pills versus therapy and things of that nature.
00:40:32.000Because I have to give all my attention to the story in front of me.
00:40:35.000In a podcast environment like we're doing now, I can talk about things that I think people need to hear.
00:40:42.000I think if they don't, they don't have to listen, but if they're interested, it's there.
00:40:48.000I like it being more freeform and me being able to talk about things.
00:40:52.000I've been talking about what makes people a champion.
00:40:55.000Like I talked to Tony Romo right after the Super Bowl about, you know, he came from Eastern Illinois University.
00:41:02.000So I got, what, nine students or something?
00:41:06.000And he turns out to be Quarterback of America's team for 14 years, set all kinds of records and then goes to the booth and becomes the number one color analyst in television.
00:42:16.000It's like if somebody thought, like he played a game, somebody beat them, beat him, that just the idea that that person went home thinking that they were better than him, that they could beat him, that he just couldn't eat,
00:42:33.000sleep, think until he got back and owned it again and got back to it.
00:42:43.000I mean, he said he would be out at 1 o'clock in the morning in the dome throwing a pass that that route got intercepted.
00:43:30.000And I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing, but the difference between winners and losers is winners do things losers do not want to do.
00:43:40.000They will get up in the middle of the night.
00:44:06.000I mean, you'd think it would be great, but it's like eating ice cream every meal.
00:44:10.000About the fourth meal, you're going to be thinking, God, let's kill something and eat it.
00:44:14.000Well, it's like when you're talking about depression, about that bad feelings will motivate you to change.
00:44:19.000If you're in a bad feeling, if you're in a bad state in your life, that pain is an amazing motivator.
00:44:26.000Even though it feels terrible at the time, it can propel you to a new and better life because you don't ever want to experience that again and make you grow and be a better person.
00:46:06.000That's why I would imagine you move towards doing a podcast where it's less restrictive and more open-ended and you can kind of do whatever you want.
00:46:13.000But that's pretty cool that out of all these years of doing that and giving out advice, you still find this passion to make it better and to do it from a different angle.
00:46:25.000Yeah, and, you know, I'm as excited about, we're just about to wrap, you know, our 17 seasons.
00:47:51.000Well, when you're doing this on your podcast, one of the beautiful things about that is that you can explore these ideas without commercial breaks.
00:48:01.000You don't have to have anybody telling you what to do.
00:48:06.000Is that how you pick the subjects and the people that you're talking to?
00:48:09.000Yeah, like this week I had on Pam Myers who wrote Lie Spotting.
00:48:16.000Is that a book on liars, lie spotting?
00:48:20.000Yeah, and I spent a lot of my career on deception detection because I spent a lot of time in the litigation arena on interrogation techniques.
00:48:38.000She got sued for a couple billion dollars, and I represented her in that case, and that's how we met.
00:48:46.000And so, I mean, I had Pam on, and we both worked a lot in deception detection and interrogation techniques and stuff, and So just, and it came right at a time when, you know, Jussie Smollett is in the news about,
00:49:02.000is he telling the truth or is he not telling the truth?
00:49:04.000And then here we have this conversation about...
00:49:06.000What did you think immediately when you heard that story?
00:49:08.000I was very suspicious when I heard that story.
00:49:11.000Jamie and I, we shut the, once the cameras were off, we're like, are these off?
00:50:08.000When people are really desperately trying to convince you they're telling the truth, they'll do a lot of times what are called convincing statements.
00:50:21.000Rather than just telling you what they did or didn't do, they'll do convincing statements like, You know me.
00:50:29.000Like somebody saying, somebody stole the petty cash in the office.
00:51:37.000There are some things that you can tell people to watch for, but one of the things you do if there's somebody that you suspect is you increase their cognitive load during the interrogation, and there's no way you can prepare for that.
00:53:01.000But if you didn't do it, it doesn't take you one millisecond to say, absolutely not.
