Matt Gutman

While others run away from danger, journalists like Matt Gutman run towards it. 

The Chief National Correspondent for ABC News joins Sophia from Israel. 

Gutman is on the ground reporting on the latest war between Israel and Hamas. He shares what he is seeing and experiencing in the war-torn area, how he's protecting himself, both physically and emotionally, while covering the story, and what was happening when he had to evacuate in the middle of a live report for 'The View.'

Plus, Gutman talks about his new book, "No Time to Panic," which details his struggles with panic attacks, how they threatened to affect his career, and how he manages his anxiety. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

(00:25):
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

(00:46):
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

(01:08):
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,

(01:32):
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

(01:55):
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,

(02:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
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

(03:01):
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

(03:21):
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

(03:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
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,

(04:28):
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

(04:49):
world around you and the constant question asking led you
into studying journalism? Did you study journalism or did you
come to it roundabout?

Speaker 2 (04:58):
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

(05:22):
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

(05:43):
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,

(06:03):
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

(06:25):
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,

(06:47):
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

(07:08):
are now twenty years ago.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
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

(07:35):
someone why this was unexpected or unpredictable.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:23):
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

(08:46):
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

(09:08):
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

(09:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
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,

(10:11):
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

(10:31):
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

(10:57):
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

(11:18):
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,

(11:40):
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

(12:02):
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

(12:27):
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

(12:48):
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

(13:11):
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

(13:32):
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?

Speaker 2 (13:57):
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,

(14:20):
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

(14:44):
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

(15:07):
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

(15:28):
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,

(15:50):
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

(16:11):
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

(16:31):
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,

(16:54):
I've had to really fortify myself in a way that
I know is ultimately not healthy.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
And now a word from our sponsors who make this
show possible. I think about this a lot because your job,

(17:20):
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

(17:43):
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

(18:05):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:46):
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

(19:06):
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

(19:29):
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

(19:50):
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,

(20:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
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

(20:55):
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.

(21:18):
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

(21:40):
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

(22:01):
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

(22:23):
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

(22:44):
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.

(23:04):
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

(23:26):
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

(23:48):
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

(24:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
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

(24:43):
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

(25:04):
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

(25:24):
understand more deeply?

Speaker 2 (25:26):
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

(25:49):
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

(26:10):
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.

(26:34):
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,

(26:55):
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

(27:17):
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.

(27:39):
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

(28:00):
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

(28:20):
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

(28:41):
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

(29:02):
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?

Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, yeah, how haven't we evolved out of it?

Speaker 2 (29:15):
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

(29:35):
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,

(29:58):
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

(30:18):
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

(30:40):
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

(31:01):
broadly than with just myself.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
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

(31:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
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

(32:02):
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,

(32:23):
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

(32:45):
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

(33:06):
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,

(33:27):
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

(33:47):
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

(34:09):
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

(34:31):
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

(34:53):
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,

(35:14):
it's just stressing me out.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
You're like, maybe this is not the moment we should
talk about this.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
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

(35:41):
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.

(36:02):
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

(36:24):
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.

(36:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
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

(37:15):
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

(37:40):
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

(38:02):
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

(38:24):
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?

Speaker 2 (38:38):
But he couldn't.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
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

(39:03):
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

(39:23):
and not a heart attack? How do you know if
you need to go to the hospital or not?

Speaker 2 (39:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Have you ever had a panic attack? Oh? Yeah, do
you know what trigger is?

Speaker 1 (40:02):
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

(40:24):
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

(40:47):
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

(41:08):
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

(41:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
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

(42:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
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

(42:54):
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,

(43:15):
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

(43:38):
so much in the last hundred years that makes no
sense to our brains. That took millennia to evolve into
these modern day humans.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
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

(44:13):
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

(44:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
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

(45:11):
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,

(45:31):
less apt to panic? Or is it really still just
a day by day experience for you.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
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?

Speaker 1 (46:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
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,

(46:41):
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

(47:01):
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

(47:22):
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

(47:46):
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

(48:10):
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

(48:32):
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.

