
#940 - Sam Harris & Dan Harris
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Three, two, one. And we're live. What's up?
All right.
How are you, man? What's going?
Great.
Sam Harris, ladies and gentlemen.
Harris and Harris.
Dan and Sam. No relation, obviously.
No relation.
Brother from another mother kind of thing.
Oh, sweet.
Actually, no. We worked this out. We are deeply unrelated because your Harris is the jewish side of your family, right?
No. Yes. Actually, no, you're right. My Harris isn't the jewish side of the family. It was changed at Ellis island, allegedly from Addis, which doesn't sound jewish either, but yes.
Right. The Goyam side of the family.
Isn't it funny how many people's names were changed at, like, they're like, nah, not american enough.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger made it right.
Proudly.
Yeah. Od. So anyway, thanks for coming, you guys.
Thanks for having us.
It's a weird time. I've been extra weirded out over the last couple of months, and I just got back from Mexico. I was on vacation. I didn't do shit for a week. And in not doing anything for a week, I really got a chance to sit down and think about stuff. And I'm more weirded out by life today than I think I ever have been before. So I'm excited to have you on because I want to hear your story because Sam has been telling me about it, and I looked into it and please explain what happened to you, where you were and what happened to you.
Okay, so you're talking about the panic attack. 2004. I was on a little show that we do at ABC News called Good Morning America.
That's a big show.
That's a big show.
That's not a little show.
No, it's not a little show. And I was doing the job that I was filling in as the news reader. That's the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads the headlines. And I just freaked out. I just lost it. So I was a couple of seconds into it and I started to get really scared, and it just. Have you ever had a panic attack?
No.
So it's like anxiety on steroids. So you start to worry, but then your fight or flight instincts kick in. So your lungs seize up, your palms start sweating, your mouth dries up, your heart is racing, your mind is racing. I couldn't breathe and therefore couldn't speak. So a couple of seconds into reading what was supposed to be six stories right off of the teleprompter, I lost the capacity to speak. And I had to kind of squeak out something about back to you, back to the main anchors wow. Yeah, it sucked uncontrollably.
Now, what caused it? Do you know?
I do. Yeah. I definitely know some dumb behavior in my personal life is what caused it. I had spent a lot of time as a war reporter at ABC News. I was in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, West Bank, Gaza, six. Six trips to Iraq. And I had come home from a long run. I covered kind of the pre invasion invasion and then insurgency in one kind of six month run. And I came home after that, and I got depressed. And I didn't actually know I was depressed, but I was having some obvious symptoms. In hindsight, I was having trouble getting out of bed. Felt like I'd had a low grade fever all the time. And then I did something really smart, which is I started to self medicate with cocaine and ecstasy. And even though I wasn't doing it all the time, I like to say it wasn't like that. You ever see the wolf of Wall street where they're popping lewds? That wasn't me. And I wasn't getting high on the air or anything like that, but I was partying in my spare time because it made me feel better. So after I had the panic attack, I went to a doctor who's an expert in panic, and he started asking me a bunch of questions, try to figure out what had caused the panic attack. And one of the questions was, do you do drugs? And I was like, yeah, I do drugs. And he leaned back in his chair and gave me a look that communicated the following sentiment. Okay, asshole, mystery solved. And he just pointed out that you raise the level of adrenaline in your brain artificially, you make it much more likely to have a panic attack. And at baseline, I'm a jittery little dude, so it doesn't take much to put me in that zone. You just offer me coffee. And I said, no, because even that will freak me out.
Well, it's weird that ecstasy and cocaine was the combination, because ecstasy is something that they actually give to a lot of soldiers that have PTSD, and there's been quite a few tests on that.
Yeah, I don't actually think ecstasy was the problem.
The coke.
I think it was the coke.
Yeah, it makes sense.
But those are the two drugs I was mostly doing.
How often were you doing it?
