Hey, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Hello Ipsmarti's welcome back for another conversation. Today's guest is the incredible journalist Matt Gutman. He is ABC News's chief national correspondent. Contributes regularly to World News, Tonight with David Muir, twenty twenty, Good Morning America, Nightline, and more. Matt has reported from fifty countries around the world. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Matt is joining us from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he is reporting on the Israel Palestine conflict, and he's here to talk about his incredible new book, No Time to Panic. It is an unflinching look panic attacks from a reporter whose career was nearly derailed by them. Matt offers readers a guide to making a truce with their warring minds. The New York Times called his book brave, reassuring and practical, A bomb for anyone who has ever suffered panic attacks and who longs to be released from their grip. I mean, gosh, I have so many questions that I want to ask you, obviously about your work and the current crisis that you have a you know, a front row seat to you're reporting, so all of us can understand what's happening. But before we, you know, focus on the war and also on your book and all of the things happening simultaneously in this moment, I like to kind of go back with people, because, especially someone like you, who folks see on the news and they feel familiar with, I'm sure they feel like they know your story. I'm always really curious about how how the people we know came to be the versions of them we know. So if we were round to you know, when you were say eight or nine years old, were you the same inquisitive, curious man in you know, the same inquisitive curious child that you grew into as the man we know, or did you have a sort of more nonlinear path to becoming a journalist as a grown up. Paint us a picture and from this vantage point and tell us if you see any sort of real connection to where you are today in hindsight.

Hey, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Hello Ipsmarti's welcome back for another conversation. Today's guest is the incredible journalist Matt Gutman. He is ABC News's chief national correspondent. Contributes regularly to World News, Tonight with David Muir, twenty twenty, Good Morning America, Nightline, and more. Matt has reported from fifty countries around the world. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Matt is joining us from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he is reporting on the Israel Palestine conflict, and he's here to talk about his incredible new book, No Time to Panic. It is an unflinching look panic attacks from a reporter whose career was nearly derailed by them. Matt offers readers a guide to making a truce with their warring minds. The New York Times called his book brave, reassuring and practical, A bomb for anyone who has ever suffered panic attacks and who longs to be released from their grip. I mean, gosh, I have so many questions that I want to ask you, obviously about your work and the current crisis that you have a you know, a front row seat to you're reporting, so all of us can understand what's happening. But before we, you know, focus on the war and also on your book and all of the things happening simultaneously in this moment, I like to kind of go back with people, because, especially someone like you, who folks see on the news and they feel familiar with, I'm sure they feel like they know your story. I'm always really curious about how how the people we know came to be the versions of them we know. So if we were round to you know, when you were say eight or nine years old, were you the same inquisitive, curious man in you know, the same inquisitive curious child that you grew into as the man we know, or did you have a sort of more nonlinear path to becoming a journalist as a grown up. Paint us a picture and from this vantage point and tell us if you see any sort of real connection to where you are today in hindsight.

Totally a little chubby with a huge appetite and hyperactive at the same time, and unbelievably curious, just sticking my nose and everything, talking to everybody all the time, asking my grandparents' friends, questions about what it was like to be in World War Two, about the depression being presented at parties, and just sort of mingling with people fifty years old or sixty years older than I was and loving it, constantly asking everybody questions to the great annoyance of I can my older sister and you know, some other people, but also just like massively inquisitive and hyper sensitive, you know, just my mom used to call me mister Mushart because you know, I, you know, it was a sensitive little boy. And I'm still you know, that inner child still lives within me, and I'm sure within you, right, they never go away. That little child in us has to be nurtured and cared for because they're ever present in us. And maybe that's one of the beauties of it. But you know, I try to take care of that little guy as much as I can.

Totally a little chubby with a huge appetite and hyperactive at the same time, and unbelievably curious, just sticking my nose and everything, talking to everybody all the time, asking my grandparents' friends, questions about what it was like to be in World War Two, about the depression being presented at parties, and just sort of mingling with people fifty years old or sixty years older than I was and loving it, constantly asking everybody questions to the great annoyance of I can my older sister and you know, some other people, but also just like massively inquisitive and hyper sensitive, you know, just my mom used to call me mister Mushart because you know, I, you know, it was a sensitive little boy. And I'm still you know, that inner child still lives within me, and I'm sure within you, right, they never go away. That little child in us has to be nurtured and cared for because they're ever present in us. And maybe that's one of the beauties of it. But you know, I try to take care of that little guy as much as I can.

Yeah, I'm having such a surreal experience because I truly, and I don't mean this hyperbolically, I truly feel like you just described me as a kid to a t. And I wonder if I wonder if those of us who you know, do versions of this sort of public facing, you know, performing love of news hosting. I wonder if we all would have been friends as kids like this, sensitive little hyperactive, constant talkers. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Do you think that that sort of desire to understand the world around you and the constant question asking led you into studying journalism? Did you study journalism or did you come to it roundabout?

Yeah, I'm having such a surreal experience because I truly, and I don't mean this hyperbolically, I truly feel like you just described me as a kid to a t. And I wonder if I wonder if those of us who you know, do versions of this sort of public facing, you know, performing love of news hosting. I wonder if we all would have been friends as kids like this, sensitive little hyperactive, constant talkers. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Do you think that that sort of desire to understand the world around you and the constant question asking led you into studying journalism? Did you study journalism or did you come to it roundabout?

I've never taken a signal journalism CLASSIFI. Wow, you know. I went to Williams, which is in the frigid northeast corner of Massachusetts College, and everybody was going off to be an investment banker or a lawyer or something else. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I took the Elsatz and then in between the Elsats and the next year of school, I just sort of had some time to kill. So had a girlfriend from Argentina whose family was from Argentina, and she suggested that I travel there, and I did, and I met her family members and they were really kind to me. And I also met a woman that I fell in love with really quickly, and I decided to stay and I fell in love, and I started working for the Buenos Aires Harold, which is a now defunct newspaper that was the English language newspaper in Buenos Aires, and I just fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the place, and I fell in love with journalism. And I was making forty an article. It was not, but it was just like the world opened up. And then I started freelancing through South America and Africa over the next ten months. I actually wound up here in Israel during the peak of what was then the Second in Devada, the Second Palestinian Uprising in two thousand and one, and I decided by then I want to be a writer or a newspaper reporter, and I wanted to be a conflict reporter. And this place was blowing up, and I landed here with two suitcases. And then I stayed for seven years and ended up reporting from the Middle East and you know, Rocket, Afghanistan and Syria and Lebanon obviously, the West Bank and Gaza for the next seven years, and being involved in or seeing and being a witness to every major conflict in the Middle East for those years. So I guess that's in some ways full circle to your question. And here I am back again covering it in a way that was just unimaginable even twenty years ago, like nobody ever thought that we would be where we are now twenty years ago.

I've never taken a signal journalism CLASSIFI. Wow, you know. I went to Williams, which is in the frigid northeast corner of Massachusetts College, and everybody was going off to be an investment banker or a lawyer or something else. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I took the Elsatz and then in between the Elsats and the next year of school, I just sort of had some time to kill. So had a girlfriend from Argentina whose family was from Argentina, and she suggested that I travel there, and I did, and I met her family members and they were really kind to me. And I also met a woman that I fell in love with really quickly, and I decided to stay and I fell in love, and I started working for the Buenos Aires Harold, which is a now defunct newspaper that was the English language newspaper in Buenos Aires, and I just fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the place, and I fell in love with journalism. And I was making forty an article. It was not, but it was just like the world opened up. And then I started freelancing through South America and Africa over the next ten months. I actually wound up here in Israel during the peak of what was then the Second in Devada, the Second Palestinian Uprising in two thousand and one, and I decided by then I want to be a writer or a newspaper reporter, and I wanted to be a conflict reporter. And this place was blowing up, and I landed here with two suitcases. And then I stayed for seven years and ended up reporting from the Middle East and you know, Rocket, Afghanistan and Syria and Lebanon obviously, the West Bank and Gaza for the next seven years, and being involved in or seeing and being a witness to every major conflict in the Middle East for those years. So I guess that's in some ways full circle to your question. And here I am back again covering it in a way that was just unimaginable even twenty years ago, like nobody ever thought that we would be where we are now twenty years ago.