(48:52):
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,

(49:20):
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,

(49:42):
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

(50:05):
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

(50:26):
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

(50:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Yeah, it's really profound because you would think that it
would be easy to say all humans grief, grief, all
humans suffer. If you can just sit in those feelings
and let them out and process them, then they'll be over.
It's just not that easy, especially when your job requires

(51:28):
you to perform as on professional, happy, eloquent and pleasant
to be around all of the time. And that's that
sort of bifurcation I was talking about earlier. You know,
this this sort of great time, you know, post pandemic,
and this big journey summer for me has been this

(51:52):
lesson in going Oh, I can track back through my
whole adult life and see every time I've turned my
back on myself to take care of other people in
the room. And it's not that I haven't loved to
do it. I love to host, I love to gather.
I love to make people happy. Is literally my favorite
thing to do. And I can see that my learned

(52:15):
tendency is to turn my back on myself, turn my
back on myself, turn my back on myself, to look
out and to try to reintegrate those two halves. That's
that's big work. It's a big journey, and not dissimilarly
to you, you know, over the last certain number of years,

(52:40):
the last six years in particular, I have really had
to do a lot of work. I've gone deep in
the you know, neuroscience and the study and the books
like yours. I've gone into you know, cognitive behavioral therapy
and incredible you know, trauma recovery. I joke, a friend

(53:01):
of mine runs this incredible place where you can go
and do like really intensive experiential therapy and lectures and
all the things for a weekend at times, called on site.
It's in Tennessee. It's miraculous. I wish everyone could go,
and I'm like, yeah, I go to trauma camp like
once a year.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
It sounds like so much fun. Honestly, it's phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
I come home with like a full notebook. I feel
more myself.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
But you have a question for you? Sure? So? I
mean I think that I couldn't have been anything other
than a journalist. And I chose it specifically because it
allows me to go and do these crazy things, to
be in places that are so troubled, and to be
around people when they're having the worst day of their life.

(53:48):
This trauma because I'm attracted to this cutting edge between
life and death, you know, where life is its most raw.
And I think I chose it in a way to
run away. I wonder if you chose what you call
your day job as an escape as well from all
that other stuff, because you're forced to be this pleasant,

(54:12):
this beautiful person this personality who's spot on and super
professional and everything that everybody else wants you to be.
And maybe that's I mean, I'm not speaking for you,
what I'm saying for me. I've learned that it's basically
an escape.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
Oh, I'm sure. I mean, we love to escape. It's
why reality TV is popular, It's why people love Instagram.
I think it's very human. And yes, I think you
know when you grow up raised especially you know you
talk about it, that notion of being a pleaser, a
people pleaser. You know, when you're raised to be a

(54:50):
people pleaser and in a patriarchy as a woman, where
you are told that your value is in how pleasant
you are to others, how easy you are to be around,
and then you become a performer and you get rewarded for,
you know, being this person who entertains and also grabs

(55:14):
everybody a coffee when you're on your way to craft service.
You need anything I got you? Yeah, Like, those are
good qualities and if they become overly weighted on the seesaw,
you can lose the rest of yourself. And I think
it's also not lost on me the way you talk
about being a journalist. You know, my curiosity and I

(55:36):
have an obsession with justice, Like I can't let it
go when something is untrue. I have learned to be patient,
but I won't give up. My adulthood has been learning
to react appropriately rather than immediately. But when I think

(55:57):
about the things that I will fine time to do.
You know. The last time I was in the Middle
East was not long after the most recent conflict in
Syria broke out, and I had friends sneak me into
an enclave where people who were escaping a refugee camp
in Jordan were living. And these were families who'd escaped

(56:20):
with young daughters because there were people coming and like
trying to buy young refugee girls out of this refugee camp.
And I was so upset and I literally got smuggled
into the city where these families were hiding, and I
spent a day with a translator interviewing families and brought
this book back to then Secretary Clinton's camp. And Hillary

(56:45):
Clinton was running for president at the time, and I
was like, you're going to get elected, and figuring out
what we are going to do for these girls is
going to be my one of my number one areas
of focus in your administration, Like I can't calm down
about it. And they were like great, and we were working.
There were plans, there were things we were talking about
in terms of using the attention that comes with my

(57:07):
day job to put global spotlight on these families. You know,
much like another girlfriend of mine was working on creating
an incredible systematization for the national organ donation system so
that we would stop wasting organs and people would stop
dying on transplant lists. We had all these plans for

(57:27):
the second Claned administration, and then things didn't go our way.
And I look back and I go a lot of
people when they're not working, like go to the Bahamas,
and this is what I do. And it's weird, Like
I watch you in war zones and I go, what
a weird thing that you choose to go, But when

