Best of Wednesday 2025

On this special episode, we revisit some of our favorite moments from Wednesday episodes in 2025. Scott Payne gets stripped for a wire while undercover, Mark Ronson recalls his rockstar-studded childhood, Blaise Aguirre defines the difficulties of BPD, Mary Claire Haver assembles a toolkit for menopause, Malala Yousafzai struggles to make friends in high school, Michael Lewis laments male anger generated by the gambling industry, Seth Harp tracks stolen cash and corruption in the military, James Kimmel, Jr. advises on a landlord conflict, Dave Mitchell & Chris Feistl infiltrate a Colombian drug cartel, and Andy Roddick mythologizes his serve. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:05Dax Shepard?

  And today is Best of Wednesday's 2025 edition.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 0:10Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Quince.

• 0:12Speaker 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.

• 0:21Dax 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.

• 0:44Speaker 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.

• 1:01Dax 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.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 1:12Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12Speaker 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.

• 1:30Dax 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. 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.

• 2:06Speaker 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.

• 2:18Dax 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.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.

• 2:37Dax 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, mm, I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.

• 2:47Speaker 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.

• 2:54Dax 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.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  From episode 900 with Scott Payne. They carried me down. Clothesline, who's supposed to be my second closest friend, says, yo Tex, you got a minute? And I said, yeah. And then he walks me through this door that I'd never been in, even though I've been in that clubhouse, I don't know how many times, it's the only door I hadn't been through. And it leads into a very tight stairwell down into a, if I call it a basement, that's being generous because I couldn't stand up straight. It's more of a crawl space. And I could, I could touch the wall probably on both sides. I see rope.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I see that they have both brandished their pistols. One outlaw follows me and he stands on the steps with his pistol and he's watching. And Clothesline proceeds to tell me, I need you to, he goes, he says, There's a lot of shit going on and it's my job to take care of my brothers. I need you to take off, because I want you to write down your full name, date of birth, social security, all, everything. And I need you to take all your clothes off, I need to check you for a wire. Mmm. So now I'm like.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I hate this.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, me too.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Oh, God. And there's no one in a van across the street?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  We'll get to that.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:40Dax Shepard?

  But really quick also, you're, you have to be playing the game in your head where you're like, okay, so I'm not wired, I am the guy, what's my reaction?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:51Dax Shepard?

  Right? You're trying to.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I would love to say yes to that answer, but I was shit and go.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was going, I was having an adrenaline dump.

• 4:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I had that panic and it's the fight or flight or freaks.

• 5:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, midbrain is in charge.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  And then you are hopefully doing what you've trained, uh, or rehearsed in your head, and that's what I did. I, if I had not seen me do these things on the video, I would have never known I did them. But just like I can show you cops and, and military, first responders in shootouts, they have no idea how many rounds they shot. They have no idea that they did a magazine exchange behind effective cover. They just do it because they've trained it so much and it's instinctive. So in the undercover world, okay, now I'm down there, I'm trying to write my name down. I'm having that adrenaline dump. In other words, if you've ever been through a traumatic incident, whether it's a car wreck or whatever, everything just slows down and your auditory exclusion, everything's going whoosh, whoosh. What I'm hearing is like, Scott, I need you.

• 5:43Dax Shepard?

  I've even had sight get minimal.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  That's tunnel vision.

• 5:47Dax Shepard?

  Closing in, yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  So that happens, you're getting the tunnel vision.

• 5:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And everything's time dilation, it's in clicks, it's like in frames, right? You go click, click, click. You can hear and feel your heart beating through your entire body. Palms are sweaty, I'm starting an Eminem song here.

• 6:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  I'm trying to talk and I'm trying to write my name and I forgot my middle name. I've been this dude forever. I know.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I know I'm Scott Calvin.

• 6:12Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  But because of the stress.

• 6:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  I don't even know. And, and it was, uh, I was blessed enough to put this training on to some Navy SEALs. And it was this guy that, and one of the SEALs caught it and he said, man. If you look, your hand's not even shaking the entire time you're trying to read. Trying to remember your name. And I'm like, well, my insides were shaking. Yeah, yeah. Um, and, and I yell back, I'm like, and what else do you need? I don't even know I do it. And he's like, what? I go, my name and what else? It didn't sound that clear though. Because I'm crapping myself, it sounds like, what else do you need? My name and what else? You know, I'm not even. You're like underwater. Yeah, I'm not even enunciating. He yells up and I hear, what do you need for that website? So I'm like, okay, they're gonna Google search me. There was a who's a rap dot com. There's things like that. And I go, okay, I'm cool with that.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Then I remember my initials were SAC, cause that, as I said before, is the head of an FBI office. And I thought that was funny, cause I know I'd never be one, you know?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Little humor for myself, you know? Um, not very humorous at the moment, but I remember Scott Andrew Callaway. So I write that down. I take all my upper clothing off. I probably was layered, cause it was cold. Um, I take my boots off. I pull my underwear and jeans down to my ankles. So from ankle up, I'm, I'm naked. And, uh, it was cold. Sure. And you were scared.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Wasn't your best showing, is my guess? I'm not attracted to you. I feel like I'm getting ready, possibly getting ready to die.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  In the, in the, uh, in the terms of a Seinfeld episode, that was a whole different level of shrinkage.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Oh my god, we're dealing with a woman. My body is an FBI agent, it's a woman. I know. I don't care what I look like right now. I just wanna get out of here, you know? So, I, I take all my clothes off and he checks everything. And I, again, adrenaline dump. I'm going, I'm trying to talk. And if you, it, like, I know clothesline for a year and a half at this point. Yeah. So if you saw what my face was saying to you, even though my words aren't saying it, my face is saying, tell me I'm okay. Yes. And his face back to me is kinda like, look, it's just business. However, he doesn't know that I'm an FBI agent undercover who's wired to the hill. Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  It's probably like, why are you that, like, don't be that worried.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  You're gonna get through this. He said, man, he goes, trust me. And these are his words exactly. I think they even quoted in the news, in the press release after the takedown. He said, "Trust me, if somebody accused me of being a fed, I'd probably smash them in the effin' mouth." And I said, "I'm not happy." And he said, "I wouldn't be either." And, uh, and I tell him, I'm like, "Look, you guys asked for this. I did not come to you, you came to me. Nobody has to do anything."

• 8:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  If nobody wants to do shit,

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Nobody has to do shit." Those are my exact words.

• 8:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Not as clear as that, but, cause I'm crapping my pants, but, I think I'm done.

• 9:01Dax Shepard?

  And all the gear's in your clothes somehow, obviously?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Some yes, some no. Trade craft, I'll look like where or how.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  You can't say, but you aren't exposed currently, like, they didn't find, they're not seeing it.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  They're not seeing, correct. I think I'm done. And then I'm pulling my pants back up, I'm putting my boots back on, and then he grabs a particular piece of clothing.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  And when he grabs it, I'm like, "Oh." And he says, when he grabs it, he goes, "Hey, I'm not gonna find anything here I don't want to, right? Like some naked pictures of an old lady?" And he goes, "Ha ha." And my laugh is like, "Huh huh." You know?

• 9:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  So, and I even say, "I hope not." Now, I'm sitting here up against the wall, my head tilted, and I'm watching him take this piece of clothing and go through it. We call this kneading, he's kneading it with his hands.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  And he's feeling it. And I'll just say this, technology-wise in 2007, had he grabbed that part of that clothing, he would've felt something.

• 9:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Um, and he gets close. And he even looks directly at a camera.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  And misses it. So while he's doing that, you think my adrenaline's here, and then it dumps, and then it's here, and then it's ebbing and flowing. When he's doing that, I have no idea I do it, but you can hear clear on the recording, me watching him, and I go,

• 10:20Speaker 02

  cause I don't even know I'm doing it.

• 10:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  It's a verbal sigh.

• 10:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Because my insides are saying,

• 10:25Dax Shepard?

  It's over.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  It's over, yeah. Oh god.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And then he says, uh, he misses it, and, um...

• 10:36Speaker 02

  He hands it back to me and I go right into business, but it's just nervous chatter. Joking is it's even though I'm a jokester anyway, it's definitely a self-defense mechanism. Yeah, yeah. I feel like I can't breathe. I try to crack a joke, things like that. PTSD is kicking in, whatever. So I go right back to business. Um, and, and people ask, um, all the time. Hey man, what would you have said if he had found it? And I remember it like it was yesterday. Uh, I had my first response, probably would have been something funny. If he would have said, what is this? I might've said, I don't know, some naked pictures of you old lady to try to buy me some time.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Or to laugh it off.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  The only other response I had is the gig is up. I'm an undercover FBI agent and I can walk out of here and we can see each other in court or all hell's gonna break loose. And here's the kicker. That would have been a bluff on my part. Sure. Because up until that point, to my knowledge, my cover team could never hear, for whatever reason, thick walls, bad equipment, whatever, they could never hear me in that clubhouse.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  What? But you didn't know that?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  You did?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  That's why, that's what it would have been a bluff. Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Oh my.

• 11:44Dax Shepard?

  You would just have to be betting on the notion that they're, they're gonna assume they're watching. And if you don't come out, now they've got a murder. That's what you've gotta be hoping.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Because that's the best case scenario is they, and they've done the math.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And you've got, you, you always try to plan contingencies. Contingency plan A, B, C, D, four or five moves ahead, right? But, um, he didn't find it. He hands it back to me and that night, my adrenaline dump just turns into anger. I end up going out with Joe Dogs and Scott Town and luckily they didn't

• 12:19Speaker 02

  take it personally or anything, but I, I took it personally and I shouldn't have because I'm just undercover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was pissed. Yeah. Now that adrenaline's coming down, I'm like, who in the, if I go, you know what? Tomorrow, if y'all do show up, I'm stripping you naked in the parking lot. How's that? Yeah, yeah. Come prepared. Yeah. It's gonna be chilly. Yeah. You know?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  That's good, because that's what you would have done if you weren't undercover.

• 12:40Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's also hard to know. You're just modeling these scenarios, you know? It's kind of like what they're...

• 12:45Speaker 02

  I'm mirroring.

• 12:45Dax Shepard?

  What's annoying about some of these docs you watch where the cops come and they're like, "He wasn't acting like someone whose wife just died." It's like, how the fuck do you know how someone acts when their wife... Like, that's bullshit. That's what you saw on TV. That's what you thought of in your head. Nobody knows what anybody does until it's happening.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And again, I took it personal. I'm like, you took... That's the same thing I would have done to Scott Payne. Who do you think you are taking me into a damn basement, even though they were right? I wasn't undercover.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you didn't have the moral high ground.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  But that's what we all do. We justify things to ourselves. Even if we know we're wrong, we can find a way to be right.

• 13:21Dax Shepard?

  From episode 941 with Mark Ronson.

• 13:27Dax Shepard?

  I'm always most interested in people's youth when I interview them.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:30Dax Shepard?

  I'll even get comments like, "Why do you bring up this movie?" And I'm like, "I don't care about that." I care about, like, how people ended up being capable of making that movie. So, I love it, because this book is just... You're just taking it to the end of the 90s, basically. And even the beginning, you have a very fantastical... Is that the word? I mean, you have a really... You have a really strange and unique childhood.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:53Dax Shepard?

