Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing) About this episode Rebecca Lemov (The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion) is a historian of science, author, and professor at Harvard. Rebecca joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the meet cute with her husband at the cafe where she was struggling to write her dissertation, how she fell under a romantic spell with anthropology as well as opioids, and the relationship between addiction and brainwashing. Rebecca and Dax talk about how Patty Hearst used brainwashing as a defense for her actions, why it's such an effective mind control tactic to strip someone of their name, and how Korean War soldiers’ health and wellness bounce back after trauma hid evidence of their suffering. Rebecca explains the normalization of brutal torture training of troops, that cult leaders intuitively act out a guidebook of hierarchical dynamics of desire and power, and Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion as an example of soft brainwashing.
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Transcript 22,094 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Leslie Stahl.
0:07 Speaker 01 And we're all brainwashed.
0:09 Dax Shepard? And we've been brainwashed. Our guest today is Rebecca Lemov. She's a historian of science at Harvard University and her research explores data.
0:20 Speaker 01 Hmm.
0:21 Dax Shepard? Trying to change my, the way I say data.
0:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, cuz now.
0:25 Dax Shepard? It's wrong.
0:26 Speaker 01 Are you sure?
0:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, every scientist we have says data cuz it's D A T A. If it was data, it'd be two Ts or even D A D D A.
0:35 Speaker 01 Data.
0:37 Dax Shepard? Data. Uh, okay. Explors data, technology and the history of human and behavioral sciences. She's written a bunch about a database of dreams, how reason.
0:49 Speaker 01 You did it wrong.
0:51 Dax Shepard? What part did I do wrong?
0:51 Speaker 01 Database.
0:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, database?
0:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, see?
0:55 Dax Shepard? Doesn't sound right. Database of dreams, how reason almost lost its mind, world as laboratory. Her new book, that's what we're here to talk about. It's very tasty. The instability of truth, brainwashing, mind control and hyper persuasion.
1:11 Speaker 01 This is wild. It's scary and it's good.
1:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's very, very scary and very good. And I'd love the history of where all this stuff was kind of discovered and workshopped.
1:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, it's not, no one's, I mean, obviously some people stumbled in, but it's calc, a lot of this is very calculated.
1:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they learned how to do this at a certain point.
1:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, as you'll hear.
1:33 Dax Shepard? So please enjoy Rebecca Lemov. We get support from Quince.
1:40 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself. Cuz let's be honest, self gifting is a love language.
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2:15 Speaker 01 It's the dream. The cashmere sweater starting at $60, down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories. You and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.
2:26 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm gonna tell you this, it just got chilly for the first time this year in California and I'm so excited and I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.
2:33 Speaker 01 It's great.
2:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.
2:38 Speaker 01 Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here and it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.
3:01 Dax Shepard? Give the gift of quality this holiday season. 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 Gusto. So here's the thing about running a small business that nobody romanticizes. It's not the big idea that wears you down, it's the payroll, the tax filings, the wait, do I need workers comp for this stuff? That's the part that quietly eats away your whole afternoon, which is where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses.
3:46 Dax Shepard? It's all in one, remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay onboard and support your team from anywhere. They handle automatic tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, 401k, all of it. And you get unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. If something tricky comes up, you've got direct access to certified HR experts who actually know what they're talking about. And they're ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and trusted by over 500,000 small businesses. That's not nothing. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/dax and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/dax. Again, that's gusto.com/dax.
4:52 Speaker 01 We had a guest this morning and Dax is wearing that shirt, but it was inside out on accident.
4:58 Dax Shepard? Which Monica pointed out to me once we left.
5:00 Speaker 01 Well, I didn't notice it till it was way too far in any way.
5:04 Dax Shepard? Really past the point of return.
5:06 Speaker 01 What was really funny is I kept looking at your shirt. One, I was like, I've never seen it. It's new.
5:10 Dax Shepard? Great, novel.
5:11 Speaker 01 And two, I have a shirt very similar. So I was like, oh, it looks like my Elizabethan shirt. I think he's stretching it out.
5:19 Speaker 02 Took a while.
5:20 Dax Shepard? She didn't recognize it.
5:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:22 Dax Shepard? You're back in California.
5:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:24 Dax Shepard? How often do you come?
5:25 Speaker 02 Pretty often. Partly my husband's family lives here.
5:28 Dax Shepard? Did you guys meet in college?
5:29 Speaker 02 We met afterwards, but in Oakland. I was struggling to write my dissertation and he was working at the cafe where I was struggling.
5:35 Speaker 01 Me cute.
5:37 Speaker 02 It really was. There was a mixtape involved.
5:39 Dax Shepard? Yes, and he was heavily tipped during the dot com bubble, but then it collapsed and then the tips dried up.
5:45 Speaker 02 Very true. It was a version of Cheers, but with coffee, where people would just come to gather around and chat with him.
5:50 Speaker 01 Fine.
5:51 Speaker 02 Because he had that kind of air about him, but I was so involved in trying to write that I would sneak by and hide behind the jukebox.
5:58 Speaker 01 You were playing hard to get.
5:59 Dax Shepard? You just had to wait for him to approach you.
6:01 Speaker 02 It was unlikely we would ever meet, actually.
6:03 Dax Shepard? How did you?
6:04 Speaker 02 I think I made a comment that I liked the music he was playing.
6:07 Dax Shepard? On the jukebox?
6:08 Speaker 02 Maybe it was through the jukebox. Yeah, Desmond Decker. And then he offered to make me a mixtape.
6:13 Dax Shepard? Whoa, hold on, that's a huge first swing.
6:15 Speaker 02 Or a tape of this.
6:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
6:17 Speaker 02 But it was a handmade tape and then inside he wrote his number, but then he erased it and hoped that I would call him, although it was non-existent.
6:25 Speaker 01 Oh, that you'd have to look.
6:26 Dax Shepard? Or take charcoal and tissue paper.
6:28 Speaker 01 He's playing a game here.
6:30 Speaker 02 Various detective methods, but instead somehow we ended up meeting. He was going to give me a photography lesson.
