The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1044: Dan Harris | From Breaking News to Breaking Habits

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Is happiness a learnable skill? 10% Happier author Dan Harris is here to share techniques for managing stress and finding contentment in a hectic world. What We Discuss: Dan Harris shares his experience as a war correspondent and his struggle with anxiety and drug use that culminated in a panic attack on live television. The intense and often toxic work environment in network news, particularly during Dan's early career at ABC News. Dan's journey from cocaine addiction to discovering meditation and mindfulness as tools for managing stress and anxiety. The concept of "Papañca" (mental proliferation) and how it contributes to unnecessary suffering through overthinking and projection. Happiness is a learnable skill. Through various practices like meditation, therapy, exercise, and mindfulness, we can train our minds to be more resilient, peaceful, and content. As Dan emphasizes, we're not stuck with our current traits as if they're unalterable factory settings — they are trainable skills that we can improve upon throughout our lives. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1044 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional arms dealer, rocket scientist, or Russian chess grandmaster. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, crime and cults, and more. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, my friend Dan Harris back on the show, he's an Emmy award-winning journalist,

the co-anchor, former co-anchor of ABC's Weekend Editions of Good Morning America. He's the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He's also running the 10% Happier Podcast and Meditation app as well. Today, we dive into anxiety, loneliness, traveling and working in war zones, high-pressure work culture. I guess that's kind of the same thing I just said, eh? Mindfulness, pop culture, gurus, Buddhism, and more. Dan is a deep thinker. He's a great guy.

He's a wise man. I love this conversation. We recorded this live in New York City, and I think you're going to like it. So here we go with Dan Harris. You've been on the show before, but it was 1,000 hours of confidence. content to go. Whoa. And then some.

Whoa. Yeah. But the same show. I don't even know. I think it might have been my previous endeavor. Really? Yeah. Okay.

All right. Yeah. Wow. Well, I always struggle transitioning from the awkward small talk in the beginning and then being like, oh, now I have to ask a really engaging question to hook the listener. I usually, you're absolutely right. That is a weird moment. Yeah.

I usually just pause for a second and bulldoze to the substance. That's one. strategy. The other one is if I come up with something really clever, and I'm like, you know, we did the show a thousand hours ago. And speaking of a thousand hours, you've done over a thousand hours of like free dives. And then it's like, yeah, or you've climbed over a thousand peaks. But I don't have a clever segue. It is one of my least favorite aspects of listening to even some of my favorite podcasts that they feel like there has to be banter at the top. I agree. What I did this past weekend, et cetera, et cetera. I never do that.

I wish that podcasters would cut it out. That's right. Meta banter is what we're doing now. Does that count? Should I cut this out? Well, that I will leave to you, but I feel like meta banter is a little less annoying. It is less annoying.

It is only because it's not done that often. That's right. And then if it goes on too long, which this will not, then that's also a problem. So anyway, society seems fractured, Dan. The reason I bring that up is I just came from Texas, and I realized I was kind of turned around

and someone's like, you're looking for something? That does not happen in San Francisco, for example. I was in Austin, Texas, and somebody was just like, what are you looking for? But I will tell you, in New York this morning, where you think society must be super fractured, this woman who spoke very little English, she looked at me, and then she looked at this dude

who had, like, crazy hair and was carrying a garbage bag and had his shirt off. And she goes, to him, how do I get to Canal Street? And he goes, he pulled his headphones up, and he goes, what? And she goes, Canal Street. and he goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're on it. You're on it right now.

And I thought, okay, never mind. Do not judge a book by its cover in this city. First of all, never judge it. Yeah, especially in New York City. But also, there is a fracturing the sense of responsibility that I feel like we used to have for one another. Would you agree with that? Yes, I think, well, for sure, we're seeing partisan divides of a more vitriolic nature

than we've seen of late. And, you know, there's some data showing, like, for both. both Republicans and Democrats, the percentage who say I would be infuriated if my child married somebody from the other party has gone way up in recent years. So that seems like a real problem. I notice just in civic discourse, though, I guess what I'm doing is juxtaposing that with what I feel like when I go somewhere. I don't feel like if I get lost, the person's going to go, you're looking for Canal

Street? Are you a Democrat? You know, I don't feel that in everyday life. I feel like discourse online is doing that and maybe crazy Uncle Frank or like the person who can't shut the heck up at Thanksgiving, that stuff's happening. And you see real fractures

in relationships and families, but I don't think it has to be that way and I don't think it has to infect every element of our life. I think that's like a choice that some people are making. But again, it's a choice. It's an unfortunate choice, but I think it's a choice. This is not an original observation on my part,

but part of the issue online is that when you're typing into a box and you're saying horrible stuff to somebody, you don't actually have to see it land on their face. You don't pay the price that you would normally pay or saying something incredibly rude in person. Incentivized might be too strong of a word, but you're incentivized in a way to be as harsh as possible.

Further, the algorithm really is incentivizing us to be harsh because if you're going to be partisan or infuriating, you're likely to be rewarded with likes and promotion. That's true. It's funny we were just talking about that at lunch, about how you no longer create for people, you create for this confluence of the algorithm and people, which Renee DeRest has said on this show. So the idea is to say horrible things only to people's face.

It would be an interesting experiment to run. If you're somebody who's in all caps mode in your digital life, try that with regular people and see how it goes, IRL, and I think it would probably be an interesting lesson for you. Yeah, it would be an interesting most of those people might not live long enough to apply that lesson to the rest of their life. Yeah, or you'd get lonely real quick. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I know you've reported from all over the world, and you've covered wars in Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Haiti, Congo. That has to be so freaking fascinating. I wanted to do that when I was a kid, but my mom talked me out of it.

my parents were not happy. And if my son wanted to follow in my footsteps, I would be deeply unhappy. Really? Yeah, I was taking extraordinary risks, extraordinary risks. Such as? I'm going to Haiti in the first place, okay, but like Congo. Well, I would say, I mean, Haiti was never,

I've been a Haiti twice. Neither time felt risky, actually. The second time I went was right after the major earthquake and like, I want to say it was 2010 or 1100. might have been 2012, but yeah, it was one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen, just the sheer amount of death and suffering. It didn't feel dangerous. The dangerous stuff was just going into, you know, kinetic war zones where people are firing at each other and there's no,

there's a certain amount of safety, you know, from being embedded or at least being a journalist, but there's absolutely no guarantee. And journalists get killed all the time. I had friends who got killed or badly hurt and, I wasn't even that young. I was in my 30s, but these are not risks I would take now. Definitely not with kids. Yeah.

But yeah, I would say the biggest risks were like Afghanistan and Iraq. I think this is from your book, but I'm paraphrasing here. It didn't take long for me to know this job was what I would be doing for the rest of my life. Turned out that was wrong. That line does not age well. That did not age well. I wish I'd put my source in here, but it is a quote and it is in italics, which means it must have been more or less what you said. I delighted in the opportunity to get intrigued by an obscure but important

subject and then devise ways to teach viewers something that might be useful or illuminating. That doesn't sound super war reporter-esque, though. Well, I mean, the war, the war reporting, it felt important because I think we need humans bearing witness to what's being done in our name and with our tax dollars at the tip of the spear, right? So that felt really important. But that was just one part of my, I mean, I was at ABC News for 21 years and I was in local news for seven years before that.

So I had a varied career. not all of it was in combat zones. The other part of my job was just reading widely, getting interested in something, and then pitching my bosses on paying the bills for me to go do or see a thing, and then I could come back and educate the viewers. And this was at a time where it felt like the news,

TV news was more relevant, you know? Right, it wasn't just clickbaiting nonsense? It's not just that, although it is that. It was more like there weren't that many other options. You know, when I arrived at ABC News, who's the year 2000, the internet was starting, and obviously there was cable, but YouTube didn't exist yet.

There were no apps. The iPhone did not exist. I felt like I was very much in the belly of the beast in terms of information dissemination. Yeah, you were. And now that has really changed. And, you know, there are episodes of our respective podcasts that will reach more people than certain hours

in prime time on major cable news outlets. Yeah. And so it's just a different time. Do you like that now? Or are you like, oh, man, he used to be relevant? Well, I'm not in the news business anymore. So I did this thing a couple months ago. I did a completely jinned up a reason to go on TV again

because it was the 10th anniversary of the first book I wrote, which was called 10% Happier. And I got my publisher to put a fancy new edition, 10th anniversary edition. It was complete bullshit. Put a sticker on it. There was no reason to do this other than I was a good time to try to see if I can make a little noise in the marketplace.

So I went and did a bunch of TV. So I went back on Good Morning America and I went on on, did I go on CNN? I went on a bunch of daytime television shows like The View and whatever, Sherry Shepard. There you go. Anyway, and I realized that I really like it. I miss the sort of what you and I are doing right now, but with a live audience and makeup. Makeup.

I didn't miss that much. But it was, that reminded me like, oh, yeah, I really did love this job. And even if the audiences are smaller and older now, you know, maybe at some point I would want to go back into it, but I'm not underemployed. It's funny. Once again, I wanted to be Dan rather when I was a kid, my mom, you know, when my mom goes, those people don't make any money. And now I'm like, oh, she didn't want me to get shot. Yes.

Got it. Respect. Those people made a ton of money. Well, yeah. I was like, I'll show her one of Dan sold pay stubs. Yes. And then they still do it. You know, it's a pyramid.

