The Jordan Harbinger Show - 619: Danny Gold | Breaking News from the Underworld

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Danny Gold (@DGisSERIOUS) is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, long-form writer, and co-host (with Sean Williams) of the Underworld podcast, which covers organized crime around the world -- from Balkan warlords to Brooklyn wiseguys. What We Discuss with Danny Gold: How coming from a family of Holocaust survivors inspired Danny to pursue journalism and keep an eye on the world's most unsavory and unreported misdeeds. What it's like to get caught red-handed trying to secretly record a violent human trafficker on his own turf. How Danny finds ways to relate on a human level to people who may be responsible for committing unfathomable atrocities. Why assuming everything is going to go wrong -- and preparing accordingly -- is the best way to survive as a freelance reporter in the field. How even the darkest shadows cast by the human experience can bring out the brightest and best facets of humanity. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/619 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with elite counterterrorism undercover agent Tamer Elnoury? Catch up with episode 572: Tamer Elnoury | Undercover with a Muslim FBI Agent here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do you, get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. We go with this group of new recruits and a couple other journalists that we're going to join. And we're sneaking through this apple orchard on the border. Maybe 150 yards ahead of us are the Turkish border guards. And once we get close enough, maybe 100 yards, two of them run out to this barbed wire fence and they put, I think it was a piece of plywood or cardboard, something like that, to sneak over the border. And we're all supposed to follow them and crawl over this cardboard or over this barbed wire fence. but what happens is the Turkish border guards see them,

and they start firing off their guns. I mean, everyone just runs this way, then that way. It's complete chaos. Then I look back and I see some people actually running towards the border break. And I follow them through it. There's like a military trench on the other side. I climb out of it, run behind like a dirt mound. There's all these abandoned cars because people I fled the city.

And a bunch of us I made it through, but I start looking around. And no one on my team is there. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional drug trafficker, arms dealer, or neuroscientist. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, and of course I appreciate it when you do that, we've got our episode's starter packs.

They're available on the website and on Spotify. They're collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started. Or, as mentioned, you can find them on Spotify as well. Today, Danny Gold has interviewed Al-Qaeda face-to-face, gone to church with MS-13 and El Salvador, lived with Syrian rebels for a week and found himself caught in the middle of a Central African War.

He's one of the only journalist to reach a city once it was besieged. seized by ISIS, and he was on the ground during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia. In other words, this dude is crazy, and it's my kind of crazy. He's been in the New Yorker, PBS, Vice, HBO, Netflix, and more, and of course I'm happy to have him here on the show today. We'll be discussing war journalism and what it's like to cover conflict in Syria, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, the Central African Republic, as well as what it's like being deep with gangs and cartels, like MS-13, gangs in Trinidad, Bloods and Crips in St. Louis, drug gang

in the Dominican Republic. If you've ever thought about what it would be like to travel and cover the most dangerous people and places in the world, I think you'll enjoy this episode. And if you just want a front row seat for it as well, then you're in the right place. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great people on the show, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over in our six-minute networking course. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find it.

The course is about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship. with you. It'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And mostly guess you hear on the show, they subscribe and contribute to the course, so come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Danny Gold. You've got an interesting, I would say job, but it's not a job because neither of us have real jobs. It's a career, but also it's one where you, you know, pay yourself slash don't get paid for a decade or two, and then you end up hopefully getting that Anderson Cooper.

I don't know. Where are you on the spectrum of this right now? By the way, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I got to say sometimes it feels like a hobby, unfortunately, one that takes up a lot of time. Yeah. You know, when I meet someone like a friend's friend or whatever who's also, or a friend who's in journalism, I meet their friend. I'm like, oh, so do you have a real job or do you what we do? That's funny. You know, yeah, it doesn't feel like a real job most of the time. You've got such an interesting background. I mean, we got connected because of your show, which I really enjoy. It's called the Underworld Podcast, or do you just call it UnderworldPod? You know, UnderworldPod. We call it the Underworld Podcasts, the Underworld Podcasts, the Underworld Podcasts, whatever it works.

The Underworld Podcasts podcast, so you repeat the word podcast, as if once isn't bad enough. Yeah, exactly. But I really enjoy it. You've got some crazy, crazy topics, some of which we'll discuss today. But, I mean, just a smorgasbord of like the North Korean meth trade, Ebola, gang stuff, gang plus religion. It's like all these kind of unique stories, the kind that I love to cover. And you're on my network, and I thought, oh, this is a guy I got to get. So I'd love to start with your backstory, as one usually does, because stress is kind of in your DNA.

Your family has a history of being in very stressful situations, and you, instead of like, taking it a little bit easy now that you live in a free country, have just decided to go to some of the worst places on earth. Yeah, you know, my family are Eastern European Jews. So that right there kind of is a giveaway, you know, that they haven't had the easiest of times. Right. You know, all four of my grandparents are Holocaust survivors. they were in the camps.

One of them was hidden. The other two had to flee Poland and were in like Siberian work camps. My mom was born in a displaced persons camp. So it's got this crazy history that I think originally learning about that was what got me interested in journalism, especially the kind of journalism that I do,

which is usually going to places where not nice things are happening, but it's also kind of like where history is being made. So that right away, I think, was part of the inspiration that, you know, saw me doing what I'm doing right now. So I gotta tell you, my mother was definitely not thrilled about me taking off for like Iraq or Syria as well. Definitely thought, you know, this was supposed to be the generation that had easy.

I kind of made it hard on myself, so not happy about that. You said one of your relatives was hidden. What do you mean? Are we talking like Anne Frank style? Not to make light of it, obviously, but I'm trying to give people a picture. No, exactly, Anne Frank style. He met a guy, a random guy, what they call a righteous gentile, not Jewish, took all the wrong. risk in the world to hide him in his house in his basement. And if he was found out at that time,

not only would he have been killed, his children would have been killed, his extended family would have been killed. Wow. So this guy, I mean, the risk these people take, like, you'd think, you know, I remember learning about this as a kid and thinking, like, I would hide people in my basement, but then it's like, now that I have kids, I'm like, oh my God, would I hide a stranger in my basement knowing that we could all get killed for it in a brutal fashion, too, not like punished and locked up or sued or, you know, have to counter sue my way. And I'm not. You know, have to counter sue my way out of, no, like you all just get murdered. And I'm like, do I know that guy that well? I don't know. He's a neighbor or not even, a random Jewish guy.

