The Jordan Harbinger Show

Screens are rewiring teen brains and torching their happiness. Michael Regilio cuts through the glare to explain what's really at stake 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 skeptic, comedian, and podcaster Michael Regilio!
Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1332
On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:
The fear of new technology is ancient and remarkably repetitive. Critics warned the telephone, the printing press, even writing itself would rot brains and shred social bonds. Today's smartphone panic is the latest verse in a very old song, though experts insist this time the data is louder.
The "U-shaped" happiness curve — high in youth, dipping in midlife, rising again after fifty — has held steady across cultures for decades. But around 2014, right as every teenager got a smartphone, that youthful high point collapsed, and researchers like David Blanchflower are sounding alarms.
Big Tech isn't accidentally addictive — it's engineered that way. Frameworks like the Fogg Behavior Model power infinite scroll, autoplay, and notification floods designed to exploit adolescent cravings for status and novelty. Reed Hastings admitted Netflix's real competitors are sleep and human connection.
Internal documents from Meta and Alphabet lawsuits revealed the ugly truth: companies knew their platforms harmed teen girls and deliberately targeted users as young as 11. One memo read, "If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens" — exploiting developing prefrontal cortexes by design.
Screens aren't the devil — how we use them is what matters. Play video games with your kids, FaceTime grandma, keep phones away from babies, and set lights-out rules at night. The best screen time report might be a screen-down report: what did you do with your one short life while you weren't scrolling?
Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] and let him know!
Connect with Michael Regilio at Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and YouTube, and check out War Bar, his comedy special!
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Your boyfriend rages through walls, jobs, and landlords like a one-man wrecking crew. You've got coping tools—but is coping the goal? 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 [email protected]. Now let's dive in!
Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1331
On This Week's Feedback Friday:
If you want to skip Gabe's thoughts on Brazilian street muggings and the story of the weirdest yoga class of his life, you can take a Vinyasa and jump straight to 13 minutes and 30 seconds.
Your marriage crisis got "counseled" by a pastor-and-wife duo who prescribed prayer and a Toblerone. You lost your church, your college friends, and years with your parents. Did the chocolate-and-scripture combo crack the case, or was something else doing the real work?
Your sister credits a decentralized, unregulated form of Biblical Counseling with healing her postpartum spiral. Now you're depressed too, convinced misery stems from not obeying Scripture, and you're about to walk into a session built to challenge you on exactly that. Brace for impact?
You're a Lutheran pastor with serious thoughts about charlatans slapping "pastor" on a business card. You refer congregants out, see a counselor yourself, and have a hot take coming on whether anyone should stay at a church serving judgment instead of compassion. Mic drop incoming?
Recommendation of the Week: Hydrocolloid Roll — a cheaper, better-sticking, washable alternative to Band-Aids that you can cut to size for any scrape, blister, or zit.
Your 6'4" disinherited wheat-heir "sweetheart" punches walls, rages at landlords, and has you one outburst from eviction. You've got Al-Anon, jiu jitsu, and Grand Master Carlos' mantra in your corner. Is that armor enough, or is the armor itself the problem?
Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at [email protected]!
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Fake cops, fake ICE agents, and prank callers are turning ordinary people into accomplices. Javier Leiva joins us to examine the psychology of obedience.
Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1330
What We Discuss with Javier Leiva:
How a stranger with a phone, a fake title, and the magic phrase "this is part of an investigation" can hijack ordinary people's judgment and turn workplaces into crime scenes — no weapons or hypnosis required, just authority, urgency, and confusion.
The "strip search scam" ran from 1992 to 2004, hitting 70+ fast food restaurants — and the managers who obeyed the fake cop went to prison. One Hardee's manager faced two second-degree rape charges and kidnapping, losing his job, relationship, and freedom, branded a sex offender from a single phone call.
PrankNet weaponized authority for entertainment, tricking hotel clerks into drinking guests' urine and convincing employees to strip naked outside in freezing weather after triggering fire suppression systems. The "prank" framing minimized what was actually felony-level psychological torture broadcast live to a laughing audience.
Fake ICE agents are exploiting today's chaos with badges, threats, and confusion to rob, kidnap, and extort some of society's most vulnerable people — including a scammer who stole $58,000 from a Hispanic family by promising fake legal documents in exchange for avoiding "deportation."
Real authority can withstand verification — fake authority needs panic. Slow everything down, ask for ID, ask "Am I being detained?" and call 911 yourself using a number you find independently. Refuse anything involving humiliation, nudity, money, or secrecy. This one habit can stop a manipulation attempt cold.
And much more...
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Psychics keep wedging themselves into police cases — and grieving families pay the price. Nick Pell explains the grift 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/1329
On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:
Psychic detective work traces back to 19th-century spiritualism, which surged after the Civil War and WWI as a grief-coping mechanism — part therapy, part pop religion, part proto-reality TV. The post-WWII pulp era rebranded it as "science," birthing the modern psychic detective archetype.
The genre's most-cited "successes" — Etta Smith in the Melanie Uribe case, Dorothy Allison on the John List murders, and Noreen Renier's many TV appearances — all collapse under scrutiny. Police never credited any of them with usable leads, and Allison reportedly tried to bribe cops to vouch for her.
Sylvia Browne is the cautionary tale that turns this from harmless grift into genuine harm. She told Amanda Berry's mother her daughter was dead in 2004 — Amanda was alive, held captive in Cleveland until 2013. Mom died never knowing. Browne botched the Shawn Hornbeck case too.
Four mechanisms explain every "psychic solved it" story: confirmation bias (remembering hits, forgetting misses), post-hoc reasoning (vague claims retrofitted to fit), emotional vulnerability of grieving families, and Barnum statements — deliberately vague phrases like "I see water" that let your brain fill in the blanks.
Real cases get cracked by forensic evidence, behavioral profiling, and community tip lines — the unsexy, methodical work that rarely makes headlines. Families seeking closure are better served by counseling and victim support than by false hope, and learning to spot the four tells above makes anyone a sharper media consumer.
Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] and let him know!
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You're 47, dating a guy 15 years younger, and quietly drafting his exit so he can find someone "better." Noble move, or self-sabotage? 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 [email protected]. Now let's dive in!
Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1328
On This Week's Feedback Friday:
You run daily, hold down a job, parent your kids, pay the bills — and quietly drink a fifth of liquor every single day. You're high-functioning by every external metric, but you're trapped in a loop where feeling like crap fuels the drinking. You wrote in hoping supplements might do the trick?
You're 47, met a guy 15 years younger at the dog park, and two magical years later he wants to move in. But you're widowed, infertile, and carrying debt from a traumatic marriage. You're convinced you're saddling this catch with your baggage. Is letting him go the kindest thing — or are you pre-breaking up with yourself?
You've been the family breadwinner for 15 years until a bad job move ended in bankruptcy. Your husband — diagnosed with BPD — has bounced between jobs, ignoring every training course you've funded. You've secretly stopped job hunting hoping he'll finally step up. How do you support him without twisting the knife?
Recommendation of the Week: Six Feet Under — Gabe's pick for the single greatest TV show ever made. The HBO family drama (2001–2005) about a clan running a funeral home becomes a five-season meditation on death, meaning, and being alive. Stick with it past episode three, he begs you.
You're a 40-something European attorney with a 24-year marriage and a life you built mostly on your own. But your clinically narcissistic dentist father and severely ADD mother left you with conditioning you can't outrun — episodes of rage, a haunting sense that your warmth might just be a mask. Now what?
Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at [email protected]!
Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.
Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.
And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps!
Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!
Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!
Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!
This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors:
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