And at the top of the pyramid. Is Anderson Cooper? Is Anderson Cooper? Right. David Muir, Lester Holt. I never got to like the tippity top of the pyramid. I was like a level or two below. At the top of the pyramid today, even in its diminished state,

cable and broadcast news is paying its stars quite well. Yeah, whenever you listen to any news or history podcast that's recent history, and they play some clip, it's almost always like you reporting on something that happened in like 1995 or 1993. And I'm like, oh, Dan still sounds the exact. exact same. It's really funny. Well, the other conclusion you could draw is, oh, Dan is old. Yeah. Well, but you did, you were kind of like front row seats to a lot of really amazing in every sense of the word kind of events. Some of them are quite horrific. I would imagine that traveling over to cover conflict zones, it's got to be, is that lonely? You know, actually, it's not lonely because usually go in with a tight crew of people and it's an incredible bonding.

You know, there's a lot of research to show, just to be very clear, my experiences are way less intense than anybody who's actually carrying a gun, you know, an active duty soldier or a Marine. Nonetheless, there are studies that show that when people get home from war zones, often they can get really depressed and miss their comrades. And I think that's true for journalists too. And the depth of the relationships I created, you know, I'm friends, very close friends with people I met in places like Toribora and Baghdad and those relationships, even if I don't talk to them for a year or two, if I see them now, it's like no time has passed because we've been through extraordinary things together. There's not a whole lot of that these days.

I mean, it's tough. Of course, soldiers get that. But in civilian life, so to speak, are there comparable experiences? I feel like, I think what I'm going with this is loneliness seems to be like, it's at an all-time high, even though people are, the cliché is we're more connected than ever, but we're also lonelier than ever. And it's, especially men, we were talking about this on your show, our mental health is just in the garbage. I think you're identifying what I would venture to say is the biggest problem we're facing as a species. I could imagine people pushing back and saying,

well, climate change, bigotry, war, but at the root of all of those things is the human capacity to work together to solve problems. And that capacity is degraded because everything about modern society militates against human connection. We are most of us raised in individualistic cultures. We are pushed deeper and deeper into our phones with our own curated information silos. And so we're not getting face-to-face interaction to the degree that we need. It's making us unhappy. We have unprecedented levels of anxiety, addiction, suicide, depression, loneliness. And so this despair, one of the roots of it really is lack of human interaction. I'm many years into writing my next book

and it's kind of about this stuff. That's good. When they pitched me your book and it was the same book that we had 10 years, I was like, really, man? It's not new when it's a paperback of a 10-year-old book. I'll have new things to say at some point soon. But one of the things I want to point out

is that we, as a species, like, we need each other to survive. Yeah. And yet we're never taught how to do human interaction. You know, like we're not taught in school. I mean, we taught math, geography, and all this other stuff, but social and emotional learning, which is taught in some... It's funny.

My son who's for his school, they're like, oh, we're big on social emotional learning. We're big on... They said SEL, and I went, what is that? Yeah, well, SEL is really important, and most of us don't get it. And that is a huge problem. Yeah. Because you cannot succeed as a human if you are not able to get along with other humans. It's a real problem.

Once we heard that, we were like, how much is this school? Actually, I don't care. Take my money. Because the other schools are like, they will be able to do trigonometry by grade three. And I was like, I just want them to not bite people. Can we do like a not bite people unit? And this school is like, don't worry, social emotional learning is our focus. And me and Jen were just like, take the money, take the cash.

You mentioned anxiety. It does seem like, it's not necessarily the other side of the coin, but is anxiety adaptive? So many people have it, I feel like it has to be. Well, there's a certain amount of fear that's adaptive, right? You want to avoid poisonous snakes and people who... Rustling bushes. Or the opposite tribe that doesn't like you, et cetera, et cetera. There's a certain amount of fear that's adaptive.

But anxiety is sort of the misapplication of our ancient fear response in a modern context where it doesn't make sense. And I speak as somebody who has lifelong anxiety and it's a gigantic pain in the ass. And it's been just a thing I've had to struggle with over and over to this day. I mean, just yesterday I was telling you this on a walk earlier. Just yesterday I had to get an MRI. But I have such bad claustrophobia that they had to knock me out to get into this thing. And I have trouble getting on planes and elevators.

And I've done a lot of things. And I'm allegedly like a happiness guru. But sometimes people say to me, you know, you're very anxious for somebody who's a meditation expert or whatever. And I'm like, no, you have the causality wrong. I am a meditation. expert or quote unquote expert because my anxiety is so bad and it's just one of the many things I use to treat it. I think there are roots of modern anxiety. There are many, many of them. Some of us are just wired for it. I think as a Jew, it's pretty deeply ingrained into our

cultural history for some pretty good reasons. Also, I think lack of social interaction is leading to a big spike in anxiety these days with kids spending more time on their phones than with each other. We need that kind of rub. We need a little bit of rough and tumble in order to, and Jonathan Haidt's done some great work on this, in order to sort of inoculate ourselves against the ups and downs of life. I think another related issue is an allergy to discomfort. We live in a world where that is too friction-free. You can get dates, you can get food, you can get information, all with a few swipes. There's a certain amount of suffering that is very healthy. And, again, to use this word, inoculates you against stress,

habituates you to stress, and we're in a world where we're not getting that. And a lot of people like my age, and you and I are both Gen X, although you're on the young side of the Gen X. Debatably, not even Gen X. I'm Gen X in a very stable way. There's a way in which people, my age,

look down on younger people and criticize them for being so anxious, et cetera, et cetera. But that's ridiculous. The anxiety that young people are dealing with is a result of the world that we created for them. And I think rather than being critical, we should be taking responsibility.

I think a lot of young people agree with you and a lot of older people do not, probably. Yeah. I'll take the young people. It's interesting to me that anxiety could be caused, your anxiety is triggered by going in an elevator, but going to a war zone totally fine. Yeah.

That's odd, right? It doesn't make sense. No, it doesn't make sense. I really like, and I've always liked adventure and excitement. There's a way in which when you're doing it for work and you're behind the camera, although it wasn't shooting,

I wasn't filming, I was actually in front of the camera, but in a metaphorical sense, you know, everything that was taking place was content capture in a way. It didn't feel real. And so it had,

there was a surreality to it that if I had been just dropped into the war zone with no work to do, just had to survive, I don't think it would have felt the same way. Were you kind of playing a character that was not afraid? Or you were playing a video game, you know? I think that would be a better analogy.

Interesting. Look, it looks scary being in a war zone. There's obviously real world consequences. It's just funny because being in an MRI machine, there's nothing to worry about it. And yet it's so that just proof that it's completely irrational and like a maladaptive trait. Yes.

You even write in the book that you were freaking out about your hairline, which by the way, has not changed in as long as I've known you. It has not changed. It turned out to be something you didn't need to worry. about it, at least not yet. I wasted a lot of time. If I could go back, you know, nobody gets the chance to do this, but I just have spent in my life so much time worrying about the wrong stuff. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine you would say the same thing for yourself. Definitely. Yeah, when I was younger, it was like, oh my God, I'm not employable because I don't like anything. It was always like,

follow your passion. We talked about this on your show, and it's like, follow your passion. I'm like, I don't have any passions. Or my passions relate to computers and nobody uses those at I was literally worried about that because nobody used computers at work. You were also using them to break the law, so there was that issue. Fine, yeah, there was that. But, you know, I could have used them for other things, but people didn't use computers at work then. And, yeah, I worried, like, am I going to be able to get a decent job? Am I going to be able to stay interested in that job?

And it turned out that I didn't need to work for somebody else who was doing soul-sucking employment. Like, I didn't need to do the law thing that I did. Everything turned out fine for me, but yeah, I worried about everything. And I'm probably still worrying about something that I don't need to worry about. I mean, maybe it's just the cost of being alive. A certain amount of worrying makes sense. Sure. The problem is it's hard to know in the moment whether you're properly allocating your worrying resources.

You know, like it's easy to know it in hindsight. This is where advice and friendship and back to social connection is really useful because I do spend a lot of time worrying out loud with my friends or with mentors or with my wife. There's a great expression. Have you had Robert Waldinger on your show? Yeah, he's great. So he is, as your listeners may remember, he is the head of the longest running scientific study, I think, in all of science. I think so.

At Harvard, where they've studied several generations of people in the Boston area to try to figure out, like, what are the variables that lead to. to a long and healthy and happy life. And there's really just one. And that is the quality of your relationship. Why? Because stress kills and relationships reduce stress. And he has this great expression, never worry alone.

And to me, that has been really helpful. To worry out loud with people I trust can really help me. If you've got the right relationships, people will say, asshole, you're worried about the wrong thing. Right.

Here's another thing you can worry about. Yes, exactly. That's what real friends tell you. You're worried about your hairline? No, you need to worry about your gut. That's the problem here. And you stink. And you smell terrible.

Yeah, there's... When you're on primetime news, are you constantly paranoid about looks at that point? Because you are, I mean, millions of... theoretically, at that point, millions of people were seeing you and going, oh, man, why'd you wear that? Yes.

Jeez. It's very hard. I found it, and maybe others are less egocentric. I found it hard to do that work without obsessing about how you look. It seems like quite shallow to be in a war zone in thinking, is my hair too windswept? But I also completely understand it.

