Dr. Phil: From Nice Guy to Nazi (with Aubrey Gordon)

begs the question, what if you had limitless money and were also completely out of your mind?

Hello, hello, and welcome back to Abit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein.

Do you want to give me like a, and I'm Aubrey Gordon?

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

Wow.

I've been waiting my whole life for a Aubrey Gordon Instead Abit Fruity.

I felt really good.

I'm really excited to be here, buddy.

I'm so stoked.

I told you beforehand, I'm coming in so fresh on this topic, and I can't wait to hear everything you've got to tell me about it.

Well, I have spent the last two days doing nothing, not even sleep, nothing but watching Dr.

Phil.

All I have on Dr.

Phil is sort of like,

you know, the sort of ambient kinds of events like Bad Baby getting her start on his show,

the sort of like, you teach people how to treat you kind of stuff, and like the general vibe that he's a guy who would maybe defend like the troubled teen industry or something.

Oh, yeah.

He's sort of like a tough love kind of a guy seems to be his.

Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, baby.

Oh, Lord.

So, Dr.

Phil, the TV doctor, put a pin in that, that we all grew up with in our homes has a new hobby, ice raids.

Since the start of Trump's second term, Dr.

Phil and his camera crews have been attending immigration enforcement raids where modern-day Gestapo kidnap human beings off the street and send them away for deportation.

Dr.

Phil insists he isn't political, describing himself as, quote, the least political person I know.

He has repeated that claim over and over, including in a speech he gave at Trump's pre-election New York City rally at Madison Square Garden, where he said he doesn't know or care much about politics.

Politico described Dr.

Phil's frequent participation at ICE raids as, quote, an unusual turn for a therapeutic media personality who got his big break with Oprah Winfrey and for most of his career fastidiously avoided partisan politics.

But having spent the last few days taking a look at the entirety of the TV mogul's career from a bird's eye view, I'm not so sure how unusual this turn is.

Today, I want to look at Dr.

Phil as one of the most ubiquitous artifacts of the American entertainment industry industry in the 21st century, and try to draw a line from the carefully constructed, kind-hearted, but tough father of America figure he was in the early 2000s to the open far-right punisher he's become.

To do that, I am so excited.

When I announced this episode on the A Bit Fruity Podcast Instagram, I was like, I want to talk about Dr.

Phil, but I don't know where to start.

And everyone was like, start with Aubrey Gordon.

Aubrey Gordon is the host of the podcast Maintenance Phase, which I think I've said this before last time we did an episode together, but maintenance phase was the podcast that I started listening to a few years ago that really made me realize I wanted to enter the ring on this medium.

I think it's like the most elevated version of like an analytical left-wing culture podcast rooted in compassion.

You are such an inspiration to me.

And I'm so happy that you're here.

Oh, buddy, what a joy!

And likewise, it is such a treat to be here.

Uh, I can't wait to hear all of the garbage, and I'll tell you this: I already didn't, was not tracking the Ice Raid stuff, and I feel like I already need to go like take a lap around the block or something to just like get it out, get it off.

Uh, I, too, have been hoodwinked by the Dean Kanes and the Steven Seagals who are doing the cosplaying, and not the Dr.

Phils who are televising the cosplaying.

My God.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that over on Patreon.

Kat Tenbarge and I are working on a bonus episode over there about Eugenia Cooney and the online internet spectacle that follows her that I have been following for years and I'm deeply confused by.

I am going to be fascinated to hear that.

I'm going to be fascinated to hear that.

Aubrey, before we get into the chronology of Dr.

Phil and try to make sense of where he's at based on who he was throughout the entirety of all of our lives, I just want to get your like broad strokes.

How do you feel about Dr.

Phil?

What has his impact on your life been?

My intro to Dr.

Phil was through the Oprah elevation of Dr.

Phil in the, I'm thinking late 90s, early 2000s, maybe.

It seemed to me at the time pretty quickly got his own show.

And what I remember about his persona at that time was that it was very much in line with the sort of like,

hey, I love you, so I'm going to tell you the truth, tough love kind of stuff.

The refrain that I remember hearing a lot sort of surrounding Dr.

Phil was that you teach people how to treat you, which I don't think is terrible advice, but I think once you start applying that to multiple situations, right?

If you're talking to someone who's in like an abusive relationship, that may not actually be the frame you want to land on, right?

If you're talking to someone who's in like other kinds of like sticky or power-loaded situations, it may just not work the way that he seems to propose that it will work.

The vibe that I got from him was also, I would say, like a backdrop of like cop energy, right?

That there's something about the close-cropped hair and the big mustache and kind of like a lumbering guy in a suit, right?

Where you're like, oh, hello, detective.

Very like is sort of the vibe.

So I also, it feels unsurprising to me that he landed in like ice territory and in sort of these like cop adjacent.

uh frameworks or just straight up cop frameworks because that definitely was like the energy that he was bringing yeah his approach to psychology which again we have to put like heavy air quotes around all of this because like dr phil is not a licensed practitioner of psychology and has not been for 20 years.

And we will talk about that.

Did you know that?

Oh, hey.

Oh, hey, we're diving into the deep end.

It's very fun to come into this fresh, I'll tell you that.

His approach to televised psychological advice is very much pick yourself up by your bootstraps.

And it's very capitalist in that way of like, everything is in your control.

So every good thing that happens to you is a product of your own work.

And every bad thing that happens to you is a product of something you're doing wrong, which I think is also, you know, not to get into the deep end too quickly, but it, to me, really makes sense how he ended up so committed to the ideology that he is in now.

Yeah, it's a...

It's very individualistic, right?

It's very American in its way, right?

The sort of bootstrapsiness of it all.

And it is like, I think that we do a lot of lionizing of rugged individualism and of doing it by yourself and of no one helped me when those things are generally not true right like most of the people who say no one helped me got a fair amount of help in one form or another and are just inherently conservative ideologies right like the idea is you should be primed not to need any help because we are not going to provide you with any help yeah yeah exactly so again like conservative sort of political alignment makes a lot of sense like tracks with his public persona to me shall we get into dr phil early life oh my god we haven't even gotten into the lore let's go let's go

dr phil or as he was known at the time philip mcgraw was born in oklahoma in 1950.

i just gotta say whenever i make these episodes about people who like turned out to be far-right conservatives it's always like So this person was born in a sundown town.

Or like Gwen Stefani being born in Orange County.

It's like, yeah, well, I get it.

Right.

Anyone who's been to Orange County is like, yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

He later moved to Kansas with his dad, who was also a psychologist.

Phil was a star football player in high school, which got him a scholarship into the university where he would get his bachelor's in psychology.

He went on to get a master's and a PhD also in psychology and briefly worked at his father's private practice.

But it seems like from the beginning, he always wanted wanted to make more money than just like being a private psychologist would allow.

And so in the mid 80s, he starts selling self-help seminars.

Does he also sell timeshares?

It's worse.

He started the Dr.

Phil show.

A television timeshare.

But before we get to the Dr.

Phil show, in 1990, he co-founds a trial consulting firm, which I didn't know what a trial consulting firm was.

Is it like jury consulting?

What kind of consulting is he doing?

It's basically like these companies of psychologists usually who will advise lawyers on like how to build a better case for their clients through the lens of psychology.

I don't really know how valid the field is, so I won't comment on that.

Yeah, I also don't, but I will say, if you had a mind to grift,

I could see that this would be an appealing field.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like, where you're like, oh, someone turned on the money spigot.

We're talking about trial attorneys, right?

Criminal trials famously are extremely expensive.

Right.

You're a consultant.

That's often a pretty big line item in budgets for criminal trials.

So, like, I could see that if you were like, wait, where's the money?

That you would go, oh, there's a lot of money over there.

Yeah, right.

You know who pays you a decent amount of money?

Clients who are, who, who need psychotherapy, but you know who can pay you even more money?

Law firms.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

And while he was working as a trial consultant, advising lawyers on how to build their case, who was one of his clients, Aubrey?

Uh-oh, who?

Oh my God, was it fucking Oprah?

It was fucking Oprah.

Shut the fuck up.

Are you kidding me?

Yes.

Oh, no.

Dr.

Phil's relationship with Oprah Winfrey began when he worked for her as a trial consultant.

Oprah was being sued in Texas for food libel.

Oh, sure.

This is the

beef ranchers.

This is the beef ranchers.

So, so basically, Oprah was being sued by Big Beef for comments that she had made about mad cow disease that beef executives believed were responsible for the decline in beef sales, which I just noted on this on my outline: LOL.

Yeah.

So my co-host, Michael Hobbs, who we love and who one day I will blackmail into doing the show with me.

Yes, make it happen.

He researched and did a whole episode on the Oprah beef libel case four or five years ago.

And my recollection was that she covered Mad Cow, the Mad Cow outbreak, on her show.

And one of the things that she said was she was like, well, knowing this, I'm never eating a burger again or something like that.

That is like a thing thing that people say you know the sort of casual kind of hyperbole that people use in everyday conversation and then she got sued for it for beef sales taking a hit rather than beef sales taking a hit because there is an outbreak associated with your product right right but oprah did win that case with the help she says of dr

Phil.

Oprah was so obsessed with Dr.