Why is that? What do you mean by that? Because you've got all the expertise, You've lived there for so long, as you said, you know, you spent just under a decade. When you showed up with two suitcases, you stayed for that long and reported you've you've had this kind of front row seat. There is so much that you know that most people don't. So how would you explain to someone why this was unexpected or unpredictable.

Why is that? What do you mean by that? Because you've got all the expertise, You've lived there for so long, as you said, you know, you spent just under a decade. When you showed up with two suitcases, you stayed for that long and reported you've you've had this kind of front row seat. There is so much that you know that most people don't. So how would you explain to someone why this was unexpected or unpredictable.

I'm gonna be careful here because I but I think the trauma, well, I think that there is historical trauma because of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza among Palestinians, and now the trauma that Israel went through on October seventh, and that supplies attack by Hamas in which they rated thirty Some keep it seeing those are communal living towns, villages and other communities along the border by land, sea and air. It was so traumatic fourteen hundred people were killed that this is imprinted upon generations of Israelis, and what Israel is doing now in Gaza in retaliation, and what it's going to do in terms of a probable ground invasion by the time this airs, it may have happened, is going to inflict much more trauma on the Palestinian population. And I think this is what Hamas wanted to happen, that generations of people are going to be imprinted with this, and this conflict is not going to go away. The grandchildren, the people who are just kids now in Gaza are going to remember this. They're going to talk about it to their children and grandchildren. And the people I've known here for twenty years and even longer talk about this now being one hundred years of conflict. These are people who've been proponents of peace just don't see a way out now for a very long time. And so I come to this interview with you and your hyper sensitivity, because you are so gentle and sensitive and empathetic with a great deal of sadness, because I love this place. I have family here, I have very dear, close Palestintan friends who are at my wedding, and it's just it's heartbreaking to see how bad it's going to get and how long that's going to last. And it just fills my heart with a lot of sorrow, because there's gonna be a lot of misery here in the coming years.

I'm gonna be careful here because I but I think the trauma, well, I think that there is historical trauma because of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza among Palestinians, and now the trauma that Israel went through on October seventh, and that supplies attack by Hamas in which they rated thirty Some keep it seeing those are communal living towns, villages and other communities along the border by land, sea and air. It was so traumatic fourteen hundred people were killed that this is imprinted upon generations of Israelis, and what Israel is doing now in Gaza in retaliation, and what it's going to do in terms of a probable ground invasion by the time this airs, it may have happened, is going to inflict much more trauma on the Palestinian population. And I think this is what Hamas wanted to happen, that generations of people are going to be imprinted with this, and this conflict is not going to go away. The grandchildren, the people who are just kids now in Gaza are going to remember this. They're going to talk about it to their children and grandchildren. And the people I've known here for twenty years and even longer talk about this now being one hundred years of conflict. These are people who've been proponents of peace just don't see a way out now for a very long time. And so I come to this interview with you and your hyper sensitivity, because you are so gentle and sensitive and empathetic with a great deal of sadness, because I love this place. I have family here, I have very dear, close Palestintan friends who are at my wedding, and it's just it's heartbreaking to see how bad it's going to get and how long that's going to last. And it just fills my heart with a lot of sorrow, because there's gonna be a lot of misery here in the coming years.

Yeah, not to create some sort of false equivalency, but so much of what we see here at home in our own political system, so much of the upheaval that seems to have no point aside from chaos. You know, something we heard during the last administration, when we saw what we thought would be unspeakably pointless and cruel actions taken, you know, by a White House, people kept saying, the cruelty is the point. And I keep thinking about that, reading about what's happening in the region where you are. Because for a terrorist group to have this idea that the cruelty is the point, a sort of centric to their mission, the ripple effect of that unspeakable cruelty, and then the cruelty in the way people are retaliating it, it just feels like it's piling on suffering. And I cannot understand the point. And I wish I could remember his name. Over ten years ago, I got to say it down. It was long before I had a podcast. I wish it was a recorded conversation better. I got to sit down with a gentleman who was the first Palestinian president or executive whatever the right title is of the Israeli YMCA, and the YMCA is a traditionally Christian organization in Jerusalem. Famous, Yeah, And he was explaining to me what it is to sit at the intersection of these three communities that he calls his own and to work across them in the same way that people come to tour the holy sites in Jerusalem, where you know, you see the whaling wall in the dome of the Rock and the sepulcher and everything is tied. And he said, people want to talk about the conflicts in the forties and the sixties, but what people forget is that our people there has been nomadic moving conflict Jews, Arabs, Christians in this region for thousands and thousands of years. And he said, if we really get honest, everyone has harmed each other. How are we going to be able to live here together if we keep saying but the last person who did the worst thing was well, we did this, but you then you did this. And he really he just sat so patiently and humanized not fifty years or one hundred years of conflict for me, but thousands of years, and it's hard. As you said, you want to be very careful and very sensitive, because it seems now that if you ask a question or try to learn, or or simply say, well, I read this and what does it mean, everybody screams and tells you you're doing the wrong thing. And now, because of the Internet, the screaming you generally comes with death threats, which then makes it hard to continue speaking at all. And this is just me, like a curious person who works in a public job, who has a podcast because I wanted an excuse essentially to be a reporter, And you're an actual reporter who lives there, and you have to figure out how to hold today's reality and all these tens hundreds thousands of years of history. How how are you doing it? How do you approach it? How are you taking care of yourself as a human inside of the responsibility of reporting on this conflict and on the atrocities that we're watching unfold. You know, yes, since October seventh, and you know, to your point, with the occupation and the complexity in the region before, how do you do this as a person?

Yeah, not to create some sort of false equivalency, but so much of what we see here at home in our own political system, so much of the upheaval that seems to have no point aside from chaos. You know, something we heard during the last administration, when we saw what we thought would be unspeakably pointless and cruel actions taken, you know, by a White House, people kept saying, the cruelty is the point. And I keep thinking about that, reading about what's happening in the region where you are. Because for a terrorist group to have this idea that the cruelty is the point, a sort of centric to their mission, the ripple effect of that unspeakable cruelty, and then the cruelty in the way people are retaliating it, it just feels like it's piling on suffering. And I cannot understand the point. And I wish I could remember his name. Over ten years ago, I got to say it down. It was long before I had a podcast. I wish it was a recorded conversation better. I got to sit down with a gentleman who was the first Palestinian president or executive whatever the right title is of the Israeli YMCA, and the YMCA is a traditionally Christian organization in Jerusalem. Famous, Yeah, And he was explaining to me what it is to sit at the intersection of these three communities that he calls his own and to work across them in the same way that people come to tour the holy sites in Jerusalem, where you know, you see the whaling wall in the dome of the Rock and the sepulcher and everything is tied. And he said, people want to talk about the conflicts in the forties and the sixties, but what people forget is that our people there has been nomadic moving conflict Jews, Arabs, Christians in this region for thousands and thousands of years. And he said, if we really get honest, everyone has harmed each other. How are we going to be able to live here together if we keep saying but the last person who did the worst thing was well, we did this, but you then you did this. And he really he just sat so patiently and humanized not fifty years or one hundred years of conflict for me, but thousands of years, and it's hard. As you said, you want to be very careful and very sensitive, because it seems now that if you ask a question or try to learn, or or simply say, well, I read this and what does it mean, everybody screams and tells you you're doing the wrong thing. And now, because of the Internet, the screaming you generally comes with death threats, which then makes it hard to continue speaking at all. And this is just me, like a curious person who works in a public job, who has a podcast because I wanted an excuse essentially to be a reporter, And you're an actual reporter who lives there, and you have to figure out how to hold today's reality and all these tens hundreds thousands of years of history. How how are you doing it? How do you approach it? How are you taking care of yourself as a human inside of the responsibility of reporting on this conflict and on the atrocities that we're watching unfold. You know, yes, since October seventh, and you know, to your point, with the occupation and the complexity in the region before, how do you do this as a person?