Random Jewish guy. That level of courage to hide people like that, the older I get and the more I have to lose, the more admirable it really is. You know, I don't know if you have that same experience thinking about it. Like when you're literally like, yeah, of course I would. Now I'm 41. I don't know if I had to have it in me. And it's like the highest level to aspire to that level of integrity that I would hide somebody in a wartime situation like that, risking everything. I mean, it's completely insane. I want to focus a lot on covering ethnic conflict.

So I've been to places where things like this have been happening, whether, you know, Syria, Iraq, Burundi, Central African Republic. And you meet people like that every now and then. And I always say this about covering conflict. You see the worst of people and you see the best as well. I was definitely intrigued by why this guy and his family would do this for my grandfather without knowing him. I actually went to Slovakia a few years ago to interview him. Oh, wow.

You know, that was the question. I kept asking him, like, why do you think you and your parents did this? There's no deeply thought out answer, right? They're not like, oh, you know, I had this background. I had that background. They were just like, you know, it was the right thing to do. We saw what was happening. We thought it was wrong and we did it.

They don't offer these deep expressive explanations for why they did it. I wish I could say I definitely had that in me. I don't know. I've never been put to the test, but it is amazing to meet people that have and that do these things. You know, you're on the right side of history for eternity if you do something like that. Yeah, unless you get slaughtered, right? And then it's not that important to you. Yeah. Doesn't work out. It doesn't work out too well in that case.

Yeah, and I can imagine, like, it's just unfair to your children as well to do that. There's so much to consider once you have kids. But I digress here. I see how this has inspired your coverage of some of the grossest events. I won't even say, say in history because they're currently ongoing, some of the things that you've covered are really horrifying. Where to begin? I mean, the Rohingya thing is somewhere that I just watched this recently where you're covering, well, tell us what's going on over in Burma, because this is kind of a modern day genocide, right? And I can see a situation in which people are being hidden in basements, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, this has been ongoing now for, I think, close to a decade,

even though the history goes back much further. So, you know, the Rohingya are this Muslim ethnic minority that have been in Burma for generations and generations in a small corner and sort of like the southwest corner of the country, the western corner of the country. And in the past 10 years, they've really suffered this absurd amount of discrimination and sort of racialized attacks on themselves to the point where, you know, they were rounded up in camps for a while. A lot of people were calling them concentration camps, not allowed to leave.

There were massacres, which the military and the police participated in and instigated. after I had covered there, there was a bunch of massacres that led to more than a million of them fleeing across the border into Bangladesh. Now they're in a horrible situation there, but it's just this utterly absurd situation that the world hasn't done much about. These people are just desperate and locked in camps. And I went there a couple times, actually. But the documentary that I made in 2016 was about the human traffickers that were preying on them in this situation. Yeah. It was sort of like a warning shot.

You know, we had all these UN documents that talked about how the UN knew what was going on. that nothing was being done, and that all these things were sort of laying by the wayside so that the government of Myanmar, which obviously turned brutal, all these things that were being done were sort of not, you know, leading to any correctives. Right, sort of like half measures, right?

So what's going on is these Rohingya Muslims are being pushed out by the rest of the Burmese population, and some of the people that are instigating the violence, I'm like, wait, isn't that guy a monk? And the answer is yes. And you think, like, we have the stereotype, at least I do, of Buddhists being like kind and they don't want to harm anyone. And meanwhile, this guy's like, go kill as many of these people with machetes

so that they leave and then burn their houses down. Yeah, it was pretty brutal. So we were there, and there have been a lot of reporters who have done good work there, but we were there in 2016 sort of showing how bad the situation was getting, showing how these human trafficking networks were preying on them. And then, you know, later that year, these giant massacres occurred, and most of the people that we talked to had to flee the country. This is something that I've started to read up and study more on. And the human trafficking element is one of the worst crimes anywhere in the world always. Whenever there are these horrific situations where people are powerless and have nothing,

there just seems to be an army of what I can only imagine are the most depraved sort of psychopathic people that you can find anywhere in the world that go and then take advantage of these people because they only see them as money. So what is happening? How are people being trafficked then in Burma? I mean, you're right. These were some of those brutal stories I've ever heard. You know, these guys would send their scouts into these refugee camps and they would pretend that they could get the Rohingya their jobs in Malaysia, you know, places like that in Dubai. And they would essentially trick them into getting on these ships that were then in international waters in the ocean. And once they were on those ships, they were effectively property. We had someone tell us that they were given these bracelets. And depending on what color bracelet you had, it was which choice. trafficker owned you because multiple traffickers would use these bigger boats. And they'd be kept in these horrific boats, you know, sometimes for months because they couldn't find a place to dock.

Then they would land somewhere usually in Thailand. They'd be brought into what are essentially slave camps, prison camps, where they'd be held until they were sold or freed by ransom. Some of them were sold onto fishing boats where they were slaves. Some of them were sold into brothels, things like that. And if they, you know, someone on the boat was being a little problematic, they'd just get tossed up the boat into the open waters. It is one of the most brutal things ever. There were Thai officials that were involved in some of the trafficking. We talk about it actually on the podcast. I did an episode on the brutal human trafficking gangs of Southeast Asia. And it's harrowing. Like, I've covered a lot of crime, a lot of war. This was some of the most brutal stuff I've ever

heard in my entire life. I did a show. I don't know if it'll be out by the time this comes out, but it's about, in part, these sort of fishing and human trafficking, and you don't even realize, I mean, if you see C-Spiracy, they do like a two-minute aside on this, but they will keep people on these boats for like eight years or three years or five years. And my wife was like, how was it even possible? The boat needs food and gas. And they just never dock it. They basically have this floating fish island that they move around in the fishing areas,

but it's fueled by other boats. They bring food on or they just eat fish. And like these people, if they're lucky, the boat will have to dock at some point for repairs. And they just jump off and run into the jungle while being pursued by these traffickers. and some of them escape can never go home, and then they just find these jungle villages with like no electricity and start their lives over after going missing at age 60.

It's just so horrible. It's the kind of thing that we don't think exists anymore. Right. You don't think this kind of thing is still happening in the world, but it is, and I think it was the Associated Press that did a big story on it. Like we get some of these products in our supermarkets.

Yeah, I was going to say, we don't think it's going on. You sure shit don't think that the tuna fish you're eating, the sandwich you're housing before the interview that you're about to do was, caught by slave labor, 17-year-old kid who hasn't seen his parents in five years, right? Like, that's what really boggles the mind. I mean, it's disturbing.