You know, the thing is, you know that the end user is thinking about those things. They are judging you consciously or subconsciously based on how you look. They have no visceral sense of the discomfort you're in. Right. They just are judging you because not because people are horrible,

but because this is just how we're wired. I think about this a lot. Like, we do a ton of interpersonal and intrapersonal violence around aesthetics, you know, around how other people look or what their weight is, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't think it's irrational for somebody on TV or on YouTube or wherever. Anybody who's putting themselves out there to be worried about this because we do arrive at these snap judgments and we're wired for it. It's just got to be such a weird, like on the one hand, I don't want to get shot.

On the other hand, the lighting is better over there. And that's a real calculation that you're making. That I've never done. That I've never done. I've never gone for the better lighting with the more exposure. But for sure, I mean, I remember my mom saying to me once there was a, I remember the shot. I was with some soldiers and we were in Iraq and they were doing nighttime raids and they were raiding people's homes and looking for members of the solder brigade, which was a Shia militia.

and I was with them. And it was in the middle of the night. I think we'd been up for like 36 hours. And everybody was chewing caffeinated gum that the soldiers were handing out to each other. And I remember there was a shot that I was in where I was kind of like my back was up against the wall because I was trying to stay out of the way

and my helmet was like on crooked and I looked really tired. And my mother was like, it was very brave of you to put that shot in because you look so terrible. Jewish mothers, am I right? Good Lord. Actually, you know, I'm only half Jewish, and my mother is not the Jewish side.

So just mothers then. Yeah. And I remember the first time I went into a war zone, I couldn't reach my mother, so I called my dad, and he started crying, and he said, you have a Jewish mother. It's just not your mother. Yeah. They must have aged prematurely watching you on TV in a war zone. I now have it, you know, we both are parents and my child's a little older than your kids, mine is nine. If he were to do this, I would be distraught.

Yeah. I can't believe what I put them through. Yeah, I think about that a lot, too. My poor parents. I didn't go to any war zones, but I worked in dangerous areas and did dangerous things, and I was just kind of like, that's fun, though, I'll be fine. And you broke a lot of laws. I did break a lot of laws. They were not happy about that. We're not happy about that. And now for a word from our sponsors, better than getting shot at in a war zone. We'll be right back.

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Now, back to Dan Harris. You worked for Peter Jennings. Yes. And he was like, for people who don't know, it's like, how would you define it, legendary broadcaster? Yes. And more, I mean,

when you talk about working for him, it's not exactly sunshine and rainbows. I believe the quote is, he tormented us or it's just, Peter Jennings tormented us. And that's probably a paraphrase, but it's probably not too far from the actual truth. I think I said he was my mentor and tormentor.

There you go. Yeah, you know, it's crazy. I always think of things through a Buddhist lens. because it is kind of my training now. Peter Jennings was panoramically famous when I came to ABC News in the year 2000. I remember walking down the street with him in New York City,

a place where people are famously unbothered by celebrities and every head would turn as we walked down the street. Every head. It was crazy. This guy at the peak of his powers was in 30 million homes a night. Wow. Nobody gets ratings like that in the current environment.

This is like Mr. Beast level, right? He's the only person you can put in this category now. Right, but here we are. You and I are talking in 2024, and it is quite common for me to be in front of audiences where people don't know who Peter Jennings is. Yeah, of course, yeah. And so I view it through the lens of impermanence.

Like, we feel that we're in a very solid movie. The way things are now, this is the way they will up. always be. But, you know, if you live long enough, you just see that things are changing all the time, things that seem like permanent fixtures, like Rushmore-level humans like Peter Jennings. Now, there's a street named after him. It's 66th Street in the Upper West Side. There's a block between Central Park West and Columbus. It's Peter Jennings Way. But it's just another historical name that we ignore, that I think most young people ignore, like, if they even notice it. But this was a guy

who was so incredibly famous, and he was my mentor, and he was, but he was also very complicated dude. And so I had this incredible privilege of being able to learn from the guy who I think is probably the greatest broadcaster who ever lived, but he also had a very short fuse and played mind games. And I thought that I learned how to be a different kind of leader, and I've learned to my humiliation over time that I picked up some bad habits that I've had to unlearn from him.

Really? Yeah, you say that working for Peter was like sticking your head in a lion's mouth, thrilling, but not particularly safe. Yeah, because he would turn on a dime, you know, like one minute. I remember him sending me off in 2005, the last conversation I ever had with him before he died of lung cancer. He was sending me back to Iraq. At this point, I had already been in Iraq a bunch of times. I had been in Afghanistan. I was a reasonably seasoned combat reporter at this point.

And I remember him saying, like, I want you to go. you're going to spend some time in Israel, and then I want you to go to Iraq, and there's a bunch of things I want you to do. And then before I left, he's like, you should know that there is a perception that you're not particularly good at this. Yikes.

And I'm going off to war, right? And that's the last thing he said to me. Jeez, man. What kind of motivation is, I don't know. That's like a sick, like, if I make him feel terrible, maybe he'll step his game up just a little bit. And then he pads himself on the back, like, I know how to make him winners.

You know, it's hard for me to, I was having a conversation with my brother, recently about negotiations. And my brother is a very seasoned businessman. He's a venture capitalist at Bain Capital. And he's done many, many big deals. And he said he never tries to put himself in the mindset of his counterparty, which I thought was counterintuitive. I thought good negotiators always did that. And he's like, it's a losing game. You're never right. And so I don't really know what was in Peter's head. I know he had a really complicated relationship with his own father. and I know that at times he was incredibly, I wouldn't say, like fatherly with me, but maybe a von

killer. It was like a kind of an uncle to me and he would take me under his wing and give me advice. And the first time I went to a war zone, I was in Afghanistan after 9-11. And when I arrived safely, he called my parents to let them know. So like he had this deep reservoir of decency. And he was truly brilliant and like unbelievably gifted at what he did. It's just that there were times when he would motivate us or attempt to motivate us in ways that scanned to me is pretty twisted. Yeah, but it makes you wonder, the reason this guy is at the level where he is and treats people the way that he does is probably largely a function of how he was raised as well, right? I think so.

Which is kind of tragic, actually. This kind of gets back to this discussion we're having before about young people and this temptation that I see in myself and definitely among my peers to be like, oh, well, when we were coming up professionally, we were hazed and, you know, these kids can't hack it. But I actually think the kids are largely right. What was acceptable in a work environment when you and I were coming up, it should never have been acceptable. First of all, the treatment of women was abominable. Same for anybody who didn't identify as one of what back then were considered only two available genders. It was a pretty unenlightened time. And I'm not trying to be

super woke or anything like that. I'm just saying the sort of militaristic hierarchical system in which I came up doesn't bring the best out of people. And I think what we know from the data is that the way to bring the best out of people is to make them feel safe. I mean, just think about what we know about the way the brain works. If you are in a fear state, the part of your brain that is operating is back here. It's called the amygdala. It's the ancient sort of reptile part of the brain. that's not the best decision-making mode to be in. If you feel safe, it's the prefrontal cortex that comes online. And so if you want to motivate your team,

I think it is better not to criticize somebody as you're sending them out at the door to go risk their lives. I think it's better to, you know, if you want to talk about what their strengths and weaknesses are, you could say, hey, are you open to some feedback? I'm sharing this with you because I really care about your success. I'm invested in you. Here are a few things you could do better,

but generally speaking, you're doing great, and here's another chance to go show us what you got. Right. That's slightly better than, by the way, most of us think that you're not good at your job or whatever it was that he said. But it's hard to be overly critical of him because he was raised by wolves.

I mean, I'm not, I'm being somewhat facetious that I don't know his parents, but that was the world in which he came up. You know, I think Peter came by his quirks, honestly. More importantly, I think the changes we're seeing in the workplace now where that behavior is unacceptable, I think are largely positive.

Now, of course, sometimes it goes too far, and there is such a thing as safetyism and, you know, like... Never heard of that. Is that like safe space type of animals? Where people are intolerant. It's back to something we talked about earlier, like the intolerance or inability to handle discomfort. I think it's good to interact with ideas that you don't like.

And that a safetyism would say that I'm, we're going to take that off the table. I think it leads to a sort of intellectual atrophy if you're not interacting with tough ideas. I'm trying to go right down the middle here and say, on the one hand, we should not abuse junior staffers. That was not a good way to do business. On the other hand, we don't want to have an environment where you can't have tough discussions. You described them as a man fueled by a combustible mix of preternatural talent and crushing insecurity, which is, that's a hard way to live your life. Yeah. And the newsroom was a never-ending

CyOps campaign? I mean, that sounds like every day is massively stressful. And that wasn't just... You'd rather be in a war zone from the biz room. I remember, so they're moving now, but the building that I spent 21 years of my life in, there are two entrances, one on 66th Street, and there's a back entrance on 67th. And I used to leave through that back entrance because I lived up on 75th Street. And 67th Street between Central Park West and Columbus is a very leafy, beautiful part of Upper Manhattan. And I I remember spending all day in that building freaking out about something. Talk about worrying about the wrong shit. I was probably just worried about the wrong shit all day long.

Can I swear on this podcast? Yeah, sure. We just did. Yeah, but I don't know if you were going to be disapproving of it. Anyway, so I spent all day freaking out about what other people were thinking of me and who was getting the story I wanted and who was up and who was down. I remember walking out every evening. And I'd step out into the fresh air and I would think, what was I worried about?