  Did you understand how unique it was? Can you have a sense of that?

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Yes. I think I had a sense of both things. I think what's... My parents were this young, partying couple in London. They had money. My dad, my dad came from some money, so they had this house. There were all these rock stars always hanging out back there, and I'd wake up in the middle of the night.

• 14:15Dax Shepard?

  You started a publishing company.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, a music publishing company. And like, that was like their world. And I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and Robin Williams, who was the time Mork and Mindy was the biggest thing, and I love Mork, came in and woke me up. And I had this vague, hazy memory.

• 14:33Dax Shepard?

  I'll say it for you. He's definitely gacked out of his mind.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Gacked out of his mind. My mom is definitely having a good time, too. And he keeps running to the window to look out stuff. But I was also like... My parents, I was used to the fact, I kind of say in the book that parents, adults were more fun at night. Adults in the day were a little scary and bad tempered and irritable and maybe you had to avoid them. But at night, everything was all good.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  So I remember thinking, this is strange and unusual, but I'm sure it perverted my sensibility of what was normal from an early age.

• 15:08Dax Shepard?

  But he's leaving the room and you say.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm like, you forgot their thing. And he turns back and he knows right away and he's like, nanu nanu, you know? And I was just like.

• 15:19Dax Shepard?

  He gave him his catchphrase.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  He knew what I wanted.

• 15:22Dax Shepard?

  And would he go like that? Did he do this?

• 15:23Speaker 03

  I think he did the thing.

• 15:24Dax Shepard?

  Might not have the dexterity at that moment.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Oh, he can do it. I can't do it.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  He had the thing, you know, towards the end of the book, I was out at a restaurant and I saw him at the table and I just wanted to go up to him, but I kind of like punked out and just asked him if he remembered my parents' house. And the universe gave me a second opportunity. He walks towards our table going to the toilet and I'm like, Mr. Williams, I know this is so crazy and there's no way that you'll remember this, but I remember my earliest childhood memories of you coming into my room like as a kid. And he like stops for a second and he's like, wait, your parents had the house on Circus Road? And I was like, yeah. He goes, man, they threw some fucking crazy parties and just kept walking. Like exactly what you want from Robin Williams, from that thing.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  And he even remembered it.

• 16:15Dax Shepard?

  I bet he remembered it because it was at the beginning for him.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:19Dax Shepard?

  Like I bet if that had happened for him 18 years later, you know, it gets in that murk of too many neat things happening at some point.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:26Dax Shepard?

  Then you and your two sisters moved to New York.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:31Dax Shepard?

  To the Upper West Side or what's Central Park West?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  And you're what age? Sorry, at this point?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  I'm eight, eight or nine when we moved to New York, yeah.

• 16:40Dax Shepard?

  And move into this pretty outrageous, huge apartment.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:43Dax Shepard?

  And I'm guessing if you're a couple of blocks from, as you later met Sean Lennon.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:49Dax Shepard?

  Were you in the San Remo building?

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Yes, we were.

• 16:50Dax Shepard?

  You were?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Lived in the San Remo building when we first moved there. Well, first we moved there, my stepdad had like a little bachelor pad on Riverside Drive. And suddenly it's like he's living with three kids and he's like.

• 17:01Dax Shepard?

  What a champ that he took on.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  He really was.

• 17:04Dax Shepard?

  Three kids.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  He was. And then Farner were just hitting this amazing peak, you know, like all these smashes. And he, they bought this really fancy apartment.

• 17:13Dax Shepard?

  For reference, the next tower, or maybe it was your tower, but the Studio 54 guy had the top of one of those towers.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tony Randall from The Odd Couple.

• 17:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, sure.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  That's a deep cut, but he was on the set, Dustin Hoffman.

• 17:26Dax Shepard?

  See, this is what I'm talking, this is a very unique childhood.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Extremely, yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  But there were like crazy shit that happened with this dichotomy of knowing that all this stuff was crazy going on. Like, there was this one time that I stayed at Sean Lennon, who was one of my closest friends, at his house when Michael Jackson came over for a sleepover. And I know.

• 17:47Dax Shepard?

  On the bad tour.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  On the bad tour.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Also a sleepover. There's a lot here.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot. It does, it is different now to say some of these things for sure.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Wow, this is wild.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  But even with that, I knew not to say anything in school the next day because I didn't want to be teased mercilessly or be made to be like, oh, you fucking dick or other or look like braggy. So like, there was this thing of like, I knew it was crazy. I also knew to keep as much of it to myself.

• 18:17Dax Shepard?

  So that was a really, yeah, that was a very specific part for me. Yeah, they're throwing wet toilet paper balls off the side, uh, which I also did.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Soggy's.

• 18:25Dax Shepard?

  Soggy's.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Please get the nomenclature right.

• 18:28Dax Shepard?

  I got kicked out of the Milford Plaza Hotel as a kid for throwing soggy's.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  He just wanted to, Michael Jackson was just really intent on packing wet mounds of toilet paper and just pelting them, nowhere near people, but just hearing them splat on the sidewalk.

• 18:41Dax Shepard?

  It's very rewarding because you start with a ball, and I don't want to encourage anyone to do this because it's dangerous. But I will say, okay, you start with a wall of toilet paper this big, when that fucking thing hits the ground, if you're 30 plus up.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 18:51Dax Shepard?

  It's eight foot wide. It's very instantly rewarding if you're little.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:55Dax Shepard?

  Wow, I made that huge thing.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  It's like if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building or something.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:00Dax Shepard?

  They say it would crush a cab. I don't know if that's true though.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Well.

• 19:03Dax Shepard?

  I think they told us that as kids to. Tell us not to throw pennies.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  I don't want to, I have, didn't put this in the book, but fuck it. We did hit the hood of a car and there was this just like fucking sound, it sounded like a tank blast.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  We were only on the 10th, 10th floor.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  It's so telling because that is something you do as a kid.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  That's what kids do. They make little balls of toilet paper and throw it at things. It's so reflective of him.

• 19:31Dax Shepard?

  Well, he was playing laser tag. You said he was like more kid life than you.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, do you remember the first time like you weren't, because you're wonderful and young. And the sharper image, that first laser pen light that kind of shone that long infrared pen.

• 19:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  They just decided that nobody ever needs that thing. So it was discontinued, but.

• 19:50Dax Shepard?

  I think it was also dangerous for your eyes.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  I'm sure. Everything about it was wrong. Michael Jackson had made, the guy who, he obviously had incredible lasers and shit on tour. The guy who built those lasers for him, built him his own little box that you could plug in the wall. It was about this big a metal and it shone a single green laser that probably shone like hundreds of feet, you know? Because he was playing in fucking arenas and stadiums. So we were running around and holding it up to the window and shining it eight floors down. But nobody had ever seen, the only thing you could compare it to would be like the thing on an Uzi, like the, the sight thing or whatever, right?

• 20:29Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  So like, we're shining it on the street and like, there's a guy walking the dog, the guy can't see because he's thinking of the dog just like, oh, like kicking out. It's terrible. Everything about it. I would hate, I would never do that now. But, um, yeah, that was what he wanted to do and in an absurd foreshadowing of who I was to become. I was just like, This Funny Games is great. Michael, give us a bassline. I want to go back and like make a demo. Like, I was just like, remember being really concerned with, my stepdad had a studio where I made demos. And I remember Michael actually was just like, okay, so he like, he did this thing where it was like, of course I'll never forget it. It was so Michael, he like did like a, like an arm out, like snapping, started to sing this bassline that went.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  And I was like, okay, it's a little ripped off from Smooth Criminal, but we'll take it. And made a whole fucking song from this bassline that Michael Jackson gave us.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  This is shocking.

• 21:28Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 21:35Dax Shepard?

  This episode is supported by Helix.

• 21:38Speaker 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.

• 21:49Dax Shepard?

  That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.

• 21:53Speaker 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

• 22:09Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  I need it. I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp for optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.

• 22:20Dax 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 with their 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.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And it's not just us saying it. Helix has been named the most awarded mattress brand by Forbes, Wired and more. You gotta try it for yourself.

• 22:47Dax Shepard?

  Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. Helixsleep.com/armchair. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work.

• 23:29Dax Shepard?

  They actually do it, start to finish. Cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 23:44Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. We get support from our sponsor, Lily. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Gleepran. Foundo is a once-daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Foundo should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundo is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundo if you're allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine euplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills, and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundo with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Once-daily Foundo is available by prescription only in 0.8mg, 2.5mg, 5.5mg, 9mg, 14.5mg, and 17.2mg tablets. Learn more at foundo.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.

• 25:12Dax Shepard?

  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?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 25:30Dax 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.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 25:57Dax 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.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.

• 26:17Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 26:28Dax Shepard?

  From episode 862 with Blaze Aguirre.

• 26:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so let's start, if you're willing. First of all, what is the difference between a mood disorder and a personality disorder?

• 26:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. So mood disorder, you know, as we sort of think a little bit about it, is is that you have discrete episodes of mood states, typically either depressed or manic, that last for a certain period of time, 10 days, two weeks, and respond typically to treatment such as medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. And that there's really, when you're in that state, there's very little reactivity to that state. So when somebody's depressed, they stay in that state for this period of time.

• 27:19Dax Shepard?

  Some given period.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  Some period of time. With personality disorders, there are traits about who you are, you know, that the way that you experience yourself in relationship to other people. And that those traits, so maybe it's, maybe you're emotionally very intense, maybe you tend to be reactive to what people say and do. That those personality traits, when activated, interfere with your ability to function. So what's confusing is that, say, somebody has, you know, borderline personality disorder, and everything's going fine. To the outside observer, they're just like doing fine. But then somebody says, so then they're on Instagram, and... They didn't get invited to a party and they see all their friends at a party.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  And now there's incredible rage, incredible anger, incredible jealousy, envy. And it spikes their emotional state. And in that state, they cannot function. Their relationships begin to be impacted, maybe their work does.

• 28:22Dax Shepard?

  So that's already revelatory to me because I thought of it as like a status quo. You're in a state of this disorder, period.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  Exactly, and this is what's interesting. Let's just say that somebody was drunk and they walked into the studio.

• 28:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 06

  And we all walk in independently, that we could see that the person is drunk. You know, that that state is permanent in that moment. But let's just say it's somebody with borderline personality disorder. And you guys have a good relationship with that person, but I really pissed them off. So then you come and you're chit chatting and everything. And I walk in and suddenly you see this spike of rage. From your perspective, that person seems to be doing fine. But from my perspective, all of a sudden this person's angry and maybe they're devaluing me or very, very upset. And you guys are saying like, wait, what's going on? So that state only manifests when there's something either interpersonal or intrapersonal inside their own head.

• 29:21Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 29:22Speaker 06

  That gets triggered.

• 29:23Dax Shepard?

  Now, is narcissism in a state of flux as well?

• 29:28Speaker 06

  It's interesting that I don't know narcissism as well. And the reason why is because people with narcissism don't tend to come in for therapy.

• 29:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we had a narcissist expert and she said exactly that. They're one of the rarest cases to come seek treatment.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't diagnose it really because who's coming in?

• 29:47Dax Shepard?

  Understanding it correctly from the expert we had on, it's like you don't suffer from narcissism the way you suffer from some other person.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  It's the scariest one because they're in it in such a way that you can't even, they don't want to feel better.