6:36 Dax Shepard? Another great hack. Mixtape photographer. If he does use like great at foot massage, you're like, okay.
6:42 Speaker 02 That's actually true.
6:45 Speaker 01 That's lovely.
6:47 Speaker 02 I hadn't really thought about how cliche written that story is, but yes.
6:51 Dax Shepard? But that's the nature of love. It is all cliche. And then it feels very special and unique to you, and that's what's so sweet.
6:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's really true.
6:57 Dax Shepard? So that means you guys have been together for twenty-five years?
7:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:00 Dax Shepard? So embarrassingly, you were graduating from graduate school in the same year I graduated from undergrad, but I imagine I'm older than you, so I think you must have boogied.
7:09 Speaker 02 Maybe not.
7:10 Dax Shepard? I was born in seventy-five.
7:11 Speaker 02 I was born in sixty-six.
7:13 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God, you look incredible.
7:14 Speaker 02 Oh, thank you.
7:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:16 Speaker 01 You do look great.
7:16 Dax Shepard? I don't know if you're supposed to comment on professors' looks, but I guess you're human.
7:19 Speaker 01 I don't either, but I always like a compliment.
7:20 Speaker 02 I accept a compliment under any conditions.
7:22 Speaker 01 There you go, yeah.
7:23 Dax Shepard? Where are you from originally?
7:24 Speaker 02 I was born in New York City, but grew up in Washington DC or the outskirts.
7:29 Dax Shepard? Okay, and then now you're in Boston. So you've really done the tri-state.
7:32 Speaker 02 And we lived in Seattle. My daughter was born in Seattle. That's where I started teaching. That's where I actually taught my first class on brainwashing.
7:39 Dax Shepard? And then why Berkeley? Did you fancy yourself an antisocial misfit? Or just they had the best program?
7:45 Speaker 02 Well, after I graduated from college at Yale, everyone I knew seemed to be heading across the country. I saw people I knew on I-80.
7:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, you did? Other graduates?
7:55 Speaker 02 Like midway through the country, others fleeing the East Coast. But when I tell students today, I make a joke about going to California to find myself, they don't know what I'm talking about.
8:03 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
8:04 Dax Shepard? Like that reference doesn't mean anything?
8:05 Speaker 02 It doesn't mean anything.
8:05 Speaker 01 Oh, no. That's probably sad for us.
8:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's why our population's declining and everyone else's is on the rise.
8:12 Speaker 02 Maybe you go to California to take a job in tech.
8:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, not to go surfing and drop acid and get countercultural.
8:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I was already living there, and then I applied to several graduate schools. Well, I got interested in anthropology.
8:25 Dax Shepard? How could you not?
8:26 Speaker 02 I thought, why not just think of the most interesting thing you could study and the most interesting questions you could ask? Surely it's anthropology. I originally went to study ethnobotany, which I thought of in a kind of Carlos Castaneda way.
8:38 Dax Shepard? Meaning expand your mind kind of way?
8:40 Speaker 02 But then ethnobotany, it turns out, the way they were studying at UC Berkeley was highly technical, and it involved cognitive networks and taxonomies.
8:48 Dax Shepard? What's your story of why you were so drawn to brainwashing?
8:51 Speaker 02 Well, it did happen during graduate school, so I finally ended Started up studying something like the history of the social sciences because I got interested in questions about why people do the things they do or how free are we really, or to what extent people can be controlled. And that's kind of a cultural question. One of the reasons I got drawn to brainwashing is that we became enamored of this kind of French post-structural theory. And not that there's anything necessarily wrong with these writers, but just the way it was treated was a bit cultish. People weaving the books around and trying to find this ultimate meaning. And I found it transformed the way I was writing. And I became very proud of writing highly complicated things, just at the very edge of being understood.
9:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Probably more often not understood.
9:33 Speaker 02 And then I would be kind of proud. Oh, that must mean it's very smart.
9:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm not even sure if I get it.
9:38 Speaker 02 Exactly. The thing you're not supposed to say. I proudly showed this to a friend who was a journalist. And he said, this doesn't sound like you. And I just remember that moment later, I thought, was there an element of something like brainwashing, even though it's very mild?
9:51 Dax Shepard? Or you fell under a romantic spell.
9:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was kind of a spell.
9:54 Dax Shepard? I think that's the journey of finding your identity in some way is you fall under the spell of these different things. And then they stick or they don't.
10:01 Speaker 02 Filed under youthful enthusiasm or just enthusiasm, which is kind of a good thing. And then the other part of it was I also fell into a kind of bad spell, addiction and an abusive relationship.
10:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
10:13 Speaker 01 Wow, you guys share anthropology and addiction. That's a lot of crossover.
10:18 Dax Shepard? We would have had so much fun.
10:20 Speaker 02 Indeed.
10:21 Dax Shepard? If you know what I mean, asking, what was your flavor of addiction?
10:23 Speaker 02 It was hard drugs, opioids. So I kind of fell into this because I found myself in just a impossible emotional situation. And a friend had shown me how to use this. I felt that it alleviated my emotional burden. It was such a relief. And I thought, this is just a great invention.
10:39 Dax Shepard? Especially opiates, they have the illusion of manageability because you can function. It's not like you're inebriated drunk and you can't do anything.
10:47 Speaker 02 And then I found someone who was a link to that or could purvey these things. So I fell into a relationship with him. And that compounded the whole situation. You know, it started off just weekends and kind of seemed manageable. I wouldn't have used the word functional, but I probably thought that I was functional. But after a couple of years. I lost friends and I lost touch with a lot of my family and has found myself very isolated.
11:10 Dax Shepard? So a good two years of that opioid hole.
11:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:13 Dax Shepard? How were you able to quit?
11:15 Speaker 02 I feel daily fortunate that I was able to because it just becomes so much a reality that you don't think you're gonna be able to get out or you don't even think you deserve to.
11:24 Dax Shepard? It's its own brainwashing, right? It alters your brain in a very significant way and you can actually not even see any longer.
11:30 Speaker 02 I remember a moment where I thought, could I go out today? Do I actually deserve to see this on?
11:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
11:36 Speaker 01 The deserving piece is so heartbreaking.
11:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I had one friend I continued to see who's really wonderful and we went out for coffee and she said something like, I just wanted to observe that your boyfriend walks around like he's smarter than you, better looking and funnier, but he's not any of those things and he acts like he has his foot on your neck all the time and that was very shocking to me.
11:56 Speaker 01 Did you feel like that in the relationship, like this person's so much better than me?
12:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I felt he was very accomplished and also I was kind of scared of him.
12:05 Dax Shepard? Did he feel familiar?
12:07 Speaker 02 Probably.
12:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, or he felt aspirational and also kind of scary. I felt like he could tell me truths about myself that I had always needed to know. I mean, there are ways that these dark relationships have a cult-like element to them. And when I went to travel, the spell would break. This also happened.
12:22 Speaker 01 Interesting.
12:23 Speaker 02 And it would just be like it lifted.
12:25 Dax Shepard? It's so cult-like, these really, really controlling relationships and even the strategies of separating you from your friends and all your support network. And then, yeah, I was even thinking, did you watch Couples Therapy by chance?
12:35 Speaker 02 I've watched a bit of it and I really like it.
12:37 Dax Shepard? It's incredible. And then this one woman, and I won't use names because I don't want to get sued, but one woman is with a bona fide narcissist. And when she's explaining what they're going through to Orna, you can see that Orna's presence anchors her back into reality in a way that she's hearing what she's saying almost with an entirely new lens and realizing, oh yeah, this motherfucker's crazy.
13:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can remove yourself from being inside of it for a second when there's someone there who's just a third party. I mean, that's why therapy is so effective.
13:09 Dax Shepard? You have to consider how this person's hearing the story.
13:11 Speaker 01 Exactly.
13:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, just being there to either witness it or give. Have you some sort of feedback can be this miraculous thing?
13:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, first of all, you're a professor of the history of science, which again, that's a discipline made up by Harvard. Yeah.
13:24 Speaker 02 Exactly. It first existed at Harvard.
13:26 Dax Shepard? I wasn't even aware that that was a discipline. But as I read the description, I'm like, oh, I love that. I think I'd be very interested in that.
13:32 Speaker 02 I think anyone who studies or is interested in the kind of questions anthropology asks would like history of science too, because it kind of asks similar questions and it's infinitely interesting.
13:41 Dax Shepard? And am I right that a lot of the question is like, how do we know what we know? And how do we trust what we know in a sense? Is that a common exploration in that?
13:50 Speaker 02 Yeah. Also, how does science gain its authority? What is the nature of scientific truth? I mean, it really asks big questions. And then, of course, as with any field, people get very specialized. But it's all kinds of interesting sub questions because we have history of medicine. And I do history of behavioral sciences, which is more unusual.
14:07 Dax Shepard? Okay, so let's start with, well, before we start that, I do want to ask, two hours a day of meditation?
14:12 Speaker 02 Well, at least two hours.
14:13 Dax Shepard? At least two hours.
14:15 Speaker 01 Were you meditating when we came in?
14:16 Speaker 02 I was.
14:17 Speaker 01 I know. I felt kind of.
14:19 Speaker 02 It's just like a little moment.
14:20 Speaker 01 That's great.
14:21 Dax Shepard? I do that before I have to go on stage or anything like that.
14:24 Speaker 02 I know. I was thinking, I can review my notes. A little part of you wants to be like, what is in my book?
14:29 Dax Shepard? Yes.
14:29 Speaker 02 It's much better time use to just observe your sensations. So a great gift that came after this whole dark episode was learning to meditate and just having that practice. And I have kept it up two hours a day. I've never missed a day since 2000.
14:43 Speaker 01 Wow.
14:44 Speaker 02 Except the three days my daughter was being born.
14:46 Dax Shepard? The three days.
14:47 Speaker 01 That's fair.
14:47 Speaker 02 2002. Yeah, like I was busy laboring.
14:51 Dax Shepard? Will you do an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening generally?
14:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, I do the same kind that Yuval Noah Harari does, just because I saw that he was on your show.
14:57 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. We just love him.
14:58 Speaker 02 Knowing what it was like not having that practice, I just never don't want to. And I get to choose to do it.
15:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And your family knows not to?
15:06 Speaker 02 Well, when my daughter was little, I mean, I adapted to my life circumstances. So for 10 years, I would hold her hand while she was falling asleep and I'd be meditating or holding her when she was a baby. But that would be the nighttime one, just to be flexible about it. Because life doesn't always give you an hour.
15:21 Dax Shepard? When brainwashing has been studied in the past, I guess you kind of like. Two methodologies, the analyst and the actor. Can you break that down for us?
15:32 Speaker 02 These are methods from the history of science that I borrowed to apply to brainwashing. So with a topic that's as complex as brainwashing, you do have many definitions and philosophical questions and many directions you could go. You can use the actor's category, which really means just look at how people were using the word, how your actors were using it. And if your actors are scientific figures, then also look at how they're using it, even though they're also using it to analyze. So it's kind of a combination.
15:58 Speaker 01 Can we get an example?
15:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, so one of the main figures in my book is this psychiatrist named Louis Jolyon West, whose papers I've been visiting for 16 years now. So I feel like I kind of know him. He was one of the most prominent brainwashing experts. And he said many different things about brainwashing. One pivotal moment is he was called to the stand at the Patty Hearst trial, which was framed as a brainwashing trial.
16:20 Dax Shepard? That was the defense, right? For Stockholm Center, is that the first time we heard that?
16:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, she never embraced that term and the legal team never used it. But people have applied that. Brainwashing was a term that her lawyer did try to use in her defense. And they brought forward the most prominent experts in the world to make the case that she had not been responsible for her actions.
16:40 Dax Shepard? And for people that don't know, she was kidnapped. She lived with this far-left wing terrorist group for a while. They end up robbing a bank and she participated in the robbery.
16:48 Speaker 02 It's also relevant that she was kidnapped from her apartment and held in a closet for about 70 days.
16:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
16:54 Speaker 02 And blindfolded and subjected to the reading of Maoist tracts and raped and horrors beyond what you could imagine.
17:00 Dax Shepard? Ungrounded, as you would say.
17:01 Speaker 02 She was ungrounded. So these experts from the Korean War, who had been military experts, were called to examine her and they saw parallels to what had happened. But anyway, so the moment when Louis Jolyon West takes the stand, the prosecutor asks him, what do you mean by brainwashing? And he says, well, actually, it's not a very scientific term. But what I really mean is, and he kind of starts to ramble on a little bit and say it's coercive persuasion, but the judge cuts him off and says, could you get to the point, Dr. West? At that moment, it seems like the case that Patty Hearst was trying to advance. Was last minutes into his testimony because he was saying it doesn't have medical or scientific authority, but just methodologically looking at that moment and seeing how
17:44 Speaker 02 the term appeared in public and it was rejected by the public as something that made sense. So it allows me to follow these threads through the book and it gave me some organizing principles.
17:55 Dax Shepard? But the actor analyst would be, if I'm getting this right, anyone that's studying something else, they might be confident in just their observations without ever really asking what the personal experience and point of view of the person being studied is and incorporating that aspect.
18:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a good way to put it, too. So many people are tempted to stick to an analyst point of view or look at how to analyze a phenomenon that's very complicated, but it's almost giving credence to the actors themselves and how they interacted even with ideas.
18:26 Dax Shepard? Even the Jonathan Haidt moral dumbfounding things, they're going to be as provocative as possible. When you learn cultural relativism and anthropology, the one that they're going to hit you with every time is infanticide among Inuits, right, that they had some practice of killing firstborn daughters. And so if you were to only just observe this practice and make a conclusion, you would never have learned from the actor, well, a boy has to hunt for us to feed us as we get old. So first we have to have that. When that's secured, we can now afford, like you would never have learned even what the rationale behind it all was. I think it's a very generous and respectful thing to assume the person you're studying has a total rhyme and reason for what they're doing, that they're not doing something completely void of any logic.
19:11 Speaker 02 Exactly. And that's interesting in itself.
19:13 Dax Shepard? So this one will be even harder to explain, but you say the other superpower is second order observer.
19:18 Speaker 02 I borrowed it from this sociologist named Nicholas Luman, but what I mean by it is the idea of observing your observers. So after you've gone in and tried to see from the point of view of people involved, even if they're experts, they're also your actors, then you pull back and try to observe the system itself.
19:34 Dax Shepard? Is this a good example? I always think of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Initially, they think they're studying the students who have gotten too much authority and abuse it quickly and abuse these. People, but then if you pull back further, you have to acknowledge that the constructor of the actual experiment is himself.
19:52 Speaker 01 Philip Zimbardo.
19:53 Dax Shepard? Nice.
19:54 Speaker 01 Nice.
19:55 Dax Shepard? This has been.
19:56 Speaker 01 It's been a lot of us trying to remember.
19:58 Dax Shepard? We're getting it wrong most often, and then finally it's cemented.
20:01 Speaker 02 Actually, I think there might be more than a second order observer, but you can keep pulling back the frame, as you're saying.
20:06 Dax Shepard? That he himself, Zimbardo, was a victim of the exact same behavior he was observing and trying to understand because he himself had elevated his authority and detachment from everything.
20:16 Speaker 02 This makes my husband very upset, actually, because he feels that Zimbardo should not have taken credit for this brilliant experiment and profited off it when he basically became part of the experiment. But he does say that.
20:27 Speaker 01 He acknowledges it.
20:28 Speaker 02 He acknowledges it, yeah.
20:29 Speaker 01 Then everyone becomes part of it. If you are the analyst, you also are entering in. And then where do you break off? Or we're all just a part of everything?
20:38 Dax Shepard? It's also a law of physics, which is if you observe light, depending on how you observe it, it's either a particle or it's a.
20:46 Speaker 02 Wave.
20:47 Dax Shepard? A wave, thank you. And that can change depending on the observation of it. So certainly, brainwashing has existed probably since humans have been humans. But we get kind of aware of it from the Korean War. Is that where we start really trying to study it, understand it?
21:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's when it actually has a moment when it enters the English language. Edward Hunter, who was an operative and journalist who worked for the OSS in China in the 1930s, started collecting a lot of examples of propaganda and observing what he thought was this new weapon that communists had as they rose to power.
21:21 Dax Shepard? At that time, would we not say it would be propaganda?
21:24 Speaker 02 Exactly. There is a distinction. He had that background as an expert in propaganda, but he starts to talk about brainwashing right before the Korean War. Around the time that this famous incident was that Cardinal Min Zenti, who was a Polish high level priest and religious hero and just national treasure. He was arrested in 1948. He disappeared for 28 days and nobody knew what happened to him, but he was taken by the secret police of Hungary. And then he came back and he looked like a shadow of himself, like a gray puppet. And he was paraded before the newsreel. Cameras and he confessed to these outrageous crimes that he couldn't even have possibly committed. Like he had stolen religious artifacts and he said he had taken money from the church. And even though he'd left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say. Oh my god.
22:07 Speaker 02 When I come back, yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he was a trophy for these new communist governments. Like an announcement that we can do this. And he did return to himself within a couple of years. And he said, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person.
22:24 Dax Shepard? And you say, yeah, becoming someone else was alarming enough. But the nightmarish part was that you had no ability to recognize that this had happened. So even scarier than becoming different is you wouldn't have even noticed it.
22:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, that first part without knowing. So within 28 days, fairly fast. And then he also revealed what had happened to him, although I didn't have full memory of it.
22:44 Dax Shepard? And if you think of your stereotype of someone susceptible to this type of thing, it's not a leader in the church who's got charisma and all these people skills and a great education and all these other tropes we think would inoculate you from this.
22:57 Speaker 02 A hero to his people and he knew what was coming. He knew that there was a possible threat to himself. So he could have been prepared or he probably did try to prepare himself. But one interesting thing about it, he said, he thinks he was drugged and he was pushed around. He was not a young man and he was sleep deprived. But one of the things that struck me was that he recalled that he was stripped of his clerical robes and he was made to wear a clown costume. And he kind of had to crawl. And so there were these status-based humiliations.