00:53:08.000Have you ever been wrong before, where you see someone on television and you go, I think that guy's guilty and they're innocent, or vice versa?
00:53:16.000Because if you really want to know for sure if somebody is guilty or innocent, you need to invest a lot of time.
00:53:24.000You need to get a baseline on what they normally look like, talk like, feel like.
00:53:30.000And then knowing that baseline, you then need to compare how they're behaving on TV. So just walking by the screen and I think?
00:53:56.000Before you decide you're going to be a human lie detector is do your homework and you ought to try to figure it out objectively before you figure it out behaviorally.
00:54:05.000I mean, you ought to do your investigation, find out if somebody took the money and, you know, find out where they were and, you know, look for fingerprints and do this and do that.
00:54:16.000I mean, you ought to really objectively figure it out before you rely on these things.
00:54:22.000And so unless you get a baseline and get one-on-one with them and spend a lot of time, then you can't be really certain that you know whether they're telling the truth or whether they're not.
00:54:43.000Yeah, I heard a cop once say that when people are guilty, they tend to plead and cry, and then when they're not guilty, they tend to get angry when they're accused.
00:54:54.000People that are wrongly accused are generally irate from the beginning till the end.
00:54:59.000I mean, every case is different, but if you're wrongly accused, that person is going to be pissed off from the minute you accuse them till the end.
00:55:21.000And when you see people, they do these convincing statements, and they're pleading for you to believe them.
00:55:30.000And any time somebody says, now, in all honesty...
00:55:38.000Usually, the next thing out of their mouth's a lie.
00:55:43.000Like, they say to you, now, Joe, honestly, as opposed to everything else you've been telling me, why are we bracketing this one out as honest?
00:55:53.000Or if they invoke the deity, I swear to God, God as my witness.
00:56:03.000And, you know, I don't know whether – I have not done what I said you need to do with Jussie Smollett, but I do know when he went to the set at Fox, he said, you all know me.
00:57:24.000But man, when the false ones come, it just does a giant disservice to everybody.
00:57:28.000Well, there's a fair amount of research as to why people do these hoaxes, and particularly hate crime hoaxes.
00:57:36.000And one of the primary motivations, of course, it's sympathy and attention and all that.
00:57:41.000But one of the interesting reasons that I've read in the research is that They really feel like it's emblematic of how the system treats them overall.
00:57:52.000This is just a dramatic example of it.
00:57:56.000They feel like, I'm treated this way anyhow.
00:59:01.000The times that I've seen, I don't watch that show a lot, but the times I've seen him on there singing, and assuming it is his voice and he's singing, extremely talented young man.
00:59:14.000I find a lot of talented people are fucking crazy.
00:59:17.000Well, you know, somebody said that the really talented singers and actors were the weird kids from high school that were in drama and all of that.
00:59:31.000Yeah, various levels of crazy, obviously not all deceptive, but some of the most brilliant actors are just completely out of their mind, and that's one of the reasons why they're so good at acting.
00:59:41.000Look, my friend Wayne Fetterman had a bit that he did about it on stage, and he's like, guess what?
00:59:47.000It's not fucking normal to be able to just cry.
00:59:51.000He goes, you could just cry and pretend something's wrong and cry?
01:01:30.000I've just always been very, very curious.
01:01:33.000And I've always recognized that everyone thinks about things differently and that I could take a little bit of something from everybody.
01:01:39.000Whether it's from a book or it's from having a conversation with someone, I can gain a little bit of experience, a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of insight.
01:02:42.000And what you're talking about when you're interviewing all these athletes, you know, I think people tend to write off athletic pursuits as being entirely physical, and they're not.
01:02:53.000I mean, I think this is an easy way for people to look at it that don't engage, or they've never really thought about playing anything at a very high level, that it requires some intense thinking.
01:03:07.000Mathematics or a large vocabulary, but understanding what's required, understanding when and how to execute, understanding how to keep your shit together under pressure, those are all intensely intellectual aspects of any really high-end athletic pursuit.