• 30:01Speaker 06

  Maybe I could teach you a thing or two.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Okay, give us some tips.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  What I'm saying is that's what the narcissist will say to me. But the most common comorbidity with a personality disorder is another personality disorder. So you can have borderline personality disorder with some narcissistic traits. And one of the ways in which I have been able to work with a few cases of people with narcissistic personality disorder is to say,

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Here's the thing is, no one actually likes you.

• 30:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  And you also have to just call it out as the truth, you know, sort of like, I know that you feel that people adore you and you're surrounded by, you know, people who you believe are supportive, they don't actually. And the thing about it is you can't even see it. So what I'm going to say is I'm going to teach you how to see the world differently, even if you don't feel that what I'm telling you is true. Because what's happening is that you're kind of lonely for a narcissist, like what's going on, you know, you know, what, is it actually about everybody else? Or maybe it's about you. So, you know, so, so mostly it's hard for me to answer that question, only because I see so many few people with NPD.

• 31:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So what are the symptoms of?

• 31:11Speaker 06

  Borderline personality disorder. Yeah. And I talk a lot about it in, in the book, because that's the group that I found with most self-hatred, self-loathing was the group of people with borderline personalities, sort of. Okay. So if we go through the criteria, the first criteria is frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. So what do I mean by that? Nobody wants to be abandoned, you know, and say like, okay, I'm going to go home, my kids and wife are disappeared or whatever.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  I know, I'm already scared. Every time we have someone on who's speaking about like the psychology, I think I have it.

• 31:46Dax Shepard?

  That's your OCD.

• 31:49Speaker 06

  What's so beautiful about this is that is, I mean, we're all on the spectrum. I mean, so we all have, like, who wants to be abandoned? But it's not so much that we fear, like anybody would say, I'm saying, okay, like you guys are going to go, the people go home, the people who love you aren't going to be there because they don't want to be there with you anymore. Well, that would be terrifying.

• 32:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 06

  But the person with borderline personality just sort of fears it, whether it's real or whether it's not real. So, you know, and sometimes it's like, boy, this relationship is so painful for me. That I can't be with you anymore. And so then that's real abandonment. But then the other one is like, no one's ever liked me, no one's ever cared about me. I just worry that people are going to abandon me. And so then what they start to do is these are, this is the first part of the criteria, frantic efforts to avoid the abandonment. What does that mean? It's constant texts, constant phone calls, constant seeking of reassurance.

• 32:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 06

  Then to the other person, it's like, how many more times do I need to tell you I love you? And it becomes actually the kind of behavior that then creates the self fulfilling prophecy.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  I can't do this anymore.

• 32:58Dax Shepard?

  Yes. What I like about, there's lots of excerpts of dialogue between you and patients. And I'm, I don't know why, but I'm blown away with how intelligent some of the patients are and how articulate. And some of them are downright confrontational with you, which I think is so brave and cool. I think there's something about the dynamic that makes that hard.

• 33:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:20Dax Shepard?

  And one of your patients, a young woman is like, you're not listening to me.

• 33:24Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah.

• 33:25Dax Shepard?

  I'm not like upset with myself in this moment. I hate myself across the board.

• 33:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 33:31Dax Shepard?

  Like, you need to fucking listen to me. And I'm like impressed and grateful that someone would have that conviction to push back against you like that.

• 33:39Speaker 06

  I tell patients, I said, like, if I've gotten it wrong, you've got to just tell me I've gotten it wrong. Because otherwise I'm going to continue down this path, believing what I believe to be true.

• 33:48Dax Shepard?

  You too are also limited by your own experience. So yes, you've learned from the DSM, all these other things, you know how to look for them. But because you yourself can't necessarily relate immediately to a constant state of self hatred.

• 34:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:01Dax Shepard?

  It's a little inconceivable until it's detailed for you.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, what does it mean?

• 34:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like, because I think a lot of people go like, well, I hate myself often.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, or I feel like a failure sometimes or whatever.

• 34:15Dax Shepard?

  I'm lazy.

• 34:16Speaker 06

  So let's just imagine a binary world. Do you identify as male?

• 34:19Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  Female?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:21Speaker 06

  Okay, now, how certain are you of that, those states?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  Okay, what if I told you that you were wrong? What if I told you that, you know what, I actually quickly snuck a DNA test and you're actually, you're actually XY and you're actually XX. Now, how easy would it be for me to convince you that you're female?

• 34:42Dax Shepard?

  It'd be impossible.

• 34:43Speaker 06

  Impossible. Male?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess if you had proof.

• 34:47Speaker 06

  No, but not only that. Okay, so here's.

• 34:49Dax Shepard?

  This couldn't be proven to you?

• 34:52Speaker 06

  It couldn't. No, but even if I had like, okay, here's your DNA.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 34:56Speaker 06

  Exactly. And, and, and so even if I said, okay, here's some proof. Now, you need to be convinced.

• 35:03Dax Shepard?

  I would pull my dick out and go, great, you're holding that. I'm showing you this.

• 35:07Speaker 06

  Right. Okay. No, but here's what I want you to do is I, you're actually wrong about yourself. You are actually female. What would the relationship between me and you be if I kept insisting that you had to see yourself as female?

• 35:20Dax Shepard?

  Well, you would be an adversary. You would be a threat. You would be someone that's living in certainly a different reality than I am.

• 35:27Speaker 06

  Exactly. Because there's nothing that I could do that would convince you to, that's the, that's the level of belief.

• 35:33Dax Shepard?

  Right. So, so I'm saying like, I'm worthless and I am toxic. This is, they use often this term toxic.

• 35:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:41Dax Shepard?

  Doesn't matter what proof you present to them.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  Right. It doesn't matter. There is no separation from the is-ness of self-hatred.

• 35:49Dax Shepard?

  Meaning they're as convicted about that as they would be about their biological sex.

• 35:53Speaker 06

  Biological identity. And then if I say, okay, you know what, I want to start talking about self-hatred, it's, it's as alienating as if it would be, I want you to start thinking of yourself as this other gender. So like, I know, I've got kids. I know who I am. You're not going to convince me out of this. We're wasting time in therapy because I don't want to talk about this.

• 36:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So it's very hard to tackle, it sounds like.

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Well, that was the problem is that, so I thought, okay, so now what I need to do is tackle self-hatred. Why aren't any therapies tackling self-hatred?

• 36:26Dax Shepard?

  From episode 871 with Mary Claire Haver.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  For decades, when you look at why menopause hormone therapy was developed, it was to treat a hot flash. And forever, the pathognomonic, the post your child symptom was hot flashes, or what we call medicine vasomotor symptoms. What was never taught to me ever, and I learned like three years ago, was we have estrogen receptors in every single organ system in this body. And what I also was taught is in peri-menopause, it's a slow genital decline. That's all I learned, one sentence.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:00Speaker 07

  To decline until full menopause, when you lose function. It is a rocking roller coaster. And your worst symptoms tend to be the ones like the mental challenges, the brain fog, the cognitive disorders, the frozen shoulder. All of it is peri, and late peri and early menopause.

• 37:16Dax Shepard?

  That's when you're accelerating your loss of...

• 37:18Speaker 07

  Bone and muscle.

• 37:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and the eggs, right?

• 37:21Speaker 07

  We were born with all of our eggs.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:23Dax Shepard?

  A million, though. That was a shocker to me.

• 37:25Speaker 07

  So, one to two million at birth?

• 37:28Dax Shepard?

  One to two million eggs!

• 37:29Speaker 01

  But isn't this a weird... It's like that thing where you're born with all your eggs, and what's the thing? And then like, so really, your grandma's eggs are your eggs?

• 37:37Speaker 07

  Yeah. So like, when your grandmother was pregnant with your mother...

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 07

  The egg that made you was inside of your mother, inside of your grandmother.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, in some ways, women have always existed, always.

• 37:51Speaker 07

  So there's all this like, knowledge, wisdom, and drama?

• 37:53Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's also the mitochondrial eve.

• 37:54Speaker 07

  That imprinting that goes on through a traumatic pregnancy.

• 37:59Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so there are 6,000 women reach menopause every single day in the United States. And there are only 2,300 providers certified in menopause medicine. So, once this occurs to you, and you're going through it, and you start getting serious about your own reluctance to go through this, which is a great motivator, how do you approach it? What do you start looking at? How do you even begin assembling what becomes the toolkit?

• 38:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, I wish that I could tell you, you could confidently walk into your OB-GYN, your family medicine, your internal medicine doctor. And have a reasonable, logical conversation about your plan of care in perimenopause and menopause.

• 38:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  That is not possible right now. It is not the fault of the individual doctor. They may have been excellent in your birth and your pregnancy plan, you know, in every aspect. But because of the six hours, so right now, they surveyed residents coming out like three years ago. Only 30% felt barely adequately trained to treat menopause. Like, Yeah. It's awful. So at least they're honest. Right. Call ahead, you know, look on the Menopause Society website, which is menopause.org, and see who has passed the test and is certified there. It's not perfect, not every, you know, there's always people out there who aren't great doctors, but who took the test. Yeah. But it's somewhere to start. We crowdsourced with my followers. And I've got thousands of testimonials and we organize them by country, city, and state.

• 39:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 07

  To help people find, they don't pay me, you know, just to go find a provider who might be able to help you. And right now, it's, it's pretty slick. There's some great telemedicine companies that have been developed, mostly female founded, who saw a gap in care and they saw a need. And they developed these telemedicine companies to serve them.

• 39:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so you don't have to live in Los Angeles or wherever.

• 39:42Speaker 07

  I have women calling me from New York, LA, London, you know, the most well-connected you would think. Exactly. Who have the same basic questions and the same worries and the same fears and cannot find help as the woman sitting on the couch in Iowa. Yeah.

• 39:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so as you start focusing on it and, and, and kind of pledging to get competent in it and start help in treating women.

• 40:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:06Dax Shepard?

  Are you yourself even shocked with the amount of symptoms? Cause I wrote down symptoms and it's about the longest list of symptoms I've ever written.

• 40:15Speaker 07

  I was shocked and most of that was driven by questions I got on social. You know, as my little social media platform was exploding, women are, you know, when 10,000 women ask you about frozen shoulder or palpitations or vertigo, you're like, they can't all be lying, you know?

• 40:30Dax Shepard?

  Anecdotally, you're just starting to see these huge patterns emerge.

• 40:33Speaker 07

  Let me look into this. And so then I'm like digging and I'm like, yeah, there's a, they, there's somebody who did the study. There's data. We've got clear data here. So I go online and I make a little video talking about the correlation between menopause and vertigo, menopause and frozen shoulder, menopause and palpitations, and the world goes crazy. Wow. I get 10,000 comments, oh my God, oh my God, why didn't my doctor know? Again. We're doing a terrible job of teaching, but I was literally learning alongside my followers.

• 41:00Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 41:00Speaker 07

  As I learned, I'd make a video and teach. And that's what inspired me to write the book. And they were like, please write a book. I don't want to chase you all over social media. It's too complicated. Like, just put it all in one place.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Frozen shoulder is, that is scaring me. Like, my mom had it, my grandmother had it.

• 41:14Dax Shepard?