23:26 Dax Shepard? Also a quite literal stripping of someone's identity.
23:28 Speaker 02 Exactly. Yeah, well, it's often the case that removal even of someone's name is very effective. Like in the Stanford prison experiments, one of the first things they do is the guards only refer to the prisoners as numbers. It's very effective.
23:40 Dax Shepard? How much were people doing brainwashing things that they didn't even know they were doing? So like a longstanding tradition is to shave all of the cadets' heads. That's part of it. You're actually stealing their identity from them. How calculated was it or some of these things just naturally happened?
23:55 Speaker 02 I think it's often not calculated, which is kind of surprising. Because it follows a seemingly ironclad series of steps. But people seem to invent it spontaneously in some cases. Like in the case of Patty Hearst, we were just talking about the guy who was in charge of her abduction and re-education. He kept asking her, you're not brainwashed, are you? Because he wanted to believe that she was truly converted to his cause, that it wasn't that she had been, you know, not allowed to go to the bathroom and she had been raped. For him, it had to be real. He was also, I guess, in it.
24:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, definitely.
24:26 Speaker 02 And you can see that with Cardinal Mencetti. I mean, there was a Soviet method that was borrowed by the Hungarian police. And there's a long history of what they say in pulp fiction, getting medieval on your, like, there are ways to unmake someone. That seemed to be part of the human repertoire. But what was different, maybe in the middle of the 20th century, is that psychiatrists and sociologists and experts would choreograph it sometimes. And then in the US, they actually responded to this crisis by
24:54 Dax Shepard? Outdevelop their opponent.
24:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, weaponize it.
24:56 Dax Shepard? So I guess I didn't know a lot of this, which is shameful, but you do a great job of painting a picture of what the Korean War was, which was initially, it was called a police action. These young kids went, one of the main characters in your book is a 17 year old boy who's in 11th grade. And he signs up before his senior year and he goes over there thinking he's a part of a police mission. They arrive, they are using all the equipment from World War II. They don't have any new guns, new tanks, new anything. Things are breaking, helicopters are falling apart. The enemy has all new Russian stuff because they're backed by Russia by proxy of China. So they're getting slaughtered and outgunned and their full sense of what an American is at that point is starting to really fracture.
25:39 Dax Shepard? Like, we're supposed to be indomitable. We're supposed to have the highest tech, everything. And all these young guys end up as prisoners of war. Tell us about the Tiger March. That was particularly grueling.
25:50 Speaker 02 Almost the definition of brutal. So the Tiger Death March, thousands of US soldiers, when they were captured, they were marched north and stayed overnight in these kind of series of impromptu camps, sometimes in old mines and sometimes in ramshackle buildings. It was under the oversight of a commander nicknamed Tiger. And sometimes when they walked along these mountain roads, he would just push soldiers off.
26:13 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
26:14 Dax Shepard? They're all completely malnourished. They have zero energy. They're already physically quite diminished. They don't have the right gear. It's freezing.
26:21 Speaker 02 And they were joined by some civilians on this march because there were monks and nuns and missionaries who were being captured in Korea, who had been serving in churches, seen as enemies. So they were being marched too. So during this march, soldiers, even though they were emaciated, sometimes they'd lost half their body weight. They would try to help one of their compatriots or a civilian. There was a nun named Mother Beatrix, I think, and she was in her 80s and she was struggling, of course. And the North Korean soldier said, just leave her. We'll take her in the cart. And then they heard gunshots and never saw her again. Other times, soldiers would just drop dead along the road because they couldn't take another step. So it was one of the most grueling and demoralizing. A missionary who had passed by them on a train
27:04 Speaker 02 said he couldn't recognize them as American soldiers.
27:07 Dax Shepard? And when they made it after these long marches and they got in these camps, then the camps were often even more brutal. They would have thought, once the walking was done. Long story short, it's all really, really heartbreaking and worth learning about. But at the end of all this, there are 21 of these guys who go through this process, who choose to stay in China and take on Korean wives, have children. They do get completely converted to some degree. And there's a process by which they do it. And I wonder, we get into now Mao Zedong. He is the leader of China and he has something called the method or re-education or thought reform. And it has a very predictable and formatted approach,
27:52 Dax Shepard? which is discussion, criticism and unity. So take us from these guys who are in these camps. As you would say, ungrounded. I think it's worthwhile to explain what ungrounded is.
28:03 Speaker 02 I like to think of it as a series of successive shocks to the point of disorientation or sometimes utter demoralization. So again, your expectations are not met, to say the least. And the soldiers had been told, you'll be home by Thanksgiving. And instead, they're being marched north. They're in the camps. Men would die in the camps initially when the North Koreans were running them, before the Chinese took over. They would die just by falling in the latrine and not having the strength to get out, which was a pit. And then seeing your compatriots die that way, sometimes they were also bombed by the US, sometimes napalmed by their own side. So it was destabilizing of sense of faith in one's own nation. But sometimes they would also just die overnight. They were living with corpses.
28:45 Speaker 02 So this prepares the way for a more targeted ideological remolding, which is what happened. And then, interestingly enough, I learned this at a conference a few years ago by the scholar named Amanda Smith, who specializes in Chinese history, that people who know about this consistently underestimate the extent to which the POWs were subjected. It was kind of an experiment that Mao was running. He wanted to see if the method he used on Chinese people would also work on American GIs and officers.
29:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because the method was designed to treat peasants one way and landowners and landlords another way. It was a very rigid prescription. And his conclusion was, well, these infantrymen are the peasants, right? They're not the landowners. The generals are the landowners, so they would receive those two different approaches.
29:32 Speaker 02 Exactly.
29:33 Dax Shepard? But it's really interesting, the discussion part, this kind of re-education or the method would start with urging these people over and over again for a very, very long time to journal their life story. And in some fascinating way, none of these people had experienced therapy prior to this. This wasn't a thing people did. So this is like a very unique experience. And comforting versus what they had just experienced. Because when you're journaling, you get to sit next to a still. So there's these little incentives along the way. And through the telling of your story over and over and over again, you then get into a zone of criticism. And this is where you have to defend your nation's ethics, how they treat black people. That was a big issue they would remind everyone of.
