The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Award Winning Journalist & TV Icon Elizabeth Vargas On Filtering Misinformation, Addiction, & The Current State Of Media

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

#636: Today, we're joined by Elizabeth Vargas, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who has traveled the world covering breaking news stories, reporting in-depth investigations, and conducting newsmaker interviews. We're sitting down with Elizabeth today to discuss her story and her memoir, 'Between Breaths,' which delves into her addiction journey. We discuss everything from what a productive conversation looks like and how to ask the right questions, to her struggle with alcoholism and how she hid it from TV cameras for over a decade. She also gives the audience tips on how to filter through misinformation and media bias to find factual information about current events. [01:17] Introduction to Elizabeth Vargas [02:47]  Childhood and Career Aspirations [03:26]  Career Aspirations and Journalism [04:27]  Interviewing Skills [08:06]  Conducting Interviews and Reading People [11:32]  Katie Couric's Interview Skills [12:46]  Changes in Journalism and News Consumption [16:36]  Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Podcast Interview [16:52]  Alcoholism and Anxiety [30:55]  Alcoholism and High Functioning Addiction [39:51]  Rehab Experiences and Support [48:02]  Balancing Career, Personal Life, and Addiction [48:36]  Writing a Book and Feeling Alone in Addiction [49:55]  Books about Alcoholism and Addiction [56:39]  the Detrimental Effects of Alcohol [58:30]  Alcohol Consumption and its Consequences [1:02:16]  Trustworthy Sources of News [1:06:23]  Reporting in the Middle East and the New Show [1:11:36]  Working Relationships and Collaboration To connect with Elizabeth Vargas click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To subscribe to our YouTube Page click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential.  This episode is brought to you by Sunglass Hut Head over to Sunglass Hut and discover the special selection of shades in store and on sunglasshut.com. There’s the perfect gift for everyone this holiday. This episode is brought to you by Ritual Start a daily ritual that you can feel good about. Visit ritual.com/SKINNY to receive 30% off your first month of Ritual. This episode is brought to you by LMNT LMNT is a tasty electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio: 1000mg sodium, 200mg potassium, and 60mg magnesium. Get a free sample pack with any purchase at drinkLMNT.com/SKINNY This episode is brought to you by Evlo Fitness Workout smarter, not harder. Visit evlofitness.com and use code SKINNY for one free month of Evlo. This episode is brought to you by Armra ARMRA Colostrum strengthens immunity, ignites metabolism, fortifies gut health, activates hair growth and skin radiance, and powers fitness performance and recovery. Visit www.tryarmra.com/skinny or use code SKINNY at checkout for 15% off first order. This episode is brought to you by Dreamland Baby Use code code SKINNY at checkout for 20% off sitewide & free shipping at dreamlandbabyco.com Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

By the way, anybody who says people who are addicted to something lack self-discipline, Him and Her. Ah-ha! By the way, anybody who says people who are addicted to something lack self-discipline, I was a model of self-discipline. I would get up and go, you know, jump on the treadmill for an hour to sweat out all the booze. Anybody who abuses a substance, I've never, in all the rooms of recovery, all the meetings I've been to, everybody drinks to numb something. Nobody just wakes up and says, I'm going to go get shit-faced tonight because that sounds like a great thing to do. And the problem is, is initially it works and it does feel sort of magical and then it stops working. So you need to drink a little bit more to get to that point. And then after a while,

the consequences of drinking are starting to pile up. Hello, happy Thursday. I became interested in Elizabeth Vargas when I read her book. I could not believe how open she was in her memoir, Between Breaths. It was all about her addiction journey. And this was so amazing because she's an Emmy Award winning journalist who's traveled the world. She covers breaking news stories. She reports in-depth investigations and she conducts newsmaker interviews. So to have someone of her caliber come out and be so open with her struggle with alcoholism

and how she hid it from the TV camera is crazy. She goes all different places in this interview. We're going to talk about her childhood, growing up an army brat, how she cultivated curiosity for the world, how to tell fact from fiction, her struggle with alcoholism, the consequences of alcoholism, how she hid her hangovers on TV, her journey to sobriety, going to rehab, and where to find information and stay informed. I personally was so excited to invite her on the show. I think you're going to love this one. Elizabeth Vargas, welcome to the show. This is The Skinny Confidential, him and her. Elizabeth Vargas is on the show. I personally am so excited because I read your book and I feel like I really got to know you through your book. It was a very raw, real book and we're going to get into that. But first, I would love for you to tell our audience how you grew up, if you always knew that you were sort of destined for greatness.

No. Not at all. Destined for normalcy, I think. No, I'm an army brat. I grew up almost all overseas. We moved every year or two of my entire life. I grew up mostly, spent many years in Germany, four years in Japan. My dad was also stationed for several years in Brussels, Belgium. What branch of the military? Army. Army, okay. Army, third infantry. Lived in Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt, Germany. And then we were in Okinawa when my dad went to Vietnam. I grew up completely without television. I had no, I never ever thought, oh, I want to grow up and be on TV at all, ever. I wanted to be a vet, a veterinarian, because, I don't know, I think a

lot of kids do that. After I read all things great and small and all things bright and beautiful, I thought, oh, I'll be a vet. And it wasn't until I was in high school that I was editor of my high school newspaper. And I thought, oh, maybe journalism. So it was natural when you got into high school. My senior year of high school. Yeah. And what was like your first moment in high school that you remember looking back on? I just remember, and I just think at the end of my junior year, I thought, okay, it was like a light switch, time to get serious about life. And I

went out to be put in my application to be editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper and did that my senior year. And I like to say, I sort of accidentally picked the best school journalism in the United States to go. I didn't really plan it or, you know, know it even when I applied there. But it was the one state in the United States where I could qualify for in-state tuition because my dad had been stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for four years. And I bought a tiny like acre of land in Missouri. So when you are getting into this, is this something that you think requires a lot of natural talent? Or do you think that it's something that you've put the reps in? Or is it a medley of both?