  One of my mother-in-laws has been dealing with it for the last six months.

• 41:18Speaker 07

  So, this is a great, this is a great story, and I hope I get the lore right. So if I don't exactly, you know, but the, the story goes, the first study on frozen shoulder in menopause, I know it came out of Duke University, I read the paper, and it was the head of OB-GYN and the head of orthopedics who both happened to be women. And it was something like they were sitting in the doctor's lounge or in the cafeteria and just shooting the breeze over, can you believe all these women with frozen shoulders? Da-da-da-da, yeah, yeah, yeah. You think there's a correlation? I don't know. Let's look into it.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  They started pulling charts and they were like, fuck me, look at this. Women who were on HRT have a lower incidence of frozen shoulder and they have it, they do better.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 07

  They have it, you know.

• 41:57Dax Shepard?

  If they get it.

• 41:57Speaker 07

  They're getting it, but they're getting it less than women who aren't, and they're having a better course, right?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 42:03Speaker 07

  So they go to get it published, and then they go to orthopedic journals first. Nobody would touch it. Nope, this can't be right. Nope, this is an artifact. Nope, nope, nope, nope. So one of the menopause journals published it. And so then, I have a friend, Vonda Wright, if you follow her, she's an orthopedic surgeon. She does a ton of teaching, and she wrote the paper on the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause.

• 42:24Dax Shepard?

  How's that all work? What's the mechanisms there?

• 42:26Speaker 07

  So, estrogen receptors and probably progesterone here as well are all over the musculoskeletal system. We know, but we know bones, we got bones down, right? We've known about osteoporosis since I was a resident. I know that one really well. But what, what wasn't understood was tendons, muscles, and where the, you know, the connections between bones and muscles and how that all works together. And frozen shoulder is adhesive capsulitis. There's a capsule around the ball joint and the shoulder that gets absolutely adheased and frozen, and it's an inflammatory condition. And so it's, you can't put your arm. Yeah. Behind, like you go to take a picture. Yeah, and it's very, very painful and you need early intervention, you need physical therapy, there's needling, there's all, they have to break it up, right? Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  And that we can delay the onset and the duration and probably prevent several cases for women on HRT.

• 43:15Dax Shepard?

  And as you said, because there are estrogen receptors.

• 43:17Speaker 07

  Protective, so it's an anti-inflammatory. But my mom didn't even know that this was connect, I've never heard her once say she had that because of menopause. Well, no, most women don't know, most orthopedic surgeons don't know. You know, we're working to change that. All of this is, that paper was written a year and a half ago. Oh, wow.

• 43:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so ringing in the ears?

• 43:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, so tinnitus, tinnitus, I still don't know how to say it correctly.

• 43:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I had it for a minute and I didn't know what to tell people.

• 43:43Speaker 07

  I've had it once and man, you know.

• 43:45Dax Shepard?

  People kill themselves from it. It's a maddening.

• 43:47Speaker 07

  Maddening.

• 43:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  So, again, this is an estrogen receptor problem. So there's, you know, and the vertigo is that the crystals break off quicker from, like, it's basically osteoporosis in the ear.

• 43:57Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 43:58Speaker 07

  And the crystals break off and then float around and you're dizzy, but the tinnitus, you know, it's the inflammation around the nerve and around some of the auricular bones.

• 44:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 07

  That is, they feel like is leading to, and that women on, you know, all these studies say age-matched women, pre-menopausal women definitely have it less than post, and women on HRT are less likely to get it.

• 44:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, wow.

• 44:17Speaker 07

  What are some other symptoms?

• 44:18Dax Shepard?

  Dry skin.

• 44:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, so in the, in the skin and tegamentary, you know, skin and the hair follicles.

• 44:26Dax Shepard?

  I like tegamentary, I've never heard that word, that's nice.

• 44:27Speaker 07

  It's a fancy, yeah, skin.

• 44:29Dax Shepard?

  Tegamentary, yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 07

  So, and, and all the like follicles and oil and sweat glands, it's the whole system, right?

• 44:33Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 44:34Speaker 07

  So.

• 44:34Dax Shepard?

  The largest organ in the body.

• 44:35Speaker 07

  It is, most absorbent. So, we see that we lose 30% of our collagen, you don't have to tell a woman that, she knows, in the first five years of menopause, we can attenuate that with topical or systemic hormone therapy. Topical works better, actually, which is why I'm on my vanity cream. Is it a ret, like retinal? No, it's estrogen for the face. Wow. So it's compounded, but some people take the vaginal product and will mix it in their moisturizer and put some on their face. Wow. You should talk to a doctor before you do, you shouldn't do that. Right.

• 45:06Dax Shepard?

  Don't do any compounding at home.

• 45:08Speaker 07

  So, yeah. Mix it up, a little mortar and pestle. So, you lose oil production.

• 45:16Speaker 07

  And the skin, you lose thinness and the trans-epidural water loss is much greater. So you're just losing all of your barrier, your protection. So the skin is less healthy.

• 45:25Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 45:25Speaker 07

  Besides looking worse.

• 45:27Dax Shepard?

  Dehydrating at a crazy rate.

• 45:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 45:30Dax Shepard?

  Dry mouth, that's the same.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  Dry mouth, same thing. So mucus production, the salivary glands dry up, you know, and we have tremendous dry mouth and dry eyes, dry mouth. It's the same kind of, you know.

• 45:41Dax Shepard?

  Guys, I don't want menopause. This is fucking miserable.

• 45:45Dax Shepard?

  From episode 967 with Malala Yousafzai.

• 45:52Dax Shepard?

  Now, I find this to be the most interesting part because it's so human. So yeah, now you start, you start this school in England and it's a disaster, right? It doesn't, high school's not.

• 46:04Speaker 08

  I, I loved that school, by the way, but what was really challenging for me was making friends.

• 46:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 08

  I was a completely different person when I was in Pakistan. I was.

• 46:17Dax Shepard?

  You were popular and outgoing.

• 46:18Speaker 08

  Funny and mischievous. I was in every competition, debate, singing.

• 46:24Dax Shepard?

  Playing cricket.

• 46:24Speaker 08

  Playing cricket.

• 46:25Speaker 07

  Being a kid.

• 46:26Speaker 08

  Everything. I mean, and I had friends. I had so many friends.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 08

  Now, at this new school, I felt like a stranger. I just thought nobody could ever know me. I could not be that old self of mine. And, you know, I, I would try to like, like I would try to have a conversation with, with people and it just like, you start it and it dies quickly.

• 46:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 08

  It's, it's such a like stressful moment. You know, you're like, I, I hope like somebody picks up this topic and it could be a funny thing and it just, it just.

• 46:58Dax Shepard?

  It just fell flat.

• 47:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:01Dax Shepard?

  Look, I mean, you had so much working against you. You're from another country. I can't imagine your English was bulletproof at that point, was it?

• 47:08Speaker 08

  I mean, it was more like textbook English. Textbook English is very different than what people actually speak.

• 47:14Dax Shepard?

  Yes. You have the cultural thing. You know, the fact that you're famous, which is an awkward thing. You've also just been shot in the face. So you're not like feeling.

• 47:23Speaker 07

  A hundred percent.

• 47:24Speaker 08

  I became very like self-conscious.

• 47:27Dax Shepard?

  Of course.

• 47:29Speaker 08

  Like if somebody is like looking at you, um, you know, we all look at each other and we all just think sometimes like, you know,

• 47:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 08

  What, what, what is that person actually looking at right now?

• 47:39Dax Shepard?

  Yes, of course.

• 47:40Speaker 08

  And usually they're not, but we just think that way.

• 47:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 08

  But I think at school, yes, I was very self-conscious and I was thinking about the facial nerve damage on the left side because of the bullet. And I just thought like, maybe, you know, I, I, I just was hesitating even to smile because I now had like a crooked smile and

• 48:00Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 48:00Speaker 08

  I was.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  It's hard enough.

• 48:02Dax Shepard?

  Acne, I didn't want to go to school.

• 48:04Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 48:05Dax Shepard?

  If I had pimples, I would not interact with anyone those days. Like it's, it's.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  It's hard enough.

• 48:10Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is.

• 48:11Dax Shepard?

  It's implausible.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  And you, you, you have to sort of carry the weight now. Your people are looking to you to be like the voice of, of activism and you're 15 and you're in a new place and people are expecting wisdom from you. Like that's too much.

• 48:28Speaker 08

  I know.

• 48:28Dax Shepard?

  Thank God you were kind of delivering on that front because you're, you're just, it's a mess at high school.

• 48:34Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 48:34Dax Shepard?

  But luckily you are, you're, you're rising to the occasion of the political stuff.

• 48:39Speaker 08

  You have to be an adult so fast.

• 48:41Dax Shepard?

  Like you're, you're crushing that part of your life.

• 48:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I just thought maybe at 15, this is where I'm supposed to be at these UN conferences, bilateral meetings with world leaders advocating for girl education, running a foundation.

• 48:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 08

  I just thought maybe this is how my life is supposed to look like.

• 48:59Dax Shepard?

  I won't get this other thing.

• 49:00Speaker 08

  Yeah. And to be honest, yes, I wanted all of it.

• 49:03Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 49:04Speaker 08

  I wanted to be a, a normal student at the same time to be, uh, to have friends.

• 49:09Dax Shepard?

  To go to McDonald's.

• 49:10Speaker 08

  And to see love and, and to be able to express myself and to try new things. But somehow I thought that maybe because I'm supposed to live this activist life, it means sacrificing.

• 49:23Dax Shepard?

  It's one or the other.

• 49:24Speaker 08

  It's one or the other.

• 49:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 08

  And, and I was like, okay, you know, of course, like I'm, I'm sad and I don't feel like

• 49:31Dax Shepard?

  You were lonely, right?

• 49:33Speaker 08

  Lonely and, but I thought, okay, this is how it's supposed to be.

• 49:37Dax Shepard?

  You did the cutest things to you, like you, you, you enlisted on field day to, to run the 200 meter.

• 49:43Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 49:44Dax Shepard?

  Dash and came in last.

• 49:46Speaker 08

  I know, I tried everything.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  This is horrible.

• 49:49Dax Shepard?

  I know. It makes me love you so much.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  When this is going on and you're like struggling at school and you know, I think a lot of American kids, they would come home and like tell their parents and I feel left out and did you feel like you could do that? Because I don't know how emotions were.

• 50:06Speaker 08

  No, I think when you are supposed to be this strong, brave, courageous girl, you feel you cannot complain about not having friends or like, you know, crying alone in the bathroom to to get over this or feel like, oh, I wish like more people could talk to me in the in the school dining hall. No, I never, I never really shared it with my parents. I would just go home and talk to my best friend in Pakistan. I would ask her about everything that was happening, you know, with in our neighborhood with our friends and how her studies were going and just try to like reconnect with my old life. And I knew like that's just not a reality. I'm not there, but I used to just imagine myself being there and imagine what life would have been like if I were there.

• 50:48Speaker 08

  So I like, deep inside, I just, I, I wanted, um, I wanted to, to make friends and just know like, who is that true Malala, you know, that?

• 50:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 08

  And what would like my life have looked like if none of these things had happened? So the day when I saw most of the students at my school talk to me was the day when I heard the news about the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 51:14Speaker 08

  So I had gone to school and I was not expected to like.