30:16 Dax Shepard? And they're now putting you in a position to have to defend your story or your identity or your sense of reality. And then lastly is unity. And now they're going to explain this other way of thinking that is so much more beneficial and so much more collaborative and helpful.
30:33 Speaker 02 One example, this isn't from the Camps themselves, but from a reeducation center that a Western doctor was subjected to. So he was seen as more elite. So I think it was more brutal in a way. He was chained and brutally interrogated. But one thing, as he slept at night, if he moved around, because he was in a small cell with 10 to 12 people, they called it capitalist expansion. He had to justify just sleeping or moving.
30:55 Dax Shepard? Man spreading.
30:57 Speaker 01 Oh my God.
30:58 Dax Shepard? This is the earliest version of man spreading.
31:02 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
31:09 Dax Shepard? This episode is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8.
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32:03 Dax Shepard? Every bite is accounted for. Someone engineered this thing with love. I love a Quarter Pounder.
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32:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the love. Don't tell anyone this, but I'll put two of them back.
32:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm not surprised.
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34:05 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about how November is basically survival mode between the holidays, the travel, the hosting, the cooking, the everything? Sleep is the one thing keeping me from completely unraveling.
34:16 Dax Shepard? It really is the foundation. And I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.
34:27 Speaker 01 That was me before Helix. I took their sleep quiz, which is so fast. It took me like two minutes and they matched me to a mattress that actually fits how I sleep. Not a guess, not a firm or soft coin flip. It's a real match. I have a midnight mattress and I really like it. I was noticing it because I actually had to sleep in one of my other beds.
34:44 Dax Shepard? Okay.
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34:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
34:46 Speaker 01 That doesn't have a Helix mattress on it. And I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.
34:50 Dax Shepard? Temperature was all over the map.
34:51 Speaker 01 It was a mess. I need a new one.
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36:45 Speaker 02 And they also reinterpret because they would take your own words, your own journal. 91% of the troops, hundreds of US troops, some UN troops, were given these books and they were actually made to answer questions about their family life and their relationship at school.
37:00 Dax Shepard? What's interesting about that, and I think why as we see it come up in modern society. Society in a far more innocuous way. Often, people haven't ever taken the time to try to explain their worldview. Probably, nobody really has taken the time to write out what their worldview is, what the ethics are of the country they are loyal to. So in doing that, it's a very clever way to establish a little anxiety in your own understanding of why and what you do. You know, it's probably the first time you've questioned any of this.
37:31 Speaker 02 The guy you were just mentioning, Morris Wills, who's enlisted at seventeen, he said, "We were never taught a word in high school about our system or about communism." He said, "It would have been helpful. We should have been taught just so we would know what we were fighting and also how to defend our own system." But he felt really unequipped.
37:50 Dax Shepard? So now's a good time to also introduce, because there's two waves, right? There's the small wave and the big wave of men starting to return. The first wave is like one hundred and thirty-nine guys. And then, over time, it's thirty-six-hundred or something massive like that. And people are coming back with varying levels of vacancy and being visibly disturbed. Then you have the people who stayed. And now's where we should learn. Our understanding of trauma doesn't exist to the point where the word "trauma" is almost not even a word in the fifties, right? So as they're seeing all this bizarre behavior, everyone stateside is assuming this is brainwashing, not, "Oh, this is a traumatic response to this horrendously traumatic experience."
38:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, the trauma was invisible partly because people didn't think the way we do. Of course, today, we complain that we've gone too far the other direction. Perhaps that we see it everywhere at every moment. Like, if your latte order didn't turn out right, then you're traumatized.
38:46 Dax Shepard? PTSD.
38:47 Speaker 02 But a friend of mine, who's a psychiatrist, he was trained in the sixties. And he said, "You just didn't expect to see it. You might see one or two cases in your lifetime. But you would also think, if there were one or two cases, these men would have seemed to be qualified." But I did not find them ever described as traumatized. And I think there are a number of political and social reasons why. Although, there's one mentioned by Robert J. Lifton. Not diagnosing them as traumatized, but just mentioning their experience was traumatic. But other than that, in the hundreds of pages, there's no mention of this. And I think it's partly one thing I call the volleyball problem, which is that even though the men had been starved to the point of nutritional deficiency and often death, by the time the Chinese took over the camps, which is sometimes a year later,
39:30 Speaker 02 they were eating better and they were able to gain back weight. And the Chinese ran this POW Olympics, which they kind of used as a PR opportunity. And they showed pictures of the men in uniforms.
39:42 Speaker 01 Having fun.
39:42 Speaker 02 Having fun, doing gymnastics, rope pulling.
39:45 Dax Shepard? Volleyball.
39:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, so that's why I call it the volleyball problem because it looks like it's okay. It was also just propaganda for the international courts. I think this is one of the profound parts of it is because it didn't have marks. Their suffering didn't show. The men themselves despaired that anyone would ever understand.
40:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, maybe the amputees that came back, which there were, they would have maybe been like, oh, they went through some shit, but the rest of the guys played volleyball.
40:08 Speaker 01 You would have just been like, that's war, not this psychological element. You can't see that.
40:14 Dax Shepard? Right.
40:14 Speaker 02 But after a time, the Korean War, it means known as the forgotten war, but it became synonymous with these brainwashed men. They were seen as either cowards or freaks.
40:21 Dax Shepard? Weak, that they had succumbed to this propaganda easily. And also, it's worth pointing out that in the entire Korean War, there was only a single psychologist on the ground at the time. And then when they returned, though, now dozens of psychiatrists and psychologists are deployed to now study these guys. And so what do they find? Because now this sets us in motion on our own program.