So a really nice little vignette about your friend who was the president of the YMCA. The YMCA in Jerusalem has one of the very few multi lingual schools in Israel, and so they have Palestinians, they have Christians, they have Jews, and they do school in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and it's just like a perfect little oasis and they you know, I've known so many parents who've said their kids there when I was living here, was too young to be a parent, or I had just had my daughter. I was born here before back to the US, so she wasn't old enough to go there, but she probably would have gone there. And it's like that one spot has been such a beacon and a concentration of people who are like minded and loving and tolerant that I've always loved the YMCA and that school and what it stands for. But yeah, I'm I'll be totally honest. I'm struggling, and I had an interaction today which I learned something about some of the atrocities that happened to Israeli women during October seventh. The only way I've been able to deal with this is to do something that is really not so healthy in the long term. I'm completely open about this, but I have my armor up, and I'm able to absorb and be empathetic with the things that I see and the things that I'm told, the images that we put on our story the other night of these two Palestinian toddlers who were scooped up by a photographer. He was just handed these kids after a blast, and he's driving bumping them around on a road to the hospital, and you know, these kids are in such shock, even though their heads are badly wounded, that they're not making a sound. And if anybody has babies out there or toddlers, they know that they're If they have a little ouch, they're hysterical. If they have a mouse massive ouch, they're silent. And just watching them bounce along in the car was devastating. And just hearing the testimony from what Israeli women went through on October seventh has been very hard for me as a father of a fifteen year old. And so I've like added to my armor. I've forged more and more steel to protect my psyche and my heart and my soul. And I'm finding right now at this point that it's not quite thick enough, and I'm struggling with it because we are at the end human and we've been doing this for more than two weeks now, but that's the way I do it. You know, Normally, in my normal life, I'm vulnerable, and that's my greatest asset, you know, being able to come out and talk about having panic attacks and exposing my vulnerabilities and being okay with it. And right now, in order to deal with this conflict and to report on it responsibly and without bias, I've had to really fortify myself in a way that I know is ultimately not healthy.

So a really nice little vignette about your friend who was the president of the YMCA. The YMCA in Jerusalem has one of the very few multi lingual schools in Israel, and so they have Palestinians, they have Christians, they have Jews, and they do school in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and it's just like a perfect little oasis and they you know, I've known so many parents who've said their kids there when I was living here, was too young to be a parent, or I had just had my daughter. I was born here before back to the US, so she wasn't old enough to go there, but she probably would have gone there. And it's like that one spot has been such a beacon and a concentration of people who are like minded and loving and tolerant that I've always loved the YMCA and that school and what it stands for. But yeah, I'm I'll be totally honest. I'm struggling, and I had an interaction today which I learned something about some of the atrocities that happened to Israeli women during October seventh. The only way I've been able to deal with this is to do something that is really not so healthy in the long term. I'm completely open about this, but I have my armor up, and I'm able to absorb and be empathetic with the things that I see and the things that I'm told, the images that we put on our story the other night of these two Palestinian toddlers who were scooped up by a photographer. He was just handed these kids after a blast, and he's driving bumping them around on a road to the hospital, and you know, these kids are in such shock, even though their heads are badly wounded, that they're not making a sound. And if anybody has babies out there or toddlers, they know that they're If they have a little ouch, they're hysterical. If they have a mouse massive ouch, they're silent. And just watching them bounce along in the car was devastating. And just hearing the testimony from what Israeli women went through on October seventh has been very hard for me as a father of a fifteen year old. And so I've like added to my armor. I've forged more and more steel to protect my psyche and my heart and my soul. And I'm finding right now at this point that it's not quite thick enough, and I'm struggling with it because we are at the end human and we've been doing this for more than two weeks now, but that's the way I do it. You know, Normally, in my normal life, I'm vulnerable, and that's my greatest asset, you know, being able to come out and talk about having panic attacks and exposing my vulnerabilities and being okay with it. And right now, in order to deal with this conflict and to report on it responsibly and without bias, I've had to really fortify myself in a way that I know is ultimately not healthy.

And now a word from our sponsors who make this show possible. I think about this a lot because your job, you know, my day job, the the women in my well men and women in my community who you know, do what I do for a living, and men and women in my community that are athletes all have And I don't know if it's like a like a post COVID reckoning, you know, the way the pandemic shifted us and taught us about our our sort of programming, or you know, if it's this everyone's calling it like back in the twenties was the Great Depression, and everyone's calling this summer, you know, the summer of the Great divorce, like everything sort of shifting, and I've counted myself as very lucky is having this community of women who've all been going through this at the same time, who you know, back in February, like the group text with three started and by the summer there were like a bunch of people in this text chain, and I was like, I don't know if I think this is amazing or tragic, or maybe it's both. But one of the things I've learned from having so many people in that community who do versions of what we do, which is you show up and you do your job, no matter what's happening around you. You know, I watched the clip of you, you know, in southern Israel when you were on the view, and like literally there's military cars rolling in and gunshots going and they're like, you got to get in the car, Matt, and I was like, the holy shit, this is crazy. But you know, you're reporting, you're walking to the car and you're telling everybody what's happening, and you know, it doesn't matter what's going on in your life. You have to show up your job, you have to play, you have to perform, you have to be excellent, And it really does teach you to leave your body to bifurcate or on some level to disassociate and perform. And I don't think it's an accident that we're in a moment where so many people across so many industries and in their professional and personal lives are going WHOA. This sort of disassociation, this splitting in half, is something I've been doing for so long, and I don't know if I can do it anymore. And yet the news has to be reported, and yet you've got to be able to show up for your kids. And yet when I go to work, I've got two hundred people on a set relying on me to do my job, even if last night my grandparents passed away. So and that's true for everybody in any job. Really, when you think about it, and I wonder, because you have been open about mental health, and you have talked about what it's like to be a lifelong sufferer of panic attacks, and you're still reporting from war zones, which to me feels like a recipe for a panic attack. If you ever were like, what could make a person panic? I don't know, maybe being shot at in a war zone that would probably do it for me.

And now a word from our sponsors who make this show possible. I think about this a lot because your job, you know, my day job, the the women in my well men and women in my community who you know, do what I do for a living, and men and women in my community that are athletes all have And I don't know if it's like a like a post COVID reckoning, you know, the way the pandemic shifted us and taught us about our our sort of programming, or you know, if it's this everyone's calling it like back in the twenties was the Great Depression, and everyone's calling this summer, you know, the summer of the Great divorce, like everything sort of shifting, and I've counted myself as very lucky is having this community of women who've all been going through this at the same time, who you know, back in February, like the group text with three started and by the summer there were like a bunch of people in this text chain, and I was like, I don't know if I think this is amazing or tragic, or maybe it's both. But one of the things I've learned from having so many people in that community who do versions of what we do, which is you show up and you do your job, no matter what's happening around you. You know, I watched the clip of you, you know, in southern Israel when you were on the view, and like literally there's military cars rolling in and gunshots going and they're like, you got to get in the car, Matt, and I was like, the holy shit, this is crazy. But you know, you're reporting, you're walking to the car and you're telling everybody what's happening, and you know, it doesn't matter what's going on in your life. You have to show up your job, you have to play, you have to perform, you have to be excellent, And it really does teach you to leave your body to bifurcate or on some level to disassociate and perform. And I don't think it's an accident that we're in a moment where so many people across so many industries and in their professional and personal lives are going WHOA. This sort of disassociation, this splitting in half, is something I've been doing for so long, and I don't know if I can do it anymore. And yet the news has to be reported, and yet you've got to be able to show up for your kids. And yet when I go to work, I've got two hundred people on a set relying on me to do my job, even if last night my grandparents passed away. So and that's true for everybody in any job. Really, when you think about it, and I wonder, because you have been open about mental health, and you have talked about what it's like to be a lifelong sufferer of panic attacks, and you're still reporting from war zones, which to me feels like a recipe for a panic attack. If you ever were like, what could make a person panic? I don't know, maybe being shot at in a war zone that would probably do it for me.