And we spoke to one guy in the documentary I did that had escaped. You know, he's telling us what happened and how he's on the boat getting beaten. And he's just crying as he's talking to me, like unconsciously crying because tears were just rolling down his face. It wasn't like he was even blubbered. He's just telling us about the beatings that he suffered. And you just see tears start rolling down his eyes. And he's not even reacting to it.

You got caught secretly recording a violent human trafficker. That must have been kind of a, I can imagine Sphincter's clenching at this point. Yeah, yeah, not one of my finer moments. I was working on this documentary with a colleague. And, you know, some of these guys pretend to be smugglers, which are actually, you know, can serve good purposes, the people that smuggled, you know, Jews out of Europe. Right, yeah. Smugglers generally work by choice, right?

A trafficker uses violence or deception to convince someone. Oh, interesting. So these guys sometimes can pretend to be smuggled. that are helping their people or their community leaders, things like that. So we were able to arrange us sit down with this guy in his restaurant in downtown Bangkok where a lot of the big fishes they call them are based. And, you know, I was working for a company at the time that it was sort of multi-tiered and they didn't give us the best equipment.

They had like one of those really cool budding cameras, but they wouldn't give us that. Instead, they gave us some pen that they probably got off Amazon for like $100. Oh, no. It's got like a giant lens on the clip. Yeah, and I couldn't, I wasn't true if it was working or not, you can't tell when it's on. So I gave it to my poor colleague and made him responsible because I was getting so frustrated. And as this guy is talking to us, he's writing with it and like pretending it doesn't work and all that.

And then it just falls apart. Like right in front of this guy. Like you can tell this is a recording device. Like a circuit board flies out of the side of it. Yeah. Oh no. It was not pretty. And we just look at each other and we look at him and he just goes, I can't talk to you guys anymore.

And we're like, what are you talking about? What do you mean? He's like, you're recording me. And he just gets. up and walks away. Oh, man. Yeah. At least he didn't say you're dead now. Like, get in the basement. At least he was like, you're not, you're not going anywhere. So we just kind of stared at each other in disbelief for a couple seconds, got out, ran back to our hotel, like looking over our shoulder the entire time, ended up switching out of hotels that night just to be cautious. We don't

know who he thought we were. I'm surprised you didn't get a flight. If it's me, I'm on a plane, man. You're braver than I am. Part of me is like maybe he thinks we're State Department. Maybe he thinks we're NGOs. Like maybe he's not going to, no one wants a bunch of dead American journalists on their hands. It's going to lead to a lot of attention. So I had this like idea that maybe we were in a position of privilege in that regard that we'd be okay. So I call my guy there who's, you know, my number one source. And I'm like, well, this happened, you know, thinking he's going to be like, oh, it's fine.

Just hide out. And he was like, no, that guy's bad news. Like, you guys need to get out as soon as he like. He like laughed and he was like, no, this actually isn't okay. Yeah. And you should be worried. Don't even get your luggage. Just go to the airport.

Yeah. Yeah. That was fun. That stuff is scary, man. But I also kind of get, there's a little bit of an adrenaline rush and you get a great story out of it. I assume you're not married, no kids, right? Yeah.

No, none of that. What partner lets you do this? Yeah. The answer is not many. So, yeah, brace yourself for that. That's why I have a podcast now. That's right. You've built your career by taking chances.

Even Anderson Cooper told me he just basically booked a flight to, I think the conflict de jour at that time was Somalia and he had like, you know, a few thousand, thousand bucks and he bought some crappy sort of VHS handy cam situation and he just went there self-funded. You don't think of it like that because now he's the big wig on CNN, the front man, but most people who are in your shoes, my shoes, his shoes, we just get whatever crappy stuff we can and then like figure out how to get into Iraq, right? I mean, that's exactly what you have to do. You know, you have to take these chances and you have to do it on your own because I mean, you know more than anyone, right? No one's going to hand it to you most of the time. Most of the time you

have to just start doing it. And a lot of people talk about doing it, but they don't actually follow through and do it. So once you follow through and do it, even if it's not going to come out that great, more people are going to respect you for actually following through on your word and delivering. And I actually literally went to Iraq on my own self-funded. That was the way I really started doing conflict journalism. I had been working for papers in New York. It was great, but I knew that they weren't going to send me to do the kind of work that I wanted to do. So I did exactly that, I saved up money. I bought a one-way ticket to Iraq. I end up actually working in Syria a bit then. But, you know, I spent months, I didn't just show up. I spent months beforehand setting everything

up that I could, doing all the research I could. I had a really close friend who was Kurdish and he had a lot of connections in the north there. So he really hooked me up and took care of me. But a lot of kids asked me, how do you get into this? And now it's even harder than it was back when I did. But the only way to do it is to just start doing it. It's interesting to hear this because I think a lot of folks assume that if you are being filmed by the Guardian or filming for the Guardian or Vice, somewhere in Central African Republic or Burundi or some of the other places you mentioned, they sent you there. And hearing it from guys like you, from Anderson Cooper, for example, as well, they don't even want you opening the mail in the mail room. And then you come back and

you go, hey, here's three VHS tapes of some not super expertly filmed stuff that I got from a place where none of your guys can go, and I've got an interview with a gun dealer in a uranium miner or whatever, and they're like, okay, here's almost enough money to cover one way of your flight, but we're going to give you another assignment since you don't care about your life. You know, like, here you go. Welcome to the first day of your career as a journalist, or at least your official first day. But success is not about waiting for somebody to give you that opportunity. You almost have to do something crazy, but safe, for legal purposes, I have to say that, to get that opportunity in the beginning.

You're earning it by proving that you can do it. And sometimes the only way to do that is, of course, to actually just do it. Yeah, 100%. But I should say, you know, when I first started out, I wasn't going to the craziest places, right? I wanted to mitigate my risk factor, and I wanted to get used to it.

The first conflict zone I went, it wasn't a super active conflict, right? I was more in the background. I was doing stuff like that. Do you hear yourself? There wasn't that many guns. There was no bombs, only gunshots and only at night. So it was safe, basically.

Well, you know, I don't want to encourage people to run into the craziest thing because people do get hurt and you have to mitigate your wrist. So I actually went, you know, when I went to Syria for the first time, I wasn't going to Aleppo where the craziest stuff was happening. I went to the northeast where the Kurds had sort of established their own area. And look, it was still an active war zone, but it was a lot safer. And I was dealing with people that I really trusted and knew very well. Meanwhile, there were other people running to Aleppo, but there were fewer people where I was. and that actually made the story better because it was far less covered.

