Mike: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. We're kind of in the admissions/life category. I had the great pleasure to spend an hour with famous award-winning journalist Elizabeth Vargas, who anchors the 7:00 p.m. ET weekday “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” on NewsNation. It’s the fastest growing cable news show, and I watch Elizabeth every night almost, for an hour, so I feel like I knew her. We talked a great deal about handling failure, handling success, and she's had both, and more to her life story: anxiety.
And Elizabeth brings up amazing points about, sometimes you can do everything right and still not get the win. And I think that's part of the admissions process that a lot experience, but we go into how to move on from there, how to calm the anxiety of the admissions not just ups and downs, but the waiting.
[1:21] Elizabeth has traveled the world covering breaking stories, reporting in-depth investigations, and conducting newsmaker interviews. She previously hosted the hit newsmagazine show “20/20” on ABC for 15 years and served as Co-Anchor of ABC's World News Tonight, and was news anchor and frequent host of “Good Morning America.” She also hosted A&E Investigates, a series of documentaries that still air on Hulu.
In 2016, Vargas released her memoir—I've read it twice—Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction, which spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won numerous awards. Vargas is a member of the board of directors of the non-profit Partnership to End Addiction and hosts a podcast I've also listened to, “Heart of the Matter,” which focuses on addiction recovery and the stigma so often faced in their efforts to heal.
This was a wonderful time with someone I look up to and admire, and without further delay, this is me and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, I know how busy you are. I'm going to watch you tonight at five o'clock Mountain Time. Thank you for making the time.
[2:25] Elizabeth: It's a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you for inviting me.
Mike: You've done a lot of great things for a lot of people. I want to start off with a quote from your book, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction: "No one walks through the world without insecurity, failures, worries, and heartbreak." That's the theme that resonated with me throughout the book. For our listeners who don't know your life story, what led you to write the book?
Elizabeth: Well, I wrote the book because, when I went to rehab and got sober, it was leaked to the press, many parts of it were public, and of course, the tabloid press—I say this as a member of the press—did a sort of sensational take on it all and a definitely incomplete take on it all. And I thought, "If my story's out there, I should tell my story rather than letting other people without my input write about my story."
But also, I wrote the book because I just know that I don't think I've ever felt so lonely in my life as I felt when I was struggling with what to do and how to move forward. It just was an incredibly lonely time. And I know I picked up books written by other almost exclusively—I didn't do this deliberately—but almost exclusively other women, who were very high functioning and who struggled with alcohol and anxiety and depression. And I read their stories, and I know how much that helped me. And I now know, I can't be the only one who feels this way, and it sure helps to read other people and their stories of what they struggled with and how they got through it.
[4:03] Mike: I watched you with Mary Karr, I think it was in 2010. And what's so fascinating is here she is, famous author, saying, "We're a bunch of sneaky bitches," I think was her exact quote.
Elizabeth: Yeah, that was her exact quote! And I had actually met her maybe 15 years earlier for the first time when I was very new into my career in network news. I was working at NBC and I was hosting The Today Show, and I interviewed her when her first book, her memoir, Liars' Club, came out. I encourage all your listeners to read it. It's an amazing book. Hilarious. It's just so incredible.
So then fast forward, many, many years later, I did a documentary, one of several I did on women and drinking. That was my way of like, do I have a problem here? Let's do a documentary. And I interviewed her for that documentary, because then she followed Liars' Club up with a memoir called Lit, all about her struggles with alcohol. And it's also an amazing book. So I interviewed her a second time for that. And we got to be very close friends as a result.
Mike: We'll link both books in our show notes.
[5:07] Elizabeth: Yeah. They're really great. Especially Liars’ Club. If any of your listeners are struggling with addiction or have somebody in their family struggling with addiction, it's a good read.
Mike: Well, let's talk about what our listeners might be struggling with, which obviously could be addiction. But addiction is just, to me, it's not that molecule ethanol, or workaholism, or gambling. It's the pain that you're trying or the fear that you're trying to mask.
And I do think, Elizabeth, a lot of our listeners are super high achievers, they've succeeded all of their lives, and for the first time ever, they've gotten a “no” from a college or a “no” from a law school. And it feels crippling, particularly in society today. It’s the easiest time ever to survive physically, which kind of makes it the hardest time ever to survive psychologically, because we have a lot of downtime; we're not fighting for survival or hunting and gathering. So we're scrolling on our phones and looking about how great everyone's life looked like.
