Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Andrew Ross Sorkin (on stock market crashes) About this episode Andrew Ross Sorkin (1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History) is a financial columnist, TV anchor, and author. Andrew joins the Armchair Expert to discuss a kid telling him when he was young that god drew him wrong, actually working with Aaron Sorkin (no relation) on his show The Newsroom, and landing an unofficial internship at The New York Times as a senior in high school. Andrew and Dax talk about why his motto as a finance journalist was ‘chasing interesting,’ understanding not trusting the stock trading system because it doesn’t deserve to be trusted, and his tips for getting ChatGPT to tell the truth with verifiable facts. Andrew explains writing an exposé on going into debt to buy stocks, shocking and unexpected stories of fallout from the stock market crash of 1929, and parallels he sees in current financial trends accompanied by an argument for transparency.
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Transcript 23,125 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to our share expert, experts on expert. I'm Buck Rogers and I'm joined by Jean Lightyear.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? I am a fan of our guest. I'm just a legit fan. Um, Andrew Ross Sorkin. I met him at a conference one time and we had a couple of lunches together and I just, I just really adore him and he's prolific as a motherfucker.
0:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:22 Dax Shepard? This kid was working at the New York Times in high school.
0:24 Speaker 01 I know.
0:24 Dax Shepard? I find this to be so.
0:25 Speaker 01 It's such a sweet story.
0:26 Dax Shepard? It is. He's such a thunder kid and a cutie pie. Uh, Andrew is an award winning journalist for the New York Times and a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC's signature morning program. And of course he wrote the ever popular Too Big to Fail.
0:42 Speaker 01 Loved it.
0:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, what a, what a, what a book, what a show they made out of it. He's also the co-creator of Billions.
0:49 Speaker 01 Whoa.
0:50 Dax Shepard? I don't think I brought that up in the interview. Did you know that?
0:52 Speaker 01 No.
0:53 Dax Shepard? He's got his little fingers in everything.
0:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:55 Dax Shepard? Uh, he has a new book that is out right now called 1929 Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation. This is, um, as he says, and I think we all agree, we all know about the great collapse and stock market crash, but we don't actually, we don't know anything. We just know what happened on that day.
1:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17 Dax Shepard? And there's a lot of juicy stuff surrounding it.
1:18 Speaker 01 Yes, and it's a, it's a thick book. He really gets into it. Before we get into the episode, we have merch.
1:25 Dax Shepard? Oh, I'm wearing a merch right now.
1:26 Speaker 01 Yes, you're wearing a really cute merch shirt.
1:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's two cherries holding, I think they're holding hands.
1:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think they're holding hands and they're happy.
1:35 Dax Shepard? They might be in a parade, like a cherry parade.
1:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's really cute. We got some really, really good merch coming your way on.
1:43 Dax Shepard? November 14th.
1:44 Speaker 01 November 14th. Incredible quality. Can't get over the quality.
1:50 Dax Shepard? No, the quality's outrageous.
1:51 Speaker 01 And the fit is nice.
1:52 Dax Shepard? I'm just realizing, for the first time, this very sim, you know who has a cherry festival? Traverse City, Michigan.
1:59 Speaker 01 Wow, why aren't we invited to that?
2:02 Dax Shepard? I was just thinking, where would there be a cherry parade? And by God, I know where there would be a cherry parade. And as you may recall, I went there one time in seventh grade in the summer between eighth and I won a cherry seed spitting contest.
2:14 Speaker 01 It's just one of those things where when you look back in life and it all makes sense, you know?
2:18 Dax Shepard? I was on the news and I'm telling you, that was the greatest. Were you ever on TV as a kid?
2:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, in high school.
2:25 Dax Shepard? For the cheer.
2:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:27 Dax Shepard? Isn't it great?
2:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's great.
2:29 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:29 Speaker 01 It's really fun.
2:30 Dax Shepard? I couldn't believe it.
2:31 Speaker 01 I know.
2:31 Dax Shepard? I felt like I was living in someone else's life.
2:33 Speaker 01 We gotta get into the app.
2:34 Dax Shepard? Okay, please enjoy Andrew Ross Sorkin. Armchair Expert is proud to have Alexa Plus as our presenting sponsor. The all new Alexa Plus is your smart, proactive AI assistant. Just chat naturally about anything and watch your to do list disappear. It learns your style and anticipates what's next across Echo, Fire TV, and more. Learn more at amazon.com/newalexa. We get support from Quince.
3:03 Speaker 01 I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.
3:12 Dax Shepard? I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.
3:34 Speaker 01 $60, $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories, they skip the middlemen, and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.
3:52 Dax Shepard? The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time, and he looks iconic.
4:01 Speaker 01 It's a uniform.
4:02 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
4:03 Speaker 01 And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home, too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.
4:20 Dax Shepard? Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show.
4:57 Speaker 01 Hi.
4:58 Speaker 02 This is very exciting.
5:00 Dax Shepard? How are you?
5:01 Speaker 02 I'm great.
5:02 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. How you doing?
5:03 Speaker 02 Even maybe taller than I remember.
5:05 Dax Shepard? Look at these muscles, these mussels.
5:07 Speaker 02 Hi. How are you? Good.
5:09 Dax Shepard? These mussels and mussels.
5:11 Speaker 02 I'm gonna double fist the coffee and
5:14 Speaker 01 Do it.
5:14 Speaker 02 Liquid Death at the same time. What do you got going on that blender bottle there?
5:19 Dax Shepard? Free workout and creatine.
5:21 Speaker 02 You know what I didn't bring with me today?
5:23 Dax Shepard? What?
5:23 Speaker 02 I should actually ask you for some. A little creatine. I find the creatine especially for brain health, weirdly. That's all the rage right now, the cognitive benefits.
5:33 Speaker 01 No, I kind of am interested because I have heard that it like makes your brain work better.
5:38 Speaker 02 I feel a little bit more on with it.
5:42 Speaker 01 Caffeinated?
5:43 Speaker 02 No.
5:43 Speaker 01 Wow, Dex.
5:44 Speaker 02 I love you for this.
5:45 Dax Shepard? We know each other.
5:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, we do. It's good.
5:47 Speaker 01 He touched Jennifer Aniston's hair. I like to tell people that.
5:49 Speaker 02 So, yeah, the creatine thing, it's not like coffee.
5:52 Speaker 01 Sharp?
5:53 Speaker 02 Everything seems to be working a little better.
5:55 Dax Shepard? Well, the study that came out that everyone's so excited about and why it's now all the rage for cognition is specifically if you're sleep deprived.
6:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
6:02 Dax Shepard? It's really, really helpful.
6:03 Speaker 02 I'm sleep deprived all the time.
6:05 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Do you have children?
6:07 Speaker 02 Three. Are we on here?
6:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
6:09 Speaker 02 Okay, good.
6:10 Dax Shepard? I'm very honest about what I think.
6:12 Speaker 02 When we first met, basically, the whole conversation was about how to get ripped.
6:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:17 Speaker 02 How to feel better. The mental health, the physical health stuff, the kids.
6:21 Dax Shepard? I think Silicon Valley has tainted it a little bit, like it has fallen into this biohacking category. Whereas just pursuing feeling as good as a human can feel seems like a virtuous goal.
6:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:32 Dax Shepard? Whereas it seems to have been weaponized a little bit in our current culture. Okay, so we have met. We hung out at a conference.
6:40 Speaker 02 We did. Can I say I was so excited to meet you? It was like crazy.
6:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, well, thank you.
6:44 Speaker 01 What were you excited about?
6:45 Speaker 02 Because I've been watching you guys and listening to you guys and I just had this great conversation, which is sort of like what's happening now.
6:52 Speaker 01 Easy peasy?
6:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. We had a really, really fun lunch and I enjoyed the hell out of meeting you. And I found out about colo- colo- Oh, that's a tough word for me to pronounce.
7:02 Speaker 02 What was the word?
7:03 Dax Shepard? Coloboma.
7:03 Speaker 02 Coloboma, which I'm fascinated by.
7:06 Dax Shepard? I think it's the coolest feature, other than heterochromia, which is really cool, too, or two different color eyes. But did you notice that Andrew has this wonderful?
7:16 Speaker 02 My left eye has what's called a coloboma.
7:18 Dax Shepard? Coloboma.
7:19 Speaker 02 My pupil looks, some people say it looks like a cat.
7:22 Speaker 01 Can I get a little closer to you, Mike?
7:24 Dax Shepard? It's kind of elliptical more than it is.
7:25 Speaker 02 Come over, come over.
7:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, get in close.
7:27 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
7:28 Speaker 02 Don't you love it? Well, thank you. It's funny to me that he noticed it. Some people notice it immediately, like I'll be like the checkout counter somewhere and someone will say, oh, my God, what's going with your eye? And then my best friend from second grade didn't notice it till I was 32 years old.
7:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:45 Dax Shepard? Is he legally blind?
7:47 Speaker 02 He is not legally blind.
7:48 Speaker 01 He just sees your essence.
7:49 Speaker 02 Some people think I have different color eyes.
7:51 Speaker 01 Right.
7:52 Dax Shepard? That's a common thing with that condition.
7:54 Speaker 02 I can see and I can see fine. And I only tell you that because sometimes people send me emails. They'll see you on TV and they'll say, I think something's wrong with your eye. You need to go to the doctor.
8:03 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
8:04 Speaker 02 Something like that. I should tell you, by the way, since I just said that, maybe I shouldn't tell the story. When I was fourth or fifth grade, there was a substitute teacher in the class and I, like a little bit of a clown.
8:13 Speaker 01 Sure.
8:14 Speaker 02 And so in the middle of the class, I went, oh.
8:17 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
8:18 Dax Shepard? Good for you.
8:19 Speaker 02 And something happened to my eye. I think something happened to my eye.
8:21 Dax Shepard? Yes.
8:22 Speaker 02 Substitute teacher comes over.
8:23 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
8:25 Speaker 02 And then they have to send me to the nurse. I got in trouble with my mother.
8:27 Dax Shepard? But could I argue, you're going to deal with all the downside of this, which is having to answer the same question all the time, like I put you through. And there should be some upside to it. So getting on a class, I definitely condone this.
8:38 Speaker 02 When I was young, it was not good.
8:39 Dax Shepard? Well, because anything when you're young, right? That makes you different.
8:41 Speaker 02 Right. And you had kids who'd make fun of you. I remember a kid, I won't name him, but a kid, I was in third grade, told me that God drew me wrong.
8:48 Speaker 01 Oh.
8:49 Speaker 02 I remember that. I remember that. You know, like these things and they hit you forever.
8:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:52 Speaker 02 It's straight, here I am, 40 years old.
8:54 Speaker 01 I know.
8:55 Speaker 02 And I remember third grade.
8:57 Dax Shepard? And did you say to him, is that how you think humans get here? God draws each one of us?
9:01 Speaker 02 I don't remember.
9:02 Speaker 01 No, you just probably cried.
9:03 Speaker 02 That part I don't remember. Yeah, I was more in that camp.
9:06 Dax Shepard? I understand, I understand. So my hunch is that I could guess the two questions you get asked the very most in life.
9:13 Speaker 02 Which is?
9:13 Dax Shepard? What's happening with your eye?
9:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:15 Dax Shepard? Are you related to Aaron Sorkin? Are these the two things that you probably have fielded the most in your life?
9:21 Speaker 02 Oh, that's a great question. I definitely have been asked a lot about the I. I definitely get the Aaron Sorkin question constantly.
9:28 Dax Shepard? I imagine so much that on your Wikipedia, there's a line that says, "He is not related to..."
9:33 Speaker 02 Not related to Aaron.
9:34 Dax Shepard? Yes, if Wikipedia has to say that, that tells me a lot of people are curious.
9:38 Speaker 02 People call me Aaron. I get a lot of emails.
9:40 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure.
9:41 Speaker 02 Start with Aaron.
9:41 Dax Shepard? Aaron Ross Sorkin.
9:42 Speaker 02 I did Jon Stewart Show, the old version of Jon Stewart Show, and, you know, at the beginning, he announced me as Andrew Ross Sorkin. And at the end, he said, "Aaron Ross Sorkin, everybody."
9:53 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
9:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, man.
9:55 Speaker 02 Which is fine. I am very happy to be confused with Aaron.
9:58 Speaker 03 Sure.
9:59 Speaker 02 I ended up working for Aaron.
10:00 Dax Shepard? You're also both from Westchester, no?
10:02 Speaker 02 Both from Scarsdale, New West. I worked for him in the third season of The Newsroom. As consultant that season, there was a merger. I'm supposed to be the business guy, so they were trying to figure out how to storyline around the merger of ACN, if you remember that.
10:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, we loved that show, yeah.
10:18 Speaker 02 And so I worked with him, and it was a ball. And he claimed, to me at least, I don't know if he was being nice, he said, "You know, I get emails all the time from people who say, 'How is it possible that you're writing all of these shows and writing these articles in the paper?'"
10:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, okay, I believe that. Okay. So, Westchester.
10:34 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:34 Dax Shepard? Dad's a lawyer and mom is a playwright.
10:37 Speaker 02 Originally a children's playwright. She used to do plays with me.
10:40 Dax Shepard? You would perform in the ones she wrote?
10:41 Speaker 02 I would perform, yes.
10:42 Dax Shepard? And like workshops are on stage?
10:44 Speaker 02 Both. We even wrote a couple sort of together. I wouldn't say we wrote them together. I would sort of come up with ideas and she would actually then go implement them.
10:51 Speaker 03 That's sweet.
10:52 Dax Shepard? That's adorable. Were the people in your town, like Scarsdale High School you went to, were there billionaires and stuff?
10:58 Speaker 02 I think it's super fancy today. I don't think it was that fancy then. I think most of my friends, their parents were some lawyers, some doctors.
11:10 Dax Shepard? Like upper middle class.
11:11 Speaker 02 I didn't know financiers, hedge fund guys. I don't think that that necessarily existed. Definitely now.
11:17 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay.
11:18 Speaker 02 A hundred percent there.
11:19 Dax Shepard? That's why I have the confusion.
11:21 Speaker 02 Now, I know people who live there who have their own planes and all the things and all of that. When I was a kid, we... You were sitting in, you know, 17C in the middle. I don't even think I knew people necessarily who were sitting in the front of the plane.
11:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:32 Dax Shepard? Okay, so that's great, because I think what's unique about some places like that is like, you could have a lawyer father and also feel broke, which I think is a uniquely American thing. We interview a lot of people, it's like, they felt fucking broke. They're doing great, but they grew up in an area with billionaires. Like, their classmates were taking private jets to Aspen at Christmas, and they weren't. And I think that's such a weird phenomenon to be like, upper-middle class and feel broke.
11:57 Speaker 02 Maybe you'll disagree with this. I think everybody feels broke.
12:00 Dax Shepard? I think you're right, for the most part, yeah.
12:02 Speaker 02 I think weirdly, you know, I've been covering a lot of the billionaire set for years, and so many of them never feel like they've achieved whatever the...
12:13 Speaker 01 The highest.
12:14 Speaker 02 The highest goal is.
12:15 Dax Shepard? Because I guess number one is the goal. It's currently Elon, or it's currently Larry Ellison, whoever it is today.
12:21 Speaker 02 Did you ever watch, I think it's the movie Wall Street 2. Not as good, unfortunately, as Wall Street 1.
12:25 Dax Shepard? I'm shocked.
12:27 Speaker 02 And there's a moment, I think it's Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf, or maybe I'm gonna get them confused. Somebody looks at the other one and says, "What's your number?" As in like, "What's enough? When are you gonna feel like you've gotten there?"
12:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:41 Speaker 02 And he looks back, and he says, "What's your number?" And he goes, "More."
12:44 Speaker 01 Ugh.
12:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:46 Speaker 01 It's a sickness!
12:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it is.
12:47 Speaker 02 And I only say that because there's obviously different levels of struggle. There are people who are really struggling.
12:52 Dax Shepard? Yes.
12:53 Speaker 02 On a daily basis. But oddly enough, even the people I know at what we think of as the top.
12:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:01 Speaker 02 Also think that they are struggling. And I know that sounds so weird, but I look at both of you as super successful.
13:09 Speaker 01 Thank you.
13:09 Speaker 02 So I'm projecting onto you that you are super successful. And I'm going to bet that you probably don't actually feel that successful.
13:17 Speaker 01 I guess it depends on how you qualify success. I feel that I'm successful, but I don't feel that I'm safe.