And then progressively, the next few trips I did, each time it got a little more imposing, a little more dangerous, on and on and on. Don't just go to the most dangerous area just to go. You know, go where there's a story where other people aren't going. That's the best advice I can give anyone. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show

with our guest, Danny Gold. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. I love having these conversations. I'm glad you like to listen to them. All those discount codes and all those deals. I know those are annoying to memorize.

They're all in one place, though. We made a page for it. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support us. Again, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Now, back to Danny Gold. I know you interviewed some Al-Qaeda associates or affiliates in Syria as well,

and you had to sneak across the border. I mean, you don't just book a flight to Syria these days, right? No, no. That was, you have to sneak across the border every time, you know, if you're going to go to the places where, where they were fighting off the Assad regime. And yeah, I was in a city called Ross Al-Ine. This is in 2013. And it was kind of a divided city. They had forced out the Assad regime. But it was split between a sort of Kurdish militia group, the FSA at the time, which was like the Syrian rebels. Free Syrian army? Yeah. Yeah. It was just a really weird period. There was a vacuum of power, so everyone was there. And there was a group called Jabath al-Nusra that was based there. Is that the same as Al-Nusra front? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so they're Al-Qaeda. Yeah, they were Al-Qaeda.

Okay. But at that time, it wasn't official. And we were with the FSA guys who had like a very tenuous relationship with them. They weren't sure what to make of these guys. They were sort of fighting on the right side, but they also were very wary of them. But they had a little base where we were. And the guys one day were like, do you want to go talk to Jabotho Nusra? And I was with an Australian photographer, Australian-Italian photographer.

And we said, sure, let's go see what they're about. So we go up to their house. with these guys. And we felt, you know, it wasn't the smartest thing to do, but we were with the FSA guys and we felt like they could protect us, which probably, you know, things really got down to it. They'd probably be like, yeah, I don't know. No thanks. I've got other fish to fry. Good luck, guys. And we walk up and the first guy starts talking to me in English. And he had studied, I think, in Seattle for a year. Oh, man. So we're talking about like the NBA and Disneyland and all that sort of stuff. And it was extremely weird. Yeah. But they kind of

were pretty tense. They're like, no, we're not going to talk to you. Cool. So we left. And then a couple days later, we get a text message from them, like the guys that we were with saying, hey, you know, we can't be filmed. We can't have it recorded. But we're willing to talk to the two journalists just to show them what we're about. So we met at this guy's house, you know, away from where they were because they didn't want their people knowing that we were talking to them as well. And we just had like an hour and a half long conversation. I excused myself in the beginning to go to the bathroom, turned down my tape recorder, put it in my front pocket, and then walked out. And we just kind of talked to them about what they were about and what they were doing. And it was extremely disturbing and it was not fun. I'll say that. It was very nerve-wracking. But we ended up having not a constructive conversation, but we learned a lot and gained some insights into what they were about. And then, you know, we left a couple days later.

And a week later, I think they made the official Al-Qaeda designation. It went out. So, right. For people who are a little bit confused about the different groups, al-Qaeda should probably be fairly self-explanatory by now. But Free Syrian Army is essentially secular slash maybe Christian- maybe Muslim, but not Islamic sort of totalitarian anti-Assad rebels who are maybe defectors from the actual Syrian army, which is still pro-Assad. It's just actually quite a complicated mess over there,

as civil wars often are. And you were hanging out with pretty much everybody, which sounds really interesting, but also potentially really dangerous, because if I'm you and I'm getting a text from Al-Qaeda after they told me no, and they say, hey, come on back, we want to talk to you, I'm 50-50 on getting kidnapped and sold to ISIS or something worse, right? Yeah, it wasn't the smartest thing to do. We trusted the guys we were with. I was actually, I lived with them for a week, this FSA sort of faction. And, you know, they were a bunch of young guys.

And I want to, you know, be a little more clear about this. Some of these guys are, you know, very Islamic, but they're not al-Qaeda and they're not ISIS, right? And I was living with these guys, maybe 10, 15 of them, a little younger than me, so early to mid-20s. And I would just sit in the house with them. And this was kind of the downtime of war. There wasn't a lot of fighting going on in their region. And you're just sitting in the house with these guys and they're smoking cigarettes. Some of them are smoking like really bad weed.

They're telling jokes. They're ballbusting against each other for lack of a better phrase. And I had this realization that it felt like I was back in college. You know, these guys obviously born into different circumstances, different situation happening in their country, a situation that they probably didn't choose. I just found the whole thing to be really, really relatable. So I wrote this piece for Esquire about what it was. like just hanging out with these guys, you have this realization that, like, you know, people are products of their environment. And these guys found themselves in a really bad environment. But if things

could have changed, it could have been me and my friends in college living this life instead of them. And if they had been in my position, they would have been the same too. So it was one of those experiences that stayed with me for a very long time. I'm really proud of the article that I wrote. And it kind of taught me how I wanted to cover stories like this, which is try to find ways that people can relate and kind of see themselves in these situations and see that, you know, some people are just born in the wrong area at the wrong time and they have to live these lives that we're lucky that we don't have to. Yeah, in the article you mentioned smoking the crappy weed, smoking cigarettes. One dude's always on the phone with one of his girlfriends or something

like that and they're busting his balls because I guess she's not attractive or something like that. And then the other guy who loves playing music is alternating between what sound like these sort of folk songs and then blasting Mariah Carey, you really do sort of think, these guys might not live to see another day, and this is how they're spending their time, and it is so normal, but so crazy,

not normal at the same time. There is this weird normality there where you feel like you're just with a bunch of friends, but then in the corner of the room is a bunch of AKs, right? And a walkie-talkie going off with reports on what's happening on this front line or that front line, or the big boss man is coming to visit, you know,

in his fatigues and with his, like, military maps and all that. So it's a strange environment to find yourself in. You've covered some other wild stuff like Ebola and Africa. Looking at this video in a pandemic, we'll link the video on the show notes, but in our current pandemic of COVID-19 and you're over there covering Ebola and you have like gloves on, you know, no suit, no mask. What's going through your head then? Are you thinking I could catch Ebola? Because I would be a little worried about that. You didn't seem to be. I definitely was. It wasn't always on camera. But that's kind of the scariest thing is when

you come home and Ebola has this long period where you can start to show symptoms, which is after 21 days of infection. Okay. And there are definitely nights when I would lie awake and maybe your stomach's rumbling a little bit, which is how it starts usually. Or maybe you feel a little flush. And then you start having questions about what did I do wrong on the assignments? Why is this my life?