I think that's relatable. You're in this high-pressure world of pie achievers, and the Peter Jennings of the world, the David Muirs of the world, look like they're flawless. Is that right? And you’re feeling inside like you’re not meant to be there?
[6:13] Elizabeth: I got off Facebook years ago precisely for that reason. They're all curated, perfect-looking posts of people’s lives. I literally have not opened that app in many, many years now. And given the events of, you know, the past few days with this assassination in Utah, I can't believe what cesspool social media has become. I agree with the governor of Utah that it's a cancer on society.
I think it feeds a lot of anxiety. I think it feeds a lot of “compare and despair.” I think it feeds insecurity. I think it feeds the worst parts of our nature, whether it's hate, anger, because that person has something that I want and I don't have. It feeds something that's already within us, because I had this long before social media was born, which is, “Everybody else seems to have the playbook, and I don't. Where was the playbook? How did I miss picking that up? What are the rules of the road?”
If there's one thing I've done with my two sons, it is hammer into them over and over and over things that I wished I'd known when I was their age, so that they don't make the mistakes that I made as I was a young journalist embarking in a brutally competitive business where bodies are by the wayside. I went to the best school of journalism in the country.
Mike: Missouri, right?
Elizabeth: University of Missouri. Nobody believes it, but it is.
Mike: They were a client of our firm.
[7:36] Elizabeth: They're amazing. It's an amazing school of journalism. And in my class, definitely now I think I'm the only member of my class who's still working in this business. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there were two or three of us still working in this business. It is a tough business, and there are so many things that I wished I had done differently, which of course, you can't fall into that rabbit hole either. But I constantly tell my kids this. Like, "Don't be afraid to ask questions." I have a series of post-its in the kitchen above my computer with little sayings or quotes from people to guide me, but also things that I constantly hammer to them. And one of them just says, “Be strategic.” And I am constantly telling my sons, be strategic, ask for mentors. Don't be afraid to ask for advice. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be afraid to ask that question, because I didn't do all those things, and it made my life much, much harder as a result.
Mike: What you're essentially saying is communicate your feelings; don't bottle them up.
Elizabeth: It's not “communicate your feelings.” You know, it's inappropriate to go into a workplace and say, "I'm feeling this." What I'm saying is, don't let your feelings stop you from being strategic. I was afraid of looking stupid or like I didn't belong there, so I didn't ask questions that I should have asked.
I ask questions for a living. That's what I do. I interview people for a living. But you'd be amazed at how afraid I was to ask a question in my own office, in my own workplace. I remember one of my—and this was pretty—like this was in the last 10 years, so this was well into my career, and I remember my boss telling me a story about a competitor of mine, a woman who had been recently hired at the network and who was vying for the same jobs I was vying for, even vying for my job. And he said there was some big reception with all the muckety-mucks from the network, all the power brokers, and all the important people who make the important decisions, and that he walked in with her, and she turned to him and said, "Who do I need to meet in this room, and can you introduce me to them?" And I remember thinking I had never done that in my life. Like, what a brilliant move. Why had I never thought to do that? But I was held back by my own, like, “That'll make me look stupid,” or “That'll make me look like I don't know who I should meet in the room.” Of course you don't know who you should meet in the room.
[10:03] And by the way, I tell my kids this all the time, people are flattered when you ask them for advice. People are flattered when you ask them, can you guide me? It's not always going to work that way. In my business, you know, especially when I was coming up, every woman looked at the other woman as a competitor. We did not wrap ourselves in glory. Many women who are household names, who you guys and your listeners will all know from television, were not generous to me and in fact did everything they could to cut me down and hurt me and stop my progress, because there weren't as many women as there are today and, “Her progress and her success came at the expense of my progress and my success,” is how women too often viewed it.
I think we're getting better at that now. You know, I'm not trying to be Pollyanna-ish, you know, about, “Ask for advice, ask questions, make allies, make mentors.” You have to find a way to do that. But you also have to quote, “be strategic” and be clear-eyed about the politics of the workplace.
