Jordan Harbinger: Podcasting techniques, surviving a kidnapping in Mexico, and fighting disinformation through interviews

see a wisdom podcast with Jordan Harbinger himself you guys probably know him the Jordan Harbinger shop he's the host of that George can you introduce yourself real quick sure yeah so I host the Jordan Harbinger show he's hosted another podcast for 11 years before that and it's I just really loved podcasting early got in early had sort of first to Market advantage in many ways which was

great and um I I just loved it you know and I still do so I host the Jordan Harbinger show I interview everybody from cult leaders or cult victims to criminals to athletes to authors performers celebrities whatever just follow my own interests and have conversations it's a pretty good gig is it fair to say that it's always hard to get a podcast started like how do you

make a good intro I don't think I made a good job at introducing you how do you do that on your side yeah I don't really introduce the guest as much as I tell people why I'm interested in the guests that's a that's a good question because a lot of people will say oh how do I introduce you and then a lot of other shows they'll just read someone's bio and it's like okay that does a good job of introducing the guest but I don't really know why I should be interested in that person you know even if you're like did Tom won a Nobel Prize in physics and he teaches at Harvard it's like okay that's amazing but why do I care I like yes I should be interested in amazing people in general

but do I really care I mean I already know people like that exist so what do I care but so I start by saying I got interested in this guy because he talks about the crime on the high seas and the reason he knows about crime on the high seas is because he lived on a boat that chased slave ships or whatever you know like something like that and then people are like wow that sounds really interesting and then it doesn't matter if you want to like NYU for journalism school you know nobody gives a crap right I guess it's like get to Value as quick as possible you can give people all the credentials that they have but as soon as they start speaking they start being interested being interesting I do think that

this is when the The Authority kicks in how do you get your guests warmed up so that they get to the value as quick as possible uh I don't ask a lot I don't bury the lead that's an old journalism Trope where a lot of times you notice they can podcasts they'll be an hour in and then they're going over credentials and backstory and little miscellaneous adventures

and I sometimes do that occasionally as long as they're really really interesting little tidbits but a lot of people will have a really long conversation and I noticed this was some some of the trending in podcasting now is like having a four-hour show and I barely ever make it through one of those almost never and the reason is because if they had prepped the conversation and they

knew what was actually interesting it could have probably been a 45 to 90 minute show Max but since the host doesn't prep and or doesn't understand what's interesting there's 45 to 90 minutes of content in a four hour conversation it's completely ridiculous and it disrespects the the the viewer slash listeners time and I can't help but think that the people who make it through those shows are

just like chronically unemployed and Stoners or something and so I think to get the guest interested or sorry to get the guess interesting I try to say I start off with a bang so I say something like so you lived in a cult that kidnapped people and forced them to become members how did you get started in that were you kidnapped yourself or whatever and then it's

like I'm not saying like oh so you grew up in Minnesota what was that like nobody cares they might care after you find out that they were kidnapped lived in a cult joined the military you know like then you might care but before that I don't care that somebody grew up in Minnesota right that's chronological who who cares so you have to give people a reason to

care so I start the show off with like tell us almost like the most interesting thing about you and then I slowly unpack it from there all right so for Jordan that's somewhat easy I'm in Oaxaca Mexico right now you've been kidnapped uh in Mexico tell us about that one yeah so I this is a long time ago I'm 43 now so I was 20 when this happened but I got into a taxi I lived in Mexico City I lived in the like the hood so I lived in among a lot of kind of people that were not well off there were no there was no public transport there was only these like spray painted school buses that have like a mural of Mariah Carey on the side or whatever and you pay him like

a dollar 10 pesos whatever to go where you're going and I got it I saw a taxi and I was like oh great I'm going out with my friends let me flag down this taxi so I get in the car and I noticed that we're driving away from the center of town because Mexico City is shaped like a bowl and if you're going down towards the bottom of the bowl you're going towards the presidential Palace if you're going up higher you're going more towards like the Barrios or like underdeveloped area so you know where you're going even if you don't know where you are in Mexico City and this driver was driving me up and set it down and I was like hey what's going on so finally and this is thankfully in before the

age of mobile phones so I'm not scrolling Instagram distracted I'm looking out the window I'm like hey where are we going oh uh I thought okay if he says there's an accident then I know we're going around it but he's and if he says there's traffic I could see if there's traffic or not he goes there's traffic I'm like well there's not really traffic and I was

like well that's a weird thing to say because that doesn't make a ton of sense and I was like so where are we going how are we getting around and he's like oh I'm actually going to ask for directions and that was super suspicious right because I'm going to the center of Mexico City this is like asking to go to Bro Times Square in in New York City and the driver says let me get directions it's like well hold on you're a taxi driver you drive here probably 50 times a day through this area you're gonna get directions this doesn't make sense at all so I knew something was up and then I said just just turn around and drop me off and he's like no uh we're almost there and I was like well