13:25 Speaker 02 I'm with you. But interestingly, I was gonna say, I know people who have billions and billions of dollars who feel that exact same way.
13:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I believe it.
13:33 Speaker 02 They still don't feel safe, and they still feel either that they have something to prove, or that they feel like they're at the top of the mountain, and they just don't wanna fall off.
13:40 Speaker 01 It's holding on to it.
13:41 Speaker 02 Back to you.
13:43 Dax Shepard? You go to this school.
13:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:44 Dax Shepard? While you're at the school, I guess you're in your junior year. You intern at the New York Times.
13:50 Speaker 02 Senior year.
13:50 Dax Shepard? Okay, how does one get to the point where they're hell bent already by 17 years old to get an internship at the New York Times?
13:58 Speaker 02 Okay, so when I was a freshman in high school, I wanted to work for the school newspaper. I wanted to be a reporter for the paper, actually.
14:07 Dax Shepard? Had you seen a movie or something?
14:08 Speaker 02 No, I just thought reporting sounded cool. It seemed cool. However, the paper, I don't want to say I was lazy, but if you wanted to be a reporter, you had to take a class. And they had the class on Friday afternoons after school was over. And I was like, I don't want to do that. So they said you could sell advertising for the paper. And I said, oh, I'll do that instead. So I started to sell advertising for the paper. And I'm actually pretty good at selling advertising for the paper. And I think to myself, I want to sort of like go up the ladder of this newspaper, but I'm still a freshman. They're not really taking me seriously. So I said, I'm going to start my own magazine. So I started a magazine when I was a sophomore in high school to distribute, originally just in the high school. And then we started distributing in other high schools.
14:46 Dax Shepard? What was the name of this?
14:47 Speaker 02 Called the Sports Page Magazine. The principal hated me. She was so scared that I was going to go take the advertising from the sanctioned school newspaper and steal it and bring it to my little magazine that she said, you can distribute your magazine, but you can only do so if you get advertising only from people who do not pay taxes inside Scarsdale. So you basically had to find-
15:07 Dax Shepard? I question whether she had the authority to make this declaration.
15:09 Speaker 02 But this was the declaration. But I was so crazy that I sort of took this on as like a personal challenge.
15:17 Dax Shepard? You wanted to say fuck you and fill it with great advertisers.
15:20 Speaker 02 Totally. So I start calling up advertisers in New York City. It was the sports magazines. I wanted Wheaties because Michael Jordan was on the cover. And Champion sweatshirts and Nike. I call up agencies in New York City to get them all to do this. And they actually do it to me.
15:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's cute. Yeah, yeah. And what's an ad in the magazine at that time? What, are they throwing you 1,500 bucks or something?
15:38 Speaker 02 I think a full page was like $900. It was an easy ad.
15:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
15:42 Speaker 02 We got in a little bit of trouble towards the end because we tried to over expand way too quickly when ads, by the way, were then costing thousands of dollars. And the whole thing went under by the time I was a senior. But there was a moment where the New York Times wrote a little article about me. When I was a little kid and I used to read this guy Stuart Elliott in the New York Times, who was the advertising columnist religiously. Other people would read the front page about politics or they'd go to sports section or whatever. And I was like going to page C six to read about advertising. So that when I went to these meetings in the city, my mother would drive me to the city. I could pretend like I knew what I was talking about. Yeah.
16:13 Dax Shepard? You're a real wonder.
16:14 Speaker 02 This is great.
16:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, so adorable.
16:16 Speaker 02 I was so enamored with him. I didn't know who he was, but I was enamored with what he did. So I wrote him these wild letters and I'd call him and try to get a meeting with him. And one day I would go home in the middle of school during lunchtime to call because I didn't want to call from a payphone. And one day I called and he picked up the phone and I literally thought God was on the other side. I almost put the phone down and he said, look, kid, we don't really have an internship program. We can't do it, but maybe I can take you out to lunch.
16:43 Dax Shepard? Wow.
16:44 Speaker 02 Which is so nice. This is Nirvana and Meg on a tour. Anyway, working with this other editor and a whole bunch of other people, they said, you can come, but it's sort of secretly. Because New York Times is a union shop. They didn't want unpaid interns right around.
16:56 Dax Shepard? That makes sense.
16:57 Speaker 02 So I used to go every day and get a visitor pass. The third week that I'm there, I used to just stand around and get coffee and Xerox. I was having so much fun and there was a woman who had no idea who I was. I was wearing a tie, probably with a blazer on, and she overheard me talking about the internet. Back when we would write modem, comma, a device that transfers data over a phone line. And she said, why do modems make that noise that they make? You remember that? That stretchy thing? And I explained it to her and she said, write an article about that. I went back to Stuart and I said, I just got to sign this article. And he said, you're in fucking high school. Go tell her what's going on here. And I sort of somehow convinced him that we weren't going to tell her exactly what was going on. And I wrote the article, Stuart edited it and they put it in the paper.
17:40 Dax Shepard? Come on.
17:41 Speaker 02 That was the beginning of my.
17:42 Dax Shepard? Has there ever, you've had a lot of accomplishments. Has anything ever compared to picking up the New York Times the first time and seeing an article you wrote in it?
17:50 Speaker 02 That was pretty much the greatest. However, interestingly, I told all my friends, my article was coming out and they didn't put back then a byline on it. They put special to the New York Times with no name. So. Then my friends were like,
18:03 Speaker 01 You're like, really?
18:04 Speaker 02 Is this really you?
18:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
18:05 Speaker 02 It's not you. And then fascinatingly, there was this thing at the Times called the Greenies. They used to put these memos together with examples of what they thought were the best articles of the week, but then also ones that were terrible. You did not want to be in this because the odds were not in your favor. And there were comments on the articles like, you know, is English really your first language? I mean, that kind of, that always tough. This little article was being put in the thing for being one of the articles that they really liked that week.
18:29 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
18:30 Speaker 02 And they went in search of who wrote the article.
18:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, my gosh, it's a whodunit now.
18:35 Speaker 02 So then we had to stay and everyone was a little worried that I was going to get kicked out. And then they said, why don't you stay for the rest of the summer? And that's how I began my career.
18:42 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, what a story. I love when go-getters win.
18:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, when they get. When the go-getters get.
18:48 Speaker 02 When the go-getters get.
18:50 Dax Shepard? So you go to Cornell out of high school, bachelor's of science and communications. By the time you graduate, you have 71 published articles in the New York Times.
18:59 Speaker 02 I have seen that on Wikipedia. I think it's probably right, something maybe like that. Who counted these articles? I should go back and look.
19:04 Dax Shepard? At some point in college, I guess your junior year, you go over to London and you really start focusing on mergers and acquisitions in business. So why that from a sports magazine? Why are you so drawn to business?
19:17 Speaker 02 I just became fascinated, not by business itself. I mean, I always thought business was interesting, but I thought if you looked at the world through the prism of money, not in a cynical way, but just in a way of sort of following the money, follow that cliche, it almost explained everything. It explained not just business, but it explained to me politics. It explained sports. It explained history. There were so many pieces of it that when you start to think about what motivates people.
19:45 Dax Shepard? I was gonna say, the most fundamental thing is humans are incentive-based creatures and money's the incentive. It's the metric for most things.
19:52 Speaker 02 So I just became fascinated by that. And I think I was also fascinated by these characters. I always say I'm chasing interesting. And to me, at that time, in the world of business, Wall Street and all of these companies that were merging, there was sort of a merger boom happening.
20:09 Dax Shepard? This is like 99?
20:10 Speaker 02 This is like 99, late 90s.
20:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
20:12 Speaker 02 Every company in the world is merging. Every other day, there's this huge headlines. And so to me, that was chasing interesting. That's where the action was.
20:19 Dax Shepard? Yes.
20:19 Speaker 02 And there were these sort of bigger-than-life. Characters that were running these companies, all with sort of, in some cases, shocking egos and other things.
20:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're generally eccentric and they're good characters.
20:30 Speaker 02 This is super interesting.
20:31 Dax Shepard? And on the merger side, you have to have a lot of government oversight as well, no? So you're open pulling in politics a lot more?
20:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there was also sort of the intersection with politics and with policy. And so I just sort of liked it. And part of the game, if you will, was trying to figure out, could you get people to tell you about these deals before they actually happened? And if you could somehow convince somebody to tell you these things, then you would have like this fascinating scoop and then everyone would read the article and then you would create this sort of amazing virtuous circle.
21:02 Dax Shepard? I imagine that's a huge challenge because it's almost implicitly kind of insider trading.
21:08 Speaker 02 Kind of illegal. Not illegal. I shouldn't say it's illegal because once it's disclosed, just to be 100% clear for anybody who's listening, I don't buy individual stocks, anything like that, ever.
21:17 Dax Shepard? You never buy individual stocks?
21:18 Speaker 02 No, this is actually a big debate inside my family now. The rule at the New York Times and also at CNBC is no individual stocks, zero.
21:26 Speaker 04 Oh, wow.
21:27 Dax Shepard? You can buy funds and stuff?
21:29 Speaker 02 You can buy mutual funds and indexes and things like that. Yes, that's okay.
21:33 Dax Shepard? That's what all the money that...
21:34 Speaker 02 With the idea that you just can't control any of it. The point is, you don't want to have bought Apple and then Apple does something the next day and then even inadvertently, somebody says you've bought it for X reason because you knew that something was about to happen.
21:46 Dax Shepard? Right. Or if you're heavily invested in Apple and you have a story that could be very detrimental.
21:51 Speaker 02 Exactly. For better or worse, I've written some of these articles or gone on television breaking news where the stock will go up 10% or go down 10%. You don't want to be around that. So I now have two 15-year-old boys who are twins. Like the culture, they're fascinated by all this stuff. And they're like, Dad, can I buy this or could I do this? I'm like, guys, you're not allowed to do this.
22:11 Dax Shepard? Because of their relation to you or because of their age?
22:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, because I said, look, I said, Max, I have a Sunday Max and another Sunday Henry. And I said, guys, if you buy Apple... And the same thing happens, even if it all is just by coincidence, we're screwed.
22:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're still connected.
22:25 Speaker 02 We can't have that.
22:26 Dax Shepard? So they go to FanDuel? Let's serve the two evils.
22:29 Speaker 02 So we have a friend who's probably gonna be on the hook. So she created a fantasy stock thing with a couple of their friends. And she said that she would make up the...
22:39 Dax Shepard? Companies?
22:40 Speaker 02 No, no, no. So like, they fantasy pretended to be invested in Apple.
22:44 Dax Shepard? I got you.
22:44 Speaker 02 But if Apple goes up a lot, she's gonna be on the hook to actually pay them one day.
22:48 Dax Shepard? She's gonna pay out?
22:49 Speaker 01 Oh.
22:50 Speaker 02 She claims that she's gonna pay them.
22:52 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
22:53 Speaker 02 So we'll see if that actually happens.
22:54 Dax Shepard? Well, the House odds would say they're gonna pay her, probably.
22:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't think she's gonna take the money. It's a one-way bet at the moment.
23:01 Speaker 01 That's nice. At what age is it, once they hit 18, they can do their own thing?
23:06 Speaker 02 I don't know. We were actually talking about that. They were actually asking me, is this forever? I need to go talk to a lawyer. But by the way, this is what's happened. You look at people in Congress.
23:15 Speaker 01 Exactly.
23:15 Speaker 02 Or senators, anybody who is in possession of or likely to have quote-unquote "inside information", it gets super complicated with all the people around them. And as a result, my little family lives in sort of a nunnery as a result of that.
23:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
23:28 Speaker 02 In terms of the stock market.
23:29 Speaker 01 It's tricky. I don't know. Then it's like, no one around you at all can do anything? What about your friends?
23:34 Dax Shepard? Well, let's just say minimally, it's fucking crazy that someone that works at a newspaper's not allowed to own individual stocks, but that someone who's way ahead of some decisions that are gonna be made that'll affect companies dramatically is not forbidden is a little nuts.
23:46 Speaker 02 A little nuts.
23:47 Dax Shepard? I think everyone could agree. A little bonkers.
23:49 Speaker 01 Can the president own individual stocks?
23:50 Dax Shepard? Everyone can.
23:51 Speaker 02 They all can. My view is they should either have to have blind trusts, or maybe there's some kind of disclosure program, or maybe they can buy stuff, but then they have to hold it for a certain amount of time. I would be cool if you said, "You're buying X stock tomorrow, and there's some letter that says, 'I am going to sell it 30 days from now.'" But you actually say today that I'm selling in thirty days.
24:14 Speaker 01 Right.
24:14 Speaker 02 So you have no control over why or when you're doing it. I think there's things you could put into the system.
24:19 Dax Shepard? To help it.
24:20 Speaker 02 All I want people to do is trust the system.
24:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:22 Speaker 02 And right now, we all do not trust the system. And we don't trust the system because the system doesn't deserve to be trusted.
24:28 Speaker 01 Right.
24:29 Dax Shepard? Earmark, at the very end, I wonder if AI is going to neutralize everything. It's like, everyone has an agent that's doing all the trading and the AIs are all equally brilliant, have equal access to all the information. Does it just become a stalemate?
24:41 Speaker 02 I don't know. That's a really interesting question. By the way, that's a whole other question, not just about the stock market and trading. It's about everything. White collar work is just going to go away.
24:51 Dax Shepard? It's going to vanish.
24:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:52 Speaker 02 By the way, I just had an experience, and my dad was a lawyer, lawyers. So I was sent a contract two or three weeks ago, little thing that I just had to look at. And I saw two or three things I didn't like. I thought, oh, I'll just forward it to my lawyer, who probably would have charged me five hundred bucks, maybe a thousand bucks to look at it. I'm on an airplane and it had Wi-Fi, so I put it into ChatGPT and I say, tell me everything that's good and bad in this. And it points out the three things that I noticed and pointed out maybe two or three other things. It then said, would you like me to redline the contract? I said, sure.
25:23 Dax Shepard? Prepare a counter, it could do.
25:24 Speaker 02 So it does that. And then it says, would you like me to write a cover letter back to the people? It writes the most lovely letter you could imagine. It says, thank you so much for all the thought you put into this agreement. I've noticed a couple of provisions in here which seem somewhat asymmetric.
25:41 Speaker 01 He's using big vocab.
25:42 Speaker 02 Big vocab. I made a couple of changes to it. Never sent this thing to the lawyer, so now I save myself the five hundred thousand bucks. Forty-five minutes later, this AI-generated letter, these guys said, sure, that makes sense. So white collar is going to go first. But by the way, I'm a writer. I worry about writing.
25:58 Speaker 01 Okay, the other day, me and my friends heard a song at a restaurant and then we were singing it. And then the next day, I was like, what was that song again? And I text my friend, she was like, fuck, I don't remember. We were trying to remember, we couldn't. It was a whole thing. And I was like, oh, I kind of remember the basic tune. So I opened up chat and I hummed it and I said, what is this song? And I think one of the lyrics is this, and it said, oh, it's blah by Trish Sheeran. I was like, okay. And then I Googled it. I was like, that's not a song.
26:23 Speaker 02 Right, because it makes up stuff.
26:25 Speaker 01 It fully made that up. And I said, I don't think that's a song. And it said, it's a song. It's just a deep cut. And I was like, no, it's not. And then it said, oh, I'm sorry. And I was like, you liar.
26:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:38 Speaker 01 They're like humans.
26:39 Speaker 02 But it's good when you call them out, because they lied to me one time and I called them out. Are you on page chat GPT?
26:44 Speaker 01 I'm on page.
26:45 Speaker 02 Okay, so the one thing, tell chat GPT, I've now done this, little news you can use. Say, only bring me back verifiable facts with links. Always never lie to me. And then say, remember that. I have found in the past couple of weeks that it's actually started to do that for the most part.
27:04 Dax Shepard? It's straightened up a little bit.
27:05 Speaker 02 I'm sure it can also get a little tricky.
27:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, you just can't blindly rely on it.
27:10 Dax Shepard? No, no, no, no. Okay, so I want to blast through some highlights, which would include becoming a staff writer in the financial section of the New York Times for years, becoming a co-anchor of Squawk Box, starting Deal Book, and then writing, of course, Too Big to Fail, which then became an HBO show. These are enormous accomplishments that are coming very quickly. I don't know how one has the time.
27:34 Speaker 02 I still don't feel successful.
27:35 Speaker 01 Right?
27:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
27:37 Speaker 01 I was obsessed with Too Big to Fail, the movie.
27:39 Speaker 02 Oh, God bless you.
27:40 Speaker 01 I don't know what happened. It was one of those things that became like a night.
27:43 Speaker 02 Contagion.
27:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, I needed it to regulate my mental state or something. I watched it every night in college a lot, and all my roommates made fun of me. They're like, oh, my God, why is she watching this?
27:55 Dax Shepard? They said she's too small to stop.
27:57 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
28:01 Speaker 02 Well, credit goes, by the way, to the great Peter Gould, who, by the way, back then, was a staff writer on a little show that was just going into production called Breaking Bad.
28:10 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
28:11 Speaker 02 And of course, Peter then helped Vince Vaughn and they co-created Better Call Saul together.
28:16 Dax Shepard? And then you came on Breaking Bad at the end.
28:21 Speaker 02 At the very end.
28:22 Dax Shepard? To talk about a merger.
28:23 Speaker 02 It was probably the highlight of. My whole career. This actually is the highlight of my whole career.
28:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:27 Speaker 02 Because I was a Breaking Bad fanatic. In the penultimate episode, they built a scene. I'm not actually physically in it. I just mentioned Charlie Rose, who I'd watched my whole life and been on his show and all the things.
28:40 Dax Shepard? I love Charlie Rose.
28:41 Speaker 02 They created a fake scene where Charlie Rose was interviewing the couple that had created Gray Matter, if you remember Gray Matter. And Charlie Rose sits there and intones something like, in an article in the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was an amazing moment just to hear your name out of their mouths. The whole thing is wild.
29:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
29:02 Speaker 02 I knew they were gonna do this, but I didn't know the parameters of it. Peter had just sent me a note saying this is gonna happen. I might have had to actually sign my rights away for my name or something like that. Yeah, totally. Anyway, then I wrote an article to almost match what happened, and it became sort of like a viral sensation.
29:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
29:17 Speaker 02 Oh, that's so cool. It was completely made up, but it was fun.
29:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Okay, so, How Long Ago Was Too Big to Fail?
29:23 Speaker 02 Book came out in 2009. The film came out in 11.
29:27 Dax Shepard? Okay.
29:27 Speaker 02 Directed by the great Curtis Hansen. L.A. Confidential, Detroit. He's no longer with us, but he was a mensch. He was a very, very sweet man.
29:35 Dax Shepard? Okay, so I guess you get the idea for 1929. How long ago? I know you worked on it for about eight years.
29:43 Speaker 02 So what happened, honestly, was I wrote this book about the crisis in 08, and invariably, people would say to me, can you compare for me what happened in 08 to this thing that happened in 29? And I'd kind of look at them with a blank stare and say, I really can't. Yeah.
30:00 Dax Shepard? Because you only knew the broad strokes, as most of us know.
30:03 Speaker 02 I think like most of us. We know something very bad happened in 29. We know there was a Great Depression, and that was about the sum total of my knowledge.
30:16 Dax Shepard? If you dare. We are supported by Alexa Plus. All right, let me tell you about something I'm genuinely excited to talk about. The all new Alexa Plus. Look, we're all juggling a million things these days and this thing is designed to actually make your life easier. It's like having a conversation with someone who really gets what you need. Picture this, you're planning a night out and instead of opening 12 different apps, you just have one conversation with Alexa and it handles everything. Dinner reservations, entertainment, the works. It learns your style and puts thousands of services at your fingertips. What I love about this concept is how natural it feels. You're not barking commands, you're just talking and it works across your compatible devices, Echo, Fire TV and more.
31:00 Dax Shepard? It's your all new, smart, proactive AI assistant. And honestly, the idea of having AI that actually anticipates what you need? That sounds pretty amazing to me. Check it out at amazon.com/newalexa. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that too.
31:30 Speaker 01 That's where your AG1 routine earns its spot. It's not fixing your sleep or your alarm time. It's giving your body what it needs so the dark mornings don't tank you before you even start. One scoop, cold water every morning before anything else.
31:43 Dax Shepard? AG1 Next Gen has 75 plus ingredients, vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics, superfoods, backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials. Key nutrient levels improved with three months of consistent use.
31:57 Speaker 01 That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.
32:01 Dax Shepard? It's an easy, everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.
32:11 Speaker 01 Well, that's also the thing. When you do it first thing in the morning, you already feel kind of self-esteem because you're like, I already did something good for myself.
32:18 Dax Shepard? Yes. Go to drinkag1.com/dax and for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of omega three fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/dax. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Armchair Experts sent you. This episode is supported by Helix.
32:46 Speaker 01 Dax, is there anything better than crawling into a perfect bed on a cold fall night? Candlelit, hoodie on, maybe even some rain outside. The dream.
32:56 Dax Shepard? That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.
33:01 Speaker 01 I know. And thanks to Helix, my bed actually lives up to the vibe. All I had to do was take the Helix Sleep Quiz and within two minutes, they matched me to a mattress built for exactly how I sleep. I have a midnight mattress. It also has cooling technology, which I really
33:17 Dax Shepard? Increasingly so.
33:18 Speaker 01 I need it. I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.
33:28 Dax Shepard? She is not wrong. I have one too, and it's been such a game changer for sleep. And I love that they make it so easy. Free shipping right to your door. And what they're happy with Helix Guarantee, you'll get a full 365 nights to try it. A whole year to live in that cozy. They've got over 20 mattress models. So no matter how you sleep, they've got one for you.
33:48 Speaker 01 And it's not just us saying it. Helix has been named the most awarded mattress brand by Forbes, Wired and more. You've got to try it for yourself.
33:55 Dax Shepard? Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. Helixsleep.com/armchair. We get support from Scottsdale, Arizona. Monica, with summer ending or heading into fall, I've been researching a nice, quick getaway location and I keep coming back to Scottsdale, Arizona.
34:18 Speaker 01 Ooh, Scottsdale's good. What's drawing you to it?
34:21 Dax Shepard? Well, first of all, I have this wonderful memory of going there as a kid when I would go see my stepdad when he was working out there. The weather is perfect in fall. Warm, sunny, no humidity, and you can really do whatever you want with your time there. I want to do a sunrise hike through the Sonoran Desert, be surrounded by Sowaro, and then at the same afternoon, just completely melt into a spa treatment at one of their luxury resorts.
34:46 Speaker 01 Oh, that sounds amazing. I want to do that. Also, I was there visiting my brother once and I loved Old Town Scottsdale. It's so walkable. They have galleries and cute little restaurants and shops. The food scene alone is worth the trip.
35:00 Dax Shepard? What I keep reading is that it's luxurious, but not stuffy. There's no pressure to do it a certain way. You can explore public art, check out the architecture, go off-roading in the desert, or just sit and watch a sunset.
35:12 Speaker 01 It really is the perfect fall reset.
35:14 Dax Shepard? Learn more about all Scottsdale has to offer at unwindinscottsdale.com. We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?
35:36 Speaker 01 Which is a fair question.
35:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts, and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.
36:04 Speaker 01 Sleep mode is genius.
36:05 Dax Shepard? Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on, and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age-appropriate experiences for teens.
36:20 Speaker 01 I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.
36:25 Dax Shepard? Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.
36:39 Speaker 02 I think I had read the Galbraith book, a great book that was written about this crisis by an economist. I might have read it in college. I've since rewritten many times. It's a well-done book. But as a result of this, I was curious about this period. I went on vacation with my wife, and like a true nerd, I downloaded a whole bunch of books onto my Kindles, and I think I brought some books with me about 29. I was like, I should just get smart on this whole thing. Look, there's a whole bunch of interesting books and interesting characters, but the books I always loved were these character-driven narratives, where you get in the room and you get to like, see what they're saying to each other.
37:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
37:12 Speaker 02 And what's motivating them, what's incentivizing them, and who are they sleeping with?
37:15 Dax Shepard? The movie version.
37:16 Speaker 02 I wanted to read the movie version.
37:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
37:18 Speaker 02 And- There were elements of the movie version, some, there are scenes in some books where they really do beautiful jobs of capturing certain things, but it wasn't like a book that did the whole thing. Right. And I was like, oh, maybe I could do that. And then I got just lucky, it was strange. A couple of months later, I happened to be at Harvard University giving a speech and I got there early and I never get anywhere early and I had time to burn. I walk into this library and I asked this archivist, there was some papers that had been donated from a family, from a guy named Thomas Lamont, who's actually in the book, who ran JP Morgan. And I said, could I look at the boxes? And I start looking through the boxes. His secretary had kept transcripts of his meetings with Rosebelts, where they're literally talking to each other back and forth. Phone calls, yeah, with Hoover.
38:03 Speaker 02 And then there's letters and you can see the letters back and forth and back and forth and, oh my goodness, this could be something. Yeah. And then the truth is, I was sort of marveling at how wonderful this was and I went back to the archivist and I said, can I tell you my idea? This is what I want to do. Could you help me? Do you think this is doable? Explained the whole thing. She said, I've read Too Big to Fail, you can't do this.
38:23 Speaker 01 Oh.
38:24 Speaker 02 This is not going to work out for you.
38:26 Speaker 01 Why?
38:27 Speaker 02 Because she said, and she was not totally wrong about this, but I think I took it again, it's sort of like a personal challenge.
38:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:34 Speaker 02 She said, there's not one or two or three archives where you're just going to be able to go there and just excavate the material. It was not clear that all the material that you wanted existed. And it was true, that it was not all in one place. It was like in dozens of places. Yeah. It was a little bit of like a mystery, putting these puzzle pieces together and you're trying to figure out, well, this guy doesn't have any archives. The main character in this book named Charlie Mitchell, nobody seemed to save his notes or letters or anything. I went to the bank, he worked out to try to get, they had nothing, there's no library. But you have to say to yourself, okay, I know he's at this meeting and I know that these other eight people were at the meeting, or he would have had to talk to these people after the meeting, can I go find their stuff? And then you just sort of pray to God.
39:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:18 Speaker 02 You'd find some other material. And then I found some depositions and other transcripts and other crazy things. He ends up getting arrested and doing some super shenanigans with his wife and found some fascinating transcripts. He would get asked, so when did you tell your wife you were going to do this? He would say, well, I did this, I was in the room, this is what I said to her. And then they'd interview her. And then I thought, okay. I could put that together.
39:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
39:39 Speaker 02 So it was a lot of that kind of thing over and over again.
39:42 Dax Shepard? It sounds very hard to organize.
39:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:44 Dax Shepard? Once you have all your snippets.
39:46 Speaker 02 The biggie was getting the New York Federal Reserve, the minutes of their board meetings had never been made public. So here we are 100 years later, no one's ever really seen this stuff.
39:56 Dax Shepard? Are they somehow exempt from Freedom of Information Act?
39:59 Speaker 02 They don't have to do it. Wow. I don't know. And I went and I begged and pleaded. And for a while I didn't get anything for like two years. I'd just got nothing. Then they finally agreed and they sent me the minutes, but redacted. They would literally have redactions over these lines. I'm like, what's going on here? And then they finally, anyway, and that really helped sort of ground the whole story.
40:20 Dax Shepard? You need their account of how they were managing that whole scenario, I'd imagine.
40:25 Speaker 02 Each of these characters to me was so fascinating just to see what they were doing and why they were doing and what was incentivizing them.
40:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're bigger than life and brand new on the scene phenomenon in America, which is like the wealthy celebrity. This is the period of time where we get for the first time ever, celebrities that are just celebrities because they're rich.
40:44 Speaker 02 Prior to the 1920s, it was Babe Ruth, movie stars, maybe Charles Lindbergh.
40:49 Dax Shepard? Singers.
40:49 Speaker 02 A Wall Street CEO is now on the cover of magazines. And that was a totally new phenomenon. Today, you wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk or if Jamie Dimon or some hedge fund managers on the cover of magazines, that would seem completely normal.
41:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
41:03 Speaker 02 But this was completely not normal.
41:05 Dax Shepard? So I think maybe this whole story starts, at least from what I gathered, maybe kind of 1990 with General Motors, oddly enough. This whole story starts at least structurally with that.
41:17 Speaker 02 It does.
41:18 Dax Shepard? Or do you want to go further back?
41:19 Speaker 02 No, I'm so glad that you hit that because I think that is actually He loves GM. The Eureka moment.
41:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
41:24 Speaker 02 But the Eureka moment, I think, was prior to 1919, at least in America for the most part, people didn't take on debt. Nobody really wanted to borrow money. It was almost a moral sin to borrow money, get a mortgage. That was like a grubby thing to do.
41:40 Dax Shepard? I think this would shock people. We've all grown up in a world where debt, that's how the whole thing works, is on debt. And people didn't have loans, which
41:47 Speaker 02 They did not have loans.
41:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
41:48 Speaker 02 And so the thing that sort of made loans acceptable to the public was the idea General Motors is like, we need to sell more cars. Most people do not have enough money to buy a car. We are going to loan you money to buy a car and people flock to it. And then you had other companies like Sears Roebuck sort of clock what's going on and go, oh, okay, well, we can loan you money so you can buy appliances. And then this guy Charlie Mitchell, who's running what turns out to be Citigroup later on.
42:16 Dax Shepard? Which at the time is the biggest bank?
42:17 Speaker 02 Biggest bank in the country. He says, we can loan people money so they can buy stock.
42:22 Dax Shepard? Okay, so here we go.
42:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:24 Dax Shepard? Terrible idea.
42:25 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
42:25 Dax Shepard? You said that these brokerage houses just pop up like Starbucks all around the city and someone can walk in with a dollar and put a dollar down and they get $10 in stock.
42:33 Speaker 02 Totally. By the way, this is happening today with crypto.
42:36 Dax Shepard? People are borrowing.
42:37 Speaker 02 You can get 20 to 50 times your money in the crypto markets right now.
42:42 Dax Shepard? You're kidding.
42:43 Speaker 02 Somewhere between maybe 5%, maybe even 10% of the crypto market, I would argue to you is super leveraged right now. The problem is we don't know.
42:50 Dax Shepard? And the collateral is the actual coin that they've bought? Is that the collateral? What collateral are they putting up?
42:56 Speaker 02 Well, in some cases, the collateral is.
42:57 Dax Shepard? Is just the coins.
42:58 Speaker 02 Is just the coins.
42:59 Dax Shepard? So it's all self generating?
43:01 Speaker 02 It's all quite circular. It's all quite circular.
43:04 Speaker 01 This is interesting. It makes me wonder because my family from India is like you buy your cars straight out.
43:12 Speaker 02 Yep.
43:12 Speaker 01 You do everything you can to not owe any money. And I wonder if that's just because they grew up in a different system.
43:18 Speaker 02 No, by the way, in my family, always pay the credit card off. You want no debt. And there's other people who live the complete opposite way. They think debt is fine.
43:27 Speaker 01 Right.
43:27 Speaker 02 They think debt is great. They use debt to lower their tax bill.
43:31 Dax Shepard? It's a very powerful tool in our economy, debt.
43:33 Speaker 02 It's a super powerful tool. But by the way, the other thing that happened after the crash in 29 was I scarred a whole generation of people to not want to do any of these things.
43:41 Speaker 01 Right.
43:42 Speaker 02 My grandfather lived to 91 years old. He'd actually been a messenger boy with his older brother down there in October of 29. And he watched somebody jump out of a window. He used to tell us the story all the time.
43:53 Speaker 01 Oh.
43:53 Speaker 02 And as a result of that, he never bought one share. Stock, there's whole existence. He would buy bonds. He would tell you to put your money under the
44:02 Dax Shepard? So you're weirdly like third generation. This whole thing with you not being able to buy is almost like a family tradition, really. Okay, so because people can borrow, it just floods the stock market for 10 years or nine years.
44:14 Speaker 02 Nine years and the market's going up like crazy.
44:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you say between 1928 and 1929, it goes up 90%.
44:22 Speaker 02 Where's your memory? How is this possible? This is a remarkable situation.
44:27 Dax Shepard? This is a remarkable situation.
44:29 Speaker 02 He's got no notes.
44:30 Dax Shepard? I have them, but my goals always to not look at them.
44:32 Speaker 02 I interview people for a living too. I look down at the notes. You've turned the pages over, by the way, so you can't even see the notes.
44:38 Dax Shepard? The personal failure for me if I picked them up, but they are there in case I need them.
44:41 Speaker 02 So interesting.
44:42 Dax Shepard? Okay, so but it goes up by 90%.
44:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
44:45 Dax Shepard? Which is crazy. My question, though, what was the growth between 1920 and 1929?
44:52 Speaker 02 Well, there'd been a little bit of a hiccup, actually, more than a hiccup. The market actually tanked in 21, but most of America had not yet really participated in this because that 1919 date, it didn't really take, it wasn't till, call it 25, 26.
45:06 Dax Shepard? Where culturally everyone's cool with.
45:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, and as the market's going up, then people are saying, oh, my goodness, they're seeing their neighbor do it. And they're like, the train's leaving the station, folks. I gotta get on the train. And that's how it always happens.
45:19 Dax Shepard? It's like it becomes loss bias. I'm losing money not participating.
45:22 Speaker 01 This is crypto. This is what everyone's doing.
45:25 Speaker 02 I mean, that's the parallel to some degree. Now, I'm always scared because people say, oh, Sorkin, you're writing this book. The whole market's gonna tank tomorrow. That's not what I was ever trying to do. It was more, I wanted to write about this period because I thought it was sort of just fascinating. And then as I was doing it, the weird part was I would go, oh, that's a little bit like this. That's a little bit like this. But there's also differences. So I don't want to overstate the case.
45:47 Dax Shepard? Crypto is a good comp because it's unregulated in the same manner that in 1929, it was hardly regulated. But you have this enormous growth. Everyone's getting in on it. Crazy timing, right? Winston Churchill happens to be visiting.
45:59 Speaker 02 Is that the most wild thing?
46:01 Dax Shepard? Yes. He's visiting the New York Stock Exchange on the day it's plummeting. What, October 28th?
46:06 Speaker 02 Winston Churchill shows up in New York, actually shows up in the US and goes on this sort of crazy trip around the country, basically trying to make money, becomes.
46:16 Speaker 02 A stock trader himself, he becomes obsessed. He's watching all this happen. He's literally calling his broker, taking out big loans.
46:22 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
46:23 Speaker 02 The whole thing is completely insane. This is before he's obviously running England. This is on a serious down. He's in the US, basically on a lecture series to try to make back some of the money that he didn't have. And then he tries to make even more money because he wants to get in on the stock market. And he loves to be around rich people and rich people love to be around him.
46:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
46:45 Speaker 02 It was sort of this fascinating thing that was happening. Anyway, he happens to be down in New York. He literally goes to the exchange, he's watching all this happen. And there's this wild dinner, this party that was set up, which for me as a storyteller was unbelievable because you're always trying to get all your characters in one room.
47:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
47:03 Speaker 02 You desperately want that. And when you're trying to write a true story, it has to be true.
47:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, unfortunately.
47:09 Speaker 02 Looking like, how am I going to get all of these characters to get in one place? And then there's a dinner in his honor where all of the main characters, as the market's crashing.
47:18 Dax Shepard? Hosted by Mitchell, our protagonist.
47:20 Speaker 02 Mitchell was at this dinner. He was not the host.
47:21 Dax Shepard? Oh, he's not the host, okay.
47:22 Speaker 02 But he does raise a glass, the night of the crash, to all my former millionaires.
47:29 Speaker 01 Oh.
47:30 Speaker 02 That was literally the toast. He stood up and he said, to all my former millionaires. And the truth is, as he was giving that toast, he was doing that in part to almost mask the truth, which was that his whole bank was on the verge of falling apart. And he was trying to figure out what to do about it. And he went to that dinner scared out of his mind that if he missed the dinner, that people would know that something was wrong.
47:56 Speaker 01 Oh my god. This is like that dinner on the Titanic.
48:00 Dax Shepard? Oh, right, right.
48:01 Speaker 01 Before it's, or like as it's sinking, they're just eating their dinner.
48:05 Dax Shepard? And playing the music, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's some key players in it. There's tons of great characters, but there's also kind of just sectors that are involved in this really complex meltdown. You've got the banks.
48:17 Speaker 02 Yep.
48:18 Dax Shepard? Of which many of them are still in existence. It's crazy they weathered these storms, JP Morgan and Chase and some did and some did. You have the stockbrokers.
48:26 Speaker 02 Yes.
48:27 Dax Shepard? They're a big part of it.
48:28 Speaker 02 They're manipulating everything. And that's the other thing that I didn't realize. It hopefully doesn't happen the same way today, or at least I pray it doesn't. I do think it happens in crypto. One of the things that was happening back then was you had these things called stock pools where basically some of these wealthy guys would get together and basically pump and dump the stock. And it was sort of known and it was legal. There was no rules against this. So they would call each other up and say, okay, for the next two weeks, we're going to try to get this stock to go higher. And it was almost like actors on the floor of the exchange saying, I'm up for 120, then you go to 180, then I go to 220, then you go more, and then we're going to pull the rug. And weirdly, the public sort of understood what was going on. They almost talked about these things somewhat openly. And so people would try to jump in, again, with this train analogy.
49:13 Speaker 02 They'd say, if I can get on and off the train before the rug gets pulled, I too can play in this craziness.
49:20 Dax Shepard? This is like the modern day GameStop a little bit.
49:22 Speaker 02 GameStop, that's exactly right. And by the way, that's happening also in crypto right now. I mean, all the time. You go on to Reddit, even these private Telegram accounts that people have set up. This is what they're doing, meme stocks. The other was a guy, it was a guy named Jesse Livermore, who was sort of the Cassandra in the room.
49:37 Dax Shepard? He's the only guy who really won huge, right?
49:39 Speaker 02 He won huge because he was a short seller. He bet against the market. And for most of the late 20s, he was almost out of business because the market kept going up and up and up and he had nothing and it wasn't working for him. And then makes a hundred million dollars.
49:52 Speaker 01 He's that guy in The Big Short.
49:53 Speaker 02 Yes, except an emotional wreck of a guy because he makes the money, he then goes on to lose all the money. He makes a little bit of money back and by 1940, without giving away the whole book, he walks into the cloakroom of the Sherre Netherland on 5th Avenue and kills himself.
50:09 Speaker 01 God, there's so many suicides in this book.
50:13 Dax Shepard? Is there a known death total?
50:15 Speaker 02 Strangely enough, despite all of the headlines about suicides, technically, there were less suicides in 1929 than there were in 1928.
50:22 Speaker 01 Oh, weird.
50:23 Speaker 02 So even though the popular perception is that people are jumping out of windows, and people were, I think what happened was... Anytime there was a suicide after the crash, there was always a headline about it. Yeah. And they were either attached to the financial industry or they were somebody who had mortgages at home or lost through this. And so in terms of the popular perception, and by the way, even the storyline grandfather would tell, I think these things did happen.
50:44 Dax Shepard? But it's outsized.
50:45 Speaker 02 But I think in our imagination, on a relative basis, it might be outsized.
50:48 Dax Shepard? OK, so then some other players, of course, are, you have the politicians and then you have the Fed. And the Fed's kind of new, right? The Fed should be doing stuff that today it would be doing, but at the time.
51:00 Speaker 02 Does nothing.
51:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, explain what they should have or could have done and what they chose to do and why.
51:05 Speaker 02 Interestingly, the Fed, which had just started in 1913, is totally basically a new institution, even though they were supposed to be an independent institution. They were worried about politics. They were scared of the politics. And for the most part, they sat on their hands. They were debating the whole time, sort of the way the Fed debates now, about whether they should raise interest rates to cut this whole thing down to size, whether they should lower interest rates. And if they did that, would that cause more speculation? The debate was happening, but they were almost too worried to do anything super substantive about it because they thought not only did they get hauled up in front of Congress, but that ultimately the Fed could just lose funding and it would be over. Now everyone talks about the independence of the Fed. There was a lot of sort of political pressure on them, or at least they felt that political pressure because they thought that they could really screw themselves. And that was pre-crash.
51:50 Speaker 02 After the crash, the thing you would have wanted them to do, which frankly Ben Bernanke did in 2008, is you want to flood the system with money and effectively bail everybody out. But you remember how politically unpopular bailing people out is.
52:02 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
52:03 Speaker 02 So back then, they weren't really game to do that either because that would have been a politically unpopular thing. I think the sort of psychological pressure of that was real. Ben Bernanke, by the way, had done his thesis, interestingly, at Princeton on the Great Depression. Whoa. And had watched all this play out. Yeah. And then I think that actually was a big impetus for him to do what he did. But look, for many, many years, we lived with the political ramifications of that because people were so frustrated, the bailouts, so upset about the bailouts. I know people who think, and I think this may be true, not to go too political, but. You look at what happened in 2008, I think that might have even led frankly to Trump's presidency in 2016.
52:44 Speaker 01 Occupy Wall Street to QAnon to all of it.
52:46 Speaker 02 All of it. So it's interesting that it might have been the right economic thing to do, but not necessarily the right political thing to do. And I don't know if there was an in-between. But the weird part to compare, the one thing I think politically about this all the time is in 29, there wasn't this sort of Occupy Wall Street movement immediately. In fact, a lot of people blame themselves.
53:07 Dax Shepard? Marx in your book.
53:09 Speaker 02 Groucho Marx was living in Long Island at the time. He was not a super famous actor yet. And he caught the bug like everybody else. He would spend all day at this brokerage house. He was convinced by this broker that he should buy into RCA, which was like the Nvidia of its time. It was like the hot stock. Radio was the ticker. It was the next big technology. He was sort of questioning the economics of it because they didn't have a dividend. He thought, well, if they're making money, they should be giving us the money. And the broker's like, dude, you gotta do this. This is the future. The world's changing. It's different this time. He does it, of course, and then gets a call in October.
53:45 Speaker 01 Aye.
53:45 Speaker 02 You gotta come down here. And he has to mortgage his house. And so so many of these people, they did ultimately blame themselves.
53:51 Dax Shepard? And he asked them, well, how did this happen? He said, well, I made a mistake. And then Groucho Marx said, no, I made a mistake for believing you or listening to you. That was like a kind of personal responsibility that we don't have as much to that degree.
54:03 Speaker 02 No, now we just blame everybody else all the time. Even questions about capitalism and socialism, that didn't really come up till mid to late 30s at the earliest. That's interesting to me because I'm always thinking about now we have these big debates in this country about what's the right thing.
54:18 Dax Shepard? Now Hoover knew what to do, but chose not to, but encouraged Roosevelt to do it, yeah?
54:23 Speaker 02 So Hoover knew what to do, sort of. And I would just say Hoover made a whole bunch of mistakes. I mean, a whole bunch of dominos went the wrong way. He wanted to raise taxes at a time where you shouldn't be raising taxes because the whole economy was faltering. He had made a pledge as he was campaigning in 28 to the farmers in America. He was trying to get them to vote for him, that he would implement tariffs. If you're seeing the parallels, folks.
54:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
54:48 Speaker 02 And so he says that he needs to go and do that in 1930. He puts tariffs in place despite, by the way, just like now, economists were writing him these open letters, CEOs going down to Washington to say, please don't do this. He says, well, I told everybody I was gonna do it. I gotta do it. So he does it. A year later, global trade is down 60%. And he had this idea in his mind that the market and the economy were different. That they were somehow separated from each other. And that this was almost like a psychological problem. That you could sort of like jawbone your way out of it. If you could just tell people to feel better, they would feel better. By the way, we just had that experience. We've had that experience a whole bunch of times. It's happening right now. It happened in the last administration. People know what they know about how things are really happening.
55:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they go to the grocery store and they get a bill and that's that.
55:36 Speaker 02 But interestingly, as things got progressively worse, one of the things that Hoover wanted to do, but he was also basically losing at this point. He was not going to be the next president.
55:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
55:46 Speaker 02 He wanted to effectively have what's called a bank holiday. He thought he needed to shut down the banks before there was like a run on all the banks. Full collapse. And he's scared out of his mind that this is gonna happen. But because he had basically told everybody that this was a psychological problem, he really wanted Roosevelt to endorse the idea that they would do this. Roosevelt had won and Roosevelt, of course, doesn't want to take this on. He wants to start with a clean slate. He doesn't want to endorse anything that Hoover is gonna do. And Hoover doesn't want to really capitulate to the idea that this was really his thing.
56:21 Speaker 01 My gosh.
56:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, ego's standing in the way of like.
56:23 Speaker 02 Hoover secretly sends a letter to Roosevelt begging him to do this with him. Roosevelt says, no way, I'm not doing it. They're going back and forth, back and forth for weeks. The night before the inauguration, literally it's 11:30 at night. Hoover calls him one last time, says, please, let's just do it tomorrow. Otherwise, the banks are gonna go out of business. He says, no, we're not gonna do it. Of course, a couple of days after he gets inaugurated, what does Roosevelt do? Shatters the banks. And it does help save the system and begins the beginning of this sort of upward trend. So he did politically get what he. Wanted out of all this. It's possible, had they done this earlier, they could have stemmed the tide a little bit better.
57:05 Dax Shepard? Okay, let's talk about all of the downriver outcomes of this collapse. Because I bet there's a bunch we don't know about. I think most we would know, and in the book you say, I think in 1934, maybe that was the nad year where we were at 25% unemployment.
57:22 Speaker 02 Thirty-two. There's like tented camps everywhere. They're called Hoovervilles. Twenty-five percent. Twenty-five percent unemployment in America.
57:28 Dax Shepard? And you point out the peak of our unemployment after 2008 was 11%.
57:31 Speaker 02 For a hot minute. By the way, the lowest unemployment we've ever had, ever, was I think about two and a half percent. That was like true Alice in Wonderland time, 1950s.
57:40 Dax Shepard? So yeah, one in four adults who would want a job can't get a job.
57:44 Speaker 02 Can't get a job.
57:44 Dax Shepard? That's pretty bleak.
57:46 Speaker 02 And that really impacted people who had nothing to do with this trading stock. This was so much of the whole country was now being impacted.
57:52 Dax Shepard? So what kind of things came out of this societally?
57:55 Speaker 02 Well, all of a sudden, you're having a situation where people like Charlie Mitchell, who had sort of gotten away with it all, I don't want to say gotten away with it all because it was unclear what he'd gotten away with, but all of a sudden, the bankers start to get blamed, really for the first time. They had been blamed in the papers, but not in any political kind of way. You know, we're always debating, you know, should people go to jail?
58:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
58:18 Speaker 02 Well, what happens? Roosevelt literally tells the Justice Department to go arrest him. So he gets arrested for tax evasion, not for an actual crime related to the banking crisis at all, which seems almost apropos of the way we seem to do it in this country. Al Capone.
58:32 Dax Shepard? I was gonna say, that's how we got Al Capone. We love to do that.
58:34 Speaker 02 That's how we got Al Capone before that. So he had saved his bank, interestingly, with his own money. Remember I tell you about that dinner with Winston Churchill? He had saved the bank with his own money, but as a result, he had a huge paper loss because he had invested all this money in his own stock to try to keep it from falling apart, which was sort of noble in its own way. And then decides, because he had made some money in cash that year, that the way he was going to try to avoid paying taxes that year was he was going to sell all of his losing shares to his wife. It was like a stock swap. It's illegal now, but back then was unclear how legal or illegal it really was. And so he gets arrested and he goes to trial. And interestingly, just like maybe after 08 or other things, he doesn't ultimately go to jail. He gets acquitted by the jury. And the jury decides that...
59:19 Speaker 02 Almost anybody would have done this in his position.
59:21 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
59:21 Speaker 02 And by the way, others were doing this. Everybody was doing it back then.
59:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:25 Speaker 02 And then we actually put a lot in place to make this completely illegal.
59:27 Dax Shepard? Okay. So that's what happened. And now, how is it a bit of a warning? What are the parallels to today? We earmarked some, but what's currently happening? I think people, even if they don't really follow the market, they would be aware of the fact that we're in quite a boom right now.
59:44 Speaker 02 Well, so I think there's a couple of things going on, and I don't want everyone to run out and go, oh, my God, the whole thing's on fire. But we put a lot of laws in place. The SEC emerged in 1934. It was the Bank Act, which split up the banks. Carter Glass did that in 1933. We had a Bank Act in 1940. There were a lot of things that we've done to try to make the system safer. And one of the things that's happening now is we are taking some of those guardrails off in the guise of sort of democratizing finance, which was sort of the concept, by the way, in the 20s. Everybody wants more access to the lottery tickets. We all want more.
1:00:16 Dax Shepard? Ideally, we'd like not to work for that.
1:00:18 Speaker 02 Ideally, if we could avoid it, right?
