In this interview, Dr. Phil McGraw discusses the psychological barriers that keep people stuck, emphasizing comfort zones as the primary obstacle to personal growth. He explains how he continuously challenges himself and his production team to reinvent the Dr. Phil show for changing media consumption habits, noting the shift from long‑form TV to short, bite‑size digital content and the competition he now faces from his own online presence. Dr. Phil highlights the negative impact of social media on youth, citing studies about body‑image issues among teenage girls and the permanence of online footprints. He contrasts generational relationship dynamics, describing how modern teens experience accelerated intimacy without the gradual steps that previous generations had, leading to unpreparedness for high‑stakes emotional situations. The conversation moves to financial literacy, illustrating how sudden wealth—especially among athletes and young internet personalities—often leads to bankruptcy due to a lack of foundational money‑management skills. Dr. Phil shares his own upbringing, including a turbulent family life with an alcoholic father, early entrepreneurial experiences, and the realization that time, not money, is his most valuable resource. Throughout, he stresses the universal human needs for acceptance and fear of rejection, and the importance of continual self‑improvement while maintaining gratitude for current achievements.
Chapters
If I see somebody in a gray suit, a gray shirt, a gray tie, a gray bag slumped over, shuffling along the street, I know that's what that person thinks they deserve. I don't have to talk to them because they generate the results in life they think they deserve. And if they're disheveled and they're tired and they're bent over, and they're depressed and they're lonely, they're generating the results they think they deserve. We all do that. I think you gotta have a dream.
The School of Greatness.
Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.
I'm curious, it seems like you've worked.
With so many people.
What do you feel like is one of the main things that holds people back from just living a better, happier, healthier life? As simple as a question that might be, but you've worked with so many people. Is it fear? Is it insecurity? Is it the shame they hold onto? What would you say is kind of the the main thing?
I would say it's comfort zones. I think people limit themselves and get in their own way. I think everybody does that, me included. Everybody gets comfortable in their own life and before you know it, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, months turn into years and you look and you go, wow, I've been doing this for a long, long time. I think it's really difficult and something that you have to consciously do to continue to challenge yourself to go to the next level. And then on the other hand, you can do that so much that you get what I call caught in ascendancy where you're never satisfied where you are and so you're always reaching for the next level and there's some balance in between where you always want to better yourself and challenge yourself to go to the next level, but that doesn't mean you're not satisfied. You know, I'm very gratified with the things that I do and I'm very proud of the things that I do, but it doesn't mean that I'm not always looking for a way to do it better. You know, we just started our 20th season, for example, but every summer, you know, when we wrap the season, we take, you know, three or four weeks to everybody decompress and go off on their own and stuff. But then we start meeting on a regular basis to start saying, okay, let's deconstruct that season. Let's start saying, what are some ways that we can do to tell our stories more effectively, to reach more people, to get out there more effectively? We're always trying to reinvent ourselves and stay relevant and say, how can we come back and and do a better job than we did last year. Not that we didn't do a good job, but we want to do a better job.
Sure.
I think people get in a comfort zone and that's real easy to do.
What's your comfort zone right now?
You know, I think I have been doing Dr. Phil, and I'm not talking about myself in the third person, I'm talking about the show. You know, the actual platform for 20 years. you hear people say this is the way we've always done it. Well, that doesn't mean that's the way we should do it. And I'm always challenging the staff to say, look, it doesn't matter how we did it last year or last two years, is this the way we should do it? For example, people's viewing habits are changing. Pacing has to change. The expectations that people are going to sit passively in front of a TV screen and let you dictate what they take in for an hour is pretty obsolete now. People get their information in smaller bits at a faster pace than they did when we started. And I think my number one competition now is myself on the internet versus watching me on broadcast television.
Interesting.
I get billions of views on the internet versus broadcast where people, they want a 18-minute bite or a 20-minute bite and I generate that content on broadcast then distributed on the internet. And that's really the number one competition because nobody else in broadcast is even attempting to do what we do. They have different subject matters. There's some great shows out there. They're just not trying to do what we do.