It's both. I think people ask me all the time, what makes a good journalist? What makes a good journalist is an authentic curiosity about what's happening in the world. And a desire to tell stories. That's what I'm doing. I'm telling stories. I'm telling your story if I'm doing a profile on you. I'm telling the story of the war in the Middle East

if I'm covering that. It is storytelling at its most basic form, trying to take what's happening in the world and making it digestible and easy and palatable for viewers to understand and grasp. Talking to someone like you, who's such a prominent interviewer and journalist, I've gone back and forth with this over the years where I feel someone could be a really great host or a great guest, but not everybody can be a great interviewer if they don't actually have that curiosity. You have got to be authentically curious. If you're not, you're not going to make it. And it's different skill sets. I spent several years in local news sort of paying my dues and starving my way up the ladder. And I was told repeatedly I was a great reporter and a lousy anchor. It wasn't until I got to the

network. I went to NBC News when I was 29 and then to ABC News after that. And that's when they said, no, you're actually a really good anchor. Mostly because a lot of anchoring at the network level involves live interviewing. So it sort of then paired with that skill set. But you'll see a lot of really great reporters who are not good anchors. It's not, they can be two different skill sets. What do you think the skill set required, or the skill sets that are required to be a great anchor compared to a reporter? Doing your homework and being able to relax and let all of that knowledge and listen. That's the biggest thing I notice when I watch people who I admire who are really,

really good at it. I always look at an interview as an educated conversation. I do all my homework and then I ask. And about 20 to 30% of the time, the guest will say something that I don't expect. And you have to follow that thread like, oh, where's that going to lead me? And be willing to let go of all your prep work and your next question. You have to really listen to what they're saying. That's what I mean by an educated conversation. When I see anchors who I think are not doing as great a job, you can see them not listening to their guest and not understanding a moment when it happens. That's the other thing. Understanding in real time on live television when there's something powerful happening and saying, wait, let this breathe.

Let the guest continue going and not interrupting to try, you know. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a really great boss of mine was, you don't have to show the audience how smart you are, and in my case, or how hard you worked. Don't do it. Just relax and have a conversation, and that's the best interview. That's so interesting because a lot of celebrities now will launch podcasts.

Yeah. And what I've realized listening to their podcast is that they're so used to being put in the spotlight on stage that it's hard for them to put someone else on stage. Well, I just think they have their prepared questions. They don't know how to listen. Yes. I was on Oprah's show, and I remember watching her read questions from her cards, and I could tell she wasn't listening to my answer because I said something, and I thought she's going to follow up on that, and she didn't. She read the next question that was on the next card.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because we obviously have preparation. We all do. I do too. But in case you, I mean, you know you that's part of doing your homework you must but i think it's a mistake like say i had question one two three but then we go on a tangent that's interesting i'm not going to try to jump back to question three that has nothing to do with the tangent one i think it ruins the conversation and it may like later come up like i'm all the time i'll come up with questions for all my interviews on my show tonight. I have every interview, I'll have some questions there. But I also, I would say at least half the time go off,

off script, follow what he said. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't think about that. Let's follow that thread and see where that leads us. Or if it's a real person and in the case of, you know, for example, the past couple of weeks when we've been interviewing a lot of people who've been victims in this terrible attack in Israel, this is real emotion. So that's understanding when to just let a person, there's a real thing. I remember when, even when I was in local news, I was always surprised there would be a shooting or something terrible happening. And, you know, my bosses at the assignment desk in chicago would say you've got to go knock on the door of the families of the family of the victim and i used to hate doing that like oh my god i knock on the door you know and i was always shocked almost every time they invited me in and they sat down on that couch and they cried and talked about their grief. And what I came to realize and what I now understand is people want to share that.

It is therapeutic and cathartic for them. It is also a way of honoring whoever has been lost or wounded and that process. It's also a cry, a very raw cry for justice in many cases. So we are doing a service for them as well. It's not entirely voyeuristic, which is what I originally thought, like I'm intruding on these, this family's grief. It isn't. Many times they want to talk about what they've lost and who they've lost and what that person meant to them. What do you do if you have a guest or someone that you're interviewing

that's opposite of that, that someone that is closed off, doesn't want to share, how do you disarm them and make them feel comfortable? Is there tactics with that? This is like kind of like homework for me. I'm loving this.

It's, you know, it's just, it's like a chess game. I can only, you know, it's a matter of you have to be able to be relaxed enough while conducting an interview that you can trust your instincts. I think if you're a gifted conversationalist and you're empathic and you read people and can sense people and trust your instincts, it's a little bit of a testing.

Okay, I'm getting resistance here. Let's try something else. And people talk for different reasons. Sometimes they have something they need to say and want to say. And it's important if they're going to give you that access and you are going to go in with your cameras and your microphones and your lights and interview them and you want something from them, the story of what happened, it's important also to allow them to say what it is that they wanted to say in order to ask you to come in. And sometimes it's a cry for justice. Sometimes I need to say I totally disagree with the government

of Israel or I need to say, how can Hamas do this? You have to let them say what it is they want to say. Who do you think did a good job of that when you were young and you were learning? Who did you look up to? Who was your role model? Oh, my gosh. When I was coming up, and especially, I went really fast to the network. I still sometimes can't believe I was only 29, and was at NBC News and I went straight to, you know, I was filling in for Katie Couric on the Today Show for three years when she was,

whenever she took vacation or she had a baby during that time. And Katie was somebody I watched carefully. She is the, you can see her authentically listening. She really listens. And she'll go, there's a famous clip of her doing a tour of the White House with Barbara Bush, who was then first lady, and in walks President Bush to just say hello. And she immediately, President Bush, let's talk about, and like, you know, in a moment, in a nanosecond, it turns from this fluffy, you know, let's look at the White House. I don't even remember if it was Christmas decorations or a new decor or something. It went from being this fluff interview

to her nabbing the president of the United States. And he didn't know that she was, like, did he expect her to be there? He was expecting to do a drive-by. Okay. I'm going to come by and say, hi, Katie, on live television and then continue on my way to the Oval Office. And she stopped him and she asked several really good questions. That's great journalism right there.

And she's a really, really good interviewer. And I have to say, there are many times when I've thought, Oprah has been a good interviewer. I think when she interviewed me, she was just reading cards. Well, I know that because I was sitting right there. Diane Sawyer is an amazing interviewer.

And Barbara Walters was a great interviewer. Barbara was amazing for the amount of preparation that she would do for, I mean, she was renowned for that. She's an icon. She is an icon. She was an icon. She was, I was, it was one of the honors of my journalistic career to succeed. I was appointed to replace her as the host of 2020 when she retired. And I hosted that show for 15 years and it was, you know, wow, what big shoes to step into. But I spent many years studying her and watching her. And my work prep is very different from hers as is. And it's very different from Diane's, both of whom I've worked with very closely and know very well. My work preparation is very different. So you don't copy somebody. You

look at the people you admire and you take what you need and figure out your own process. When you look at the current state of journalism, all these people you mentioned are iconic people and I feel like you grew up and there was like this kind of respect that you had for the interviews they were conducting and how they were conducting. But I feel like some of the pushback that our generation, a lot of people tune out of the news now and they don't want to watch because at times I feel it feels really angry, really combative, really divisive. I don't know how much that has to do with ratings and making sure the numbers are there and how much it's competing with channels like these and like socials where there's things that are quick and quippy and all that.

