Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 31: Traum-Com, with Dr. Arash Javanbakht
Episode Date: May 30, 2024Matt and Daniel talk to Dr. Arash Javanbakht, Director of the Stress, Trauma, and Anxiety Research Center at Wayne State University. Plus, the definitely real and not fake phone recording from Rafah. ...AFRAID by Dr. Arash Javanbakht Subscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Mashwama bitch, a ribbon polka toast.
We invented the terry tomato and weighs USB drives and the iron d'all.
Israeli salad, oozy, stents, and jopas orange crows.
Micro chips is us.
iPhone cameras us.
Taco salads us.
Both out about us.
Olive garden us.
White foster us.
Zabrahamas.
As far as us.
Hello and welcome to Bad Hasbara, the World's Most Moral Podcasts.
My name is Matt Lieb.
How's it going out there?
Terrible.
Thank you for listening to this Most Moral Podcast.
What a, what a day.
What a everything sucks.
Like and subscribe.
It has just been one of those days, the last couple of days,
have been
fucking atrocious and awful and terrible
and I think anyone
who continues to listen to this podcast
I know that people
come here for a little bit of sanity
and sometimes
you know, I don't know if I can offer it
things are bad
but that doesn't mean
you can't give us
five stars in a review
do that
and um yeah and also once again telling everyone to please go on to um your podcast apps and press
subscribe and shit uh that would be sick and without further ado i'm going to bring in
daniel mate my most moral co host to share in the misery of life what's up bit
sorry i'm having a bad one
What the fuck did I do?
I've been cherishing this album recently.
Oh, what is it?
Oh, okay.
Gene Gray and Quelle-A-Cris, who are actually a married couple.
Gene's last rap project.
She's one of the great underground rappers of like the late 90s and early odds.
Now she doesn't rap.
Now she just does comedy and music and stuff.
But her husband, Chris, is an amazing rapper and producer.
And they have this album called Everything's Fine.
And I just pulled it off the shelf when you were talking because
you can see by their expressions that they feel exactly the way I'm doing.
Everything's great.
Everything's super great.
Nothing's weird.
And that looks like a great album.
Maybe I'll listen to it.
It's so good.
Yeah.
But we, you know, we kind of.
Hannibal Burris has a guest spot on it, actually.
Hannibal Burris has a guest spot on that album?
Yeah, yeah, he raps on that album.
Oh, see, I thought you were saying that that album was from.
the early 90s and so i was like no no no no it's from 20 it's from 2017 they
that makes more sense i got john hodgeman's on there nick offerman's on there they get a
john hodgman huh yeah yeah i like that um but yeah we we've got a great episode listen it's going to be a
great episode uh we are later in the pod going to uh have a interview with um a trauma doc uh
and his name i was saying yeah i don't have enough trauma doctors in my life it's
Yeah, I know. I've decided to add some more.
You need...
Fucking Jesus Christ.
The trauma doc is of no relation to either of the podcast hosts this time.
It is Dr. Arash Javanbacht, and he is...
He's great.
We had a great interview, and we're going to throw to that in a bit.
And before we do that, we got to talk about...
Listen, this is a comedy podcast.
at least it tries to be
and I will be the first
to admit that, you know, the last
week or so, the episodes we put out
while great and awesome
and informative
and fun, I've not
been like super funny
and the reason
for that is because occasionally
you know,
life comes at you fast and
shit, you know,
the conversations that we end up having end up being
coming from a place
of vulnerability and
you know, emotion rather than
I know, I know, I don't want it to be that
away from me. You understand that
like what I want to do is like
dick joke, dick joke, dad joke, pun.
Dick joke, dick joke, dad joke, pun.
Yeah, yeah.
But then, you know,
mass atrocities carried out
genocide via social media.
And also, like,
thoughtful guests who are not dumbasses like us like they come in and they and they deepen the
conversation against our will yes explicitly written in the contract that we do not yes do not be deep
do not say interesting resonant things do not make the podcasters feel anything yes i try and then
yeah every time i tell them like remember you like even if you're smart in real life you got to be
a dumbass for this podcast and then they won't be a dumb ass and said they'll be
really thoughtful. And I'm just like, well, way to make me look like an asshole. I'm
out here trying to do jic joke, jic joke, that joke pun. And you're out here talking about
trauma. But yeah, let's, you know, break down just what's gone on. Let's give the people some
post-comedic stress disorder. Yeah, exactly. PCSD. So as people may or may not know, I'm sure
you do, there was a some sort of event.
you know, what the New York Times called a, I think a mass casualty event in Rafa.
I guess that would make Benjamin Nahu a mass casualty event planner?
Yeah, he's a mass casualty promoter, you know?
He's just like, you know, it's the, listen, this is the job A.J. Soprano wanted when he told his parents what he wanted to do for a living.
He wants to be an event planner.
And for him, it's mass casualty events.
Oh, I'd like everyone to gather in the tents, please.
It's a very, very good Netanyahu impression.
Everybody gather in the tents.
The good thing is he doesn't have much of an accent.
No, it's the sinister lack of an accent.
It's just a slight.
Yes.
It's because he was, you know, he raised as much of his life in New Jersey or Philly or whatever.
Philly, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I would call it a satanic lilt.
Exactly.
Exactly. It's a satanic...
It's not quite an accent. It's a satanic lilt, you know?
Eastern seaboard by way of the deepest sulfuric pits of hell.
Yes, yes.
You will just occasionally, you know, it'll sound like a...
Oh, that's an American accent, and he'll add a...
Do you know that his born name is a completely Polish, Ashkenazi...
Of course it is.
Nebishy sounding name?
Yes, yes.
What is...
Benjamin Netanyahu's...
It's like something like, you know, like.
Niemowitz.
Yeah, like Benny.
Numenowski.
Numenowski, yeah.
It's something, now we got to look it up because it's like, come on.
He is born.
Oh, look at that.
Did they take it off?
It would be great if they took off his actual name from Wikipedia.
Yeah, he was.
Anakin Skywalker.
What the fuck?
It is Anakin.
guy walk uh his last name is uh myli akowski um or amelia kowski yeah you know again that's uh that's him
uh anyways uh there was a mass casualty event that happened in rafa after um you know
weeks and weeks of the israeli government um saying oh we're going to do this no matter whether
or not, you know, Biden supports us or not, you know, luckily for them.
Israeli atrocities are the opposite of the Spanish Inquisition, you know, per the
Montepidon show. Everyone expects the Israeli atrocities. Exactly. Yeah. The most, like,
you know, telegraphed shit of all time is basically you can expect to happen when it comes
to Israel. You know, if they say they're going to do something, they're going to do something.
It's like Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth pointing at that part of the fence.
Every town within a hundred miles of that direction is going to be incinerated.
Yes, just like a pool player.
Rafa, corner pocket, boom.
Yeah, and he said he was going to do it.
They said they'll do it no matter what.
They said it.
They meant it.
They're here to represent it.
That's right.
And lo and behold, that is exactly what was done.
And yeah, they recently bombed a, you know, refugee camp.
You know, this is after, you know, months and months and months of telling people to go south and then bombing everything up north as, you know, as they were going down.
And finally, the last refuge for millions of people has been the southernmost point of the Gaza Strip, Rafa.
and they were told it was a safe zone,
and of course, the other thing with Israel is if they tell you something,
they're also lying.
So you have to remember that.
But yeah, there was a, it was, I believe, a refugee camp,
I forget how it was described, but that was bombed.
And I have some footage, not of that.
I think a lot of people have been posting the raw footage of shit that's happened, and the shit I've seen in the last couple of days has been, for me, something that I, you know, choose not to show to everyone on this podcast, because as we're going to see later, we're going to have a conversation about the effects of seeing these images over and over.
Suffice it to say that as Winston-Zenemore, the fourth Ghostbuster said, I've seen shit that'll turn you white.
yes exactly um and as bill murray said it's true this man has no dick um it's just also quoting ghost
busters for no reason about well yeah that was a totally inappropriate ghost bruce just quote on
my part yeah but i i it's self defense as we'll talk about with the doctor as we'll talk about
sometimes it's like a tick you know you got to you got to pull up oh must uh horrible horrible atrocities incoming
Must find 80's movie reference from back when life seemed nice.
Normal and good.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Anyways, here's a CNN report for people to.
The Biden administration, it used a precision munition to hit a target in Rafa,
but that the explosion from the strike ignited a fuel tank nearby and started a fire that engulfed the camp.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netany.
