Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

On this episode, we'll get some advice on what we need to do to survive in an increasingly dangerous world.

Our guest is Judith Matloff, who's a veteran international correspondent who instructs others on how to survive hostile environments.

Over a 40-year career as a journalist, she's covered stories around the globe,

and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Forbes,

and the Los Angeles Times, just to name a few. And Judith has developed protocols for digital,

gender, and physical security. And she also consults for leading organizations like the State

Department and the United Nations. And she's the author of the new book, How to Drag a Body and other

safety tips you hope to never need. Judith, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure.

We have all been thinking about COVID-19, obviously, in recent months, and I know it's been at the

forefront of your mind as well. It has upended our lives, and I'm wondering

what observations you have to share about it and how we've responded to it. Well, you know,

it's such a good question because it is an extreme crisis. It's for a lot of people, it's probably

the worst crisis they've ever

encountered. And the coping mechanisms to deal with it are very, very similar to the one that

foreign correspondents deploy when they're covering crises like war. You need to take the long

view, you need a fair amount of emotional resilience to get

through this anxiety-producing experience where we don't really know that much about the disease,

and also we don't know for how long our lives are going to be upended. And when you're covering a war as a journalist,

it's the same sort of thing. You've just got to develop a lot of emotional stamina to power

yourself through it. It's so crazy to me that even though this is a really dangerous situation,

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