The Jordan Harbinger Show

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is happening right now to girls worldwide. Jessica Wynn explains why — and what stops it — on Skeptical Sunday.Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Jessica Wynn!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1378On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:Female Genital Mutilation isn't a fringe practice — an estimated 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone FGM, and the number is climbing, up 15 percent in eight years. More than two million girls are cut each year, most before their fifth birthday, some within days of being born.FGM isn't Islamic — it predates Islam and appears among Christian and non-religious communities alike; the common thread is culture, not theology. "God requires this" is used as control, which is also wh

You carry an attraction you never chose and never acted on, but therapy could trigger a report that ruins you. Get help, or hide? It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1377On This Week's Feedback Friday:If you want to take a siesta on Gabe's Barcelona adventures and resident post-traumatic growth expert Arseny Thumb von Neuburg's thoughts on cognitive empathy vs. affective empathy, skip forward about 16 minutes and 30 seconds!You're a pedophile who's never acted on it and swears you never will — but the secret is crushing you. You want a therapist to help you rewir

How does shame curdle into addiction? Ex-dealer and federal informant Sean Hemeon retraces his descent and the long climb back to sober.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1376What We Discuss with Sean Hemeon:Sean Hemeon was primed for addiction before he ever tried meth. Abandoned at four, taught by his church that being gay made him diseased, meth gave him the confidence and belonging shame had denied him. It didn't create the void, but filled one that was already there.Moral collapse is gradual, not sudden. A year without a sober breath is how a smart person ends up stuffing meth into a dying stranger's nose, hoping to restart his heart. Boundaries don't break all at once — they give way one rationalization at a time.The system meant to stop the harm made it worse. Agents saved in Sean's phone as 'yes' and 'no' pushed him back into dealing to gather intel. A judge charmed by his school's basketball team let him walk. The outcome had less to do with the crime than with luck.

Think you need to be an "alpha" to win? Nick Pell debunks the wolf-pack myth and reveals what actually earns respect here on Skeptical Sunday!Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1375On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:An "alpha" is supposedly the dominant top dog — the leader who takes 90% of life's spoils while the lesser "betas" scrap for crumbs. But the whole pecking order traces back to a 1940s study of captive wolves crammed into a pen — the "wolf prison yard," not real pack life.The biologist who made "alpha" famous, L. David Mech, spent decades disavowing his own bestseller. The so-called alpha wolves aren't the toughest fighters who clawed their way up — they're just the parents. The pack defers to them

War and police work broke your husband, then he ditched his meds. Do you stand by a spiraling man, or shield your sons from him? It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1374On This Week's Feedback Friday:Don't want to hear about Gabe's Spanish hippie countryside misadventures? Fast forward to 16 minutes and 20 seconds!19 years married, two young sons, and a husband whose army malaria-drug trial and years as a cop left him traumatized — now off his meds, raging at every institution on Earth, and dropping $60K on domain names in a manic spree. Your compassion is bottom

Money, fame, and abs buy admiration, not intimacy. How to Feel Loved author Sonja Lyubomirsky reveals the five mindsets that make you feel loved.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1373What We Discuss with Sonja Lyubomirsky:Being loved and feeling loved are two different things. Surveys found 70 percent of people can name a close relationship where the love just isn't landing. Someone can adore you completely, but if it never clears your firewall, you can feel utterly alone in a room full of people who care.The fix isn't becoming more lovable or overhauling your partner — it's changing the next conversation. A relationship is really just a series of conversations, which means feeling more loved is far more under your control than the entire self-help aisle wants you to believe.Money, status, and six-pack abs buy admiration, not intimacy — and admiration never makes anyone feel known. Optimizing your dating life like you're shopping for a used Porsche, chasing the mythical 'fou

Oat, almond, soy, dairy—the milk aisle is a culture war in your coffee. But what's best? Jessica Wynn brings all the truth to the yard on Skeptical Sunday!Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Jessica Wynn!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1372On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:On nutrition, dairy still wins — about eight grams of high-quality protein per cup versus one to two for most oat milks, plus it's the cheapest protein you can pour. Switching to plant milk to feel healthier can quietly cost you the very nutrition you assumed tagged along.The viral "gallons per almond" stat is engineered outrage — framed per nut, never per glass, and never beside dairy. Full life-cycle studies show dairy actually uses more total water and carries the biggest footpr