But when you look at the current landscape, how do you feel about the way journalists are conducting their interviews today versus kind of like the environment you came up in? I mean, you know, the business has changed radically since I got into it. When I first got into this, you know, I'm going to date myself now, but, you know, CNN was an upstart. So there were basically three big networks and one brand new cable news network starting and trying to get its feet under it. There was no Fox News. There was no MSNBC.

There was no News Nation. There was no, you know no fill in the blank. And there sure wasn't the internet. I don't know about you guys, but you were both young. My kids, my oldest son is 20. My youngest is 17. They have grown up sitting at the dining room table talking about foreign affairs. I talk about the news constantly with them and debate like I love debating them and hearing their points of view I think it's important very early on to have conversations like that be interested in the world and what's happening around you understand how it will actually directly impact your life but they don't get their news the way I

get my news they don't watch television newscasts all their news the way I get my news. They don't watch television newscasts. All their news comes online. And that's a real challenge. And you're right. I think in the desperate, you know, scrabbling about for ratings and eyeballs, you see some outlets getting more outrageous. You also see online, you know, I've had to explain to my kids when I did pieces for ABC News, when I do pieces for News Nation, we have lawyers and standards people and producers fact-checking and saying, no, no, no, no, you can't say that. Or, wait a minute, that's out of context. Online, anybody can post something. Yeah, it's a problem. It's a huge problem.

I think that's one of the other things. I don't think people, especially journalists in positions, they're not outright lying in a lot of situations, but I heard somebody say like sometimes there's lie by omission. Sure. Right. And I think that's also challenging. Context is absent. Yeah. I mean, I watch my kids, one of my sons likes Joe Rogan. And I recently did a town hall with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It was his very first town hall. And in one of the ways I prepped, I read and watched everything he had done. And he had done a very long podcast with Joe Rogan.

It was a three-hour interview, right? Yeah, it was a three-hour interview. I actually heard the interview was good, but I haven't heard it yet. It was a good interview. It was an interesting interview. But it was also striking how much Joe Rogan would say something that was not accurate like it was, just fact. And I was very aware of the fact that a lot of because

his audience is mostly young men i think and including my sons who watch him well joe rogan said this and it's like honey joe rogan is wrong he's right about other stuff joe rogan is a good interviewer right he is a good interview you see him engaged with this guest you know it's the only podcast of his i've seen but it was a good podcast he was paying close attention to what robert f kennedy a junior was saying he had done his homework on several different you know things but he also had his own attitudes that he was just saying without facts to back them up so it's you know you can be a great interviewer and also not a hue to the facts.

Yeah, I think the lines are blurred. So for what Lauren and I do, obviously we don't quote unquote call ourselves journalists. I would never classify myself. We host a show and we talk to interesting people. And obviously a lot of our personal perspective we get interjected because again,

we're just humans having a conversation. And I don't feel necessarily the responsibility that maybe many journalists would feel to go and present every fact on every issue because it's just not my line of work. But there's the problem. Joe Rogan doesn't call himself a journalist either. And he doesn't do all that homework or an effort to,

I'm not going to say he doesn't do that homework because he did prep for that RFK Jr. interview. But my son is watching joe rogan like that's the authoritative yes news that's what i'm saying and so i always preface like whenever anybody listens to us on this show it's like these are our opinions and like we may stumble and i might have to come back a week later and say whoops that was wrong but i think the difficulty well yeah i think the difficulty though is a lot of people don't know what to trust or who to trust anymore. And so then it just becomes whatever bias aligns most with my bias.

That's who I'm going to take as the point of authority. People are not looking so much right now. And it's not just the media. It's politics. They're not looking for information. They're looking for affirmation. I want someone to tell me what I believe is right and sort of fuel the echo chamber that everybody sort of exists

in. Yeah, 100%. I don't think that's going to get any better because I think... I hope you're wrong. I hope it does get better somehow. I think the problem is when you demock... I think everything is the media now. Anybody with a smartphone and a perspective doesn't mean they might have the same size audience as other people but i think everybody

can have a perspective where before it was like you went to the like i grew up with my dad he was always at the news on and i there was only two or three channels that would ever be on right right and now it's like everything every publication every article and so what do you believe and not believe yeah i want to go back to you being 29. Okay. And you coming into this huge news network, were you overwhelmed? Did you have tools that you used to, I don't know, start working there? What was the strategy at 29 years old? That's very young to be having such a huge job. I was so nervous and so excited and had the great fortune of having an amazing boss. Jeff Zucker was the executive producer of the show that I worked on for the

first year that I was there. It was called Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric. It only lasted a year. It was a news magazine show. But I got to work closely with Tom Brokaw, who's incredible, Katie, and most importantly, Jeff Zucker. And then during that time, I started filling in for Katie on the Today Show. I think I had a panic attack the very first day I filled in anchoring the news on the Today Show. I could not believe I was in this position. And it's live? Live. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Live. But it was, I think, you know, it was just an incredible, one of those three years, it was, I look back on those three

years I spent at NBC with great affection. It was a really great opportunity, but I had all the right people. They didn't just throw me into the deep end. You know, Jeff was there. He had there was a great senior producer who would help me on tracking and teach me how to do long form magazine format is what we call it reporting. So it was it was really great. And at what point is your relationship with alcohol go astray? Like, I guess my first question is, what point did you start drinking? At 29, is alcohol a part of this? Or is it not even a thought yet? I have always battled tremendous anxiety. I started having daily panic attacks when I was six years old and my dad went to Vietnam. We were living in Okinawa. I was aware. I was old enough to be aware that was

a big staging military base for troops going in and out of Vietnam. As I said, I grew up without TV, but I must have known on some cellular level that this was a dangerous place. So I had panic attacks every day. And my mom, who was only 28, I think, had two small children, was pregnant with my little sister, had her husband at war, completely had no idea how to help me. Six years old, you were having these kind of panic attacks? Daily. Wow. Like sobbing, crying, begging, pleading my mother not to leave me. She had to leave for work every morning before I went to first grade, to school.

I was in first grade. And she would have to peel, like I would cling onto her coat or her dress. And I remember saying to her once in rehab during family weekend, I was like, how did you try and comfort me during those panic attacks? And she said, I didn't. And I literally, I remember calling my sister and saying,

can you imagine? Because I had small children and so did she. Not getting down on your knees in front of your child and saying, what is happening? Why do you think? Do you think she just didn't have the tools or? I think she was overwhelmed herself. She was quite young. I don't ever want to criticize my own mom, but I think she was quite young and overwhelmed with

everything that she had on her plate. I think that she probably didn't have great modeling either as a child from her parents. And it was, you know, this was a time, remember, that Vietnam vets were coming home with severe PTSD and nobody was helping the vets, much less helping the children. I don't think at that time in 1969, which is when it was, that there was a lot of awareness about anxiety and mental health at all. It's definitely not on that Army base, I can tell you that much. Yeah, I mean, it's happening obviously more and more now, but I still think there's people that don't take the issue as seriously as they should.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So anyway, I'd always had tremendous anxiety and no help. Nobody. At some point, very early on, it became something I was ashamed of and wanted to keep hidden. I would have it inside,

but I would make every effort not to show that I was feeling this way. I didn't have my first drink of alcohol until I was out of college. I had to put myself through college. I waited tables. I had a scholarship. I hate beer. It's the only thing that everybody had in college campuses was beer. And I drank like everybody else, pretty moderately for decades. It was a very, very slow escalation and mostly really got bad after the birth of my second child when I thought I had postpartum depression. And, you know, a little bit before I was even married, it was, you know, it's a very sort of hard drinking culture.