1:00:20 Dax Shepard? In the best-case scenario.
1:00:22 Speaker 02 And so, Washington just approved a bill called the Genius Act. Genius Act allows people to trade in crypto in ways they couldn't before, trade in private equity, venture capital, private credit. Now will be available to put in your retirement funds and 401K plans and all sorts of stuff like that. So that worries me a little bit in terms of what is going on. I think you can do it, but you have to figure out a way to do it transparently with a lot of eyes and safety mechanisms on there. And I think right now, we're taking a lot of the safety mechanisms off. Private equity, venture capital, all that stuff is really a private market. You don't have to disclose stuff in that world. And so here, it's going to be available to the public without the sort of same disclosures that public stocks require, for example. By the way, President Trump recently announced, I think it's pretty interesting.
1:01:07 Speaker 02 He says, "Public companies shouldn't have to disclose their earnings quarterly." Historically, companies would come out with earnings reports four times a year. You could see what was going on. That was the whole point.
1:01:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's pretty important.
1:01:19 Speaker 02 He says, "Now, should only do that twice a year." Now, his argument is that these companies are wasting too much time focused on short-term earnings and are not thinking long-term enough. It takes too much energy and time away. But there's a whole other argument, which is, the more transparency, the better.
1:01:35 Dax Shepard? That's not an invalid argument.
1:01:36 Speaker 02 No, no, it's not an invalid argument. I have time for the argument. I just don't know what the true implication of it is. So I think it's like a red flag. It's a question. We should sort through the question.
1:01:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I mean, it kind of parallels what I think is a general issue in politics, which is 80% of their life is out fundraising, right? That's all they do. That's the trap of the job. They can't really govern because all they got to do is endlessly raise money.
1:02:00 Speaker 02 By the way, that's a trap that CEOs and business leaders would say, and every quarter, they have to take a week, four times a year. So a month out of their year is being used to build decks and talk to the analysts and talk to the journalists.
1:02:11 Dax Shepard? Worse, probably make some short-term decisions that are not good for the company you have invested in. So there is some, I mean, there's like a fiduciary responsibility aspect to it.
1:02:22 Speaker 02 And that's why I get it. I'm just saying, I think it's all part and parcel of this sort of this larger guardrail thing.
1:02:26 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes.
1:02:27 Speaker 02 And it's funny because the one thing I do think about a lot is that speculation, we all talk about speculation is like a dirty word and you don't want people speculating. The other side of it is you need a little bit of speculation for our economy to make these great innovations. I mean, speculation is like the twin of innovation in a way. Think about whoever invested in Tesla in the beginning, when it was an absurd investment, was speculating.
1:02:51 Dax Shepard? All the AI stuff right now is speculating. There's no profitable AI product.
1:02:54 Speaker 02 It was speculation. And so when you think about the great innovations that have come out of this country, in a very weird way, I know it's a little heretical to say, it was built on speculation in some ways. It's like a needle to thread. How do you have enough speculation without having too much speculation?
1:03:09 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes. You're trying to control this force that is very powerful.
1:03:15 Speaker 02 And maybe you can't, which is the question.
1:03:16 Dax Shepard? All of our industries, virtually, have been in one way or another funded by the stock market.
1:03:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:23 Dax Shepard? And so everything we have that is now an asset of ours is somehow, you can pretty much trace it back to this system, hate it or love it. It is how we have done what we've done. And this will come up in the book review I read.
1:03:36 Speaker 02 The question that I also think about is just how much we've decided that gambling is a part of our, so speculation is a form of gambling, but now we're also gambling just on any and everything, which is a different kind of speculation.
1:03:49 Dax Shepard? That's my complaint about crypto.
1:03:50 Speaker 02 Well, there's crypto, but I was gonna say, you can now bet on the news. You can bet on a presidential election. You can bet on Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey, where they're going to get married.
1:04:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:04:01 Speaker 02 I mean, you can bet on all of this stuff. And obviously, you can go on FanDuel and bet on the game, but. I just don't know what that does to the culture.
1:04:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:04:10 Speaker 01 I mean, everything's gamified. It's also as a result of our social media and our attention and needing to move quickly.
1:04:17 Dax Shepard? I'll say it's terrible.
1:04:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:18 Dax Shepard? I mean, that aspect's terrible. There's been a lot of Michael Lewis parallels between you guys as we've been sitting here. Even the going to London part and getting into finance in London. There's a lot of stuff they're writing.
1:04:27 Speaker 02 He's like a hero of mine.
1:04:29 Speaker 01 Oh, he is?
1:04:29 Dax Shepard? As he should be.
1:04:30 Speaker 01 He's so awesome.
1:04:31 Dax Shepard? He is like a historic figure. He is so charismatic and brilliant and casual about it all. I'm totally enamored.
1:04:37 Speaker 02 I'll tell you what I'm enamored by. I have this vision in my head of him playing the keyboard, meaning the typewriter, like a piano. And just with a smile on his face, writing these books, almost cackling.
1:04:50 Speaker 01 I know.
1:04:50 Speaker 02 As he's writing, whereas I'm sitting there and I'm like hunting and pecking and eating and all of the things.
1:04:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's really good at the thing you said, which is making a big story, making the characters so real.
1:05:03 Speaker 02 So real.
1:05:03 Speaker 01 And you're so invested as if it's a movie.
1:05:05 Dax Shepard? But he's so fucking playful along the way. It's like our favorite kind of performers, the ones that make it look effortless.
1:05:11 Speaker 02 The best.
1:05:11 Dax Shepard? Yes. But all of his recent work on his podcast about this insane gambling addiction that a very significant portion of the young men in the country have. It's fucking terrible. But capital needs to be raised for innovation, and this is our instrument to do so. So I'm also very in defense of the stock market. Okay, now.
1:05:30 Speaker 02 Oh, now we're about to get serious.
1:05:31 Dax Shepard? We are, because I absolutely adore you.
1:05:34 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:05:35 Dax Shepard? I adore you. I've had nothing but when I met you, I'm like, I love that guy. I hope I'm on his show. I hope he's on our show. Just love him.
1:05:42 Speaker 02 You guys have the illusion of journalistic integrity, but it's become so politicized. Like, The New York Times is very, very clearly left and Fox is clearly, clearly right. And that's the problem. It has the illusion of journalistic integrity, but it's interesting that it falls so perfectly that they've become so political. Do you think that's a valid point at all?
1:06:03 Dax Shepard? And I'm going to bring up your book review. So I read the book review of 1929 in The New York Times, a place where you worked forever and helped build.
1:06:11 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:06:12 Dax Shepard? And it's not a great review. And it's not a great review because the person doesn't like the stock market. It's not a review of your book. It would be like someone who hates gas-powered cars reviewing the Honda Accord. Don't review the Honda Accord. You've already established you only like electric vehicles. The notion that the New York Times had the audacity to review Joe Rogan's stand-up routine, I thought was preposterous. You've got to recuse yourself from that. You've already declared. So I don't think that review of your book was fair at all. And I think it reeks of the thing that I am suggesting is happening.
1:06:44 Speaker 02 Wow. I have a couple of thoughts. One is, so I grew up at the Times. Started when I was 18.
1:06:48 Dax Shepard? I love the Times, let me say.
1:06:50 Speaker 02 No, you don't have to say that.
1:06:51 Dax Shepard? No, I do, I do.
1:06:51 Speaker 02 It's hard for me. There are things I agree with and there's things I don't agree with. Like anything in life. And so the only thing I feel like I can be responsible for is me.
1:07:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:07:02 Speaker 02 I think what happens is, and maybe this goes to then the audience. I think that I am channeling the audience. I think as a journalist, my job is to sort of channel the public. What does the public think? And you may say to yourself, well, who is the public? Who are your listeners versus who's listening or watching MSNBC or reading the New York Times? Or who's watching Fox? I like to think of myself, this is selfish to say, as a completely independent actor.
1:07:28 Speaker 01 You're thinking on your own.
1:07:30 Speaker 02 Whether it's the Times or CNBC or any other part of my life, there's no model. There's nobody saying to me, hey, Sorkin, you got to do it this way. This is what you have to do. I'm asking you to do it or I'm instructing you to do it.
1:07:40 Dax Shepard? Well, you're smart enough to predict the criticism you'll get.
1:07:42 Speaker 02 You got me on the couch. I am cognizant of that. Maybe that's not good.
1:07:46 Dax Shepard? Maybe it's great.
1:07:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. So I don't know.
1:07:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't either. I wanted to talk about it.
1:07:50 Speaker 02 I'm not unhappy that you did. It's a little uncomfortable. I won't tell you it's not.
1:07:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:07:56 Speaker 02 But I can't figure out what the public actually wants. This is the thing I grapple with in the following way. I think that part of the public wants questions that are super newsy, super accountable. There's part of that audience that wants that. And increasingly, there seems to be an audience that doesn't want that at all. And Maybe we're sort of just moving in these different directions. I don't know what the right answer is. By the way, I think about this all the time. So I don't want you to think that this is like, this is like clearly, unfortunately, on my mind in a way that you've sort of got in there.
1:08:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think all sides are claiming they're doing it. But then there's these very big and public and known failings of it, right? So even on the daily, these two Princeton professors on talking about, you know, there's a huge failure of the media during COVID. Distancing didn't work. It was already known by the WHO six months before and it was shut down. So it's a bummer and that's not what the fourth estate is supposed to be. So it's like, just if we acknowledge that there's some failures, why are these failures? My hunch is that because all of these things have become really dedicated to one side or the other, and that to me is what's scary.
1:09:04 Speaker 02 I think there is, again, get out your salt shaker, because this is what I've been doing for my career. I think there is a value in journalism, capital J. Me too.
1:09:11 Dax Shepard? Me too.
1:09:12 Speaker 02 No, no, but so here's the complicated part, because now we're going to get into like the economics of the media business and where the story goes and all the things. If journalism, capital J, dies, or if it can't do what it's supposed to do, which is actually to provide news and information that you can learn from, we can't have a conversation using facts and we need the facts. Yeah. Somehow. And by the way, sometimes in these interviews that I'm doing, and by the way, sometimes in the interviews that you're doing, you are collecting facts. You are in the business of collecting facts that then get put into the public bloodstream and are hopefully picked up and used in the right way. Yeah. Sometimes, obviously, they can get spun and all sorts of things, but we need the facts. Yeah, I agree.
1:09:56 Speaker 02 And so I always wish I could do it better, every single time. Even something that I've done that's great, I never think anything I've done is great, to be honest with you. I always sort of go, oh, it could be better. The book could be better. Everything could be better. Always.
1:10:08 Dax Shepard? Ah, you're pretty fucking good, though. The bar is pretty goddamn high.
1:10:11 Speaker 02 For me, that's what's going on constantly. I'll write an email, send the email and think I could have sent a better email.
1:10:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:10:18 Speaker 02 By the way, that's like the prison of my own brain.
1:10:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I have the same fear you have. How are we trusting anything?
1:10:24 Speaker 02 Right?
1:10:25 Dax Shepard? And I want to get to the bottom of that. And I really want us to figure it out. I'm not sure people are really suggesting the real problem and then the real solution.
1:10:34 Speaker 02 Can I throw out one other thing?
1:10:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:10:36 Speaker 02 We're all trying to be. Trusted. I think everybody wants to be trusted. We talked about people want more money. And actually, I would argue too, they want trust. And so the question is, what does that mean? How do you react? How are you trusted? Right?
1:10:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:10:50 Speaker 02 And sometimes a brand can be trusted. Sometimes a person can be trusted. And I think what's happening that's so interesting right now is, especially in the media landscape, it seems like individuals are trusted more than brands are trusted.
1:11:03 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:11:04 Speaker 02 Except then you-
1:11:05 Dax Shepard? Until they-
1:11:07 Speaker 02 Right. I don't, I'm just saying, I don't, I don't know. I wish I had a better answer for you.
1:11:11 Dax Shepard? Well, I love the book. You're a phenomenal writer. You take too long between books.
1:11:17 Speaker 02 Takes a while.
1:11:18 Dax Shepard? Because we're going on like-
1:11:19 Speaker 02 Eight years. Oh, no, much longer.
1:11:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Too Big to Fail is-
1:11:23 Speaker 01 I wonder if they'll make a movie out of it and I'll watch it over and over.
1:11:26 Speaker 02 It's been 16 years, yeah.
1:11:27 Dax Shepard? This is definitely gonna get made into a show and you know it.
1:11:29 Speaker 02 Maybe. We can hope.
1:11:30 Dax Shepard? I'm watching it. It's gonna be a great show. The characters are phenomenal. They're also interesting. It's from such a different era, too. Like, the way people are living is just so fascinating. It's the birth of all the stuff that we're still kind of seeing now, like on steroids. Now they're going to space instead of building the Empire State Building. Yeah, yeah. Well, Andrew, I adore you. I really, really, really, really am grateful for what you do as a journalist and the different things I've read that you've exposed and the loopholes. And you do hold power accountable and I'm very grateful for it. And I just think you're a wonderful dude. And I hope you come back.
1:12:04 Speaker 02 I appreciate it. Thank you, guys. This was fun. A little scary.
1:12:10 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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1:14:58 Dax Shepard? We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.
1:15:06 Dax Shepard? You know, sometimes you're just grumpy.
1:15:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:10 Dax Shepard? I haven't felt this agitated in a long time.
1:15:13 Speaker 01 Yeah. Oh, no.
1:15:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's okay. I'm gonna get over it. This is a change of venue.
1:15:18 Speaker 01 This is new, starting fresh.
1:15:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in my house.
1:15:29 Dax Shepard? There's a lot of stuff in my house that I think gets used one time and then just sticks around forever.
1:15:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:36 Dax Shepard? And like I couldn't close cabinet doors in my gym because there's just stuff overflowing. It's never, ever been used. It's never gonna get used.
1:15:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure.
1:15:48 Dax Shepard? You gotta cut that out.
1:15:49 Speaker 01 No, I wanna keep it.
1:15:50 Dax Shepard? I kinda, no.
1:15:53 Dax Shepard? This ridiculous fucking back thing that, no, the tag is still on this motherfucker. You can't close the cabinet. I'm fucking throwing this motherfucker. No one's ever gonna notice.
1:16:02 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:16:03 Dax Shepard? I did. I pitched it.
1:16:05 Speaker 01 Did you feel good?
1:16:07 Dax Shepard? No, I felt conflicted. I was preparing for if I get caught. What is my defense of this?
1:16:14 Speaker 01 Okay, okay. And what did you mount? We're keeping this.
1:16:18 Dax Shepard? We're gonna, I'll be busted.
1:16:21 Speaker 01 She doesn't listen.
1:16:23 Dax Shepard? That's true.
1:16:23 Speaker 01 Neither does Anna. No, they don't listen.
1:16:26 Dax Shepard? Nicole does. Hi, Nicole.
1:16:27 Speaker 01 Hi, Nicole. They're soliciting. Nicole, please don't tell.
1:16:31 Dax Shepard? Please don't tell. It's a contraption. Yeah. So I was like, what am I gonna s- First of all, well, I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't like 99% sure. It's never gonna get brought up.
1:16:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:43 Dax Shepard? And then I think, well, what if it does get brought up?
1:16:46 Speaker 01 Is it a scratcher?
1:16:49 Speaker 01 A back scratcher?
1:16:50 Dax Shepard? Or some, yeah, it's huge and heavy and.
1:16:54 Speaker 01 Okay, that feels hard to do.
1:16:56 Dax Shepard? Has a tag on it. So it can't be getting used because you can't really use it with the.
1:17:02 Dax Shepard? I snapped.
1:17:04 Speaker 01 I know, I can feel it.
1:17:08 Speaker 01 Well, if you're gonna snap-
1:17:09 Dax Shepard? But I'm not trying to hide it, I'm trying to own it.
1:17:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, but also, if you're gonna snap, I suppose that's the best way.
1:17:15 Dax Shepard? That's me snapping, is all, like, I'll throw something away secretly.
1:17:18 Speaker 01 Well, no, you could snap by yelling, so it's better that you did this.
1:17:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't ever yell at anyone.
1:17:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:17:28 Dax Shepard? Unless they were yelling at me.
1:17:29 Speaker 01 Sometimes you get angry, everyone gets angry, and sometimes things get pushed over. Instead of yelling, you could throw stuff out, this is a good lesson.
1:17:38 Dax Shepard? Well, I don't know if anyone should copy this.