Phil by the end of that case and so satisfied with the work that he had done for her that she started having him on her show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, in 1998, first introducing him to the world as, quote, one of the best psychologists she's ever run into.

I think from the beginning, it's very interesting that all of this is motivated by like rich people making each other rich.

Yeah.

You know?

I was just

doing some research into Gwyneth Paltrow and Tracy Anderson, the Tracy Anderson method, and was thinking about how much Tracy Anderson's a personal trainer who has, I think, really made a name for herself by pushing folks really, really, really hard and

being, I would say, at times, mean to them.

And I think a lot of this stuff is also like formed by the unique wants and needs of public figures,

right?

That like Oprah's like, I was in this trial and this psychologist was very helpful to me in this multi-million dollar trial, right?

Or Gwyneth Paltrow is like, I'm surrounded by people who say yes to me.

It feels refreshing to have someone who says no or who's like really strict with me or whatever.

And I think that folks then go, Well, I have a platform.

I could platform this person, right?

Without really thinking about like, how does that actually play out in the broader population?

Like to normal people.

To people who are not in a beef libel trial, to people who are not running goop.

Who among us hasn't been in a beef libel trial.

Oh, there, but by the grace of God, go I living in a glass steakhouse over here, not about to cast a stone.

Oprah begins to feature Dr.

Phil in weekly segments on her show where he would give advice to people struggling in relationships.

Here's where I want to ask you, because you're somewhat of an Oprah expert yourself.

I feel like a big part of Oprah's legacy now is that she launched the careers of so many dubious figures, quack scientists, wellness gurus, and now right-wing leaders like Dr.

Phil, Dr.

Oz.

Why do you think she was so attracted to these people?

I think a couple of things.

One, again, I do think some of this is like the unique sort of public figure-ness of it all.

I think some of it is that she is a businesswoman and that launching more careers expands her business reach and her influence as well.

And I also think, like, listen, I think this comes up with Dr.

Oz as well.

I assume it will come up with Dr.

Phil.

That when you are making, right, like when people talk about Saturday Night Live as an hour and a half show that happens once a week, they're like, it is a slog.

It is like famously one of the most difficult shows to put together.

These are people who are putting together five hour-long shows a week.

And I think even if you

are doing your level best,

booking guests for five hours of TV each week means you are just going to need such a quantity of people that some of those people are going to end up being not good.

Right.

Like you just sort of are going to end up having some folks who are like,

if the priority is just push out a ton of content all the time, like your quality control is going to have to drop.

I I think the thing that I find perplexing about Oprah is continuing to platform, right?

Like, not just having Dr.

Oz on once, but having him on, I think it was like dozens of times that she had Dr.

Oz on, right?

Many, many, many times with Dr.

Phil, many, many, many times with like lots of sort of quacky people.

That part I don't totally understand.

I mean, I think part of that has to do with like, she's Oprah.

I don't know how many people are saying no to Oprah if she gets excited about somebody.

I think some of that is having been a very wealthy person for a really long time and having lost some amount of touch with like, what do actual people actually need?

Yeah, I think it's sort of rangy.

What do you think?

Oh, God.

I mean, I agree with all of that.

I also think, you know, Oprah is someone who, I don't know, I look at a lot of this through the lens of class.

And I think Oprah, despite all of her, you know, endearment to the American public for how empathetic and compassionate she is on her show and whatever, like, she just went to Jeff Bezos' wedding, you know?

Yeah.

Yes.

In like France or wherever it was.

So I think this is someone who is loyal over anything else to Capital.

And I think a lot of these people she was surrounding herself with were too, and they were able to do it together.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me.

So, anyway, Dr.

Phil does well on the Oprah show.

Dr.

Phil the Show airs as a standalone talk show in 2002 produced by Oprah.

I grabbed like a statistics bit from the Wikipedia page about the Dr.

Phil show

because it really is stunning how popular this show gets.

By 2008, the only talk show more popular than Dr.

Phil was the Oprah Winfrey Show.

On December 11th, 2018, Dr.

Phil was the top syndicated show with a 2.9 live plus same-day national Nielsen rating, ranking first among talk shows for the 117th consecutive week.

His ranking improved, and by 2020, he was in the 22nd spot on the Forbes list with earnings of $65.5 million for the year.

How much of that rating boost is just being played in every nail salon

and every like oil change waiting room?

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Helix for sponsoring today's episode.

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Okay, now let's get back to the episode.

So I want to talk a little bit about the Dr.

Phil show.

Actually, more than a little bit about the Dr.

Phil show.

And I have curated what I'm calling in the outline, the Dr.

Phil Show Selected Works.

I have pulled a number of episodes that we are going to talk about that I see as representative of the show's ethos at large.

And before I talk about those episodes with you, I want to take a pin out of the doctor in Dr.

Phil.

And note here that Dr.

Phil lost his license to practice psychology, which he held in Texas in 2006.

He stopped renewing it because he had a show at that point and he was based in California and he was like, I don't need this Texas license to practice psychology, so I don't need to be a doctor anymore.

He has never held a license in California where the show is filmed.

So on a technical level, he was never providing psychological diagnostics on that show.

He was just giving glorified peer-to-peer advice.

And I know that sounds like a technicality, but I think it turns out to be very important as the behavior that he exhibits on that show would be derided as extremely unethical by the medical community at large.

You know, yeah, that was what I was going to say: is like, I think that not being licensed means that there's nothing you can threaten to take away from him on the grounds of ethics, on the grounds of, you know, just sort of like how he ran that show in general.

Again, I don't know that it's possible to run a sort of like psychology show or like a therapy show or whatever that is five days a week and stay within the ethical bounds of the profession, right?

Like, I don't, I don't know that you can do all those things.

At least, not like, I don't think that would yield the result that he wanted, which was just to get people to watch.

Like, if you were watching just actual psychological advice all the time, like it might not be as interesting as what the Dr.

Phil show turned out to be.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think that's right.

He wanted to make Jerry Springer, and that's exactly what he did.

Yeah, 100%.

The other thing that I was thinking of while we were talking about this was like Dr.

Drew and the celebrity rehab of it all, right?

That that was sort of another chapter of just like, oh, you made a TV show.

And I'm not sure that you can do that super ethically on this topic at that scale, right?

If you're trying to compete with, at the time, Jerry Springer, you're coming out of the era of like Ricky Lake, Jenny Jones, and just like a sort of era of daytime talk shows that was like, find low-income people who you can goad into physically fighting each other on stage, right?

Was sort of the vibe of like a lot of daytime talk shows.

Like, it seems to me that what he was doing was trying to do that sort of thing with this little like patina of like, actually, I'm certified.

Actually, I'm educated on this.

Actually, you're in good hands in some way or another, while still doing the thing that people absolutely, rightly derided Jerry Springer for doing.

Exactly.

And I was putting together my notes for this show and I was like, oh, like this was just Jerry Springer.

This was just Maury.

But the difference is he called it Dr.

Phil.

At least with the Jerry Springer show, they were honest about what they were doing.

Yeah.

And Jerry Springer was very much like, yeah, I'm a dirtbag.

What are you going to do about it?

Right?

Like, he just sort of owned that.

And again, like, I am definitely not here to be a defender of Jerry Springer, but I do think there's like a level of honesty in just sort of being upfront about who you are and what you're doing, right?

I think the same is true of like a lot of reality TV.

A lot of my beloved reality TV is a similar sort of thing that, like, when things try to get a little highbrow is when you get sort of hoodwinked into thinking it might be safer than it is, it might be more respectful than it is, it might be more consent-based than it is, all of that kind of stuff, right?

Shall we get into the selected works?

Let's do it.

So, the first episode that I wanted to bring up was the episode of Dr.

Phil that has actually stayed with me in all of the years since I saw it as a child because it was really fundamental to the way that I grew up thinking about eating disorders.

Hmm.

So, you know, for the next however many minutes we talk about this, there is, you know, a general content warning for eating disorders because that's what this episode was about.

This episode of Dr.

Phil, which aired in 2008, chronicled the struggles of a woman named Amy Moore, who was a woman in her late 20s.

She had anorexia, she had bulimia, and she also struggled with binge eating.

And I remember watching this episode during a time where I was really fixated on eating disorders.

You know, I was like a young, like very, very skinny, like naturally scrawny gay boy who was made fun of a lot.

And I just had a, you know, hyperfixation on my body and bodies in general, as I think a lot of kids do.

And all I remember from this show was the imagery and how it made me feel.

They filmed this woman in her home, very graphically engaging in all of the behaviors associated with her eating disorders.

Did they show her purging?

They showed her, they showed her binging and they showed her purging.

Holy, so yeah.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna just pause for a second and say, my earlier read on this was it would be really tough to do things within sort of ethical the ethical bounds of being a psychologist uh and run this show i feel like what you're telling me in this show is just just hurling ethics out the window oh a hundred percent just like gleefully throwing them away because both as a person who has uh dealt with eating disorders of my own and as a person who is a fat person who shows up on camera periodically, the public response to seeing a body that people don't automatically clock as desirable is like one of the most horror show things you can sort of experience.

I kind of think, just in terms of like interpersonal behavior with strangers, it's really astonishing.