• 51:18Dax Shepard?

  You were seventeen at that time?

• 51:19Speaker 08

  I was seventeen, yes. I was in my chemistry class, the school's deputy head teacher walks in and, um, and calls me outside and tells me that I have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 51:30Speaker 08

  And I'm like, wait, what? Yes. And I'm like, oh, thank you.

• 51:36Dax Shepard?

  Thank you.

• 51:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 51:37Dax Shepard?

  Thank you.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  As if it's like she did it or yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 08

  But I, I actually went back to my class. I, I finished my whole school day.

• 51:44Dax Shepard?

  In hopes that people might engage with you and show interest.

• 51:47Speaker 08

  And I feel like more faces were looking at me that day, when you, when you feel noticed.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yes, it's huge.

• 51:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 51:54Speaker 08

  But the day after, it was just back to normal. Everybody is looking the other way.

• 51:59Dax Shepard?

  They were all going to McDonald's and you weren't.

• 52:00Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 52:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Oh, man.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  What a bizarre, you, you're winning the Nobel Peace Prize and you're not getting invited to McDonald's? Like, none of this makes, this is too much.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 52:20Dax Shepard?

  We get support from ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. So I went down this rabbit hole the other day on real holiday jobs that exist and I couldn't stop. Somebody out there is hiring a ham glazer, a professional ham glazer. Another place is hiring a lead elf, implying a whole hierarchy of elves I had never even considered. Here's the thing, these jobs need real skills. People like that are hard to find. And whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/dax. Plus ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first.

• 53:05Dax Shepard?

  So you meet the right people faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/dax. At ziprecruiter.com/dax, meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 53:28Dax Shepard?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  You know, I love therapy more than anything. Gets me through. Often I'll want to cancel because I'm like, I don't really have anything to talk about. And then I'll go and I have some major revelation.

• 54:17Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud, the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds. Once it's out into the world, you gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 54:33Dax Shepard?

  If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Do yourself a favor and just try it. Future you will be grateful. Visit betterhelp.com/dax to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash DAX. We get support from SKIMS. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the girls who get it, they get it.

• 55:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but for those of us who are clearly not girls, walk me through it.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Well, you know how much I love my SKIMS fleece joggers because the plush fleece is so soft. It's cozy. It's really comfortable without feeling too heavy. Well, I went to friend them and she would not stop talking about how comfy they were. She almost didn't give them back to me, which was upsetting, but I'm a girl's girl. So I let her have it.

• 55:33Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  So the sleep sets are awesome because they are very soft and comfortable, but they're cute. If I'm in my sleep set, I feel fine about going down the street to pick up my food. I'm still looking cute, but I'm comfy and I'm cozy.

• 55:47Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  A really fun thing to do is if you're going on vacation with your girlfriends, to get matching SKIMS pajamas. I've done this with Callie and it is so fun. First of all, the pics are so cute, but also it's just fun and friendship.

• 56:01Dax Shepard?

  So a girl's girl is looking out for your friends with better loungewear. I get it. Am I one of your girls now?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  You are. You and the other girlies can shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at SKIMS.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.

• 56:20Dax Shepard?

  We get support by Peloton. You know that feeling when you're spiraling over a problem and you just can't figure it out? When that happens to me, I need a change of pace. And I've found that running is the best way. It takes my brain out of the driver's seat and I come back with a fresh perspective. Running can be freeing and cathartic and Peloton helps you feel all of that. And now that feeling fits wherever you need it with the new Peloton Tread Flex. It's movable and foldable, designed to fit your life. So next time you feel stuck, you can go for a run literally anywhere, whether that's in your office, living room, or even the attic. Plus, they have classes with expert instructors and programs to meet you at any level and keep you moving. Let yourself run.

• 57:04Dax Shepard?

  Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onepeloton.com.

• 57:12Dax Shepard?

  From episode 891 with Michael Lewis.

• 57:19Speaker 09

  People get pissed off because there's a lot of money at stake already.

• 57:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 09

  Those two companies are 30, 40 billion dollar companies. It is sinister. Yeah. Uh, what we're doing to young men right now.

• 57:30Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 57:31Speaker 09

  It's not just with sports gambling, but we're, we're creating young male anger at a fantastic rate. If you were to set out to what, to create as much young male anger as you could, you'd do a lot of things.

• 57:43Dax Shepard?

  We're doing a great job.

• 57:43Speaker 09

  We're doing a great job.

• 57:45Dax Shepard?

  Let's take away manual labor jobs. Let's take away the trades. Let's stop sending them to college. Let's get that suicide rate up. Let's, I mean, it's-

• 57:52Speaker 09

  Let's tell them they're evil and when they're from the, from the minute they walk in the classroom when they're in first grade.

• 57:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Speaker 09

  And then let's create an industry that preys on young male overconfidence.

• 58:01Dax Shepard?

  And testosterone and rites of passage and-

• 58:03Speaker 09

  All of that.

• 58:04Dax Shepard?

  Acts of bravery.

• 58:05Speaker 09

  Yes. And that has, um, with unbelievable precision, the ability to identify people who don't know what they're doing and get them to do as much of it as possible.

• 58:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 58:17Speaker 09

  At the same time, they can with great precision, identify people who, the very, very, very few people who actually know what they're doing when they're betting on sports and kick them out of the casino.

• 58:26Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 58:27Speaker 09

  It's, it's, it's diabolical.

• 58:29Dax Shepard?

  Those algorithms, they can go, oh, this guy's too good of a gambler.

• 58:32Speaker 09

  He actually is making edge bets, the bets that are of positive expected value.

• 58:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 58:37Speaker 09

  He knows something about- Golfers that we don't know, we can't take the bet.

• 58:41Dax Shepard?

  And he's gone.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  So they just say you can't do this?

• 58:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they only want fucking.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  They're allowed to just say.

• 58:46Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah, they'll say, they'll say, we'll either ban you, this we gave. So we got a pro gambler who knew what he was doing to give us his bets to place.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 58:56Speaker 09

  And we participated a little bit, so it was legal. And we got booted out everywhere in a matter of four or five bets. And it was even, even where we'd lost money. Because they could identify that the bet, even though the bet lost, it was a smart bet.

• 59:08Dax Shepard?

  That's like a bar that's only letting alcoholics in. You gotta prove you're an alcoholic first.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 59:13Dax Shepard?

  And then anyone who can manage their drinking, you get the fuck out of here.

• 59:16Speaker 09

  That's exactly right. If you're just gonna drink water, we don't want you.

• 59:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we want fucking addicts in here.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  How can this be legal?

• 59:21Dax Shepard?

  Well, let's go through it. Can we start, I, I was really fascinated with Dan Wan. It's a great, he's a great character.

• 59:28Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 59:29Dax Shepard?

  So Dan Wan started studying fans.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:32Dax Shepard?

  Which no one had really ever studied.

• 59:33Speaker 09

  Right.

• 59:34Dax Shepard?

  And I think the, the reigning opinion of people who attended sporting events was a certain type of person. And through his studies, he found out, well, you know, you'd be surprised to find out that fans are, um, they donate more money, they're more politically active, they have higher GPAs. They're not the group you think they are.

• 59:48Speaker 09

  No, they're socially engaged.

• 59:51Dax Shepard?

  They're socially engaged.

• 59:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, and you know, so that they are, but they are not rational.

• 59:55Dax Shepard?

  Right, so now we get into that kind of Conman, Danny Conman.

• 59:59Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 59:59Dax Shepard?

  Take on these guys, which is what happens to someone's thinking when they're a fan?

• 1:00:04Speaker 09

  I mean, it's motivated reasoning, right? It's like you, you, you will systematically think your team is going to do better than, than you should think. Or your favorite players. You got one's, half your brain in a really irrational space already because you are a fan.

• 1:00:20Dax Shepard?

  Well, I like when he puts it so simply, like just the, the, the original proposition is, come spend two hours with us, there's a 50% chance that you're gonna be very upset at the end of this. And it costs a lot of money. You see the bias right there, like.

• 1:00:34Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Dax Shepard?

  Any rational person would be like, no, those are terrible odds if I'm gonna spend a bunch of money. You say half the time I'm gonna leave here totally upset?

• 1:00:41Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah, and so that you're, when you, when you introduce gambling into this mind, you're, it's, it's already a mind that is, it thinks it knows things it doesn't know.

• 1:00:50Dax Shepard?

  He gets into the superstitions.

• 1:00:51Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Dax Shepard?

  Like, you know, and I myself just did this. I went to a Detroit Lions game, the one they lost in the playoffs, and I hadn't been to a game all year, and I went, and it was like a big deal, and they lost, and I'm like, it's because I fucking, I hu- I hugged the, the coach. He didn't want to hug me. He's like, why do I have to hug that fucking guy? Because he's on TV? I had this whole story. I'm like, all Detroit hates my guts. And I'm, I'm kind of buying it.

• 1:01:13Speaker 09

  It's funny what gets studied by academics and what doesn't.

• 1:01:16Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:16Speaker 09

  And as he points out, he says, like, the fan was just sitting there waiting to be studied. It's such an important character in American life. And he said, but, but pinheads like me generally don't like sports. Like, they, they do, it's, it's like, people were just turning a blind eye to it because they thought it was not worthy of attention.

• 1:01:35Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:01:35Speaker 09

  And, and for our podcast, it's worthy of attention just to establish that the brain space in which this gambling industry is going to enter.

• 1:01:44Dax Shepard?

  Because they are targeting fans. That's why it's very important to understand.

• 1:01:48Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Dax Shepard?

  Right out of the gates, that a fan is, is doing some irrational thinking.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  So most people who's, who bet are a fan of the thing. That, that's surprising to me already. I would assume most people who get into sports betting aren't fans, so they could be sort of objective about it.

• 1:02:02Speaker 09

  There are some who do that.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 09

  But, but it's.

• 1:02:05Dax Shepard?

  And they're kicked off.

• 1:02:06Speaker 09

  Over, overwhelmingly, they are fans.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:02:10Speaker 09

  So what happened in this country is that, um, back in 1992, uh, Senator Bill Bradley, former New York Knick, had, had passed a federal law that forbid states from legalizing sports gambling that didn't have it already. And that grandfathered in Nevada, for example, and a couple of other little exceptions.

• 1:02:29Dax Shepard?

  Atlantic City?

• 1:02:30Speaker 09

  Maybe Atlantic City. No, they didn't. Not Atlantic City, no.

• 1:02:33Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they didn't have a sports book there.

• 1:02:34Speaker 09

  Then what happens is that because Atlantic City's not Grandford, they don't have it.

• 1:02:40Speaker 09

  New Jersey gets upset they can't do it. And Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, launches what seems to be a quixotic and futile lawsuit to try to get overturned Bradley's law. It succeeds in 2018. And in 2018, the Supreme Court says this law is unconstitutional. It's up to the states. Any state that wants to legalize sports betting can. And since then, 38 states have legalized it. Which created all kinds of weird natural experiments, like Alabama doesn't, Mississippi does, and suicide rates go up in Mississippi, and savings rates go down in Mississippi. You can see the effects of it.

• 1:03:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, bankruptcy.

• 1:03:18Speaker 09

  All that stuff.

• 1:03:21Dax Shepard?

  From episode 944, Seth Harp.