01:03:23.000And there's a different breed of cat That wants the ball at the buzzer.
01:04:18.000You already have to know how to fight by the time you get to camp.
01:04:21.000So what you're really doing is just kind of working on specific movements where you're dealing with one kind of fighter and then getting your body in shape.
01:04:30.000Getting your body conditioned, getting your mind ready, preparing everything, cutting your body weight down so you can weigh in and have a good amount of...
01:04:44.000So there's this complicated dance that goes on.
01:04:46.000And that haunting thing of did I do enough can cause fighters to screw themselves over by overtraining.
01:04:54.000So you have to have enough confidence to know that you've done enough as well as enough You have to know you've done enough, but know you haven't done too much.
01:05:07.000This weekend is a giant UFC. Big UFC. Two big title fights between four of the very best fighters in the world.
01:05:16.000That is one of the most interesting aspects of the fight game to me.
01:05:20.000One, watching these guys stare each other down at the weigh-in, where they get a look at each other and they know 24 hours from now they're going to war.
01:05:27.000And just see, is there just a smell of doubt?
01:07:39.000And they have reached a level of confidence.
01:07:42.000When you get to a certain level of success, like, you know, John Jones has one loss in his record and it's by disqualification in a fight that he was destroying the guy.
01:07:50.000And he was hitting the guy with, it's a really dumb rule, but when you throw elbows, you're not allowed to throw a 12 to 6 elbow, meaning coming straight down.
01:07:58.000The only reason that exists is because when mixed martial arts was first being, It was first being sanctioned by athletic commissions.
01:08:06.000The people that were in the athletic commission had some nervous fears.
01:08:11.000They had seen those late night TV shows where karate guys are breaking bricks with their elbow driving straight down.
01:08:17.000They thought they could kill somebody if they did that.
01:08:30.000So for a guy like that, who has this staggering resume of achievement, he's widely considered to be the greatest light heavyweight champion of all time.
01:08:39.000If not, he's definitely in the running of the greatest fighter ever of all time.
01:08:43.000For a guy like that, he's confident to the point of, you know, he's...
01:08:50.000He's not trying to just beat this guy, although he's going to beat this guy.
01:08:54.000He's trying to go down in history as one of the greatest of all time, or the greatest of all time.
01:08:58.000So for a guy like that, it doesn't matter what you do.
01:10:21.000They're staring across the ring, and I'm like, oh, Jesus, what did I sign up for?
01:10:24.000Yeah, they're thinking, I don't know what the money was here, but it wasn't worth it.
01:10:28.000It seemed like a good idea at the time.
01:10:30.000It was a life-changing, life-defining moment when you were staring across the ring at Iron Mike, and it was like 1989, and he was on top of the world.
01:10:40.000Yeah, and you knew he was going to come over there and hit you like you had never been hit before.
01:11:48.000But also, you know, when I talked to Mike on the podcast, one of the things was, and this was just him sort of coming to grips with the fact that He never really had a childhood.
01:12:02.000His childhood was from the time he was 12 years old.
01:12:04.000Custom model took him in, was hypnotizing him and teaching him how to fight.
01:12:08.000Teaching him how to fight and hypnotizing him to be a machine.
01:12:11.000He was literally saying to him, you don't exist.
01:12:17.000And you're going to go out there and you're going to get the job done.
01:12:21.000And he was telling this to a 13-year-old that never experienced love.
01:12:24.000He just was abandoned and homeless and this is the only way he ever got any sort of positive reinforcement in his life is by destroying people.
01:13:28.000I don't think he wants to be that guy.
01:13:30.000He says he doesn't like that guy, which is crazy because that guy is who made him rich and famous and everybody loves him because he was that guy.
01:13:40.000But who he is now is a completely different person, just a sweetheart, a real sweetheart.
01:13:54.000Yeah, I think the psychological aspect of fighting is one of the more intriguing parts of it to me.