I just before we continue on this I have to say one thing what what is it with these fucking guys that every time they do a mass atrocity they have to explain how oh no it technically wasn't our fault and they invented an entire Rube Goldberg machine of destruction in which they're just like well I
actually, this is Hamas's fault, you see, because we bombed, it was a precision bombing, but then a toaster went off, and the bread came down, and then there was a conveyor belt that led it to the eggs, and then the eggs got in there, and then there was a mouse that ate some cheese, and then it went down another conveyor belt, and then it blew everything up.
It's like, you fucking psychopaths can't continue to invent these elaborate reasons why Hamas is actually at fault, especially when you later apologize for it.
Yeah.
But here is more of that.
A tragic error while still pointing the finger at Hamas.
Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved,
unfortunately a tragic error happened last night and we are investigating the case.
For us, every non-combatant that is hurt is a tragedy.
For Hamas, it is a strategy.
I'm sorry, but just the video of him.
doing saying tragic mistake
but that's translated
what you see him doing in that video
is just yelling is as loud as he can
we are sorry about the tragic mistake
like that is the most aggressive
I'm sorry I've ever fucking seen
yeah oh just
and it's just you know
the the images that have come out of this
you know the last two days of the camp
that has been was in
incinerated. I mean, you've seen, I've seen some things that will turn me white.
That, oh, yeah, that'll keep me white.
And, you know, we're talking, you know, mass fires that broke out as a result of these bombings.
I mean, you know, all collateral damage that is, you know, an insult to collateral damage in terms of intention.
And collateral damage itself.
as an insult to the English language.
I mean, that very term, all of these terms,
you want to just, I get the most sickened, actually.
I mean, obviously, looking at these horrible images,
it's just beyond anything.
Like, the system doesn't even know what to do with it, you know?
And it's like one after another,
every single one of the debunked false claims about October 7th
is now coming back to assert itself in reality,
on camera in Gaza.
Beheaded babies? You want
wanted beheaded babies? We got that.
Yes, exactly.
You want, you know, like
people torn limb from limb, you know,
you want...
Yeah, you want people hung on walls.
Hung on walls, just like mass shootings,
fucking parking lots of cars,
all destroyed.
You know, like, they're just...
It's like their attempt to,
you know,
to manifest the shit that they claim happened to them on October 7th.
And it just,
you know,
I have,
it's almost like the,
it's almost like a kind of,
uh,
rhetorical voododal.
You know,
we're going to,
we're going to,
we're going to create this,
whatever,
whatever little nightmare,
uh,
narrative and fantasy we need to get us into action.
Yes.
And then we're going to go and,
yeah,
it'll have that effect out there.
But,
not here. Yes. It's incredibly dark. Yeah, incredibly dark, incredibly
sickening and incredibly evil. But speaking, yeah, yeah, I was going to say,
but sickening, though, is that you hear military people and political people use these terms
like precision munitions. Yes. Or mass casualty event or collateral damage. Try to sit
through a White House press briefing or a State Department press briefing these days with
Jake Sullivan or or Matthew Miller or any of these or Karin Jean-Pierre and see if you can make it
through a single sentence without them saying something so absolutely deadening like these
these these crimes against language and you know you hate to mention George Orwell because
any idiot can quote George Orwell when things are getting bad in the world but it's fucking
Orwellian yeah the the just the way that language and and I don't I don't like
people talking about how language is violence
but in the hands of empire
in the hands of power systems
you see it
you see how how
the twisting of reality
and the flattening of reality
and the twisting of words
that allows things like this to happen
it's I mean I don't even have anything funny
or insightful to say about that's what really
makes me the sickest
is the crimes against truth.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's, you know, also the crimes against originality.
And, you know, like the fact that we have to say something as hackneyed as this is Orwellian.
Like that's a crime in and of itself, you know.
Fuck you for making me quote Orwell.
Yeah, exactly.
Fuck you for being that fucking unoriginal, you know?
Like, you're just going to do a facsimile of just what is Orwellian.
And now we have to sound like one of those fucking guys who's just like, oh, you know,
it was pretty Orwellian the way that, you know, McDonald's,
they don't let you get a 10 piece anymore.
You got to get a 12 piece.
You know, it's just like we got to fucking sound like someone.
It's just, it's all so.
Fuck you for making my reality more sort of.
Kinne in because now I'm starting to spout, now I'm starting to spout, you know, political
cliches, bad writing.
Oh, my God.
This is a side note, but I, for no reason other than just masochism, I rewatched the newsroom.
Yeah.
Just because I was like, you know, I ran out of stuff to watch and I was just like, oh,
what if I, let me revisit this fucking trash.
And I got to say, there is a special place in hell for Aaron Sorkin.
Like, it just, the way that that show runs on smugness and, like, the way that that show is
proud of its own hindsight, like, it's just like, oh, it's, it's terrible.
Anyways, Sorkin invite out to you to come on the Most Moral Podcast so it can yell
it you and call you a bitch to your face um but uh you know so when this attack happened uh initially
the uh idf was um you know celebrating the successful uh precision attack of you know some humas
commander you know doing the same fucking bullshit that they always do which is like oh you know
we successfully you know completed our mission nothing to see here folks we killed a Hamas guy
Don't worry about the 45 dead, you know, and over 200 injured in this attack.
Did you see Rapaport on Twitter?
It was like, oh, 40 were killed?
Where did they get that number?
Like, he was like, he thought it was some own that he could be like, are you sure it was
exactly 40?
Sounds pretty specific to me.
I'm like, no, you fuck, they're rounding up or slightly down.
It's like somewhere around that.
And also, I mean, like, just in terms of, like, Zionist scumbags, like, Michael Rapoport's one of the worst.
He also quote tweeted the video that we've all seen of the actual decapitated baby.
Quote tweeted it saying, like, you know, they have videos of everything except for the hostages.
And, you know, at this point, like, you know, there's no more perfect example of, like, how Zionism degrades the human soul.
than Michael Rappaport's Twitter feed
of the last like seven months
watching this fucking guy
go from like this kind of like
tribal reaction
to the attack of October 7th
of just kind of like you know
hey Jews of the world we're going to unite
and we're going to destroy Hamas
you know you've got to kill Hamas
and all that to being able
to just casually quote tweet
one of the most horrific things
I think a lot of us have seen in a long
time with some
pissy smug
fucking glib
comment about how
oh you know how come show
why don't you just show the hostages instead of this and it's just
like you you've got to
have lost your soul
entirely and
in seven months
you must have not had much of a soul to begin
with um
but after uh
you know the whole
incident of um you know
the IDF celebrating their victory soon after it was reported, you know, about the official
or Israeli line of it being a tragic mistake. And then the most recent thing is this video
that I'm going to show. So the IDF has released another of their famous videos in which they
show a intercepted conversation between two
Gazans about the strikes in
Rafa and I'm going to play a little bit of that
just because I just find it to be
just I mean you got to you got to see it
and I'll read out the
subtitles for people
okay so first speaker
and they say Hamas
they say they the Hamas
terrorists were bombed.
Oh, I see.
And they say that they sat in a meeting and that there is a facility.
And in addition, they had ammunition.
And because of all the ammunition, that started exploding.
And furthermore, bags of money were flying in the air.
These, the ammunition that exploded, were really ours.
Yes, this is an ammunition warehouse.
I tell you, it exploded.
So this is a, you know, this is the same thing that they put out after,
maybe it was El Shifa Hospital or...
It was very much the same format, too.
You're muted, Daniel.
Sorry, yeah, it was very much the same format.
It was like, are you talking?
telling me that this thing that people are conveniently blaming on the Israelis was in fact
due to us? Yes. I tell you that in fact it did belong to us. And furthermore, then this
happened. Yeah. It is me, the representative of all Palestinians on the line. How are you doing
other representative? Fine. Kill the Jews. Anyways. So here is the exposition to the T of exactly
how I want this narrative to go.
I mean, you can't get anything more perfect than just this type of bullshit, especially when
they only seem to put out these, you know, intercepted calls when there is something that is
just so egregious done in broad daylight for everyone to see that they can't explain
it away.
They can't say it didn't happen.
And they can't say actually it was, you know, it wasn't as bad as everyone's saying and said they say, yes, it was bad. Yes, it was Hamas. And, you know, we just have to sit here and listen to these fucking, you know, clearly fabricated videos. And here's the thing, even if they weren't fabricated, even if this was an actual intercepted call, which no way it isn't. No way it is an actual intercepted call.