Yeah. There's a whole world out here. Like, why did I spend the whole day coiled like that? And part of it is it was back then the culture was, by design, internally at ABC, adversarial. If you go back and read the book written by Rune Arledge, who was the boss, he was the president of ABC News when I arrived. He set it up as a series of stars. They were called The Magnificent Seven. It was Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings, Ted Cople,

Hugh Downs and one other person whose name I'm forgetting, and they were meant to be at war with one another. So if you were, if you like me were close with Peter, you were automatically on the outs with his competing anchors. Oh, man. And this was true at the executive level, too. There were certain executives who I fell in with, but they had enemies.

If you were friends with one, that by definitionally you were not friends with the other. It was an incredibly difficult environment to operate. in. And this is what I'm talking about when I'm saying, like, this shit would never fly in corporate America now. No, it's not even efficient or anything. I mean, it's just, it's totally inefficient. It's totally inefficient. God, I mean, look, I have sympathy for people who are hard on others because they're often exponentially harder on themselves in environments like this. Yes. And, but it just seems, it seems like you would want to change that environment so that it's not so horrible. It has changed.

you know, by the time I left ABC in 2021, it was very different. You sometimes see in press reports, like media reporters will describe ABC News as like famously combative internally. But that, by the end of my tenure there, was absolutely not the case. It was, I have, to this day, some of my closest friends are my colleagues from ABC News. And we, you know, are regularly barbecuing at each other's houses and going to baseball games with each other's kids and, going to see movies together. And that really did change over time. But in my early days, it was not good. Jeez, man. With the benefit of the hindsight you have now, how do you navigate

that sort of Hobbesian environment, you know, where the various broadcast, the anchors and they're competing with each other, it seems like you can't, like you said, you can't align yourself too closely with somebody because if they're on the out, your whole career is over. I mean, how do you, it's massively competitive? And wasn't it Cuomo who was like, hey, I heard you got cats. Do you also sit down to pee? I mean, this is like ridiculous, the level of crap that you wait to.

Well, that was actually pretty funny. Well, yeah, that one. That's why I made the notes. Yeah, Chris was a great friend and supporter when I was at ABC News. I haven't talked to him recently, but Chris and I are almost exactly the same age. I think he's a couple years older than me.

And, like, that generation was me, Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, Bill Weir, Jake Tapper, David Muir, and we were, they were trying, the bosses were like treating us like we were gladiators, you know, we were trying to get us to dislike each other and to compete against one another.

And it wasn't just our generation, it was the generation above us, as discussed earlier. It really shows how an organization can be, corruptive may not be the right word, but the phrase I often use in my little team now is that the fish rots from the head. So if there's a problem on my team, it's generally my fault.

because whatever pathology I'm bringing into the work environment, whether I want to or not, is bleeding out to the team. And so when I hear about dysfunction on my team, my story usually is not, oh, well, that person's a jerk. Although sometimes that does happen. Sometimes there are people that you need to get rid of. But usually it's like, oh, I should do some introspection now

because there's something I'm doing that's creating, an environment that's problematic. And I think what happened at ABC News was Rune Arledge, who was a genius in many, many ways, set up a system that was, you know, deliberately or not quite toxic. Tell me about going to Pakistan. I know September 11th you start going to some, the crazy kicks up a notch. Yes. I remember getting off the plane and I had never been to, I don't know, can we say third world anymore? Is that unacceptable? I think you're supposed to say developing, which is interesting because every place is developing. But we like, we like, Like euphemisms now.

Okay. Well, I'd never been to a developing country before. It was like an incredible shock to the system. Being on the other side, I've never been that far away from home. It was, I loved it. Yeah. I loved it. I thought it was awesome.

You know, I've spent huge chunks of my life being the only white person. And that's a really, I think more white people should have that experience. Yeah. Because you can see what it does to your nervous system. You know, you're always just aware that you're sticking. out like a sore thumb. And that, it creates a lot of empathy, I think, like what it's like for other people who are not in the dominant group, right? So, yeah, so that was the beginning of spending years in places like, you know, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel,

West Bank, Gaza, been all over Africa, all over East Asia. I love being the fish out of water, but it's not for everybody. And you've done, I know you've done quite a bit of this work, too. Four times in North Korea? Yeah, yeah, but I'm not getting sure. shot at. If something, if that happens, yeah, something's gone wrong. Something's gone horribly wrong. Yeah, but you know, most of my travels were not to war zones. I mean, I spent a lot of time covering actually endangered species.

That's actually quite interesting. It was really fun. I've been, you know, I've been riding on elephants and chasing rhinos and looking for tree kangaroos and Papua New Guinea and all that. ABC News was, when I was working there, just, it was a fantasy factory. I basically would dream up the coolest shit I could think of and convince my bosses to pay for it. And it was awesome. It was awesome until, you know, this whole side hustle of meditation and happiness took over

and I just had to make a choice at some point. We'll get there at some point. Now, you said that there were swashbuckling types of people also on these things. Are they veterans of places like Bosnia, Rwanda. It seems like a movie where, I don't mean this in a patronizing way. It seems like a movie where a kid finds himself hanging out. with like mercenaries. Yeah.

And you're just like, wow, this is awesome. And I felt like a kid. I really did. I was, I think I was 30 when this all started going down. And I know that's technically not a kid, but I, the other reporters. We are old now. That's a kid now. Yeah, well, saying this from age 53 definitely does seem young, but the other reporters

were older and more experiences and the other producers too. So I was in this environment of people who had covered, you know, the fall of the wall and had, you know, covered the war in Bosnia and had been in Kosovo and had a lot of experience. And they seemed like totally comfortable being, you know, in the presidential suite at the Islamabad Marriott, which later blew up. Jeez. I should not laugh. And I remember specifically I remember Bob Woodruff, who, again, this might be a name that people don't remember, but he was very, very famous.

When Peter Jennings died, Bob took over as the anchor. and then just a few weeks later, he got hit by a bomb in Iraq and had to have his whole head and brain operated on. It's a miracle that he's still alive. Yeah. And after that accident, he set me up with my wife. Really? Yes.

I remember walking out of, there was a gym. I think it's still there. It used to be called the Reebok. And it was right across from, my whole life was like in this one little. Three blocks of Manhattan. Yes. When I wasn't traveling, my whole life, was within four or five blocks of Manhattan.

The office I worked, the gym I went to in my apartment. Jeez. That and like Rwanda. Yes, exactly. Crazy. And I was walking out of the gym one night, and Bob and his wife, Lee, had set me up on a date with a young woman named Bianca. Dating apps didn't exist.

Again, this was pre-Iphones. It was like 2006. I remember Bob calling myself to make sure I was going. And the last thing he said was, trust me, dude, she's hot. I guess that's something you can admit now that you guys are married and have children. Yes. No, and she is. Not that that's the most important thing, you know, but she's very beautiful. And yeah, I met her that night. We got married not that long after. But just to say, there were a bunch of swashbuckling types around, and it was really cool to be in that environment.

I had like a healthy version, I think a healthy version of imposter syndrome. Like, I did not walk in there cocky thinking, I know how to do what you do. I walked in there thinking, I'm going to watch you very close. and learn how to do what you do. That's important when you are, you could die if you do something wrong. I mean, it's important in all industries, but especially there, it's like, how much do I want to concern myself

with ego right now? You talk about the fact that you can die and definitely people did, and I lost not a few friends. Now, there's a whole, very careful protocol if you're going into a combat environment. But back then, there was no protocol. I got no training.

You should buy a helmet somewhere. I don't think we wore helmets. It was like... Well, I looked at video when I was researching this. I did not see you wearing a helmet. It was a couple of years into it, they started saying you have to wear a helmet.

Yeah. Especially if you were embedded with the military. But generally speaking, maybe you had a flack jacket, but if it was super hot, maybe you didn't wear it. You know, it was... You wouldn't want to get sweaty

in that war zone. Well, it was 130 degrees sometimes in Baghdad. What's the difference at that point? Yeah, I remember one day... Is it really 130? Yes. One day we're in Mosul. were embedded with the army and the cameraman I was working with fainted.

And so I shot the rest of the story. And when I came back to the Fob, the forward operating base, they had him hooked up to an IV with an ice pack on his groin. On his groin? Just to cool it down. Insult. Oh, is it? It was just a mess with him.

Was he unconscious? No, he was conscious, but like kind of in a twilight zone. Oh, I see. So they were like, put this right here. Oh, that's, yeah, good old hazy culture. They were ruthless. But they were much more good nature to best. it than my early days at ABC.

Yeah, so the military was less ruthless than Peter Jennings. That's saying a lot, actually. I'd never put that together, but yes, it is. Wow. Because the military is not necessarily known for taking it easy on guys who make mistakes or pass out in the desert. Yes, but, you know, so my experience with the military is that they are ruthlessly, they mock each other ruthlessly.

Like, I remember being in a, what's called an MRAP, which is a, an armored vehicle. I think it's a mind-resistant vehicle of some kind. Mind-resistant armored something? Yeah, I don't know. Personnel carrier? I don't know. But that would be MRAP.

Yeah, it would. So I'm not sure. My apologies to anybody who knows anything about this, but I was in what I believe is an M-Rap and everybody's wearing headsets. And, you know, you've got the gunner and the driver and the people in the back. And it's just a non-stop insult fest.