• 1:03:26Speaker 10

  There's a lot of crime in these secretive units. And one of the big types of crime that you see frequently is theft from military supply lines, because there's an enormous amount of money and material, weapons, ammunition, things like gasoline, and just straight up cash.

• 1:03:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, talk about the cash, because I doubt people would know how much cash is entrusted to these people when they get in these countries to train these soldiers. They have to buy equipment, they have to pay people off. They do got to throw a lot of money around.

• 1:03:57Speaker 10

  That's the main thing that they do, just like the CIA. The main thing that they do is throw money around.

• 1:04:01Dax Shepard?

  And there's just, there's hundreds of millions of dollars that get thrown around. I don't think people understand the scale of it.

• 1:04:07Speaker 10

  There's billions of dollars. A lot of it, we know, was stolen directly by the soldiers who are entrusted with these stacks of cash. You know, I interview military wives in Fayetteville who talk about how this is kind of a thing. You know, your husband comes back from a deployment, and he's got several thousand dollars taped to his body when he gets off the plane.

• 1:04:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 10

  Just skimmed off the top of the OP fund, is what they call it, the operations fund.

• 1:04:33Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. By the way, I would do it. I'm like, I'm gonna give this bozo $60,000. This guy's a bozo. I'm gonna take four. I mean, it's not hard to imagine how one finds himself skimming when you're giving it to shitheads a lot of the time.

• 1:04:45Speaker 10

  It's not hard to imagine, especially when you know, hey, there's almost no accountability over this. This is just a handwritten receipt that I'm signing off of. Nobody cares.

• 1:04:53Dax Shepard?

  I have a friend who's an FBI agent. He too has to pay informants and stuff. And he said, you know, every time we come back, there's a lot of, they have to polygraph after every single time they bring back the money. And I don't think that's happening here.

• 1:05:06Speaker 10

  No, I don't think so. No. You know, the, there's so much less oversight over the military than an agency like FBI.

• 1:05:13Dax Shepard?

  Right. It's so huge. I'm also sympathetic to it. It's like when you're over there, it's like, what a fucking machine that's, that's trying to run and keep up.

• 1:05:22Speaker 10

  Yeah. And they spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan. And so the, the cash is just a tiny fraction of that.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, hard to detect, I'm sure.

• 1:05:29Speaker 10

  But we do know of, um, you know, cases where, there were several cases, quite a few cases of special forces soldiers being caught, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for stealing six-figure sums of cash. So this is not, this is not just an inference or a suspicion.

• 1:05:45Dax Shepard?

  What's the, do you know the one with the most?

• 1:05:47Speaker 10

  Yeah, I saw one, this guy, 210,000, you know, I think, yeah. Actually, no, you know what? There's, there's significantly more because there's all different kinds of, uh, diversion from the supply lines. There was one sport rag soldier who got caught smuggling $1 million in cash. A female soldier named Tanya Long.

• 1:06:05Dax Shepard?

  Go get it, girl. One million.

• 1:06:07Speaker 10

  A million dollars that she was smuggling back in a, um, in like VCRs or some kind of electronic equipment.

• 1:06:13Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 1:06:14Speaker 10

  But she hadn't, she had taken that money, she and her likely with conspirators, co-conspirators, had taken that money not from the op fund, but through a kickback scheme. Whole different type of corruption that also exists. The war in Afghanistan was an incredibly corrupt enterprise. The Afghan client state was staggeringly corrupt. And it's no surprise that some of that blew back and rubbed off on our own. People who were the ones pumping all the money into there. And one small part of it, but which ends up being important for the culture of the Green Berets is the theft of cash. I was gonna point to the, a study done, um, that showed, or not a study so much as a count, of all the cases that had been adjudicated, uh, and they total $52 million in thefts that US soldiers were convicted of stealing.

• 1:07:00Speaker 10

  But that's just a drop in the just a

• 1:07:03Dax Shepard?

  Conviction rate, I'm sure versus incident rate is probably single digit percentage.

• 1:07:07Speaker 10

  A final fact I can tell you about this is that the largest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve was, I think, three hundred and forty-three tons of cash. That's, that's, that's how much it weighed.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Speaker 10

  A hundred dollar bills, they were put on planes and flown into Iraq. And all of it went missing. Billions of dollars.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:31Speaker 10

  Whole, whole pallets of shrink wrapped cash went missing.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Went missing?

• 1:07:36Speaker 10

  Say the number again of tons. Here's what I know is accurate. It was the largest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. And you wonder where it all went. All these, you know, shadowy fortunes that were made out of the war. And a lot of people that make a bunch of money and decamp for Dubai and never come back. Well, they came up through the Special Forces or JSOC or the CIA.

• 1:07:57Dax Shepard?

  From episode nine oh three, James Kimmel Jr.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  I have one.

• 1:08:05Dax Shepard?

  Great.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  I have one. Okay, so my apartment building currently

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  is so disgusting, like they're, they're, this is so annoying. Randomly, nothing of mine is turned on, right? Like, I'm not running any water or anything, but randomly they'll be like water, soapy, like water, weird stuff coming up out of the tub into, into my tub. Also, it happened in the laundry room and it flooded the laundry room. It's been an ongoing thing and I've had to say over and over again, this is unacceptable. This needs to stop now, fix it. They keep sending in a plumber, the plumber's like, it's not clogged. I'm like, I know, clearly that's not what's going on here. What are you gonna do, like, what are we gonna do? So that's my grievance.

• 1:08:56Speaker 11

  Okay, so they're, and they're not reacting. They're, they're, they're not fixing this, this situation at all, right? Okay, so let's just do it, let, let's just do it, so.

• 1:09:04Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna add, they're placating you. That's a trigger for me.

• 1:09:08Speaker 11

  To keep it short, shortish, we'll just say that you've just begun testifying as the victim.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:14Speaker 11

  So imagine now that you're in a courtroom, okay? You could close your eyes for a second and just sort of picture the judge's bench, and the lawyer's tables, and the jury box, and maybe the defendant, like, is the landlord, and they're over at their table.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, by Seer.

• 1:09:28Speaker 11

  And you're over in your, your thing, uh, you're in your, at your table, and there's a judge up there, and you're now on the witness stand, and you're testifying to what they've done to you, and what's, what has happened to you. And this could be something really significant. So I've done this with people with serious sexual violence.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:46Speaker 11

  Murder, people, family members have been killed. So it can be as big or as small as your life, right? But let's just stick with yours. So you testify that that has happened, and tell us how that has made you feel.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Um, totally unrespec- disrespected. I pay money to live here, and I feel that this is the basic level of care and, um, hygiene that should be handled by the landlord quickly.

• 1:10:18Speaker 11

  Okay, great.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  So, it's very annoying.

• 1:10:21Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. All right, so let's, um, let's stop with the victim testimony for a minute, and let's switch over to, so now you're gonna play the role of the landlord.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:32Speaker 11

  Okay, so the landlord was over at that table, and now the landlord's walking up to the stand and sitting down. You're just sitting and watching.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:10:42Speaker 11

  Uh, that's you as the victim, but now you are the landlord. So it's actually you in the witness stand, okay?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:49Speaker 11

  All right, so you've gotta switch that role.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:52Speaker 11

  And now, you're a lawyer.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Speaker 11

  Very well-paid, good lawyer, is gonna ask you-

• 1:10:57Dax Shepard?

  Jimmy Kimmel Jr.

• 1:10:58Speaker 11

  And his name's, right, Jimmy Kimmel Jr. Thank you. Thanks for that advertisement. And he's gonna ask you, so what's your side of the story?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Monica has complained about some water leaking into her building. She showed me pictures. It looks bad. I've sent the plumber in multiple times. The plumber doesn't know what's wrong. He's snaked the drain. And it's, she's still, it's still happening. She's still complaining about it, but there's not much more I can do.

• 1:11:39Dax Shepard?

  You would probably add that you, you're looking over like 18 units. There's one of you. You don't have access to everyone else's. The plumber thinks maybe if he chased down this problem and all these other people's units, I can't get them to agree to let the plumber in because they don't have an issue. There might be a lot she might feel like, you know, I'm doing really everything one person can do with these 18 units. And I keep sending the plumber, and I'm as frustrated with the plumber as Monica is, and she somehow is holding me responsible as if I'm putting the suds, suds in her tub, and I don't either have anything to do with it. We're on the same team here.

• 1:12:18Speaker 11

  Right. So you've just, now Monica, in your own role, you've just sat and listened to the defendant testify.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:26Speaker 11

  Both versions.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:12:29Speaker 11

  How did it make you feel to, you know, hear the defendant's story? What was that like for you?

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  I understand that there's a lot on her plate. She's just a person. She's not, you know, a machine. She can't just make sure something gets done because I want it done fast. And I still think, unfortunately, I do think it is her job to make sure that the building is run up to code. So though I have compassion for her, I would still like the thing to be done properly.

• 1:13:04Speaker 11

  So how do you find, as the, as the jury, is the landlord guilty or innocent?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Um, I think she's guilty.

• 1:13:12Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  I, I do think that objectively.

• 1:13:17Speaker 11

  That's fair. You're the jury and you get to say what you want. You don't have to apologize.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Well, I feel bad for her. And I do, which is why I think I can really do this objectively to some extent. Like, I don't think she's a bad person.

• 1:13:30Speaker 11

  So what should your sentence be? Since you found the landlord guilty.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 11

  You're gonna have to hand down a sentence.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  That's the problem.

• 1:13:37Speaker 11

  And in the non-justice system, which is what this is called, or the miracle court, because there's a free app that you can use that.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:13:44Speaker 11

  An audio-driven app where it takes you through all the steps.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:47Speaker 11

  More methodically than I'm doing right now. But in that, you do need to have a sentence.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  This is hard. This part's hard. I definitely don't want her to get fired.

• 1:13:59Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  So I'm not sentencing her with that.

• 1:14:02Dax Shepard?

  Can I suggest a sentence that I bet you would love?

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:06Dax Shepard?

  She has to have the same foam coming out of her tub and her laundry room.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:14:11Dax Shepard?

  Because now she'll be heavily incentivized to deal with the core problem.

• 1:14:15Speaker 11

  Unless foam doesn't bother her.

• 1:14:17Dax Shepard?

  Well, we'll find out.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  That's funny. That doesn't even cross my mind.

• 1:14:21Speaker 11

  Interesting. Because that's a very, I mean, your, what you did, Dax, is a very, you know, that's a very reciprocal type of view. And research shows that males are much more caught up in that.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:14:34Speaker 11

  Than women who, their empathy centers are more readily available. Males, it goes quiet. When there's, somebody does something wrong, males just go towards.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 11

  Revenge-seeking.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 1:14:46Dax Shepard?

  I agree.

• 1:14:46Speaker 11

  Correct. That's right.

• 1:14:47Dax Shepard?

  So I have to deal with this, and you should have to deal with it too. My hunch is, once you have to deal with it, you'll be motivated to fix it.

• 1:14:53Speaker 11

  Right.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  I don't have that. And I wouldn't want to sentence her with that.

• 1:14:56Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  I think I just.

• 1:14:58Speaker 11

  You don't want her to have the foam.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Say, oh, well.

• 1:15:01Dax Shepard?