When your listeners—I know a lot of your listeners are in law school, going to law school, or coming out of law school, going into law firms—not everybody's going to be your ally. That's okay. There will be people who are allies, and go to a partner in the firm and say, "Can I work on some of your cases?" People love that. I never did that. I never “asked for help,” quote unquote. I didn't ask for help in my career, and I didn't ask for help with my anxiety, and I didn't ask for help when I started to drink to soothe and cope with my anxiety and when that became a problem. Asking for help is not something that comes naturally. I can try and psychoanalyze myself until the cows come home to figure out why, but I think the important thing is to recognize that as something I don't do.
Being aware of something is the first step toward fixing something. If you're aware that you don't do that naturally, then try and correct yourself. Catch yourself and say, "Hold on, I can do this. I can ask."
[11:59] Mike: So, there's a version of you—I think I was introduced to you on 9/11, believe it or not. Karen, who we chit-chatted with a little bit, we were both supposed to be on a plane—for me, American Airlines from Nashville. I was working at Vanderbilt at the time. I know you spent some time on Vanderbilt's campus; you mentioned it in your book.
Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. Beautiful campus.
Mike: I was hooked on the news. And this is my first memory of seeing you; Peter Jennings hands it over to you. Peter seems tired, as he should have, and worn out and emotionally exhausted. Kind of like no different than you were talking about maybe today with the political assassination and political violence. And there's this version of you that's so calm and poised, but you're holding the table with your wedding ring and mashing it in because there's an inner voice that has a lot of anxiety.
[12:42] Elizabeth: Yeah, I had a lot of anxiety. It was more when I was anchoring the evening news, because that was a very highly scripted show. Every script, every word I said was timed to the second. And if you stumbled or were imperfect in some way—and Peter never seemed to do that—that would set up a cascade of, something else would have to be cut later because you just ate up a few seconds there. That's the show that gave me the most nerves. I always feel most comfortable when I'm ad-libbing.
When I took over the 9/11 coverage for Peter, which I did every night that week, it was 11:00 PM East Coast time, so it was 8:00 PM West Coast. And then I anchored the coverage until Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer came in to take over for Good Morning America. And that, less so. I've done lots of breaking news coverage, and that's all ad-libbed. And I find I'm more comfortable ad-libbing.
But yeah, that was really—it's funny, because now today I anchor a live hour-long show five nights a week, and, you know, I have my own thing that I do to be focused and ready, but I don't have to fight that anxiety any longer.
Mike: You're not anxious anymore?
[13:53] Elizabeth: No, not like I was for World News Tonight. Oh my gosh, no. Maybe it's just because I've been doing it for three and a half years every night for three and a half years, for World News Tonight. You know, I anchored weekends at NBC. I anchored NBC's evening broadcast on the weekends, and then I came to ABC and anchored Saturday night and Sunday night. And then I started filling in for Peter. And then of course, when Peter died of lung cancer, I was named co-anchor of World News Tonight with Bob Woodruff and anchored that show for almost a year, until I had a baby and was pushed out.
Mike: Yeah. Your show, NewsNation, I watch it for two hours; I watch you and then Cuomo. I'm going to assume some of your lack of now needing to hold the table is mastery. You've done this over and over. For people—you might know people in your life; our firm knows thousands—who are studying for the LSAT right now. One solution to the anxiety is this, repeat repeat repeat, master master master the topic.
But there are other ways I am certain that you've calmed down that anxiety. It's still there; your childhood voice is still in you. Mine is in me. Are there any other ways that you can think of? Was it therapy? Was it writing the book? Which people questioned; they said, “Hey, this is two years removed,” which my mind says, “Well, yeah, this is the most raw time. It's the best time to write about it.” Is there anything else that sort of helped you be the composed outer version of you match the inner version of you now?
[15:15] Elizabeth: While I'm doing the show—you remember the show is basically four blocks of me interviewing people live on the air—and I work very, very hard in preparation. It's a little bit like what I did when I was in college, when finals came around and everybody was frantically pulling all-nighters studying. And I always knew my process was to review my notes and outline them, because for me, rewriting something helps imprint it in my brain. I still, to this day, will take a hard copy of a newspaper and underline things, and then I'll throw it away. The process of underlining, for me, imprints it somehow in my brain. So in college, I would make an outline of my notes, and then I would go to bed. I knew, for me, the best thing I can do is get a good night's sleep. And still to this day, if I don't get good sleep—and that happens a lot, sadly. I'm a terrible sleeper, and that's where the anxiety manifests. I will wake up in the middle of the night and start to worry about things that I have no control over, especially at 3:00 AM, and it'll derail me. So I do a lot of prep as I go into my show every night. And then, it's always been this way, even when I was at ABC News, it's literally a focus, like you focus like a laser beam. You have to listen very carefully to what your guests are saying, because I would say, half to two-thirds of the time, I don't ask any of the questions that I've spent hours preparing and writing. They say something, and I'll go, “Oh,” and follow that thread.