So you know. I have a phrase for that. It's called the paradox of the courageous coward, right, because ask that exact question, Wow, Like, you don't freak out when you're in the middle of a war zone there are rockets falling. By the way, there were like three infiltrators right in that area when they broke up my hit on the view and you're watching it. It's because there were gunfights, literally machine gun fights with small arms and machine guns one hundred and fifty yards away. That's why we've been hearing that all afternoon. How can you handle that? And yet when everything is quiet and calm, you have a panic attack like or you can. And I think it's because humans have a This is actually the gift, right. We wouldn't have been able to survive if we didn't have this capacity to disassociate, to block out what is extraneous in moments of crisis, which is an asset. So the question I ultimately asked myself is why am I always seeking that chaos? Because in the chaos I can be calm things, I can focus on just one thing. I'm talking to Whoopee right now, I'm telling her what I know. I know this stuff cold and right now, I am absolutely calm and in control. But it's in the moments of quiet, when you're alone or when there's no threat, that the panic starts to bubble up. And that can be on a broadcast as well. So if I'm doing a broadcast and I have a live shot and it's all calm around me, there is very little reason to not mess it up or to mess it up right. There is an expectation of perfection, of flawlessness, and it's that fear of social judgment that gets to me. That's when I crumble. Because if you're in the field and there are you know, Hamas militants a couple of hundred yards away opening fire in a gunfight with Israeli soldiers and guys interrupting your live broadcast telling you to get out of there, then you're seeing soldiers running around. There can be zero expectation that you'll be flawless, which calms down right. So like in my head, I'm like, oh, I got this, Like I'm just going to be me and Matt can handle that. It's when there's a full expectation of perfection that I really struggle. And this is actually natural right, because one of our greatest fears, we've had two buckets. For tens of thousands of generations human had. Humans had two major buckets of fear. The first is that fear that we're going to be eaten by a lion on the savannah, then a rock fall is going to kill our progeny, that the a holes over in Cave seven are going to come over and club us in the head. Right, that's the physical fear. The social fear became the other major primary fear, and that's that we run a foul of our group, we cross some taboo, we offend somebody in our cave group, are tribe in the woods in the jungle, and then they excommunicate us, they kick us out, in which case we're walking around on the savannah alone and the lines are going to come eat us anyway. So we learn to associate that social fear as being life and death, which is why people have panic attacks like me, and which is why I fear the judgment of my peers, who I respect greatly and whose respect I want. It's them that I'm thinking when I go live, that my my cave group, if you will, right, my social group, and so like that's what's going on in my head. And so we're so good at compartmentalizing ourselves. And I mean that's part of what I explained in the book about why we do it and how it happens.

So you know. I have a phrase for that. It's called the paradox of the courageous coward, right, because ask that exact question, Wow, Like, you don't freak out when you're in the middle of a war zone there are rockets falling. By the way, there were like three infiltrators right in that area when they broke up my hit on the view and you're watching it. It's because there were gunfights, literally machine gun fights with small arms and machine guns one hundred and fifty yards away. That's why we've been hearing that all afternoon. How can you handle that? And yet when everything is quiet and calm, you have a panic attack like or you can. And I think it's because humans have a This is actually the gift, right. We wouldn't have been able to survive if we didn't have this capacity to disassociate, to block out what is extraneous in moments of crisis, which is an asset. So the question I ultimately asked myself is why am I always seeking that chaos? Because in the chaos I can be calm things, I can focus on just one thing. I'm talking to Whoopee right now, I'm telling her what I know. I know this stuff cold and right now, I am absolutely calm and in control. But it's in the moments of quiet, when you're alone or when there's no threat, that the panic starts to bubble up. And that can be on a broadcast as well. So if I'm doing a broadcast and I have a live shot and it's all calm around me, there is very little reason to not mess it up or to mess it up right. There is an expectation of perfection, of flawlessness, and it's that fear of social judgment that gets to me. That's when I crumble. Because if you're in the field and there are you know, Hamas militants a couple of hundred yards away opening fire in a gunfight with Israeli soldiers and guys interrupting your live broadcast telling you to get out of there, then you're seeing soldiers running around. There can be zero expectation that you'll be flawless, which calms down right. So like in my head, I'm like, oh, I got this, Like I'm just going to be me and Matt can handle that. It's when there's a full expectation of perfection that I really struggle. And this is actually natural right, because one of our greatest fears, we've had two buckets. For tens of thousands of generations human had. Humans had two major buckets of fear. The first is that fear that we're going to be eaten by a lion on the savannah, then a rock fall is going to kill our progeny, that the a holes over in Cave seven are going to come over and club us in the head. Right, that's the physical fear. The social fear became the other major primary fear, and that's that we run a foul of our group, we cross some taboo, we offend somebody in our cave group, are tribe in the woods in the jungle, and then they excommunicate us, they kick us out, in which case we're walking around on the savannah alone and the lines are going to come eat us anyway. So we learn to associate that social fear as being life and death, which is why people have panic attacks like me, and which is why I fear the judgment of my peers, who I respect greatly and whose respect I want. It's them that I'm thinking when I go live, that my my cave group, if you will, right, my social group, and so like that's what's going on in my head. And so we're so good at compartmentalizing ourselves. And I mean that's part of what I explained in the book about why we do it and how it happens.

Wow. So was it an interesting thing to essentially have to go and report on yourself, like when you decided to write your book and talk to the world about, you know, panic disorder, and for our friends at home, Matt's book No Time to Panic is I mean it's such a beautifully honest and full journey into what this looks like, what this feels like, how it presents your history with the experience. Do you think because the way you speak about it right now, you know human evolution and how our brains work, and you, like me, really want to understand the data so you can make sense I imagine of the big emotion or the big indescribable feeling. And do you think that going into this and reporting on it in a way made it something you could understand more deeply?

Wow. So was it an interesting thing to essentially have to go and report on yourself, like when you decided to write your book and talk to the world about, you know, panic disorder, and for our friends at home, Matt's book No Time to Panic is I mean it's such a beautifully honest and full journey into what this looks like, what this feels like, how it presents your history with the experience. Do you think because the way you speak about it right now, you know human evolution and how our brains work, and you, like me, really want to understand the data so you can make sense I imagine of the big emotion or the big indescribable feeling. And do you think that going into this and reporting on it in a way made it something you could understand more deeply?