  Which is basically what you've already done.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 11

  Which is actually something that does happen from time to time in these trials. As in, some people will stop at, right after the defendant has testified. They'll get some new insight by adopting the other view that was completely unexpected to them. And it'll be shocking to the person. They may find that they themselves were at fault.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:26Speaker 11

  Or that, you know, they understand at a very deep level why, and they might have done the same thing in the same circumstances.

• 1:15:32Dax Shepard?

  It is a workaround to force you out of attribution error. Because no one's gonna get on the stand and go, I did it because I'm a piece of shit. I did it because I'm a selfish monster. You have enough integrity, even in your own court trial, to know that no one would do that. So in the absence of that, you really have to fill in what they could possibly have been motivated by or what their explanation is and it will kind of

• 1:15:55Dax Shepard?

  inoculate you from attribution error.

• 1:15:58Speaker 11

  Right, and it also, I mean, what we find from the research is it will also reactivate if it wasn't your empathy.

• 1:16:06Dax Shepard?

  So a different part of your brain.

• 1:16:07Speaker 11

  It's a different part of your brain that was silent, like I was saying for males in particular.

• 1:16:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 11

  So it reactivates that.

• 1:16:13Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:13Speaker 11

  And you gain some new insight, but not for everyone and most of the trials go the whole way to the end.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19Speaker 11

  But some people will stop at the defendant's testimony or where you're at.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Speaker 11

  Here right now, it's sort of almost like it wants to be stopped because you really don't have a sense, you don't have a punishment.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:31Speaker 11

  But you did want to be heard.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  I did.

• 1:16:34Speaker 11

  And you got to be heard, didn't you?

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:16:36Speaker 11

  And you're holding them to account in the sense that they had to come and be put on trial.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Right, and I guess the sentence part is interesting because even though I still at the end, I'm like, yes, I think she is guilty of negligence as a landlord. But when it comes to sentencing, do I think that's worth a sentence?

• 1:16:55Speaker 11

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  It makes you start doing that, like, is that really worth a punishment?

• 1:17:01Speaker 11

  Right.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:02Speaker 11

  And in your case, because the case wasn't a super serious case. I mean, part of it's driven by the type of case that you just did.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Speaker 11

  If this was something, a romantic betrayal.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:13Speaker 11

  Like, I'm gonna be doing this next week on Dr. Phil with somebody who's lived through a romantic betrayal, like really bad.

• 1:17:21Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:21Speaker 11

  And there won't be

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:23Speaker 11

  an easy go through that.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Speaker 11

  You know, that's gonna be a seriously difficult thing because the pain of that betrayal.

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:17:39Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff, but there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left. What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working. Not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly is different. It's already right there. Inside your email, your docs, your browser, you don't go to it. It's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important? It flags what doesn't add up before

• 1:18:23Dax Shepard?

  it leaves your hands. It knows your style, your workflows, and it just backs you up without getting in the way. A thought partner that's already up to speed, at your service, not after your job. So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.

• 1:18:45Dax Shepard?

  From episode 932 with Chris Fiesel and Dave Mitchell.

• 1:18:52Speaker 12

  Here's the head of security for the Cali cartel. First he tells me, "Let's meet at Seattle, but come alone." I'm like, "I'm not coming alone. Are you crazy? I have to come with my partner." And then finally he says, "Okay, all right, come with your, you can come with your partner." And then he says, "No Colombians," right? Because he was one of the guys that was paying off a lot of the Colombians. So he knew about the corruption. Because if I see anybody who's even looks Colombian, the deal is off.

• 1:19:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Even if they brought you, Monica, you might as well. Yeah, too close. Too brown, yeah.

• 1:19:22Speaker 12

  So we're sitting there thinking like, "The head of security, the Cali cartel wants to meet us an hour outside of Cali, telling us to come alone, telling me to come alone, and not to bring any Colombians." And we're thinking like, "Dude, this could be a trap. This could be an ambush." We weren't sure what to expect. We're not even supposed to leave the base. And then here we are going to go meet this counterintelligence officer in the middle of a cane field, an hour outside of Cali. So it was, it was pretty, pretty hairy. I think we outlined that pretty well in the book, how we felt, because honestly, we were, we were pretty scared. Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 13

  It's funny when we're there. Everything's funny now. At the time, it wasn't. But I looked at Chris, I said, "Chris, have you ever seen that movie Onion Fields?" This could be our onion field.

• 1:20:02Speaker 12

  Why? What happened?

• 1:20:03Speaker 13

  Well, that actually happened in California.

• 1:20:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Speaker 12

  Oh, what happened?

• 1:20:07Speaker 13

  It's where some police officers were killed. And the onion field.

• 1:20:10Dax Shepard?

  And they made a movie about it. Uh, okay, so you meet with him and do you like him?

• 1:20:16Speaker 12

  He's not at all what we thought, right? And just to, just to backtrack a little bit, when he, he says, meet us at the cane field at 3 o'clock. Right, we get out there at 12, before 12, right? Cause we're terrified it's gonna be an ambush, or they're gonna set us up and try to kill us, or kidnap us, or whatever. So we're out there in this blistering heat, like, sitting around for 3 hours, waiting, but we had a good vantage point, so at least we can see Yeah. everything coming for a while, so if anybody came in, we were prepared and we were, we were pretty heavily armed, like I say, we, we looked like Neo in Trinity when they went into the government-controlled building to get Morpheus. We were loaded. But as we were there, we noticed, we didn't see anybody. Nobody came. Maybe this guy's for real. Yeah.

• 1:21:01Speaker 12

  And I think we all have preconceived notions, right? So, we're thinking, head of security for the Cali cartel, it's gonna be like a really bad guy.

• 1:21:08Dax Shepard?

  Something out of the movies.

• 1:21:09Speaker 12

  He's gonna, exactly, he's gonna look a certain way, he's gonna talk a certain way. And when we saw him, he was the exact opposite of what we thought, right? Came alone, he wasn't armed, you know, we made sure Davey had patted him down, we checked the car, we were still wary for a trap.

• 1:21:25Speaker 13

  And he said our names first, we went to introduce ourselves.

• 1:21:28Speaker 12

  Yeah, he knew who we were.

• 1:21:29Speaker 13

  That was a hard, that was a hard play for him.

• 1:21:32Speaker 12

  They knew.

• 1:21:33Speaker 13

  They knew everything about us. They had nicknames for us. We were called Los Monos.

• 1:21:39Dax Shepard?

  What is Los Monos?

• 1:21:40Speaker 13

  Los Monos is a monkey.

• 1:21:41Dax Shepard?

  A monkey?

• 1:21:42Speaker 13

  But what they would use it for is if somebody is bare-constructed.

• 1:21:47Speaker 12

  Like the gringos, where the gringos.

• 1:21:49Speaker 13

  The gringos that's born, they would call them Los Monos.

• 1:21:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's interesting, that's almost a universal racial slur.

• 1:21:55Speaker 12

  Yeah, for real.

• 1:21:57Speaker 13

  There's something comforting about that.

• 1:21:58Speaker 12

  That was what the cartel called us, they referred to us as the Monos, but, um, but he talked real softly, like, with a very low voice and very, like, the cadence.

• 1:22:08Dax Shepard?

  Was he even an imposing man, or was he just a normal?

• 1:22:10Speaker 12

  No, he was just very normal-looking, the clothes that he wore, the way he walked, like, not trying to make a sound or an impression, so I look at Davey, like... And this guy is like the exact opposite of everything that we that we thought. And then, of course, and the first thing he says to us is like, hey, this is gonna be a one-time meeting and it's gonna be real quick because I gotta get back to Cali because I'm on standby for him to go, the head of the cartel. But as we started to talk and go over things, we ended up being out there three hours that first meeting.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:22:38Speaker 12

  Until it got dark.

• 1:22:39Dax Shepard?

  Was your mind being blown? Were you learning things that were unimaginable?

• 1:22:42Speaker 13

  I absolutely was. You opened up the book.

• 1:22:44Speaker 12

  We learned more.

• 1:22:45Speaker 13

  We learned more in those three hours than.

• 1:22:46Speaker 12

  The whole year on the ground.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:48Speaker 13

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:49Dax Shepard?

  Can you remember one of the most shocking things you heard during that?

• 1:22:52Speaker 13

  Well, there's one thing I I looked at him, I said, hey, is I just need to know, is DEA a threat? He looked at me, just like a father would, and says, you and Chris, you work very hard.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Oh, so patronizing.

• 1:23:06Speaker 13

  No.

• 1:23:07Dax Shepard?

  He felt bad for you.

• 1:23:08Speaker 13

  You guys are hard workers, but no, DEA is not a threat, and this is why. He goes, you and Chris can go out, talk to anybody you want, gather information, intelligence, but at the end of the day, you don't have arrest powers, you have to deal with the Colombians, and that's where we got you.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:23:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it all unravels a second. You gotta get official.

• 1:23:30Speaker 12

  And by that point, we were very well aware of the systemic corruption that existed within not only the security forces, but in the government. But just talking to him and how plainly and how simply he would just put out that, oh, yeah, well, you can't deal with this person because he's corrupt and the cartel's paying that guy, and we paid this guy, and this and that. And it was it was staggering. It was overwhelming, the amount of corruption that we were dealing with.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Did you ask, why should we trust you?

• 1:23:58Speaker 12

  Well, we did. We talked all about that. But then, when we started to hear his story, right, and we talked about that, how he got involved into the cartel, and that he couldn't get out.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  I'd have such a hard time believing it.

• 1:24:10Speaker 13

  Really, you don't have a choice.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  I guess you're right.

• 1:24:13Dax Shepard?

  You don't have a choice. And then also, I think you'd be reasonable to conclude, it's not worth them fucking with us. As the as he said, you're not, they're not a threat. They don't have to be appeased. They could be ignored. Well, so why do this? They already know where you're at.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Unless they wanna kill, yeah.

• 1:24:30Dax Shepard?

  I would trust it because there's almost no incentive for them to be keeping an eye on you. They're already doing that.

• 1:24:36Speaker 12

  And plus, when we started to talk to him, and at that point, we were pretty well-versed on. On the cartel and what they were doing, but talking to him, he just took us to a whole another level. Yeah. We would ask a lot of questions that we knew the answers to. Mm-hmm. Just trying to vet him. Yeah. And he was basically doing the same thing to us, like, hey, you guys are kids, you're, you know, we were 30 years old at the time. Yeah. You know, and he's like, you guys are here trying to bring down the head of the Cali cartel, look at you guys. So he was like, how can I trust you? How do I know that you guys are gonna be able to handle it? You guys are delusional. Right?

• 1:25:05Speaker 13

  Yeah. And then he, then he asked us, he goes, listen, it's not only my life, but my family's life.

• 1:25:10Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Speaker 13

  So it's my family's life is in your hands.

• 1:25:13Speaker 12

  Oh.

• 1:25:13Speaker 13

  Can I trust you?