Mike: It happened last night with your first two guests. One wanted to ask a final question; I could tell you were out of time, but you granted him the final question.
Elizabeth: Yeah, no, no, no, General Clark—he's on my show all the time—he all the time says things that I’m like, ”Oh, what do you mean by that?”
Mike: Yeah. We haven't had him; we had General Petraeus.
Elizabeth: General Petraeus has also been on my show. And same thing with him. They're both very, very smart men who will casually say something that I'm like, "Oh, I hadn't thought about it that way. What do you mean by that?" And you have to just focus like a laser beam. After all these years of doing this, I'm very good at that focus.
The other thing is, there are times, if I do feel anxious for whatever reason—something's going on in my life, or I don't feel good, or I'm too tired, or I'm fighting a cold or the flu, or something's happened, or someone's upset me—I will take a moment and close my eyes and take a deep breath in and then a long, slow exhale out. And sometimes it's as simple as, you just put your hand over your heart and say, "All will be well." Just, “All will be well.” And just trust, it will be well, it'll be fine.
Even a crappy show, and I've had them where technically every single thing goes wrong. Their Zoom link is crazy, and we can't hear them, and that makes me so mad because we've gone to all this effort and trouble to book somebody and prepare for somebody, and we're airing somebody, and nobody can hear what he's saying. Stuff happens.
Mike: Almost every night on the news, there will be some news channel, “Oh, we lost so and so.”
Elizabeth: Something will happen. And the only thing we can control in that moment is how we react to it.
[18:24] Mike: Sure.
I've had therapy. You've had therapy. Can we spend a little bit, maybe, on the roots of your anxiety, if it's okay with you?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Listen, I haven't had that much therapy. I have had a lot of AA meetings, which is group therapy, and the best kind of therapy in my opinion. Nothing is better than listening to other people talk about what they've endured in their life to sort of, number one, a reality check of like—I've heard some things that you're like, "Wow, that's huge."
I don't know. I think—listen, I have two kids. One of them was born a little anxious; one of them wasn't. I think a lot of it is just the way you're made. And I was definitely one of those kids who was born anxious. My dad went away to Vietnam when I was six. That was very traumatic for me. We were in Okinawa, and I was old enough to know that there was a war going on and it was dangerous, and nobody at that time on these military bases during the Vietnam War was doing anything to help. They weren't helping the vets coming back with PTSD; they sure weren't paying any attention to the kids. There's a lot more awareness now of the trauma that families endure when a loved one is off to war. I still don't think we do enough to help with that, but we do a lot more now than we were doing then. And my parents were not equipped to do that.
Mike: Through no fault of theirs.
Elizabeth: I can't blame them. My mom was 21 when she had me, and my dad was 25 or 26. They were young. They were under stress. It is what it is. I think if you walk around through your life looking for someone to blame for what happened to you, you're not going to get very far in your healing process. It is important to acknowledge, it is what it is.
What it was for me was, there was nobody there, ever, to say, "What's wrong? Why are you having a panic attack? Talk to me about it. What are you afraid of?" Therapy was not an option. We moved so often, every year or two, that a neighbor or a teacher never got to know me well enough to see the massive anxiety that I was carrying around with me, and to understand that what I was having was panic attacks.
I had a childhood of tremendous anxiety, and then huge separation anxiety, struggled with it all my childhood, which obviously looking back now, it's like, “Of course, her dad went away to war. She didn't know he was ever going to come back. He might die there.” And then, I was the oldest, and they packed me on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany and sent me to a college that I'd never seen where I didn't know a soul and said, "Bye. Don't call. You can't afford it. We'll see you at Christmas.” It was very hard.
Mike: And you're hiding this from the world, though.
Elizabeth: I think that—yes. I had a neighbor lady who looked at me like, "What is wrong with you?" when I started to have a panic attack when my mom went away to the hospital to give birth to my little sister. I was six. And that was my first sort of like, “Oh, this is bad. I need to hide this.” So that's what I did. I hid it and every other insecurity and anxiety I ever had.