The idea, like, this is just two, they're not even saying these are like two Hamas guys.
Like, they're not saying, yeah, they're just like a strike between or a conversation between two
Gazans, just two Gazans. Just, just guys. Two Gazans work, two Gazans walk into a Tel Aviv
recording studio. Yeah, exactly. I'm just like, oh, you know, you see shit like this and you go like,
Who is this for?
Like, who's supposed to believe this?
Who is supposed to go off?
Good.
You know, at this point, I just,
I don't even know who they're trying to convince anymore.
I mean, months ago, I was saying they're just trying to convince themselves.
But at this point, they all know it's bullshit.
They all know that they're just going to do the same thing over and over again,
which is just find a way to say, you know, this is not our fault.
after weeks and weeks of saying we're going to go into Rafa and then to call it a tragic mistake is insane.
You know, I felt like back early, in the early days of this genocide, they were hoping that these
bombshell intercepts or whatever would catch on and have long-term traction. At this point,
it just strikes me as a short-term diversion tactic. Like let's just push, let's just get enough
controversy out there
and the controversy will last
30 seconds before it implodes
but that's enough time to run interference
you know
that there's value in that
they don't have to convince anyone of it
they just have to muddy the waters enough
have enough people reshare
you know give just feed more food
to the people whose job it is
to post like
you're telling me this isn't incriminating
to hummus and you know
you muddy the waters and then people
forget where they move on
and
yeah
I mean, but I still, you know, and maybe it's all, we're all in our different, like, social media bubbles and we're all in our, you know, with our stuck in our worldviews and think that our reality is reality. But I just, I'm like, who the fuck? Who is watching this and going, yeah. And I can only imagine at this point, it's liberal Zionists who will do anything to believe. It's like it's for an American audience to, you know, and at this point,
You know, I'm even willing to believe it's for an Israeli audience.
Like it's also, you know, they have to convince even their own people that, no, no, no, this was Hamas.
We would never do that horrible thing you just saw us do.
And I'd like to believe that there's at least some portion of Israeli society that sees this and needs.
this kind of diversion tactic in order to, you know, rationalize.
Like, it's almost a worst case scenario is if they didn't need it, you know, if they were just like,
no, that was us. Good. Glad we did it. You know, that's almost, that's worse. So, Daniel,
you just shared with me an article from Haaretz. Do you want to talk about it for a second?
Do you want to intro what it is you sent to me? Apparently, I'm subscribed to them or something.
I don't know if I'm paying the money. But it does, it does give me a,
daily briefing on what Israel is saying
to itself. Oh, and in
particular what the part of Israel
that still wants to consider itself liberal
is saying to itself.
And yeah, you want to put
on the screen? Excellent. Okay. So
the head, this is from
Monday, the 27th of May.
And it's by Alison Kaplan
Summer. And the headline
is, are right wingers celebrating Palestinian
deaths in Rafah, the true
face of Israel? And here's the
the subheader, some, because they have to complicate it because otherwise the article would be one
word. Yes. Some say this is the true ugly face of Israel. Those who believe in and know a different
Israel face the impossible challenge of proving otherwise. Oh, I love a good. I love a good,
that's not my America from Israel, you know what I mean? That's exactly right. Yeah, I know it's not,
but it will be impossible for me to prove otherwise.
There's literally no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Yes.
Israel, for me, is this good feeling of the possibilities of us not doing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Exactly.
And that's just, that's not provable in the same way.
It's true, but no one will believe it because people want, you know, evidence and facts.
So let's, this is actually just the writing is just so mealy-mouthed and so.
It was inevitable.
No matter how carefully planned an Israeli military operation
against Hamas and Rafa may be, is it?
With over a million Palestinian refugees camped out sooner or later,
there was going to be a mass casualty incident.
Mass casualty incident.
And what's, okay, so that paragraph itself is crazy.
It was inevitable, right?
Yes.
No matter how carefully planned an Israeli military operation,
blah, blah, blah, with over a million Palestinian refugees camped out
sooner or later there was going to be a mass casualty incident. Okay. So the logic here is
it was inevitable, no matter how much we tried to kill one person at a time a million times over.
Eventually we were going to kill. From afar, by the way. Eventually, there was going to come a day
or a moment where 40 people died in an hour. Exactly. And then the world was going to get all up
in arms. And so the inevitable took place Sunday night. An IDF air strike reeked
Large-scale destruction.
Oh, for the first time, an IDF, like, what the fuck are you talking about?
You've destroyed entire buildings.
You've killed hundreds of people at a time.
Killing at least 45 people in the southernmost Gaza city.
Footage showed that civilians living in tents were trapped in an inferno.
And it's just like so insane.
The inevitable took place.
Yeah, it is actually inevitable that there's going to be a mass casualty event
when you use a fucking, what, 2,000 ton bomb or whatever to,
fucking to bomb a fucking uh refugee camp like yeah like that's your careful plan that's your
careful plan no matter how careful no there's nothing we could do to avoid the fact that we're
definitely going to use this giant bomb against people packed into a camp like you have to be
a complete fucking psychopath to look at this and be like yeah you know it's cost of doing business
oh god so then the next paragraph which we don't need to read is basically you know
recapitulating what the Israeli government says, saying, despite we tried to avoid it.
So, and then the idea being that it was unfortunate and regrettable collateral damage,
and they talk about the International Court of Justice and so on and so forth.
But if you go down a little bit, oh, and they talk about the most moral army,
Israel's far-right media voices quickly began celebrating the flames, and by extension,
the deaths of those engulfed in the fire, by jokingly comparing the images to commemorative
bonfires lit on Lagba-Omer, which we just had on Sunday.
Sunday, the Jewish holiday that fell on the same day as the tragedy.
They said with glee that the blaze was the central bonfire in Rafah,
wishing them happy holidays in tweets that were deleted and won't be forgotten
and will be pointed to as evidence that the fire was deliberately sparked and was celebrated.
Well, it was celebrated as far as deliberate, but yeah.
Yeah, and it was deliberate.
I mean, I'm sorry, but you know, you can't at this point,
and I think this is like my main problem with this kind of mealy,
mouth liberal Zionist talk is the idea of deliberate or not.
Like, if it is inevitable, if you truly believe this is inevitable and you continue to do it
anyways, that's called deliberate.
Under international law, you're right.
Yes.
Because you deliberate about the possible consequences of what you're going to do and the probable
consequences.
And if you do things that have probable consequences and those consequences come true, then whether
or not you meant to, you opted to, and that's deliberate. And it's exactly the same status
as intentionally targeting them. The most prominent journalist who fed the flames of hate,
Yunnan Magal, is consistently proving himself to be the Idemar Ben-Givir of Israeli media.
Like the extremist minister, he appears to delight and take pride in shameless displays,
excuse me, shameless demonstrations of disregard for Palestinian lives and denial of humanity,
as opposed to the sorts of demonstrations of disregard for Palestinian lives that Haarets and the Israeli liberal left prefers, which is shame-filled, you know, contriate demonstrations of disregard for Palestinian lives.
Right. And then pointing rightward and saying, like, that's those guys. That's not us. We are in no way complicit with that because we believe in a better Israel that, you know, has somehow managed to elude us in the years and years and years we've been saying we want to.
better is real but also we've sobered up and they do need to die like right it's completely just
the most scatterbrained moral approach like political approach these guys have no idea what they
believe other than bad things aren't our fault and good things are what would happen if
humas well and they love they love blaming the right you know and they love blaming the
you know, the Likud supporters, which is also racially coded because now they get to blame
the unwashed Arabs and the Mizrachim, right? Because yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. It's like
the Mizrahi Jews is perfect. But as as Max Blumenthal pointed out in a interview with
Judge Andrew Napolitano, just the other day, I was listening to it this morning, he pointed out
that the vast majority of the war crimes committed by the Haganah during the Nakabah. Yeah. That was
done by the leftist
Kibbutz-affiliated
socialist wing.
The labor government
is by far the bigger
settler party
over time.
There's been a few periods
during the Sharon and Begin years
when Likud took over
as the primary
motors of ethnic cleansing,
but it's actually
just not the case
that the Israeli
center left
can look at itself
and say,
oh, no, no,
it's the right wing.
No,
is now learning its lessons from what the so-called Israeli left has always done.
The Zionist left, I should say.