Yeah. But with love. I wish there was more of that vibe in my early days at ABC. because it was the insults, but without the love. Right, yeah, the whole, still sticking with me, there's a perception that you're not very good at this. That is, you still remember that,

and it's been what, like, 20 years? More than 20 years? Yeah. It's the sense of purpose, I think, that you get from doing something like war reporting, being in an MRAP with your comrades. I mean, there's a lot of the war reporting types. People say they're adrenaline junkies,

but I wonder, are they more maybe purpose junkies instead? Or in addition? Yeah, well, I was going to be. going to say, I mean, it might be hard to disambiguate those two. I think for me, it was both. It felt very important. The work felt really important. You know, that the- It was, actually. I mean, you didn't have TikTokers doing stuff from, or people recording Instagram videos. You were the message, or it wasn't going to get out at all. Correct. Yes. So it felt, it felt really important. And it was thrilling. And that's a drug. And I definitely got addicted.

You talk of a time where you went to interview these Taliban commanders. That must have been pretty damn exciting, right? They're like, okay, they're not going to kill us, probably, and we get to go talk to the Taliban in the middle of this war. Was that kind of a hell yeah moment, or were you nervous? So the offer came in. We were in Quetta, Pakistan. So Quetta is in western Pakistan right on the border of,

it's like southwestern Pakistan right on the border of Afghanistan and Kandahar is in southern Afghanistan. It was the capital. It was where the Taliban really had their stronghold. So Kabul is the capital of the country, but Kandahar was kind of like the spiritual and military stronghold of the Taliban. I see. And this was a few weeks after 9-11,

and they were actively being bombed by the Americans or the coalition. And our local fixer got an offer from the Taliban to come in and kind of embed with them and report from their vantage point. And I remember we had an offer in air quotes, yeah. Well, I mean, they didn't have any elaborate. It wasn't like a gun to our heads because we were in Pakistan

and they couldn't force us to do it. It was really like, do you want to do this. I thought you meant your fixer got a job offer from them. No, no, no, no. The fixer got the offer of like, hey, do you want to bring your team in? I see. And let them spend a couple days with us.

And I remember we had this big meeting and we're all like in a circle with chairs. There's maybe 15, 20 of us from ABC, and people were debating the merits of it. And I knew. Pros, Taliban interviews, cons might die in coalition bombing. I remember letting the conversation play out and knowing I don't care what anybody says.

Yeah. I'm doing this. Was the conversation generally, hey, we should do this? Or was it like, if anybody wants to go do this, fine, but we're, you know, we'll fly. I really did not want to go. Really, yeah. And nobody was forced to go.

There were three of us who were willing to do it, and we did it. It was me and a cameraman and an engineer. So I needed a cameraman, and then I needed somebody who was going to be able to get to access the satellite so that we could send the footage out. Those guys were willing to do it, and so we went. Are those kind of career-making things where it's like, I'll do this, and is it expected, like, hey, Jennings, I went to Afghanistan. All these other people didn't want to go.

pick me for the next opportunity, or is it just like, you know what, you kill what you eat and that's it? No, no thank you. It's not that linear. I mean, I thought, of course, I remember the two guys that I went in with these British guys,

Matt and Jeff, and they would make fun of me the whole time. They were like pretending to be me back in a bar in Lower Manette and bragging about my exploits in Afghanistan. And I think I thought that it was going to be, you know, but as it turns out, there was a really negative article written about me in the New York Times

criticizing my coverage. So it didn't end up being that positive for me. What was wrong with your coverage? Too sympathetic to the Taliban? Yeah. Really? Yeah. I remember there was a BBC reporter there who didn't leave the compound much because he just had to be on the air all the time.

Oh, I see. And I actually, because ABC News only had a few big broadcasts, Nightline, World News Tonight, and Good Morning America. We were not on all the time. I had time to go out and really spend time with the Taliban. So I actually really got to know some of these young kids and interviewed them. And I talked about how, you know, they would whisper to me, take me to America. Really? They really were not as fearsome as the media had portrayed them.

I thought this was great material. Yeah, it sounds amazing. There was a cultural reporter from the Times, Karen James. I'll never forget her name. You disagreed with me. That's where Karen comes from. Karen James. She spelled her name with a C.

and Karen did not like my coverage and I was devastated. That is too bad because I think now it's oh we want nuance. You know hey our enemy is not just like faceless ISIS level I mean unless it is ISIS right it's not just like there's complexities going on

here and it's like oh I'm going to bring some of those in the article and it's like eh we just want you to wave American flags around and be like we're definitely right about this. Yes I think it's true we nuance is important and sometimes undervalued in Karen's defense I do want to say that I was very green and I probably made all sorts of embarrassing errors.

So that humiliation, that very public humiliation, was a good bit of seasoning for me. Yeah, man, a lot of us take seasoning at work, but not all of it ends up in the New York Times. Yeah, it was hard. It was hard, but like, who remembers it now? Like people, you know, it's like... Karen and Karen probably doesn't remember it. Karen's like, Jordan, I love your show, but that Dan Harris guy was, he's always been such a loser. Right. She's going to just send you a little note that says, still a schmuck. Still, yeah, after all these years, still not, good thing he got into meditation and podcasting,

where all you losers belong. Yeah. It's interesting that these guys whispered, take me to America. I mean, is it, were they messing around or were they like, no, really, take me to America? This sucks. No. That's incredible. Yeah.

I mean, they were just scared kids, you know, they weren't the murderous, religious zealots. They may be now, but it was their bosses. And these were the guys who, I'm just talking about the kids. kids who were assigned to just keep an eye on me while I was out taking pictures. The leaders, those were not people to trifle with. Yeah, of course. A friend of mine, he's in high-level hostage negotiations, international stuff. I'm like, I don't know, he didn't really give me too much permission to talk up. So I'm trying not to, I'll be blurry here, vague, but he told me about a time he went to Lebanon, you know, Lebanon's full of militias. A lot of them are religious. And he

talked about a meeting where it was him, the leader of the Lebanese Christians and Hezbollah and Hamas and local Lebanese army and a few other stakeholders, and they were all smoking, shisha, and drinking scotch, which I don't know how much people out there know about Islam, but alcohol is generally haram, forbidden. They were all drinking and having fun. He said every guy in this room is a multi-billionaire, and their militias are right now shooting at each other,

sniping each other, setting booby traps for each other, they'll kill each other. These guys are all laughing and smoking and drinking together. And he said that one of the guys turned to him and goes, Now you understand Lebanon because it's just like these guys are all just profiting off of this crap. Yes. It's really sad, actually. I don't doubt any of that.

And I think what's even scarier is that there are true believers who are, you know, we're seeing this play out in the Middle East right now. They're true believers on both sides. There are. Religious zealots on both sides. And those are the people you really ought to worry. But I would take the corrupt ones over the people who believe that there is a heavenly reward for. Well, the corrupt ones can be bought off, right?

The Hamas leaders that are in Qatar in a five-star hotel and the crazies that are in the Israeli Knesset who are never going to send their own kids over there, those are the people that can potentially be reasoned with or bought out in some other way, compensated. Yeah, the people who have lost all their family or are like, God has given me the right to do this. Those are the people that you are not going to convince.

That's what makes this conflict terrifying. Because one type is pretending to be the other type, pretty much any given time. That's not healthy. You ever wonder about these kids that you met in Afghanistan? Like, are they still alive? Like, I do. I just wonder, is this guy sitting around somewhere watching friends on his phone and being like,

I met an American once? He was a newscaster. Yeah, I do wonder, I mean, who knows what happened to their lives. You know, they might now be senior figures in the Taliban. Maybe now they're true believers. Or maybe they got killed. Who knows? They live in a rough neighborhood.

Yeah, to say the least. You mentioned that when you got home from war, you did. got sick, you know, essentially depression. But like not just, well, tell me about that. I felt horrible physically. I just felt like had a fever all the time and had no energy. And this was summer of 2003. So it was, I covered Afghanistan and then I spent a bunch of time in Iraq, sort of the pre-invasion,

then the insurgency. I'd spent a good amount of time in various war zones at this time. And I came home and I felt awful. I did all these tests. I went to see all these doctors. I had my apartment tested for a gas leak. I mean, I like went all out. I could not figure out.

Oh, really? You were thinking like, oh, I must have radon coming up through the floor. Yes. And I never once considered. That it was psychological. Yeah. Really?

There's a different time, right? Now I feel like if you feel like crap, one of the first things you think of is, is it the way that I feel causing me to be ill? Because looking back, it's almost, it seems like, oh, I left this war zone where I had a ton of purpose, and now I'm like going back and forth

to planet fitness. and wondering what kind of burrito I'm going to get for lunch. Right? It's like you just yanked the plug of purpose out of the wall. Yes. And the adrenaline out of the wall. And I think I was really addicted. You know, even though my life when I was home was pretty exciting,

I was on national television covering big stories. That's true. But it's not the same as, you know, putting your life on the line. But you make a really interesting point about how things have changed. It's true. In 2003, you wouldn't go to the mind-body connection. I was just like, oh, it must be lime or a steam bar or whatever, you know, like, who, who, I had all

these tests done. And nobody in the medical profession even suggested it to me. It was only when I finally, as a last defense, went to a psychiatrist. It was like, yeah, dude, you're depressed. And now. It's like the first thing you think of. Well, I mean, it's also, I mean, I mean, it's interesting to think about it. I think it's incredibly positive that we are really open to discussions about mental health.

Yeah. Incredibly positive. And I sometimes wonder whether we've taken it too far. Just a little bit. What? How so? Specifically, I worry about people on social media talking about their diagnoses in a way that is just wallowing in the suffering, which has some benefit because, you know, it's good to normalize these experiences. Yeah. Yes, never worry alone.

