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The CIA's Hidden Hand: Unmasking the Shadow Government & Deep State with Ex-CIA Officer Kevin Shipp

A Note from James:"That was insane. Kevin Shipp, 17 years with the CIA, then, he had some wild experiences that led to him leaving the CIA. He wrote, just published a book that he published without the CIA's permission. It's called Twilight of the Shadow Government. And I got almost scared during this interview that maybe I shouldn't even release this podcast episode. I don't want to say anything. He didn't say anything that was like crazy or off the deep end. I just got scared. And when you listen to the episode or, and read the book, you'll see why. So I'm just going to go right into it. And I'd love to hear your comments. Here it is. Twilight of the Shadow Government about the CIA."Episode Description:In this episode, former CIA officer Kevin Shipp sits with James Altucher to unravel secrets and operations that rarely see the light of day. With over 17 years in the CIA, Shipp shares personal experiences that highlight systemic issues, unexplained cover-ups, and the often unchecked influence of intelligence agencies on public policy and global events. The discussion spans decades and touches on topics from high-profile events to shadow government operations, all detailed in Kevin's book Twilight of the Shadow Government. This episode dives into the real-world implications of intelligence, secrecy, and the inner workings of the CIA.What You'll Learn:The Inner Workings of the CIA: How operations are conducted behind the scenes and the influence they wield over government decisions.Shadow Government Dynamics: Shipp explains what he calls the "shadow government" and its implications on U.S. foreign and domestic policy.The Cost of Speaking Out: Hear about the personal risks and consequences Shipp faced after publishing his book and coming forward with his experiences.Critical Events in U.S. History: Insight into high-stakes moments, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, and the CIA's possible involvement.Reforming Intelligence Agencies: Shipp's views on necessary changes within intelligence organizations to restore accountability and transparency.Timestamped Chapters:[00:01:30] - Introduction to Kevin Shipp and his background in the CIA.[00:03:01] - Media, government, and intelligence connections.[00:06:48] - Reflecting on personal experiences with DEI within the CIA.[00:14:02] - Strange intelligence operations and moments of disillusionment.[00:24:15] - Dangerous assignments and shocking security oversights.[00:36:33] - The recruitment and "elite" culture within the CIA.[00:47:04] - Distinguishing the "shadow government" and the deep state.[01:01:26] - CIA's historic influence on global and national events.Additional Resources:Twilight of the Shadow Government by Kevin Shipp and Kent Heckenlively ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn

