Name: Joe Rogan Experience #940 - Sam Harris & Dan Harris
Uploaded: 2017-04-05T02:57:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #940 - Sam Harris & Dan Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-04-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #940 - Sam Harris & Dan Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-04-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #940 - Sam Harris & Dan Harris

three two one and we're live what's up all right how are you man what's going
on great sam harris
ladies and gentlemen got harris and harris dan and sam no relation obviously no
relation brother
from another mother kind of thing oh sweet yeah actually no we work this out we
are deeply
unrelated because you're harris is the jewish side of your family right no no
no no my harris
is the yes actually no you're right my harris is the jewish side of the family
it was changed at
ellis island from allegedly from addis which doesn't sound jewish either but uh
yes right
my harris is uh the goyim side of the family yeah funny how many people's names
were changed at ellis
island yeah like where they're like nah not american enough yeah meanwhile schwarzenegger
made it right
proudly yeah odd so uh anyway thanks for coming you guys thanks for having us
this is a weird time
you know i've been extra weirded out over the last couple months and i just got
back from mexico i was
on vacation i didn't do shit for a week and in not doing anything for a week i
really got a chance to
sit down and and think about stuff and i'm more weirded out by life today than
i think i ever have
been before so i'm excited to have you on because i want to hear your story
because sam has been
telling me about it and i looked into it and it's please explain like what
happened to you
like where you were and what happened to you okay so it was uh you're talking
about the panic attack
yeah yeah so it was 2004 i was on a little show that we do at abc news called
good morning america
that's a big show that's a big show that's not a little show no it's not a
little show uh and i was
i was doing the job that i i was filling in as the newsreader that's the person
who comes on at the
top of each hour and reads the headlines um and uh i just freaked out i just
lost it i like how
so i was a couple seconds into it and i i started to get really scared and it
just uh if you've ever
had a have you ever had a panic attack no so it's like anxiety on steroids so
you start to worry
but then your fight or flight instincts kick in so um your lungs seize up your
palms start sweating
your mouth dries up your heart is racing your mind is racing you just i couldn't
breathe and therefore
couldn't speak so a couple seconds into reading what was supposed to be six
stories right off of the
teleprompter i just i lost the capacity to speak and i had to kind of squeak
out uh something about
you know back to you back to the main anchors wow yeah it sucked uncontrollably
now what what caused it
uh do you know i do yeah i definitely know um it's some dumb behavior in my
personal life is what
caused it i i uh had spent a lot of time as a war reporter at abc news um i was
in afghanistan pakistan
israel west bank gaza six six trips to iraq and i had come home from a long run
and i i covered uh
kind of the pre-invasion invasion and then uh insurgency in one kind of six
month run
and i came home after that and i i got depressed and i didn't actually know i
was depressed but i was
having some obvious symptoms in hindsight i was having trouble getting out of
bed felt like i had a
low-grade fever all the time and then i did something really smart which is i
started to
self-medicate with uh cocaine and ecstasy uh and even though i wasn't doing it
all the time i like
to say it wasn't like that you know you ever see the wolf of wall street yes
where they're popping
ludes that that that wasn't me i was and i wasn't getting high on the air or
anything like that but
you know i was getting i was partying in my spare time because it made me feel
better uh so after i had
the panic attack i went to a doctor who's an expert in panic and he started
asking me a bunch of
questions trying to figure out what what what had caused the panic attack and
one of the questions
was do you do drugs and i was like yeah i do drugs and he leaned back in his
chair and gave me a look
that uh communicated the following sentiment um okay asshole mystery solved and
he just pointed out
that you know you raise the level of adrenaline in your brain artificially uh
you you make it much
more likely to have a panic attack and i at at baseline i'm a jittery little
dude so it doesn't
doesn't take much to put me in that zone i mean you just offered me coffee and
i said no because right
because that even that will freak me out well it's weird that ecstasy and
cocaine was the combination
because ecstasy is something that they actually give to a lot of soldiers that
have ptsd and there's
been quite a few tests on that yeah i don't i don't actually think ecstasy was
the problem the coke
i think it was the coke yeah yeah it makes sense yeah so but those are the two
drugs i was mostly
doing how often were you doing it i would say you know there would be months
where i wasn't doing it
at all because i would i was off i covered the 2004 presidential campaign and i
didn't have a lot of
time to be you know snorting coke so um but when i was home and around my
friends you know on a good on a
busy week you know two three times a week wow that's a lot yeah that'll do you
there's uh there's a
comeback right now that uh cocaine is experiencing did it ever go away i don't
know i've never done it was
there some sort of cocaine recession that i had to bounce back from i believe
there was really this
is what this i'm talking totally ignorantly i've been out of the game for a
long time so cocaine yeah
yeah i'm kind of boring now um uh but it feels to me like it's kind of a perennial
favorite
yeah i don't know i mean i feel like it went through a recession maybe it's
just my perception
i had a buddy of mine when i was in high school and his cousin was uh hooked on
coke and i watched while