Your in-laws lowballed you for your own home, took the deed, and kept the cash. Do you fight family in court, or eat the loss? It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1371On This Week's Feedback Friday:Your wife's parents paid off her mortgage, then "gifted" the renovations they now insist were a $225,000 investment. When you two planned to move states away, they demanded the house, lowballed you to $100,000, took the deed with no written contract — and never paid up. Can you claw it back?Everyone swears you'd make a great mom — you teach Sunday school, you "mother"

War is getting cheaper, supply lines are in danger, and the old order is cracking. Peter Zeihan explains why it's breaking and what North America can do.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1370What We Discuss with Peter Zeihan:War just got cheaper, not less lethal. A drone costing double-digit dollars can now pick its own target, fly hundreds of miles, and destroy gear guarded by $4 million interceptors. Ukraine fires hundreds a day, and the edge that made piloted systems king is shrinking by the week.America blew through half its Patriot interceptors in the Iran war and can build only about 70 a year — refilling the stockpile is a 15-year math problem. The result: a broad drawdown of US power across the Eastern Hemisphere, because we can no longer afford to defend it.The real crisis isn't losing cheap gadgets — it's losing the building blocks. Roughly 80% of the world's steel, copper, lithium, and cobalt is processed in China. Break that system before a replacement exists, an

Trepanation, voluntary eunuchs, and other things to never try at home. Nick Pell cuts through the crackpot science here on Skeptical Sunday.Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1369On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:The oldest surgery on Earth: How humans spent 7,000 to 10,000 years drilling holes in skulls — and why survival rates reached 40 percent, climbing as high as 78 percent in some pre-modern European populations, rivaling the best of early modern Europe.When the ancients got it right: Why trepanation was sometimes sound medicine — relieving deadly pressure from a brain bleed — even as it was also used to release evil spirits, treat epilepsy and migraines, or mark warriors and shamans in rites of passag

A massage therapist you vouched for turns out to be unlicensed and a predator. How can you make up for your lapse in judgment? It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1368On This Week's Feedback Friday:You're a massage therapist who vouched for a longtime colleague — then learned he'd never been licensed, was working under his wife's name, and had confessed to assaulting 15 women on the table. Despite this all being brought to light, he's still illegally working from an app. How do you protect your community from this creep and recover trust in your own judgment?You'

Bioweapons are cheaper and deadlier than nukes — and we're not ready. Biological War author Annie Jacobsen breaks down how close we are to catastrophe.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1367What We Discuss with Annie Jacobsen:The Soviet bioweapons program was not dismantled after the Cold War — it was absorbed. The State Department says Russia and North Korea run active illegal programs; China and Iran are of concern.Bioweapons have a low barrier to entry, needing no uranium or missiles. Experts say one could be made in a basement with basic biology and AI help. The Pentagon rates bio the greatest overall WMD threat.Pneumonic plague is 100% fatal without antibiotics within 24 hours. The US has roughly 100 special-pathogen beds for 340 million people, so hospitals would be overwhelmed on day one.Soviet scientists inserted a euphoria gene into plague so the infected feel good, stay social, and spread it widely instead of staying home in bed.Annie Jacobsen's message is pressure,

Probiotics, cleanses, leaky gut, worms — science or scam? Jessica Wynn digests the truth about your microbiome this Skeptical Sunday!Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Jessica Wynn!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1366On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:Your gut is a genuine marvel, with 500 million neurons chattering up the vagus nerve to your brain. But "marvel" got rebranded as "malfunction" the second the wellness industry smelled money. The gut-brain axis is real science; the $62 kombucha is not."Scientists discover the sadness bacteria" sells. "We found a correlation we can't explain yet" doesn't. Depressed people do have different gut bacteria — but no one knows which is driving the bus. Correlation isn't causation, a lesson the internet forgets