The Jordan Harbinger Show
01:15:29 5/3/2022

Transcript

Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show, Pain is one of the biggest stressors on the human body, like moving cross-country is stressful and death of a loved one is stressful. But being in pain day in and day out is a huge stressor. So not only are we facing pain, but our brain is in this state of fight or flight emergency, and we know that amplifies the pain alarm. So it's just so important for people with pain to know that part of what's happening for them is that their brain has become extra sensitive and it is alarming when it doesn't need to. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger on the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the story's secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional billionaire investor, investigative journalist or economic hitman. Each episode turns our guest wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it and of course, I love it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like negotiation and communication, disinformation and cyber warfare scams and conspiracy debunks crime and cults and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger Outcomes Slash Start our search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, we're going to learn about pain from my friend and pain genius Dr. Rachel Softness. She's a really amazing pain psychologist and pain neuroscience expert focusing on kids and pain, which is both noble and heartbreaking to think about. It's a big reason why I've got such a soft spot for her and for this topic here today, we're talking not only about acute but also chronic pain. What pain really is. Where it exists in our body and its effects on the brain. I've never learned about this stuff. It just occurred to me. I know nothing about pain. Or at least I didn't. Until this episode turns out, it's all pretty fascinating. We'll also discuss pain treatment, what modern medicine gets wrong and what we can and should do instead. Hey, even if you don't have pain, this episode will teach you about something that millions of people have to live with every single day. And if you do have pain, what this episode will do is offer you hope and a better path forward. Here we go with Dr. Rachel softness, so I almost got bit by a bullet ant in the Amazon almost doesn't count. No, but it counts enough for the story I saw. That's my point. I almost had a really good story for this episode, but I'm also really glad that I don't have a really good story for this episode because it was the last day of a two week long Amazon hiking trip, and it came out of my backpack where I had my wallet and we were paying the bill for the hotel at the end. And I was like, I brought cash and I pulled my wallet out and there was a bullet on my wallet. And I've never thrown so much money so far away in my whole life. I'm not actually sure which to react to first, the fact that there was a bullet in your backpack or that you were paying for an expensive hotel in cash. But all of those things are there are very few hotels in the jungle, so you don't have much choice and they also don't have much internet. So it's kind of like if you don't bring cash, I'm not really sure what happens to you at the end fair. I'm glad you didn't get bitten, by the way. Yeah, that's a memory I don't really need and also anything that causes that much pain. If you google bullet ants and bullet and pain, it sounds truly awful like it comes in waves of unstoppable pain and there's like no way to get rid of it. There's no antidote for it. You just have to deal with it. Which thinking about it gives me a lot of sympathy for some of the people that you've talked about in your work, because these are people that didn't go on a silly hiking trip to the Amazon and have worse or similar pain to what a bullet could do to you. But it's coming from inside their body, and there's nothing they can do about it seemingly. Or at least that's what they think. And so we're going to talk about a little bit of that today, but I wanted to start off on a little commonality here, which is that I also had some stomach pain as a kid. You did. Yeah, and I'm like, I had that, but I just really didn't want to go to school, and I kind of knew that was what was going on. But I was like, but also my stomach hurts. But also when I think about how much I don't want to go to school, my stomach hurts more. So they're probably connected. But whatever, I just want to go to school, that's as far as I thought about it. That's as far as most people think about it. Yeah. And you had that rant. This is something you struggled with. But were you aware also that it was kind of like, OK, I just really totally. No, no, no. I went to stomach aches, actually. They run in my family, but I was not aware that my stomach aches were due to stress and anxiety at all because I went to a million doctors. I was scoped. I was prodded. I got all the tests. I was even put on medications and nothing worked. But at no point did any doctor or specialists say to me. Hey, guess what? Anxiety and stress are somatic because emotions don't just live in your head, they also come out in your body, and it turns out that serotonin has brain chemical that everyone talks about all the time that's related to depression and stress and anxiety. It doesn't just live in your head 90 percent 90 percent of the body. Serotonin lives in your gut. Your gut is actually one of your body's emotion centers. So when you get sick to your stomach watching the news or when you get butterflies, when you're nervous or you have a gut instinct, there's a reason for that. And if someone had said that to me, I think I would have made the connection that you so intelligently made when you were a kid that I did not make. Well, my mom also said after a while, I think this is psychosomatic, and after I looked up psychosomatic, I was like, Maybe right? My mom is a speech therapist, but she's also my mom and knows me really well. And she's like, I'm pretty sure you just really hate school because it's super boring. You're in middle school, which is hell for everyone. Some of your teachers are horrible people. By all accounts, my mom was a teacher, so she wasn't like, I'm going to blame the teacher. But some of the teachers were just absolute crap and mean and stuff. And also, my mom was going through all this crap with her brother, who was like stealing from my grandma and her and my grandpa was in a nursing home. So my mom was depressed and my dad was really stressed out at work. So he'd be like yelling a lot and my dog was dying. So I was having a time and it was like, I just want to stay home and play on the computer. And if I say my stomach hurts, but then it was like my stomach did hurt and it was like, Wait, you can't just magically give yourself a stomachache and the truth. What you're saying is now, hey, man, that's not magic. That's you having the worst years of your life and finding out that pain comes out in other ways. What you just described to me actually is what I would call a perfect pain recipe, because what we know is there's always a recipe for pain, always. And the recipe isn't just to do with your body. It's also to do with your social environment and everything happening around you and your emotional state and the thoughts happening in your head. And it's always a million different things. But I just also want to say this word you use psychosomatic. Yeah. Has become, first of all, a really bad word in medicine, because when you say something psychosomatic, what you're saying to someone is, you're crazy. I don't think this thing is real. It's just in your head. That's right. Or, you know, you're just anxious or it's just depression. It's not really pain. And what I'm hoping to do is sort of flip that script and instead say literally the words somatic means of the body. That's what it means in Greek and Latin. Soma means body. When you say that emotions are somatic? Yes, of course they are, of course, emotions. What are emotions? Emotions are a biological cascade of things. Emotions are neurotransmitters and hormonal changes and changes in muscle tension and blood flow and immune functioning. And emotion by definition, of course, is physiological. And if it's physiological, it is, of course, somatic. I'm trying to reframe this language that we use, like when a kid has stomach aches, those stomach aches are real, like their enteric nervous system. This bundle of neurons connecting brain to gut gets disrupted. Serotonin is part of that system. So it is physiological stress and anxiety. We all know our physiological and it's different for everyone. So for me, stress and anxiety, I now know because I'm down this rabbit hole so far. I know what stress and anxiety does to my body. Like I know my heart rate starts going really fast. I notice that my shoulders and my back are really tight. Sometimes my mouth gets dry. I'll get like jaw tension, or I'll clench my jaw. Sometimes at night. I know my sleep sometimes gets messed up. I will get stomach aches, but I look now I'm like, OK, what is my body doing? Because of my emotional state and in western medicine for reasons I do not understand. We separate it out so far. It's like either you have physical pain and you see a physician or you have emotional pain and you see a psychologist or a therapist. But guess what? That is, not how the brain works. The brain in humans is connected to the body 100 percent of the time. All of the things are connected. Emotional health and mental health are connected to your physical health. Always. There is no divide. It's a false divide, which is why it bothers me so much. This thing you said before. Most physicians don't get trained in pain. 96 percent of med schools in the United States have zero dedicated compulsory pain education. That is a statistic from a 2018 study 96 percent. So we're saying that physical and emotional are separate. And then even then, if you're saying pain is physical and you send someone to the doctor, even then, 96 percent of our medical schools are not adequately training doctors in pain. That's so great. You'd think doctors would know more about pain than anyone, and that pain would be like a first year of medical school class like contracts are for a lawyer in the first year. It's like you have to have a good foundation in pain and know all about how it works and how the mechanisms in the body. And it's just. Out the case, huh? I get in trouble when I talk about this, and by the way, I'm just reporting literature. This isn't an opinion. I just read everything I can get my hands on, and there's abundant literature actually on the lack of pain education in medical schools. What we also know is that the Med ED, the medical education that does exist on pain is very biomedical. And I'll say what I mean by that. What people are trained in if doctors are trained in pain or nerve, it's not just physicians, by the way, it's also nurses or pets or OTS. Or, you know, any kind of therapists were trained in the biomedical model of pain. And what that means is we tell people that pain is purely to do with physiology like parts of the body and brain chemicals, and that therefore the treatment for pain is also biomedical so like pills and procedures. So people with back pain probably know this. You probably have been sent for a million different procedures and maybe a spinal cord stimulator and probably some medications. But a lot of people with chronic pain will tell you that it isn't sufficient and it isn't working. And we know that that's true because chronic pain is on the rise. There's 100 million Americans living with chronic pain, and that number exploded during the pandemic, and it continues to go up. Not only that, more evidence that what we're doing isn't working. We are in the midst of an opioid epidemic which everyone is sick of hearing about, but that also is exploding. Like if our treatments worked, they would be working. So there's a metaphor that I like to use to explain how pain works in the brain and also what we can do about it. So I want you to imagine that in your central nervous system, you have what I'm going to call a pain dial, and it operates much like the volume knob on your car stereo, like you can turn pain volume up and you can turn pain volume down. And there's a lot of things that change pain volume in any given moment of every given day. And I want to tell you about three things in particular that will be useful when we're talking about all the rest of this stuff. So one of the things that changes pain volume is stress and anxiety. And I'll say specifically how that works. When stress and anxiety are high and your body is tense and tight and your thoughts are worried. Neuroscience tells us that pain volume is amplified, that pain volume, that pain dial is turned up, and the opposite is also true. When stress and anxiety are low, your muscles are relaxed and your thoughts are calm. Your brain turns pain volume down. That's thing. One thing, too, is mood, mood and by mood. I mean emotions positive or negative. And what science tells us is that negative emotions like depression and sadness and frustration and anger your limbic system when you're depressed and when you're angry and when emotions are negative, your limbic system will turn up that pain dial and amplify pain volume. But the opposite again is also true. So emotions matter to pain a lot. When emotions are positive, you're feeling joyful and happy and you're engaged in pleasurable activities. Your limbic system again, that part of your brain responsible for emotions will lower pain volume, so pain feels less bad when emotions are positive and thing number three. I know it's counterintuitive. So when emotions are positive in good pain, volume is low. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah, it's like if I crack my toe when I'm at home alone and I like, just got a nasty email from somebody and had a cancellation on something that hurts. But if I crack my toe when I'm like drinking coronas at the beach with my friends, I'm like, Oh, that's annoying. You don't even notice. Perfect example. That's exactly right. Because emotions change, pain, volume and thing three is attention attentional processes. So again, when we are stuck at home, stuck in bed, thinking about our pain, or you're trapped in the hospital or, you know, your body's been hurting for so long, you feel like you just can't get off your couch. Your prefrontal cortex will send a message to that pain dial. Amplifying pain volume pain feels worse when we think about it, when we focus on it, when we ruminate about it, which is why part of our treatment is distraction strategies. So the opposite is also true. Neuroscience tells us that when we distract from pain, sometimes I ask my patients, Hey, tell me about a time you were so absorbed in some activity you briefly forgot about your pain, and everyone can give me an example. And that forgetting is not magic, it's your pain dial. So being absorbed and distracted in activity, your prefrontal cortex will lower pain volume, so pain feels less bad. And by the way, it's during the last couple of years when we were giving kids vaccines, we stuck a screen in front of their faces because distractions can really help gait and control your experience of pain. Some kids don't even notice they're getting a shot in the arm when they have a screen in front of them and others if they're staring it or screaming bloody murder and they have to be held down, which is an. Absolute disaster, no one should ever do that, but that's why we play Baby Shark when we cut my kid's toenails, exact. Perfect. See, yeah, you just got pain psychology one on one. That's it. That's the science of pain, but we don't talk about it in this way. Explicitly, the neuroscience of pain is not discussed, so people don't know this metaphor. I just gave you the neuroscience of pain tells us that the thoughts we think change the pain we feel, the emotions were feeling in any given moment control, pain, volume and distraction or what. We're focusing on matters intimately. So pain, whether it's in your leg or your knee or your back or your tooth, always is bio psychosocial. All the factors always matter to your brain when it's deciding whether or not to make pain and how much we can get into that in a bit. I do have questions about that as well. I, before I forget, I want to go back to pain recipes because that was interesting and we kind of glossed over it. What are pain recipes? Because whenever there's a recipe, usually there's what like a counter recipe, right? There's like a remedy for the recipe. I guess this is a crab analogy, but I'll let you take over. OK, well, so to tell you what a pain recipe is, I sort of need to go backwards and tell you what pain actually is. Can we do that? Yeah, tell me what it is. It's really nerdy pain science. But I am nothing. You're in the right place. Not a nerd. Yeah, I feel like I'm in good company. So again, we've been trained to believe that pain is this purely biomedical problem, something to do with anatomy and physiology. But neuroscience tells us that that's not actually true. Pain does not live exclusively in the body. And one of the reasons we know this is because of this condition, called phantom limb pain and phantom limb pain is when someone loses a limb like an arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain in the missing body part. Now, if you can have terrible leg pain in the leg that you don't have anymore, that tells us that pain must be constructed somewhere else and that somewhere else in the brain. That's right. And here's the funny thing about the brain. And by the way, neuroscience is my jam. It just helps me make sense of everything and especially pain. And this is a thing that doesn't get talked about, ever. This totally makes sense, right? Because we've we've heard of people that are blind that can see things in their brain. Because the brain constructs reality based on input from the eye, from the sensors, but also from the eyes. So if you don't have eyes, it's impossible to see. Well, not really. You just can't see using your eyes because you don't have any. But if you can feel pain like you don't have it, then you can see with eyes that you don't have as well. As long as there's another form of sensory input like these tongue grids with electrical stimuli and stuff that people are experimenting with. This all checks out and seems like we should have sort of applied these principles across the body a long time ago. But I guess it's all new. Yeah, but guess what? You and I are doing today, we're revolutionizing pain. We're telling everybody how it actually works, because guess what? None of us are going to escape without having pain. Pain is part of being human. All of us at some point if we haven't already are going to experience pain, seems about time. We understood it, knew how it worked and knew what to do about it. So that's why this whole conversation is even happening. So the thing about the brain is that there's no one single pain center in the brain. That's not how it works. There's multiple parts of your central nervous system that process pain, including your spinal cord and all these other parts of your brain. So I'm going to tell you about three in particular. One is your prefrontal cortex processes pain, and that's the part of your brain responsible for attentional processes are what you're focusing on. There's a reason I'm telling you that part of the brain No. Two is your cerebral cortex. That's the part of your brain responsible for many things, but also thoughts, thoughts because the things you think affect the way your body feels always. And part of the brain three is your limbic system, your brain's limbic system, and that is your brain's emotion center. Your limbic system processes your emotions. Now, I want to be more clear about what that means 100 percent of the signals the sensory messages from your body filter through your brain's limbic system before they become the thing that we call pain. So all of the time, all of the time, pain is both physical and emotional. So I am what's called a pain psychologist, which no one has ever heard of. You know, people are like, Well, you're not an M.D.. No, I'm a pain psychologist. Here's why that's important. People say, Oh well, you must treat emotional pain. The answer to that is no pain is always both physical and emotional. That's what neuroscience says. And in fact, what we know is that negative emotions like stress and anxiety or depression or anger or frustration turn up pain volume in the brain. We think and are trained and our doctors are trained. That pain lives in the body, like in your back or in your knee. It is of. Course, true, that things may be going wrong in your back or in your knee, but that isn't where Payne lives. Payne lives in the brain. And so the pain recipe then is this c**ktail of stress and anxiety. Also, your knee pain. Also the fact that your family support sucks because your parents are breathing down your neck about how you should just try not having pain and being depressed and get your act together and go to school like your brother or whatever, right? It sounds like that's what happened to this kid who was in bed for four years. Can you as a parent? That was so horrifying to hear that story and you save that kid's life. Can you tell me about this? Yeah. So thank you for circling back around to pain recipes. So can I get more clear on what that is? Yes, I went down a tangent of pain neuroscience. All right, that's why I'm here. Yeah. So there's always a recipe of things that can amplify pain volume. And again, we have established that pain lives in the brain. We have established that pain is not biomedical, but we haven't said what pain is. Pain is bio psychosocial, bio psychosocial, and all that means is, of course, there are bio components to pain like genetics and tissue damage and system dysfunction and sleep and exercise and diet. Of course, all of those things are part of what we're calling a pain recipe that will lead to high pain. But pain also has cognitive components and emotional components and behavioral components, and they live in this psychological, which has so much stigma around it, but the psychological component of pain. We've got bio, we've got psych, which our thoughts and emotions and trauma past. Trauma lives with pain and behaviors. The things we choose to do, and I promise I'm getting to your pain recipe. And then we've got the social or the sociological domain of pain, which is quite literally everything else. So it's socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity and access to care and its social environment, its parents and friends. And whether you're lonely and isolated. It's a million things. So a pain recipe is the sum total of all of those different domains of pain. The factors in the bio bubble that can amplify pain like tissue damage and system dysfunction and lack of sleep and lack of moving your body and poor nutrition. It's all the things in the psych domain of pain, like thinking scary, catastrophic thoughts. And when you're a kid in eighth grade, you know there's a lot of horrible things going on in your life. Those happen in your head. Also, it's your emotional functioning again. Negative emotions amplify pain if you're stressed or anxious or depressed. Pain volume is going to be amplified. And if behaviorally, if you're staying at home and inside, which is a lot of people with chronic pain, do they don't move their bodies? They don't leave their house? Pain will also be amplified. And then we have all the stuff in the social, those sociological bubble. So a pain recipe for me when someone comes to my office, I'm always looking at those three big domains and I want to pick out the things in each of those domains that are contributing to a pain recipe. So for you, I should have written it all down. But death of a dog, angry parent. A lot of family conflict at home. You know, having some social stuff going on at school, maybe some academic stress, you know, or some social anxiety. All of that stuff will contribute to pain volume being amplified in the brain. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Rachel Softness. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great folks for the show, these authors, thinkers, creators, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your own network for free. Over at Jordan Harbinger.com/ course, it's about improving your network in connection skills, of course, but also 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 Jordan Harbinger Ecomdash course. And hey, by the way, most of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now back to Dr. Rachel Softness. And so can we do like the inverse of the pain recipe? I mean, that's harder to do, of course, but is the cure for that then instead of just going on pain meds for your knee pain is that maybe I start exercising, even if it's just a walk around the block and maybe my family gets a frickin therapist for God's sake. And maybe we end up with another type of pet that is, you know, my dog hadn't died. But let's say that he did. Like, maybe we get another pet that I can take care of, that I care about that keeps me company when I'm home alone all day, and maybe I open the curtains in the morning and stay or leave the curtains open. Like, Can we do the George Costanza method where we're like, What's the opposite of what I'm doing right now? And then do that and then the pain gets better. Is that a thing? Yes. So the answer is yes. With the caveat is, it's not quite that simple. It's not like, Oh, just do the opposite, and everything will get better because there's, of course, a number of complicated processes usually maintaining a chronic pain cycle. But you are on it 100 percent. Yes, that's right. So we look at the things that are maintaining a pain cycle. So that's actually why I wrote the Pain Management workbook. The reason I wrote the pain management workbook was because I want everyone to understand their pain recipe and to know how to hack it and it can be hacked. The first part is the stuff we're doing right now, which is just pain education. Like if we don't understand pain, we can't treat. How do you treat a thing you don't understand? So first, we have to locate pain to the brain. We have to understand all the little bits of pain neuroscience that help us lower pain volume. And then exactly what you're saying. We have to put together this recipe, this c**ktail of things that's going to hack our pain recipe and lead to a lower pain volume. So moving your body if you've been sedentary, going outside and connecting socially, treating your depression and anxiety, which by the way, by the way, the last two years of the pandemic have been a s**t show for everybody, like our definitions of anxiety and depression are just really bad and wonky. If you've experienced some anxiety and depression in the last two years, that's what we call a situational trigger. It does not mean that everybody has been mentally ill in the last two years. Like, obviously, if the entire world is mentally ill, our definition of abnormal is clearly wrong. It is a normal response to an abnormal situation. But that's true with chronic pain to a lot of people with chronic pain, live with some anxiety and some depression. And I will say that is not what I call mental illness. That is again, a normal response to an abnormal situation. The human body is not built to be in pain for like months and many years. So yes, the answer is yes. To hack a pain recipe, you first have to understand what's happening and use tools. So like the Pain Management Workbook can be used by anyone like anyone with pain and also any provider like for me, what pisses me off is that the stuff that I do these like biobehavioral treatments aren't reimbursed by insurance. You can get seven back surgeries, but things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which have evidence for treating pain and biofeedback. They're not reimbursed. So you need to like, cut people open and then give them cognitive behavioral therapy and so them back up and then you'll get reimbursed for it. That's ridiculous. It's insane. That's actually insane. So you asked before about a kiddo that I mentioned, are you talking about the kid or that I mentioned on a different podcast? I am talking about the kiddo you mentioned on a different podcast. Yeah. OK. So thank you for using the word, kiddo. I love that people who care about kids use that word like that is that is like, it's so funny. I actually really don't like that word, and I try not to use it because I usually just call my kids my kids. But then people say, Well, are you talking about your own children? And then I I don't know. Yeah, I haven't yet found a better way of doing that. Yeah, it's a little bit of a generation above in terms of and age, but I actually hate the word kids, do you? It's so funny. So teenager, this teenager came to me with chronic pain. He had multiple diagnoses. He had been diagnosed with chronic migraine and chronic abdominal migraine, and he had diffuse amplified body pain of unknown etiology. People weren't sure why he was in pain or what was happening. And I want wanted. He had missed a lot of school. He had been in bed for about four years. He had seen 14 physicians and he had been on 40 medications, including some narcotics and also Thorazine. Thorazine is an antipsychotic that it's an old school antipsychotic. When I worked on an inpatient unit, if there was an adult