Why am I doing this? Maybe I should go to law school and things of that nature. But Ebola is actually a lot harder to catch than COVID is, right? Ebola has to do with fluids, mucus membranes and all that. So it's not an easy disease to catch, but that doesn't make you feel a lot better when you're lying awake at night and your stomach hurts, I'll say that much.

I will tell you, one of the only things that's worse than law school is probably Ebola. So you do have your priorities straight a little bit. I'll give you that one. You don't even wear body armor, though. You're in Central African Republic, and there's people getting shot and machete,

and you can hear the bullets, and you can hear the bullets hitting things, and you're just standing there in a linen shirt, you know, a couple buttons undone because of the heat. I'm thinking, you seem like you're prepared in every way but one. No, no, I do wear body. I want to be very clear about that. I do wear body armor and helmets, and I'm always prepared in that way.

This was a random situation. We had gone to a press briefing with Samantha Power, who was the ambassador to the UN at the time, and you know, you're not going to wear body armor to a press conference. We had it in our car. The situation is that we were driving, and a firefight was breaking out all around us, and the cars that were shooting

had you turned back around and were coming towards us. So we had to ditch the car and just run off into a village. And because of that, I did not have the body armor. Probably should have been wearing it. So I really was a mistake on my part.

It's more useful when you do that, yeah. But no, I am usually very, very careful. You know, but you don't want to be the guy wearing body armor at the hotel, you know, doing a live hit, pretending you're in danger. Yeah, because if there's something I'm worried about while in a war zone,

it's looking cool for other journalists. Come on, man. But I get what you're saying. There probably are a lot of people that sort of stand outside their hotel in the green zone and they're like, oh, I hear bombs going off.

Let's run outside and pretend like that's a block away instead of two miles and like get my helmet and put some dirt on me. Yeah, you don't want to be that guy. No. It's a little self-serving

to make something look even worse than it is when it's actually really, really, really bad for the people that live there. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. And there's, I think, a lot of, that in the documentary and news industry, that's unfortunate. You know, you can be honest about

these things and be very real about them without being hyperbolic, without exaggerating, without putting the scary music in the background and making things look worse than they are. When you're off traveling, you're on assignment, are you planning for things to go wrong? Because it seems like even if we're not talking about violence, we're not talking about you're getting shot at or someone's trying to kidnap you, which is probably the reality in a lot of these places, just the logistics of making an arrangement to interview a rebel commander from, I don't know, your apartment in New York and then showing up to Central African Republic or Congo, and then expecting them to just pick up the phone, be where they say they're going to be,

be agreeable at that point in time. I mean, that, I would imagine that almost never works out as planned. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, one of the keys to being a good reporter or a good producer is that assuming that everything is going to go wrong. You know, it's not the best way to go about your normal life, but for making a documentary, for going on a reporting trip, you have to have to have a plan B, you have to have a plan C. I know that I could plan things best as I possibly could. Everything could be locked in. But the second that plane lands where I'm going, everything's going to fall apart and I need a backup. I need a backup interview. I need a backup place to stay, I need a backup way to get in and get out. I need to backup local translator, all that sort of

stuff. You need to be prepared for. And I think the best reporters, the best producers, have an ability to adapt on the fly, you know, not get paralyzed by indecisiveness, not sort of be wishy-washy, not get surprised by anything, right? Just assume that things are going to go wrong and be willing to adapt on the ground. You need to be able to do that. Not that I don't get frazzled. Definitely get frazzled. Definitely have had some screaming matches at myself in a bathroom era. But you need to be prepared for things to go wrong and you have to expect that things are going to go wrong. The one plan that can't really go wrong or that I assume strive to make sure it does not go wrong is your sort of ex-fill, right? You're your escape from that place. I would imagine that you

know you have to be somewhere to catch a flight out or in your case sneak over the Turkish border while being pursued by the police. That seems like a very tricky scenario because you actually did have to sort of escape Syria, correct? Yeah, that was a, I went into a city called Kobay at the end of 2014, and it became a very powerful symbol because this city, it was held by the Kurdish fighting groups, the YPG, and they were surrounded on all sides by ISIS. On the fourth side was the Turkish government, and the Turks aren't very big fans of this Kurdish group because they've committed some bad acts in Turkey as well. They were effectively preventing people from leaving at that point.

And this city was going to fall at one point to ISIS, and there were people there fighting for it, like fighting for every inch of it. It was the first time that the coalition bombed inside Syria was to help save this city. So I had to sneak in because the Turks weren't landing people in. And then I had to sneak out. How do you arrange something like that? Like, hey, it just reminds me of walking into the bar in Star Wars where it's like, da-na-na-na-da-da-na-na-da-na-na-n-it.

Right? And then you're like, hey, sure would love to sneak across the border. How do you arrange this? I mean, it was getting in was one of the crazy experiences of my career. Basically, I was working with a bunch of guys. I was working for vice at the time. and we had it set up that a smuggler would take us in from southern Turkey, which is, you know, at that point, all sorts of shady stuff moving back and forth.

Unfortunately, by the time the smuggler was actually coming to meet us, when we were in this border city, my cameraman literally got sick as we were waiting for him. Something with the wrong with his kidneys. He had to fly back to the UK. He had to go to the hospital. It was really bad. The smuggler showed up. I believe, you know, he had like a limp and like an eye patch.

You know, he looked like you'd expect a smuggler to look. And things were not easy to organize. But so he disappears. New camera guy goes in. and things just keep falling apart. You know, one day we can't go in, one day we go right to the border, but they're like, we have to turn back. It's too dangerous.

Finally, like after seven days, we go with this group of new recruits and a couple other journalists that we're going to join. And we're sneaking through this apple orchard on the border. We're literally in a line following each other tiptoeing because maybe 150 yards ahead of us are the Turkish border guards. And once we get close enough, maybe 100 yards, two of them run out to this barbed wire fence

and they put, I think it was a piece of plywood or cardboard, something like that, to sneak over the border. And we're all supposed to follow them and crawl over this cardboard, over this barbed wire fence. But what happens is the Turkish border guards see them. And they start firing off their guns. I assume they were firing off in the air, but at that point we had no idea. I mean, everyone just runs this way, then that way. It's complete chaos. I run one way.