There's an Israeli left, and we had Noam on last episode,
and she represents the, I'd say, a genuine Israeli left,
a peace and justice and equality left.
One of six.
Exactly.
Anyway, but the one of six, as she said.
So the article concludes, and it's not even an article, it's just a little news brief,
while one could argue that both Ben-Givir and Magal represent a minority of the sentiment of Israelis,
one could argue it, and you are arguing it, but you're not offering any...
But you're choosing to pretend not to.
That's right, and you're not offering any real evidence for it.
They provide enough evidence of malicious intent to disrupt any attempt for the country to defend its military's behavior.
Well, good.
Some say this is the true ugly face of Israel.
Those who believe in and know a different Israel face the impossible challenge of proving otherwise.
And I just love that little interjection and no, because you're suggesting to me that you have evidence that you somehow can't share.
How do you know it?
Sometimes you know things deep in your heart, Daniel.
Deep in your heart.
By talking to your nice ante?
Deep down inside.
I know Israel isn't really like this.
It's just right now it's just, it's mad.
It's hungry.
It's hangary.
When you get hungry for the blood of the Palestinians, you act up, okay?
Have a Snickers bar.
That's what those commercials are about.
You have a Snickers and then all of a sudden you stop killing Palestinians
and then you just do a slow world ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It's all very traumatic and that's why we need to take a quick break
and talk about our trauma after the break
with an interview we did with Dr. Arash Javanbacht
and it was a great one.
Please stick around.
Listen to these ads and we'll be right back.
And we're back.
Today, I wanted to introduce our most moral interview that we are doing here on Bad Hasbara.
We have an expert.
Now, we've had, you know, all sorts of guests on the show, comedians, you know, journalists and whatnot.
And sure, you could say a journalist is an expert.
But today, we have an actual expert.
someone who is the director of stress trauma and anxiety research,
sorry, excuse me, someone who is the director of stress trauma and anxiety research clinic
and author of Afraid, Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety.
Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome to the podcast, Dr. Arash Javanbach.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
We really appreciate it.
So to begin, the last few months, I think, have been an interesting.
I think a lot of things are happening to our brain chemistry based on the last few months of videos that we have seen online of people dying in horrible ways.
And one of the reasons why we wanted to bring you on this podcast is we wanted to talk about the effect that that is having on people, the effect that that's having just seeing the images over and over on their phones every day.
So I want to get into that with you.
But first, let's just talk about you for a bit.
You know, I read your intro, but can you tell me more about what you do and what your research is?
Sure. I'm a psychiatrist and I'm specialized in trauma and stress on what they do to the human brain and body from changes in genes and intergenerational transmission of trauma to advancing our treatment methods, mostly focus on special populations, refugees, war exposed people, internally displaced people, and first responders.
Basically, civilians exposed to the most horrific things humans do to each other.
And I also treat patients ranging from all these different populations in my clinic.
And I'm involved a lot in public educations via media outlets.
And you mentioned the book, which is part of that work, talking about fear, stress, anxiety from evolution to diseases and treatments and politics and media and issues like bravery, all different aspects of fear and trauma.
okay and so you know you're talking about people who have been exposed to traumatic things directly
and i can imagine obviously that when it comes to being you know directly traumatized
especially as like a refugee from a place that's you know currently experiencing war um or just
the trauma of having to flee a country. That's what I would consider, you know, for lack of a better
term, a more classic type of trauma. There's a new type of trauma, I believe, you know, or a more
modern type, a technological trauma that I'm interested in talking to you about with regard to
the way in which people now more so than ever are exposed to images and video of things that
I don't think previous generations of human beings have had so much easy access to on their
phones. And I wanted to know if that, you know, I would, you know, call that, you know, indirect
trauma or something. But what is that and is that, not to compare the two, but would you say that
the effects of that are similar to actually experiencing it, or is it completely, completely
different? So I think first we need to establish what trauma is because these days trauma
as a word and terminology if she's used by everybody in all these different contexts in a very loose
way.
I don't know.
Do you look up on TikTok and people are talking about a difficult conversation they had with
their peer with their boss and can call it traumatic.
I was so traumatized you guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He told me I had to come in on a Sunday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then the other person says, this is not PTSD.
This is complex PTSD.
So, but when it comes to the field of, like,
Psychiatry and psychology, trauma is horrible experiences that can be significantly threatening
to someone's physical, sexual integrity.
We're talking about war, explosions, shootings, rape, robbery, assault, domestic violence,
serious motor vehicle accidents, natural disasters.
All these are considered trauma in that field.
And these are the conditions that we consider to lead to what we call post-traumatic stress disorder.
We can talk about later.
But that's not the only outcome of traumatic exposure.
depression, anxiety, substance, use a lot.
There's a wide variety of things that trauma can do to people's mind, brain, and body.
But then it comes to the type of exposure.
Trauma can happen directly to me.
Let's say I'm assaulted or I'm shot at or I'm in a horrible motor vehicle accident
or it could be indirect.
Indirect exposure is mostly through whether it's like a close relatives of myself
or family members or people and I get indirect exposure.
to details of their horrible traumatic experiences or dental injuries.
And then there's exposure, another way of indirect exposure we see a lot
is in first responders and journalists.
This is the kind that this didn't happen to them,
but there's a school shooting they have to go clean up.
There are journalists in these war scenes and they see horrible evidences.
And then, for example, there are people who I work a lot with first responders.
As I mentioned, there are cops who are in special sex crime units.
And they have to go through these documents and review them over and over and over.
And the people like Facebook staff, they have to go review all these details of these images and videos which are posted.
This can lead to PTSD by definition.
Now you're talking about exposures that happen.
I'm scrolling and I see pictures of puppies and someone's weddings and this and that.
And then I see a burnt baby, those kind of images.
You see the videos.
These could be, I mean, now we are getting in the realm of terminology.
is how exactly would they fit within the definition of what causes PTSD or not.
But I could consider these traumatic and they can have significant impacts.
Actually, there are studies that show, for example, post-9-11 people who had exposure to the news
and other terrorist attacks and other situations like this, people who had exposure to the news
and ongoing exposure to the images.
And as you mentioned in the past, news was more screened and more basically.
what's the word selected for us yes so kind of yeah in that sense or you would hear them rather
than seeing them now the exposure is a lot more vivid not that these are happening more than let's say
a hundred years ago it's like we have all these phones in our hands and everybody can be reported
and we get the exposure so in that sense there's data that actually shows they can people can develop
symptoms of PTSD anxiety depression so I went on a long run to tell you yeah I could consider
of these two men.
Yeah.
So as we were talking before we started filming, you and I have met once before.
And we didn't realize this until we got on the call here.
But one of the weird things about me, you know, I'm not a comedian that I co-host a political
comedy podcast with someone who is, Matt.
I'm not a trauma expert.
I'm not a therapist.
But I co-wrote a book with someone who is.
my dad, Gabramate, and I wrote a book called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a
toxic culture. So I'm sort of in this position in this interview of like knowing more about
this than I feel like I ought to based on my own area of study, but here I am. Definitely more than
me. Yeah. I mean, I'm just, I'm just learning the names of words right now. So you and I, Dr.
Javenbach, met at a gala for a nonprofit that does work raising awareness.
about the prevalence of trauma in our society.
And one of the things I remember from that evening
was a sort of an informational reel or film that they played,
which was really quite in line with what we write about in the book,
which is that while the kind of big T traumas that you just described
are the ones that we classically think about
as the main sources of lasting emotional, cognitive, neurological wounding,
right? The wars, famines, genocides, rapes, all that kind of stuff, rancorous divorces, alcoholism,
the family, things like that. That given that the word trauma comes from the Greek word meaning
to wound, that many of us in our society are walking around with emotional wounds that are
harder to see and that the sources of which are harder to pin down in terms of specific events
and incidents. And there's, there's, I'm winding my way around to a question here. I'm just sort of
setting up my working definition that I'm coming from. And if you want to dispute it, fair enough.
But that any sort of either discrete or repeated experience that leaves us diminished inside, fractured,
alienated from ourselves, are, you know, incapacitated in some way, could be said to be
trauma inducing. And when we look at the, um,
the events of, let's say, the past eight months. And without getting into the political
specifics too much here, I think one of the things that you're seeing is that people on multiple
sides of this issue slinging around words like trauma saying, I was so traumatized by what happened
on October 7th, or I've been so traumatized by everything that's happened since. And one of the
things we say in the book is that trauma is not what happens to you. It's what happens inside of you
as a result of what happens to you. And that has to do with partly the meanings we make. And this is
where propaganda comes in. This is a podcast about propaganda. And I'm wondering what you can say about
the ways in which narrative and storytelling, which when you talk about people consuming, say something
like 9-11 through the media, they're not just consuming raw events. They're consuming a story
about those events, right? And it's a story that is coming from a particular government line.