I mean, I think that's exactly right. So I didn't have a choice. I am. In January of twenty twenty, I was reporting on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, and I was first out the door, pretty much first Enroot when we had our live broadcast on it. It was a special live broadcast. And you know, my dad was killed in a plane crash when I was twelve, and he was the same age as Kobe, and I was the same age as Gianna. And so you know, I've had hundreds of panic attacks on live television before, and most of the time I get through it right. Like I describe it as a leaf blower, so like I have this pile of words that I've compiled, things that I know I'm going to say or want to say. And then when the panic attack happens, And you know, a panic is this like ultimate expression of anxiety. And it hits you like a sledgehammer right. Your heart starts to just like punch out of your chest. You can't breathe, you can't catch your breath, You forget how to swallow your sweat, You tremble, You have feelings of derealization, brain fog. Some people feel like they're going to die, some people throw up. I don't have the throwing up or the die, but I feel a loss of control. And so I'm doing this report, and I basically felt like I lost control and all this stuff is going on in my head, including the subtext of my own personal experience with my father, and I just like I couldn't separate between some that I'd heard that was reportable and something that I heard was not reportable, and I couldn't remember, couldn't process everything at once. My brain just couldn't navigate all those lanes of traffic, and it made a catastrophic reporting error, and that of difference to Kobe's family. I'm not going to get into the exact error, but I was suspended for a month, and you know, suspension kind of has a way to open up your schedule. So I've been suffering from panic all these years, and my wife and I talked about it, and she was really supportive of me leaving TV News because I was like, I just don't know if I can do this anymore because I'm miserable. I have all these weird coping mechanisms that I've tried to use so I don't have panic attacks, like smoking before going on air, which is really not so healthy, magical underwear that gave me luck, weird stretches. Yeah, Like I had a couple of pairs, so it's not as gross as it sounds, but it is definitely probably the one of the few people had magical underwear and live television weird stretching showing up late. I had tried like all of the pharmaceuticals by then, you know, benzos and SSRIs, propranolol, and nothing really worked. And so we decided together that I had to like face this, And I didn't know I was writing a book at first. I was just trying to fix me because I was broken, Sophia, Like I felt broken, like something was wrong with me that shouldn't be wrong with me, and I needed to fix it, and I didn't know how, and so the only thing I know how to do is to report. And so I sort of just as you said, like you know, you do what you know, and so, like I first started geeking out on what a panic attack is, the chemical cascade that occurs when you're having one, then I went into this whole side world of evolutionary psychology because then I wanted to know, Okay, if I'm broken, why am I broken? And why do humans even have panic attacks? If we know that anxiety and panic is so bad for your health. How is it persisted in a human genome?

I mean, I think that's exactly right. So I didn't have a choice. I am. In January of twenty twenty, I was reporting on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, and I was first out the door, pretty much first Enroot when we had our live broadcast on it. It was a special live broadcast. And you know, my dad was killed in a plane crash when I was twelve, and he was the same age as Kobe, and I was the same age as Gianna. And so you know, I've had hundreds of panic attacks on live television before, and most of the time I get through it right. Like I describe it as a leaf blower, so like I have this pile of words that I've compiled, things that I know I'm going to say or want to say. And then when the panic attack happens, And you know, a panic is this like ultimate expression of anxiety. And it hits you like a sledgehammer right. Your heart starts to just like punch out of your chest. You can't breathe, you can't catch your breath, You forget how to swallow your sweat, You tremble, You have feelings of derealization, brain fog. Some people feel like they're going to die, some people throw up. I don't have the throwing up or the die, but I feel a loss of control. And so I'm doing this report, and I basically felt like I lost control and all this stuff is going on in my head, including the subtext of my own personal experience with my father, and I just like I couldn't separate between some that I'd heard that was reportable and something that I heard was not reportable, and I couldn't remember, couldn't process everything at once. My brain just couldn't navigate all those lanes of traffic, and it made a catastrophic reporting error, and that of difference to Kobe's family. I'm not going to get into the exact error, but I was suspended for a month, and you know, suspension kind of has a way to open up your schedule. So I've been suffering from panic all these years, and my wife and I talked about it, and she was really supportive of me leaving TV News because I was like, I just don't know if I can do this anymore because I'm miserable. I have all these weird coping mechanisms that I've tried to use so I don't have panic attacks, like smoking before going on air, which is really not so healthy, magical underwear that gave me luck, weird stretches. Yeah, Like I had a couple of pairs, so it's not as gross as it sounds, but it is definitely probably the one of the few people had magical underwear and live television weird stretching showing up late. I had tried like all of the pharmaceuticals by then, you know, benzos and SSRIs, propranolol, and nothing really worked. And so we decided together that I had to like face this, And I didn't know I was writing a book at first. I was just trying to fix me because I was broken, Sophia, Like I felt broken, like something was wrong with me that shouldn't be wrong with me, and I needed to fix it, and I didn't know how, and so the only thing I know how to do is to report. And so I sort of just as you said, like you know, you do what you know, and so, like I first started geeking out on what a panic attack is, the chemical cascade that occurs when you're having one, then I went into this whole side world of evolutionary psychology because then I wanted to know, Okay, if I'm broken, why am I broken? And why do humans even have panic attacks? If we know that anxiety and panic is so bad for your health. How is it persisted in a human genome?

Yeah, yeah, how haven't we evolved out of it?

Yeah, yeah, how haven't we evolved out of it?

Exactly? Like we don't have tails anymore, we don't have hair all over our face and bodies. We've evolved out of all sorts of traits, and why not that it turns out that it's actually evolutionary beneficial, Like it's a secret weapon in some ways. Your body is willing to sound the alarm, a false alarm, which is a panic attack a thousand times, so long as you don't miss a real alarm alarm or real threat, because if you have a panic attack, your body's like you're burning fifty calories. Don't worry about it, don't sweat it. If you miss a real threat coming in, if it's a crash on the one oh one and you don't hit the brakes, or a social threat that you don't up the cues too, you could potentially be dead, which is a lot worse than fifty calories burned. And so like our brains think that that's like, hey, that's a bonus. So yeah, I'm going to your brain's thinking I'm going to pull the fire alarm all the time that I want. It has actually worked for humans, I suppose to our dismay for many thousands of generations and so like that's how I started getting into all of this. And at first it was just about fixing me. And then I started to realize how many other people experience panic In the US, anywhere from like twenty six to fifty percent of the population will experience it in a lifetime. Forty percent of all patients who show up at the er with chest pains thinking they're dying of a heart attack or actually having a panic attack. And so I realized this, and about a year and a half into this journey, it's like, oh, people need help. It's not just me, and I started sharing and talking about it, and that's when I learned that this is good medicine and we all need to talk about it. Maybe I need to share this more broadly than with just myself.

Exactly? Like we don't have tails anymore, we don't have hair all over our face and bodies. We've evolved out of all sorts of traits, and why not that it turns out that it's actually evolutionary beneficial, Like it's a secret weapon in some ways. Your body is willing to sound the alarm, a false alarm, which is a panic attack a thousand times, so long as you don't miss a real alarm alarm or real threat, because if you have a panic attack, your body's like you're burning fifty calories. Don't worry about it, don't sweat it. If you miss a real threat coming in, if it's a crash on the one oh one and you don't hit the brakes, or a social threat that you don't up the cues too, you could potentially be dead, which is a lot worse than fifty calories burned. And so like our brains think that that's like, hey, that's a bonus. So yeah, I'm going to your brain's thinking I'm going to pull the fire alarm all the time that I want. It has actually worked for humans, I suppose to our dismay for many thousands of generations and so like that's how I started getting into all of this. And at first it was just about fixing me. And then I started to realize how many other people experience panic In the US, anywhere from like twenty six to fifty percent of the population will experience it in a lifetime. Forty percent of all patients who show up at the er with chest pains thinking they're dying of a heart attack or actually having a panic attack. And so I realized this, and about a year and a half into this journey, it's like, oh, people need help. It's not just me, and I started sharing and talking about it, and that's when I learned that this is good medicine and we all need to talk about it. Maybe I need to share this more broadly than with just myself.