Exactly. And if that's all that's on offer, instead of actually, here are some things you can do. about it. I think that can lead to a little bit of contagion or deepening of these feelings as opposed to agency and empowerment. It's funny you mentioned contagion. I had Jonathan Haid on this show, you know, and he talks about social contagion of things like eating disorders and depression with social media because since that algorithm feeds kids especially what they're already watching, you get girls being funneled like eating disorder content and guys to certain extent, but with guys, it's often like muscle and steroid level kind of content.

We mask it as biohacking. We call it biohacking, but what it is is injecting yourself with testosterone and getting an eight-pack or whatever along those lines. That stuff's dangerous. There's other things that are socially contagious and even talking about it will get you canceled, which is too bad because I think mental health needs to be discussed and needs to be discussed openly. And if you're starting to apply that political correctness veneer over things, like it just gets ruined. It's great that we can I was too embarrassed back then to admit that I had any psychological issues because it was not accepted in this rather toxic atmosphere. Sure.

Now it would be accepted and that's great. But I think if we're fetishizing, oh, what's your diagnosis? Here's my diagnosis and we're over-medicating. I think that could be a problem, although I'm not against medication. It can have really positive effects on some people. I think there just needs to be an emphasis in the dialogue on what is doable. to help rather than just the pathos and the pathology of the suffering. That's the missing element, I think.

Reporters say war as a drug. You mentioned you went through, was it kind of like war zone withdrawal? Is that fair? Yeah, adrenaline withdrawal. You see this in much more seriously among the soldiers, the troops, because, you know, my experience was nothing compared to theirs. And my little way, that's what was happening for me, that I had all of this excitement. I would come home to what normally would be an exciting situation,

but how can it compete with standing in Iraq and watching, you know, missiles fall or watching the fall of Sanam or whatever it is? Yeah. It can't compete with that. And, yeah, I really struggled. And I made a bunch of dumb decisions. Like what? Cocaine.

Okay. That's just one decision. Go on. What are the other? Well, I made it repeatedly. I see. There you go. Yeah.

So did you have an addictive personality? before that? Yes. Is that sort of something you knew about yourself your whole life? Yes. I don't think I did much about it. I mean, I never, first time I did cocaine, I was 32 or 33. Okay.

I had never done hard drugs. I drank, but not really, I mean, I have alcoholism in my family, but I'm not an alcoholic. I didn't like it that much. Right. I'd smoked a little weed, I didn't like that much either,

but when I did cocaine, I was like, oh, this finally found a drug. This is my poison. And I remember specifically, because you had asked me before about being sick and testing for gas leaks and Epstein Barr and whatever. This was the first thing that made me feel better. Well, actually, actually, the first thing that made me feel better was going back to the war zone.

Oh, I see. Yeah, of course. I remember one day, I had this very clear memory of coming home. This was pre-Iraq. This was during the second Intifada and Israel. So 2002, there was a Palestinian uprising. Yeah. And I was spending a lot of time.

in the West Bank and Gaza and covering it. I came home. I was having an early taste of what it's like to be withdrawing from adrenaline. And I was just kind of feeling like shit and I was fighting with my bosses. It just wasn't going well. And they sent me back.

And I remember getting off the plane directly into an armored vehicle and going to the West Bank and covering a riot in the town of Janine in the West Bank and diving into a ditch after like shots went off. And then getting back into the car

and falling asleep because I was jet lagged and waking up on the side of the road and we were out of danger and there was some local Palestinian gentleman selling watermelon and I was eating some watermelon with the West Bank is beautiful,

just this beautiful environment and I realized I don't feel sick anymore. It was just gone. Wow. And the same thing happened the first time I did cocaine. Could have been the watermelon, no. No, it was not the watermelon. It was not the watermelon.

It really just, you know, this malaise, this lethargy, this languishing that I was doing when the adrenaline was taken away from me, cocaine, yeah, it did it. I don't recommend it, but it definitely did it. It's a weird binder in. What's more sustainable, a cocaine habit or a war zone habit? Yeah, exactly. Jeez.

Neither. Right, right. So I had to give them both up. Oh my gosh. So when you're in the war zone, you can't get cocaine, you don't need the cocaine. Is it just like when you come back? You're like, all right, here's the baggie. Yes.

Get my war zone fix. Yes. I don't even think I made the connection. Of course not. I didn't make the connection until I know at some point you're going to ask me about having a panic attack. It wasn't until I had a panic attack. A spoiler alert. From like 2002 to 2005, I would go back and forth from war zones or I also covered like the presidential campaign.

I covered John Kerry's campaign when he lost to Georgia. Joe B. Bush. I was basically going between these big experiences professionally, and then when I was home, I would occasionally go out and rip it up, you know, bright lights, big city style. But I did not make the connection that one was compensatory for the other until I had a panic attack on national television. Now for a word from our sponsors, not as exciting as cocaine in a war zone, but it's certainly the next best thing. We'll be right back. If you like this episode, to the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show

are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. Email me, Jordan atjurbaner.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. All right. Now, back to Dan Harris. Yeah, so tell me about that panic attack. I'm sure it's a fine moment that you love reliving. Yeah, so it was June 2004. I was filling in on Good Morning America. There used to be a Good Morning America,

a person who would come on and read the headlines at the top of the hour. That person in 2004 was Robin Roberts, who is now the main host of the show. But she was the newsreader then. That was the technical title. And I was filling in for her, which I had done a bunch of times. And the job was at 7 a.m.

at 8 a.m., you sit in front of a camera and read the main headlines of the morning. And it gives the main hosts a break and gives the audience a quick news rundown. So I was in the middle of doing this, and I'm like looking at the camera and there's a teleprompter, and I'm reading the words off of the teleprompter, and all of a sudden it becomes incredibly salient to me that there are five plus million people on the other side of that camera, and they can see me right now. And maybe that should make me a little bit nervous. And then my mouth started to dry up.

My palms were sweaty. My heart was racing. My lungs seized up. My mind started to register that my body was in mutiny mode. And the more terrified I became psychologically, the more my body reacted. And it's kind of what a friend of mine calls a toilet vortex of this vicious cycle. Yeah.

And I just, at some way, I just couldn't breathe. which is a problem if you're trying to read the news on television. Live. Live. And so I had to quit in the middle and toss it back to the main hosts of the show. I mean, in some ways, that was like a real luxury. Because if it was just, you know, many shows are just you. You know, it's just you anchoring the news.

But this was a multi-host show. So I was able to say, hey, Diane and Charlie, back to you or like kind of squeak that out to the extent that I could speak. If I hadn't been able to do that, I don't know. I probably would have ripped the mic off and run away. Oh, my God. That would have been, that's a career-ending move, I would imagine, yeah? Yeah.

Yeah, it was horrible. Oof. It was horrible. If you look at the video and if you just Google panic attack on television, it's the first result. Yeah. If you look at the video, one of the responses I often get is, it doesn't look good, but doesn't look that bad. Yeah, it wasn't that bad.

And I think part of that is because I was able to toss it back to these other hosts. And part of it also is that even though I was young at the time, I think I was like 33, 34, or my whole adult life had been on camera. So I'm like pretty good at concealing my emotions, which is not an interpersonal strength, as it turns out, that has caused problems for me and my relationships. But in that moment, it was pretty good that my poker face is strong.

It seems like now, well, I guess top line newscasters, they don't seem overly emotional about things, but it's weird. And podcast land, it's like, no, no, we like it when you get fired up, or we like it when you get angry or dignite about something. It's like, you don't see David Meir doing that, right? No.

He's funny. He always looks like he's not quite able to see the teleprompter and he's off to the side. I just want to ask him like, are the lights bothering you or is that just like your trademark look? He's got that little like tonight. Unlike Peter Jennings, David Muir is an extremely friendly person. He does not look friendly on the news.

Really? No. No, he's the sweetest. That's funny. He's such, like I actually emailed him the other day because when the Trump verdict came down, I did something I never do, which is I turned on the news.

I actually stopped watching TV news like a decade ago. Who did you stop working there? No, no, no, way before I stopped working. I just lost interest in, I read the Times, and I read a bunch of substack and I listen to a lot of podcasts, but television news just stopped doing it for me. But I turned the news on, and I wanted to see ABC's coverage of this huge historic moment.

And David was on, he was so good. And I sent him a note. I was like, dude, you're just a master. And he got right back. He sent me this very sweet note. I mean, he is like the anti-Peter Jennings. He is very nice to everybody. That's great.

Yeah, he always looks so dang serious. I'm like, oh, this guy must be a terror to work with. No, no, no, not at all. Speaking of you becoming suddenly aware that five million people are watching you, the inner voice, you've said before that we assume the voice in our heads is actually us and it's not. Tell me about that. Because if the voice in our heads is not us, who are we then? That's a very deep question.

That's a very deep. Don't get too deep in the answer. If people want, I'm not going to follow. We don't have that kind of time. Well, how can I say this? We have many modes that we go into, right? So there's self-critical mode, there's generous mode, there's fearful mode. So which one of them is you?

And by the way, if you go looking for who ordered up that thought, you know, Jordan, you might be walking down the street later today and be like, you know what? I don't look good today. I just passed myself in a reflective. Yeah, it never happens. I don't really have to choose a different example. Who asked for that thought? Right, no, that's true.

It's true. I mean, sometimes actually it's very interesting if you're in the middle of some sort of thought shitstorm like an anxiety or self-criticism, it's an interesting way to flip the script is to go looking for who's having these thoughts? Whose voice is this anyway? You can't find it.