01:14:01.000For me, it's like probably one of the reasons why I got interested in psyche in the first place and the way people think about things and weakness, like real weakness.
01:14:12.000Weakness can get exposed in a variety of different ways, but in competition is when you really see it.
01:14:24.000We see it in sports, and I saw it when I talked to Emmett.
01:14:28.000He's been a friend of mine for a long time.
01:14:30.000I was talking to him about his psychology as he goes into a football game, and he says he plays a movie in his mind of the entire game before he plays it.
01:14:41.000Because in a football game, you're going to have 11 or 12 possessions during the game.
01:14:46.000Throughout the football game, you're going to get that ball 11 or 12 times.
01:14:50.000I'm going to carry that ball three or four times per possession.
01:14:54.000He knows which plays he's going to run.
01:15:29.000I forget which ward it was that got so wiped out.
01:15:33.000When Katrina hit New Orleans, and there was a guy down there that had been really quiet.
01:15:39.000Nobody had ever heard anything out of him.
01:15:42.000He was an older guy, lived in a house, stayed to himself.
01:15:45.000And that night, when the water was at rooftop level, I mean, he swam rooftop to rooftop and saved six, seven, eight people, got him out of there, and he didn't make it out.
01:15:59.000But he got seven or eight people out of there.
01:16:01.000And you go back and you check his history, and he was a military hero.
01:16:40.000Or they may show you that they've got the focus to hang, or they may show you that they're a hero, but life circumstances are going to come along and they're going to show you who somebody is.
01:17:16.000No, I think we learn about ourselves, and everybody talks about self-esteem and self-worth, but nobody ever talks about what it really is or how we get it.
01:17:29.000And I think about it in terms of self-attribution, because You know how you form opinions of other people.
01:17:39.000Like, if you look at this guy, and maybe you work with this guy, and so you watch him across a couple of years, and maybe this guy shows up to work every day, and he's there 15 minutes early, and he unlocks the place, gets everything ready, puts the coffee on, has his desk ready,
01:17:54.000he's all buttoned up, and man, when the bell rings, he's ready to go.
01:17:58.000And you just learn that this guy's buttoned up, ready to go, dependable, never misses, he's always there.
01:18:05.000So you attribute certain traits and characteristics to him based on your observations of him and your experience of him.
01:18:12.000Based on that, you assign certain traits and characteristics to him.
01:18:16.000But I say that's exactly the same way we form our own self-image and our own level of self-worth.
01:18:24.000We watch ourselves go through life, and we watch how we handle certain circumstances and situations.
01:18:33.000And that's why I say overindulgence is one of the most insidious forms of child abuse known to parenting.
01:18:40.000It's not the worst, it's just insidious.
01:18:43.000Because if you overindulge your children and do everything for them, you never let them observe themselves master their environment.
01:18:52.000You never let them step back and say, wow, I did that!
01:19:57.000And we make those attributions to ourselves and so we shrink from the challenge for the rest of our lives until, like you said, it's hard to overcome that and something pushes you up until you finally observe yourself overcome something.
01:20:11.000And I think that's how we form our level of self-esteem and our identity about who we are.
01:20:19.000And I don't think most people think about that.
01:20:21.000They look back and say, okay, how did I get to be Joe Rogan as I sit in that chair?
01:23:25.000It was a Short period of time, but they took students into class where they put the steps of learning the information so close together that there was never a failure experience.
01:23:37.000It would say, like, the War of 1812 happened in 1812. Then the next thing would say, the War of 1812 happened in blank.
01:23:52.000So they would put it together, and they would teach the information, and they would teach it to criteria where you mastered the information, you had it 100%.
01:24:15.000And then they took them out of that program and put them back in the regular classroom.
01:24:20.000And the first time they came to questions they didn't know the answer to, the first time they didn't get 100, they came apart like a cheap suit.
01:24:30.000They didn't know how to handle adversity.
01:24:32.000They didn't know how to handle it when they didn't have the right answers.