So it never like when I finally said, I need help. I need to I need this is a problem. There were a lot of people in my life who knew me really well, who were really surprised. I think that was the most interesting part of your book because so often I've read memoirs about, you know, everyone knows that they're a drug addict or an alcoholic and like yours was kept close to the chest, which is interesting when you look back at your childhood, you said you suppressed your anxiety inside. It's almost like you did the same thing with the alcohol. Do you feel that when you look back that you use the alcohol to sort of like self-medicate the anxiety?

Oh, totally. Oh, yeah, completely. And it got progressively worse. It wasn't, I think that's another thing that's interesting. There's a lot of mothers that you talk to that they have like wine night and like, then it starts later on to become a problem. So it was progressively. Oh yeah. The woman, the woman who wrote the book, Sippy Cups Are For Chardonnay and Nap Time Is The

New Happy Hour later had to quit drinking and because she admitted she too was an alcoholic. She just wrote a brand new book in fact, and sent it to me to read or maybe to give a blurb or something. I haven't read it yet, but it is a very common thing. Women self-medicate. We know that like twice the number of women who are alcoholics are drinking to soothe anxiety than it is for men. It's a very uniquely female thing to drink alcohol to soothe anxiety. Recently, I went to Sunglass Hut in Austin and I picked out the cutest, chicest Burberry sunglasses. They're like evergreen. They're so pretty. I'm obsessed with them. And I was thinking about gifts and we did that gift guide podcast, and I thought sunglasses

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I would highly recommend checking them out. I'll sometimes add lemon or ice. You can kind of jazz it up. You can go to drinkelement.com slash skinny. That's D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T dot com slash skinny to receive a free element sample pack with any order when you purchase through our URL. That's drinkelement.com slash skinny. Do you remember the point where it was you were drinking like everyone else to the day that you could tell something had changed in yourself? No, it's not like that. It's not like there's a, like all of a sudden you're, you know, guzzling whiskey. It, it's a very slow ramp up. And, and, and all I knew is that it used to be that one or two glasses of wine would take the edge off and make the shoulders drop and everything seemed rosier and softer and more hopeful.

It was just magical at first. That's the problem. Talk to any alcoholic and they'll tell you initially it worked. And by the way, anybody who abuses a substance, I've never in all the rooms of recovery, all the meetings I've been to, everybody drinks to numb something. Nobody just wakes up and says, I'm going to go get shit-faced tonight because that sounds like a great thing to do. And then I'll feel horrible tomorrow. And yeah, let's go. They're always doing it to numb something.

And the problem is, is initially it works and it does feel sort of magical and then it stops working. So you need to drink a little bit more to get to that point. And then after a while, the consequences of drinking are starting to pile up. And, you know, so then you're like, well, in order to get that magical, relaxed, finally relief relief I'm waking up and feeling horrible and and having to pay all these consequences what were some of the first consequences that became apparent to you oh you just wake up hungover yeah you know I feel like if I smell alcohol these days past 35 I'm hungover just like even I can't hang like I used to yeah no no I used to I mean and by the way anybody who says people who are addicted to something lack self-discipline,

I was a model of self-discipline. I would get up and go jump on the treadmill for an hour to sweat out all the booze. That's almost maybe more dangerous for people around you because you're so high functioning. You're on television. You're doing the thing. Everyone's like, oh, she's got it together. Well, that's why so many people, including George Stephanopoulos, who sat next to me for, I would probably, as he put it, hundreds of hours of live television, said, I have sat next to you for years on live TV. I have never

once thought, he was shocked. How did you manage being on television and having this sort of like secret? Like, how did you manage that? I know you talked about it a lot in your book, but like being on air and drinking, how, how did that work? Well, I wasn't drinking on the air. You would wait till after. Yeah. Okay. Until like, I think there were a handful of moments that the, and I talk about them at the very end when it was, the wheels were really falling off the cart. Um, when, you know, like I had to fly one night really late and I would, I started missing, like on occasion I would miss a shoot here and there. Or there was one interview in Los Angeles that they had called me to do at the very last minute and I had been drinking the night before. That's the one I think I'm talking about.

Yeah, that's the Katy Perry interview. Yeah, that happened on air where there was alcohol involved. That one, they pretty much, I did the interview. It was beyond appalling. Why was it beyond appalling? Because I just, I looked bad. It wasn't anywhere near the standard that I hold myself to today. And even then, I'd always been able to power through, you know, hangovers and patch it together and sweat it out and show up and still do the homework and do a good job. And I failed to do a good job on that interview. We used the interview, but we cut out most of my questions because they were not very good. And you can't be not very good and work at this level not very good and and work at this

level you have to be at the very top of your game and does someone say something to you after that like what the hell was that interview which is really that's the most amazing thing interesting i think they were worried about me they were also aware that i had been flying shooting up late yeah hold it all night she's tired she's exhausted yeah yeah there was there were other it wasn't I had been flying, shooting up late, holding all nighter. You're like, oh, she's tired, she's exhausted. Yeah, there were other, it wasn't like I just showed up for work one day like that. It was sort of like I was up in,

I can't remember, I was up in the Northwest and getting ready to get on a plane to fly back to New York. And they were like, oh, we need you to fly to LA very quick. We just got this Katy Perry interview. It's going to be like in six hours. It was very little notice. And I think, I don't know, maybe people chalked it up to, I don't know. I can't tell you what other people were thinking. I can only tell you that it was something I have great embarrassment about. Still? Oh, I don't think anybody, listen, I have,

gosh, I've been sober for nearly 10 years and I still I in my podcast I just interviewed one of those singers from Lady A who just went to the same rehab I went to and is celebrated a little more than a year of sobriety and we were talking about his journey and even him telling his story it's a very different story he's's a man. It's very different reasons why, but he also, same thing, anxiety. He had a lot of anxiety and touring and being alone on the tour bus was a real danger zone for him. And he was telling me the stories of how he would drink and be so sick in the back of his own tour bus. And just hearing him tell, like, it's very much like there isn't a day that goes by that I don't like say, I am so grateful that I'm sober and I can't believe how lucky I am because, you know, we know that what, like slightly less than,

I think only 80 some odd percent. I mean, almost 20% of people who need help don't get it. It's really, the numbers are not good. You mentioned postpartum, it got worse. I had a horrible postpartum depression and I could see how it's very easy to turn to something like alcohol. Did you feel that you had postpartum depression and anxiety because of the alcohol? Or were you using the alcohol to soothe that? What was the relationship between the two? I thought I had postpartum depression and I was depressed. I couldn't sleep.