And if you're watching it from another point of view or in a different media stories, you'll get a
different story. What is that nexus where the facts of what happens meet the method of delivery
for receiving it, meet the kind of superimposed meanings that human beings can't help but add to
events. And I mean, that's a massive, massive cluster of questions for you. But that's just what comes
up for me when we talk about this. Is it? Are they? Good. Excellent question. So first thing I have
to whenever we talk about trauma, I will emphasize that when I say this thing is the trauma
and this other thing is not trauma, it doesn't mean this other thing is just flowers and
butterflies, right?
Right.
So there are a lot of adverse experiences.
There are a lot of difficult experiences.
There are a lot of stressful experiences that will impact our genes, impact our mind, impact our
our brains and impact our bodies.
So when we say one thing is traumatic and the other thing is not traumatic, it doesn't mean that
you're discreding that other experience.
Now, that leads to the second part of your question and that actually I have an interest
in the meanings that we create or others create for our experiences.
As you said, exactly, different people experiencing the exact same event might have different
interpretations created by themselves or by the environment for them, right?
For example, and this is something I all the time work in my clinic with because we always
create a meaning or an explanation for our experiences. And then based on that, we are impacted
by those experiences more or less. For example, I was in the shooting. I lost my partner
as a police officer or a firefighter. 10 years later, I'm crying because I feel I'm guilty.
I should have done something differently versus I might have thought that I did the best I could
do and that led to saving two of my other partners. The outcome is significantly different.
So now you're talking about the aspect that's especially in this era, everything is
extremely tribal. You're talking, I have a whole lot of different conversation about
politics of fear and tribalism and how fear and trauma are used within a tribal setting
where this is us, this is, there's them, and there's a distinct, clear definition
comparing us versus the others. Usually when it comes to us versus others is not like,
oh, let's look at their philosophical ideas. It's just want to. We are this, they are there.
We are Democrats, they're Republicans.
We are Muslims.
They are Jews.
We are this.
It's something that is very, very easily defined even to the dumbest before the dumbest people.
And then the them are after something we want or that them are against something we are or what we have.
And anybody can be dragged into the them.
Like that changes over time.
Look at the politics of the U.S. politics these days.
Everybody can be grabbed and put in this other category that we just defined or we had defined before.
and they were not part of it, but now our basically agendas
basically require them to be within that definition.
So coming back to what you ask, definitely,
when I see an image, it is within a context,
it's a social context, it's a biological context,
it's a genetic context, it's an environmental context,
it's a tribal context, and it's even within the context
of what I was doing right before that.
When you hear the same news, I have this thing,
So when you hear a news on BBC versus you hear that same tragic news on Fox and CNN,
the emotional intensity and tone is different.
And for Fox and CNN, it depends on what is their agenda, right?
Is it us or them and how we want to gravitate the situation in the mind of the people who are hearing it?
Because specifically, we are emotionally queued humans.
If you put any of us, any of the three of us, we put them in a brain scanner,
and we see a face of a human scared or angry.
Amygdala, which is the emotional part of the brain, emotional salience, fires up.
I'm sleeping in the scanner.
I don't even know what I'm seeing.
I'm just bored with what I'm seeing.
It's a black and white picture of a human face.
But the amygdala fires up.
The emotional intensity that is attached to whether it's through words
or through even the motions or through the emotions and volume and tonality of the voices
that can affect how I am perceiving.
that thing. Even a lot of times, you watch the TV and you look, yeah, this was such a huge
bad or good thing. And then if I challenge you logically, you're like, well, I don't have
the answer. It just, it was relate to me that way. So in that sense, then others can decide and
define for you what is bad and what is good and what is how, if something is bad, how bad it
is. And you mentioned the amygdala, which is this almond shaped, sized, what is it,
gland or it's just a part of the brain that controls our sort of our sort of fear center,
right? And it gets our nervous system going in certain ways. What are the mechanisms by which
I mean, I don't know how neurobiological we want to get here, but it might be interesting.
You have, there's a scary experience. It's frightening. Fear is supposed to be a short-term
biological event that motivates us to either hide or flee or
fight or whatever, what are the mechanisms by which a discreet, short-term, healthy survival
instinct turns against itself and becomes what we would call a lasting wound or a lasting trauma?
How is it that that doesn't get discharged or why does that become toxic for some people
and in some situations and not for others?
So, as you mentioned, the Megdalot is a very subconscious part of the brain.
We have had on both sides in the temporal lobe, it's near our use.
His job is sailing detection.
Every time I see something,
Magdala decides should I attack it,
should I run away from it?
Should I eat it or should I have sex with it?
Very primitive animal salience detection instincts.
Can I tell you, Matt Lieb, confuses my amygdala like crazy?
I just whenever I'm around this guy,
I don't know which of those to do.
Do you want to eat me or do you want to fuck me?
Everyone asks this question.
I'm sorry.
So then, so amygdala sees the lion.
Amygdala fires up.
You should run away.
Then there are other parts of the brain that come in, hippocampus and prefrontal cortices involved very much
hippocampus is right here, again, next to McDonough and prefrontal, what we call the human brain, which is debatable.
And the hippocampus is involved in basically looking at the context.
Okay, I saw the line in African Sahara is near me and there's no bars between us, so I should freak out.
Or I see that there's zoo, there are people having fun, and there are all these different things in the context that tell me they're okay.
and I enjoy.
So the emotion is suppressed by the hippoceros.
Then the prefrontal cortices are involved in, let's say, I see that a lion or a snake, and I freak out.
So my friend tells me that this is a pet snake or a pet lion.
I don't know where you can see a pet lion, but this is safe.
And immediately this response is limited.
But the prefront, that friend of mine could also tell me,
approaching your funny and cute dog and tells me, hey, watch out this dog, but it's
and I immediately have a fear response. And that's actually where our fear secret is very much
abused by the tribe leaders. And I can go back to the evolutionary function of all of these
different ways that we learn to be afraid of things. But this is how the system works. And
then when it comes to traumatic experiences when the exposure or the intensity of the pain and
suffering is beyond the threshold. What happens is the McDowler goes to the, we go to a state
of fight and flight and we stay there. I don't know how much time you have, because one thing
that helps us understand this is the evolutionary purpose and function of fear. The system was
put in place to prevent us from being destroyed and killed and annihilated. And the experiences that
we had when the system evolved were just all physical threats. So now the system goes to fight and
fight for to fight against physical efforts. That's why a lot of times in modern world we get
confused. My heart is pounding because of having this conversation with you guys and I'm worried
that you may not like this. But that doesn't make sense. That's not helping. Reality is that 50,000
years ago, if the three of us were talking and you didn't like my conversation, chances
where I could get killed or you could be one of us could get seriously injured. So I had to be able
to attack or run away. So brain and body go to fight and flight mode and they don't come down.
And the prefrontal and hippocampal cortices, which are involved in emotion regulation, slow down.
And they will not be able to slow the unleash amygdala.
So my heart is pounding all the time.
I feel very anxious.
I'm on edge.
I'm constantly looking for a threat.
So that's when we are talking about PTSD, right?
But at lower levels of threshold, let's see that horrible image.
I'm in the state of some level of fear and disgust arousal.
Now my brain and my attention are redirected towards anything related to that emotion.
and I'm looking for the negative.
And that's why I look at the politics of people these days in the U.S.
Everybody's angry.
Everybody's negative.
You watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC one hour later, you feel extremely hopeless about the humanity.
There's no good news there.
And that leaks to other aspects of life, and that leaks to how you look at other people.
Actually, now that we are talking about the brain and we talked about tribalism, there's like interesting studies.
And actually, when we talk tribalism, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
our tendency to be attached to other humans and connect with our cons specifics,
which are other humans, has saved us.
And that's why you and I are still alive and we're not destroyed by other animals
through the history of humanity.
The reason that any time there's a disaster somewhere,
we start sending money and support is because we are tribal creatures,
so it has good aspects.
But there's also the competitive and bad aspects.
I mean, the finest ways of tribalism is that you have your football team
and I have my own football team and we cheer for it.
and even sometimes get stupid enough to pray to God to support our football team, right?