So,

and for a person dealing with this much disordered eating and this much like of a psychological load to carry, piling that onto that person with, I'm presuming, no support after the show airs is not just depicting their situation without care it's i would say actively putting them in a much worse position for their eating disorder to worsen a thousand percent i mean like so many of the subjects of the show they they depicted her like like you would look at a zoo animal you know

there were videos of her in her own kitchen it like almost cartoonishly like screaming at the food like yelling at people around her it felt like a caricature of a caricature of a person with an eating disorder.

Not to mention, she was obviously very, very, very, very, very, very, very thin.

And they really, really focused on showing her body in the most, you know, contorted lighting and like making her sure a lot of ribs,

a lot of ribs.

Shutting out bones, a lot of, yes, all of that sort of aesthetic.

Exactly.

And they like recorded her like yelling at herself that she was fat.

Like it was, it was a, it was a, it was a freak show.

And I remember growing up knowing people with eating disorders, you know, a girl in my grade, a friend of my mom.

And this segment made me more, like as a child, it made me more judgmental of them.

Well, and it's also like, if you situate this, what did you say it was?

2007?

2008, yeah.

So 2008 is four years after the Attorney General of the U.S., Richard Carmona, told the press that in terms of threats to national security, that terrorism was the threat from without and that obesity was the threat from within, right?

This is also

around the time that Michelle Obama starts talking about the Let's Move campaign.

This is around the time that stories about the quote-unquote obesity epidemic are at a fever pitch, right?

This is also the era of like treating Jessica Simpson like a fat person, right?

Like, this is, I would argue, like a decade of like national enforced body dysmorphia, right?

Like just like as a, as an agenda.

So the idea of taking someone who has taken that message to heart too much and also ridiculing that person, there's like a darkness.

There's like a real deep, deep, deep darkness in that.

Well, and there were so many Dr.

Phil episodes that focused on weight loss and fat people.

Sure.

And then you went on the other hand and you were like, you're too thin.

You know, he, he really attacked it from all sides.

Yeah.

Again, I'm just thinking about like the sort of soup strainer mustache and the lumbering guy in the big suit being like the arbiter of like bodies and particularly women's bodies.

And I'm like, this time out, everybody.

Let's just take a minute, take a breather.

What are we doing here?

What's the plan?

And like you said, there's such a thin veneer on all of these episodes of care.

You know, you have this man with this like homely southern accent.

And he's like, Lod, are you afraid of food?

And he's like pretending to be invested in like the well-being of his guests, but it was very clearly, you know, what I would call like humilitane.

Yeah, yes, but you could feel good about the fact that you were judging and disgusted by the people on screen because you had this man who you were identifying with pretending to care about them, right?

I mean, so, like, if we're painting the sort of cultural picture of the time, also,

this is the era of American Idol, where they would spend like multiple episodes on the initial terrible auditions.

This was the William Hung era.

This was the like, we are going to spend weeks showing you terrible singers who think they're good and dunking on regular people who thought they had a shot at this thing that is like regular people might have a shot, right?

That this kind of just like plucking people out of obscurity just to make fools of them in public was sort of a pastime at the time.

So it makes makes sense that that would like, if that's already our lens when you're like watching TV is like, who's going to be a real dummy that I can make fun of today?

Then like, of course, stories like this also get slotted into that lens, right?

Oh, God.

Before we move on to my next selected work, I do want to note that Amy died 10 years later.

And, you know, I'm not going to sit here and be like, it was Dr.

Phil, but, you know, I'd be hard pressed to argue that Dr.

Phil like helped.

Interestingly, like, I watched all of these in the early years of YouTube because they were uploaded to Dr.

Phil's channel and they were widely, widely viewed.

This particular episode has been scrubbed from all of his media channels because I think that they were probably like, Yeah, this one's, this one's bad, this one's bad, this one.

I think we gave the game away a little bit with how reckless we were.

Yeah, but it still stayed with me, and I remember finding her obituary through Reddit when I looked this up.

Good lord.

The one one thing that I will say that your listeners may or may not be aware of is that it is a widely known thing.

If you even just sort of dip a toe into eating disorder world, one of the first things that you will hear is about eating disorders having one of the highest death tolls of any mental illness.

I just want to really underscore that this was not only knowable to Dr.

Phil, but likely already known to him.

right in going into this episode if there was anyone on his staff who sort of knew the world of eating disorders, if he himself had treated people with eating disorders, you know that you are on a high wire, right?

That you are trying to balance all of these things without this person just tipping off into the abyss, right?

So to play with fire this way in a way that is like someone else's mental health is at stake in a way that really could conceivably lead to or contribute to their death is,

I just want want to really, really, really underscore that, like, dying is part of the conversation when you talk about treatment of eating disorders.

And, like, he wouldn't, he would have known that is my guess.

He would have known that.

God damn.

Should we move on to the next selected work?

Do it.

This one's a little lighter.

Obviously, Dr.

Phil kind of like runs the gamut of like really, really awful to like awful, but kind of dumb.

This falls into the latter, which is fun.

So, this is a segment from a Dr.

Phil primetime special, Family First from 2004.

And the segment begins with Dr.

Phil looking into the camera and saying, Actually, I'm going to send this to you because I want you to read it.

Am I going to say it?

Yes.

Great.

He says, The most important signs parents need to look for.

Could you be raising a criminal?

What did that even mean?

Uh, Jaywalker?

I'm assuming it's Jaywalker.

I'm assuming it's about returning your library books on time.

Would you be raising a criminal?

So, this segment is about Eric, a nine-year-old, who is filmed in his home by Dr.

Phil's camera crews while his mother kind of tearfully narrates about how Eric hurts animals, how Eric hits his sister, and seems to not feel remorse about it.

And the one that they really fixate on, I think for obvious like TV humilitation reasons, is that this kid wipes poop on the walls.

Oh, Jesus hell.

Do they do bedwedding?

Is bedwetting a part of the you beat me to it?

Did I really?

Well, I'm just thinking about the like serial killer checklist, right?

The sort of psychopathy checklist.

You're beating me to it.

Sorry, I've watched simply too much criminal minds.

So, you know, this mom is talking to Dr.

Phil about how she fears leaving this nine-year-old alone.

She says she fears leaving him alone with knives.

And I'm like, you probably shouldn't leave any nine-year-old alone with knives.

Like, that's not that uncommon of a fear to have.

But, you know, she's saying she's terrified and she wants Dr.

Phil's help to save her marriage and family and son.

Dr.

Phil's diagnosis, based on like footage from his film crew spending time with the family, is that the boy needs more male approval and essentially blames the dad who's sitting there on stage.

And the dad is like, what, what, what, what, what, me?

You know, like,

oh my God.

And then, and then he goes into, you guessed it, the 14 characteristics of a serial killer.

He says, quote, your son has nine of the 14.

Jeffrey Dahmer had seven.

And then he flashes side by side photos of this nine-year-old and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Surprise, you're raising a gay cannibal.

What are we doing?

Truly.

What are we doing?

Like, here's the thing.

Wait, before you tell me what the thing is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.

I screenshotted from that episode three of the 14 serial killer traits.

Do you want to read them?

Male intelligent and bedwetting?

Male intelligent and bedwetting.

Well, I have two of the three.

Male and bedwedding.

I was going to say, this is bad news for so many adult men that I know.

Uh-oh.

So what do you make of this?

Look, I think you can look at this from like one of two directions, right?

Either you can look at this from the perspective of of like, we're making a TV show and we're trying to decide what's best for the audience, or you can look at this from the perspective of we're dealing with this family system and this kid and we have to decide what's best for this kid.

Either way, if you're deciding, hey, what's best for this kid?

First of all, I 1 million%

understand how a parent with a child that they were afraid of would be very quickly at wit's end and would be trying, like just reaching for kind of anything

to figure out how to address this kind of situation.

That feels very much like a there but for the grace of God go I kind of situation.

Far be it from me to judge.

And in the mental health care system that we have in this country, not a lot of great options for treatment for lots and lots of folks, right?

You would be hard pressed to say, ah, yes, the best thing for this nine-year-old with purported violent tendencies is to go on TV

and be sort of, as you you say, sort of exhibited as like a freak show, right?

In this case, again,

I can't fathom that that is the best thing for the kid.

I can't fathom that it was the best thing for the parents.

But also, even if you're just looking at it from the TV side, okay, you want to create something that's instructive to your audience.

What is instructive to your audience about this?

That again, hasn't already been on like 40 episodes of Law and Order SVU or whatever, right?

Like, it is not as if this sort of traits of a serial killer stuff hadn't already been hammered into the ground at this point.

So, I just, it's really difficult to imagine what the value proposition of this is, aside from salaciousness, ratings, all of that, at the expense of a family system that's genuinely struggling, and at the expense of a kid who very clearly has some kind of psychological something going on.

You know, I included this one because it's absurd and awful for all the reasons you've stated, but I also think the focus on criminality is so interesting.

And really, like,

I'm trying to pick up these like breadcrumbs, right, of this like conservative ideology that's flowing through his career the entire time.

And this framing of, could you be raising a criminal as if criminal is an identity marker and something that like, you know, something that some kids are biologically destined to become and stay forever.

Right.

This sort of connects back to there's a long, long, gross history in criminology of like race science playing a big role there, right?