01:24:36.000They didn't learn how to not be perfect.
01:24:40.000And so they scrapped the whole program because they said, you can't do this because that's not the way life is.
01:24:47.000And if, I mean, you're not teaching them how the real world works.
01:24:52.000You might as well teach them to go on red and stop on green and then give them the keys and put them out in life because that's not the way it works.
01:25:00.000And those kids were absolutely screwed up when they got into a truly competitive environment.
01:25:24.000You know, I read that story not long ago when these students, I think it was at UCLA in law school, complained and got a professor Either disciplined or fired because he required them to take a counter-argument over something controversial like Ferguson.
01:25:47.000He said, I know that you're all on this point of view.
01:25:53.000Now I want you to prepare an argument for the other side.
01:25:57.000And they all said, that's upsetting to us.
01:26:01.000And they went to the administration and complained.
01:26:03.000Wow, that's crazy, because you may have to, as a lawyer, you may have to represent someone who's done something you don't agree with, if that's what you want to do for a living, right?
01:26:34.000Well, there's a movement going on in this country right now, the social justice movement, and it leans in that direction, that people don't want to look at things for how they are.
01:26:46.000They want to look at things for how they want them to be.
01:27:16.000Everybody has their own value, but that doesn't mean Their marketable skills in an open society, in an open market, are going to be the same.
01:27:27.000I had a joke in one of my specials, two specials ago, about, there was a story about a woman who was guarding the White House.
01:27:35.000She was the lone guard at one of the doors of the White House, and some crazy man broke in and knocked her to the ground and just ran through the White House, and he was running around inside the White House for like three minutes before they finally, some off-duty Secret Service agent,
01:28:12.000Because a man can't do everything a man can do.
01:28:15.000I go, look, I've met Shaquille O'Neal, and his dick is where my face is.
01:28:19.000And if the White House is experiencing a Shaq attack, I'm the wrong person to save the world, because he's just going to run right over me.
01:28:27.000I go, but if my wife and kid were guarding the White House, guess what?
01:29:22.000If everyone has a chance to work at CERN, everyone has a chance to work at the Large Hadron Collider, including people that have no idea about physics, we're going to have a real time making these equations work.
01:29:35.000That's what I mean about finding your own lane, like you.
01:29:38.000I can't add two and two and get five every time.
01:30:07.000If you find a thing that you're good at, whether it's gymnastics or singing or painting, whatever the fuck it is, if you can find a thing that you're good at, it'll give you a feeling of self-worth and you won't need to be good at everything.
01:30:22.000You can accept and you can enjoy other people being good at things as well.
01:31:02.000So now, okay, that leveled the playing field for me.
01:31:05.000And like you said, find what you're good at at a given time and do what you're good at.
01:31:11.000Yeah, find something you love, find something you're passionate about that you could also excel at.
01:31:15.000And if you can work it out where it's your vocation and your avocation, you love doing it and you get paid for it, then you're just double blessed.
01:31:34.000And I just think if you're in your life and you don't have something that you're passionate about, I mean, and I don't mean that in a cliche way.
01:31:46.000If there's not something where you wake up every day and there's nothing in your life that you're excited to do, man, you need to go back to the drawing board.
01:31:57.000Because if all you're doing is just grinding it out and You get up every day, go to a job you don't like, do tasks you don't care to do, and come home to a home you don't want to come home to and wait to get up and do it again the next day,
01:32:40.000There's something healthy that's not illegal, that's not going to be high risk.
01:32:45.000There's something you can do that's not going to kill you or put you in jail that you can be excited about.
01:32:50.000Yeah, and I think it's one of the most important things to do when you're a parent is to try to expose your kid to as many different things as possible to find those things for them.
01:33:40.000And boy, when you don't know what you're doing, As a dad, that's a bitch.
01:33:46.000I mean, just little things, like you go camping and you don't realize that setting your tent up on the side of a hill, even if it's like 8 or 10 degrees, is a bad idea.