Then I look back and I see some people actually running towards the border break. And I follow them through it, you know, dive through the barbedire fence. I think I ripped up my jacket. There's like a military trench on the other side. I climb out of it, run behind like a dirt mound. There's all these abandoned cars because people I fled the city. And a bunch of us I made it through, but I start looking around. And no one on my team is there.

Not a single person. I was carrying the tripod. The three other people were each carrying cameras. We were there to make a documentary. But of course, no camera. None of them are there. You know, we're able to talk on the phone and they're like, yeah, we can't make it in. We don't know one will be able to get in.

And I just am like, what am I going to do? But I start looking around, and there's a sweetest journalist there who I'd worked with a little bit before and knew before. So we decided to partner up. And for three days, we just kind of ran around this completely besieged city that was abandoned. You know, you're hearing firefights at night. There's mortars flying here and there. It was honestly probably the craziest reporting experience I've ever had. And then getting out was another journey as well that involved sneaking back out, being chased, having to walk a bunch of miles in like three o'clock in the morning, my phone dying.

I had to meet an old man in a graveyard so you could bring me to the people. that were trying to rescue me. Well, not rescue me. My team that was trying to pick me up. Right. They couldn't make it close to the border because they were checkpoints. So it was not a fun experience,

but a good story to tell. How are other journalists getting into and out of Syria then? If that's your experience. I mean, that was a particularly dicey situation. You do have, I think, some people getting in similar ways. Things have changed over the years, right?

In the beginning, it was very easy to get across. I think in some areas, not officially. Obviously, getting official permission from the Assad regime was very hard. But you had a lot of people sneaking across the border. I'm sure people with crazier stories than that. But it got tighter at times.

You know, the situation changed on the border drastically, especially when sort of ISIS emerged and you had to be a lot more careful. Well, now they think if you're crossing from Turkey into Syria that you're an ISIS recruit, generally speaking. They're probably not expecting some journalists from anywhere to be crossing in that way. Or maybe they are, but what's the over under for them, right? Like, okay, I'm going to let these people through and then they join a terrorist organization or we just try to arrest them or shoot them,

and then some of them turn out to be independent journalists, oh well, right? I think a couple have gone in through the north in the last couple years. I believe Clarissa Ward with CNN. Martin, what's his name? Martin Smith, I think, with a PBS Frontline had gone in there. I'm not positive, but I know a few have gone in, but it's extremely tricking. You've got to know, really have high-level connections

to make it in there and survive. This northeast region where the Kurds are is still pretty easy, I think, to make it through. Sometimes the border gets shut down, but there are a lot of journalists that are in and out of there. Yeah, I got invited over there as well. And surprise, surprise, my wife was like, no, I don't think so. And I never went.

But you obviously have some skills when it comes to establishing trust and winning people over, getting access and things like that. Otherwise, you never would be able to even get in with these groups in the first place, right? So if you're going to walk in the room and be the only white dude or the only American or the only non-local there, whether we're talking gang members in St. St. Louis, Syrian rebels, Central African Republic government officials. It seems like you need to embrace the fact that you're the outsider. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I call it, you know, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, right? If you walk into these rooms and you act

like you're not supposed to be there, if you act like you're intimidated, you know, if you're awkward, for me, it just doesn't work. It sets the wrong tone. It sets the wrong atmosphere. I kind of do a grinning idiot thing a lot of the time. You know, I walk in like I've been there 15 times. I'm going to shake everyone's hand. I'm going to crack a couple jokes. I just want my body language to be really relaxed. Not that I am, you know, but at this point, I can kind of force myself to be relaxed and to sort of just, you know, act like I belong there and just pretend. And that sometimes translates into a feeling where it ends up that you do belong there and people are happy to talk to you. You know, it's not going to always work, but it's like going on a first date, right? Even if you're

nervous, the person that you're on the date with is going to respond to that. But if you act comfortable if you make a couple jokes, you know, people are generally going to warm up. And it's just about finding that level to do it. Sometimes you do have to pretend like, well, not pretend, but sometimes you do have to act a little intimidated, a little afraid. The guy you're talking to wants you to feel like that. You know, and you want to show him at like a level of respect. You know, you're nervous about it. But for the most part, I think it's all about, and this is a skill I think I apply to real life too, is just acting like you belong, acting like you're supposed to be there. And just acting like you're comfortable, even if you're not, just forcing it.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Danny Gold. We'll be right back. By the way, you can now rate the show if you're listening on Spotify. This is a huge help. It makes the show more visible on Spotify as well. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Spotify or search for us in your Spotify app. Click the dots on the upper right to make it happen. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Danny Gold.

When you're in these situations, do you plan, okay, I've got a relatable joke I'm going to tell? Or like, I'm going to tell this story about this, or is this Savoy affair that you've learned on the job and you're kind of, are you dancing in the moment? Or do you go in with a couple things up your sleeve to lighten the mood, for example? Yeah, I think you go in with some knowledge of like who they are and what they represent and what they stand for

so you can kind of play to what that is. Other times you kind of have to improvise. Like I remember this one story, that time that I was with these Syrian rebels, you know, their big commander showed up and he was very serious face and all that. And a big thing when you're doing these stories is they ask, do you have a wife, do you have,

kids and all that, and you start talking. This guy was very closed off. So he started asking me those questions. And I started telling him a story about a heartbreak that I pretend it was recent. Reality was like two years before. And the guy's eyes lit up, right? Who doesn't identify with a young man having his heartbroken, right? Everyone's been there.

Guys lit up. You know, after that, he's giving me like, oh, there's plenty of fish of the sea speeches. And get in love advice from Syrian rebel commanders. He's like, you know, if she was the right one, it would have worked out. But after that, I mean, we were buddies. He started telling me everything that he could, and he was much more happy to talk to me. So it's, you know, finding little things like that,

I think, in those circumstances that everyone can relate to. But at the same time, you know, I know what that guy stands for. I know what his principles are. I know what he wants to get. And you can't just go into an interview with someone like that, not knowing those things.

Yeah, you do a lot of research. I know I also do a lot of prep as people comment on all the time, right? That's kind of what I'm known for is lack of talent, but in abundance of hard work. And hey, I'm fine with it. But you do a lot of prep as well, right? You're not just walking into a Kurdish area of Iraq and being like, all right, let's get on the Wikipedia and read about Kurds on the airplane ride over. You're doing a lot of deep background.