The big example that I always go back to is a criminologist from the 1800s, I believe, named Cesare Lombroso, who believed that there was a subspecies of humans called Homo criminalis who were defined by wide noses and sloping brows.

You're like, got it!

Hey, got message received, champ, right?

So it is, it really is sort of historically sort of a hop, skip, and a jump from this kind of like, are criminals born this way to just like straight up race science and like fodder for eugenics kind of stuff.

Dr.

Phil also tries to really involve himself in sort of the medical processes of struggling celebrities because what could be better for ratings than that?

He tries to like visit Britney Spears in rehab.

To what end?

Was he, he was just like going to say hi or he was trying to get her on the show?

He was probably trying to get her to like come on the show.

There isn't any footage to my knowledge of this happening, but it's just like he visited her at her rehab or in her hospital room or something.

This is the buzz cut umbrella attack era of Britney Spears.

Yes.

Is that right?

Okay, gotcha.

The people representing her were not happy about this at all.

But someone that he does successfully get on his show in 2016, I believe, is Shelly Duvall.

My love.

You didn't know about this?

No!

I love Shelly Duvall.

What?

No!

When Shelly Duvall later in her life was struggling with, you know, mental illness and paranoia, Dr.

Phil gets her to come on his show in a segment he called From Hollywood Star to Near Isolation, Helping the Shinings Shelley Duvall.

He frames this interview as like, this, you know, previously famous and beloved actress has been living in isolation for years, which to my understanding was true.

But then he's like, we need to help her.

He says, quote, this was a woman forgotten by the world, and we just could not walk away from her.

Like, he really positions himself in all of these situations throughout the entirety of his show as like some sort of like Gandhi figure in a way that even like real, I would say, and especially real therapists and psychologists don't, because that's not how psychotherapy works.

Totally.

And also, like, there are writers on his show.

He is still presumably, like, I'm presuming he's an executive producer.

As the host of the show, even if writers are writing lines for you, you can still push back and go, hey, I don't think this is quite it.

The process of making a show is an inherently collaborative one.

And so you're in a constant state of like giving each other feedback and all of this kind of stuff.

A woman forgotten by the world is so needlessly mean and also like clearly needling someone who used to be a public figure.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like just like, ugh.

Well, and it's, I actually have a really big issue with this in general.

When you see, you know, people who were at one point very famous public figures who then become reclusive, whether by their own decision or they have some medical problems, mental or physical, you know, there's this framing of like, oh, like we let them go.

But it's like, no, you don't know this person.

You as you as a stranger and perhaps a former fan don't have an obligation or a right to like stalk someone whose movie you loved and see how they're doing medically.

Well, and we're like decades in now to like a very clear, very public understanding that when famous people are asked about their fame, they're like, it's bad.

I don't like it.

It feels bad.

People are boundaryless.

I'm afraid for my safety in some baseline ways, right?

Like, I think there is part of this, like a woman forgotten by the world, that is like presuming that there's not some rational decision-making that goes into deciding to step away

from public life.

It's like I didn't forget Shelly Duvall.

I'm just leaving her alone.

Right.

She decided to do something else and I'm deciding to let her.

Yeah.

This is a really painful watch that I honestly only watch like 10 minutes of.

It's Dr.

Phil just kind of like poking and prodding what seemed to be her delusions and letting her just kind of like talk and talk.

And she's clearly not well.

Dr.

Phil just continues to like be like, well, explain that and elaborate on that.

And, oh, are they in the room with us right now?

Like that kind of shit for an hour.

And it just sucks.

And he was widely criticized for doing this interview.

Good.

Because, again, it's one of these examples that it kind of gives the game away.

It's like, oh, there's no care here.

There's just exploitation for capital, for profit.

That's all this is.

Yeah, that's right.

And it's like, how far away are we now from just fully like the national inquirer or fully like beach body garbage, right?

Like it's just full sort of like tabloid style exploitation is what it feels like.

I want to take a break from the show to give a shout out to Ground News for sponsoring this episode and truly just being a great service.

A big part of my job is reaching people where they're at information and a big part of figuring that out is understanding their information diet and my own.

You know, a straightforward event can be reported, as we all know, in a lot of different ways, depending on the ideological goal of the people who are publishing that story.

For example, a trans woman running in the London Marathon could be reported as, as it was in the New York Post, Trans Runner beats 14,000 women in London Marathon.

Or it could be reported, as it was by The advocate, Trans Marathoner places

6,159th in women's category.

This is a real story.

She really did come in 6,159th place.

And there was so much outrage that she was pressured to apologize to the London Marathon itself and offered to return her participation medal.

Are eggs cheaper yet?

Anyway, this is where Ground News comes in.

Ground News is a website and app that aggregates all different news articles about a single story and organizes their left, right, and center biases, gives you information about the owners of the platforms publishing those stories and any conflicts of interest therein, and so many more news transparency tools that make it easier to understand your own information diet and maybe your dad's or your brothers.

Ground news has been a really helpful tool for me in understanding how our reality, how our shared reality has gotten so fractured, especially in the last couple of years, based on how people are reading about the same events.

Ground News is also purely subscriber-backed.

There are no venture capitalist funders, so it has no allegiance to any billionaires.

If you would like to subscribe to Ground News, you can get 40% off a Vantage Plan right now at ground.news slash fruity, or just scan the QR code on the screen if you're watching the video version of this podcast.

Thanks so much to Ground News.

And now let's get back to the episode.

What I want to get to next is, you've been waiting for it.

We've arrived.

Bahad Bahabi.

It's upon us.

If you are not familiar with the cultural artifact of Bahad Bahabi, Bad Bahabi,

I can't stop for that.

I really, I really love your commitment to this bitch.

Bahad Bahabi

is the rapper name for the woman at the time, girl named Danielle Brigoli, who at the time she goes on Dr.

Phil is an unknown to the world 13-year-old.

Her mother takes her onto Dr.

Phil to try to rectify her behavior, which included stealing and, quote, twerking.

Sure, you gotta get that kid in line.

She's twerking.

When Danielle is having her interview with Dr.

Phil about how she's kind of unruly and, you know, acting out in all these ways, the audience is kind of jeering at her.

At which point, she coins the iconic, catch me outside.

How about

that?

The public's understanding of Bahad Bahabi really started there and then evolved into her spinning this into a career, kind of as a media mogul.

She has a number of successful rap hits.

She starts like a makeup line to my understanding.

She's extraordinarily wealthy now.

She's beefing with Travis Barker's daughter?

Yeah, she's beefing with Alabama Barker, the daughter-in-law to Courtney Kardashian.

These people are too young for me to have any business being invested in that.

But notable to Dr.

Phil, what I will say, and what I think a lot of people don't know or include in their memory of this woman's come up, was that after she appears on the show, Dr.

Phil sends her to Turnabout Ranch, which was a troubled teen camp in Utah, where she later said she was abused in the form of not being allowed to sleep for three days straight, standing outside in the cold, and having to pick up horse feces for hours as a 13-year-old.

She watched staff physically restrain kids who tried to escape from this troubled teen camp.

And while she was staying there, a murder occurred when when Jesus.

One of the fellow,

you can't even really call them like campers or student.

Like you're essentially child prisoners at these troubled teen camps.

Someone trying to escape killed a staff member by bludgeoning them.

I will say this, even in the absence of a murder, even in the absence of all of these sorts of things,

I have a number of friends who went to facilities that were part of the quote-unquote troubled teen industry.

Do you want to like talk a little bit about what those are for people who don't know?

Yeah, the idea is essentially that like this was particularly big in the 2000s and into the 2010s.

It also stretches back to the 90s and 80s from the DNA of sort of scared straight kind of programs.

But the troubled teen industry is something that Paris Hilton has actually spoken out about quite a bit.

It is for the most part, I think the most well-known facilities are essentially like boot camps where you send kids who are acting out, who are having behavioral issues.

Often, just anecdotally, I will say from the people in my life, those are like queer kids whose parents were opposed to them coming out.

Those were kids who were dealing with like really significant trauma or had experienced sexual assault and were acting out as a result of that because they didn't know how to process it, right?

These were kids who had really significant underlying issues and the way that that was showing up was through acting out.

And I think the sort of cultural narrative at the time was you have to address the behavior.

And the idea was, these kids are just acting this way because nobody's told them no, and they're kind of soft.

And like, they just really have to get out of the real world and have some people who don't take their shit.

And kids would get sent away to these residential programs

where, you know, people will say it sort of later came out.

I would argue it came out at the time, but no one was listening to the kids at the troubled teen camps

that there was profound abuse happening in those spaces.

I will say, as someone who both attended and has done some research into fat camps, I think there are some really meaningful through lines there, which is like, you have already proven that you're not willing to try is sort of the perception in both cases, right?

That fat kids are not willing to try.

Like, if you just put some effort into it, you'd be thin.

If you just put some effort into it, you would be acting better or behaving more.

And the response to that is sort sort of deeply incurious, right, from adults.

And it presumes that the issue is that you haven't been punished enough.

It's carceral mindset.

1 million percent.

It's you will fix the thing that you've done wrong, whether that's be fat, whether that is be a traumatized child who acts out,

whether it's, you know, in the case of prisons, like you've committed a crime.