Yes, and now a word from our sponsors. Was it scary to open up really publicly for the first time because you are you know, you present, and you're the consummate professional, You have a phenomenal vocabulary, you always know what to say, and then you had to say this, How did you how did you get the words out? Publicly for the first time, So.

Yes, and now a word from our sponsors. Was it scary to open up really publicly for the first time because you are you know, you present, and you're the consummate professional, You have a phenomenal vocabulary, you always know what to say, and then you had to say this, How did you how did you get the words out? Publicly for the first time, So.

There are two first times. Actually, the first first time I actually told like it was the deepest, darkest secret that I had so feel like. I didn't tell anybody. My wife knew, my shrink knew, and that was it. And eventually I told my agent, the other confessor in our lives. And I couldn't tell anyone because I thought that people would judge me. I couldn't tell anyone because I thought, like, you know, being a TV reporter live on air who's afraid of going live on air, who has panics on air is like a free solo climber who's afraid of heights, Like this is a major professional liability. And I was sure that I'd be fired, I'd be pilloried, I'd be humiliated if I let anybody know, And so I kept it a secret for many, many years. Even after I decided to start this journey and to try to figure it out, I still didn't tell anyone. And I had my last full on, sweating through my underwear panic attack in December of twenty twenty, and I was so ashamed, and I carried around so much shame for so many years for feeling broken that I was broken, and I went on this out. We were in Phoenix doing a story about the first Pfizer vaccines that had come out. I knew the story cold, and I still kind of messed it up on air. And I was just so mad at myself and so frustrated. And I got onto the Southwest flight and I sat next next to this lady who was crocheting. She'll say, it's knitting. We beg you know, and I just like I just started talking to her, you know, just like the normal chit chat that people make, and for some reason, I just spilled my guts, like I spilled the beans about panic, about everything. And she reciprocated she had experienced panic before, because so many of us have. And her daughter has is a metaphobic. She's actually in the book cat Armado. Her daughter's a metaphobic, which means she's got a fear of choking or vomiting, or seeing anybody choking or vomiting, which in turn means that anytime she sees someone having like even a coughing fit, she will have a panic attack because her body goes into the stress response. Wow, so this is part of that whole thing. And I realized having talked to this woman for the entire hour and ten minutes on the way from Phoenix to la I'm like, oh, I feel a lot better now, Like, oh, that's that's good medicine. That worked. And then I started seeking out support groups for panic attacks, of which there are only like three nationwide. And again this is part of my whole crusade to bring awareness to it because people don't know, and you know, alcoholics explode. It's often messy and sloppy and very visible and very public. You know, whatever happens, we all, you know, we all have experience with people with substance abuse, and people with panic attacks tend to implode. It all comes inside. We get small, we get insular, we get a gooraphobic, we don't want to talk. Everything gets internal. So it's these people often can't find outlets and so like, this whole sharing thing was huge, and that was this revelation. The second time it went public was when I announced that the book was going to come out, which is really sort of coming public, and then everybody and their mother started asking me about like, oh my god, man, you have panic attacks. I didn't know, Like right before I'm going on air, producer. It's like, you can have a panic attack. Now, does this happen all the time? Are you gonna be okay? Yeah, it's just stressing me out.

There are two first times. Actually, the first first time I actually told like it was the deepest, darkest secret that I had so feel like. I didn't tell anybody. My wife knew, my shrink knew, and that was it. And eventually I told my agent, the other confessor in our lives. And I couldn't tell anyone because I thought that people would judge me. I couldn't tell anyone because I thought, like, you know, being a TV reporter live on air who's afraid of going live on air, who has panics on air is like a free solo climber who's afraid of heights, Like this is a major professional liability. And I was sure that I'd be fired, I'd be pilloried, I'd be humiliated if I let anybody know, And so I kept it a secret for many, many years. Even after I decided to start this journey and to try to figure it out, I still didn't tell anyone. And I had my last full on, sweating through my underwear panic attack in December of twenty twenty, and I was so ashamed, and I carried around so much shame for so many years for feeling broken that I was broken, and I went on this out. We were in Phoenix doing a story about the first Pfizer vaccines that had come out. I knew the story cold, and I still kind of messed it up on air. And I was just so mad at myself and so frustrated. And I got onto the Southwest flight and I sat next next to this lady who was crocheting. She'll say, it's knitting. We beg you know, and I just like I just started talking to her, you know, just like the normal chit chat that people make, and for some reason, I just spilled my guts, like I spilled the beans about panic, about everything. And she reciprocated she had experienced panic before, because so many of us have. And her daughter has is a metaphobic. She's actually in the book cat Armado. Her daughter's a metaphobic, which means she's got a fear of choking or vomiting, or seeing anybody choking or vomiting, which in turn means that anytime she sees someone having like even a coughing fit, she will have a panic attack because her body goes into the stress response. Wow, so this is part of that whole thing. And I realized having talked to this woman for the entire hour and ten minutes on the way from Phoenix to la I'm like, oh, I feel a lot better now, Like, oh, that's that's good medicine. That worked. And then I started seeking out support groups for panic attacks, of which there are only like three nationwide. And again this is part of my whole crusade to bring awareness to it because people don't know, and you know, alcoholics explode. It's often messy and sloppy and very visible and very public. You know, whatever happens, we all, you know, we all have experience with people with substance abuse, and people with panic attacks tend to implode. It all comes inside. We get small, we get insular, we get a gooraphobic, we don't want to talk. Everything gets internal. So it's these people often can't find outlets and so like, this whole sharing thing was huge, and that was this revelation. The second time it went public was when I announced that the book was going to come out, which is really sort of coming public, and then everybody and their mother started asking me about like, oh my god, man, you have panic attacks. I didn't know, Like right before I'm going on air, producer. It's like, you can have a panic attack. Now, does this happen all the time? Are you gonna be okay? Yeah, it's just stressing me out.

You're like, maybe this is not the moment we should talk about this.

You're like, maybe this is not the moment we should talk about this.

Like literally thirty seconds before air, Oh you're writing a book about it. That's crazy, and so like that was the second sort of coming out, and I hadn't anticipated the stress of that, and that was sort of over the past six months, and I got massively anxious this summer, like really unhappy. But I've been because like everybody had been talking about it, and I now felt this level of expectation that I'll, well, Matt can never he wrote a book about panic attacks, he can never have a panic attack again, which basically like triggered my anxiety exactly. But because I've been doing this for three and a half years now, I was able to take control of it. I don't like control. I was able to redirect. I doubled down on mindfulness and meditation and you know, little practices. I have a little practice. I don't do big meditations. I cut caffeine significantly. I stopped drinking entirely, like I wasn't drinking a lot, but I was drinking socially and I find that it makes me anxious. So I took all the things out that I could control in order to make me feel better, and it worked. And so you know, it's the little things. We are all works in progress, right, and wellness is maintenance, and it's unfortunate. I wish that there was a magic bullet or a silver bullet, or it doesn't exist, I would have taken it. So it's a constant maintenance that we all need to do, and that you know, I've learned how to do, which kind of helped me through that second sort of tougher phase.

Like literally thirty seconds before air, Oh you're writing a book about it. That's crazy, and so like that was the second sort of coming out, and I hadn't anticipated the stress of that, and that was sort of over the past six months, and I got massively anxious this summer, like really unhappy. But I've been because like everybody had been talking about it, and I now felt this level of expectation that I'll, well, Matt can never he wrote a book about panic attacks, he can never have a panic attack again, which basically like triggered my anxiety exactly. But because I've been doing this for three and a half years now, I was able to take control of it. I don't like control. I was able to redirect. I doubled down on mindfulness and meditation and you know, little practices. I have a little practice. I don't do big meditations. I cut caffeine significantly. I stopped drinking entirely, like I wasn't drinking a lot, but I was drinking socially and I find that it makes me anxious. So I took all the things out that I could control in order to make me feel better, and it worked. And so you know, it's the little things. We are all works in progress, right, and wellness is maintenance, and it's unfortunate. I wish that there was a magic bullet or a silver bullet, or it doesn't exist, I would have taken it. So it's a constant maintenance that we all need to do, and that you know, I've learned how to do, which kind of helped me through that second sort of tougher phase.