I would say there would be months where I wasn't doing it at all because I covered the 2004 presidential campaign, I didn't have a lot of time to be snorting coke. But when I was home and around my friends on a busy week two, three times a week.
Wow.
That's a lot. Yeah, that'll do you. There's a comeback right now that cocaine is experiencing.
Did it ever go away?
I don't know. I've never done it.
Was there some sort of cocaine recession that had to bounce back from.
I believe there was really. I'm talking totally ignorantly.
I've been out of the game for a long time. Yeah, I'm kind of boring now, but it feels to me like it's kind of a perennial favorite.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it went through a recession. Maybe it's just my perception. I had a budy of mine when I was in high school and his cousin was hooked on coke. And I watched while we were in high school, he starts selling it and he withered away. Lost like 30 pounds or something like that. And just him and his girlfriend just hide out in the attic. They had an attic apartment. They would just hide out there and watch tv and do coke and sell coke to people. And I was like, well, fuck that drug, whatever that drug is doing these people. It was almost like knowing someone who had gotten bitten by a vampire and become something different. It was very strange. So my experiences seeing people do that led me to never do it.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly was not like that for me, but I could see it over the horizon. It's an incredibly addictive drug, so I think you made the right call.
Yeah, it seems a little. It's got a little too much gravity attached to you.
You can get hooked and it will bring you down. There are other drugs you can do. I'm not recommending drugs, but the way my friend Sam, my half brother Sam over there does.
Let me get to it.
There are other drugs you can do that have vastly lower addictive character. What's the word I'm looking for here, Sam characteristics. Yes.
Thank you.
So how did you recover so I.
Wasn'T actually doing it that long. I actually had never done hard drugs until my early thirty s. And when I came home from the war zones.
And that's what started it.
Yeah.
You just were freaked out by seeing too much.
No, it wasn't PTSD. It was. I was addicted to the adrenaline. It was not that I was traumatized. It was that I was enjoying it too much and I would come home and the world would seem gray and boring. Yes, that was the problem.
Did you watch hurt locker? I'm sure you did, right?
Yeah.
Did that resonate with you?
Absolutely. It's been a while since I watched it, but absolutely, I want to just be clear that the experience of a journalist is so different from the experience, so much more mild than the experience of an enlisted man or woman.
Sure.
So I don't want to compare my experience to the hurt locker. I'm observer on the side, and I don't even want to compare my experience to more experienced war correspondents out there. I'm thinking of, like, guys like Richard Engel on NBC. Absolutely. I just actually sat down with him the other day for. He's got a new documentary coming out. My experiences are much more mild than that, but certainly enough to really get a sense of how thrilling it is. There's an expression, there's nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses you. And in my case, luckily, they all missed. That was not true for some of my friends. So I had a real sense of the stakes. But it is exciting. It's also thrilling on an idealistic level. I believe in the importance of bearing witness to the tip of the spear, to what we're doing, to what our military is doing in our name. So all of that is a heady mix.
So you knew people over there, journalists, that got killed?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. A very good friend of mine, the guy who actually ultimately set me up with my wife is a guy named Bob Woodruff, who was the anchor of World News Tonight on ABC News. He had only been in the chair for about a month when he was on a trip to Iraq, and he literally got his head nearly blown off when he was in the top of an iraqi tank. Almost died is an absolute miracle he's alive. There are pictures of him on the Internet with basically half a head. Traumatic brain injury was brought back to life. Is to this day, a walking miracle that he's alive. And after he recovered, he then introduced me to the woman I married. So he's a close friend. And I saw cases like that, lost friends, both iraqi friends and journalist friends. The woman I was dating at the time, when I was spending a lot of time in Iraq, she got hit by a tank shell. She was in the hotel Palestine where all the journalists were staying. She was on a balcony, and one of her colleagues was on the balcony below her. He got a direct hit and died. She carried him to the hospital, and she basically got the reverberations and couldn't hear. Still can't hear. As far as I
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