(57:47):
you can't not when you mean to witness.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Meaning, you yeah for more meaning, and you want to
help people, And that's I think it makes total sense
to me. You know, we want to be useful, which
is part of the reason I wrote this book is
to be useful.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
I guess, well, right, you turned your personal pain into
something that could empower.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
Others hopefully, And yeah, I mean just to I don't
I just you know, I both get criticized for this
and applauded for But I don't have the magic solution,
and I don't think it exists. It's all hard work,
you know, it's all the stuff that we know how

(58:31):
to do. Part of it is finding meaning. Part of
it is talking to people. Part of it is just
taking care of our bodies the way we know we
need to. Part of it is emptying out that well
of grief once it fills up with all that that
gunk of pain. There's so many different components, but yeah,
for me, part of it is finding meaning is like
feeling like I'm doing something of utility in my day job,

(58:55):
and like it both crushes me sometimes because I hear
these horrific stories, but it also makes me feel like,
at least you know I'm doing something. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
Well, it reminds me of something a friend said when
we were working on a community organizing project in La.
She said, Look, everyone has a different skill set, and
we need everybody to bring their skill sets to the table.
And I really think that's true. You know, you are
called to go to places and learn from people. I

(59:28):
feel a similar calling. You know. There are people who
don't feel that, but who can make incredible art and
design the campaign or the billboard. There are people who
are you know, the best copy editors. There are people
who will sit and phone bank all day. We always
need all hands on deck when something is wrong, and

(59:50):
so I think it's interesting to I feel encouraged in
a way from this conversation to lean into what my
gifts are, and then to remind people to lean into
what their gifts are, because if we all had the
same gift, like, we wouldn't ever get anything done. When
you lean in in a moment like this, in such

(01:00:13):
a moment of suffering in a region, how how do
you decide to go back? Because you mentioned earlier that
you lived in the region for almost a decade and
now your wife and family you live back in the States.
How do you measure as your life continues evolving, when

(01:00:36):
you're going to dip back into a war zone and
when you're going to stay home or do you just
always say yes?

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
You know, I was on I was flying with my
wife on Saturday morning, October seventh to Miami because I
had a couple of speaking engagements there and then there
was part of the book tour, and then I was
close to fly to Detroit and then a story in
Malaysia on the day after that, and I had this
whole you know, two weeks planned out, and you know,

(01:01:08):
this is like history happening, and there's no choice, Like
this is what I do for a living, and so
like everything got blown up. My wife stayed in Miami,
stayed with our friends there, and I flew off to
New York and then Tel Aviv. So you don't often
have a choice. It's just, you know, this is an
historical moment the world is watching, and it's it's sort

(01:01:32):
of what I do. And my wife is amazingly understanding
about it. So that's just like been part of the
fabric of how we live our lives, which takes a
lot of flexibility on her part and mind. But obviously
I think it's it's harder for her, but it's just
sort of how like we're kind of used to it
at this.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
Point, right, Yeah, because you've been doing this together for
so long.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Yeah, and it is like, you know, I've lived here
and I care about this place. I care about both
sides of this place and spent so much time here,
and every time there's a conflict, I come back because
I speak Hebrew and a little bit of Arabic, so
it's very useful. But yeah, it's been it's been hard.
This one's been a tough one.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
For everybody at home who's watching your reporting and really
struggling with knowing what to do, because listen, it's it's
horrific to understand that the Jewish people just incurred the
greatest day of violence that their population has seen on
Earth since the Holocaust. And it's simultaneously incredibly difficult for

(01:02:35):
a lot of people to not be upset with the
way Netanyahu has been operating since before the seventh and
with this scorched earth response that the government is enacting
that's harming so many innocent Palestinians who are also victims

(01:02:56):
of Hamas as a states answered terrorist organization being you know,
funded and fueled by bad actors in the region everywhere,
the humanitarian tragedy for civilians is undeniable, and the complexity
of a terrorist group, and you know, multiple countries warring

(01:03:21):
with each other at the same time, it's very hard
for most people to hold and you know, none of
us is the president of any of these countries, like
if they if the actual presidents don't have an answer,
I don't know how we're expected to what in that
sort of paralysis of what are we going to do
about this that everyone seems to be feeling, What do