having an aggressive, psychotic outburst, he would be held down and injected with Thorazine. Thorazine knocks people out, but that's still what we do for children in pain. You can tell I have some feelings about that. He had no life. He had no friends. He had no hope. When he came to my office, he had like long unwashed hair. He was walking, bent over and hunched, holding his belly. He was really pale. He hadn't really gone outside. So I asked him if he had given up and he said yes. I told him I could help him, but only if he did everything I said. And I should say, I never know, of course, whether or not I can help one of my patients. I believe very strongly in what I do and like the results are insane, like I'm addicted to this work and. I go out here even though I have public speaking anxiety and I do things like this because it's so important to me to spread the word because I see how many lives are changed and how profoundly they're changed by this work. So I want everyone to understand pain and what to do about it. So I told him that we could do this thing together, but he had to do every single thing. So we started really slow. When someone's been in bed for four years, their brain and body have become very sensitive. And I want to explain what that word means before I explain to you what we did with him. What happens with chronic pain is chronic pain is known as its own disease process, and there's a process that happens with chronic pain called central sensitization. And I want to explain in layman's terms what that means. So I'm going to ask you a question Can you tell me a skill that you practiced over time and got good at? You were bad at it. You practiced it. You got good at it over time. Yeah, I mean, any language, does that count? Yeah. I mean, this language, I'm speaking right now, for sure. I mean, everybody has done this right, but also like German or Chinese or something great. Wonderful languages. Perfect. So you've noticed that the more you practiced speaking German or writing German or reading German, the easier it got, the better you got in it, right? Sure. And for me, it was piano. So when I was a kid, I had to play piano and I practiced all the time. And it turned out that over time, what would happen is I could sit down at the piano after 10 years of playing and my fingers just magically knew what to do. I didn't even have to look at the sheet music, and I could hear in my head the notes before I played them. Oh, is that magic? That's cool. No, not magic. It's your brain. So the more you practice a thing, the pathways in your brain are like the muscles in your body. The more you use them, the bigger and stronger they get. So the more you practiced German, the bigger and stronger the German pathway in your brain gets, the more I practiced piano, the bigger and stronger the piano pathway in my brain got. And I can still sit down even now and access that pathway and my fingers know what to do. It's very weird. Now, guess what happens when you inadvertently accidentally practice pain over and over? For months and years, the pain pathway in your brain gets very big and strong. And when that happens, we say that your brain has become sensitive to pain. That's horrible. That's right. But that is how the brain works. Right now, it totally makes sense, right? That's like the worst thing. There's a lot of things I would want to be sensitized to, and pain is like the last one on the list. Well, said Sir Well-said couldn't agree more. And so what happens when our brains become sensitive to pain? It took me a while to figure out how to explain what that means. What that means is that small bits of sensory information from the body that are not dangerous are interpreted by your brain as dangerous. Because pain is your body's danger detection system. Pain is your body's danger alarm. That's what I remember learning about the definition of pain and like middle school science. It's like the body's way of telling us something is wrong and you hear about kids that feel no pain. And have you heard about this? I'm sure you have. Of course, this is horrifying, right? The kids will like jump off the roof of the house and break both of their legs and then do it again the month after, like staying in the hospital for six weeks because it doesn't hurt. But when they are in the hospital, their parents who are crappy and fighting all the time, are giving them nonstop attention. They don't have to go to school. They can eat whatever they want or and this is like the same kid that I've read about. He would pull out all of his teeth with pliers because it was kind of fun. Made a weird noise. OK, I've never heard that story. Don't know if I want to hear any more about it. I tell you about those kids. They don't live very long. Yeah, they don't live very long. It's really. Yeah, and that's exactly right, because pain is your body's danger detection system. And if you either don't have it or it's not working well or you're ignoring it, you're not going to survive. However, the caveat is, like every system in the human body, the pain system can fail and pain does not always indicate danger. That's the most important thing I'm going to say all day. Pain does not always indicate danger when you have chronic pain and your brain has become sensitive. Small bits of non-dangerous input from the body are being interpreted incorrectly as dangerous. And so your brain is telling you to stop doing all the things to stay inside, to not move, to not exercise, to not go out, to not see friends because it believes that your body is in danger erroneously incorrectly. So when we have chronic pain, our brains have become like that car alarm you've you've seen that car alarm like you're looking at your window and that car, the lights are flashing and the horn is beeping and you're like, bruh, no one's braking in. You're safe. The glass isn't even broken, but the car is alarming. It's like, help me help. And that's a brain on chronic pain. Your body is safe, but your brain believes you're in danger. So the treatment is the opposite of what you think it's learning to desensitize a sensitive brain. Now, to be clear, that's not to say that things can't go wrong with the body. Of course they can. And of course they do. And back to that thing where pain is always bio psychosocial. Always, always, always. So we're always looking at the three parts of the puzzle the biopsies, the cognitive and emotional and behavioral pieces, and the social and sociological pieces. So I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that I'm missing out on the bigger picture of pain. But the most important piece to know is with chronic pain. Our brains flip into this state of chronically being in a state of alarm and stress because pain is one of the biggest stressors on the human body, like moving cross-country is stressful, and death of a loved one is stressful. But being in pain day in and day out is a huge stressor. So not only are we facing pain, but our brain is in this state of fight or flight emergency, and we know that amplifies the pain alarm. So it's just so important for people with pain to know that part of what's happening for them is that their brain has become extra sensitive and it is alarming when it doesn't need to do that makes sense the way I said that. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And the analogy with the car alarm makes perfect sense, and it also is really enlightening that we can strengthen our pain pathway or make it so easy for pain to flow down that channel that everything registers as pain. Like, you know, we've heard that pain is sort of subjective, is subjective. And some people feel like a good workout feels good and other people and they're like, I'm sore and other people are like, This is horrible. I hate every second of this. It also makes perfect sense that somebody would feel something and say, this hurts a lot. And the other person, like, you know, what drove me frickin crazy is whenever I would get hurt as a kid, my dad would go, that doesn't hurt. And I would be like, No, it does hurt. I separated my shoulder up. And then he'd be like, Oh, sorry, you know, because the doctor would be like, Yeah, your kid's shoulder ripped out of the joint. Like, that hurts. And then what was interesting about that was when I went to the E.R. It didn't hurt that much because no one was there to sympathize. So I was like, actually, the pain. The physical part is like, not that bad in the E.R. doctor was like, Yeah, do you want an injection of something for that? Because that looks really bad. And that was like, I'm fine. And he's like, No, no, don't be a tough guy. That's a bad injury. And I was like, I really don't feel like this hurts that much. And he's like, Sure, OK, thinking that I was just like, straight up in shock. But it turned out that I'd probably done nerve damage or whatever, and it didn't hurt that much, or it was all the way out and didn't hurt that much. But it was so interesting that me scraping my knee and crying and my dad and having him blow me off. Definitely. I remember that hurt way more than separating my shoulder. Later on in my life, which is an actual injury. I mean, that's so profound for so many reasons. Honestly, what you just highlighted very well is that context matters to the brain. The brain is always taking in all available information when it decides whether or not to make pain and how much all available information matters, including context, including the reactions of people around you. And there's this famous playground study of these little kids. It's a different than what you just told me, because what you just told me is like a little bit more layered. It's like being dismissed and like being told that your experience is invalid, which of course, is triggering in a whole other way. But there's this famous playground study where there are these kids running around on the playground and they would fall and the first thing a child does, as you know, you have a small child. They look at their parent's face, see how their parent is reacting. And if a parent on the playground after the child fell went, Oh my God, I was really anxious and activated. The child would cry if the parent was calmly like, Oh sweetie, let me kiss that boo boo. But you're OK and distracted and was like loving and nurturing, but also very calm and distracting. The kid would not cry because context matters very much in the brain's interpretation of the sensory messages from the body. So that story is great. I also want to get back to the kiddo that I started talking about. Yeah, please, the teenager. Let's not kid. I'll stop using the word, kiddo. Come on. Sorry, the I've been trained to use that word. People tell me it's inappropriate to say kid teenager. So again, I told him we were going to walk through this treatment protocol. It's called cognitive behavioral therapy for pain. People have heard of CBT for anxiety and depression. CBT for pain is different. Very few people are trained in it, which is again why I stuck it all in a workbook because it really pisses me off. But I don't have anyone to refer to, and that isn't reimbursed by insurance bothers me a lot. So we walked through this whole protocol and so week one, I always sent him home after our sessions with some homework and week one, his homework was to go outside and stand on his porch in the sun. I like that and we. Who it was to walk to the corner mailbox. And by the way, the goal again. How do you desensitize a sensitive brain? We've established that with chronic pain, the brain has become very sensitive. How do we desensitize a sensitive brain? The analogy that I make, which explains why this treatment was happening for him, is like, if you've ever been in a really dark room, you know that if someone pulls open the blinds, all of a sudden you're like, I'm blind and it feels terrible. But if someone opens the blinds just a tiny little crack a couple of seconds later, your eyes and your brain desensitize and you're fine. And if they open up just a little bit more, let a little more light in and wait for like 30 seconds your brain and your eyes desensitize and you're fine. And all of a sudden, you know you're in a light filled room and your brain and your eyes are OK. You can tolerate it. And the treatment for chronic pain is the same. How do we lead someone out of a very, very dark room? You have to desensitize their brain little bits at a time. So with this teenager, we first just had him standing on his front porch because he had been in bed again for four years. Then we had him walking around the block and his goal, by the way, was to get back to soccer. He told me that he wanted to play and I was like, We're going to get you back to soccer. You are going to play soccer again. Then he walked his dog to the dog park and talked to a couple of strangers, which was terrifying for him. As you might imagine, that's hard for people that don't have chronic pain, so props to him for doing that. And he said it's not easy. He also had social anxiety and he was also depressed and suicidal as a lot of people with pain like suicidality and the chronic pain population is 50 percent higher. I'm sure that's right, because a lot of hope is lost. And here's what started happening. The more he started doing physically, the more he started doing cognitively, the more he started doing emotionally and socially, the lower and lower his pain alarm started becoming, the more functional he started becoming. And the more he did, the more he realized he could do. He went and got a haircut. He went and bought a backpack that was like a game changer. When he did that, it was like all of us were like, something really good is happening. Like, by the way, he was still having pain flares, but they were not laying him out and he was not taking Thorazine anymore. So he wasn't like drugged for four days without being able to function. So there were a lot of other things happening, too. He was gradually not only moving his body, but he got a tutor. He was catching up in school. He was catching up with his friends. He started seeing them in real life. This was years before the pandemic. And that walk around the block turned into a jog, and then it turned into running a mile. And when he went back to school, he was like this tall, fit, handsome kid. He got asked to prom by two girls, that kid. And he got on stage when he graduated because he did graduate. And he said, If you had told me four years ago I'd be graduating high school, I would not have believed you. And I was there. And his mom and I, of course, cried and like, the crazy thing about this work is that it absolutely changes lives, and I would love to take credit and say that I made it up. And there are people who are writing books even today with this