Mike: Yeah. I just listened to your podcast, Heart of the Matter, with—your most recent one, season seven—I believe his name is Walker Hayes. Hiding his insecurities came up over and over again.
So, you used the word “separation anxiety.” There's four kinds of childhood trauma. There's abuse, which I suffered, from a sibling. There's enmeshment, which is kind of like when the family treats you like an adult and only celebrates adult-like victories, which many of our listeners will have; it’s very common for successful people. And I know you got to do ski trips and had some very enjoyable memories as a child. Let's not celebrate the day of skiing; did you win that Nastar race? What was your time? That would be enmeshment.
But the two that strike me, that maybe hit you as a child and led to some maladaptive things as an adult, would be abandonment and neglect. Because you also were bouncing from school to school, meeting completely new people, coming in late, a week late, so of course you're going to be bullied. And your inner childhood voice is saying, "It's my fault. My hair was curly; theirs is straight, I'm small; they're bigger."
Elizabeth: It definitely wasn't enmeshment, but my parents were very strict and very harsh with my brother and me. And my little sister was six years later and had a slightly different experience. But, you know, the bar was set very high for my brother and me.
And both my brother and I put ourselves through college. I got myself through college with a scholarship that I had to renew every year and keep my grades up to keep getting, and by waitressing. So I'm not sure it even matters which category it falls into. What matters is, no one was there to help me, and no one even acknowledged what was going on right in front of everybody.
Mike: Was it Earl Hightower who said, "It doesn't matter if you were born an alcoholic or not”?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Earl Hightower is a very popular speaker in recovery, and I think he's amazingly gifted. He's right. It's the whole “nature versus nurture” thing. Was I born this way, or did I become this way through life events? And this might be controversial, and people might completely disagree with me—I think we can spend a little too much time debating. It doesn't matter which one it is. And it doesn't matter if maybe it's a combination. It might be 10% that and 90% better, 50/50, or I don't know. I think what really matters is understanding what the issue is, recognizing it, labeling it, and then trying to figure out how to move through it.
I don't know the answer of whether or not I was born anxious, or the way my parents raised me contributed. I don't know whether or not I was born an alcoholic. I think I was born anxious. My earliest memories are of anxiety. But that could have also been something about what was happening to me as a baby. I was a challenging baby. I had colic. You know, I had scarlet fever of all things. My parents were incredibly young, on their own, had no help. My mother's mother was dead at that point. She had nobody to tell her how to be a mother, and made a lot of mistakes.
Mike: She was listening to Dr. Spock, who said, "Let the child cry."
Elizabeth: Yeah, “Let the baby cry,” which years later, people were like, “That's abuse. What do you mean, let the baby cry?”
Mike: It's abandonment and abuse. We had Dr. Gabor Maté; have you read his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?
Elizabeth: I have not read his book, but I've met him.
Mike: Well, he is a tough interview. He prepared me for interviewing you. He fights back. You're less intimidating, so thank you. Dr. Mate would say, you know, that's classic. You can study this; in aboriginal cultures, they carry the babies with them. They're holding, they're touching the babies. And you're developing all these neural pathways through that 24/7. I didn't have it; you didn't have it. We grew up in an era when, “Put the kid to sleep and let the kid cry themselves to sleep.”
Elizabeth: By the way, it's interesting, my sister was born when we were living in Okinawa, and my mother had to work in order to stay on the island and be close to Vietnam. And we had a Japanese nanny who carried my sister everywhere in a sling on her back, and I've often thought one of the reasons why she doesn't have anxiety the way that my brother and I do is because of that. I do firmly believe in that. That's why I said, I don't know what happened to me as a baby, but I know my parents were incredibly ill-equipped. I don't know. I think I was born anxious, but I think maybe it could also have been a lot of what happened in that first 12 to 18 months of life. Who knows?
Mike: I don't think there's any E=mc2 equation for all of this, but I do think that Maté would strongly agree that having that sense of comfort around—you didn't have it.