Yeah, I mean, when I used to do a lot of assignments like that, it was months and months of reading. You know, you want to know when you go, for example, like to a Kurdish area in Iraq, you want to know that actually they like George W. Bush because he removed Saddam. So, you know, if you can drop little things like that in conversations, even when you're going to be, you know, the taxi driver. People are going to see that you've actually respected the history there and that you've learned about their culture and their people and all that. And it makes them warm up to you a bit more. They know that you're not just some random foreigner there to get a quick story that hasn't done his research, that doesn't know what's going on. If you can show people

without being patronizing that you actually care about them and they're people enough to learn some of these facts, you're going to get a completely different reaction than otherwise. One of the episodes of your podcast that I'm looking forward to is the meth trade in North Korea. How do you research something like that where you, I assume, didn't go to North Korea and interview a meth dealer because they would never allow something like that? No. See, my co-host, Sean Williams, who is another just amazing journalist, great guy based in Berlin. And actually, we haven't met, but I linked up with him when I was starting the podcast because he's just this guy. Whenever I was trying to do research on a story, Sean's name would come up because he had written a story about it. So he has this amazing tale he's done about chasing this billion-dollar meth lab in the jungles of Burma.

I think he wrote it for GQ. So he's kind of tapped in to that international mega-billion-dollar meth scene. I mean, the guy just, he knows people that are sources on it. He knows people involved in it. And he's really good at doing research. So he sort of dove into the North Korea thing. He unfortunately did not get to go to North Korea and visit a meth lab or sample the meth industry at all. But he's connected.

He knows people that in law enforcement, he knows people that are involved in the international trade because a lot of it involves China as well, especially in Burma and in North Korea. So he was able to tap into that. And I think it's the episode that we've done that has the most downloads because people are just fascinated by how that world works. Yeah. I mean, North Korea stuff is always extremely popular. My episodes on North Korea, people always listen and then they're super popular download

numbers. And then they come back and say, more like this. And it's tough because I can't go back. back to North Korea and there's not a whole lot of information coming out of North Korea either. So I'm dependent on finding people like you that have done pieces on it that we can bring on the show. How do you decide what topics you're going to cover? Because you like me look for these sort of wild stories where you go, wow, nobody's talking about that and it's kind of crazy. Let's do it. Is that as simple as your sort of selector is? Because I think that's kind of where,

I think that's how my machine works. Nobody's talking about it and holy crap, that's crazy. And there we've got a show, basically. from that. Yeah, that's like 95% of it. You know, we try to do episodes about the reporting that we've actually done that we've been on the ground for, but we have a new episode every week. So we can't always do that. So there's stuff that we know that catches our attention, so we think it's going to catch other people's attention, like North Korean meth, or I just did one on the Chinatown Wars of New York in the 70s and 80s. And I love those gritty New York mafia and gang stories from that era. And I knew that people were going to enjoy it as well. Sometimes,

though, it's something in the news, right? We did an episode on a Capagon in Syria, which is this sort of meth-like pill that they make that has a huge addiction rate in the Middle East that not a lot of people know about, but there were new stories breaking and it was topical. So we just jumped right into it right there. You know, I just did a couple stories on opium and heroin in Afghanistan when Afghanistan, when Kabul was falling. And I knew that that would, people were super interested in the Taliban and how the drug industry in Afghanistan has worked or did work for the last 40 years.

You know, so it's mostly stuff like that. But yeah, I think a cool story that we just find out about that maybe other people don't know about is kind of. the top of the list in terms of how we pick an episode. So the drug is called Captagon and it's a meth, it's pseudo, well, is there even such a thing is pseudomethamphetamine? What, I've never come across my radar. I've never heard of this.

So Caphtagon is a pill that's kind of like speed. And it was a real like legal pill that was made. I think it got outlawed in the early 80s in most places in the world. But it got popular in the Middle East, in the Gulf, in Syria, Lebanon, places like that. And it's really cheap to make. And what they make now, it's called Capitagon, but that's kind of, just like the catch-all phrase for it. It's more just like methy, speedy pills, you know, and it's a massive industry. And the industry used to operate a lot in Turkey decades ago. Now it's in Lebanon.

And after it got shut down in Lebanon, it moved across the border in Syria because, you know, various groups as well as the Assad government, which now controls it, needed something to make quick and easy money with. And they're usually profitable. They're super cheap to make. And they're just pumping these things out all over the world. You're seeing billion dollar bus happening in Mediterranean port cities, Saudi Arabia has a ton of bust of it because they're shipping it out, and it's super popular in the Gulf

and Saudi Arabia in places like that. It looks like ISIS is making it as well from some of my research that I've done in the last 35 seconds. But just the Google results are like, the drug ISIS, of course, is giving to its fighters because it's like what the Nazis did, give people meth,

because they have to stay awake at crazy hours and be fearless and not feel pain. So making your own meth is a good look for people involved in a place where they can't ship things in and out. And then why not sell it to everybody else and generate some revenue to buy some bullets for the guns that your fearless, meth-up fighters

are now shooting everywhere, right? This is crazy. The government now is taken, the Assad regime has taken over making it. Sure. But the ISIS thing, I don't think ISIS was making it. They were definitely taking it,

but it was one of those things in journalism for the past like eight years. You know, you just stick ISIS on something and everyone's going to click on it and read it. That's a good point. Like, if we write Assad regime making meth during a Civil War to fund it, people are like,

uh, but if you write, ISIS is making meth. It's like, ISIS and meth, I've got to read this. Yeah. Yeah, that worked on me. There was a big bust in Italy, I think, a year or two ago, where at first, the Italian police pointed to ISIS, but it ended up not being ISIS, I think. It ended up being the government and people affiliated with the government. Ah, that's literally the headline I saw. It's like Italian police claim ISIS is producing meth. Yeah, well, all right. So basically, I got dup by that, but that's okay. I did two at first. Yeah, of course. Who believes the headlines, everyone, apparently,

until you spend 30 seconds digging deeper. This stuff is always fascinating, man. Your topics are crazy, but I would imagine it has to get to you at some level. I mean, you're seeing like dead bodies of people that you probably knew the day before were safe. You know that when you leave a group of guys that remind you of your college buddies, that they might not live to fight another day, whereas you get to go home and have your favorite food three days from then.