that's patently untrue you know I know we're getting further away so I said just let me out here and he goes no we're almost there and I this was just very suspicious and I said look I'll pay you and unfortunately when I got in I said hey when we get there I got to go to an ATM to get cash and pay you because I only have a credit card and he was like no problem so he goes I thought you said you didn't have any money and I was like crap that's true I don't have any money I was just gonna kind of Bolt because I had a feeling something was weird or I was gonna go find an ATM and then like you know put the money in the window and not get

back in the car and I was like he got me on that one so I said just take me to an ATM and he's like oh yeah we'll go to an ATM I'm just gonna ask my friend for directions we pull up in front of this like really sketchy house made out of cinder block no lighting anywhere I'm like this is not good so I was in the back seat he was in the front obviously driving I slid behind him and uh put my hand between him and the door and he didn't know that I put my hand between him and the door and so I said you know don't get out of the car because I thought if he goes in there he's going to come out with like three dudes and they're gonna

get in the car or they're gonna take me out of the car by force whatever so he goes okay okay relax relax and then he sort of made this like Fast shoulder charge for the door but he was 50 something years old sits on his ass in a cab all day I was 20 years old all I did was work out and eat tacos so he had no I was probably 209 pounds he was probably like 140 150 pounds so he had no chance so I grabbed him with that arm pulled him up against the seat headrest wrapped my other arm around the headrest and I just squeezed my forearms over his face until he stopped breathing and uh and then I tried to open the door I couldn't open the door because he had

cut the lock on and this is an old Volkswagen Beetle so the locks they mechanically move up and down he had cut the lock so that when it was locked it was underneath the door so you couldn't grab it with your fingers and pull it up it was just like impossible and it had some sort of child lock mechanism or or some kind of rigging so that you couldn't open the door when the door was locked so I had to open his door push him out his unconscious body crawl between the seats uh get the car keys and throw them because I couldn't drive this old ass stick shift that probably had you know a busted clutch or whatever and then I ran back towards where I thought we had come from until I hit

a road and tried to flag down a car which took me a while because I was like a sweaty Gringo wearing Banana Republic Chinos in the middle of the you know probably 9 p.m 8 P.M in the middle of the hood in Mexico City finally somebody stops lets me in the car uh after a little bit of negotiation and I said take me to the police and then this guy who it turned out to be a doctor was like dude I'm not taking you to the cops you just told me you may be like how's the taxi driver is he alive is he dead you know why do you want to go to the cops for all you know they're going to just bring you back here to this place or they're going to charge

you with something like you should just leave Mexico City if I was you I would leave Mexico City so that's what I did I packed up all my stuff and I moved to Guadalajara and left after that and uh it was just like you know I was on a bus by probably six o'clock seven o'clock in the morning at that point oh yeah yeah I had well I mean I had my [ __ ] stolen in Morocco my assistant got her my phone stolen from her hands we went to the police station afterward and nothing you know and um where was it again Marrakech or yeah Casablanca Morocco so yeah not going to the police is pretty much pointless they're incompetent and it's like finding a needle in the haystack um this is funny but

this is some dark [ __ ] at the same time and nowadays you're into interviewing a lot of people that have some of these dark stories are you attracted to these and what insights do you get out of interviewing these folks that went through some uh dark [ __ ] yeah I think in a way I'm attracted to it because it's uh you can kind of touch the dark side a little bit like now I'm old I've got kids I'm not doing dangerous things not on purpose so it is interesting to reach out to somebody who maybe is either a journalist documenting dark stuff and needs to get that the word out about that or is perhaps a victim of something that's quite dark uh or studies something that's quite dark you know that stuff's

all very interesting to me but that's not the focus of the show really the insights are more of the purpose and some of the insights that I get from that are resilience of course of people who've been through crazy stuff um it I would imagine also going through something really dark gives you a lot of clarity about what's important so you get an insight about what they

think is important based on you know their their life uh at that point you also get a glimpse into it I mean obviously look there's excitement and things like that when you hear a story about an arms dealer or a corporate spy but I think a lot of times when we open up our world and we see people's real lives we can see how different people from us still kind of believe the same blood and have the same feelings and I think for the United States that's an especially important important message because right now the media bubble that a lot of people are in is Frank it's shocking and ridiculous people will believe things that they're told by some turd on Twitter or YouTube but they won't believe something that's been well documented studied by