we're in high school he started selling it and he withered away lost like 30
pounds or something like
that and just him and his girlfriend just hide out in the attic they lived they
had an attic apartment
they would just hide out there and watch tv and do coke and sell coke to people
and i was like well
fuck that drug like whatever that drug's doing like these people it's like it
was almost like knowing
someone who had gotten bitten by a vampire and become something different it
was very strange so
my experience is seeing people do that led me to never do it yeah i mean it
certainly was not like
that for me but you know i i could see it over the horizon you can it's an
incredibly addictive drug um
so i think you've made the right call yeah it seems a little it's got a little
too much gravity attached
to it yeah i mean you you you can get hooked and it will bring you down there
are other drugs you can
do i'm not recommending drugs but uh the way my friend sam my my half brother
sam over there does let me
get to it yeah uh there are other drugs you can do that have vastly lower
addictive uh uh character uh care
what's the word i'm looking for here characteristics yes thank you um so how
did you recover
i so i wasn't actually doing it that long i actually had never done hard drugs
until my early 30s
and when i came home from the war zones and uh and that's what started it yeah
you just were freaked
out by seeing too much no you know it's actually it wasn't ptsd uh it was i was
addicted to the
adrenaline i was having i was it was not that i was traumatized it was that i
was enjoying it too much
and i would come home and the world would seem gray and boring uh wow yes that
was that was the problem
did you watch hurt locker i'm sure you did right yeah did that resonate with
you absolutely it's been a
while since i watched it but absolutely i want to just be clear that the
experience of a journalist
is so different from the experience so much more mild than the experience of a
an enlisted
man or woman sure so i don't want to compare my experience to the hurt locker i'm
a observer on the
side and i and and i don't even want to compare my experience to more
experienced war correspondents
out there i'm thinking of like guys like richard engel on nbc absolutely i just
actually sat down
with him the other day for he's got to do documentary coming out um my
experiences are much more mild than
that but certainly enough to really get a sense of how thrilling it is there's
an expression there's
nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses you and in my case luckily
they all missed that was
not true for some of my friends um but you so i had a real sense of the stakes
but it is exciting uh it's
also thrilling on a um on a idealistic level i mean i believe in the importance
of bearing witness to
the what to the tip of the spear to what we're doing to what our military is
doing in our name
so all of that is a heady mix so you knew people over there uh journalists that
got killed oh yeah
absolutely a very good friend of mine the guy who actually ultimately set me up
with my wife
is a guy named bob woodruff who was uh the anchor of world news tonight on abc
news he had
only been in the chair for about a month when he was on a trip to iraq and he
got hit literally got
his head nearly blown off when he was in the back when he was in the top of an
iraqi tank uh almost
died is an absolute miracle is alive there are pictures of him on the internet
with basically half a
head um traumatic brain injury was brought back to life is is to this day a
walking miracle uh that he's
alive uh and and after he recovered he then introduced me to the woman i
married uh so he's a close friend
and i i uh i saw cases like that lost friends both iraqi friends and journalist
friends um my the woman
i was dating at the time when i when i was spending a lot of time in iraq she
got hit by a tank shell
um she was in in the the hotel palestine where all the journalists were staying
she was
on a balcony and one of her colleagues was on the balcony below her he got a
direct hit and died
uh he she carried him to the hospital and she basically uh got the reverberations
and couldn't
hear still can't hear as far as i know when you're a journalist and you're over
in iraq or in afghanistan
you're in war and what you're experiencing is so far removed from the day-to-day
life that most people
experience what what is it like trying to relay that to people how difficult is
it trying to because
i think so many people have this almost um dramatic uh television movie slash
view of of war where they
don't they don't ever experience it like i would imagine probably 99 of the
people that are in this
country will never experience it no and that's good yeah um no it's it's it's i
don't know that you can
describe it uh in a way that will really give the full picture of its uh absurdities
and and horrors
and um long stretches of boredom punctuated by terror um and also this other
piece which is taboo to
talk about which is the pleasure and excitement that people get yeah fighting
wars i mean this is
sebastian younger's thesis as well i mean just the camaraderie is the most
intense camaraderie they ever
experience and so that's something they come back to civilian life and are
missing it and and it's
part of what's so difficult about coming back and that's why you see them a lot
of uh risk-taking
behavior among uh vets um because they're you know that you're looking for
another way to get that
hit of adrenaline for sure there was a there's a book and i'm blanking on the
name is a great book
written by a much more experienced war correspondent than me he used the phrase
war is a drug
and that to me sums it up at least in my experience i got hooked on the
experience of
being in these really elevated situations heightened situations cinematic
dramatic situations and i would
come home and i just i didn't know what to do to replace it and so this
synthetic squirt of adrenaline
that you can get from cocaine seemed to do it for me obviously had tremendously
negative uh consequences
and so i wouldn't recommend it but i see why people do this so how did you how
did you bounce back oh
that was actually the 