treatment, calling it something after themselves, like as if they've made it up. It's been around for F-ing ever. We've known science has known for decades that pain is bio psychosocial and it requires a bio psychosocial treatment. But here's the problem. It doesn't make the kind of money that surgeries and pills do, and Big Pharma owns pain medicine, so they will tell you all day that the answer for your pain is a pill. But science shows that is wrong. Wrong, wrong all day long for acute pain. Short term pain. Oh yeah, thank God for morphine, for short term, but for long term, chronic pain ain't the thing. I want to get to that for sure. But I also there was another point you'd said about how pain is constructed in the brain and context matters. Tell me the tale of two nails because this is one gross which I kind of dig and also so freaking interesting because of what it says about pain in our brain. I love that you've done your research, Dr. Harbinger. You look, I'm not an MD, all right. But I know a lot of stuff about podcast. Totally. So I kind of feel like a used car salesman. As you know, no one wants to go to a psychologist for pain. No one zero people want to go to a psychologist, practically giving them away over here. It's easier for us for them, right? Because we think of pain as a biomedical problem. And if someone says you should see a pain psychologist, you think, of course they're saying it's all in my head. They're saying my pain isn't real. So I'm constantly having to think of ways to prove basic pain neuroscience that I started studying as an undergrad at Brown, that I have been studying for the last 20 something years of life by just using all of this information that I've gathered over time. So there's two papers from the medical literature that report on two different construction workers. So construction worker number one was on a job site and he jumped off of a plank straight onto a seven inch nail and it went clear through his boot straight through to the other side. And he was in terrible pain, and he was rushed to the emergency department and all of his co-workers were. Horrified. He was screaming with pain. They gave him fentanyl, I believe, an intravenous opioid for his pain. Right. We all unfortunately know what fentanyl is now like. That's like a very 20, 21, 22 thing that unfortunately has hit our zeitgeist. Yeah, I'll say, by the way, I am not anti fentanyl. I am not anti opioid. Like, Thank God for those drugs. Thank God for modern science, but for long term chronic pain. It's a disaster, but for short term pain blessings anyway. So they gave him IV opioids, and the good doctors removed his boot and they discovered that a miracle had occurred. The nail had passed between the space between his toes. There was no puncture wound. There was no blood. There was no tissue damage. But his pain was real. How did that happen? He expected it. His brain, as I would expect it, right? Yes, that's right. Looked like it went through his right. His brain, a.k.a. his danger detector, used all available information to determine whether or not to make pain and how much. So his brain used knowledge again, cognitive and our psych bubble of pain. Knowledge of the dangerous work environment. Memories of past pain experiences. Mm hmm. It used the visual input of this giant Seven Inch Nails sticking through the top of his boot. It used the visual of his colleagues faces. It used all available information to determine whether or not to make pain and because his brain decided that his body was in danger. It made pain to protect him. And guess what? That pain did exactly the right job. It got him to the emergency room. Yeah. And if that nail had gone through his skin, the emergency room is exactly where he needed to be. So pain did its job. But again, reminder the pain system, like every system in the human body, can fail. Pain is not always an indicator that there is damage to your body, and I love that example because it really shows us that you can have pain in the absence of danger and damage to the body. So interesting. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Rachel Softness. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to the show and for supporting the show, you guys the best. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps the lights on around here and allows us to have these amazing conversations. By the way, all these URLs and the codes and all that stuff, I know that's hard to memorize. We put them all in one place. This is a new mobile responsive page. Jordan Harbinger, Akamai Slash deals. We're also working on the search function for that page. By the way, you can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website as well, so please consider supporting those who support us now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Rachel softness. I will give a little appetizer to number two when I was a kid. Somebody blew up a mailbox with a pipe bomb in my neighborhood because white trash and we had nails all over through wood pieces in the yard. And I went out with my friend Tim, who I'm still friends with. Shout out to Tim, get in. And we were playing and I was like, I have a rock in my shoe. And then I looked down and I had a rusty nail that went all the way through the sole of my shoe through my foot and came up a little bit to where you could see a bump in my foot. And I obviously had to go to the hospital and get a tetanus shot. But the thing is, it didn't hurt that bad because I really didn't notice it. But I will tell you, once I noticed it, it hurt a lot. And once my mom was like, Oh honey, oh my gosh, it hurt way more than that. You got it. Having this conversation with you, looking back at all these examples as a kid, I'm like, I almost didn't have that much pain unless somebody was watching. And also I saw how gross the wound was. It's like if you just ignore those things, your level of pain. My level of pain would have been so much more manageable and easy to deal with, and probably I would be dead from tetanus because I'd be like, Oh, it's nothing. It's a little tiny hole in my foot. I'm just going to pull this out and keep riding bikes. You remember how we talked about the parts of the brain that process pain include your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for attention. Science shows that attending to pain amplifies pain volume. So if you're thinking about your pain or you're staring at it or your home, missing work and missing out on life and feeling miserable, it's going to amplify pain. Volume pain is going to feel worse. So exactly what you said, attending to pain ruminating and definitely ruminating about pain will make pain worse. That is exactly right. That is a great lead into tale of two nails number two. Yes. So let's do it. Let's do it. Don't eat. If you're eating right now, take a little break or pause this. It's not that gross. I think it's pretty gross. All right. It's pretty gross. I wish I could show you the pictures. Maybe I can send them to you and you can show them, and you can send it to me of a link in the show notes. So second, construction worker, because obviously that's the most dangerous job a person can possibly have was on a job site somewhere in Breckenridge, Colorado. And he was using a nail gun and the nail gun accidentally backfired, and it ricocheted backwards and it clocked him in the jaw and he saw a nail shoot across the room and bury in the wall across from him. But he had this like injury on his chin, and it really hurt. He had jaw pain and tooth pain. He had a headache, but he went home after work, hung out with his wife, ate dinner. He had this headache and this toothache for six days at the end of six days, he said, his wife, you know, I'm going to get this toothache checked out and he went to the dentist and the good dentist did a scan of the gentleman's jaw and face, and much to both men's surprise, they discovered a four inch nail embedded in his face. That's right. There was a four inch nail embedded in his face, protruding into his brain for seven entire day at this point, seven days. Right. Because six days have gone by where he's like, man, right, that eating cereal hurts. I should probably have somebody look at this. That's right now. Minimal pain, maximal damage. No one would argue that that's very significant and dangerous, but pain stayed very low. How did that happen? His brain? Again, his danger detector used all available information to determine whether or not to make pain and how much. So it used the visual of the nail shooting across the room into the wall, and because his brain believed his body was safe. It did not make sufficient pain to protect him. Thank God, there was some pain from where that thing backfired. Yeah, but just to say just to say pain or hurt is not the same as harm or damage to the body. They are not the same. And the mistake we make in Western medicine is assuming that pain means the body is in danger. And that's why when we have chronic pain, we stay inside and stop doing all the things. It's the reason why we have 4200 surgeries because we think we assume that there's something dangerous happening with the body. And I will say with back pain, hundreds of studies have come out showing that when you take scans of normal people's backs who do not have back. Pain, they look just as bad or worse as people who do have back pain and have these wonky looking scans with bulging discs and all the language, that sounds so terrifying. The studies are up on my website. I have a nerdy website with all this pain research, softness dot com. It's just my last name will link it in the show notes, of course. So if people want to read these papers, they're up there on back pain. So I want to say again, you might get messages that there is damage or structural stuff going wrong with your body. And yes, that of course, can be true. No one's saying that isn't true. But long term back pain is not necessarily chronic. Back pain is not necessarily a sign that your back is in danger of harm. It does not necessarily mean that you need surgery. There is something in medicine called failed back surgery syndrome, failed back surgery syndrome. You got it, sir. Wow, how interesting. It tells us that back surgeries often fail for pain. I think the statistic is like surgery for back pain is only successful 20 percent of the time or something like that. It's because we're not treating pain as a bio psychosocial problem. We're not looking at the whole pain recipe. We're only looking at the bio domain of pain. And by the way, if we're only looking at the bio domain of pain, we are missing two thirds of the pain problem, right? Yes, exactly. I was going to say, you're treating one third of the problem. Of course, you're going to have two thirds of the pain at least still left over. You got it. So we really want to treat back pain and we have to do the things that nobody wants to do. We have to talk about your past trauma. Trauma lives with chronic pain up to 80 percent of the time. That is not a coincidence because trauma also sensitizes the brain. Trauma sensitizes the brain. If trauma makes the brain more sensitive, literally what that means is it's going to amplify any potential danger message from the body. So we want to look at past trauma. We want to talk about your toxic relationships and the divorce you're going through. We want to talk about the fact that your parents are dying. We want to talk about your history of illness. We want to talk about how you got fired and how there's economic stress. We want to talk all about what just happened in the last two years with the pandemic and how anxious you've been because anxiety amplifies pain. If we really want to treat pain, we have to talk about all the hard things. And I know that's bad news, and I know that listeners will think I'm saying it's all in your head. It's all psychological. I am not saying that. I'm saying that in the human body, all of the things are connected. All of the time the brain is connected to the body, 100 percent of the time. That's just how humans work. I know we're running short on time, so I want to do some quick ones and then we can go longer if you have time. It's so funny to hear that you think you called this public speaking anxiety. Nobody listens to this podcast. You have nothing to worry about. I think it's funny that you consider this to be public speaking like I'm the only one here, right? So I have during the last two years, I was like, I need to get pain education out into the universe. And I wrote this book and it had no marketing budget, and I'm like, I need to tell people that I wrote a pain management book because no one can afford what I do. So how do I do that? I reach out to people who have really rad and awesome platforms. If no one's listening to this podcast, and we should just turn this off right now, let's just let's just go, OK? Nobody's listening. But this is public speaking anxiety, Dr. Harbinger, because I have in my mind this awareness that people might listen. Yes, it makes me very nervous and sweaty. You can't tell, but I am sweaty right now, and I'm talking fast because I am nervous when we say emotions manifest physiologically. That's a perfect example sweating and talking fast. But I am really moved by this message. And again, I have kids and adults who have been in bed for four years and they get out of bed and they go back to life and they get asked to prom by two pretty girls. And this s**t works and everyone deserves to understand pain. We've all been lied to for the last bazillion years, but the neuroscience is out there. It exists in the literature, so nothing frustrates me more than watching the way we continue to treat pain. Why do I feel pain when I see other people get hurt or embarrassed? Because in your brain you have a really cool thing called mirror neurons. And it's actually adaptive for humans to react to other people's emotions. I'll tell you why. Back in the day, of course, we were hunters and we would be hunting animals. But guess what? Animals also were hunting us. So if there was a lion approaching and you saw people running and screaming, you have a couple of options, you can either sit down and think, Hmm, I wonder what I should do in this situation. It seems people are fleeing for their lives. Here's my menu of responses or your mirror neurons can just mirror or mimic the response of people around you. So you've noticed probably that if people around you are panicking, you feel panic. Even if you look around and you're like, Why am I panicking? That happened during the pandemic. Anxiety contagion in the last two years was absolutely insane. So mirror neurons in your brain will mirror the emotions of people around you. It's called emotion, contagion or anxiety contagion. And that's real. And by