That's really great, how because you mentioned something that I that I find really important, you know, for people to know, and there's obviously so much science around it, but the fact that oftentimes the symptoms of a panic attack feel and or present like a heart attack. You know, when you talk about that triggering episode reporting on that helicopter crash, on that very deep, you know, wound about your own father's loss that it brought up in you, you reminded me of, you know, something I learned about my dad. What an interesting thing, By the way, I know you mentioned your daughter's fifteen to be in the stage I'm in where you know, I'm an adult and my parents are adults, and we relate to each other as you know, parent and child, but also as friends. You know. I knew my dad had lost his dad when he was young. I didn't know a lot of details about it, and that the year my dad turned sixty six, he was just different and I couldn't figure out why, and my mom couldn't figure out why. And right before his sixty seventh birthday, he got rushed to the hospital. We thought he was having a heart attack, he was having a panic attack, and he finally shared with us. He was like, well, my dad died when he was sixty six, and all year long, I've just been waiting to drop dead. And when my dad turned sixty seven, it like opened up this whole thing in him, that this you know, release of emotion and sadness, this unbelievable wave of relief. And my mom and I were like, why didn't you tell us?

That's really great, how because you mentioned something that I that I find really important, you know, for people to know, and there's obviously so much science around it, but the fact that oftentimes the symptoms of a panic attack feel and or present like a heart attack. You know, when you talk about that triggering episode reporting on that helicopter crash, on that very deep, you know, wound about your own father's loss that it brought up in you, you reminded me of, you know, something I learned about my dad. What an interesting thing, By the way, I know you mentioned your daughter's fifteen to be in the stage I'm in where you know, I'm an adult and my parents are adults, and we relate to each other as you know, parent and child, but also as friends. You know. I knew my dad had lost his dad when he was young. I didn't know a lot of details about it, and that the year my dad turned sixty six, he was just different and I couldn't figure out why, and my mom couldn't figure out why. And right before his sixty seventh birthday, he got rushed to the hospital. We thought he was having a heart attack, he was having a panic attack, and he finally shared with us. He was like, well, my dad died when he was sixty six, and all year long, I've just been waiting to drop dead. And when my dad turned sixty seven, it like opened up this whole thing in him, that this you know, release of emotion and sadness, this unbelievable wave of relief. And my mom and I were like, why didn't you tell us?

But he couldn't.

But he couldn't.

He couldn't talk about it. It was such a deep seated trauma and fear that he didn't want to jinx it. He didn't he just couldn't talk about it till he got past it. And to hear you talk about it is so familiar to me, even though your story is unique. And I I understand the depths of a trigger like that because I watched it happen to my dad. I mean he literally went to the hot We were like, Dad's having a heart attack. Oh, I got you know, how as the expert are our resident expert here, how can people differentiate if the symptoms are so closely linked? How do you know if you're having a panic attack and not a heart attack? How do you know if you need to go to the hospital or not?

He couldn't talk about it. It was such a deep seated trauma and fear that he didn't want to jinx it. He didn't he just couldn't talk about it till he got past it. And to hear you talk about it is so familiar to me, even though your story is unique. And I I understand the depths of a trigger like that because I watched it happen to my dad. I mean he literally went to the hot We were like, Dad's having a heart attack. Oh, I got you know, how as the expert are our resident expert here, how can people differentiate if the symptoms are so closely linked? How do you know if you're having a panic attack and not a heart attack? How do you know if you need to go to the hospital or not?

Like, what do you do first? Well, I'm sorry about your dad's experience because it's terrifying. Right, just to go to the hospital and go to the er is a traumatic experience. It's especially when you think you're dying of a heart attack. So, my god, I feel for the guy. Tell him I got him.

Like, what do you do first? Well, I'm sorry about your dad's experience because it's terrifying. Right, just to go to the hospital and go to the er is a traumatic experience. It's especially when you think you're dying of a heart attack. So, my god, I feel for the guy. Tell him I got him.

Well, now he's in his mid seventies and like looks like Santa Claus and is having a great time. He's adorable. But it was like it was definitely a weird It was a weird year.

Well, now he's in his mid seventies and like looks like Santa Claus and is having a great time. He's adorable. But it was like it was definitely a weird It was a weird year.

Have you ever had a panic attack? Oh? Yeah, do you know what trigger is?

Have you ever had a panic attack? Oh? Yeah, do you know what trigger is?

Yes, there are certain things. Definitely for me, it that I can tell when something's coming exactly because of your earlier point, that feeling of implosion. For me, what starts to happen is I feel like my rib cage is in a vice and starting to crack inward, Like I feel like my sternam is going to snap right right into my heart. And I'm like, oh boy, here we go. And it's the it's the dry mouth, and it's the clammy hands, and it's and it's the it's the inability to listen. People will be talking and I'll realize I can't hear any other words they're saying, and it it's all of those things. I think for me, because of my job, it can really be triggered by you spoke earlier about human evolution, right, like we were programmed to be afraid of the lion coming at us out of the grass somewhere. Well, when you live in a digital age and have a job like we have where millions of people are connected to you through a device, what a privilege to be able to talk about activism and cause raise awareness, have discussions like this one about mental health but when it feels like millions of people are coming at you, it's like the feeling of there being millions of people in the grass, millions of lions in the grass can really it triggers a terrifying feeling of being alone in like a very grand scale for me.

Yes, there are certain things. Definitely for me, it that I can tell when something's coming exactly because of your earlier point, that feeling of implosion. For me, what starts to happen is I feel like my rib cage is in a vice and starting to crack inward, Like I feel like my sternam is going to snap right right into my heart. And I'm like, oh boy, here we go. And it's the it's the dry mouth, and it's the clammy hands, and it's and it's the it's the inability to listen. People will be talking and I'll realize I can't hear any other words they're saying, and it it's all of those things. I think for me, because of my job, it can really be triggered by you spoke earlier about human evolution, right, like we were programmed to be afraid of the lion coming at us out of the grass somewhere. Well, when you live in a digital age and have a job like we have where millions of people are connected to you through a device, what a privilege to be able to talk about activism and cause raise awareness, have discussions like this one about mental health but when it feels like millions of people are coming at you, it's like the feeling of there being millions of people in the grass, millions of lions in the grass can really it triggers a terrifying feeling of being alone in like a very grand scale for me.

You know, I read about that in the book as well, because it's unnatural, right, we evolve to be a certain way, and the human genome is, you know, kind of old. We should take sense, it's not so old, but like you know, it is old ish, right, we're talking a couple hundred thousand years. Yeah, But the evolution of social media and the way we connect now is like a split second in time, and so our genome, the way we are, hasn't caught up with modern technology. So being responsible for millions of people, or having them react to you or relate to you in any way, it's just too much for our brains to handle. It's just not natural.

You know, I read about that in the book as well, because it's unnatural, right, we evolve to be a certain way, and the human genome is, you know, kind of old. We should take sense, it's not so old, but like you know, it is old ish, right, we're talking a couple hundred thousand years. Yeah, But the evolution of social media and the way we connect now is like a split second in time, and so our genome, the way we are, hasn't caught up with modern technology. So being responsible for millions of people, or having them react to you or relate to you in any way, it's just too much for our brains to handle. It's just not natural.