So, I can relate to a couple things. My father was shipped off to Okawa and participated in the military. One of my first memories, Elizabeth, is being maybe, I don't know, four or five, and being in the garage of our house. We had just moved into a one-story house. And my mom being in her business—I can just remember it, and I'm like five years old, but I can still remember—she's in this, like, beautiful business suit, getting in the car, and I'm standing on this little ledge where the stairs went down in the garage, and I'm just crying and crying, and my mom was leaving. And point being, I think we've all—all of us and our listeners, we don't know it. I didn't know this until therapy, but my mom was leaving and I was about to be abused. So of course I was crying. And of course that led to maladaptive things at that age: punch back. Punch my brother back. Helpful when you're five years old and you're getting beat up. Not really helpful as a 21-year-old when you're in college, and you're drinking at a football game, and you're punching people in the stands and getting arrested, or threatening to be arrested.
I would argue that the panic attacks were adaptive, because it's not comfortable to feel anxious, and the panic attacks were, “How do I get out of the state and get people to come, because they haven't been around me?” And then the maladaptive part was the self-medication.
I watched your Diane Sawyer 20/20 piece; it was moving. And I'm happy to link it if you think it'll help others. But to me, it's not so much the self-medication. It's, how did you get past—and you clearly have gotten past it—the pain of separation, the pain of abandonment?
Elizabeth: Well, at some point, the pain of separation, in one respect, my parents shipping me off to college like that was a brutal rip off the bandaid. It's literally like throwing somebody into the deep end of the pool, and they have to figure out how to get to the edge without drowning. And that's what happened to me.
You adapt. We all adapt. As humans, we adapt. Bad things happen. The one thing I remember realizing is that, at some point, dealing with that kind of panic and anxiety as a kid gave me a lot of grit, which is ironically the number one predictor of success in this world: grit. It's either you sink or swim. And somehow I swam, albeit I got to the edge and it took a huge toll, because I was never dealing with my own anxiety, and I started to self-medicate with alcohol. You can't self-medicate or shove down those feelings forever. It always comes out. Whatever your mechanism you're using, whatever manhole cover you're using to squash it down, ends up finally bursting free and hitting you in the face.
You have got to stop and take a look. And that was the one thing that I remember, early on, when I struggled a lot more with anxiety. What I did all my life was try and outrun it. And at some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face it, and look at it, and identify it. What is it? Is it real, that thing that's terrifying me so much, or is it something I've concocted?
And I think just being on this planet as many decades as I've now been on it and being a parent and being a journalist most especially, has in many ways taught me that bad things happen. Bad things happen. And I'm not going to outrun the bad things. One day, I will lose my parents—the ultimate separation anxiety. That will happen. My parents are still alive today, and I'm grateful. But that will happen. And my childhood fear that they would die and leave me will come true, because we can't outrun that reality.
Mike: Yeah. My mom passed away in January—
Elizabeth: I'm so sorry.
Mike: —thank you, and I can see you mean it on your face—but also, I think just like you, a childhood where I had to overcome things, if nothing else, it gave me some maladaptive tendencies too.
Elizabeth: Everybody does.
Mike: Well, Peter Jennings did, too. You're looking at him as this flawless, never skipped a sentence, never missed a second, but he had them too. We all do, 100%.
And I'm curious what advice you have for our listeners. Looking back, is there a time maybe you could have talked to yourself in a different voice, done something differently, before you wrote the book, that you would tell someone now in their shoes? What would you tell your son or a 24-year-old applying to law school who—I'll give you an analogy.
You've spent five years killing this Amanda Knox story, which would kind of be like spending eight months on your law school application and taking the LSAT. And then not only do you not get it—they give it to, I believe, Diane Sawyer, not you—and that felt like failure. What would you, now, looking back with the decades you have in you, what would you tell that person who probably felt crushed in the moment?
Elizabeth: Well, it wasn't failure, it was wrong. It was Amanda Knox's first interview after being freed. She made the wrong decision. I think Diane Sawyer would tell you the same thing; Diane hadn't covered that story and didn't know that story the way I did. And Amanda Knox didn't come off very well in that interview.
And to this day, I think that they made the wrong decision. And I'll never forgive them for like—I just won't. I don't have to. Guess what, I don't have to. They made the wrong decision. And it wasn't a failure on my part; I did everything right. That's what I mean by “bad things happen.”
You can do everything right and still not get the thing you want. And that just means there's something else, and you have to just focus on, “There'll be something else, and I have to move on, and I have to set my resentment aside. I did my best. Everybody in this world who does their best doesn't always get the prize. It happens.” When you look at some of the biggest successes, they're not people who went to the very best Ivy League schools and aced the LSATs and went to the best law firm. Some of the biggest superstars went to community college, or didn't even graduate college, like Peter Jennings. You know, there are people who had phenomenal, astonishing success only after major setbacks.