Look, I'm still traumatized by when the Vancouver Canucks,
both in 1994 and 2011, lost game seven of the Stanley Cup,
and my city was so traumatized that they went and rioted both times.
That was the tribal response to a disappointing loss in a hockey game
was torching the place.
Which also tells us the next thing,
that when we go tribal and motivate,
that by fear and anger, we become more primitive and less logical and more animal,
which is what we see that.
It's easier to kill and it's easier to hate and it's easier to destroy.
That's a whole different conversation, how we dehumanize the others.
But this is a study.
So in Australia, they bring students from two competing universities.
Let's say if I'm in Michigan, University of Michigan and Michigan State University,
they hate each other because of the football teams.
now they show me a photo of someone hitting someone else with a broom seat
in one of the photos we tell me the person hitting the other person is from my college
in another one they tell me the person being beaten is from my college
and they found that people have different responses different emotional responses
even different levels of activation in brain areas involved in emotional processing
and moralities that's the extent of tribalism so we are not
designed to be tribal about like, okay, I am of this race, I'm tribal about this race.
No, we are designed to be tribal, not racist, which means we are designed to acquire a tribe,
whether it's a tribe that I was born to, or it's my city, or is the college I go to,
it's a political affiliation I join, anything that we require, we have a tendency to trust
our tribe and mistrust the other ones.
Well, it's interesting because, you know, I feel like personally, you know, sticking with the broom analogy, I have at least in the last, you know, few months, and also for many years with regard to this, you know, situation, Israel, Palestine, have felt very much like I'm seeing the picture of someone from my college with a broomstick hitting someone else.
And can you talk about the effect?
Except in your case, Matt, and in mine, we look at that and we're like, why did I join this college?
Right, exactly.
I don't want to like.
Yeah.
God damn it.
It's because my dad was an alumnus.
Now I'm in this college, this college of being a Jew.
The damn legacy program.
In terms of that analogy, you know, the way in a,
which we, I guess, internalize tribalism and the way that it expresses itself, it feels like
it's not a monolith for people. So like some people, they feel connection to a certain tribe
because they are born within it. And some people later find a group of people and are, you know,
consider themselves part of that tribe, whether it's in spirits or whatever, not in a race
sense, but just in kind of like a spiritual sense or a moral sense.
I want to talk about how that's used or, you know, how that is manipulated in an unhealthy way
and whether or not it's something you deal with in, like how far does the, the, the
trauma study go, does it talk about, do you talk about deprogramming people from certain levels?
I guess the question I have is, do people need to be previously traumatized in order to
allow themselves to have their tribalism trump what would normally be, you know, the moral side
of their brain or the rational side?
Universal morals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would say, no, no.
So these are the separate stories.
So trauma, and we can talk more about basically how these images traumatize people.
And what are the things actually that you would like us to talk about how people can
protect themselves against the traumatic experiences of these images and how they can have a more
productive response to it rather than just being heard by it.
But I disagree that you are in a tribe that is holding this.
broomstick and you hate it.
That's a tribe that is being defined
these days.
These days, this has become
Jews versus Muslims.
I mean, there were Jews and Muslims who were
friends. They were bodies
and now they're a little bit having challenges
messaging each other in America.
Yeah.
This is something happening in a
total different part of the world. But what is
happening? There's forces on both
side which are pushing
this to become
a Muslim Jew issue.
So that anybody
who's on red ones. So basically
that is the tribalism of fear.
Basically creating this easily
defined boundaries
and then put you in one of these
whether you wanted or not.
Right? And
then people start
and then people stop talking to each other.
And social media is basically
doing a lot in the service of
these strategies. Unfortunately
not that social media
are evil, have evil intentions, but social media's job is to show you what they think you're
like.
And if you follow one person, they show you more people like that person and more people like
that person, and you will see more and more and more and more content.
And then you're within an echo chamber of whoever you are, whether you are liberals or Democrats
or conservatives or this and that.
And the only thing you hear from the other side is their heads on spikes, like the worst
stuff like this.
If you're a Democrat, all you hear is Marjorie Green Taylor in America.
I'm using American equivalent so people can connect with this more.
While there's so many other Republicans you don't hear about,
and the other way around.
So for this, you don't need to have been traumatized.
You have a tribe that you listen to and going back to our evolutionary purpose.
50,000 years ago, I could be beaten,
I could be attacked by a wolf in a part of the woods to learn that partisan safe.
Well, they would never go there.
I sometimes also saw my tribe mates were attacked by the wolf and I would never go there.
But sometimes the tribe leaders would tell me, hey, watch out.
Do our predators in the corner of the woods don't go?
We wouldn't go there and we would be safe.
That has a purpose that we trust our tribe mates.
You may hate your neighbor and totally not trust them, but you walk out of your house
and your neighbor tells you, hey, did you hear there's a gunman in our neighborhood?
You would go inside.
So our trust of our tribe and tribe leaders intensifies when we are scared.
So the fear is mongered and pushed upon us.
You are not traumatized you, but we are scared.
And of course, part of the strategy is to show you and make you hear over and over and over and over and over,
the horrible things the other tribe did to you and to your people and want to do and will do and said they will be.
Right.
Is there a, do you, how much stock do you put in the notion?
that it's not only those who are at the receiving end of atrocities who end up with trauma,
but in fact, to perpetrate these atrocities is inherently traumatizing.
And so to be in the position of the aggressor, the powerful one, the occupier, the attacker,
to be in that position, I mean, I guess this is sort of in arguable, given that,
American soldiers coming home from Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, they had PTSD, not necessarily
just because they got attacked, but because they had to do things or they witnessed their
fellow soldiers doing things that lined up with the orders they were given and lined up
with what they were told. Their tribe was justified in doing, but in some level ripped something
apart inside of them in terms of their connection to their own emotional vulnerability. How do you
work with people in terms of understanding the trauma of the victimizer.
I mean, that is a big issue, but the more modern the warfare has become, the less of an
issue that has become. Once a soldier told me when you are shooting someone in war, what you see
is not a human. You see a dot in your scope. Or you see a dot and you push the button and a bomb or
missile is fired. So less of that is but still is happening. There are always.
lot of people who go back to what happened, what they did, or they become disillusioned
about what they believed at some point, or they become, you know, they come back because
there's also within the crisis, there's very heightened intense emotions that kidnap our
logic. And then they have, they come back and they have the time to look at it and explore.
And also, even there are people who lose partners, lose their friends, lose a lot of things,
lose family members. And then they come back to it years later and they ask, was it worth it?
What did we achieve? What did we not achieve?
Because usually when horrible atrocities and wars happen, years later, you will start to learn what was going on, really.
I mean, now with the social media, you see the details of horrible things, but then you may think of an agenda or things you are hoping to achieve, and it depends on years later, you look back and see if you did or did not achieve this.
So I want to ask you regarding sort of this like modern trauma.
You know, your work as a psychiatrist, do you deal directly with patients?
Are you more researching or do you have patients as well?
I do both.
Okay.
I have friends who are not psychiatrists, but like, you know, MFTs.
therapist, right? And one of the kind of unifying things that they say is they all say
the last seven months have been a fascinating case study in trauma in terms of they have
they have patients who are not directly experiencing, you know, any of the things. They're not
in Gaza, for example, but they are getting it through their phones and they, it's kind of all they
want to talk about.
I want to ask, just in your experience, have you seen an uptick in terms of mental health
crises in the last few months?
And do you think there's a way to mitigate it that does not?
not involve completely shutting that part of your empathy down, where you're just like,
oh, I'm just going to not, I'm just not going to read any news about it, and I'm going to be
completely avoidant. Or is avoidance healthy? You know, what's your opinion on this?
So first, the first part of your question, I haven't seen an immense increase, but I mostly
work with traumatized PT actively PTSD people and we are talking about the trauma.
So we don't go much to that field.
But one of the challenges of these days is that it has become a topic that nobody even
dares talking about, right?
People are even terrified of bringing up these conversations because it has become so
what's the divisive these days, even inside America.
All this is happening not in America.
Americans are fighting each other over this issue.
But I have a lot of advice for people, including
my patients who are highly stressed, not only with this, but also other horrible, horrible things,
news that they hear and they see and the images they see.
So absolutely, we don't want people to be ignorant.
People need to know.
People want to know.
And I in no way recommend people to stop learning about what's happening, but there are ways
that we can be informed, but limit the negative impact.