the way, empathic pain or sympathy pain is also real for the same reason you will. People, sometimes physically. The pain of people that you love, and by the way, I am in the wrong profession because I feel S.L., you're so sensitive, I am sensitive and I feel a lot of my patients pain like I sometimes work with kids who are amputees. And then I can't function for a few days because I just absorb that and have to become better at that. But it's not a bad thing. It also makes me better at what I do. I was going to say, it makes you awesome at your job. Imagine if you were just like, Oh, your phantom limb hurts. Come on you crazy little munchkin. That's not real. Munchkin is worse than ghetto. I'll just because I was trying to avoid saying kiddo, and I just made it worse. Why do I rub my knee when I crack it against a table? And why does that actually work? There is a really cool theory of pain from many years ago, called the gate control theory of Pain Mel and and 1965 one a pain neuroscientist and one the first ever pain psychologist. And they forever revolutionized pain, medicine and everything we know about pain today has grown out of the gate control theory of pain. And what they showed is there's a lot of things that can gait or change pain value. Many things can do it. So it turns out that, like you said, when you bash your head or bash your knee. One of the first things that you instinctively do is you reach to touch it or rub it. And the reason for that is because you have very, very skinny pathways connecting your knee up to your spinal cord up to your brain. That code for the sensory messages that tell your brain that something bad has happened, that maybe it needs to make pain. You also have very fat or thick pathways leading from your knee up to your spinal cord up to your brain. That code for touch and touch messages get up to the brain faster than sensory messages from the body that code for possible pain. So touch reaches the brain faster in the spinal cord faster. So what it does is if you touch your knee, that message gets up to the spinal cord quicker and it closes the gate and it prevents that pain message from getting up to the brain. So it gets it. So touch will actually lower pain volume. And by the way, there's a million things that will gait or control the experience of pain touches one of them. Positive emotions is another social support is another treating trauma is another, but touch is one of them. So massage really helps. There's something called a tens machine that will vibrate on the part of you that hurts. That is effective for pain. A lot of things my wife used that when she was giving birth to tens machine, it really helped. A lot of those muscles are just like going through some serious stuff and that you turn this thing up a little and it's like, Oh, this is pulling in another place. That's right. Instead of. That's exactly right. So touch interrupts the pain messages that are trying to get up to the spinal cord and brain. You've mentioned social pain a few times. So that's similar to physical pain in that there are all types of pain. And I've always wondered if the types of pain are similar. If it's just like pain is pain when you've answered that here on the show. But does that mean that I can, like take a Tylenol for not getting invited to prom? Hypothetically, of course, the answer is a complicated one, and I love your question. Yes, there are studies that show that things like Tylenol and other pain relievers will treat the pain of a broken heart or the pain of social rejection and ostracization. It's pretty wild because again, the parts of the brain that process physical pain are the parts of the brain that process emotional pain because pain is both physical and emotional 100 percent of the time. So yes, there have been studies that show that emotional pain can also hurt physically, which shocks no one if anyone has ever had a broken heart. You tell me that you didn't have chest pain or that your body didn't hurt. We all know that social and emotional pain also can hurt physically because again, as we said at the beginning, emotions don't just live in your head, they also come out in your body. So because those two things are connected, by the way, is why opioids are so magical for pain, because opioids also alleviate anxiety and depression and the trauma of past traumas. Opioids knock out everything. It's why they're so addictive and why we don't use them for chronic pain, or we shouldn't use them for chronic pain. And again, I am not anti opioids. Opioids are great for acute pain, but what research shows for long term chronic opioid use, by the way, and a lot of people who have been taking these for years don't know this is that they sensitize the brain to pain over time. I can get a lot of trouble for talking about opioids, so I I want to say this carefully. I am not in favor of ripping opioids out of the hands of people living with chronic pain because they haven't been given other options. But there are ways of ethically tapering and giving people replacement tools to manage pain. But I do think it's critical for people to know that opioids are very powerful medication because they target not only physical pain, but emotional pain too, and that over time they make the brain more sense that. So again, small sensory messages from the body are going to feel even more terrible to you if you've been on long term opioids, so we are actually harming, we are harming our pain patients or hurting them, right? We've been taught that medication is the only answer. And like you said before, a big pharma hoodwinked us by convincing us that all of it is a chemical issue that can only be solved by other chemicals, which is not the case at all. In the sense, opioids actually making our brain more sensitive to pain totally makes sense because of course, when you try and get off them, you're just like, Well, wait a minute, everything sucks even more than I remember it sucking before. Of course, I'm not going to quit this like it was bad enough to make me go on this before. And now that I'm taking a break, it's twice as bad. Screw this, I'm going back in the hole, right? Like, I totally get that. That makes complete sense. But people in pain have just been screwed because, first of all, nine times out of 10 or more than that, their doctors actually haven't been trained in this bio psychosocial neuroscience. It's not their fault. We have a flaw in our educational programs like doctors, by the way. Thank God for doctors. It's like everyone just wants to help. Everyone just wants to heal. It's not like some malicious, terrible thing. I mean, Big Pharma is pretty malicious. That's just all like money focused crap. Doctors want to heal, but the patients haven't been told. They weren't told upfront that their pain is bio psychosocial and therefore requires a bio psychosocial treatment, including cognitive behavioral therapy and biofeedback and dealing with trauma and all these other things. And they were told the opposite. They were told their pain is purely biomedical and therefore requires just pills and procedures. It's not their fault, either. It's just this is the cycle we're trying to break. This is the system we're trying to fix. This is why you and I are doing this thing today. Who doesn't deserve to understand how pain works? What about people who like super spicy food? You know, what's the deal with those freaks that love just crazy heat and they're inhaling this like crazy hot ramen that would give me blisters? What's going on there? Yeah. Turns out that people can desensitize to things like heat as well. So you have sensors on your tongue, of course, that correspond to sensors in your brain over time. Gradually, with small bits of sensory input, your brain desensitizes so you could become desensitized also to really hot, spicy food if you wanted to. It's sort of like what we do with chronic pain, sort of the metaphor I gave before opening the blinds slowly one at a time. We would do that with spicy foods, and you would start with just a little bit and then you would increase the spice and you would just increase the spice. And yeah, people love it also. Yeah, listen. By the way, I should say there are people who love pain. Yeah, I was going to say, What about kinky stuff, man, like the people who are into, you know, asking for a friend? Yeah. Toad, of course you're asking for a friend. That is totally normal. It is not weird. It is not weird. Because again, when we talk about pain, context matters. If you're with a partner you like and trust and you want them to do a thing. It will feel good in that context. It wouldn't feel good if a stranger on the street grabbed you by the hair and slapped you across the face. But like, if you like an apple, if you like that in bed with a trusted partner, it's going to feel differently to your brain. Your brain is going to interpret that sensory input differently, depending on context. That's a perfect example of white social context, and your emotional state matters a lot. So again, it's not weird to enjoy things that can be painful in other contexts because in certain contexts, they can be pleasurable and exciting. And again, that's just further proof to all of us that all pain is bio psychosocial all the time, and that your brain uses all available input when it decides whether or not to make pain. I know there are lots of practical is in the workbook I checked some of it out definitely seems like something that if you have pain or somebody you know has pain, this is well worth the purchase. We'll link to the book in the show notes. But if you cannot afford the book, email me and I will buy it for you and I will send it to you. Because I think a lot of people who are in this situation might also not have a lot of disposable income or the person won't buy it because they're like, nothing works. Stop talking to me about this. I hate every second of thinking about it and you'd want me to send it to them. I will pay for it using the ad revenue from this episode. Has anyone ever wept on your podcast before? That was the overwhelmingly kind. I don't even know what to say. It would be what is it? 20 bucks? It's got to be 20. Something like it's 20 bucks. Well, can you imagine that somebody's life is changed by 20 bucks? Jordan, you're my new hero. I like officially, you're my new hero. That was so rad. That was so rad. I'm going to talk about this for like years. I want to tell you, I get messages. Sometimes I post them. Sometimes I sit around and read my social media and I get these messages that just make me. They bowl me over like, I'm sure I've had pain for 40 years. And finally, my pain is changing for the first time. Or like, I have hope or, you know, my body is changing for the first time. I cannot tell you like the response to this work has. Just bowled me over, like you can tell, I'm passionate about it, I believe in it. I have had pain as an adult. Also like it has changed my life too. But when I read these messages, it's just like, I mean, we are starting a revolution. There's no way around it. We are going to change pain medicine and thank you for helping me do that and for believing in this resource. That means a lot. It's my pleasure. This conversation has really been super fascinating, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. We've got a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB spy who posed as an American in a truer than life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control. So a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules. How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that? They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past to call back an agent. And as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets, and then one day they sent one of their resident agents and he said to me, You've got to come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. And tell us how you got caught because this story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past. I was stopped on the other side of Toll Gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration and could you step out of the car? I step out of the car still not having a clue what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Somebody approaching me from the back. Fellow introduced himself as Joe Riley FBI, and he showed me his badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked. Am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, What took you so long? For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that, check out episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. I learned so much about pain from Dr. Rachel Z. There's a lot in her workbook as well, something called the pain voice. Basically, it's a voice that tells us that pain is never going to go away. She'll teach us how to recognize that voice. The pain voice doesn't want to be out of a job. We got to catch it. Check it. Change it. You can't identify with it and let it become your reality or let it become you. Write the pain. Voice thinks it's protecting you. But it's really just causing you to identify with the pain. And there is a lot of questions like this in the book. There's a lot of techniques in the book as well. And remember, this isn't as simple as thinking the pain away or being like Dr. Spock and saying, I refuse to feel the emotions of the feelings of the pain. This is real stuff. I am serious about buying the workbook for people who need it but cannot afford it. All you need to do is reach out and say the word. I think if I could help somebody get rid of or manage their pain. It's just the best money I've ever spent, frankly. Big thank you to Dr. Rachel Z. Again, the book is linked in the show notes links to everything. Always in the show notes that Jordan Harbinger. Com Please use website links if you do buy the books from the guests. It does help support the show and it lets me by other books for people who need them than can afford them. That's what I use a lot of that money for. Transcripts are in the show notes videos are on YouTube advertisers deals and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger Akam Slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using software systems and tiny habits. The same stuff I use every single day, folks. It's our six minute networking course. The course is free. It's at Jordan Harbinger. RT.com Course. Dig that well before you get thirsty, and most of the guests you hear on the show subscribe and contribute to the same course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. And if you know someone who is dealing with pain, this is a great episode to share with them, and I will happily get them this book if they need it. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time.