Your brother-in-law cut off the family, can't hold a job, and asks his girlfriend what he's feeling. Hostage, or willing prisoner? It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1365On This Week's Feedback Friday:Your brother-in-law Tommy was the little brother you never had. Then a much older girlfriend rebranded herself as a "somatic trauma therapist," diagnosed him from a certificate mill, and helped him cut off everyone who loves him, all while living rent-free in his parents' basement. Can you free a hostage who keeps demanding pizza money?You've got a hard-working hus

A late text isn't a diagnosis and chemistry isn't destiny. Psychologist Dr. Max Butterfield is here to debunk viral dating advice with science.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1364What We Discuss with Dr. Max Butterfield:Viral relationship advice converts ambiguous behavior into confident universal rules because certainty sells. The halo effect makes attractive people believable and provocative claims spread, while real science says "maybe, sometimes, it depends," which rarely goes viral."If he wanted to, he would" ignores that motivation and desire are separate systems. People stall from fear, old wounds, or being buried — not indifference. Knowing what to do isn't the same as doing it, so give people room before writing them off.Separate the pattern from the story. A slow text reply is a pattern you can verify; "they hate me" is a story you author on top of it. Before committing to the worst version, tell yourself the most likely, least likely, and current story — most pe

Your niece accused her cousin of abuse, but her story doesn't add up. Now you fear your own sons could someday be falsely accused. It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1363On This Week's Feedback Friday:You fell head over heels for your nieces and nephews years ago. Now one niece says one of your nephews — her cousin — touched her back when they were both kids, but to you, the pieces don't quite click. Your mother-in-law fast-tracked a report, and you're bracing for the day your own toddlers get accused. Are you wrong to doubt, and can the family knit itself back

Our alphabet is history's junk drawer. Why Q Needs U author Danny Bate traces letters back through 4,000 years of pictures, invasions, and happy accidents.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1362What We Discuss with Danny Bate:How the alphabet became civilization's 4,000-year-old junk drawer of borrowed symbols, stitched together from Egyptian pictures, Greek tweaks, and Roman branding: not a language at all, but a wildly successful technology shared across English, Spanish, and dozens of unrelated tongues.Why a capital A is secretly an upside-down ox, and Q is a monkey that kept its tail to this day, O began as a lashed human eye, and R traces back to an ancient word for "head" that still lives inside the Hebrew rosh.How dropping the vowels turned writing into an MP3 file. Semitic workers in Egypt around 1900 BC repurposed hieroglyphs into one symbol per consonant, trading the beauty of pictograms for something fast, portable, and simple enough to spread across the ancient wo

You biked nude for body positivity. Years later, a predator posted the pics and your personal info online. How can you fight back? It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1361On This Week's Feedback Friday:10 years ago, you rode naked through Philadelphia in the name of body positivity and silliness. Then a stranger's LinkedIn message informs you your nudes are live on an exposure site — posted by a serial creep who's quietly stalked a dozen women across two countries. You've filed a report and started reverse-doxxing him. So how do you actually bring this ghoul to j

SE Asia's scam compounds have grown into billion-dollar criminal empires. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsay Kennedy bring us in from Out of the Loop here!Welcome to what we’re calling our “Out of the Loop” episodes, where we dig a little deeper into fascinating current events that may only register as a blip on the media’s news cycle and have conversations with the people who find themselves immersed in them. Investigative journalists Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy are here to help us understand what Southeast Asia's scam compounds are, how they've built criminal empires worth billions on the backs of trafficked humans, and how we can fight back against them.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1360On This Episode of Out of the Loop:What are scam compounds? What started as online boiler rooms has mutated into multinational criminal empires — CEOs, crypto treasuries, diplomatic cover, billions laundered. As Jordan quipped, it's LinkedIn with torture rooms — and now figh

Corn subsidies, cartoon tigers, and fake health claims turned sugar into breakfast. Nick Pell digs to the bottom of the box on Skeptical Sunday!Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1359On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:Your innocent bowl of Corn Flakes was invented by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg — a Seventh-Day Adventist convinced that bland, flavorless food would stop people from masturbating. The great American breakfast staple is, at its root, a failed anti-vice experiment that accidentally became candy."Part of a balanced breakfast" and "the most important meal of the day" aren't dietician wisdom — the latter was minted by a 1944 Kellogg's ad campaign and simply repeated until it felt like science. The health