I mean, that can't be good for your psyche. Yeah, I mean, there was a period. Now I'm mostly doing the podcast. but there was a period when I was running around a lot, you know, bouncing from war to war and back home to Brooklyn and then back, it gets to you. You know, you don't realize it.

It's not like the movies for me where you just snap or I was having bad dreams, but like you get super tense. Everything starts irritating you that didn't irritate you before, but it's a super weird position to be in, right? Because compared to everyone else in the places I go, I have it really good. I don't have to worry about my family or my friends or my home.

I'm only there for a couple weeks max. And like you said, I get to go home five days later, go get a cheeseburger at my favorite diner, hang out with my friends, get a bunch of drinks. It's a super weird situation, but it does mess with your head. You know, you're not supposed to see these things. And it's also the tension that you're living with. When I was in Kobani for three days, you're tense the entire time. You're hearing bullets at night.

You don't know what's going on. You're just on edge. Corosol levels are through the roof. And it takes a lot out of you. It also gives you this perspective. You know, you start to really understand how people in these places can lose their minds in a way. You know, because their families aren't safe. Their friends aren't safe.

They're dying, right? They are operating like this, not for two weeks before two years, five years, six years. That is going to break somebody's brain. They don't get to go home a week later in their warm bed and eat at their favorite restaurant because both those things were probably blown up. Or maybe it's not safe for them to do that. They've got to worry about their family, their neighbors, their friends, and themselves. And you really understand what people are going through, especially when you look at

refugees and what they have to deal with, you know, how to build. back your life, I don't know how I could ever do that. You know, I look at my grandparents who were able to do it. I look at Syrians, I know, that are 30 years old, that lost everything that had to live through this stuff and they're trying to build back their lives. I don't know if I have the fortitude to do that. But these people, you know, live through what I live through for 10 times, a hundred times over. And for me, it broke my brain, you know, in a way. So for them to have to come back from that, I think, you know, it's really all inspiring in a way. And I think people should be maybe a lot more empathetic to some people that come over here that have lived through.

that than I guess, unfortunately, a lot of people are. Have you had any psychological issues from this, or is it just kind of like cold sweat, and then after a while, you're fine? Yeah, I mean, I had, 2014 was a pretty crazy year for me. You know, I was in the Central African Republic at the end of 2013, was in Gaza, I was in Ebola, I was in Iraq, I was in Syria, and it kind of, I think, broke me in a way for a period. And like I said, it was PTSD in a level that was just like things that I could do before I wasn't able to do now.

And my temper was short. I was irritable. I would scream at people a lot. And I had to kind of tone it down. You know, the company I worked for got me a therapist at that time. So you did have PTSD. Like you legit had PTSD from all this, which isn't surprising. Yeah, yeah.

Wow. And there are some people I think that could have been in my situation and gotten out fine. But for me, it's just something about this adrenaline and this stuff that courses through your body and you're in and out of it. And it just made me behave in a way that I wasn't happy with that I didn't like being. It made me short with people a lot. It gets to you. It definitely gets to you. Things have definitely calmed down for me in the past.

couple years, I haven't done as much of that stuff as I could. So I feel, I feel 100% normal. Well, normal in that way. Definitely not normal in other ways. Yeah. You know, now I just have my generalized anxiety living in New York as opposed to the stuff that comes with all that stuff. And then also, I've done a little bit of research and read a lot about the sort of genetic PTSD that comes down, especially there's been a lot of work with Holocaust survivors and people that were in the camp. So I definitely think that plays a role sometimes and some anxiety that I get when it comes to stuff like that. Yeah, it was funny. I was going to mention before the show that there is new research that shows that trauma can be, what's the word, transferred from one generation

to another, it's epigenetic, right? It sounded like nonsense to me when I first read it, like, oh, how is stressed from a great grandparent that I don't even know? How could that possibly get transferred to me? It's not just that it has an effect on every relative because of the way that they're raised. It actually presents at the genetic level, which to me is crazy. There's not a whole lot on this, but this topic is fascinating because imagine what that means. for every society that has groups that have undergone trauma, the United States, the Jewish community, everyone, every community has these kinds of groups. And what does that mean? Are we going to start comparing how one group's ancestors went through something worse than the other? It's really,

really going to have a lot of effect on policy, I think, in the next couple of decades, once we actually know what's going on with it. But now you're podcasting, man. Podcasts, I think you came up with a good tagline unintentionally here. Podcasting, slightly less traumatic than a civil war in Africa. Podcasting's a tough nut to crack, man. I wish you good luck with it. Underworld Pod.

We'll link it in the show notes. Really a fan of your work. Thanks for coming on the show today. Dude, that was great. That was like one of the best interviews I've ever done. Oh, really? Yeah, for sure, man.

Good. I'm glad to hear that. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with an undercover FBI agent posing as an Islamic terrorist. I live with and grew up with the religion

of Islam. After 9-11, and knowing full well that this was not the religion that was being portrayed, it kind of broke me a little bit inside. I was in law enforcement. I spoke Arabic. I'm a Muslim. And my knee-jerk reaction was to simply help working undercover. It definitely is an adrenaline rush, unlike anything I could describe, putting your arm around someone, telling them that you're their best friend, getting them to believe you. But what attracted me a great deal to this case or what blew my mind about this case was the fact that he was arguably one of the smartest, most brilliant men I've ever been in front of. This guy was on the precipice of curing infectious diseases. The shit that he talked about in his work was science fiction to me. How could someone so smart,

so brilliant, such a gift to humanity turn into a fucking killer, an absolute, disgusting piece of garbage overnight? He was the epitome of evil. So we were going up to his apartment, and it was right next to Ground Zero. And he put his arm around me and looked up to where the towers were. And he said, Tamer, this town needs another 9-11, and we're going to give it to him. I've heard him say so much horrible things for so long that you'd think at that moment in time, I could have just accepted it and gone up and did my job, but I couldn't. I imagined killing him right there and then.

I imagine stabbing him in the eye with a pen I had in my pocket and leaving him for dead. To hear more from Tomor El Nuri about what drew him to the exciting and dangerous life of undercover law enforcement work, check out episode 572 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Love stories like this, love shows like this. Danny's got his own podcast on the Podcast One Network. It's called Underworld Podcast. It'll be linked up in the show notes. Links to all things from all guests are always in the show notes at Jordan Harbendor.

Thank you,orgonharbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy books or anything like that from the guest. It does help support the show. Transcripts in the show notes. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can also hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same

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