I was anxious. I was desperate to get rest and couldn't. So I thought something's wrong. So I thought, I think I have postpartum depression. So I went to my OBGYN and she sent me to an expert in postpartum depression. She did this long examination of me and she said, you don't have postpartum depression. You're anxious. I think you should go home, drink a glass of Chardonnay and take an Ambien. I swear to God, that's what she said. Wow. Did you do that?

Of course I did. Are you kidding? I have doctor's permission. And up until then, remember, I had just been pregnant. I didn't drink during the pregnancy. I was nursing still. So I was very careful about if I drank any alcohol, it could only be a small quantity. And I had to time it so You know, whatever. That felt like a permission slip. And, you know, it took many months, but

that's when it really sort of got bad for me. Was your relationship with alcohol more alone behind closed doors? Totally. So you weren't like going out with friends and like blacking out. That's a different, different thing. So it was more you and alcohol together. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why also friends of mine were like, what? You know, cause I would go out and have one or two glasses of wine with them and, and that's all they ever saw. And I never did crazy stuff. I't you know fall down I didn't you know get sloppy I would just go home and go to sleep go to sleep aka pass out I guess I mean but again it would

be like I would get into bed and you know it was substance use disorder you know that's part of why I was in such denial for so long because we all have this picture of what that looks like. And it looks like the woman who's falling off her shoes with her makeup down her face and her dress hanging wrong and slurring and getting sick. None of those things ever happened to me. Yeah. We've known,

I think everybody's life at some point gets touched by addiction somewhere, friend, family, somehow. Everybody. Yeah. And, and I think the people that we've known that on the outside,

they have it together. They're dressed up at the makeup or they're put to, you know, they're going to work. Like they sometimes have the hardest time in recovery because the people around them fail to acknowledge that there's an issue. Yeah. But like we've also had other friends, it's like they're the quintessential poster child

for addiction. And that one's like, oh, I get it. I see why I need it. But it's almost like a disregard for the way the other people look. You're like, oh, they don't have a problem. They're okay. You don't have to think about it so much. And almost sometimes because it's so put together, you don't want to sometimes, especially

if they're close, face that there's an issue. Oh, they're functioning. They're okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. That's completely the case. It doesn't really matter because it's not a lot of people outside you who are going to get you sober or clean. Nobody stops doing alcohol and drugs for somebody else and stay stopped. You have to do it for yourself. We just had a woman on that battled anorexia. She's been very public about this. She just wrote a book about it. And we had this discussion. She's like, there was nothing anyone could

have said, done with her to her. It wasn't until she... We asked, who could have helped? What could they have done? Nothing. She just had to be heard. She told us that if someone had told her to get help, that it would have been her asking someone to cut off her finger there was there was no way she was getting help she had to do it on her own i was really resistant i mean you know there were a handful of people in my life my then husband and um even my mom and dad at some point who you

know were like you need to stop you need to go get help and you know i were like, you need to stop, you need to go get help. And, you know, I was like having none of it. But how did it come up for the audience who hasn't read your book? How did it come up? And how did, did you bring it up? Or did they bring it up? And when they did bring it up, how did you eventually get into rehab if you were resistant? I think for me, I just finally got, you know, first of all, it took me two different rehabs. One was really good and one was really bad. So that's something I'm passionate about reporting on is that. How were they?

How was one good and one bad? You know, one actually helped me and one actually hurt me. So I think, you know, there was a big story in the New York Times several years ago saying that people spend more time picking which restaurant they'll go out to dinner than picking which rehab they'll send a loved one to. And at a time when insurance doesn't cover oftentimes all the cost of rehab, you have families across America scrimping together money and savings to send a loved one to rehab, and they're not doing enough research to figure out if that's really a good rehab or not. And there are places and there are ways that you can do this. But there's in the vacuum, since the Affordable Care Act passed and now that it's become a moneymaker for a lot of

people who are not really committed to helping people get sober. Because they can take the insurance money you're saying? Yeah. These places, like there's something in Florida called the Florida Shuffle. And the district attorney there has been cracking down on it and has sent a lot of people to prison and has prosecuted a lot of cases. But in these cases, these rehabs will bring people in. They pay finder's fees to recruiters who go out there. And then they'll have everybody take urine tests five times a week to make sure they're clean and sober. You're in a rehab.

You don't have access to drugs and alcohol. So those tests are needless. But they're all covered by insurance. So it's a moneymaker for them. And then they give them to a sober house where you know people actually give them drugs and alcohol and they relapse and they go back to the rehab so that hence the florida shuffle they're in and out and in it's a cycle wasn't there a big one in california too that got cracked down but i can't remember i remember now reading about no no there

was a really bad rehab in malibu where the head of the rehab in malibu was actually found at a cheap motel getting high with several of the women who were at his rehab and he was abusing some of the women too right yeah I know exactly I read that that book on him that that was a gnarly story it was we did it when I was at ABC we did a big 2020 on it a whole hour on it it was an incredible story but it's it's not unique you really have to do your homework and this first rehab I went to was incredible that's the one that the singer from Lady A went to and um it was you know they just were smart and caring and and you know had you doing exercises and meeting with people and the other

one was literally a traumatic experience so it was and people dropped out all the time and, you know. Because of the people who worked there, what makes it? Yes. Yes. Just they're not nice. They're not kind. Literally, I can only make the analogy of, you know, you can go to Daniel in New York City and have an amazing experience with waiters and, you know, food, or you can go to McDonald's. And they are two very different experiences. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. A friend of mine who helps people find the right rehab said, I, for example, knew of a 50-year-old

Catholic priest who decided he had a problem with alcohol and needed to go to rehab. My 50-year-old Catholic priest friend should not be at the same rehab with 20-year-old heroin addicts. Sure, sure. Not because one's better and one's worse. It's not. It's just two different people. And in order for rehab to work,

you need to be sitting with people who you can relate to and who have stories somewhat similar to yours so that you don't get to indulge in the thing that everybody does at first which is that's not me i don't have the problem because i you know i don't have you have a problem i don't look like you sound like you live like you there's you you know and and in order to get better you need to be you know you need to hear stories from people similar to you. That makes a ton of sense.