1:17:40 Speaker 01 Well-
1:17:40 Dax Shepard? I bet it's already been copied, let's get honest.
1:17:43 Speaker 01 You were the first one to do this?
1:17:44 Dax Shepard? You know, there's a lot of like, there's, things get worked out in interesting ways and everyone, you know, there's a certain amount of life that's between the lines.
1:17:53 Speaker 01 Oh, sure.
1:17:54 Dax Shepard? Right?
1:17:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:55 Dax Shepard? And everyone knows, wink, wink.
1:17:57 Speaker 01 Nicole?
1:17:57 Dax Shepard? It's part of the, uh,
1:18:00 Dax Shepard? you know, the silent lubricant that makes everything work.
1:18:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course.
1:18:04 Dax Shepard? I don't even know what I'm saying, but once in a while, I snap and I-
1:18:07 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:18:08 Dax Shepard? And I pitch something.
1:18:09 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:18:09 Dax Shepard? I've never been busted. Which makes me think I have a really good barometer of what, like, no one's ever gonna notice.
1:18:16 Speaker 01 Okay, so you threw it in the big trash can.
1:18:18 Dax Shepard? Outside, and I picked a trash can that was like, very, no one's, the person who owns this item's never gonna be in that trash can. There's several that they would use before they got to this deep one.
1:18:28 Speaker 01 Right, now, what, okay, so if-
1:18:30 Dax Shepard? Okay, so if-
1:18:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, if you're confronted.
1:18:33 Dax Shepard? I would go, I, I snapped, I couldn't shut the door, I was already really frustrated. I tried nine times to shut the door and put it in different things, and finally I just said, it has a tag on it, and it's never been used, I've been wrestling with that forever, and I'm gonna pitch it, and if someone wants it, I'll replace it.
1:18:47 Speaker 01 Great answer!
1:18:48 Dax Shepard? You're liking this?
1:18:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's honest.
1:18:51 Dax Shepard? But then that person might say, as if this is so hard to figure out, that person might say, you can't just decide which of my items you're gonna throw.
1:19:00 Speaker 01 I understand that point of view too.
1:19:01 Dax Shepard? It's very valid, it's more valid than my point of view. Which is like, being an adult, come talk to me about it. But I knew I was not in a headspace to have a gentle civilized- Talk about it?
1:19:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:13 Dax Shepard? The right thing would probably just been walk away. Cause I bet tomorrow wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it did in that moment.
1:19:19 Speaker 01 Look, I think you saying you, you didn't have the capacity in the moment to walk away.
1:19:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:26 Speaker 01 And you didn't have the capacity to have a conversation because you knew wasn't gonna go well.
1:19:31 Dax Shepard? It wouldn't have gone well, yeah.
1:19:31 Speaker 01 Then, and you felt this was the only option, this was the next best option.
1:19:36 Dax Shepard? It was the least worst option.
1:19:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:19:39 Speaker 01 I think if you say that, I know this person and I think this person is gonna, this unnamed person is gonna, is gonna be like, you know what? I get that.
1:19:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:51 Speaker 01 And, and I know him and I'm glad he chose that option instead of the other ones.
1:19:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I hope so. But what I have to do in these situations where I, I've done something and I, I feel very, um, validated in my decision or, or very confident.
1:20:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, you feel happy about it.
1:20:11 Dax Shepard? What I do that helps me is I transplant this person, I, I transplant, plant Delta onto this person. And then when I imagine throwing anything of Delta's away.
1:20:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:24 Dax Shepard? I feel terrible. Cause Delta also has a lot of things and they all have a very special meaning. So then that was step two. So I'd already kind of snapped and I threw something away.
1:20:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:33 Dax Shepard? And then I went upstairs in my bedroom to rush to take, and then we have another basket in our room. There's so many baskets in the world.
1:20:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:20:41 Dax Shepard? They've all found their way to my house, containers and baskets.
1:20:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:46 Dax Shepard? And I look in this new basket that's virtually in the center of our room. Like, what is in this basket?
1:20:51 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:20:52 Dax Shepard? It's half full with stuffies. They're not obviously mine, they're not Kristen's.
1:20:56 Speaker 01 Not obvious, but.
1:20:57 Dax Shepard? There's also an Arant sweatshirt in there, it's not mine.
1:21:00 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:21:01 Dax Shepard? And then I go, well, this basket's going in their room.
1:21:03 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:21:04 Dax Shepard? No, no, no, no, no.
1:21:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:21:07 Dax Shepard? But that was me being insolent too. It's like, I'm taking this basket and I'm putting it in their room, cause it's full of stuffies.
1:21:12 Speaker 01 Right.
1:21:12 Dax Shepard? And then I had to stop, cause then I felt like I was just giving me a whirligig and just start clearing out. I think I wanna live in a big empty box sometimes.
1:21:19 Speaker 01 Sometimes, sometimes, yeah.
1:21:22 Speaker 01 Of course, but then you don't.
1:21:24 Dax Shepard? And I was telling myself as I was, as I was ramping up and starting to boil, I was like, this is the price.
1:21:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:30 Dax Shepard? To have a house full of life and love.
1:21:31 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:21:33 Dax Shepard? And that always works until it doesn't sometimes.
1:21:35 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:21:36 Dax Shepard? And then it's time to take a secret trip to the trash.
1:21:37 Speaker 01 One day, you're gonna miss that basket of stuffy so fucking much, you're gonna, you're gonna pine for the basket of stuffy.
1:21:45 Dax Shepard? Bobby Brown.
1:21:46 Speaker 01 Bobby Brown, front of the pot.
1:21:48 Dax Shepard? Not the rapper.
1:21:49 Speaker 01 Not the rapper.
1:21:50 Dax Shepard? Not the Stranger Things.
1:21:51 Speaker 01 Is it Bobby Brown?
1:21:52 Speaker 07 Millie Bobby Brown.
1:21:52 Dax Shepard? Millie Bobby Brown.
1:21:53 Speaker 01 Oh, sure.
1:21:54 Dax Shepard? MBB.
1:21:55 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, that could get us on another tangent that I don't, I mean, I want to talk to you about, but I'm afraid to talk about on here.
1:22:02 Dax Shepard? I know. I see that there's a feud.
1:22:04 Speaker 01 I can't believe you don't know this. I can't believe I'm breaking, um, scoop.
1:22:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:22:09 Speaker 01 This is cute. This shows how not clued in you are.
1:22:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:22:12 Speaker 01 Rob, you know what I'm talking about, yeah?
1:22:14 Speaker 07 I had to ask a friend a couple of days ago what was going on.
1:22:16 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:22:17 Speaker 07 It was Lily Allen, right?
1:22:18 Speaker 01 Yes, Lily Allen, his wife.
1:22:22 Dax Shepard? David's.
1:22:22 Speaker 01 David Harbour's wife, Lily Allen.
1:22:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:22:25 Speaker 01 Put out a album.
1:22:27 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:22:28 Speaker 01 They're not together anymore.
1:22:29 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:22:29 Speaker 01 She put out an album and it's, uh, wild.
1:22:34 Dax Shepard? It's derogatory towards?
1:22:35 Speaker 01 It's, the whole thing is about him.
1:22:37 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:22:38 Speaker 01 And very explicitly about him and, um.
1:22:42 Dax Shepard? What kind of stuff does it say?
1:22:43 Speaker 01 Well, there's a song called Pussy Palace.
1:22:46 Dax Shepard? What's that mean?
1:22:48 Speaker 01 He had a pussy palace.
1:22:49 Dax Shepard? Meaning he had lots of girls?
1:22:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, he had a, another apartment that she thought was a dojo, but.
1:22:55 Dax Shepard? Whoa, whoa, whoa, a karate dojo or a Mikasa Su dojo epic Ken style?
1:23:01 Speaker 01 I'm, I'm not so sure. The whole album, it reads like a diary, like it's like one, it's like a novel. And it's, it's intense.
1:23:10 Dax Shepard? It is?
1:23:10 Speaker 01 It's intense.
1:23:11 Dax Shepard? I can't, do you know some of the lyrics by heart?
1:23:13 Speaker 01 I can pull some up for you. I didn't know it was your pussy palace, pussy palace. Pussy Palace. I always thought it was a dojo, dojo, dojo. So I'm looking at a sex addict, sex addict, sex addict, sex addict. Talk about a low blow. Oh, no. Oh, no. There's also a really tough one. I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters from broken-hearted women wishing you could have been better. Sheets pulled off the bed, strewn on the floor, long black hair, probably from the night before. Dwayne Reid bag with the handles tied, sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside. Hundreds of Trojans, you're so fucking broken. How'd I get caught up in your double life?
1:23:56 Speaker 01 So they were in an open relationship. This is part of the... I also have, I find this very complicated.
1:24:03 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:24:04 Speaker 01 Extremely complicated.
1:24:04 Dax Shepard? First of all, congratulations and thank you. You've popped me out of my mood. I'm gonna go take that out of the trash.
1:24:12 Speaker 01 All it takes is a pussy pal. So you hear from the very beginning, the story of this, basically, how she, he asked her for an open relationship.
1:24:24 Dax Shepard? Can I pause for half a second? They don't sell butt plugs at Dwayne Reid, do they? Maybe that was that back scratcher you threw out. That might have been a really...
1:24:33 Speaker 01 That's a huge butt plug. I mean, maybe that's just how he was carrying him all his shit around. He just grabbed a plastic bag and put all his sex shit in there.
1:24:42 Dax Shepard? I guess, but you like, you don't have a ba-, he doesn't have a backpack or a bag? Okay, okay, okay. I'm getting bogged down in the details.
1:24:49 Speaker 01 And maybe they do sell, maybe there's like behind the...
1:24:52 Dax Shepard? I hope, because butt plug, every, like, there's no shame in anything I've heard so far.
1:24:56 Speaker 01 No, no, well, there's shame if, okay. So she starts the album by talking about how she got cast in this play in London. She goes to London and then he kind of turns on her a little bit. And he calls her and he asks for a open relationship. And she says, yes.
1:25:20 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:25:21 Speaker 01 So in, she plays, like, she plays the, her side of the conversation on the phone. But really, it's like her recreating it.
1:25:30 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:25:31 Speaker 01 I assume, I assume she didn't record that.
1:25:33 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:25:34 Speaker 01 Okay, so then what follows this whole album is, uh, they had rules, as you should.
1:25:42 Dax Shepard? Sure, boundaries.
1:25:43 Speaker 01 Boundaries, and it seems that he really crossed all these boundaries. It seems like they were supposed to only have sex with sex workers.
1:25:53 Dax Shepard? Wow, that's an interesting parameter, yeah.
1:25:55 Speaker 01 But that's their-
1:25:56 Dax Shepard? Not judgmental, just saying interesting.
1:25:57 Speaker 01 I agree, um, but I think it's because the separation-
1:26:01 Dax Shepard? The attachment.
1:26:02 Speaker 01 Exactly, so sex workers, um, yeah, no love, no sex, I think in the house or bed or shared- Exactly, shared locations.
1:26:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:26:14 Speaker 01 Anyway, it seems that that didn't happen. He fell in love with this person, her name is Madeline, she says that, there's a song called Madeline.
1:26:21 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy.
1:26:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like-
1:26:22 Dax Shepard? Really putting everyone on blast.
1:26:24 Speaker 01 And then she was Madeline for Halloween, like, she's really leaning in.
1:26:27 Dax Shepard? Lily Allen was, went as Madeline.
1:26:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there's just a lot of drama.
1:26:33 Dax Shepard? Okay, when you go at Halloween-
1:26:37 Speaker 01 Rob just-
1:26:38 Dax Shepard? Is this her as the person?
1:26:40 Speaker 01 She just put up that-
1:26:41 Dax Shepard? She looks like Tori Spelling.
1:26:42 Speaker 01 No, she was-
1:26:43 Dax Shepard? She's gone as Tori Spelling outside.
1:26:45 Speaker 01 Listen to me, she, this is Madeline the character, you know, the like, the illustration?
1:26:51 Dax Shepard? No.
1:26:52 Speaker 01 You know Madeline, the French?
1:26:54 Dax Shepard? Oh, I can kinda see it's a cartoon cover, yeah, yeah.
1:26:57 Speaker 01 Bemelman, Ludwig Bemelman.
1:26:59 Dax Shepard? I do, I do.
1:27:01 Speaker 01 This is Lily Allen.
1:27:02 Dax Shepard? That's Lily Allen.
1:27:03 Speaker 01 As Madeline, the character for Halloween, but that's a play off of, in her album, the person that gets called out is this woman, Madeline. So she's just like, she's being cheeky.
1:27:17 Dax Shepard? Okay, she's playing, she's being playful.
1:27:19 Speaker 01 She's being playful, cheeky, but I find it a little like, eh!
1:27:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm a little concerned about it.
1:27:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:25 Speaker 01 So I, this goes, but we had this exact conversation about Taylor-
1:27:31 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:27:32 Speaker 01 And the Charli XCX, and this type of thing.
1:27:35 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:27:35 Speaker 01 Where I was like, I just think, I mean, Taylor's different, but, and the whole thing is different, but I do feel like, of course it's your right, you're an artist, so like, you can do whatever you want.
1:27:50 Dax Shepard? Take your pain and make art out of it.
1:27:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I think it is so irresponsible.
1:27:59 Speaker 01 To drag someone, even if they, like, look, I get it, like, you're so mad. And you just want to throw them in the garbage like you threw that backscratcher in the garbage. But like, what about, so many people are affected more than him. I mean, not more than other than him. She has kids who are, you know.
1:28:21 Dax Shepard? When I try to imagine what she's feeling like to make the decision to go to Halloween is that? It's, it feels like it could be either, I'm hurting so much. I wanna hurt and embarrass you.
1:28:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:36 Dax Shepard? That.
1:28:37 Speaker 01 Halloween or the album?
1:28:38 Dax Shepard? Oh, both.
1:28:39 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:28:40 Dax Shepard? Um, but Halloween to me is where we really.
1:28:43 Speaker 01 Well, that's like extra. The whole thing is the album and everyone is talking about and everyone's like, oh my god. And everyone's like, to David Harbour.
1:28:52 Dax Shepard? Right. So I think the desire is, I'm hurting a lot. You've hurt me.
1:28:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:28:58 Dax Shepard? I wanna hurt you back.
1:28:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:00 Dax Shepard? And that I understand. But then I would just, I'd do the same thing. Time out.
1:29:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, T.O.
1:29:05 Dax Shepard? I don't think you're hurting him. I don't think that's working. I don't think he's hurt by this. I think he feels probably confirmed that it was right to not be with her. So for starters, I don't think it had the, it would have the desired outcome.
1:29:21 Speaker 01 Right.
1:29:22 Dax Shepard? So I think there's either that, that would be one thing I could understand. And then another thing I could understand is, I'm deeply humiliated. Now, this is kind of what I would do, right? I'm humiliated by this and embarrassed. And the way I take ownership of it back is to go as this other woman to Halloween. In the same way I make fun of myself before you can. Like, there's a, there's a judo move to go like, I'm not affected by this. Look, I'm playing with this. This is, I'm fucking with this. And it's like, and I think in a, it could be an attempt to, um, salvage your own, does that make sense to you, what I'm saying?
1:30:04 Speaker 01 It does, but she's not embarrassed. She's, this is like. A huge album now, like she's happy. I think the reason she's leaning in and going as Madeline for Halloween is because
1:30:15 Dax Shepard? Like a promotional
1:30:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I'm asking more about the the actual art itself, like it is, is that okay? And I guess like, okay, is gray like, oh, yes, it's should be allowed.
1:30:30 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:30:30 Speaker 01 Is it ethical? Is it ethical to do what she just did? Like, I find this can hard, hard to answer.
1:30:42 Dax Shepard? I think it's fine. So that's my answer.
1:30:45 Speaker 01 You think it's fine?
1:30:45 Dax Shepard? Totally fine. And the result of her actions are, in my opinion, he doesn't look bad. She looks nuts. And she has now limited, I think, her future with anyone that isn't rational. So, yes, I think it's totally fine if she does it. And then I think she'll pay whatever price comes with that, which I think will be a real one. I'm not even evaluating what he did. I'm saying when someone does deal with their very long term intimate relationship in a very knee jerk, public way.
1:31:19 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:31:20 Dax Shepard? Forget the details. I go, whoo, that's a, that's a way to deal with it.
1:31:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, me too.
1:31:26 Dax Shepard? And so
1:31:27 Speaker 01 That's my whole point.