So one thing is that a lot of people feel if they are not feeling horribly bad, they're doing
something wrong or they're not doing something for the people who are suffering.
Reality is that me, actually I was telling another reporter in another conversation,
she was basically a child of Lebanese refugees.
So she, this reporter specifically had the emotional suffering even more intense, right?
And one thing was that if there is another person who is not around to enjoy anymore
or is not allowed to enjoy anymore at this point, that includes.
It increases mine and your responsibility to have as prosperous a life as we can for ourselves and that other person.
Me, suffering is not going to reduce anyone else's suffering.
So the question is, number one, what am I going to do with this?
So I want to be informed, right?
So to be informed, I don't need to go over those images and videos 10 times.
Right.
The first time I read, the first time I heard, the first time I saw was enough.
So no enough, nor our limits.
When I work in my clinic with the patients, I work with people who have seen the worst.
I have survivors of torture, first responders, refugees, human trafficking.
I don't, I overcome my desire for disaster, pornography, or voyeurism to want to know all the details of the worst things that happen to them.
I know enough to be able to help them.
Now, I want to know enough.
I want to avoid overly dramatic, emotionally charged news deliveries.
So if I'm listening to the news, I will look.
listen to an anchor or reporter or a channel which has composure and which shares facts with
me. I don't care about the super excitement of Tucker Carlson or Wolf Blitzer. I don't care
about their emotions. And I always talk about both sides of the media, so I will not appear
as a person who was on one side because I want to be neutral here. And then, so avoid scrolling
over and over and over. We need time. We need breaks. Some people are constantly going over. And know
your limits. Each person has different limits. I have learned through my experience and work
that I've been doing. I have a better capacity for exposure. My wife cannot. I will not show to her
something that I see, which I know is extremely bothersome to her. So number one, to do it to myself
and also to do it to other people who are around me. And then we need to, as I said, not be
manipulated. That's the very important part because a big chunk of the emotions come through
the manipulation and their turn to hatred, then what do I want to do with these emotions? So
emotion is energy. If I let it be on its own, it's going to eat me up and it's going to hurt me
or it's going to hurt others. How can I reduce the intensity and how can I transform this? If I'm
really motivated and moved by an emotion, whether it's hate or not hate, if it's sadness or
anger or disgust or fear, what am I going to do with it? How can I transform it? Like a lot of people
who have been survivors of shootings in America, what are they doing?
They're advocating for better gun regulations, right?
How can I turn this to something useful that helps those who are suffering
or help others who are suffering that I can help now?
So mobilizing those energies.
But then there's another aspect of how we deal with it with kids
because it also should be age-appropriate.
Children are getting these exposures these days.
They may be impacted.
They may have questions.
Ignoring them, ignoring it is not going to be helpful.
And the first thing that kid wants to hear is that they are safe.
Because for a child, when they see the scenes of explosions or the disaster images, whether it's on TV or on social media, it's for a younger child, it's hard for them to even know this is not happening here.
So the first is to tell them this is safe.
And then in an age-appropriate way, talking to them, and of course we want to limit the exposure to these scenes for children.
They do not need it.
And another actually important aspect of, for those who want to be empathetic,
another negative aspect of too much exposure is desensitization.
This becomes the new norm.
Now I'm okay, with it.
The same way when they say, okay, five people died is horrible.
Ten people, 15, 20, 100, 1,000, 50,000, it becomes statistics.
It becomes a concept.
So constant exposure, there's been actual research that shows concept exposure desensitizes us.
and reduces our ability to empathize.
Yeah, I have to say doing what we're doing on this podcast strikes me as,
and I've been doing it since before, I started co-hosting with Matt,
but now doing it together, you know, trying to do satire.
And the feedback we get is that the effect is that it's not desensitizing for people,
it's regulating, that people are able to laugh or discharge
or just feel seen and heard that, no, you're not crazy.
We're seeing the same thing and, and, you know, together we're going to, it's almost like emotional, intellectual antioxidants.
It's harder to manipulate people who can laugh at and see through things.
But at the same time, satire has another edge to it, at least for me, I know that my capacity to perceive and point out irony can sometimes in many ways diminish my need to feel things.
Because it's like, ha, ha, this ironic veneer, a facetiousness.
and it becomes so routine for me to see the ridiculousness of things
that I notice myself sometimes pushing away opportunities
to really have an emotional experience now.
And it's almost like my brain is saying,
ah, I'm over it.
I felt, you know, back in November, back in February,
I felt those things.
Now I know what's going on.
Right.
So if there's a new incident that needs to be witnessed,
if I'm going to talk about this,
with any authority, but also it needs to be experienced if I'm going to stay emotionally
connected. There's a part of me that wants to use my humor and my irony to push it away.
The defense, right? As opposed to using it for the purposes of like the defense of my tribe,
which is people with moral conscience, like using it for good. Now I'm using it for self-defense
and then my satire might become, I don't know, more narcotic than cathartic. I don't know.
I'm just kind of spitballing here, but have you seen this fine line when it comes to
these kinds of coping mechanisms that can be very helpful and healthy, but then they can turn
against us?
Actual humor is considered a mature defense mechanism and psychodynamic approaches, right?
But I think another thing that's...
Even bathroom humor, which is our favorite here.
Whatever is consensual of both sides, absolutely.
Here's the thing.
But another way humor can even help people understand these concepts better is that.
that they are less rigid, their boundaries and their tribal, because when you are not afraid,
when you're laughing, when you're not angry, when you're laughing, you're more loose with the
boundaries and you're more open to accepting those new concepts, for instance, because unfortunately,
one of the things is that right now the system has become that there are people who totally
believe in their own tribe and gods, and they will never leave that. So no matter how much
you and I and this and that other person with whatever agenda keep repeating over and over and over
it's just an echo chamber those who believe and agree with us continue who are in our tribe and
the others don't and I think humor and satire is one way that we can loosen up a little bit
these boundaries because again when people are less scared they may be more open to information
and instructions sure yeah which is why yeah which is why fascist or fundamentalist
contexts are so wary of comedians and of humor. And I mean, Matt and I have noted the sort of
the death of the sense of humor in certain corners of, say, the Jewish world that staunchly supports
Israel. There's an inability to see ironies. And I can't presume to speak for what happens in other
tribes. But we've certainly lamented that because one of the things we love the most and try to embody
the most from the Jewish tradition is that ability to see a scantz a little bit, to look at the world
a little bit from the outside, which you need to be able to have humor. And to lose that, to me,
is to lose an essential part of what makes our tradition so valuable. Yeah. And I feel like,
you know, as you were saying, Daniel, this is like for me serving this dual purpose. And one of them
is as sort of a self-defense mechanism of being able to um being able to joke about it is the only way
that I can I guess function I'm a comedian so everything for me is is self is defense mechanisms
I'm built out of them you know and so I I try to um you know protect myself uh
using jokes and whatnot.
And I don't,
I don't even think I do it in a wholly unhealthy way.
I'm not saying that as a negative.
I'm saying it as a positive.
It's,
you know,
it's better than avoidance for me.
But,
you know,
I'm wondering if the effect of people,
you know,
listening to this podcast or,
or consuming,
you know,
humor. I mean, we don't make fun of dead people. It's not, it's not like that, but it is
something where we're trying to bring light to a subject that is incredibly dark. And I
sometimes find myself wondering whether or not we are participating in the desensitization
phenomenon that happens around subjects like this in which you are talking, you know,
flippantly about something
that in general
should be taken seriously
and
I guess my personal feelings on it are that
there's just so few outlets
where anyone in especially in entertainment
is willing to even joke about the Israeli government
and they're constantly
you know
they're constantly
degraded
PR machine that keeps getting weirder and weirder and more and more detached from reality.
But yeah, so my hope is that people see it as a positive and that it does have a positive
effect on people.
But I wonder if it is desensitization.
I'm trying to avoid normalization while at the same time trying to still make jokes.
My hope is that it's fortification, not desensitization.
that we're fortifying people's immune systems
rather than desensitizing them
from the capacity to feel.
That's the hope.
I think it also depends on how it is done.
If you start everything and end everything,
we're just joking about what's happening there.
It's different than, I don't know,
do you know John Stewart and Colbert's styles?
They are like, well, the joke is joking,
and then they get serious and talk about the serious thing.
Right?
So you have, I'm sure, you have a mix of the serious,
deep, thoughtful conversations,
and then there's humor is in the mix.
It's not just joking about everything.