Past Episodes

The Jordan Harbinger Show
1115: Schizophrenic Spite Dims Golden Years' Light | Feedback Friday

What happens when your parents' peaceful retirement plan collides with a neighbor's deteriorating grip on reality? Find out here on Feedback Friday!

And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!

On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss:

  • Your elderly parents bought their dream retirement home to be closer to their grandchild, but their next-door neighbor's increasingly erratic behavior has turned their golden years into a nightmare of harassment and intimidation. How do you protect your parents without making things worse?
  • You're in a prestigious high school choir group and your teacher is crossing boundaries — encouraging dating drama, trash-talking students, and making inappropriate requests. The situation keeps escalating, but you're worried about speaking up. What should you do?
  • After divorcing your unfaithful ex who subsequently made a string of chaotic life choices, you're faced with a moral dilemma about enforcing court-ordered child support payments that could leave her homeless. Is revenge worth the collateral damage?
  • You're trying to negotiate better pay for entry-level positions while juggling college, but employers seem resistant to standard negotiation tactics. Is there a secret playbook for when you're starting from zero?
  • Recommendation of the Week: The Fidelity Debit Card
  • You recently had a baby and got scammed by fake buyers who came to your home to "purchase" your photography equipment. Though you got an unexpected resolution, you're haunted by shame and self-doubt. Why do victims often blame themselves?
  • Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
  • Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1115

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence

Psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia discusses the hidden psychology of modern tech addiction and shares evidence-based strategies for breaking free!

What We Discuss with Dr. Alok Kanojia:

  • Digital addiction, particularly to pornography, has reached unprecedented levels (49-75% self-reported addiction rates), largely due to technology's ability to hijack multiple brain circuits simultaneously.
  • Trauma creates hypervigilance through the brain's survival mechanisms, which weigh negative experiences more heavily than positive ones. This explains why one bad experience can override many good ones.
  • Mental illness is increasing partly due to better diagnosis, but also because modern technology and social media distort our sense of self and relationship with reality, particularly through filtered images and curated content.
  • Traditional therapy approaches may not work for everyone, especially men, as the field has inherent biases toward verbal processing. Alternative approaches like exercise, body-focused work, or other methodologies can be equally effective.
  • You can rewire your brain and change who you are by first accepting your authentic self and desires, then building positive habits around them. Start by asking "Do I wish I were someone who wanted to change?" rather than forcing change through willpower alone. Small, consistent steps toward your genuine goals lead to lasting transformation.
  • And much more...

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1114

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1113: You Just Want to Hike, Not Revisit Third Reich | Feedback Friday

Your hiking group's newest member has killer calves and concerning ideologies. Should you hit the trail or fight for higher ground? Welcome to Feedback Friday!

And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!

On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss:

  • You joined a hiking group after your divorce to focus on personal growth and make new friends. Everything was going great until a charismatic, physically impressive guy showed up spouting fascist ideologies and making disturbing comments about weaponizing drones. The worst part? Everyone else seems captivated by him. What's your next move when you're the only one seeing red flags?
  • Living 14 hours from family in a foreign country, you're struggling with your husband's ongoing pattern of deception, from emotional affairs to secret drinking while on antidepressants. With a six-year-old daughter and limited professional options, you're torn between love, fear, and dignity. How do you find your way through this maze of betrayal when you have no support system?
  • You're a single woman implementing networking strategies in the conservative South, but there's an unexpected cultural hurdle: people find it "suspicious" when unmarried women contact married men professionally. How do you build crucial business relationships without triggering social landmines?
  • Something's fishy in your California condo complex: managers seemingly getting paid under the table, maintenance staff double-dipping, and board members possibly involved in the scheme. You suspect corruption but fear retaliation. How do you expose potential fraud without becoming a target?
  • Recommendation of the Week: Blue-Light-Blocking Book Light
  • Your adventurous friend just booked a trip to Afghanistan, brushing off your concerns about the risks to foreign women travelers. Despite your attempts to share information about the dangers, she won't even listen to relevant podcast episodes. How do you protect someone determined to venture into a geopolitical hornets' nest without proper preparation?
  • Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
  • Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1113

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1112: Jay Dobyns | Undercover with the Hells Angels Part Two

How did former ATF agent Jay Dobyns spend years undercover with the Hells Angels and live to tell the tale? Listen to this two-parter to find out! [Pt. 2/2 — find Pt. 1/2 here!]

What We Discuss with Jay Dobyns:

  • The Hells Angels maintain an extensive rulebook that governs members' behavior, with strict hierarchies and protocols. Breaking these rules can result in severe consequences, demonstrating how the organization operates more like a structured criminal enterprise than just a motorcycle club.
  • Many Hells Angels members live in stark contrast to the glamorized Hollywood image of biker gangs. While some members are affluent, others live in extreme poverty, and children in these environments often face severely challenging circumstances.
  • Undercover agents cannot use drugs or engage in certain criminal activities — even if it would make their cover more convincing — as this would compromise their credibility as witnesses and violate laws they're meant to uphold.
  • The emotional toll of undercover work had a severe impact on Jay's family life. His son would give him rocks as protection talismans, revealing how even young children understand the dangers their undercover parent faces.
  • Successfully compartmentalizing undercover work from personal life is a crucial skill that requires conscious effort and practice. This can be developed by implementing clear boundaries, as Jay's wife suggested with the "dimmer switch" concept — learning to dial down the intensity when returning home and being present with family.
  • This is the second half of a two-part episode. Find part one here!

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1112

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1111: Jay Dobyns | Undercover with the Hells Angels Part One

How did former ATF agent Jay Dobyns spend years undercover with the Hells Angels and live to tell the tale? Listen to this two-parter to find out! [Pt. 1/2]

What We Discuss with Jay Dobyns:

  • Jay Dobyns was shot and nearly killed just four days into his ATF career, but rather than quitting, he used this experience to build credibility and learn valuable lessons about how quickly situations can turn violent in law enforcement.
  • The ATF's undercover program was considered elite among law enforcement agencies, with ATF agents being particularly skilled at getting "down in the weeds" of criminal investigations due to their backgrounds in local law enforcement rather than specialized fields.
  • Jay explains that successful undercover work is like being a salesman where "the product is me" — it requires building genuine trust and relationships while knowing you'll eventually have to betray that trust, making it psychologically challenging work.
  • To establish credibility in criminal circles, Jay and his team would create elaborate "street theater" — staged criminal scenarios with other undercover agents that allowed suspects to witness what appeared to be real criminal activity rather than just hearing stories about it.
  • Here, we learn how complex and sophisticated undercover work can be, highlighting valuable lessons about building trust and credibility through actions rather than words — and there's much more to come in part two later this week!
  • And much more — be sure to hear the second half of this conversation here later this week!

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1111

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1110: Can True Love Last In Shadow of Dad's Dark Past? | Feedback Friday

Finding love in midlife with a baby on the way seems like a miracle, but your father's dark past threatens to eclipse it all. It's Feedback Friday!

And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!

On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss:

  • You've found true love in midlife and have been blessed with a baby on the way, but there's a dark family secret lurking in the shadows ? your father's abuse of your sisters decades ago. Now you're torn between protecting their story and being honest with your partner. Can you find safe passage through this minefield of trust and trauma?
  • You're the new kid at a utility company where everyone's old enough to remember the Carter administration. They call you "little boy" and move at glacial speed, but the pension is golden. How do you bridge this generational grand canyon without losing your sanity?
  • Two passionate readers weigh in on AI with opposing views ? one concerned about the environmental impact of our chatty digital friends, another warning about cognitive dependence. Join this fascinating debate about the true cost of convenience.
  • You're in love with someone half your age, you're both on the autism spectrum, but her mother's controlling behavior feels straight out of a Gothic novel ? 8 p.m. curfews and confiscated phones included. Did we mention you're married? Oh, boy, how does this tale unfold?
  • Recommendation of the Week: Chia Seed Pudding 
  • Your corporate IT job pays the bills but feeds your soul about as well as a cardboard sandwich. At 35, with a family to support, you're wondering if it's too late to chase meaningful work. Is stability worth the daily dose of misery?
  • Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
  • Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1110

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here ? even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking ? our free networking and relationship development mini course ? at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1109: Michael Israetel | Fitness Myths and Science-Based Solutions

Is diet soda bad? Do muscles vanish when you stop lifting? Dr. Michael Israetel, bodybuilding professor and fitness expert, answers these questions and more!

What We Discuss with Michael Israetel:

  • Common beliefs about artificial sweeteners and diet sodas being inherently harmful are largely unfounded. According to Dr. Israetel, there's no scientific evidence supporting that diet sodas are bad for health when examining both empirical literature and mechanistic studies.
  • Muscle dysmorphia in men is a real issue, though not as prevalent as body image issues in women. It can lead to unhealthy obsessions with appearance and potentially dangerous behaviors, especially when combined with social media pressure and unrealistic comparisons.
  • "Muscle memory" is a real physiological phenomenon based on satellite cell nuclei that remain in muscle tissue even after losing muscle mass. These nuclei never leave once created, making it easier to regain lost muscle even years later.
  • You can't outrun a poor diet with exercise — the body is extremely efficient at conserving energy, making it much harder to burn off excess calories through exercise than it is to simply not consume them in the first place.
  • The key to sustainable fitness is implementing "cleanup phases" rather than extreme dieting. You can maintain a healthy weight by following normal, balanced eating habits most of the time, then doing 3-4 week periods of stricter eating when needed to reset. This approach allows you to enjoy life while staying fit, rather than constantly restricting yourself.
  • And much more...

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1109

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1108: Sound Healing | Skeptical Sunday

Are sound healers hitting the right note, or just making noise? Maddox joins us to investigate frequencies, facts, and fallacies on this Skeptical Sunday!

Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by Maddox, the blogger behind The Best Page in the Universe and bestselling author of The Alphabet Of Manliness, I Am Better Than Your Kids, and F*ck Whales: Also Families, Poetry, Folksy Wisdom and You!