1:31:27 Dax Shepard? So I'm saying that's not a good look for her. Forget the details, just the notion like if that if Chris and I got divorced and my first stop was Us Weekly to give a play by play breakdown of everything she did wrong. That says more about me than her.
1:31:42 Speaker 01 I, yeah, that's what my point is.
1:31:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, feels very Amber Heard, Johnny Depp.
1:31:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, it feels, it feels to me that they probably were meant for each other.
1:31:52 Dax Shepard? It's probably a very tumultuous, high, high intensity.
1:31:56 Speaker 01 Relationship.
1:31:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:31:57 Speaker 01 Yes, I, I agree.
1:31:59 Dax Shepard? I think some people will be thinking, well, what if he hit her? Could she not?
1:32:06 Speaker 01 She should go to the police.
1:32:07 Dax Shepard? Yes, exactly. So I think if anytime that's something you can't go to the police over, which you should. I mean, a thousand percent clear.
1:32:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, yes.
1:32:17 Dax Shepard? In any relationship, anyone gets physical, you should go to the police.
1:32:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:21 Dax Shepard? So anything short of the person breaking the law, sorry, that's just.
1:32:27 Dax Shepard? Shitty girlfriend, shitty boyfriend, fucking run-of-the-mill stuff. And that's life.
1:32:32 Speaker 01 It is, and I guess that, again, that's the thing. But you're allowed to write about your life in a memoir. You're allowed to write it, like, you're allowed. It's just like, at what point does the line cross? And I guess it's person to person.
1:32:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it just.
1:32:46 Speaker 01 It's individual.
1:32:47 Dax Shepard? You're allowed, it goes, it's lea-, it's, A, it's legal.
1:32:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:32:51 Dax Shepard? It's, it's totally, I'm not saying anyone shouldn't. I will just file that person into a category in my mind. And that's the price you'll pay. So when you're deciding whether you want to do it, you just go like, well, what will be the fallout? What will most people think?
1:33:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's.
1:33:07 Dax Shepard? But I think if you're young and you have recently been cheated on and feel heartbroken and you hear this, you're gonna be a moth to a flame. You're, you're gonna feel very comforted by it.
1:33:20 Speaker 01 I think a lot of people feel seen.
1:33:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I get that. I mean, this is my definitive statement on it. I totally support it. Because it's art. And there are, there's art that I like, that people find grotesque and overshare, whatever they think.
1:33:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:34 Dax Shepard? Um, but that's art. And, um, so I support it, you know? At the end of the day, and it's not for me.
1:33:40 Speaker 01 Right, right, right.
1:33:40 Dax Shepard? But a lot of art's not for me.
1:33:41 Speaker 01 Right.
1:33:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:33:42 Speaker 01 Okay, I want to say an opposite thing.
1:33:44 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:33:45 Speaker 01 Uh, I saw Sentimental Value, the movie Sentimental Value.
1:33:48 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:33:49 Speaker 01 And talk about a piece of art that I support.
1:33:54 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:33:55 Speaker 01 And, and, uh, it's so good. It's so beautiful.
1:34:01 Dax Shepard? What got you to the theater? Because I was not even aware of the movie. So how did it come across your desk?
1:34:06 Speaker 01 So I love the movie The Worst Person in the World. It's one of my favorites. And it is the same director and the same actress in the movie. I heard that this was coming out like earlier this year. And I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. And I'm like, November, that's way too long.
1:34:27 Dax Shepard? Almost being in 2026 by then.
1:34:29 Speaker 01 Exactly. But it came and I went to the theater first weekend. And I saw it and it is a
1:34:37 Dax Shepard? Masterpiece?
1:34:38 Speaker 01 Gorgeous movie.
1:34:39 Dax Shepard? I can't wait to see it.
1:34:40 Speaker 01 And it's really, uh, it speaks so beautifully to family dynamics. Complicated and simple.
1:34:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:34:51 Speaker 01 And, um, it's, it's, it's gorgeous. I really highly recommend it.
1:34:55 Dax Shepard? Can't wait.
1:34:56 Speaker 01 And I think after what happened today with your back scratcher.
1:34:59 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:35:00 Speaker 01 You'll see it.
1:35:01 Dax Shepard? Feel foolish.
1:35:03 Speaker 01 You'll just feel like.
1:35:03 Dax Shepard? I can already tell, I'm gonna feel foolish.
1:35:05 Speaker 01 No, you don't have to feel foolish.
1:35:07 Dax Shepard? I'm already feeling foolish. And just because I've calmed down. I might have to remove it from the trash can.
1:35:13 Speaker 01 Great.
1:35:14 Dax Shepard? And then, well, then I gotta clean it. So it was in the trash can. It'll never get used, so I don't really need to clean it.
1:35:19 Speaker 01 What if you take it out and then there's a maggot on it? And then you get maggots in the house. And then it's like, joke's on you.
1:35:26 Dax Shepard? Hoorays.
1:35:26 Speaker 01 Ew! Gross. Um, all right, let's do fact.
1:35:33 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:35:45 Speaker 01 In the spirit of honesty, I'm not done with this episode.
1:35:49 Dax Shepard? Great.
1:35:49 Speaker 01 Okay?
1:35:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:35:50 Speaker 01 So there might be facts left on the table. I'm so sorry.
1:35:55 Dax Shepard? It's okay.
1:35:56 Speaker 01 I'm sorry.
1:35:57 Dax Shepard? Everyone will live.
1:35:57 Speaker 01 I think you will make, I think you will live. I think you will get through it. But I do have a few, because I did, I did get.
1:36:05 Dax Shepard? Few's better than none.
1:36:06 Speaker 01 Few's better than none, that's what they say. Benefits of creatine, okay?
1:36:10 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:36:10 Speaker 01 Creatine is a natural source of energy that helps your skeletal muscles flex, contract. It helps create a steady supply of energy in your muscles so they can keep working, especially while you're exercising. If you have diabetes, though, you probably shouldn't take it.
1:36:24 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:36:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, it says, studies show that it's safe for many people to take creatine supplements. However, there isn't enough evidence, oh, there isn't enough evidence, to show if it's safe if you are pregnant or breastfeeding.
1:36:35 Dax Shepard? Oh, I got you. They just haven't tested on all these different people.
1:36:38 Speaker 01 Have diabetes.
1:36:39 Dax Shepard? Diabetes.
1:36:40 Speaker 01 Kidney disease, have liver disease. Um, and if you have bipolar disorder, it says creatine may also increase your risk of mania.
1:36:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, we don't want that.
1:36:50 Speaker 01 You know, this is from the Cleveland Clinic. Studies suggest that creatine supplements may help brain function in people sixty and older. This includes short-term memory, reasoning, neuroprotection, keeping groups of nerve cells safe from injury or damage. Researchers are studying whether creatine supplements may help people with cognitive conditions, including dementia. I mean, obviously, there's like a lot of stuff with muscles.
1:37:18 Dax Shepard? Sure.
1:37:19 Speaker 01 That is beneficial. Um, helps recovery.
1:37:23 Dax Shepard? Do you know, I had, I had a third grade education before I started taking creatine.
1:37:27 Speaker 01 Wow, and then you graduated from UCLA?
1:37:30 Dax Shepard? That's right, the America's hardest school to get into.
1:37:34 Speaker 01 I want to take it. Um, Mary Claire Haver, who we had on, the perimenopause expert recommends it for women. So I would, I'm gonna start taking it, I think.
1:37:44 Dax Shepard? You should.
1:37:45 Speaker 01 I could have also gotten into UCLA, I just didn't apply. But I think.
1:37:51 Dax Shepard? You could figure it out, though, from your GPA, that that would have been quite a challenge.
1:37:53 Speaker 01 Okay, no. No. I did great in school.
1:37:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:59 Speaker 01 And I would have got in. Yeah, better than you, and I would have got in because I also have Indian diversity and Southern diversity. We already discussed this.
1:38:08 Dax Shepard? Southern.
1:38:11 Dax Shepard? This is the new square footage of your house debate, I think.
1:38:17 Speaker 01 Um, okay, I looked up percentage of people with Coloboma.
1:38:20 Dax Shepard? I might have to find my diploma and hang it behind my head.
1:38:23 Speaker 01 Ew! No.
1:38:26 Dax Shepard? I don't know where it is, but I think it might be worth finding it. And then also print out that page that said it's the hardest. So when people see, oh, did you go to UCLA? What's that other thing? Oh, wow, it's the hardest school in the world to get into?
1:38:38 Speaker 01 Okay, not the world.
1:38:39 Dax Shepard? Didn't you have a third grade education when we started taking creatine?
1:38:44 Speaker 01 Not the world.
1:38:45 Dax Shepard? I don't have a thing of a jar of creatine next to that. So it'll be the diploma, the bona fides, and then the reason.
1:38:52 Speaker 01 Now, Coloboma.
1:38:54 Dax Shepard? Hmm, I love it.
1:38:55 Speaker 01 I looked up the percentage of people with Coloboma and percentage of people with heterochromia.
1:39:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I know someone with that, too.
1:39:04 Speaker 01 He has both.
1:39:05 Dax Shepard? He has both?
1:39:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:07 Dax Shepard? Oh, I get so distracted by the colonoba. No, I don't think so. It just, it takes over enough of his eye that it looks like he has different colored eyes, but I don't think he has both.
1:39:14 Speaker 01 Oh, are you sure?
1:39:16 Dax Shepard? I'm pretty sure.
1:39:18 Speaker 01 Dang.
1:39:20 Dax Shepard? Find a nice close up of his eyes.
1:39:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're right.
1:39:24 Dax Shepard? He would be, that'd be a double jackpot winner.
1:39:25 Speaker 01 That's why I thought it was extra cool.
1:39:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, no.
1:39:28 Speaker 01 Coloboma affects approximately one in 10,000 people, or about 0.01%.
1:39:33 Dax Shepard? That's rare.
1:39:34 Speaker 01 That's cool.
1:39:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's very limited-ish.
1:39:37 Speaker 01 Extremely limited-ish.
1:39:38 Dax Shepard? I bet he's insecure about it, but I genuinely love it. It makes it so much more interesting to talk to him, and I hope he feels that way.
1:39:45 Speaker 01 And it does make it look like he has heterochromia.
1:39:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, which I love.
1:39:49 Speaker 01 Which is also affects less than 1% of the human population worldwide.
1:39:55 Dax Shepard? And I have a friend whose daughter has it. And I used to hold her as a baby, and I've been around her a ton. And it wasn't until this summer, I was looking at her, and I went, oh, my God, you have heterochromia.
1:40:05 Speaker 01 You noticed it only now?
1:40:06 Dax Shepard? Yes. Now she's just old enough to like lock in and talk to you as an adult.
1:40:10 Speaker 01 Right.
1:40:10 Dax Shepard? And I was like, whoa!
1:40:12 Speaker 01 What colors are they?
1:40:14 Dax Shepard? Blue and brown.
1:40:15 Speaker 01 Really?
1:40:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:17 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:40:18 Speaker 07 There's a Blue Jays pitcher that has the heterochromia.
1:40:21 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. Some of those players were very cute. I wasn't rooting for them. That was so fun. We didn't even talk about that. The Dodgers won.
1:40:30 Dax Shepard? I know. It was the craziest series.
1:40:32 Speaker 01 It was so fun.
1:40:33 Dax Shepard? There cannot have ever been a more hotly contested series. Like, has there ever been one, Rob, where they went 15 innings, they went 11 innings? Like, that's gotta be the closest.
1:40:42 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think that was the most innings played in a World Series.
1:40:46 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:40:47 Dax Shepard? There you go.
1:40:48 Speaker 01 That's so cool. We had so much fun watching it, watching the game seven.
1:40:55 Dax Shepard? Where were you?
1:40:56 Speaker 01 Charlie's.
1:40:57 Dax Shepard? Oh, right. He hosted.
1:40:58 Speaker 01 He hosted. You were out of town, but...
1:41:01 Dax Shepard? I was hosting a birthday party, and I was doing that thing I did at the Globes, which is I was like watching it at my seat, and I was afraid I was gonna miss my cue to go introduce a new...
1:41:11 Speaker 01 I would imagine a lot of people at that party were...
1:41:13 Dax Shepard? They made an announcement about phones. You couldn't have your phone out. So I was really breaking the rules.
1:41:18 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
1:41:19 Dax Shepard? But I had to check in with the scorers, my Los Angeles... Most of the people in the room weren't from Los Angeles. They can be forgiven.
1:41:24 Speaker 01 Right.
1:41:25 Dax Shepard? And of course, no one's from Toronto. Just kidding, Toronto, I love you. I didn't feel as great about the victory that I would normally, did you?
1:41:35 Speaker 01 Yes, I thought it was the absolute best way to win.
1:41:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, just they fought so hard and they haven't won in a long time.
1:41:42 Speaker 01 I don't care.
1:41:43 Dax Shepard? It was a big deal that they get, you're, this is why you're a champ, this is why you're a champ. If I were competing against them, I'd start throwing it. Like, I'm gonna throw this guy a fucking heater.
1:41:53 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna give him a home run.
1:41:54 Speaker 01 That is.
1:41:54 Dax Shepard? These boys deserve it. They're from, they're from Canada.
1:41:57 Speaker 01 Deserve.
1:41:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're from Canada, Monica.
1:42:00 Speaker 01 No, stop this.
1:42:01 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow, yeah.
1:42:04 Speaker 01 Rob just put up a picture of the blue.
1:42:07 Dax Shepard? And he's showing us his Adam's apple.
1:42:09 Speaker 01 He has a big Adam's apple.
1:42:10 Dax Shepard? He's got big, girthy Adam's apple.
1:42:11 Speaker 01 And he has heterochromia.
1:42:13 Dax Shepard? It's Max Scherzer.
1:42:15 Speaker 01 He's cute.
1:42:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:42:16 Speaker 01 He's very cute. If he wants to move to LA and if he's single.
1:42:20 Dax Shepard? He's rich, athletic. He's got a wife.
1:42:22 Speaker 01 Ah.
1:42:23 Dax Shepard? Get rid of her, come to LA.
1:42:24 Speaker 01 They all have wives. It's so irritating. Anyway.
1:42:29 Dax Shepard? You didn't feel bad for them at all?
1:42:30 Speaker 01 I felt like they put up a good fight and that's life, that's game.
1:42:35 Dax Shepard? When we were playing the Yankees last year in the playoffs and we won, I'm like, yeah, fucking, we beat the Yankees. Like, they're, they're the, you know, they're the underdogs, Monica, we like underdogs.
1:42:45 Speaker 01 I'm not interested, no, like, it's who is the best.
1:42:49 Dax Shepard? I know, I know.
1:42:50 Speaker 01 The best is the best, so you don't get upset.
1:42:53 Dax Shepard? Listen, some victories feel better than others. Can we agree on that?
1:42:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I thought this victory felt so good.
1:43:00 Dax Shepard? I know, but we were Goliath. Like, when we beat the Yankees, they're Goliath and that feels awesome.
1:43:06 Speaker 01 Listen.
1:43:06 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:43:07 Speaker 01 As someone who has won two state championships.
1:43:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:10 Speaker 01 One being a David and one being a Goliath.
1:43:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you've been on both ends.
1:43:14 Speaker 01 I've been on both ends and.
1:43:16 Dax Shepard? That first one was better.
1:43:18 Speaker 01 It was better to win.
1:43:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:21 Speaker 01 Like, for me.
1:43:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and probably for the audience.
1:43:24 Speaker 01 But I don't like that. Like, I like that we, if we had lost because people were booing. Don't make fun of me. Because people were booing because we were somehow Goliath.
1:43:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:38 Speaker 01 I'm like, fuck you, we're the best.
1:43:40 Dax Shepard? There you go. Yeah, then great.
1:43:42 Speaker 01 And we get to be the best because guess what? We are.
1:43:45 Dax Shepard? Right, right. This is the heart and mind of a champion, and I respect it.
1:43:50 Speaker 01 I loved it. The fact that we were, like, down. We weren't gonna win for a lot of that game. And then we came back. These are the victories that really pack a punch. And, um, you know, I was with Charlie and Erica and Ryan and Amy and Lauren and Matt. And Matt is a Blue Jays.
1:44:10 Dax Shepard? Of course, he's from Toronto.
1:44:11 Speaker 01 He's from Toronto, yeah. Um, and I was there and Jess and Anna. It was so fun. And, you know, at one point Ryan was like, he wanted to leave.