So in that sense, I mean, it's not, I haven't done research in this field,
but I'm hoping this is not going to do the desensitization.
And the other thing which I miss to say is that to accept the fact that these are horrible
things that we are seeing and hearing.
I mean, empathizing with oneself, accepting that I have horrible,
I mean, I have had horrible painful reactions to these and other things I hear from my
patients, right?
So this is okay to suffer to some extent from when we hear these things.
But we don't want to make that point of it my own suffering.
Let me ask you about that.
What is this compulsion?
Because you talked about how the fact that you even need to tell people consume this news in moderation,
don't keep scrolling, which indicates that there's a compulsion, there's a tendency,
there's a vortex that pulls us towards more and more bad feeling, more and more suffering.
And we could liken that to addiction,
but that might be flattening the case a little too much.
But what I'm wondering is what is this compulsion either in,
I mean, you could talk about in the lives of people with complex PTSD
to relive and relive and relive aspects of the inciting incident
or for those of us who maybe haven't been through anything comparable to what's going on there.
Still, you could call it a sick fascination,
but maybe that's pathologizing it too much.
But either way, there's some kind of magnetic pull
I can feel it when I'm scrolling
and whether I'm magnetized by
outrage or I'm magnetized by
sentiment or I'm magnetized by ironic humor
this is a part of me
I'm telling you that gets disappointed
when I run out of Twitter posts
to read that I haven't read.
I'm looking for the next hit of something.
What is that about?
I think there's two aspects.
One aspect is as you said,
the kind of stimulation
and the negative emotions
are stimulating to the brain.
Yes.
It's like a cocaine.
And that's why actually that is what,
one reason the media and social media
have become so viciously negative these days
is that it has been learned
that the negative emotions
keep you around.
You keep watching, you keep listening,
you keep scrolling, you keep clicking.
Number one is because of that stimulating effect
that has on the brain.
And our animal brain wants stimulation,
whether negative or positive.
The other part is that your attention is redirect.
Emotions redirect our attention.
It goes more towards threat detection.
The animal in me is looking and seeing danger and then goes to full
precept preservation or other preservation mode combined with fear and anger
and I look for any sign of threat around me and I keep looking and looking and looking.
The other aspect I believe is that some of us feel like we have to be doing something.
You feel like if I don't keep scrolling and if I do not suffer,
I'm a bad person, I'm a cold-hearted person, I'm a person who doesn't care.
And that has become a way of showing care for some people.
But in reality, my scrolling and my suffering is not going to help anybody who's suffering now.
I should think about what I can do to really productively help those people or other people that I am advocating for and not feeling it before.
Otherwise, I'm wasting time on energy and emotions and neurotransmitters.
Yeah, that really resonates.
I mean, one thing I was saying a lot early on in this, and I'll say it again, is that, you know,
we can chant free, free Palestine, but if we can't be free, free ourselves, what are we even talking about?
We don't, you know, we want something to stop, but we don't, we're not able to embody the thing that we
want to create more of, which is going to create, you know, that kind of deficit of imagination and
just an inability to live consistently with our values. And as far as not deny,
ourselves pleasure. My friend Katie posted this today. She says, in your moments of joy, hold on to
Palestine, not because, quote, I don't deserve this, but because they deserve this too. Joy is a
reminder of the universality of human pleasure. Joy is one piece of liberation. Joy is a lived
example of what exactly we are fighting for. And that, if you come into your activism or your media
consumption with that in mind, then you're magnetized by wanting to bring something positive
into the world rather than just that just divert my attention just make me feel useful just take the
pain away for a second by giving me something even more intense yeah yeah absolutely you got as i said
earlier also i agree if someone else is not around or able to enjoy now my responsibility to
enjoying and being prosperous and being productive is doubled and triple and multiple yeah that really
resonates well doctor we thank you so much for
coming on and talking with us about trauma and about, you know, everyone's responses in the last
few months and what's going on in our brains. Before we get out of here, I just wanted to know
I was looking you up. Do you have a Malamute? I have a great, I have a great Pyrenees dogs.
That's a Pyrenees? Yeah. Okay. How many pounds was, how big is that?
dog. So the guy you saw probably is Jasper, who was my former great Pyrenees. He was 110 pounds. And when
he stood up, he put his paws on my shoulder and looked at my eyes. But the other guy's Mishka and Lucy are
smaller around 100 pounds now. Beautiful dogs. I saw those and I immediately was just like,
you know, I got to get a dog. They were just beautiful dog. That immediately, I was like, I've never
had a picture be an emotional support animal
before. Speaking of that,
I was on the subway yesterday
or no, two days ago
here in New York. And
sitting across from me, it wasn't a
very full car, was
a woman with a little dog on her lap
and a man with a cat
on his lap. And the dog
and the cat were like looking at each
other and it was, you know, my instant
my impulse
was to take out my phone
and wanted to film it. Oh, isn't this cute?
Because my compromised damaged brain now sees everything through,
oh, this wouldn't just make a great reel or a great post.
It's terrible.
Like the world is just little clips waiting to happen.
And the person I was with sitting next to me said,
what are you doing?
You need to ask these people for permission.
I'm like, come on, it's a dog.
It's a cat.
It's cute.
And so I didn't.
And I looked at the cat.
And I noticed the cat was actually in a carrier.
And there was words written on the carrier.
And I looked closely and it said,
PTSD emotional support cat, no eye contact, no sudden movements, like really a request for
respect and space for the purpose. And I looked at the person holding this cat and the person,
you know, was wearing dark glasses clearly trying to regulate themselves as best they can on
the subway with this cat. And here I was about to be like, hey, can I take a picture of your cat so people
will like me, you know? And just
speaking of trauma, like I'd never seen a
PTSD cat before, but the cat
really did look like it took its job seriously.
That's beautiful. Well,
you know, this is
if you get anything out of this
podcast, it would be highly recommending
emotional support pets
because they sound great.
And if not, then just choose
us as your emotional support. Yeah, it would be your
emotional support pod.
Doctor, can you
tell us one more
time, name of the book, and just generally what it's about.
It's afraid, understanding the purpose of fear and harnessing the power of anxiety.
Basically, it's written for the public to have a good understanding of fear from its
evolutionary purpose, to how we learn and unlearn fear, what we love to be scared, how we
can utilize our own anxiety to our own advantage, what are the diseases of fear, trauma,
what are the cutting edge treatments, how we can get those politics, media, all these different
aspects of fear and anxiety.
And I also wanted to add a very quick note.
So I'm not religious.
I'm more on the spiritual side, but I'm Iranian from a Muslim country.
And two Jewish people sat here and had a very stable and nice conversation and we enjoyed
and we didn't hate each other.
So whoever is listening, going back to full circle back to where we started.
The boundaries and lines others draw for us shouldn't apply to us.
I mean, why would I be scared for someone else's benefit?
At least if I want to be scared around, let it be for my own benefits.
Yeah, let it be because there is a lion, not in a cage, not, you know,
because you were told to be afraid to have a conversation with someone that you were told was a lion out of a cage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Dr. Jabinbach.
The people who tell us that are just lying to keep us in cages.
Oh, wow.
He got the pun in.
I was wondering if he was going to get one in.
Beautiful.
Thank you again, Dr. Jevinbach.
It's great talking to you.
Thank you for having me.
So that was our interview.
Please check out his book.
It is a great, I haven't read it,
but I bet it's a great book.
I'm pretty sure it is.
And that is your most moral podcast for today.
Daniel, thank you so much for being.
my most moral co-host on this podcast.
Always a pleasure, Matt.
Next time we see each other,
you might not recognize me.
I'm planning to shave this ferret off my face.
No, I like it.
It looks good.
But I actually, I did see a video.
I looked back at us recently when we did our first episode together where you came over.
And I saw that you were clean shaven.
And I was like, oh, you also look good, clean shaven.
So both works.
Both works.
I like looking.
Yes.
uh thank you for being here thank you for listening patreon.com slash bad hasbara please join up
and all right everyone thanks again so much for listening and until next time from the river to the sea
i think i have PTSD i need help jumping jacks was us pushups was us god maga us all karate us taking molly us
Michael Jackson us
Yamaha keyboards
Us
Georgia makes not us
Andor was us
Heath Ledger Joker us
Endless Brent success
Happy Meals was us
McDonald's was us
Being happy us
Bequam yoga us
Eating food us
Breathing air us
Drinking water us
We invented all that shit
Yeah.