⛪️ cults, podcasting and kidnappings with Jordan Harbinger

CEO Wisdom Podcast with Jordan Harbinger himself. You guys probably know him. The Jordan Harbinger Show. He's the host of that. Jordan, can you introduce yourself real quick?

Sure, yeah. So I host the Jordan Harbinger Show. I used to host 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 I, 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. It's just follow my own interest 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 guest. 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. 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, 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 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 went 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 can kicks in. How do you get your guests warmed up so that they get to the value as quick as possible?

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, like in podcasts, there'll be an hour in and then they'll. 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 and it's completely ridiculous and it disrespects 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 to, or sorry to get the guest 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 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 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, 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 ten 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 notice 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 Socalo. 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 instead of down, and I was like, hey, what's going on? So finally, and this is thankfully 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, 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 Times Square 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 going to 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, 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 they 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 going to kind of bolt because I had a feeling something was weird or I was going to go find an ATM and then like, you know, put the money in the window, knock it 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 going to ask my friend for directions. When you 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 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, 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 going to get in the car or they're going to take me out of the car by force, whatever. So. 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. 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 then I tried to open the door. I couldn't open the door because he had cut the lock. 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 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, 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 9:00pm, 8:00pm in the middle of the hood in Mexico City. Finally, somebody stops, lets me in the car. After a little bit of negotiation, and I said, take me to the police. And then this guy who 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. And I moved to Guadalajara and left after that. And it was just like, you know, I was on a bus by probably 6 o', clock, 7 o' clock in the morning at that point.

Oh, yeah, Yeah, I had. Well, I mean, I had my shit 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 where was it again? Marrakech or Casablanca, Morocco. So, yeah, going to the police is pretty much pointless. They're incompetent and it's like finding a needle in the haystack. This is funny, but this is some dark shit 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 dark shit?

Yeah, I think in a way I'm attracted to it because it's. 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 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, our resilience, of course, of people who've been through crazy stuff, 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. 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 bleed the same blood at 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 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 when you're, especially when you're a kid or it's really 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 TikTok 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 moron who deserves to be, you know, rounded up and shot. 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, geez, man, what, what is happening? And part of that is because we're just getting crap news. A lot of it's bullshit 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 harder. 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 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 disinformation?

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. People 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, TikTok. 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 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. Having people who are not able to discern real news or real information or credible information is very dangerous in a democracy. And so, yeah, it's a big, big problem.

How much more time do you have?

I have. Let me see. Hold on. What's my next thing? Yeah, I've got, like, one minute, but we can. We can do, like, one more question. Why not?

Yeah. Okay. Well, last question. I think these folks, yeah. Like, their opinions start from the education that they had early on in their lives, and then whatever points kind fits in their puzzle piece, they. They kind of acquired feels good dopamine release. How can we fight that? Is. Is. Is that even a worthwhile fight? 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 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 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 love 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 dumbarian.

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. 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, 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, 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 frickin 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 0.1% of kooky people, they're going to be kooks going to kook, 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, a 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.

Full alignment. Where can people find out more about you?

Jordan? Yeah, if you're interested in stuff like disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, cults, science, neuroscience, all that stuff. The Jordan Harbinger show is a great place to get it. The Jordan Harbinger show on any podcast app. There's also a YouTube channel, but it's like less than 1% of my audience there, and I don't put up most of my episodes there.