And by the way, that's just initially. I mean, I'll go to meetings now and I'll hear stories from people who have completely different lives. Because you're sober now and you can help them. And substances are completely different. And that's what's so powerful about that is then you still see that common thread, that person as a child feeling the exact same way you felt you know when you were six years old having panic attacks every day and and and where their life went and they lived different lives in different places with different circumstances and ended up

doing different substances and and having different stories and some of them really powerfully different and even more destructive. But at the end, we're all the same. We're all battling the same demons. When you were going through all of this and you have to leave to go to rehab, what was happening with your kids and your husband? I can imagine that that was very stressful. It was really hard on my kids, I think. My youngest was really young and didn't, I think, I don't know. It impacted my oldest son a little bit more. We still talk about it sometimes. You know, he's read my book. He's read it twice, he said, actually. And I'm glad because I'm glad he knows the full story of,

you know, it can be easy to think when, and I haven't had this experience, but I've heard a lot of people talk about it. When you have somebody in your life who is struggling with substance abuse disorder, it's very tempting to blame them and to think, you know, you're a terrible person for doing this to me or failing me or why can't you quit and not understanding that it's a disease. It is a disease. I mean, and that's, there's still so much stigma around it. So I'm glad my son read the book and understands that it is a disease and understands what led me to,

you know, to drink and to use alcohol as a way to, and he struggles with anxiety himself. So he understands exactly. And we talk a lot about the kinds of things I never talked about with my parents. You know, panic attacks, anxiety, what to do. He's been seeing a therapist for years. That helps him.

The kind of thing that probably could have saved me an enormous amount of grief in my life if I'd ever had that kind of a resource. Or parents who talk to me about my mental health and ask me what was happening when I was having those panic attacks. Was your husband supportive and the news station that you were working on supportive when you go to rehab? ABC was very supportive when I went to rehab. And my husband was initially supportive. It did not last. And you guys ended up divorcing? Yes. So you're going through all this and what you do for a living is so, I mean, it's so dynamic. There's so many layers to it.

It's a lot to handle. I asked you off air, I said, how do you balance having such a big career, going through all this at the same time, and you're a mother? It's a lot of stress. Yeah, it was a lot of stress. Yeah, it was a lot of stress. It was very public. I think everybody deserves to have the opportunity to go through something painful and private and to do it privately. And that was stripped away from me. It's why I wrote the book because I thought somebody thought it was a great idea to call page six. And when I was in rehab and

tell them I was there, I mean, you know, I would still always, always thought, you know, why would you do that? Why would anybody do that to a person? But someone did. And, you know, so the story was sort of out there and I just thought I'll just tell my own story. And I also, I wrote the book because I don't think I've ever felt so alone in my entire life is at the end when I was really struggling. It was the loneliest place. And you think you're the only one. And that was the great revelation in recovery is that you're not. That there's a lot of people who felt just like you did and were in the exact position you were in. And they got through it.

And here's how. And I read books. The first thing I did when I first started wondering if I had a problem years before I got sober is I started reading books about it, written mostly by other women. Books about maybe people's memoirs or just books about addiction? I read Drinking a Love Story by Carolyn Knapp, who was another newspaper reporter. I read her book and I read Mary Carr's book, Lit, very high functioning woman, female, alcoholic. Corin Zelkis, Smashed, story of a drunken girlhood, very straight A, student at an elite college, terrible battles with alcoholism. I read book after book after book and every book made me feel better because it made me realize I'm not the only one.

And it stripped me of that veneer of I can't possibly be an alcoholic. I'm a network news anchor supporting, you know, a husband and two children. And these women were also all highly functioning and in huge success stories in their own rights and they also were i mean i will never forget there was a scene in mary carr's book where she writes about sitting on the back step under an overhead light of her house drinking out of a bottle of drinking a bottle of whiskey all by herself knowing you, after having vowed to herself hours earlier that day not to drink that night, she's sitting there all alone in that sort of depressing setting swigging whiskey. And, you know, she was a teacher at a college, you know, and an acclaimed writer

and author. It helped me, you know, break down some of the illusions that I had that, oh, you have to be living under a bridge drinking out of a brown paper bag or passed out in an alley someplace. Recently, we had the founder of Evlo Fitness on our podcast, and I am just obsessed with this idea. So Evlo Fitness is something you can do at home, and it's all about lifting and strength training. I personally have been lifting and strength training for the last probably like two and a half years, and it has changed my body composition. I cannot say enough good things about women building muscle. What I've noticed is that I've built muscle and I've burned fat. I notice I can eat more. I notice I have more energy, more serotonin, more dopamine, and everything just fits me different. I honestly, if you told

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health, hair growth, skin radiance. I just think that this is like the next thing. I think people are really going to see benefits quickly with colostrum. I know this because I've been taking it every single day. I do a scoop in my mouth. I swish it around like a paste. I like let it sit there and then I swallow it. My kids love it. They each take a spoonful in the morning. They literally beg me for it. Michael loves it. I just think it's such an incredible way to help with your immune system. So this one, and this is really important, is sustainably sourced and it's also from grass-fed cows. If you don't want to do a dry scoop in your mouth like I do, this is really good for your oral microbiome though. Then you can do it in cold liquid. So you don't want to do it in warm,

but I'm telling you, try it as a paste. Like I said, good for your microbiome. We've worked out a special offer for our audience. Receive 15% off your first order. I have used my code three times. Go to tryarmorad.com slash skinny or enter code skinny to get 15% off your first order. That's T-R-Y-A-R-M-R-A.com slash skinny. I'm going to put you on to the hack that helps my son sleep from 7.30 to 7 every single night. Dreamland baby. Okay. They have this weighted, it's like a gently weighted sleep sack that does so many things. The first thing is

it associates like when it's time to sleep. So I'll put it on Townes and he automatically knows it's time to wind down. It's time to sleep. His body immediately relaxes. And then when he's sleeping, it just like relaxes his nervous system. And when he wakes up, he's so cute. He's in his little sleep sack. It's like a whole production. He loves it. It helps him fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. And Towns loves it. So just a little backstory. The founder started Dreamland Baby in 2018 when her son was waking up every hour and a half. She was so exhausted. So one night she put like a heavier throw blanket on him and she noticed he calmed down. So that's where her aha moment came from. It makes a ton of sense.

I use a gently weighted blanket to wind down all the time. So this makes sense. If you want a better sleep for you, a better sleep for your baby, and you just want something that helps them sleep deeper, check out Dreamland Baby's gently weighted sleep sack. It is absolutely amazing. Go to dreamlandbabyco.com and enter our code SKINNY at checkout. You receive 20% off site-wide plus free shipping. This offer is for new and existing customers. That's code SKINNY, dreamlandbabyco.com. And this makes the best gift ever, by the way. Since you've been sober for 10 years,

what are some positives that have come out of the break? Almost 10 years. Almost 10 years. What are some positives? You know, it's funny. It's just, I think that you don't realize, first of all, the anxiety is better. That's the huge irony. I mean, I didn't realize this.