1:44:20 Dax Shepard? Sure.
1:44:20 Speaker 01 He was like, we lost.
1:44:22 Dax Shepard? Okay, he gave up.
1:44:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:23 Dax Shepard? He gets so emotional during games. I watched him play a football games with him once and I said, it's too much for me, Ryan. I can't. Like, his emotions.
1:44:30 Speaker 01 He's devoted.
1:44:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and his emotions are just, they're really plugged in.
1:44:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, but he wasn't screaming or anything.
1:44:36 Dax Shepard? He wasn't. He ain't throwing anything.
1:44:37 Speaker 01 No, he was defeated and he told Amy, like, we should go.
1:44:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I wanna go.
1:44:42 Speaker 01 And I was like, no! I said, there's a lot of game left.
1:44:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:44:46 Speaker 01 Don't give up.
1:44:47 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:44:48 Speaker 01 And I was right.
1:44:48 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, you were.
1:44:51 Speaker 01 Uh, it was really fun.
1:44:52 Dax Shepard? To that, you had a fourth fact you didn't even remember you had, which is LA won the World Series.
1:44:57 Speaker 01 That's right. And I really loved that part, and this is not very me, but I did love the part in the movie. No, when the pitcher, you know, the can a guy.
1:45:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, my goodness.
1:45:17 Dax Shepard? You had a little bit to drink, I think.
1:45:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:45:26 Dax Shepard? Do you know?
1:45:27 Speaker 01 I don't know what just happened.
1:45:29 Dax Shepard? Do you know?
1:45:32 Speaker 01 That's because.
1:45:33 Dax Shepard? Canagga guy?
1:45:36 Dax Shepard? You can see someone on a bar stool trying to say, "Canadian guy," and just hung up on Canada.
1:45:41 Speaker 01 But I was also trying to say catcher or pitcher. Like, I got confused.
1:45:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, a lot of times.
1:45:45 Speaker 01 There's a lot going on in my head. The pitcher, the Dodgers pitcher was throwing and the Canadian at bat was trying to get hit.
1:45:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, interesting. Okay.
1:45:54 Speaker 01 And then that's why the pitcher got so pissed and then he did hit him.
1:46:00 Dax Shepard? Beamed him.
1:46:01 Speaker 01 And he said, "Fuck you, motherfucker."
1:46:03 Dax Shepard? He did?
1:46:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you can just, it's silent, but it's so clear.
1:46:07 Dax Shepard? It's hard for me to know whether this is in your head or this was on camera.
1:46:09 Speaker 07 Yeah, no, I think that happened.
1:46:11 Dax Shepard? He said, "Fuck you, motherfucker."
1:46:12 Speaker 01 You think? You guys.
1:46:14 Speaker 07 This was game seven?
1:46:16 Dax Shepard? We had a "fuck you, motherfucker," those sweet.
1:46:18 Speaker 01 And they all ran.
1:46:20 Dax Shepard? Do you remember when the Cana- Cana-?
1:46:23 Speaker 01 I don't even, it's not.
1:46:24 Dax Shepard? Cana-.
1:46:25 Speaker 01 You guys didn't even watch, apparently, so, yeah, Justin Robleski.
1:46:30 Speaker 07 No, that happened.
1:46:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:33 Speaker 07 The bench was cleared after.
1:46:34 Dax Shepard? Well, that was at the beginning of the game. Wasn't that the third inning?
1:46:37 Speaker 01 It's just in the game.
1:46:38 Speaker 07 Bottom of the fourth.
1:46:40 Dax Shepard? Bottom of the fourth, okay, great.
1:46:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:46:42 Speaker 07 I missed that part.
1:46:43 Speaker 01 You missed it?
1:46:44 Speaker 07 Yeah, I didn't see that part.
1:46:45 Speaker 01 Oh, it was a big part of the game.
1:46:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:48 Speaker 01 And it was hot.
1:46:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah. You're mixed messages.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 I know.
1:46:52 Dax Shepard? You hate aggression.
1:46:52 Speaker 01 I know.
1:46:53 Dax Shepard? You hate violence.
1:46:54 Speaker 01 But I love winning.
1:46:55 Dax Shepard? Right, so you have priorities. That makes sense. We all have, you know, we make concessions for bigger priorities.
1:47:01 Speaker 01 And I was like, I was like, fuck that guy.
1:47:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:47:06 Speaker 01 Trying to get.
1:47:07 Dax Shepard? Fucking Cana- Canadian.
1:47:08 Speaker 01 These kind of guys. I looked up this guy after the hot one that screamed.
1:47:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, huh.
1:47:16 Speaker 01 He's much younger than me and I think he also has a wife. And he's from Georgia. Actually, I don't know if he has a wife, but he's too young.
1:47:23 Dax Shepard? That's such bullshit.
1:47:25 Speaker 01 It's not.
1:47:26 Dax Shepard? You can't say that till you've met them.
1:47:28 Speaker 01 He's 25.
1:47:29 Dax Shepard? You don't know, he could be so mature.
1:47:32 Speaker 07 Oh, he grew up in my hometown.
1:47:33 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
1:47:35 Dax Shepard? That's another strike.
1:47:36 Speaker 07 Hoffman Estate.
1:47:37 Speaker 01 No, that's cool, because that's Georgia and Rob.
1:47:40 Dax Shepard? Bi-coastal.
1:47:42 Speaker 01 He said he had to apologize to his mom.
1:47:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, you love it.
1:47:46 Speaker 01 I love that. Women, there he is.
1:47:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:47:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's cute, right?
1:47:50 Dax Shepard? You kind of like white trash look. It's kind of surprises me sometimes because he looks like he went to Milford High School with me.
1:47:57 Speaker 01 He went to Georgia. He looks like a Georgia boy.
1:48:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I mean, he's got a fucking short long. He's got shaved sides and a big, big wolf in back. He's got a.
1:48:07 Speaker 01 Look how cute his face is.
1:48:08 Dax Shepard? No, he's cute. I like it, but I am a little surprised you do. Because this dude's like, he's driving around a 79 Trans Am with a tee tops off, drinking a glass bottle of Mountain Dew, cut off jean shorts, a V I high tops with no laces, yelling fuck you out the window with reckless abandon. Here's a better one. Oh, yeah, dude, this guy's dirty.
1:48:29 Speaker 01 No.
1:48:30 Dax Shepard? Oh, he's nasty, Monica. You should take him for a ride. You don't have to marry him, but take him for a ride.
1:48:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, we all agreed he was getting fucked that night.
1:48:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:48:39 Speaker 01 Can you look up if he's married?
1:48:40 Dax Shepard? Can you look up if he fucked that night?
1:48:42 Speaker 01 He definitely fucked that night. That's a fact. I can check and I check.
1:48:45 Dax Shepard? He might have gotten too drunk to fuck that night. I don't think he is married. No, he's 25. He married.
1:48:52 Speaker 01 People are married.
1:48:53 Dax Shepard? If you want to fuck Monica, what's his name?
1:48:55 Speaker 01 No, I'm not. I'm cutting that.
1:48:56 Dax Shepard? Oh. Wilson Rebelski. You're asking right now out loud, hey, will you come over and treat me like it's the World Series game seven?
1:49:07 Speaker 01 I got nervous because he's rejecting me. I can feel it. He's gonna, I just imagine the whole thing, like, someone sends him this clip and he's like, ew.
1:49:17 Dax Shepard? No, he's like, what's her address?
1:49:18 Speaker 01 No, he's like.
1:49:19 Dax Shepard? God, you're so stupid sometimes. You are so stupid sometimes. I don't know. I mean, it makes sense. You didn't get into UCLA.
1:49:26 Dax Shepard? You couldn't be more stupid, but that's okay. We'll move on.
1:49:29 Speaker 01 Okay, it was Wall Street 2. Who said, what's your number?
1:49:34 Speaker 01 Jacob Moore asked the question, what's your number? He's speaking to Bretton James. Jacob Moore is the Shia LaBeouf character.
1:49:42 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:43 Speaker 01 So he's the one that says it. Bretton James.
1:49:48 Speaker 01 Is friend of the pod Jess I need to go home. I don't know what's going on.
1:49:54 Dax Shepard? Let's get you some. I think you need an IV for fluid.
1:49:57 Speaker 01 I am dehydrated. I had muscle spas. Okay, friend of the pod Josh Brolin.
1:50:03 Dax Shepard? How does Josh fit into all this?
1:50:04 Speaker 01 He's Brett and James.
1:50:05 Dax Shepard? That was the character that said it.
1:50:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, that received it.
1:50:08 Dax Shepard? Received it.
1:50:09 Speaker 01 And Shia LaBeouf asked it.
1:50:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, interesting. Boy, this answers the craziest question. That's so weird. So I stumbled upon John Brenthal's episode of his show, Real Ones with Shia LaBeouf.
1:50:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:50:27 Dax Shepard? It's incredible. I mean, it has 12 million views. I'm not
1:50:30 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:50:31 Dax Shepard? Like I didn't discover something.
1:50:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:33 Dax Shepard? But it's an incredible interview. You've got to watch it. It's fucking wild.
1:50:39 Speaker 01 What do you mean it's an interview?
1:50:41 Dax Shepard? Well, John has a podcast.
1:50:43 Speaker 01 Wait, John Brenthal, who are friend of the pod?
1:50:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah. He has a
1:50:46 Speaker 01 He had Shia LaBeouf on.
1:50:47 Dax Shepard? On his podcast called Real Ones.
1:50:49 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:50:50 Dax Shepard? And it's, remember how much he was talking about how Shia like got to the tank movie? And he's like, this guy's way too much. And then by the middle was like, this guy's fucking walking.
1:51:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:51:01 Dax Shepard? So they have this connection and Shia, I don't think has come out and spoken publicly about all the gnarliness he's created.
1:51:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:10 Dax Shepard? And he does in this interview and it's so captivating.
1:51:14 Speaker 01 Oh, good job.
1:51:15 Dax Shepard? It's a level of honesty. I don't know if I've ever seen him in public. Yeah. Yeah, because Shia hit girls. He's a domestic abuser.
1:51:24 Speaker 01 And he talks about it.
1:51:25 Dax Shepard? Yes, he owns it in this crazy, crazy way that I'm just shook by the level of ownership and an introspection he has on it. And
1:51:39 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:51:40 Dax Shepard? He's like, yeah, man, I'm gonna be apologizing for the rest of my life and I need to. I have to and I should.
1:51:46 Speaker 01 Is he sober?
1:51:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:51:48 Speaker 01 Good job, John Brenthal.
1:51:50 Dax Shepard? It's a great interview.
1:51:51 Speaker 01 I'm gonna listen immediately.
1:51:52 Dax Shepard? I was going to. Recommend to Brolin.
1:51:56 Speaker 01 Uh.
1:51:56 Dax Shepard? So weird you just said all this.
1:51:58 Speaker 01 Weird, yeah.
1:51:58 Dax Shepard? Cause I was texting with Brolin and I s- I was like, oh, I'm gonna recommend this thing to him.
1:52:04 Speaker 01 Why? Just cause?
1:52:05 Dax Shepard? Cause of the level of um, of inventory this man has done and is willing to say in public is like, it's fucking crazy.
1:52:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:13 Dax Shepard? And um, and I know Brolin would like, would enjoy a thing like that. In the same way I, I enjoy it. And that, but I had this thought. I don't know if he's worked with Shia. He might, like, if you've worked with him and I would imagine during his chaos, maybe you hate his guts.
1:52:30 Speaker 01 Right.
1:52:30 Dax Shepard? And there's no way you're gonna be able to listen to this thing. And it just crossed my mind like, oh, I wanna recommend it to Josh, but I kinda wanna figure out first.
1:52:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:36 Dax Shepard? Has he worked with them? And then now you're telling me three hours later.
1:52:40 Speaker 01 That's weird, that's sad.
1:52:40 Dax Shepard? That is weird. That is weird.
1:52:42 Speaker 01 Well, we love Josh Brolin. We love his episodes. He's a, he's a great guest.
1:52:47 Dax Shepard? He is.
1:52:48 Speaker 01 This reminds me, though, it's so funny. So Beth's dead is out and a lot of people have consumed the whole thing because they've moved over to Patreon. So that we're starting to get feedback on the end.
1:53:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:53:00 Speaker 01 Which is very interesting, cause I'm, no spoilers, but people have a lot of thoughts and opinions on the end. And it's so funny, we're all projecting our own stuff.
1:53:17 Dax Shepard? As we do.
1:53:18 Speaker 01 Everything.
1:53:18 Dax Shepard? That all time.
1:53:19 Speaker 01 But it is, it's been so interesting to hear.
1:53:23 Dax Shepard? I know, like, I posted the clip, the clip I chose to post of Reese was her talking about writing on a daughter's mind with a Sharpie and not a dry erase board. And there were a handful of people who were like, what about boys? You don't think that goes for boys? And it was like, yeah, talk about projection, like, well, A, she's a, she's a girl, so she was a daughter. She, she can't speak about what the impact is on a boy, cause it's, she's telling her story.
1:53:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:53:50 Dax Shepard? For starters.
1:53:51 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:53:51 Dax Shepard? B, because she said that about girls does not mean she said that's not true for boys. But you filled in.
1:53:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:53:57 Dax Shepard? It's not true for boys. And that's like the, the power of like. Your narrative is already, no one gives a fuck about boys. And so I hear one thing about girls and like, I knew, you know.
1:54:06 Speaker 01 Right.
1:54:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's crazy how like you can look at this clip that is like so benign.
1:54:12 Speaker 01 And beautiful.
1:54:13 Dax Shepard? And beautiful and true to her and get really triggered by it.
1:54:16 Speaker 01 I know. Well, that's why, but yeah, it's just funny to hear, yeah, people have such specific reactions to things. And it says so much about you. Your reaction says so much about you.
1:54:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:54:28 Speaker 01 And I think I'm proud of that with Beth's dad, that it it's caused that.
1:54:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:54:35 Speaker 01 It's like has the ability to cause people to feel a lot of things.
1:54:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and disagree.
1:54:41 Speaker 01 About them. Yeah, it's, it's been interesting.
1:54:44 Dax Shepard? That's why we love cereal. It like it begat debate.
1:54:47 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:54:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:54:48 Speaker 01 Okay, one thing I get fact I gotta check and I'm embarrassed. I said I watched Too Big to Fail. I was obsessed with it. I was obsessed with it. But I said I watched it in college.
1:54:59 Dax Shepard? Not possible.
1:55:00 Speaker 01 It's not possible. It's fucking me up a little bit because in my head, I like have a memory of being in my college apartment.
1:55:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:55:10 Speaker 01 Doing this, but I wasn't. It's so confusing.
1:55:13 Dax Shepard? You had a screener.
1:55:16 Speaker 01 Two years before.
1:55:18 Dax Shepard? Cause you were a comm major, marketing.
1:55:19 Speaker 01 I was. I was a PR major, but um, and theater. Um, I have two diplomas back to your diplomas thing.
1:55:26 Dax Shepard? Well, they're easy to get there, so I'm not surprised you didn't get three.
1:55:29 Speaker 01 They're not easy at all.
1:55:31 Dax Shepard? They say it takes five diplomas from U G A to equal one UCLA diploma.
1:55:37 Speaker 01 Okay, so.
1:55:39 Dax Shepard? I want the world to know I don't think this about UCLA at all. I'm just doing it because I love that it agitates Monica. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's, I mean, it's, I mean objectively, it's hard as school in the world to get into, but I don't, I don't even care.
1:55:50 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Graduates of UCLA just twist everything. Now, I.
1:55:59 Speaker 01 I guess, I think what happened is when I was home for the holidays, unfortunately, I didn't even, it's not even in the year I lived at home.
1:56:07 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:56:07 Speaker 01 I lived here in Los Angeles. I must have been home for Christmas and watched it, and then I couldn't stop watching it. And so I was around all those people
1:56:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:17 Speaker 01 from college.
1:56:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:20 Speaker 01 But wow, did that really mess me up.
1:56:22 Dax Shepard? Cut yourself some slack. Think how much this brain is holding. I mean, you've fucking been here for 38 years and you have a lot of it? It's kind of crazy.
1:56:28 Speaker 01 But what can be trusted? None of it.
1:56:31 Dax Shepard? Trust it all. Let God sort them out. I love you.
1:56:33 Speaker 01 Love you.
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