Or or think that because you share anything, they know everything about you. That's hard. My therapist said something really interesting to me this morning. He said, our emotions evolved with us phones, did not exactly. We have these deep seated evolutionary patterns and how we feel and relate to people, and then we have this crazy device. And thing I learned about my you know, the nerdy stuff I like to research that I learned about my day job, which I find fascinating, is that the first silent movie, or one of the first silent movies, featured a shot, you know, from low angle on a train track and a huge steamer train coming at the camera. And when the train was racing toward the camera, everyone in the theater started screaming and got up and ran right because they'd never seen moving images before. And so the brain said, you're all about to get run over by a train, and people ran out of the theater. We've had to learn so much in the last hundred years that makes no sense to our brains. That took millennia to evolve into these modern day humans.

Or or think that because you share anything, they know everything about you. That's hard. My therapist said something really interesting to me this morning. He said, our emotions evolved with us phones, did not exactly. We have these deep seated evolutionary patterns and how we feel and relate to people, and then we have this crazy device. And thing I learned about my you know, the nerdy stuff I like to research that I learned about my day job, which I find fascinating, is that the first silent movie, or one of the first silent movies, featured a shot, you know, from low angle on a train track and a huge steamer train coming at the camera. And when the train was racing toward the camera, everyone in the theater started screaming and got up and ran right because they'd never seen moving images before. And so the brain said, you're all about to get run over by a train, and people ran out of the theater. We've had to learn so much in the last hundred years that makes no sense to our brains. That took millennia to evolve into these modern day humans.

Yeah, and there's there's this cognitive dissonance. So and it causes a lot of trouble for us. And I don't blame people feeling like they know us and you're famous. I'm not, but you know, because we put ourselves out I do on social media, and I'm me I'm trying to be super authentic, like and so they do know a form of us. And I don't blame people. I just it is overwhelming because you know, even a few hundred years ago, or one hundred and fifty years ago, but certainly thousands of years ago, our networks were tiny. It was just a few, maybe a couple dozen people in our cave group or tribe or whatever it was that we were roaming the savannah, the jungle, the whatever in with. It was just you know, a few people. Now it can be hundreds and hundreds of people, and our brains simply can't manage it. And I think we all struggle with that.

Yeah, and there's there's this cognitive dissonance. So and it causes a lot of trouble for us. And I don't blame people feeling like they know us and you're famous. I'm not, but you know, because we put ourselves out I do on social media, and I'm me I'm trying to be super authentic, like and so they do know a form of us. And I don't blame people. I just it is overwhelming because you know, even a few hundred years ago, or one hundred and fifty years ago, but certainly thousands of years ago, our networks were tiny. It was just a few, maybe a couple dozen people in our cave group or tribe or whatever it was that we were roaming the savannah, the jungle, the whatever in with. It was just you know, a few people. Now it can be hundreds and hundreds of people, and our brains simply can't manage it. And I think we all struggle with that.

Yeah, and now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy and I think you will too. How then, from this vantage point, you know, having written the book, getting this big picture on the data, the science, you know, the chemicals, the adrenaline and the cortisol and everything that happens in the body when when you panic, knowing yourself and the larger you know, diagnosable disorder, So well, what does it feel like to be on the other side of the book. What does it feel like to have everybody know in a way? Do you feel more free, less apt to panic? Or is it really still just a day by day experience for you.

Yeah, and now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy and I think you will too. How then, from this vantage point, you know, having written the book, getting this big picture on the data, the science, you know, the chemicals, the adrenaline and the cortisol and everything that happens in the body when when you panic, knowing yourself and the larger you know, diagnosable disorder, So well, what does it feel like to be on the other side of the book. What does it feel like to have everybody know in a way? Do you feel more free, less apt to panic? Or is it really still just a day by day experience for you.

I mean that. So obviously part of the book was figuring out what panic is, learning why it is we have panic, learning that it's okay to be vulnerable about it because I'm pretty vulnerable my day to day but this was a deep, dark secret that I chose not to reveal, and being all about it is something.

I mean that. So obviously part of the book was figuring out what panic is, learning why it is we have panic, learning that it's okay to be vulnerable about it because I'm pretty vulnerable my day to day but this was a deep, dark secret that I chose not to reveal, and being all about it is something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also learned that there was more that was going on, and I started taking breathwork classes with a buddy of mine, Lane Jaffey, who's in LA and does breathwork. And have you ever done breathwork like holotropic breathwork?

I also learned that there was more that was going on, and I started taking breathwork classes with a buddy of mine, Lane Jaffey, who's in LA and does breathwork. And have you ever done breathwork like holotropic breathwork?

The no, and I really want to, And you are the third person who's talked to me about it in the last two weeks, and I feel like it's a sign.

The no, and I really want to, And you are the third person who's talked to me about it in the last two weeks, and I feel like it's a sign.

Okay, it might be. So those holotropic breathwork or any type of intense breath work basically takes you to it. I thought it was going to be this really calm, sort of chill thing like meditation plus or yoga. It's not. It's a pretty intense experience. And so you start by breathing, you know, two in one out. He does it through your belly and you can do it. Depending on the cadence, it sort of sends you deeper and deeper. So if you do it fast and big, basically it deprives your body. Even though you're hypervent it deprives your body of the ability to intake oxygen. So you're running short on carbon dioxide because you're hyperventilating, which prohibits your body from intaking and such a digesting oxygen into your blood system. So what ends up happening is you're you sort of you get lobster hands, you lose sensation in your extremities, your toes go all weird, and then you like almost have a psychedelic experience. And I basically every time I do it, I have I wouldn't say psychedelic, but nearly like I'm out of my body. I'm certainly out of my right mind because I realized that there were there were decades of untapped grief that I hadn't dealt with that I'm so good at suppressing. I'm so good at putting up the armor, which is why I can see those terrific things that you can imagine. Like just last week, you know, I was in the room as they were zipping up the body bags of people who were murdered in little hamlets and I'm totally okay, but I'm just because I'm so good at keeping that armor up, but too good. And so I realized when I was doing this first breath work class with this guy that I just started sobbing like a big, ugly hysterical cry in front of a room of other people. And I'm just crying and I can't stop, and I'm like, he comes and he grounds me, so he just like put his hands on my legs, on my shinds, and he's like, you know, I got you. Not taking me out of it, but just like I got you. You're okay, keep going, Yeah, And such a relief. It was such good medicine that cry, that I realized that there's a lot more of it there. And I also realized that I've done therapy and I've done literally every pharmaceutical you can imagine, for you know, gabba is to propranolol, to prasis in all these anti seizure medications, ADHD medication. All of this is with my psychiatrist to try to figure out the panic attacks and maybe there's something else that's causing it. And a lot of what's causing it was this subterranean anguish, this untreated pain, this grief that I had dealt with. And I ended up gravitating towards psychedelics because I realized that as long as I'm in my right mind, as long as I'm here with you on this plane of conversation, my inclination is to please, is to be thoughtful, to be reasonable, and I needed to do stuff that was not reasonable, that was not logical, to take me out of my right head, which is why I went and tried ayahuasca and psilocybin ketamine five MAO DMT that's the toad, various other modalities that forced me a time and again out of my right brain to let me into this place that I call the well of grief that you know. This place I would go was after my dad died. My mom and I would have these bouts of crying. We would just hold each other and sometimes it would last for days. And it was so scary to go back in there that Sophia, I just didn't want to go, Like I was afraid that if I'd go and fall into that well of grief, I wouldn't be able to claw my way back out again, and so I completely I sealed it shut with cement, and so the only way to unclog it to reopen it up to excavate that pain for me, And this is I'm not advocating this for anyone. I'm just saying what worked for me was to go on these psychedelic journeys and to work through it that way, which then taught me how to cry without having to be on some sort of hallucinogen. That's the skill that I learned, is to find my way back to the well of grief and to know that I'm not going to drown inside of it. Sure.