Right. You know, I'm gonna add another, you're a star also on TikTok, I saw. You've got like 50 million views in your last video that I was like, you're like crushing TikTok, you're all over YouTube. I mean, it's amazing how you've reinvented yourself to stay relevant with the different platforms. I was listening to an interview you had with Oprah. I know I started with Jay Leno, where you were like, you know, when we started this 20 years ago, there was no social media, there was no- yeah, think about it.
Really, the internet, I mean, it was kind of like just getting started. it was. There weren't any of these social media platforms, which means we've had to really adapt over the years because there was no such thing as cyber bullying, for example. And we've now had to learn, research and study that because kids are taking their own lives by being cyber bullying. I read a study, I read all the time. I can't add two and two and get five every time, but I read really fast. And so I'm a voracious reader. I just constantly am gathering information and data. And I was just reading a study.
That.
Like one in three girls, we're talking about the negative impact of Instagram.
One in three, like in the country or just teens or?
Yeah, teens, young girls. And so there's this impact of social media and putting expectations on girls in terms of their body image and all of that. And so those were things that weren't challenges we had to face then. And having to teach young people where they have to realize, look, I put this stuff out on the internet. They don't think that a college admissions committee is going to go look at that stuff when they're considering them for admission. a human resources group is going to look at that when they're considering them for hire. They're going to go back 10 years, 15 years and see what they were doing when they weren't applying for a job to see who they really are. And so you've got to teach them, look, you've got to think about this stuff because once it's on the web, it's out there forever. It doesn't go away. And so just a whole different set of values that we're having to deal with that weren't even on the radar when we started.
What were some of the problems, I guess, 17, 20 years ago that are still the same today from human beings that you're seeing and what is different?
Well, you know, all the all the dynamics are the same in terms of, I think, interpersonal relationships. You have the same things from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s in terms of interpersonal relations. The number one need in all people is acceptance. the number one fear is rejection. And you can put synonyms in there, acceptance or success, belongingness, rejection or failure. You can put synonyms in for those things.
Embarrassment, humiliation. Yeah.
And those things have been consistent generationally across time. But what's different within that framework is, We're jumping a lot of steps right now. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, relationships formed in steps. My mom would take, her mom would pick up. We would hold hands at lunch. We would then go to a movie together and stuff. A lot of that is jumped over now because kids, they they move so much faster. What we were exposed to on television then, there were three channels, you know, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, Dick Van Dyke. They were sleeping in separate beds on network television. You watch Lucy and Ricky, they had them in twin beds and they were sleeping and they looked like snowsuits. Wow. For pajamas.
In the same room, but in different beds.
In the same room, but twin beds. That's what network would allow on. They wouldn't let the public see a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed. They were in twin beds with a nightstand in between. Wow. I didn't even know that. Well, that's what network television showed. Then that's what was acceptable. That's what the censors would allow. Look at what's on network television now. It's what you would consider pornography back then. And our kids at 10, 11 and 12, that's what they see now. 10, 11, 12 year olds weren't seeing that back then. So they've jumped way ahead on the curve in terms of what their expectations are and what they're exposed to. So I think they get exposed to a lot higher levels of deeper levels of physical, interpersonal and emotional intimacy at an earlier age than they were back then. And they've jumped over all those steps. So what are they? Well, they get deeper into a relationship without having done those preparatory steps. so they're much further into a relationship without having these trials before they get there. And so when the wheels come off, they're not prepared for it. We have things in life that prepare us for things that come later. Like we lose a goldfish. We lose a pet bird. We lose a cat before grandma dies. And that prepares us for death. we have dolls and pets that prepare us to raise babies and things. We learn on with lesser stakes for later in life when the stakes are higher. And now we're jumping over a lot of those steps where we get to high stakes interactions without some of those interval steps. And then when the wheels come off, we're not prepared. We haven't had those interval steps of learning before we got to the high stakes losses and we're not prepared for it.