• 1:25:15Speaker 12

  It's like you see in these old movies where you, you push the wall and it opens. Yeah. Highly sophisticated. Wow. So he tells us, look, there's supposedly, is there a big red desk in the apartment? Because there's these really sensitive documents. So we're looking around for latches, we're pushing, we can't find shit. And then one of our, uh, partners who's there, Jerry Salome, he comes and he picks the desk up and he just turns it over and it smashes on the marble floor and it breaks open and in the back of the desk is a hidden compartment in a desk. Oh. How do you do that? With three, uh, three briefcases. Oh my god. And in these briefcases, check this out, this is staggering, are all these super sensitive files, corruption-related information, letters from the president's office, you

• 1:25:59Speaker 12

  know, about money that they had donated. And there was a list of, check this out, 2,800 corrupt officials. Oh my god. Just in those briefcases. 2,800. 2,800. Yeah, good luck finding the straight one. So we find that that buys us a little more time. Then he tells us, look, he's in this secret compartment in the bathroom. He's hiding, he's in the bathroom. He's there. So he's been there for the last 12 hours, right? How was he telling you this, on the phone? Well, we were going outside. Oh. You know, making phone calls. He was at a payphone. Oh my god. And we were at another phone about 100 yards away and we didn't even know, we didn't know we were that close. Oh my god. And then he would go back in and get more information to come out. As the head of security, he was able to get out and to relay, hey, I gotta go check

• 1:26:44Speaker 12

  on my guys, they're telling me this. So it didn't cause a lot of attention. So finally, there are like four bathrooms in the apartment. And we're knocking on walls, we're thinking, how the hell can there be a hidden compartment? In the bathroom.

• 1:26:59Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Speaker 12

  So finally, you know, we take measurements of the apartments below and above. We get the thing, we were in the bathroom, we go, this is smaller, this bathroom is smaller. This is the only one that doesn't make sense.

• 1:27:11Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Speaker 12

  And we opened the sink cabinet and it hits the toilet.

• 1:27:14Speaker 13

  Keep in mind, we're going days and days with hardly limited sleep.

• 1:27:17Speaker 12

  Oh yeah, we're exhausted.

• 1:27:19Speaker 13

  Yeah, okay, yeah.

• 1:27:20Speaker 12

  We're beyond exhausted.

• 1:27:21Speaker 13

  You're not at your best.

• 1:27:22Speaker 12

  We're not at our best, we're exhausted.

• 1:27:24Speaker 13

  Chris and I, we're in the restroom and we just, you know, you had the sink right here with the door right under it. And it doesn't open all the way, it hits the toilet. And we are so exhausted, we go, look at this, who would make something like this?

• 1:27:39Dax Shepard?

  You're just judgment of the construction.

• 1:27:41Speaker 13

  And then we realized, this is the car lot.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Speaker 13

  And then we saw a little yellow hose over it, this is it. And that's when we started doing drills.

• 1:27:49Dax Shepard?

  So you start drilling into the walls and you break three drill bits.

• 1:27:54Speaker 13

  Right.

• 1:27:55Dax Shepard?

  You run out of drill bits.

• 1:27:57Speaker 13

  Corrupt captain that was supposed to be our liaison, who was the main source for him. He grabbed me by the arm, this guy was literally in a panic. And he goes, who's your source? Who's your source?

• 1:28:09Speaker 12

  How do you know this?

• 1:28:09Speaker 13

  Now, how do you know this? Who's your source?

• 1:28:11Dax Shepard?

  None of your business, bitch.

• 1:28:13Speaker 13

  I said, no, there's some space not accounted for. And then, once we started drilling through the walls, he looked at, you know, the lawyers for the government and said, the Americans are doing... Yeah, prosecutors are doing unilateral action. So that's when they detained us.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:28:31Speaker 13

  Some say maybe arrested us, but...

• 1:28:34Dax Shepard?

  They got everyone out of there. And he escaped. They had drilled holes right next to him. He's, imagine his experience in the wall.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  He's just standing there like, oh my god.

• 1:28:43Dax Shepard?

  Listening to you guys bitch about the construction quality. Just wondering like, fuck are they gonna get out? I mean, I can't imagine what his body was feeling like.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just like dodging, like...

• 1:28:54Dax Shepard?

  In there, and now drills are coming through.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:28:56Speaker 13

  Yep.

• 1:29:12Speaker 12

  The prosecutor is getting this information that the Americans are conducting a unilateral operation. He comes in, shuts the entire operation down. We're within a minute of accessing this compartment. This is no lie. You couldn't have drawn it up any better in a movie script if you tried. We were literally a minute away from grabbing this guy. And the prosecutor came in, he shut it down, he brought us out to the living room, took the keys, locked the keys to the door, put them in his pocket, typed up a formal complaint against us, and then escorted us and made us leave the apartment. Just full corruption.

• 1:29:45Speaker 13

  Wow. And we said, can we leave? No. I said, so we're arrested. No, you're not arrested, so you just can't leave. All right. Yeah.

• 1:29:53Dax Shepard?

  From episode 958 with Andy Roddick. Okay, so but with your height, that has to be a part of your serve, right? Because the crazy part about your game was you had this insane serve.

• 1:30:09Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Dax Shepard?

  I like this detail of it. You had numerous different coaches over the years, and I do want to talk about that. I want to know how one, you're like, you got to break up with someone and hire someone. That's got to be a very stressful part of the experience. But as you hired coaches, your whole game was on the table except for the serve. The serve was to not be talked about, is that right?

• 1:30:31Speaker 14

  It was to not be talked about. It was, yeah, it was.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Proprietary.

• 1:30:35Dax Shepard?

  Were you afraid, were you superstitious about the serve?

• 1:30:37Speaker 14

  No, I just knew it backwards.

• 1:30:39Dax Shepard?

  You knew it backwards.

• 1:30:40Speaker 14

  I knew the cadence when it started, I knew this little three count that I had. There was, I knew the feelings of it, I knew what, more than they did. And I don't say that lightly, because we'll get to the coaches, and I was obviously always in pursuit of something new, something different, something additive, and also...

• 1:31:00Speaker 14

  Don't talk about my serve.

• 1:31:01Dax Shepard?

  Ever. Is the origin of it true that you got really frustrated at like 16 and you served in a weird way out of anger and it worked? Is that true?

• 1:31:09Speaker 14

  That's true. I was playing, um, my friend Marty Fish, who ended up being a really good player. Um, he was sixth in the world. And so we, we, we used to play at this, uh, basically all the kids who didn't get, um, picked by the, the federation, right? So the people not funded by US tennis anymore.

• 1:31:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:31:25Speaker 14

  Kind of the throwaways.

• 1:31:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 14

  Um, we played at, uh, Crystal Palms apartment complex in Florida.

• 1:31:30Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:31:31Speaker 14

  Uh, and there were like six of us and out of that group, a couple, you know, a couple of us made top, top five, top six in the world. But I was playing against Marty, who's really, really good and at that point better. Um, and just got pissed off and I have like this little half motion of boarded tears, but it's not conventional.

• 1:31:46Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:31:47Speaker 14

  Hit one irresponsibly out of anger.

• 1:31:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Speaker 14

  And it went in.

• 1:31:51Dax Shepard?

  Which by the way is the thing they tell you to never do in anything, right? Don't try to kill it. Don't try to crush it. Don't try. And you did. You're like, I'm gonna fucking murder this ball cause I hate it.

• 1:31:58Speaker 14

  And that was it. Had I won that day, had I, had I been playing, had I been doing well with Marty that day, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be here having this conversation.

• 1:32:07Dax Shepard?

  That's so crazy. And how do you, like, when you recognize it clicked, do you then think like, okay, how do I commit this whole thing to muscle memory? Like, I gotta.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Replicate.

• 1:32:16Dax Shepard?

  You just over and over again, you do it or what?

• 1:32:18Speaker 14

  Just started doing it and it was.

• 1:32:19Dax Shepard?

  And you didn't have to overthink it?

• 1:32:21Speaker 14

  It was immediately, well, a lot of the muscles building, like your shoulder still goes over. It's just your feet is, it was different, but it was like, it, there was no time. And it literally took you, it, it went from, and there were some other things that needed to be adjusted, but yeah, I mean, you literally figured it out. And then the year before you're 40 or 50 in the world in juniors, which sounds good, but that means you're going to college.

• 1:32:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 14

  And then four months later it was.

• 1:32:42Dax Shepard?

  You're number one in Florida.

• 1:32:43Speaker 14

  One signed a rebuck deal.

• 1:32:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay. So this, uh, one thing I just want to end on with your serve, which I find is just so incredible. So you, you had the record for the fastest serve in history at 155 miles an hour. It has been beaten, but it's still only at 156.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:33:01Dax Shepard?

  That's so massive, like the service described in many of the things I was reading as unreturnable.

• 1:33:07Speaker 14

  Well, to most, except for these, the Avengers that came on the road through career, but um yeah, I mean, I wasn't a natural tennis player. I was like a work guy, but I could throw it. That was it.

• 1:33:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:19Speaker 14

  Like I could make your life uncomfortable for a little bit.

• 1:33:21Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you, you win um the 2003 US Open. Um, you are...

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  I'm dying to go to the US Open. No one will invite me.

• 1:33:30Speaker 14

  Let's do it.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33:31Speaker 14

  Whenever.

• 1:33:31Dax Shepard?

  You just have to be a guest on his podcast.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Invite me and then let's...

• 1:33:35Dax Shepard?

  You have to pay, you have to, you know, earn your way.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  I have to earn my way.

• 1:33:38Speaker 14

  You don't even have to do that.

• 1:33:39Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  I wanna go.

• 1:33:42Dax Shepard?

  I know why you wanna go.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  I wanna try the, that honey, honeydews.

• 1:33:47Dax Shepard?

  That's a cocktail?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Speaker 14

  It's, they basically invented a signature cocktail like that everyone pretends like has been around for a hundred years.

• 1:33:54Dax Shepard?

  Like a mint julep.

• 1:33:55Speaker 14

  They fucking put it in like eight years ago. It's not, have you had a honeydews to the US Open? It's like, no, because they didn't fucking have when I was playing. It's a made up thing.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  But it's a real...

• 1:34:03Speaker 14

  It's genius, though.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  I don't know. I never had one.

• 1:34:06Dax Shepard?

  You gotta buy it to find out.

• 1:34:07Speaker 14

  No, a little chambray, lemonade, Grey Goose, and Sprite.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want that.

• 1:34:13Dax Shepard?

  I'll make you one and serve it on a fact check.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  At the US Open, and then also...

• 1:34:17Speaker 14

  She wants to overpay for it.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:34:21Dax Shepard?

  You can't imagine how well you know her. You literally know everything you need to know about a go with a sentence.

• 1:34:26Speaker 14

  It doesn't taste as good if you don't pay $28 for it.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  It doesn't. And if it doesn't have those little melon balls on there. Yeah, that's really cool.

• 1:34:33Speaker 14

  My favorite thing about that is they have these cups with like, you know, they have their, the honeydews cups that have all the winners on them. It's like, oh my God, I know, but I know I paid $30, but I got this.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Souvenir cup.

• 1:34:43Speaker 14

  I got a free cup. It's worth $0.75. So I won.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want that. I want that. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that.

• 1:34:49Dax Shepard?

  I saved thousands by getting this.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Well, also the US Open's gotten so cool, like everyone goes...

• 1:34:56Dax Shepard?

  It's definitely a social event.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  It's the Met Ball.

• 1:34:59Dax Shepard?

  It's the Met Ball of sports.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's really, I do really, really wanna go.