academics or or medical professionals or whatever and so when you actually hear somebody who's lived experience is different from yours and you know that that it's true that opens up a level of understanding where people will write in and say things like wow okay initially I thought that I would never get in this situation but now I realize it's really easy to get find yourself in a

cult uh when you're especially when you're a kid or it's really uh easy to blame such and such for this when really it's a combined failure of all these different things like you get a more nuanced and 360 degree perspective on people's lives and that's completely missing in this day and age because you have this mini media you have like Tick Tock media where the world is

black and white and the Democrats are responsible for all the bad stuff the Republicans are responsible for all the bad stuff and anybody who doesn't think like you is an effing [ __ ] who deserves to be you know rounded up and shot and and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration you know if you look online you see people talk like that and it's like

jeez man what what is happening and part of that is because we're just getting crap news a lot of it's [ __ ] and made up and then you're getting a 15 second clip of it so you make your judgment based on that few people are looking at all sides of a story it's just not it's it's harder it requires more brain power to produce and it requires more brain power to process and people decided why do that when you can polarize and get clicks yeah this information is one of my top five uh fights also nowadays is it fair to say that it's one of your main fights nowadays you've got the Pod that generates some nice revenue is is it your top mission to fight this information definitely one of my top missions

yeah we have a whole disinformation playlist for the Jordan Harbinger show cyber war that sort of dovetails into that disinformation is really really uh people are are in a prison that's so complete they don't realize they're in it with the disinformation you know they're watching news or reading news and they'll say something and you see this all the time whenever you disagree with somebody on social media

they'll say something like oh you're just a sheep and it's like okay tell me where you get your information and if you get these people talking a lot of the people with really unhinged viewpoints who think everyone is a sheep they literally get their news from Anonymous accounts on YouTube Twitter Tick Tock and you're just thinking oh my God you have no critical thinking skills whatsoever I'm

almost surprised you're a real person but then you've got to remember holy cow this person votes this person talks to other people who are maybe influenced by them it's like a cancer um having people who are not able to discern real news or real information or credible information it's very dangerous in a democracy and so yeah it's a big big problem how much more time do you

I have let me see hold on one's my next thing because yeah I've got like one minute but we can we can do like one more question why not yeah okay uh well last question I think these uh folks um yeah like their opinions start from the education that they had early on in their lives and then whatever points kind of fits in their uh puzzle bees they they kind of acquired feels good dopamine release um how can we fight that is is that even a worthwhile fight uh education is kind of and yeah it's very much related to Neuroscience kind of this rocket science problem how would you tackle it do you think like running your own pod and uh spreading information through your newsletter is do you think that is a good solution

to crack that one yeah I mean all you can really do is teach people how to think better so somebody who gets uh somebody who's addicted to disinformation and conspiracy theories for example they don't want the truth because they really Thrive off of the community they get from believing that the moon landing was fake or the Earth was flat or they they loved being a contrarian because

it makes them feel smart where in their real life they're probably made to feel like an idiot a lot of the time because they are what's that a dunbarian yeah because they're not necessarily I mean look you're not going to meet a flat earther who is an attorney or a doctor you're not generally speaking going to meet somebody like that maybe there's a few I doubt it

um the reason is because you're going to meet somebody who is who struggled their whole life with school and being liked and fitting in and now they're like aha here's something that makes me feel smarter than other people who actually have education and also gets me into a community of people that aren't going to reject me like every other community has and so the solution is not

just being like here's how you think better right you can train other people to think better who are interested in that and then when they when their dumb cousin tells them the moon landing was fake they go yeah yeah yeah you're a [ __ ] and rightfully so getting those people out of conspiracy theory black holes though is very tough because it's not about teaching them to

think better it's about it's there's a whole sort of societal element there they are going to find something else right they're going to join an MLM or something to get the the community they're going to join a freaking some other cult to to get their community and social contacts I'm less worried about those people because that's a job for a therapist I'm not going to say they're

a lost cause but they're way too much work for me what I want to do is teach people that might be on the fence and are just like hey I'm an open-minded guy I want to teach those people how to reject disinformation because look the point one percent of kooky people they're gonna be kook's gonna cook right but the point the other people who are on the

fence who could be swayed by that I want them to have an inoculation of vaccine speaking of disinformation I want them to have a vaccine against Bad thinking and stupid conspiracy theories and cult-like thinking and all of that crap because that's that makes a real difference pull alignment where can people find out more about you Jordan yeah if you're interested in stuff like disinformation cyber warfare crime

Cults uh science Neuroscience all that stuff the Jordan Harbinger show is a great place to get it the Jordan Harbinger show on any podcast app but there's also a YouTube channel but it's like less than one percent of my audience there and I don't put up most of my episodes there