These things will be rectified through punishment, through forced labor.

And in the case of troubled teen camps where Dr.

Phil was known to send many of his guests their children.

And again, this is another through line to like where this man ends up, which is like steeped in conservative ideology because this was his ideology in psychology where it's like some things you just have to punish out of people.

You just have to throw kids in labor camps in the freezing cold woods in Utah.

Also, I will just say, if you, dear listener, like me, are an adult without children, I just want to return return you to the concept of like what a 13-year-old actually is.

13-year-olds are in middle school.

I will say I know a handful of 13-year-olds from friends, kids, and such.

They are still very much into Pokemon cards.

They're still like they are children.

So, this idea that you need to, first of all, just like, I think there are kids for whom going to a sleep away camp at 13 is like too much, much less this kind of gnarly garbage, right?

It's really sort of stomach-turning to think that this was like a thing that folks convinced themselves at a cultural level was not just worth doing, but was laudable and was like for the greater good to treat kids this way is it's genuinely sort of stomach turning to me.

I bring up the murder because, well, if a murder occurred while she's there, obviously we have to bring it up, but also because like there was press around that murder.

There was like widespread understanding that that murder at Turnabout Ranch had happened.

And yet, a couple years later, Dr.

Phil sends another person from his show to that very same ranch.

In 2019, he films an episode with a 17-year-old named Hannah Archoletta, who had committed the grave sin of struggling with mental illness and suicidal thoughts because she had a terminally ill mother.

Troubled teen industry for someone whose mom is on is slowly dying in front of her?

It's it's actually, you can't even exaggerate how evil it is, but it does kind of get worse.

So,

sorry, no, it's fine.

I'm just, it's uh, it's a rare thing, given the nature of the work that I do, the show that Mike and I make, and sort of the waters that you and I both kind of swim in, that something is like dramatically worse than I thought it was going to be.

Yeah,

this is dramatically worse than I thought it was going to be for Dr.

Phil.

Good lord.

So according to the lawsuit that Hannah's family would later file against Dr.

Phil, Dr.

Phil took Hannah's dad into his office before they started filming and told him that he thought Hannah should go to the turnabout ranch immediately after they stopped filming.

Shouldn't even go home.

She should be put in a vehicle and sent to this trouble teen camp right after filming at his studio in Los Angeles.

He said he would pay for it and provide transportation, which he did for all of the people.

It seems that he sent from his show to these camps.

And Hannah went.

Hannah would end up being sexually assaulted twice by a male staff member at Turnabout Ranch.

And when she spoke up about it, she was, according to a Washington Post article about this case, quote, punished, forced to pick up horse manure, sleep on a wooden plank, verbally abused, and deprived of sleep.

It has been alleged that Dr.

Phil was being financially compensated by the trouble teen industry and perhaps by Turnabout Ranch by sending his TV guests to them.

We don't know that and I can't say it for sure, but it's been kind of hinted at in these lawsuits that he was being motivated by something to continue sending kids there.

I would argue it doesn't even matter

because whether or not he was being paid by them, first of all, he thought this was the best course of action.

And it's also like he's being paid by this entire process.

He gets to make his big show.

He gets to, you know, get all of the ratings.

And he basically gets to like throw these kids in the slammer after he's done his episode and, you know, cashed his check, right?

As you were reading off the list of like pick up horse manure, sleep on a wooden plank, all of that sort of stuff, the thing that was going through my mind is like, this is very genuinely the kind of stuff that like Ruby Frankie is in prison for.

And those were her kids, right?

This is a facility being run professionally, quote unquote, that parents are paying to send their kids to.

Again, just like absolutely stomach turning, like absolutely stomach turning.

Not only that that existed, that it was a paid service, that I'm sure it still does exist in some way, shape, or form, right?

Turn about Ranch still exists, yeah.

Jesus God help us.

It's also deeply horrifying that this was lifted up and I'm sure applauded by the audience of Dr.

Phil's show, of one of the most popular shows in the country.

That's what I was going to add here is like, these aren't the private dealings of individuals, which would be bad enough.

You know, when a parent or a guardian chooses to send someone under their care to a place like this, that's bad enough.

But this was being broadcast to millions of people more than any other TV show in the country as this is what you do when people are struggling.

This is, this is what you do with them.

This is how you rectify it.

And I feel like, like I said at the beginning, you know, when I watched that episode about Amy Moore, who was struggling with all these different eating disorders, like the net result of that was I was more judgmental of people around me in my life who were struggling because Dr.

Phil was judgmental of them.

And I feel like that's like the bigger undercurrent of all of this is that like people who struggle are beneath us.

And I think it's notable too, and you mentioned this, like a lot of the people he was having on his show, I would argue most people, these were low-income people with oftentimes without a ton of privilege.

I think the net effect was just cruelty, disguised as care.

Absolutely.

I also just, you know, I think about this a lot with parents of fat kids who put their kids on diets and that sort of thing,

that it is both not great, don't like it, don't love it, wish they wouldn't do it.

And also, it really is hard to reckon with the fact that, like, that is the primary, if not the only, cultural solution that they are offered, right?

Is like you, no matter what, you have to make your fat kid thin.

And I think there is a similar sort of like cultural mandate around this kind of acting out.

And at that time,

and again, I would argue for years beforehand with scared straight programs and that sort of thing, the answer to your kid is having a tough time and is acting out was

you need to put them in painful situations whether that's you directly causing the pain or whether that's you hiring someone else to cause the pain to your child like there have to have been parents who really really really deeply struggled with that and had to convince themselves that this was in the best interest of their kid right to go to these sorts of programs as a result of being platformed on dr phil and dr oz and all of these sorts of shows right that like if that's the only solution that you're really seeing, then you sort of go,

well, hey, man, I guess that's it.

I guess this is what we have to do.

And I think that's where things get extra sinister to me.

You know what I mean?

Is the not just these individual experiences, which are shocking and horrifying, but the trumpeting out of those and the proposing those individual series of like really horrifying dramas as like a solution to a societal problem or a solution to a parenting problem

is alarming and distressing.

The last episode I want to talk about of Dr.

Phil, this was perhaps the shortest Dr.

Phil segment of all time.

I don't think it lasted more than two minutes.

And this was about a little thing called bum fights.

Do you know about this?

I know about the existence of bum fights.

I didn't know that there was a segment on Dr.

Phil.

So there hardly was.

Allow me to explain.

So tell me.

If you weren't there, which quite frankly, I wasn't, Bum Fights was an early 2000s video series phenomenon where these men who made the videos essentially paid people who were experiencing homelessness to fight each other or hurt themselves, do kind of like, you know, it was reminiscent of like the jackass films, but like the jackass people were choosing to do it themselves and profiting themselves.

These people were like exploiting, you know, people on the streets to do it.

And one of the creators of this film series, Bum Fights, he got the idea to do it based on an experience he had when he was living on the streets and someone paid him $5 to run headfirst into a shipping container.

This was peak, peak, peak, like trauma, exploitation, porn, humilitainment.

Getting people at their lowest and offering them money to let you film them for public spectacle.

So in 2006, the owner at the time of this video series was a guy named Ty Beeson, and he was invited onto Dr.

Phil.

In the segment, they rolled footage of Ty Beeson talking about this like gross enterprise he has, right?

Which included paying an unhoused man who was struggling with tooth decay to take a wrench and pull out his own teeth.

Jesus God.

And then it cuts to Dr.

Phil, who is like, stop.

Stop the tape, stop the tape, you know, very performatively, because he obviously planned to do this from the beginning.

He's so disgusted by the conduct in bum fights that he doesn't even want to do the interview with Ty.

He says, I don't want to talk to you.

You're despicable.

Leave.

And then it cuts to Ty Beeson, who I'm going to send you a photo of what Ty Beeson showed up on the show looking like.

Oh!

Well, that is this.

That is Dr.

Phil minus a mustache.

Well, there's a little bit of a fake mustache there.

Oh, is there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, there is a little shadow, huh?

If you squint.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

But basically, Ty Beeson comes to the show dressed like Dr.

Phil.

He has the gray suit.

He's wearing a bald cap there.

What?

The sideburns and the mustache are fake.

As he's being ushered off by like Dr.

Phil's like production and security, he goes, quote, if you think I exploit people, every time you have a guest on this show, you exploit whatever problems they have to the whole world.

Who do you think you are?

And it's like, it's really the spider-men pointing at each other.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Where you're like,

he's not wrong.

I don't know that he can claim the moral high ground here, but he's not wrong.

But I don't even think he is claiming the moral high ground.

He's just, he's basically just like, we're in business together, buddy.

We're two sides of the same coin.

And it really like punctures the veil of like Dr.

Phil being like, no, I just want everyone to do better and get these families back together.

What you need to something that I love about Dr.

Phil is his like, he really pronounces the H.

What are you doing here?

You know what I mean?

I'm a little bit upset that we're like halfway through and we're just getting to your very excellent Dr.

Phil voice.

I feel like you've been holding out.

You got to get off this stage.

You're despicable.

No.

Guards, get them out.

Yeah, which also, like, what a showy way to, I mean, I'm sure they aired all of that, right?

They did.

And the whole thing was like over in two minutes.