So what happens when people achieve success before they're prepared for it?
I think it's the same thing as experiencing loss before you prepare for it. You haven't had those plateaus, those steps where you had a little bit of success and then you had some more and you learned to appreciate that. And, you know, with the internet bubble and some of these things, we've had some very young people that went to insane levels of wealth.
And fame.
And they had no idea of what really usually goes into earning that kind of wealth and financial freedom and stuff. And you see it now in some of the pro sports leagues. I saw a statistic not long ago that 80% of professional athletes two years out of the league are either bankrupt or in serious financial dire straits financially because they go from having very little, if any kind of financial independence or income, let alone wealth, to millions of dollars and they don't know how to handle it. next thing they know, it's gone and they haven't prepared for it. They don't know. I, you know, Shaq talks about the first time he got a $20 million contract. He didn't stop and think about, wait a minute, half of that goes to taxes. So he was spending $20 million. He thought, okay, I've got 10 I can spend here, five here and five here. And then they came in and said, no, no, wait a minute. You only had 10 to spend. You spent 20. And he's like, holy. And he says that, he says, I wasn't, nobody taught me about that, I wasn't prepared for it. And then I got caught in the rears in the beginning and had to play catch up. So they haven't been through those steps where they learn, hey, you got to pay taxes on this, you got to hold some things in reserve. And most people think that when you see all of these people get in trouble, with credit card debt, they think, oh, people just went out and went crazy with their credit cards. The number one reason they get in trouble is some kind of medical problem. Really? We have double income families and then one can't work because of a medical problem. That's where they get in. It's not that they're out spending crazy, it's that they had a double income family and then one couldn't work and now they're in serious trouble.
So, I'm curious about your story a little bit because when you were in college, you were studying psychology, but also you were this all-star football player, turned all-star tennis player in college on a scholarship. And then for essentially, call it 30 years, you were working, but it wasn't until you were 20 years ago when the season started, the first season started for Dr. Phil. and really that success kind of took off to another level by being one of the top talk shows. What was the challenge that you faced at that stage of your career, or since you had 30 years of working experience roughly, did you feel really prepared for that level of success and fame?
Well.
It was not a rags to riches story for me. That makes a great story, but that wasn't the story. I had, you know, I was raised by a mother and father that were very loving, but my dad was a terrible alcoholic.
Really?
And when I say terrible alcoholic, I.
Mean.
Really bad alcoholic. When he finally got a job. He had Wednesday afternoons off and every Thursday morning was spent finding the car because he'd come home drunk and have no idea where he left the car.
Wow.
I had to find the car and get to school by noon because if you weren't in school by noon on Thursday, you weren't eligible to play in the game on Friday. Right. I had to find that car and get to next school.
So you're running around town trying to find the car.
Yeah.
And I was in Kansas City. You had no idea where the car was and you I finally kind of learned what his haunts were and you'd go around and find them.
And.
It was not a good situation. But when I got on my own, I've always been very fortunate to kind of have a knack for making money. Really? When I was very young, I was making more money than my dad was when I was 19.
Really?
And I've always been able to, you know, to me, and it may sound cliche to say it, but I've always.
Thought.
Money was the cheapest commodity I had. It was time that was so critical. Money you can replace, money you can make. It's time that's really precious. And when I got married and had kids, that really came into focus then. And I've never, since high school, never really had a job. I had a job in high school, and since then I've always been in business for myself.
Really?
And I mean always. I had a job in high school working for Hallmark cards. I worked in their underground warehouse in Kansas City. They had an underground warehouse on 31st Street where they kept all their greeting cards. And I got a job working in it. It was carved out of actual rock. I mean, it was just carved out and I worked there. But after that, I never had a job. I loved working for Hallmark. What a great organization that is, I can tell you. But I've always been in business.