I ended up doing a whole primetime special with Diane Sawyer when my book came out, when we really, not just on my book, but on women and alcohol. And I interviewed a doctor who explained how while the alcohol initially works, it begins to eventually backfire. It boomerangs on you. It actually causes more anxiety than it ever soothes. So at the end, it's like a terrible, it's also one of the reasons why people with anxiety

are twice as likely, I think, to relapse as people who don't have anxiety because you've got this supercharged anxiety that you're desperate to make go away somehow. So I'm much, much less anxious. And I don't know, it's funny, I saw something recently, I think it was on Twitter. If you could say something to yourself,

your 20-year-old self, what would it be? And the first thing immediately to my mind was don't drink. It's becoming a bigger topic now and I think there's a lot of people talking about the detrimental effects of alcohol. Oh, it's so bad for you.

It's so ingrained in this culture. It is and celebrated. When we come here compared to when we're in texas uh-huh how's it different oh my god it's it's we don't drink at all i don't want to say it's different in the sense that it's like it's like every night and it's it's ingrained in the culture here in a way that i don't think you can explain unless you live somewhere well i don't want to say that it's not in texas i mean listen no it's texas but it's just different here but there's I don't want to say that it's not in Texas. I mean, listen. No, it's in Texas, but it's just different here. But there's issues. Interesting.

I think New York, it's not uncommon to see people breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a cocktail and not think anything of it. I think where we are, if you were to see somebody sitting there at lunch with a martini, you're like, oh man, what's going on? Where here, it's just like, it's normal. It's lunch. And when we

come here, we notice ourselves like, oh, we're out a little later oh we were doing this little and it so it's something you just got to think about and check the city gives you energy you're socializing more so then you're like oh i have to do this event or do this see this person and then it becomes oh you have a drink here you have a drink there by the time you get home you've had four drinks and then you wake up you're a little hungover you're chasing the hangover and then you work your ass off and you almost feel like you're rewarded i mean one of the things i love about a spiral yeah that i love about this city so much which is maybe good and bad it's like it really is an adult playground like there's something to do all the time there's someone to see there's

something different it's always going it's not like hey you have to go at this hour if you go to a place at this hour and it's not good there's a place right next door that's probably better you know i mean it's like it's like that kind of thing where where we are it's just a little slower i think you i think that you have to be very thoughtful and have very specific boundaries and be purposeful with with like i i'm like that with my phone like i'm very purposeful about boundaries around my phone i try i try with alcohol the same like okay but i'm going back to Austin, so now there's no more alcohol. You really have to be thoughtful. You can't just kind of go with

the flow. That's so interesting. I do think, though, there seems to be a growing movement celebrating at least temperance, if not sobriety. I don't know. I just think we're getting more and more research about how bad alcohol is for you. And you don't have to be an alcoholic to be suffering the consequences of drinking. And I don't know. I just think I've, you know, I just had dinner with three girlfriends of mine two nights ago. All of us are sober. And we were talking about the fact that I said, and I was talking to them and saying, I'm still very aware of how much sharper I am mentally. You know, all that energy that you gave up to drinking or socializing and drinking or getting up and having a run on the treadmill to get to sweat out the effects of last night's

drinking. You know, even when you weren't drinking alcoholically, it was still it takes up a certain you've got you've got a plate every day of your life that you get to pile up and empty or whatever. And if part of that plate is constantly taken up with drinking or then mitigating the effects of drinking, that's a lot less of your plate left for all the great things that you could be doing, whether it be homework for work or just real quality time with your family and friends. When we moved to Texas from LA, which I told you off air earlier, she got pregnant with our second child. And during that time, I was like, you're not drinking alcohol. So I took seven months. I was like, I'm not going to have anything. And I didn't.

And I talk about this all the time on the show. During that period of time, the business accelerated much quicker. I got in much greater shape. I was thinking, I was reading more. There's so many benefits. At least if you're going to partake, I think people that have even been, quote unquote, social drinkers, you don't realize that when you have alcohol in your life that consistently for long periods of time, like maybe you got out of college like, oh, I only drink twice a week. It's not that big of a deal. But if it's there for year after year, you don't realize the effect, the negative effect

that it's having. You just think, oh, that's part of my life. And it wasn't until I removed it for so long. I was like, whoa, look how much clearer, faster how much clearer faster sharper all these so why did you pick back up again well i actually now don't really drink that often at all i'm talking like maybe once or twice a month now uh-huh so it's very yeah it's not that's nothing when we're here this week do you guys need a sober companion in New York City? Maybe next time we'll call you

and we'll go, no, maybe we just have degenerate friends. But no, I think like since I did that exercise of not,

like my relationship, I have not gone back to it. It's just like there's no more like, hey, we're doing this only two or three times a week. It's like maybe it's once

or twice a month and the amount is much, much less too. Where it's like there's no like going out and having four to five drinks. We're talking like one to two glasses at dinner and then you're going home.

But anyways, in a completely separate line of questions because I know we're getting up on time, going back to your son a bit and when you think about a young person that wants to be, or I guess any person that wants to be informed about what's going on in the world now, when they're trying to figure out who to trust, what to listen to, what to read, what to watch, where would you tell people or where would you point people to go and, I guess, vet their information?

I'm an advocate of reading everything you can. And I think that I've long realized, and you guys will realize this in about a decade or so, teenagers do not like to be told what to do or how to think. So I figured out the best way is to ask them questions. So when they'll say, Mom, did you know X and X, you know, XYZ? And well, how do you think, you know, they got that information? Where did that come from? And I'll remind them that Joe Rogan or, you know, I'm not even going to mention the other things that they sometimes watch

because I can't believe it. You know, he doesn't have fact checkers. There's nobody, you know, he can just say whatever he wants to say. And I managed to convince them to read the New York Times online. My youngest is very interested. He's reading now the Economist articles. And I've realized that I have to do less sort of like, you know, lecturing and hectoring on, you know, good sources of information by them reading. So I think nobody should be relying just on television or, you know, internet, whatever, God forbid, TikTok. I mean, that's what we're down to, just for their news. Reading something is really what is the most important thing. And across the editorial spectrum, if you're going to read the New York Times editorial

page, you should also be reading the Wall Street Journal. You know, I think the scary thing is how fast these things move. And listen, news is always fast, and you want to break it. But even speaking of what's going on in the Middle East, we saw, what was that, a day or two ago, articles present one thing and then literally the next day- That was a huge mistake by major media organizations, including the New York Times. Yes. And listen, I think that sometimes there's a greater need to break something fast and first than there is to say what actually happened. But that was a huge mistake, right? And not to say that that happens all the time,

but when things like that happen, I think it fractures the trust that people have in organizations because if it's happening at that scale that quickly with such a prominent organization, what's to say it's not happening more frequently and more consistently in other areas with other stories? It's a very, very good point.