Right, which is like, so then you have this guy, again, who's doing like Dr.

Phil, who's doing these like extremely, not even morally questionable, but like morally bad

things on this show, who then

gets to appear to be taking the high road, like this is too far or whatever, right?

It makes you think he's a good guy who has standards

that are not borne out by the rest of his programming.

We have been talking about some heavy stuff and we are now done talking about the Dr.

Phil show.

We're going to get into the later years of his career and get closer to where we are now, but I want to do a fun little interlude where we can laugh at something that's kind of inconsequential.

Yes.

So I thought we could look at Dr.

Phil's house.

I can't wait.

In 2020, Dr.

Phil puts his LA home up for sale for just under $6 million.

Uh-huh.

And I'm going to send you a few pictures of the home that I want to look at together and have you describe what it is because it is such a crazy manifestation of this man.

Now listen,

are those tentacles?

Are they antlers on the banister?

What's happening here?

First of all, let's start at image one because what chain restaurant would you say the exterior of this home reminds me?

Olive Garden.

Olive Garden.

Okay, I was going to say Cheesecake Factory, but one in the same.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can go Cheesecake Factory as well.

There's so what we're seeing is a stucco house that has the sort of tile roof, those sort of scalloped tiles on the roof.

Very LA style, but also like trimmed hedges and a manicured lawn and, you know, pedestals and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And look, I can't hate on this too much because like a lot of people, especially in LA, live in cheesecake factories.

Britney Spears.

Britney Spears lives in a cheesecake factory and I can't knock that for her.

You know,

it is what it is.

But then we open the doors.

Good lord.

So there's like a big sort of rotunda thing

happening here, like a big circular kind of entryway.

There appears to be a bar with stools at it, and the stools look like they have antlers for backs, is what I'm going with.

Yeah.

The banister is very Cthulhu.

There are just like endless tentacles happening on the banister.

I don't understand what they are.

And then I am now realizing I got so distracted by the antlers and the tentacles.

And if you look into the next room, there is a glass case with a bunch of assault rifles on display.

Okay, we'll get to that one in a second.

Good God,

what is happening?

I can't tell if they're like antler.

To me, I saw this and it's almost like

weird, misshapen bones.

It's like, it's like the staircase is lined with what look like antler bones.

Interior design by the Yellow King from the first season of True Detective.

Like, good lord.

You know, I gotta say, as a gay guy, like, if this was Bjork's house, I would live.

But it's Dr.

Phil's house.

And I'm like, you're troubled, you know?

Yeah, there's something about it that feels also like it's like on the same continuum as like Donald Trump's design aesthetic, which is just like too much of everything.

Yes.

Just like way too much of everything.

And speaking of too much of absolutely everything, do you want to see the third photo?

We talking about the gun room?

Yeah.

It's the dining room?

The dining room is where you keep the guns?

So what we're looking at is a dining room.

It's like an all black and gray dining room that kind of looks otherwise just like a kind of dark but sort of standard early 2000s McMansion dining room.

And on one wall, it is just covered in assault rifles.

But also in the same room, there's like these little like cartoony footstooly guys.

Yeah, there's almost like like they look like like laboobus actually kind of.

They do look a little bit like labooboos.

Like they come from the world of like labooboos but also like maybe uh uh squishmallows and like troll dolls or something right like there's something like a little bit childlike but a little bit unsettling about them it's the luboo assault rifle dining room it's the combination assault rifle labooboo dining room this just sounds like you're trying to optimize seo now assault rifle laboo boo

I am

someone, I found these images and the real estate article through Reddit where someone described this as a cheesecake factory that doubles as the ninth circle of hell.

Dante could never.

I included this because I felt like we needed a little levity.

And also, it's just a fascinating peek into

his mind.

Do you know what this reminds me of is there was like a run of, boy, if you haven't watched them, Matt, treat yourself to some old episodes of an TV show called Trading Spaces.

It was where like neighbors or friends would trade rooms in their house.

They'd get paired up with a designer, but they'd be on like an extreme budget.

And they'd be like, I'm going to do a makeover of my neighbor's dining room because they hate their dining room and it's time to change it.

But they would be on this like wild budget and they would have absolutely nutty ideas and they'd be like, we painted the inside of your dining room so it looks like you're inside a circus tent or something.

Like this feels like that level of sort of like budget and design aesthetic where you're like, Why are there drapes on the light fixture?

Like, why is that what's happening here?

There's just a bunch of sort of mystifying 2000s interior design choices being made here.

Yeah, it begs the question: what if you had limitless money and were also completely out of your mind?

Right, the outside has all the taste of a cheesecake factory, but it ends at the outside.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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And now, let's get back to the show.

Okay, I want to catch up with Dr.

Phil in 2020, which is when, as we know, a lot of people's brains really started to melt in different ways.

Dr.

Phil was vehemently against against COVID lockdowns.

He did a media tour where, and you can see we're kind of really converging on the like, oh, I'm a very outspoken, very open right-wing activist.

Like we're not doing this so much, like, I want to heal the world and bring the families back together through like teen labor camps.

Like we're not even pretending anymore.

Dr.

Phil does a media tour where he argues that quarantines were doing more harm to children than the virus would, which I noted here, like even if he's ignoring the fact that there are immunocompromised kids, like, one major point of closing the schools during the early months of COVID was so kids couldn't contract COVID and then bring it home to people in their home who were older or more vulnerable.

When he was pressed on this issue, Dr.

Phil said that the real thing that he took issue with was that there were kids who were trapped in abusive situations at home who no longer had access to counselors or outside help, which again, I note, like, that's true.

But then the broader issue there is homeschooling, I feel like, which you don't see Dr.

Phil speaking out against.

You know, like COVID lockdowns for school only lasted a few months and then kids started going back in for hybrid learning.

And now obviously kids are entirely back in school.

The bigger issue, I feel like, when it comes to kids trapped at home in abusive situations without outside resources or help or opinions is homeschooling.

But Dr.

Phil now works for the party, which is taking money away from public schools so that more kids can be homeschooled or in alt schooling.

So it just doesn't comport.

Right.

This is what I was going to say: is like, look, man, if you're concerned about kids not having access to counselors and not having access to the kinds of services that they get in schools, you have to kind of reckon with the fact that at this point, you know, at the point that COVID hit, we're coming on 20 to 30 years of like systematically underfunding schools, of casting aspersions on teachers' unions as being like uniquely greedy, and of eroding the public school system through sort of the proliferation of charter schools and that sort of thing, right?

So like the answer to this is like, if you want kids to have that kind of support, COVID or no, you need to have the money to hire counselors, have enough counselors that the number of students that you have means that they can actually access time with the counselor, all of that kind of stuff.

But that's not,

doesn't have the same kind of curb appeal as being like, I'm at home and I'm tired of being at home.

Ergo, open the the schools.

Totally.

Amidst this sort of press tour that he's doing around his fight against COVID lockdowns, Dr.

Phil goes on Fox News and makes perhaps the most insane argument I've ever heard.

I'm going to play it for you.

Look, the fact of the matter is, we have people dying.

45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don't shut the country down for for that.

But yet we're doing it for this.

It's fun that he didn't mention gun violence.

Yes.

That's a fun one.

When we're talking about unnecessary deaths in the U.S., it feels like that one usually is pretty close to the top of the list.

Noticeable that Mr.

Gun Dining Room, Laboo Boo Assault Rifle Dining Room himself was not leading with that point.

Strange.

I love how he starts with the fact of the matter is.

And I'm like, well, I don't know if that's the fact of the matter.

His whole sort of persona is he's like a

tough-talking dad who gives good advice and, you know, is just coming after you because he cares, right?

Which I think allows him to play pretty fast and loose with facts.

And I think, as with any number of public figures who have like a pretty defined lane of expertise, when he starts getting outside of that and speaking with the same kind of authority that he uses when he is in his lane, you're like, oh, uh-oh.

Also, just like the implication that

we have come to accept unnecessary deaths in other realms.

Ergo, we should accept unnecessary deaths in this realm is like

really

morally devoid kind of take.

So moving right along, because it does continue to get worse, the sorry, I'm going to say it differently than that.

I got to keep spirits light here.

Like,

God, Aubrey.

That's your response project.

Dan Savage had it gets better.

You have.

It continues to get worse.

It gets worse.

We've all got our lane in the community.

The Dr.

Phil show runs its 21st and final season in 2023.

After which Dr.

Phil up and moves his studio from Los Angeles to Fort Worth, Texas, and launches Dr.

Phil Prime Time, a new talk show, which is also self-produced, where he gets more overtly into politics.

Like I said, it's produced by his own production company, which is called Merit Street Media.

Do you know about this?

I don't know about Merit Street Media.

Okay.

Also, this is very, he's just pulling a Rogan here.

Yes.

He's like, so long, California.

I'm going to Texas.

I'm starting my own weird little empire.

Basically, yes.

He talks a lot now about Merit Street Media because he loves to promote his own businesses, sure.

But he always says every time he brings it up, he goes, the fact that it's called merit street media is no accident.

America is built on a meritocracy, not on DEI, not on equal outcome.

That was a quote from his Trump rally speech.

We didn't choose the name for that by random.

Merit street media.