And you have to look at a setback—first of all, don't say it's not a setback. Acknowledge it. It's a setback. Don't say, “It's not a big deal that the high-powered lawyer for Amanda Knox told her to pick Diane Sawyer because she's a bigger name than Elizabeth Vargas.” It is what it is. It sucks. It's ridiculous. It's a stupid decision by that family to not go with the reporter who knows that story inside and out and was the first reporter to say on national television, she's innocent, which I was. They went with somebody else who didn't know the story, and it showed in the interview.
But you can just say, “This is bad, a mistake, it's a terrible thing.” And then you have to move on. There will be something else. “I will make something else happen.” There is nobody out there who is at the top of their field, in any field, who has not been told “no,” who has not been told “you can't,” who has not endured some sort of failure or setback. We all do. It's how you respond. You would dust yourself off and keep going. If somebody says, "No, you can't come to this law school, we reject you," first acknowledge, “This feels terrible. And by the way, this is unfair. I worked really hard for this.” But then think, “Okay, there'll be something else out there.” And many, many people who are at the very top of their field have succeeded after hearing that exact same rejection from somebody.
Mike: Right. 100%. We've had guests—we'll link Justin Ishbia, scored very low on his LSAT, didn't get into his dream school, was the last person I admitted off the waitlist when I was at Vanderbilt Law School, and he now owns the Phoenix Suns.
Elizabeth: Yep.
Mike: With an LSAT in the 150s, and there's many, many, many stories like that. And we try to have people from, in your words, 100%, community college, or who dropped out of college like Peter Jennings, who are still killing it in the world.
You know, you used the word rejection. It's not—in admissions, it's not even rejection. It's a deny on your application, and it's a deny of 12 pages. It's not you; it's 12 pages and two data points, a GPA and an LSAT or a GRE.
Elizabeth: And they get it wrong sometimes. We see “deny” and we think, “Oh my God,” it's like issued from God. “I'm not good enough.” It's not. They made a mistake that they denied you, the same way the Knox family made a mistake when they didn't pick me. “It's your mistake, and you suffered for it. I'm moving on.”
Mike: 100% admissions committees make mistakes. Karen, who you met, was at Harvard. 100% she would tell you, she had to deny a lot of people she really wanted to admit, and it was simply a numbers game. And you've been in that world.
Elizabeth: And by the way, it's important, like, I think people should be aware that some of the moguls that we look at now as all-powerful and incredibly wealthy and incredibly influential—Mark Cuban sold garbage bags door to door and was a dork in college, but had an idea, and got rejected, and it didn't work at first. Then finally it did. We tend to just look at Mark Cuban and think, “Whoa, that guy has it all.” Most of his life he had nothing. He had nothing except grit.
Mike: Yeah. A parting thought for our listeners—this is beautiful, and thank you again for saying these words. They're going to hear this, and then they're going to go through this brutal process of being told no. Is there any go-to book, movie, piece of advice, holding your hand on your chest, over the last 10 years since you've been completely sober? Is there any go-to motto that you would give to them?
Elizabeth: I still think the “All will be well.” That is basically, if you are a religious person, it’s your faith in God that all will be well. It might not be right now. That's why it's “All will be well,” not “All is well.” All will be well. It will all turn out the way it's supposed to be, the way it's meant to be.
I love the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”—I can't change that Yale just denied me. “The courage to change the things I can”—the thing I can change is how I'm reacting to this. Am I going to spin out in self-despair, or am I going to pick myself up, dust myself off, and keep going? “And the wisdom to know the difference”—we have to understand, there are things we can control and there are things we can’t. And that is the part of the prayer I focus on the most, like—because I tend to obsess about the things I can't control, the things I can do nothing about. And you have to focus on what you can control, and that's you and your reaction to what happens to you.
You can lash out in anger, you can be resentful, you can be discouraged. You can think, “This isn’t meant for me.” You can give up on what was once your dream. Or, you can think hard about the next step forward, or you can pick up the phone and ask for help.