On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:

  • Sound healing's purported benefits lack strong scientific evidence. While some studies show modest stress reduction benefits from sound meditation, claims about treating serious medical conditions are unfounded.
  • Sound and vibration can actually cause physical harm. Research has documented damage to nerves, circulation, and other systems from certain frequencies and prolonged exposure.
  • Many sound healing practitioners mix legitimate scientific concepts with pseudoscientific claims, often misquoting scientists like Einstein and making unsubstantiated statements about quantum physics and cellular vibrations.
  • The lack of regulation in sound healing is concerning, particularly given potential risks to vulnerable populations like pregnant women and children. The FDA only provides general guidance on "complementary and alternative medicine."
  • Sound healing can be beneficial when used appropriately as a relaxation tool. Research shows it may help reduce stress and anxiety when combined with meditation. Those interested can try sound meditation classes or sound baths, while maintaining realistic expectations about benefits and continuing any prescribed medical treatments.
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at jordan@jordanharbinger.com and let him know!
  • Connect with Maddox at The Best Page in the Universe and pick up one of his books!

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1108

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1107: Ballet Date with a Geopolitical Incel Mate | Feedback Friday

Your fascist colleague thinks clubs turn people gay but loves male ballet dancers. Sometimes the closet has geopolitical dimensions. It's Feedback Friday!

And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!

On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss:

  • You're a PhD student who befriended a peculiar new colleague with a penchant for authoritarianism, homophobia, and ballet. He's confiding increasingly concerning political views, showing up in clouds of cologne, and taking you on what might be accidental dates. Can you guide him toward compassionate self-acceptance, or is this a lost cause?
  • Your neighbors are living like chaos incarnate — their yard's a tribute to entropy, their unmuffled car sounds like a dragon with indigestion, and there might be a whole rat civilization developing under their porch. The police can't help, and your three-year-old keeps getting woken up. What's your next move?
  • 20 years ago, your alcoholic father's infidelity led to your mother's tragic end. Now he's remarried to someone younger than you, and you're caught in an exhausting cycle of guilt, obligation, and resentment. Is it time to break free from this emotional tornado?
  • Recommendation of the Week: Mixbook
  • You're a teenage tech prodigy who landed a dream gig with a Forbes 30-Under-30 founder and a popular YouTuber. But four months after delivering stellar work, they've gone radio silent. The prototype's gathering dust, meetings keep getting canceled, and your professional relationships are hanging in the balance. How do you light a fire under success?
  • Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
  • Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1107

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1116: Fake Foods | Skeptical Sunday

From food deserts to ultra-processed flavor deception, Jessica Wynn maps out America's nutritional divide and corporate food games on Skeptical Sunday!

Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by Jessica Wynn!

On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss:

  • Imagine your body as an ancient supercomputer, humming along with software that's been fine-tuned over millions of years. Then suddenly, ultra-processed foods show up like a sketchy software update, introducing code your system never evolved to handle. The result? Your internal operating system goes haywire, consuming 500 extra calories daily even when the nutritional "specs" look identical on paper.
  • Remember that Italian restaurant scene in Goodfellas? Well, the real food mafia (yes, the actual "Agromafia") is less about fancy dinners and more about fancy fraud. They're orchestrating a culinary shell game where your exotic $35 "Chilean Sea Bass" is actually $7 Costco tilapia in disguise, and your "extra virgin" olive oil might have a considerably less virtuous past.
  • That plant-based burger patty might be wearing a hemp necklace and preaching about sustainability, but underneath its eco-friendly costume lurks an ultra-processed food wolf in sheep's clothing. It's the dietary equivalent of greenwashing — solving one problem while potentially creating a lab full of new ones.
  • Picture 40 million Americans living in food deserts — urban landscapes where fresh produce is as rare as a unicorn sighting. These nutritional wastelands force folks to survive on a diet of convenience store cuisine, creating a tragic cycle where the most affordable food options are often the ones most likely to compromise health. It's a modern-day dietary dystopia.
  • Here's the silver lining, food adventurers! Think of your grocery store as a game board: The real treasures are hidden along the perimeter — that's where the fresh produce, meats, and dairy hang out like nutritional VIPs. Stick to the edges, and you'll dodge the ultra-processed center like a dietary ninja. Want to level up? Grind your own coffee beans, befriend your local farmers market vendors, and remember: every whole food purchase is a vote for a healthier food system.
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at jordan@jordanharbinger.com and let him know!
  • Connect with Jessica Wynn at Instagram and Threads, and subscribe to her newsletter: Between the Lines!

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1116

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1115: Schizophrenic Spite Dims Golden Years' Light | Feedback Friday

What happens when your parents' peaceful retirement plan collides with a neighbor's deteriorating grip on reality? Find out here on Feedback Friday!

And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!

On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss:

  • Your elderly parents bought their dream retirement home to be closer to their grandchild, but their next-door neighbor's increasingly erratic behavior has turned their golden years into a nightmare of harassment and intimidation. How do you protect your parents without making things worse?
  • You're in a prestigious high school choir group and your teacher is crossing boundaries — encouraging dating drama, trash-talking students, and making inappropriate requests. The situation keeps escalating, but you're worried about speaking up. What should you do?
  • After divorcing your unfaithful ex who subsequently made a string of chaotic life choices, you're faced with a moral dilemma about enforcing court-ordered child support payments that could leave her homeless. Is revenge worth the collateral damage?
  • You're trying to negotiate better pay for entry-level positions while juggling college, but employers seem resistant to standard negotiation tactics. Is there a secret playbook for when you're starting from zero?
  • Recommendation of the Week: The Fidelity Debit Card
  • You recently had a baby and got scammed by fake buyers who came to your home to "purchase" your photography equipment. Though you got an unexpected resolution, you're haunted by shame and self-doubt. Why do victims often blame themselves?
  • Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
  • Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1115

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence

Psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia discusses the hidden psychology of modern tech addiction and shares evidence-based strategies for breaking free!

What We Discuss with Dr. Alok Kanojia:

  • Digital addiction, particularly to pornography, has reached unprecedented levels (49-75% self-reported addiction rates), largely due to technology's ability to hijack multiple brain circuits simultaneously.
  • Trauma creates hypervigilance through the brain's survival mechanisms, which weigh negative experiences more heavily than positive ones. This explains why one bad experience can override many good ones.
  • Mental illness is increasing partly due to better diagnosis, but also because modern technology and social media distort our sense of self and relationship with reality, particularly through filtered images and curated content.
  • Traditional therapy approaches may not work for everyone, especially men, as the field has inherent biases toward verbal processing. Alternative approaches like exercise, body-focused work, or other methodologies can be equally effective.
  • You can rewire your brain and change who you are by first accepting your authentic self and desires, then building positive habits around them. Start by asking "Do I wish I were someone who wanted to change?" rather than forcing change through willpower alone. Small, consistent steps toward your genuine goals lead to lasting transformation.
  • And much more...

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1114

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1113: You Just Want to Hike, Not Revisit Third Reich | Feedback Friday

Your hiking group's newest member has killer calves and concerning ideologies. Should you hit the trail or fight for higher ground? Welcome to Feedback Friday!

And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!

On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss:

  • You joined a hiking group after your divorce to focus on personal growth and make new friends. Everything was going great until a charismatic, physically impressive guy showed up spouting fascist ideologies and making disturbing comments about weaponizing drones. The worst part? Everyone else seems captivated by him. What's your next move when you're the only one seeing red flags?
  • Living 14 hours from family in a foreign country, you're struggling with your husband's ongoing pattern of deception, from emotional affairs to secret drinking while on antidepressants. With a six-year-old daughter and limited professional options, you're torn between love, fear, and dignity. How do you find your way through this maze of betrayal when you have no support system?
  • You're a single woman implementing networking strategies in the conservative South, but there's an unexpected cultural hurdle: people find it "suspicious" when unmarried women contact married men professionally. How do you build crucial business relationships without triggering social landmines?
  • Something's fishy in your California condo complex: managers seemingly getting paid under the table, maintenance staff double-dipping, and board members possibly involved in the scheme. You suspect corruption but fear retaliation. How do you expose potential fraud without becoming a target?
  • Recommendation of the Week: Blue-Light-Blocking Book Light
  • Your adventurous friend just booked a trip to Afghanistan, brushing off your concerns about the risks to foreign women travelers. Despite your attempts to share information about the dangers, she won't even listen to relevant podcast episodes. How do you protect someone determined to venture into a geopolitical hornets' nest without proper preparation?
  • Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!
  • Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
  • Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1113

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



The Jordan Harbinger Show
1112: Jay Dobyns | Undercover with the Hells Angels Part Two

How did former ATF agent Jay Dobyns spend years undercover with the Hells Angels and live to tell the tale? Listen to this two-parter to find out! [Pt. 2/2 — find Pt. 1/2 here!]

What We Discuss with Jay Dobyns:

  • The Hells Angels maintain an extensive rulebook that governs members' behavior, with strict hierarchies and protocols. Breaking these rules can result in severe consequences, demonstrating how the organization operates more like a structured criminal enterprise than just a motorcycle club.
  • Many Hells Angels members live in stark contrast to the glamorized Hollywood image of biker gangs. While some members are affluent, others live in extreme poverty, and children in these environments often face severely challenging circumstances.
  • Undercover agents cannot use drugs or engage in certain criminal activities — even if it would make their cover more convincing — as this would compromise their credibility as witnesses and violate laws they're meant to uphold.
  • The emotional toll of undercover work had a severe impact on Jay's family life. His son would give him rocks as protection talismans, revealing how even young children understand the dangers their undercover parent faces.
  • Successfully compartmentalizing undercover work from personal life is a crucial skill that requires conscious effort and practice. This can be developed by implementing clear boundaries, as Jay's wife suggested with the "dimmer switch" concept — learning to dial down the intensity when returning home and being present with family.
  • This is the second half of a two-part episode. Find part one here!

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1112

And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals

Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!

Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!

Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!



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