But by the way, this wasn't just a blow to trust in media. This was a major driver of world events and uprisings. Now listen, the Arab street is going to believe what it wants to believe. They're never going to believe the Israeli defense forces, even though they have provided audio transcripts. There's a lot of skepticism about anything coming out from both the Israelis and the United States. But the New York Times had to quickly,

within I think the span of hours, change its headline three times. But the question is how much damage was done in those hours. Much damage. Yeah. A lot of damage. Of course, for the perceptions of the entire world. Initial headline was Israeli's bomb hospital in Gaza.

Yeah, which is a terrible headline. Anyways, what we're talking about is then it turned out it was a parking lot and it wasn't. But it's just like when things... Well, most importantly, it turns out that according to Israeli intelligence and US intelligence, it was an errant rocket from Islamic Jihad fired from within Gaza.

So this was a Palestinian rocket that misfired, according to Israeli and U.S. intelligence at this moment, that misfired and dropped. It was not an Israeli missile. But I think this is where people, especially younger people, get alarmed and also hyped up because the story was literally the exact opposite and completely, I'm not going to say opposite, maybe that's not the right word, but completely different than what was initially reported. And I think that one thing I worry about in the current cultural climate is sometimes there's this need to be so fast and break and first, even with podcasts, like, oh, this thing happened to this person. I'm going to be the first person to get that guest. You got to do a little research. You have to be informed.

You have to think. Yeah. What is it like reporting in the Middle East? I mean, how would you explain it to someone that has no idea? I remember the very first time I went to Israel, what struck me the most was how small it all was. Like you're standing in this one place and you're like, Oh, there's the West bank. And Oh, like it's you. And you go to Jerusalem and there's this collision of all these religions and

cultures, you know, all on top of each other. So that's the thing that I think people tend to, especially in the United States, we're such a geographically enormous country. For context, for people listening, what kind of land mastery,

like if they were going to think about something in the US comparing to size? Oh, I can't off the top of my head, but the Gaza Strip where all this is happening is about the size of, a little bit bigger than Washington DC. It is two miles wide and it's very small. And you can see these places are all very, very, very close together.

These people are all on top of each other. Are you nervous being you going there? No, I wasn't. I was there during one of the intifadas, and I felt fine. But I would go there. ABC News would provide me with security. Most correspondents overseas must have security. And you've got to be smart.

You have what we call fixers, people who are local. This happened when I went to Russia after the terrorist attack in Beslan and that horrible attack. You have fixers there who will tell you. And when I went to Iraq, same thing. Locals who understand, oh, I can see danger when you, an American from the outside, might not understand that this is not good. This is not a good situation. What's an example of that? What do you mean? and I was literally mid-question when my security came up and said, we're leaving. And I had, at that point, so totally trusted them. I literally, in the middle of my question, turned and walked and followed them

because the fixer recognized that there was a bad element that had just showed up. Things were about to go south very quickly, but they got us out of there before it did. And did it? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

It was a very volatile time. I feel like we could talk to you forever, but I know what you got to get. We got to get you out of here. Tell us all about the show. Give us all the details. It's a new show from six to seven on News Nation. It's a brand new cable news network. And we're just covering all the biggest stories of the day. And I think the whole network sort of philosophy is that in this time of hyper polarization that you guys were just talking about, you know, we're trying to be right down the middle and ask the tough questions for both sides. I mean, I think, I think it's very hard to

be, you know, at Christiane Amanpour, a friend and colleague and who I admire greatly said, you know, be truthful, not neutral. And I think that's, you know, you can't always say yes, but this side, you know, sometimes it is just doing the news, but I'm loving it. It's really to be able to cover all this. It's a very exciting time to be a journalist right now. It's challenging for all the obvious reasons we've talked about. And I think, you know, to have the chance to do an hour every night to cover the news and to try and do it as fairly and thoroughly and without falling into the partisan, you know, BS that you see on a lot of cable news is important. And I hope that the network continues to grow.

And what about your podcast? The podcast is something I do just on my own time. I'm on the board of directors for the Partnership to End Addiction. I do it for them. And I'm happy to, it's my way of sort of volunteering my expertise on the board. And we interview all sorts of people who are in recovery or experts in the field of recovery or even just journalists who've done really great reporting like Sam Quinones or

Beth Macy who wrote Dope Sick, Sam Quinones who spent years in Mexico reporting on the fentanyl crisis. You know, there's a lot of really big things confronting. We have tens of millions of Americans who suffer from substance use disorder, an opioid crisis that is setting records sadly every month for the number of people it kills and you know in a mental health crisis really in this country ever since I think it really the pandemic really brought it to the fore people are talking more and more about it but you know everybody self medicates that anxiety or depression and that can really lead you down a dangerous road. Where can everyone find you? What's your social media, your book?

Tell us all the things. On Twitter, I'm EvargusTV. The newscast is on News Nation from six to seven every night. And you can see the podcast is called Heart of the Matter. It's on Spotify and Apple, wherever you, it's just a little recovery sort of oriented conversation. Well, I learned so much. Not nearly as impressive as your guys' podcast.

Selfishly, this was such a fun podcast for me because I learned so many tips. I almost wanted to take notes. Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, guys. And congratulations on all your success. Thank you. We've got a long way to go.

No, I don't think so. I think you're there. We're practicing. We also haven't managed to kill each other yet not yet well that's the big thing I mean

yeah marry people who also work together parent together and I say figuring out this dynamic is actually

harder than figuring out the relationship like I think since we've been able to figure this out for a while now it's actually the marriage

has gotten stronger because like this stuff is this is what brings up a lot of stuff the relationship of i've often talked about the fact that my relationship with my co-anchors throughout all the years some good some challenging it's a very intimate relationship especially on live television and in this case you're doing a live to tape podcast you have to really sort of read each other and sense can i jump in yes is it okay is she going with something is he in the middle of something do i interject he should always let me talk he should just say yes dear

okay that's why but it's why we refuse to do zoom interviews because i can't pick up the readings of what you're talking about really important important. No zoom interviews in person. Really important. I'm so excited. You came on the podcast. I've really stocked. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you for taking the time.

Thank you. Thanks guys. If you're looking for a new book, you got to read her book. You'll love it. And make sure you watch this interview on YouTube. We have it up. So you can watch us from the comfort of your home.

It's like, we're all hanging out on video on our YouTube channel with that, we'll see you on Monday with a very juicy episode.