And that actually is kind of liberating. In Buddhism, they often say that the not finding is the finding. To see the insubstantiality of what you are calling yourself or Jordan is a relief, because then you don't have to take all of the garbage that your ego is vomiting up so personally. You don't have to act it out as if it is gospel truth. First of all, it's just very interesting, but it's also very practical. Did I go too deep? No, no, no, it does make sense.

It's just that I would never assume that the voice in my head is not me. It's like the only part of me that I was like pretty damn sure before this conversation. was actually me. It's deeply counterintuitive. Yeah. And it's countercultural. In the East, the idea that there is no core self, that this sense that you have, that there is some Jordan behind your eyes and between your ears, it's actually a non-controversial

idea in many cultures in the East, it's been around for millennia. Take enough psychedelics and this truth will come bearing down upon you with thunderous force. This is what when you take. take psychedelics and they talk about ego death. I mean, I had this experience when I was 14 years old and I was smoking skunk weed with my buddies at Newton South High School. I was a freshman. And I was in the gym watching a JV basketball game with all my friends.

And I just smoked some weed out in the parking lot. And the weed started to kick in. And I had a classic psychedelic experience where I realized, holy shit, everything that's happening right now is happening right now. Oh, no, no, no, no. Now it's right now. Now it's now. Now it's now.

Maybe that weed wasn't so bad. This was, I don't know if it was the quality of the weed or the quality of my mind at that moment, but this was my first panic attack. Oh, never mind. I realized that I don't think I would have been able to articulate it at the time. But now in hindsight, what I realized is I was just seeing that the solid ground that we think we're walking around on isn't so solid. This is what happens on these psychedelic drugs. And this is what can happen in deep meditation. And it is healthy.

It is also true. It's an insight into what is true. But this can sound super-asoteric and maybe not that helpful. But what is helpful about it is that you don't need to believe your thoughts. Whether you see them as you or not, whether you want to go down that rabbit hole or not, that's fine. But what is universally helpful is every single thought you have, you do not need to acted out like it's a tiny dictator. The thought, oh, I should say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage, or I should go eat 75 burritos because I'm lonely or bored. You can call

bullshit on these thoughts, and that is really helpful. That sounds powerful. I think you said something along the lines of the ego is obsessed with the past and the future at the expense of the present. Yes. I mean, I obviously identify with that. I think everyone probably can identify with that, unless they've done a shitload of psychedelics, as you'd mentioned, and their ego is dead and not talking to them anymore. The problem with psychedelics is that you can have those experiences with, and I'm not somebody who's done a lot of psychedelics, and I'm not against them at all. I think there's a lot of healing potential.

I see them more as medicine than as drugs, and I use drugs in the pejorative. I think there's a ton of potential to psychedelics. But one of the problems is that the learning can be episodic, that you have the experience, but it doesn't get into your molecules in a sense. deep way because it's kind of unearned. This isn't always true, but this is sometimes true that you take the molecule and you have

this big experience and then it's hard to access it again. Yeah. Integrate it or to re-access it. What I think can be more true about meditation, since it's such a pain in the ass, you know, you have to do it and do it and do it. And the big experience if it ever happens is slower is that you're getting it into your marrow in a deeper way. Yeah, that makes sense, right?

So the meditation is sort of like getting strong through weightlifting, and psychedelics are more like getting strong because you're Popeye and you're a can of spinach and your muscles plump up. Yes. That is true enough. I just want to be big, just so nobody like, don't at me. I just want to be clear. I'm a huge supporter of the research around psychedelics.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I think it can affect lasting change in some people, but even Michael Pollan, who I'm sure you've interviewed and I've definitely interviewed, even he will say that the downside or one of the downsides or the knocks is that you can have these big experiences and they're a bit ephemeral. Yeah, I suppose there's so much good research on psychedelics and MDMA for like PTSD. Yes. So yeah, I definitely don't want to scare people away from asking their doctor about this kind of stuff. This is another one of these great aspects of the fact that it's become socially acceptable to talk about our mental health challenges.

I don't know if it's a parallel discussion or the same discussion in a different form, but the fact that psychedelics are also now back in favor, I'm sure there are problems, too, that we should look at, and maybe, you know, as often is the case, the pendulum can swing too far. But generally speaking, from what I know of the research around psychedelics and what's happening out there, it seems very positive. We probably at some point are going to need some more regulation. Sure. And like a good housekeeping seal of approval and quality control and all of that,

stuff. But the fact that, you know, veterans can come home and talk about the mental health challenges and that there are these novel treatments that here tofore were either illegal or, or embarrassing. That's awesome. You mentioned that you were doing a lot of cocaine, had a panic attack on live TV. You were mostly only present in the war zone slash on the drugs. How did you, I mean, you're not on cocaine these days. So how did you kick all that stuff? You got any? No, officer. I do not have any. Are you a narc? No, I am not on cocaine.

I've not done cocaine in 20 years. We're too old for that stuff, man. Yeah, it would also kill me. Yeah, so I went, I had a panic attack, and then I went to see a psychiatrist, who was the first person to point out to me that the cause of the panic attack was most likely that I was doing drugs.

I was not high on the air, but he was like, if you're doing it with some regularity, your brain chemistry is going to change, and you're more likely to lose it in any number of contexts, especially live television. So I quit that day. And he did not think I had been doing it enough to warrant a trip to rehab, but he did want me to see him once or twice a week. And I ended up seeing him, I think, for 10 years until he got promoted upstairs.

Dr. Broughtman, shout out to Dr. Brotman. He was awesome. And he really helped me. You know, it was not easy. You know, I really wanted to keep doing it. And I had a lot of friends who were doing it. And so it was complicated in those relationships. And so that was a real struggle.

It took me a couple of years to, like, feel okay with that. That's a lot of therapy, by the way. It's like a thousand hours of therapy. There's a lot of therapy. Holy moly. Yeah. But I learned a lot. And it was through that that I got turned on to this whole meditation and Buddhism thing,

you know, because Bratman himself wasn't really into it, but he mentioned it. And I started reading a few books and then I was off to the races. So you began seeing thoughts just as thoughts. And it's hard for me, though, because worry, it feels like it keeps me on my toes. So it feels useful in some ways. It is useful in some ways. Okay. Good.

Because I would say worrying works, man. 99% of the things I worry about never happen. Yeah, I don't know if that is evidence for worrying work. I don't think so. Worrying working. I think some... That joke failed. No, I got the joke.

Okay, good. Well, you know, that's an, earnest, that's a, no, I'm getting the name wrong. Samuel Longhorn Clemens, but what did he write under? What was his pen name? He wrote Huckleberry Finn. Oh, God. Why am I saying? We should both know this.

Yes, this is embarrassing. It is. We have to edit it together once we find it and feel like. Mark Twain. Oh, yeah. Obviously. Thank you, Lauren. That's Mark Twain, by the way.

Yes, thank you, Jordan. Mark Twain said most of the worst things that happened to me never happened. And that is true. We're just constantly conjuring situations in our mind, situations that have not happened. But the suffering we're doing is actually happening. So some worrying or plotting or planning or stress does make sense, but it very quickly crosses the line into useless rumination and manufactured suffering. I see. And so the value of practices that will give you more self-awareness, including therapy, talking to friends, and I would argue meditation, is that it helps you draw the line between constructive anguish and useless rumination.

And that has been very helpful to me. That is not to say, I still struggle with anxiety in a very real way. And so there's no silver bullet here. And that's why my whole schick is, you know, 10%. 10% happy. Yeah, just go for, lowering the bar. Lowering the bar. I mean, I just don't.

I mean, you've done how many thousand plus interviews? Has anybody presented you with a silver bullet for anything? Yeah, a lot of people have tried. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, they always have something for sale, those people. So my point is what I think is on offer is messy marginal improvement over time. But perfection is not available.

I think that's important. What was the trending? I feel like when we first talked about this, there was something trending. What was it? You know, it's the secret. That's what it was. Yes. That stupid, like, law of it, like, if you manifest.

It is coming back. That's why I was going to bring it up. People still send me messages about this. And I'm like, my God. Have we not? past this already? I see influencers, podcasters, and stuff talk about this, and I go, surely nobody's actually buying it. It's a huge thing right now. Look, a magical thinking is, you know, it's been with us since humans, you know, started walking on two feet. And I get the appeal.

You can disprove it with a very easy thought experiment. We were talking about the earthquake in Haiti, the Port-au-Prince. So if it is true that you can control objective reality through the power of positive thinking. Is the opposite true? So was everybody in Port-au-Prince Haiti during that earthquake engaged in some mass cognitive error that resulted in incalculable woe

and suffering coming down upon them? Of course not. So this is just an easily falsifiable set of beliefs. Yeah. Do I think that there's some value to being optimistic and positive and working your ass off in pursuit of your goals?

Absolutely. But do I think that you can cure your own cancer through the power of your thoughts. No, I'm highly skeptical. Yeah. Even, and I think it's so funny, this quote's been said three times in three different days

on this trip that I'm on right now. Praise Allah, but also tie your camel to the post. Absolutely. It's funny because one guy who told me this was an Israeli-Jewish guy. I know it's in your book. I think it's in your book.

It is. And another person who told me is definitely, like, I'm not talking to even Muslims. It's just such a really funny, famous line from the Quran. I love it because, It's like trust in God. But you know what?