The biggest thing for me, for just clearing my head: go out for a walk. Go out for a walk. Look at the trees. I make myself, when I'm walking to the grungy gross subway every day to get to the studio, I look up at the trees and the sky, and I thank God for this beautiful day. “Thank you for the sunshine.” Notice it. Take it in. It does wonders for your mental health. And it also puts you—you’re just one tiny part of this big, busy world. And yes, this one school that maybe you wanted to get into denied you, but there's a big world of schools out there, and somebody else is going to look at your application and say, “You’re exactly right for us.” And that's what is meant to be. “All will be well.” Just let it play out. Don't be impatient to get to the end. It’s unfolding at the pace it’s meant to be.
Mike: We’re in a turbulent time right now. Our nation, there’s a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of stress. What are your thoughts on the future? Do you think all will be okay?
Elizabeth: It’s a tough time. We’re in a moment where I think we’re forgetting that other people with whom we might not agree are also still human beings. I had on my show last night somebody who is very far right. I also really like her personally. And the same thing with, you know, somebody who’s very far left, I might not agree with their politics, but I get to know them as people, and I like them very much. I would love to go out to dinner with them. I love talking with them and hearing what their point of view is. That's part of the mission of my show and the mission of this network, is to give people on all sides of the political spectrum—and in my show, I insist you have to be respectful about it—but you get a chance to say what your view is.
I think that people need to do that more in their lives. I feel like we're very siloed right now. I feel like everybody’s a keyboard warrior and very quick to say nasty things and judgmental things and make assumptions that aren’t helpful.
I would really encourage people to get off social media. I think it does very little good and a whole lot of bad right now in our culture. And the more you can actually talk to human beings—Let them finish their sentence. Don't make presumptions about who they are and what they think. And walk away from people who are poisoning your peace. You know what I mean?
Mike: 100%. You're allowed to say no.
Elizabeth: You're allowed to say, “This is not good for me.” I say this to my son all the time—we have very robust political arguments in my house, because we've been talking about politics since they were tiny boys, and we encourage it, and I think it’s good to teach children and young adults how to be critical thinkers—and there are many times when I say, "Okay, we need to stop now. It's enough."
Mike: You stop at the dinner table with your kids who are young adults now.
Here's my final thought. Things are tense. But I've seen it before, and I’ve seen people come together again. I tend to think of society—there was a Yale professor from 1920 who wrote about these 20-year swings of tension versus people coming together. And he actually identified, he did a lot of data, Arthur Schlesinger is his name if anyone wants to look it up. You know, we might be on part of this 20-year swing of tension, but I think we’re going to swing back. I think things are going to be okay.
Can you give us one motto on a post-it note to conclude the conversation? Something that you have written down?
Elizabeth: Honestly, I would just go back to the one I already told you. That's the one I go to most often, which is “be strategic.”
There's another one I have in there that's—I’m going to mangle it—but it’s basically, the metaphor is, “Life is like a river. We are not meant to cling to the banks. Go with—you're not supposed to cling to the banks.” And that's what I think.
I had a real need to control things. I still fight that, but it’s less so. It’s a little bit like if you jump off something or fall, if you’re stiff, it hurts more. It damages more. Whereas, if you are flexible—I’m a former gymnast, so I’m—if you’re flexible, if you land on the balls of your feet, and your knees are slightly bent, and you're loose enough to roll with the impact, no matter how sudden and harsh it might be, you are better off. You survive it better. That’s how life is.
Don't be rigid. Don’t cling to the bank. Don’t think, “This is the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to get into this school. I'm supposed to get into this firm. I'm supposed to succeed. I'm supposed to, supposed to, supposed to.” Sometimes you have to work very hard to control what you can. and then accept what you can't. “Okay. That wasn't meant to be. Something else is meant to be. I don't know what it is yet. It will reveal itself. My job is to continue to do the best job I can do to study hard, to work hard, to be a good person, to be grateful every day for something.” Find something in your life that you're grateful for. It helps reset your perspective. I'm mashing together now all of my post-it notes.
Mike: It's a great theme, which is, fall down six times, get up seven.
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Mike: You got up on your seventh time. I'm going to go watch you in five hours. You're killing it in life, this podcast, things you said in here are really going to impact other people. So thank you so much.
Elizabeth: Thank you. It's great you guys do this. I wish I’d had a podcast like this to listen to when I was a young adult. It would've helped me a lot. It would've saved me a lot of grief.
Mike: Thank you for helping other people, and we'll see you soon.
Elizabeth: Thanks, guys.
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