This country was built on hard work, added value, and talent.

Not on equal outcome.

Not on DEI.

Wow.

Hey.

My camera just got too hot.

I have to give it.

Do you need to take a second?

I have to give it two minutes to cool off.

Is that okay?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll run to the restroom real fast.

Great.

My listeners know this, but when my camera gets too hot, I will put it in the fridge for a couple minutes while I go to the bathroom and we'll be right back.

Real peek behind the curtain.

All right.

I'll be back in like two minutes.

Cool, great.

Hi, Famy.

Hi, my boy.

What was the last thing I said?

Was it about Merit Street Media?

It was about Merit Street Media and him talking about America being built on meritocracy and not on DEI.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, you see this theme, which I've been trying to like plug in these themes and like, you know, almost like stick a toothpick into, I don't know if, hold on.

Oh, are we not a baker?

I've been trying to like, I guess, plant these flags, right, at different points in his career and be like, what is the fundamental ideology that he's exhibiting here, right?

It's this bootstraps.

It's this capitalist grind set.

It's this, you know, you have the power.

It's think and grow rich, you know?

Now he kind of is just nakedly saying it.

He's like, America's a Americanocracy.

Fuck DEI, which again, I feel like brings his past into the present.

I pulled some selected thumbnail images from different segments, different interview segments Dr.

Phil has been doing on Dr.

Phil Primetime.

And I would like for you to take a look and tell us who are the guests on his show nowadays.

Oh my God.

This is a who's who

of

just

a true nightmare blunt rotation, right?

Like, just like an absolute nightmare.

The first one is a thumbnail that says exclusive new interview with Donald Trump.

Tried and true.

The next one is for the Dr.

Phil podcast, episode 286.

Dr.

Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God.

The man's self-importance knows no bounds.

I love it.

And the third one is another exclusive interview on Dr.

Phil Primetime, one-on-one with RFK Jr.

And the fourth?

Oh, boy.

Oh, I didn't even see that there was a fourth.

My God.

Oh, my God.

I'm going to describe the thumbnail as well.

The fourth says exclusive interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And in the background of this thumbnail is just war-torn Gaza is what appears to be in the background.

Right?

Like, just like rubble.

Yes.

Is he

are there...

We're like serial killers not available.

We're like, what are we?

This is such a staggeringly terrible lineup of people.

Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.

Again, it's just like, I try to contextualize all of this in like what he's been doing for 20 years.

Yeah.

Because to me, like, this is horrifying, but like, also, I get it.

Like, this is where, this is where he was going, especially now.

that there has been this cultural tide.

You know, I think for a long time, he wanted to embarrass people.

He wanted to profit off of people's pain.

He wanted to be cruel, but he wanted to do all of that under the, again, very thin veil of like, I care for you.

I want to make you better.

We're in this cultural and political moment now where you don't have to pretend to be nice.

You don't have to pretend to care about anyone.

And so he can just like interview like genocide leaders and far-right white nationalists and whoever else, because like the ideology that there's a hierarchy of people and people struggling and people beneath you deserve to be punished and deserve, like, that, that's,

it's been there the whole time.

I don't know.

Well, he's also following what is now like a relatively well-worn path from Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, all of these folks who have stepped away from traditional like network media jobs or have been fired from those jobs and then have set up their own little fiefdoms, their own little empires of media stuff that allow them much more latitude in who they talk to, how they talk to them, and what they talk about.

And I think just seeing what folks do with that kind of latitude feels really illuminating because, like, either he's having these folks on because he believes them and is supporters of them, or he's having them on because he thinks it's like red meat for his listeners.

And either way, the outcome is sort of the same, right?

Like it doesn't really, doesn't really matter.

And he now doesn't even have to deal with like the same kinds of restrictions that like a syndicated talk show would otherwise have, right?

100%.

Good God.

In October 2024, just weeks before the general election, like I mentioned, Dr.

Phil speaks at the Trump rally in New York City, the same one where the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a quote floating island of trash.

He spoke at that one where he said, quote, celebrities don't know anything about policies or politics.

The only difference between me and them is I'm willing to admit it.

But if you support Donald Trump, you're marginalized and bullied.

Now we're talking about something I know a hell of a lot about.

Now you're in my wheelhouse.

Now you're in my wheelhouse, buddy.

You're really a student of his speech patterns, and I really appreciate that.

After the last few days of consuming nothing but Phil McGraw,

at least I have that to show for it, you know?

Yeah, you're like a, you're like a tiny bill hater,

just racking up impressions, but only of this one gremlin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, Lord.

Most of his speech was about cancel culture and Donald Trump is the ultimate victim of bullying.

And, you know, now he's just tapping into, you know, standard right-wing grievance culture of the 2020s.

And it is so interesting how so many of these people who like got their careers not being explicitly political, even though, as we've described, there's like this political undercurrent of everything that they've ever done, now very naturally flowing into this right-wing pipeline.

you know, like like Dr.

Oz.

Yeah, absolutely.

Part of what happens there is like that there is a right-wing sort of media infrastructure that is generally speaking not super concerned with facts.

Generally speaking,

embracing of the hottest of hot takes and the most sort of fearful and fear-oriented kinds of positions.

And if you are willing to lead those conversations, they are so happy to have you.

And actually, if you have been fired from another job in media, that actually makes you a little bit more enticing because now you can speak to the perils of cancel culture, right?

Like, that's actually a thing that this guy doesn't have going for him, unfortunately, in this narrative, right, for the right wing, is like

a lot of folks like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson can beat a cancel culture narrative into the ground and Dr.

Phil is like one step removed from it.

It's a really horrifying thing that we have such a huge portion of our sort of media landscape that is like, oh, you don't know anything.

You keep getting things wrong and you're being mean to people.

Come on down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, ugh.

In an effort to boost the profile of Merit Street Media's Merit TV.

I will say, there's a part of me that wants the like bizarro world where there is a merit TV and it's just round-the-clock screenings of Merit Weaver's work.

Sure.

It's just

a constant, just like Nurse Jackie around the clock.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

So in order to boost the profile of Merit TV, Dr.

Phil first embeds himself within ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as they swept Chicago in January 2025, just days after Trump is inaugurated.

He films himself.

embedded in ICE, greeting and detaining immigrants for a fucking made-for-TV special to be put on merit.

And I watched part of this where he is like in the cold in his coat talking to an immigrant who is being arrested and detained by ICE.

And it's one of the most uncanny things I've ever watched.

You're just watching two people and the person who's being arrested, who's being talked to by Dr.

Phil, of like, are you a violent criminal?

What did you do to end up here?

And this guy is just like, wait a minute, aren't you Dr.

Phil?

I've seen you on TV.

You're Dr.

Phil.

And there's like, it's heartbreaking.

It really is.

It's like you have this one person who spent 20 years just like crafting wealth for himself in the most evil ways imaginable.

And then on the other hand, you just have this guy who's like being a person.

There's something really still quite jarring about this turn in the last few years, which is like, despite the fact that the media that Dr.

Phil was producing was never like, we're here to care for the people, right?

Was never like

rooted in an ethic of community care or anything like that, right?

And despite the fact that like a conservative ideology was very clear and very present in his work for a very long time, there is something still really jarring and chilling about stepping into a role as just a straightforward propagandist for authoritarian regimes, right?

It's like that, that is a new level, right?

That like there is a ramp up here, right?

But if we're looking at it, it's sort of like things are ramping up, ramping up, ramping up.

And then all of a sudden, you're like, oh my God, what?

How did we end up here, right?

Feels like part of what's happening here.

It is still quite jarring and troubling to watch it play out.

He and his camera crews go to LA during the ice raids there in June.

And after that, he does this interview with Bill Maher, who, to be very clear, I have nothing good to say about Bill Maher.

But he happened to be in the room with Bill Maher, and Bill Maher is like, what are you doing?

You know, you built this reputation for trying to bring families back together, which, again, I think as we've demonstrated in this episode, that's a very dubious claim.

But nevertheless, he was like, you built a career on bringing families together.

What are you doing these ice raids for?

Why are you tearing families apart?

And Dr.

Phil gets so defensive and he immediately launches into this very clearly scripted and rehearsed grievance culture complaint about how people who work in ICE are being doxxed.

You know, of course they wear masks.

They're being canceled.

And why them?

He says, quote, are they supposed to not do their jobs?

The negative actions against ICE agents are up 1,000%

in the last several months.

130% violence against them.

And

why them?

They didn't make the laws.

They didn't make that law.

What are you expecting to do?

Just not do their job?

And I'm like, oh, like, you're kind of a member of the Third Reich.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah, you don't want to go right to Lenny Riefenstahl, but like, boy, oh boy, becoming a, again, a propagandist for horrifying raids, right?

Like, I just, this is another one that to me feels like it's hard not to talk about this in pretty absolutist terms.

It's really hard for me not to look at folks' response to ice raids and see a real litmus test of folks' humanity, right?

Um, and the idea that you would not only be like, these are good, they're good for people, they're good for the country, but also like the people gotta know, right?

Like, he's going like several steps further, even than like Dean Kane did with his weird ice cosplay.

Yeah, I'm just like, send this guy off to an ice flow, man.

Just send him off to a fucking ice flow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We got, there's nothing left to save here.