Lock the door. Just lock the door. You should lock the door too. Yeah, Ronald Reagan's, when he was negotiating arms deals with the Russians used to say trust but verify. And it's a similar thing. Is the universe mysterious and maybe magical in some ways? Sure. I'm open to that.

Quantum stuff. Yeah. Like, I don't need. It's incredible that we even exist. And if you lose touch with that, you're missing out. You know. Right. I'm not trying to kill all the joy.

In the magical thinking like the secret, there's no post. You're visualizing the. Visualizing the post and the camel. And just hoping that both of them show up. Yes. Which is not how any of this works. Correct. Tell me about Proponsha.

This is a cool concept. I love it because it's such a relief that people have come up with a name for a thing we all do to ourselves that we think maybe just like only we do. So Propancha is, it means a lot of things in the ancient language of Polly. but one application of it is the mental movie making we do when say we stub our toe and then we imagine, I'm never going to walk again or why does this always happen to me? I'm always the guy who stubs his toe.

I'm not going to be able to play squash later tonight or whatever. We make these phantasmagoric projections into the future as a result of some data point in the present moment. That is proponsia. And we're doing this all day long. somebody looks at us some way in a room and we think that person hates us. Oh my God, I'm never going to get a raise because that person might be my boss someday and I'm going to die alone.

We just make the, it happens really quickly and we're doing this all day long. And just to be able to put a label on it is really helpful. So the next time you notice yourself doing it, if you can remember the word, pro poncho, you can just say projection if you want or movie making or whatever. it just kind of takes the air out of it and helps you do what I think is really important, which is to not take this self-inflicted, self-manufactured suffering so seriously. And there are just these very effective ways to work with the mind that often involve just seeing clearly what's happening. And so the fact that there's a name for it is really helpful.

I think that is helpful because, one, you realize you're not the only person who does it. Two, if there's a name for the phenomenon that it's essentially so kind of, that you can call it out every time it's happening, which makes it less like, this is definitely real. Yes. Speaking of worry and worry and not necessarily being kind of useful, how can you essentially advise us not to worry about the things we have to do in the world? Like if I miss my plane, that is a real, genuine problem.

It's not an irrelevant thought. Yeah, there's a great, and this is not, I want to give credit where it's due, there's a great little tool you can use to figure out whether the worrying makes sense. and this comes from a guy named Joseph Goldstein, who's my meditation teacher, and he's awesome, just turned 80. And I remember I actually asked him once, dude, you just what you just asked me,

you know, there are times, there's some shit I need to worry about sometimes. And he's like, yeah, that's true. But maybe on the 18th run through, ask yourself one simple question, is this useful? And that is brilliant, because it cuts right through the nonsense.

Is this useful? No, but I'm doing it compulsory. Possibly, potentially. Yeah, but once you see that it's not useful, you can change the channel. That's true. And it may come rushing back, but you can change the channel again.

I mean, I think, and this is, you may have heard me say this before, but there's so much wisdom out there. The hard part is just remembering to apply it. Well, I was even going to make a joke, like now I'd have got to remember that. Yes. Well, honestly, I mean, this is why tattooed.

I mean, like, I have a tattoo on my left wrist, and my wife and I got tattoos last summer and she's already making noises about, are we going to do it again this summer? Wow. So, like, is this useful would be not a bad little tattoo? On my left wrist, it says F-T-B-O-A-B. It's kind of off-brand in its sincerity

because I'm usually not very earnest, but it stands for the benefit of all beings. And it's a reminder to me to not be so selfish because I am wired for a certain amount of fear-based, acquisitiveness, selfishness. And so, but my job really is to be helpful. And so I like to have this right next to my watch. So when I check the time, I remember, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

My job is to be helpful? And so maybe on my other risk, is this useful? Or Joseph has all these little expressions that are good ways to just kind of remember what you know, but tend to forget because the world is always dragging us into habit. What are you going to do when your kid wants a tattoo? And he's like, dad, you have one. Mom has one. He just got his ears pierced.

It's different. I feel like that's like your wife's probably like he'll take those out in a few years. Tattoo, not going anywhere. My dad always said that the hardest part of parenting is letting your kids make their own mistakes. And I made a lot of mistakes and he had to put up with it. And so I tend not to be overly prescriptive with my son. I've basically chosen two things to lecture I'm about. And other than that, I just try to be a supportive listener.

Yeah, that's a good strategy. I actually would love to get a ton of tattoos. I just want the ability to turn them off when I don't want them anymore, and that's not how tattoos work. It can be a little claustrophobic, like the morning after I woke up, and I was like, oh, man, this thing is,

this is never coming off. Never coming off, no. But it has been so helpful. I mean, because I'm looking down in this direction all the time because I'm looking at my watch or my arms are out in front of me while I'm on a exercise bike. I mean, you just, I see these letters all the time.

And for me, I just, I need this reminder. As I often say, the hardest part of personal development is forgetting because you listen to a great podcast, you read a great book, it opens your eyes, but then the world's just dragging you back into denial and routine. And so you need ways to wake up. And so for me, tattoo, if my son wanted to get it, I mean, he's nine, he's not getting a tattoo until he's 18, but, you know, if you wanted to get a tattoo of something like.

That's what you think. But yeah, go ahead. Exactly. Exactly. If tattoos are as big as vice, that would be worth. my problem, yeah. Could be worse. Your book has a lot of tiny bits of wisdom.

One, I love, which is there's no point in being unhappy about the things you can't change and there's no point in being unhappy about the things that you can change. Did I do that right? I feel like I might not have done that right. Let me do that again. I'm trying to think it through. I'll just do it again in case I read it wrong. There's no point in being unhappy about things you can't change and there's no point

in being unhappy about the things you can. So if you can't change it, why be unhappy about it? there's nothing you can do. And if you can change it, there's no point in being unhappy. You can just change it. Go change it. Yeah. I feel like I'm glad I said it twice because there's people who are jogging or like driving.

Angela and Blake pay attention to the road. And they're like, oh, God. So just leave that in there. Do you just pull Angela and Blake out of nowhere? Are those two people you know? No. Okay. Often when I say something twice or I'll say, I'll just name people.

And I figure statistically, there are people with those names that are freaking out that I just, there's a woman named Angela's great. grocery shopping right now or driving and she's going, oh my, oh my God, wait, how does you know? Yeah, that's the voice in my head. It's shocking. It jars them back into the present moment. I think it's really true. First of all, it's not my observation.

Most of the things I say in the book and elsewhere are like taken from other people. Joseph has a great phrase that he's like, we're part of a lineage of thieves. So we're just taking wisdom from the millennia and like re-skinned it and relanguaging it for modern audiences. I think it is true. if there's nothing you can do about a thing, worrying about it, there's not a lot of utility in that.

And if there is something you can do, then do it. Having said that, like, I'm a warrior and I get it. We come from a multi-thousand-year tradition of worrying about things. Overall, though,

your podcast and book, pointed the idea that happiness is essentially a learnable skill. Yes. Which is pretty empowering. Yes. That's the whole point. Yeah.

That's the whole point of my life now is to point that out to people in a million different ways, that you're not stuck, as I often say, this is like my go-to language, but it's true. Like, you're not stuck with your current mind and traits like they're unalterable factory settings. They are trainable skills. So I've just got to find new ways to say that

and present that information until I can't breathe anymore. Yeah. That is, and it's incredibly good news. It's incredibly good news. It's incredibly good news. And so I used to do bad news, and now this is the news I do. And there are many ways to train these skills. Obviously, I spend a lot of time talking about meditation, but therapy, relationships, nature, medication, exercise.

There are many ways that you can train your body in your mind and psychedelics, and we should be investigating all of them. Dan, I'm grateful to know you, man. Like that. Really. We've been friends, and every time I hang out, it's just such a pleasure. I feel the same way. Thanks for having me on. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with John and Mendes. She was the chief of disguise for the CIA in Moscow during the latter part of the Cold War. We really get into the weeds on how they hid people and hid spy gear in one of the most hostile espionage environments anywhere in the world.

We invented technology that didn't even exist yet. The small batteries, for instance, they're in our watches and our phones and all of the that stuff today. They're kind of like Q from James Bond, but it's the CIA. We could create any kind of character over your face, masks that came out of Hollywood, and we'd say, great, go down to the cafeteria and have lunch. This is at CIA headquarters where everybody knows everybody in the cafeteria. And they would go and discover that no one paid any attention to them. You go, wow, I'm hiding in plain sight. They were following us just every minute. The case officer, would step out of the car, the driver would hit a button, this dummy would pop up, wearing the same

clothes as the guy that had just left. Trailing surveillance would come around the corner and they'd follow that car all night. They never knew. And if they could get to those people, they would execute them. They were feeding people into these crematoriums, feet first, alive. Unbelievable. A really valuable agent said, I'll work for you on one condition, and that is that you give me the ability to take my own life. Eventually, everybody got arrested. So they were really, And we had put that L pill we gave him in the cap of the Monblock pin. It was cyanide. And he knew where it was. And they said, we want you to write your confession. So they brought him as a boneblock pin. For more with John Ombandes, including some incredible spy stories that will really perk your ears.

Check out episode 344 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Love, love, love talking to Dan. What a smart, wise guy and a good friend. All things Dan Harris This will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com, including 10% happier. Check out the show, check out the app as well. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser.

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I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. I'm also on LinkedIn for those of y'all who use that one. That's where the sane people are, although that is changing rapidly. This show has created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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