(01:03:42):
you recommend people do? Are there aid organizations that are
supporting civilians. Are there news sources that you believe, you know,
are the most well rounded and that can educate people
who feel like they don't know enough about this? Where
where do you tell people to turn who want to
do something but don't know where to start.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
First, I would say to parents, and because I'm a
dad of two and I'm acutely attuned to this kind
of thing, I would say, turn off your phones, get
off social media, don't watch too much news, don't expose
your kids to this because it's not going to help
right now, and they're you know, our website on ABC

(01:04:26):
News has a whole bunch of organizations that can help. Okay, privately,
Matt to you and to the listeners, try to take
a bit of a of a fast of a news
fast right now because it's so toxic and images are
so hard and I want people to be engaged, but

(01:04:47):
I also want to be to protect people, and I
want people to protect themselves because you know, this is
a twenty four hour news cycle and you can watch
these videos all day long and they've been we've been
bombarded with that, you know, bodycam footage from Hamas fighters,

(01:05:07):
surveillance video, social video, newsreels stuff that we're producing. It's
just so intense and there's so much of it that
I worry about people's mental health consuming it too much.
I'm not saying don't watch the news, because of course
I want you to watch the news everyone, but I
do think that we should all impose some limits on ourselves.

(01:05:28):
And I do too in one of the ways that
I've you know, I told you I have this armor up,
and one of the ways I've done that is by
trying to avoid watching too many of these videos that
are out there, because Hamas filmed themselves doing a lot
of this, and you know, we see these images coming
from Gaza, and it's so intense that I don't think
that our brains are equipped with watching this much intense

(01:05:51):
violence and harm and blood and gore and cruelty. And
so I just urge everyone to just be cautious about
their take of these videos and the news right now,
and especially if you can keep it away from your kids,
because it's terrible and it has an effect, and we

(01:06:12):
should I think our children should be aware of some things,
but I don't know how much we should expose them
to some of the things. That is even tough for
us to tolerate as adults.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Right being there, Now, how long do you anticipate staying
in the region. Do you have any idea of you know,
how long you'll be reporting on the ground versus when
you'll get to come home.

Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
I'll probably come home in about a week, okay, but
I'll be back.

Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
I think this is going to last for unfortunately, I'm
afraid to say this will last for a long time,
for months and probably years.

Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
It's hard. Yeah, it's heavy.

Speaker 2 (01:07:00):
If anybody's listening, It's okay to cry, you know. If
this is the thing I learned in my book, is
that okay, it's okay to have armor up, and it's
okay to also let go, and it's okay to cry,
and it's okay for men to cry. You talk about
the patriarchy. We boys, we little boys. This eight year
old Matt, just to sort of close the circle, cried
easily when he was eight, you know, he easily went

(01:07:23):
into his mother's arms and wept and was held by
her and felt comfortable and cradled and allowed himself to cry.
And so forty nearly six year old Matt has learned
enough to be able to also dive into the pillows
here in this hotel room if he needs to, and
just let go. And I'm okay saying that. You know,

(01:07:44):
I know, I'm a girl and man and I need
to cry sometimes and that's okay, And it's a chemical release,
it is an emotional release, and sometimes I just you know,
we all need to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
Yeah, really important to give yourself permission to be fully human, right,
you know, not just a performer, but a person.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
Right, and feel that full spectrum of emotions that we
are capable of experiencing.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Matt, what feels It's my favorite last question to ask everyone,
even though I could ask you questions for another four hours.
What would you say, you know, in your life right now,
whether it's personal or professional, what feels like you're work
in progress?

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
My wellness, just my mental health. It's never going to
go away. And it's sort of you know, it's exciting
to have a big project on the one hand, and
on the other hand, oh my god, I've still got
to work on that project. It's still going on. Yeah,
it's still going on. Yeah, just this mental health thing.
You know, I'm naturally anxious. It makes me sensitive to people,

(01:08:55):
it makes me curious about people. It also can be
prone to panic attacks. And you know, it's my secret
weapon and my achilles heel in one. And so I've
just got to, as I said, you know, try to
embrace that range of emotions, not try to allow the
armor to come down when it needs to come down,

(01:09:15):
keep it up when it needs to be up, and
just experience this balanced breakfast of life if I can. Yeah,
as much as I can.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
I like that, A balanced breakfast of life. Maybe that's
the title of your second book.

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
Like that? Thank you?

Speaker 1 (01:09:33):
Okay, great, I love it. Thank you so much. I
really appreciate it. It's been such a pleasure to talk
to you. Please stay safe over there, and best of
luck to you and your crew. And congrats on the book.
It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Thank you so Hea