My God.

A lot of people, like, I was watching these videos on YouTube and there are so many comments being like, oh, Dr.

Phil, like, being an ice agent was not on my 2025 bingo card.

And fair enough, it wasn't on mine either.

Again, until I started thinking like really critically about his entire career.

And it's like, you're making exploitation suffering porn of downtrodden people who are being punished for existing in a world that's hard to live in, in a world that's hard to live with dignity in if you don't have a certain level of privilege.

And that's also what you've always been doing.

You just don't have to pretend to be nice anymore.

It seems like the sort of undercurrent of rhetoric for this guy has always been: if there's something going wrong in your life, it's because you're not trying hard enough, right?

Which is like an absolutely wild thing to then

see that person documenting families being split up and documenting folks being detained and deported.

And

it's like deeply disheartening.

Yeah, the whole arc is like deeply, deeply disheartening.

And the fact that he like really did build so much trust with such a large audience, right?

Like regardless of whether or not I think that trust is is merited, it is really clear.

Whether that trust is what?

Sorry, whether that trust is Merit Weaver,

whether or not that trust is earned, or whether or not I would invest that same kind of trust in that guy, it seems observationally true that there are many, many, many people who were dedicated viewers of his show for years and remain dedicated viewers of his show

who have been sort of further and further drawn down this garden path with him.

And it's really, really deeply troubling.

The arc of Dr.

Phil's career reminded me kind of of the episode I did about Gwen Stefani, where she started shilling for Peter Thiel's pay to pray app, which includes all sort of like anti-abortion stuff.

This is Hallow.

This is Hallow.

This is Hallow.

Yep.

Yep.

And I went into that episode and the research that I did for it thinking like, what happened to like, no doubt, I'm just a girl, sort of this, like, punk feminist figure from the 90s.

But then you kind of scratch it with a coin and you're just like, the heart and soul of this person's personality and career has always been vaguely right-wing.

And it just doesn't have to be vague anymore.

Yeah.

She's like, what if I married a country singer and started sponsoring a prayer, like paid prayer app?

Exactly.

Great.

Yeah, absolutely.

The last thing I wanted to ask you before we wrap up here was you just in a documentary

about The Biggest Loser and

how awful that was and how much cruelty and humilitainment was involved in the creation of The Biggest Loser.

And what's interesting about The Biggest Loser is that one of the two star trainers on that show, Jillian Michaels, is also now a regularly appearing Fox News far-right pundit who recently said in a CNN debate that slavery is not entirely the fault of white people.

My question is like, what about these sort of 2000s TV phenoms do you think ultimately lended itself to this and what these people have become?

So I think a couple of things.

One, I think that the sort of cultural milieu at that time was really focused on humiliation, right?

That like the sort of core of like prime time and daytime entertainment

was about humiliating people.

Whether that was the sort of jackass era of like, we're going to do it to ourselves, whether that was,

as we mentioned, like bum fights, where it was like horrifically on its face exploitative and horror show stuff, or whether it was sort of cloaked as with Dr.

Phil in sort of concern trolling, in this idea of like, I'm doing this for your own good, right?

That actually I'm engaged in a high-minded endeavor here.

You just can't see it because you think I'm being too mean.

Which was also the biggest loser model.

Which was absolutely the biggest loser.

And I think in both of these cases, right, like part of what allows Dr.

Phil to get traction as a large-scale personality and as a TV show is doing this kind of tough love stuff, quote unquote, heavy quotes, on...

folks who were widely culturally believed to have deserved it or to have needed it.

Right.

So like there was this idea that if your kid was acting out, you need to send them to a boot camp or you need to just get really extra tough on them.

Similarly, with the biggest loser, I would say Jillian Michaels, much like Dr.

Phil, has a long, long history of very clearly very conservative and frankly, just like very mean politics.

But part of the reason that she flew under the radar was that she was going after fat people, which folks thought was like not just an okay thing to do, not just that that was acceptable, but that it was culturally celebrated, right?

She built a massive empire out of publicly abusing fat people.

So I do struggle a little bit now when people are like, oh my God, when did she go off the deep end?

And I'm like, baby, she was always already there.

She was just taking it out on people who you didn't care if she was taking it out on them, right?

Like that it was entertainment to watch folks absolutely shout at

and humiliate and berate and cause physical pain and damage to fat contestants on TV.

And I think for certainly for me, for a lot of fat folks that I know, it doesn't feel surprising one bit that she's like a MAGA talking head.

Now, and I think similarly, as you've demonstrated with the Dr.

Phil of it all, like if you're paying attention, it's not especially surprising, right?

Like if you're really sort of tuning in to the rhetoric that folks are using and who they're going after and all of that kind of stuff, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah.

In both cases, these are folks who found soft entry points into the kinds of bigotry that they wanted to spend a bunch of time in, right?

So you start with your soft entry point of a 13-year-old who's acting out of line, or a fat person who just won't put down the Twinkies or whatever, right?

And there is a great deal of cultural alignment around, like, yeah, give it to them, right?

And then you build an audience who's ready ready to watch you just sort of rip into and exploit folks who are going through terrible times in their lives and who didn't ask for or deserve any of this.

And like, of course, you end up with things like, yeah, I like ice raids.

Yeah, America's a meritocracy.

Slavery wasn't that big a deal, right?

Like all of that sort of stuff, like, of course, follows because they've gotten so much sort of affirmation for the earlier and more widely accepted forms of bigotry that they were engaged in.

So well said.

Fucking Aubrey Gordon.

And this is why I think like, what's the big takeaway with like studying Dr.

Phil, Jillian Michaels, all of this stuff is that like on a granular level, what these people have been exhibiting as their priorities the entire time is cruelty, it's punishment, it's carceral.

And I feel like what we can do as individuals on a granular level is like empathy, compassion, not empathy and compassion compassion as a cloak for like judgment that really is like resting underneath, but like, how can we actually help each other?

I feel like you're really inching up on the Jerry Springer final thought sign-off of like, until next time, take care of yourselves and each other, which was always the fucking sign-off of the Jerry Springer show.

What?

I mean, yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense.

And I also think it's worth looking at, like, just because that kind of, as you say, like, humilitainment doesn't exist in the same way on network TV now, that's not to say it doesn't still exist, right?

I've been thinking a lot these last few weeks about, uh, I don't know if this is someone who has shown up on your FYP, she is definitely all over mine, Kendra, who fell in love with her psychiatrist, right?

Uh, are you familiar with this story at all?

No, oh lord, it's just a person who is very clearly going through like a profound break with reality on TikTok and has made like a 20-part story that is essentially like cataloging all of what appear to be her delusions.

She has monetized it.

She's getting paid to share her delusions.

It's like got tons and tons and tons and tons of views on TikTok.

And we now have an ecosystem of YouTubers and influencers who are making videos breaking down the Kendra who fell in love with her psychiatrist drama, right?

Where you're like, hey, team, we really are

amplifying someone's mental health break right now and making it harder and harder for them all the time to get to meaningful treatment, to get to all this sort of stuff.

And there are people making lots of money off of talking about the absolute, what will, I'm guessing, emerge as one of the worst chapters in this person's life, right?

So like, I think also just being wary, it's easy to go, that was in the past.

We did that then, we don't do it now.

But I think we still do a lot of the same things now.

They just show up in different places.

So I think being willing to clock that kind of stuff as well, it can be hard to see when things get so popular and so large scale.

But it is like we are still doing plenty of that large-scale dehumanizing of people in crisis.

And I think that's also a thing to just like keep an eye on.

And anyone with a you know, microphone and a TikTok account can now be their own smaller Dr.

Phil, you know?

Speaking as two people with microphones and TikTok TikTok.

Which is nothing like what we're doing here.

We're different.

We're gay.

Did we do it?

Aubrey,

that was the sign offline.

That was really good.

Yay.

We're different.

We're gay.

Aubrey, thank you so much for walking down this sort of treacherous memory lane with me.

I love you so much.

I really do.

Oh my God, you're the best.

This was, it would be incorrect for me to call it a joy,

but I will thank you for your service of spending several days in the trenches of Dr.

Phil research.

And thank you for nailing that voice and also just for being like an absolute joy in this world.

This was like such a treat.

Do you want me to hear here?

I'm going to do it.

What?

Aubrey.

Aubrey,

where can people find more of your work and glean more of your wonderful insights?

Uh, I am at YR Fat Friend across platforms, um, and folks can listen to maintenance phase, the podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

You can buy my books wherever you buy books, and you can uh watch a documentary about me and my family at uh yrfatfriendfilm.com.

A boom.

And if you've made it this far in the episode, I do thank you so much.

I love you and I appreciate you.

We all need each other to get through to the other side.

And just be kind to yourself.

That's all I ask.

I feel like the next time I see you, you're going to be in a bald cap and like a tan suit

and some prosthetic sideburns.

Yeah, you're going to have the mustache, the whole thing.

The nails will be gone.

Oh, the nails will be there.

I'll be Dr.

Phil with nails.

The nails are gone.

That would be amazing.

Happy Halloween!

I love you all.

And until next time, stay fruity.

Is that good?

Nailed it!

Boy, oh boy, what a dark ass fucking set of things!