40:42 Speaker 02 It does. It very much has waves of effects. The only time they compare them with veterans of other wars or POWs from other wars is initially. They think that maybe it's something like what happened in World War II, which was a condition called rice brain, which involved men drinking too much and unable to control their behavior. We'd probably call it PTSD today. They were said never to recover. There was one article that initially, right after the men came back, compared them to that. But subsequently was more framed as something unique and knew that was happening. And it fell into this narrative that the communists had a weapon that had never before had been seen in history. And the level of collaboration or indoctrination among American troops was said to be a
41:24 Speaker 02 Emergency and the different experts found different things, used different methods. Sometimes they gave them the war shock test. They gave them some sort of psychoanalysis sometimes, but mostly not for healing, but more to try to understand what had happened to them and whether this could be distilled into a method that could either be protected against.
41:42 Speaker 01 Or learned and used.
41:44 Speaker 02 Perhaps used.
41:45 Dax Shepard? Defended against or deployed on your enemies. Yes, sir comes out of this survival evasion resistance escape.
41:52 Speaker 02 Exactly. So there were survival schools already used to prepare troops for deployment. They would be sent off to the wilderness and had to survive for three days with limited amount of equipment, but they added a resistance component. So it was called SEER, Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. This was developed directly out of the Korean War by Louis Joly and West and others. And the resistance was really to create a mock POW camp stocked by Eastern European.
42:18 Dax Shepard? There were stand ins for the Koreans?
42:20 Speaker 02 Well, stand ins for just who might be capturing you in the future. Men would be interrogated there and brutalized and waterboarded.
42:28 Dax Shepard? In the training?
42:29 Speaker 02 In the training, yeah. It often involved really being punched until you fell down to the ground. And then when you struggled to stand up, being kicked or punched again over time. And so the person would lose track of the fact that their antagonist torturing them was actually a fellow member of the military, but they would fall under this disorienting condition. They would then maybe be locked in a Syrian box, which meant this tiny box, sometimes in the sun where you couldn't move your limbs and they would start to lose their minds.
42:59 Speaker 01 So we were doing this to our own people to get them ready for this? How is that going to do anything if you're just doing the exact same thing?
43:07 Dax Shepard? Well, that's my question. So I wonder how effective it was. The men who went to Vietnam, had they received this training?
43:11 Speaker 02 Thirty thousand men initially, right after in 1956, went through this training to see if it was working. So it was regularized and routinized and then applied to any service member who was in danger of being captured. They also instilled a uniform code of conduct, which mandated that you couldn't say anything more than name, rank and serial number, which was supposed to address the brainwashing problem. So during Vietnam, Washington didn't really arise again, but I don't necessarily think it was being attempted either.
43:40 Dax Shepard? I was gonna say, yeah, how do we know if that was a failed attempt by the Vietnamese or the great training the GIs received?
43:47 Speaker 02 There was classic torture that John McCain or Admiral Stockdale experienced. It had different purpose.
43:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:54 Speaker 02 They weren't that interested in ideological remolding or converting during Vietnam, but nonetheless, the training continued. And they were finding that troops themselves were damaged, that it was so brutal.
44:04 Dax Shepard? Even if it's pretend.
44:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not pretend if you're actually going through all the stuff.
44:09 Dax Shepard? Pretend broken ribs.
44:10 Speaker 02 So they brought in the same experts to modify the training so that it wasn't actually crippling the men. Nonetheless, it was still very brutal. And even today, there are legends about it. And if you get in the company of veterans, they'll often tell you their seer stories, although technically they're not really supposed to talk about it.
44:26 Speaker 01 Oh.
44:26 Dax Shepard? It's also really easy to underestimate just how young all these people were.
44:31 Speaker 01 Their frontal lobes.
44:32 Dax Shepard? Their identity isn't even solidified yet.
44:35 Speaker 01 I think people who think they could never be brainwashed could definitely be brainwashed, maybe the most susceptible.
44:43 Speaker 02 I agree with you. That 100% certainty is probably a sign. You could even use the Milgram experiments as another example of that.
44:50 Speaker 01 You talk about him to shocks. We've learned some stuff over the years here.
44:55 Speaker 02 It probably comes up sometimes in your interviews.
44:57 Dax Shepard? There's like five studies we give, marshmallow, delayed gratification, you know, these.
45:01 Speaker 02 Classic touchstones.
45:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're ubiquitous.
45:04 Speaker 02 They're so good because they're almost parables of our time.
45:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:07 Dax Shepard? They're our bible in a sense.
45:08 Speaker 02 I teach a whole class on them because the deeper you go in them, historically, they're very interesting. But with Milgram, as people watch the film, they often become convinced one way or the other. It's rare for someone to become convinced that they are sure they would have given shocks. I've heard of one person saying that, which I think is admirably honest.
45:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I agree.
45:26 Speaker 02 She's a psychologist, but most students, I can see them wrestling and people don't always talk about what they think. But when you see someone who's 100% certain and even mocking those who gave shocks or who succumbed to this kind of intensive situation, it shows a kind of lack of imagination potentially of what it might be like. And also who's being tortured in this experiment, it's kind of invisible to us.
45:48 Speaker 01 Right.
45:49 Dax Shepard? If you told Monica she could get an A if she zapped people, she would have done it.
45:53 Speaker 01 That's mean. That's not even about brainwashing. That's just like trying to get ahead.
45:57 Dax Shepard? No malgraim. I know. You get an A plus if you shock those people.
46:01 Speaker 01 Oh, so mean.
46:02 Dax Shepard? I know.
46:03 Speaker 01 No, I have a lot of integrity.
46:05 Dax Shepard? I know you do.
46:06 Speaker 01 But I definitely think I could have ended up doing that with the thought that I guess it's fine. I mean, I could just see it. And we had somebody on I thought was so interesting who talked about this experiment, but also talked about the rookie cops in the George Floyd situation. And her whole take was everyone watches that and thinks, how come they didn't do anything? This is crazy. And she's like, most people in that position would not do anything. And to walk around with this moral high ground when you've never been in any of these positions is crazy to me. I'm always like, yeah, I think I probably wouldn't have done anything.
46:40 Speaker 02 You just don't know. And I think living your life so that should that occasion arise, you would know how to act.
46:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. I think there's something really, I mean, this is a weird way of looking at it, but with you, with addiction and probably with you, and I have some things that I've done that I am shocked I did. My identity would not have lined up with certain actions. And so if you have experienced that, I think it's easier to say like, you know, we all sometimes do things we don't think.
47:11 Dax Shepard? Who knows what I'm capable of?
47:12 Speaker 01 Who knows what anyone is?
47:14 Speaker 02 People like Thich Nhat Hanh write about. It's easy to be sympathetic of the victim, but to understand the capacity we all have. I was thinking about the fascination with scams we have, which is somewhat related to how people respond to brainwashing or cults. It's very reassuring to say, that's so absurd. If anyone details a scam that someone fell for, I even do this too, where you think, at this point, I never would have believed they were in FBI. There's something wrong with them. You try to identify that moment where you wouldn't have, or it's not you, just not me.
47:43 Dax Shepard? So that you're not scared?
47:44 Speaker 02 You can turn it around and make it reassuring, but actually, these things are profoundly destabilizing because we're all subject to them.
47:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:51 Dax Shepard? So how did MKUltra and the CIA take what they had learned from these Korean POWs and improve them and/or perfect them?
47:57 Speaker 02 So MKUltra was secretly funded in 1953 by the CIA.
48:03 Speaker 02 To be a comprehensive program investigating various routes for massive behavioral change. Or to go back to Cardinal Mendza, the idea, could you make someone into another person? And perhaps even like a perfect assassin, or just an operative? Or could it be used for interrogation purposes or things like that? So really, they created zones of free investigation clandestinely. And they funded them through conduits or cutouts. And there were about 150 sub projects.
48:31 Dax Shepard? 150?
48:32 Speaker 02 I think around 150. Some of them quite small, some of them involving dolphins, potential dolphin assassins.
48:38 Dax Shepard? Some fell in love with those dolphins. We talked a lot about that.
48:40 Speaker 02 But then a lot of them involving LSD or hypnosis, or the ability to create dissociative states and unground systematically subjects in different ways so that they could be transformed. And so they really took the brainwashing episodes and created a scientific and military mandate. A lot of what the social sciences were interested in was creating a better running society in which people would assume their roles without being asked. So they would internalize codes and normalize routines.
49:11 Speaker 01 Behave.
49:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, kind of behave. Because I guess you could really say that too much democracy was seen as concerning. Because surely each person couldn't just go about living as they wanted to. So there were ways that behaviorism and learning theory, that was also flourishing during this time.
49:28 Dax Shepard? Do we have any smoking gun from the very top with a president's awareness going like, this is the goal. We're going to start subliminally doing this. Or we're going to try to start on a huge grand scale doing this.
49:41 Speaker 02 Dean Acheson, actually, the Secretary of State.
49:43 Dax Shepard? Under Truman?
49:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, he said, in the United States, we are willing to let the rest of the world live as they want to live, as long as they believe as we do. There is a sense that if you could have a kind of inner conformity, people could go about their business. I don't know that he intended it exactly as I am interpreting it. But I would say that this describes the project that you also see among many behavioral scientists, which was seen in rats running through mazes, in elaborate Skinnerian systems where people are just responding to these kind of. Conditioning messages in order to take on certain roles. Actually, that it was for the common good because people don't actually know what they want. So might as well.
50:22 Dax Shepard? We have a rise of cults as well. It was like the heyday, the seventies. When does the cult phenomena start taking out?
50:28 Speaker 02 I think it picks up in the late sixties.
50:31 Dax Shepard? Manson's late sixties.
50:33 Speaker 02 And he overlaps or intersects with MKUltra.
50:36 Dax Shepard? He was a participant?
50:37 Speaker 01 That's a theory.
50:38 Speaker 02 I've been hot on the trail of this. And you may know about the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill, where he investigates this as well. But in the Louis Jolyon West papers, where I just was yesterday, I found more evidence that West, who was one of the CIA's main behavioral experts, who went back to the Korean War, he had investigated the pilots, the soldiers. He'd done many other things, but he ran a project in Haight Ashbury that was affiliated with the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. And he was calling it the Amphetamine Research Project. And he had several people working under him, some of whom went to do ethnographic fieldwork with the Manson family in Mendocino. And the Amphetamine Research Project was run by Roger Smith, who was Charles Manson's parole officer, in addition to being a psychologist.
51:23 Speaker 02 And Roger Smith got a grant with Louis Jolyon West. So you can bring them very close together. This was before the Manson family committed the crimes for which they're known.
51:31 Dax Shepard? I guess my question is, do these cult leaders stumble upon this stuff intuitively? Or was there at some point a guidebook for people?
51:40 Speaker 02 I think mostly intuitively, there's a kind of guidebook that they intuitively play out, is my sense. Often, it comes out of these extreme hierarchical power relationships that they cultivate, the effects of charisma, also just the cycles of blissful release that their followers get in cults creates this kind of dynamic where the cult leader is almost jealous of his followers and then it leads to a kind of abuse.
52:05 Dax Shepard? Some kind of sadism?
52:06 Speaker 02 There's all sorts of dynamics that emerge in cults. And in the late sixties, before the Manson murders, cults are still kind of seen as intriguing.
52:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what's the difference between an ashram and a cult? People are starting to live communally as the love movement's happening.
52:20 Speaker 02 There are all kinds of love movements. There are many back to the land. Which I have always found fascinating. Of course, the definition of a group as a cult is not always ironclad. In some cases, it is very damaging for one person, but could be briefly healthy or liberatory for someone else. So it's tricky.
52:36 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm obsessed with cult docs. I think I've watched every single one of them. And what's undeniable is there's a huge period of bliss, of improvement, of growth, of community, of connection. You look at the Rajneeshis, if they don't go to war with their neighbors, I don't know that the thing ever goes sideways. It's like, they're all pretty happy, but now they need to outvote the town. So they gotta bring in homeless people and they lose control of that. Now they're poisoning a salad bar in town. You know, before this dispute happened, they're all kind of dancing and moaning and yelling.
53:07 Speaker 02 If I were going to write a review of Wild Wild Country, I would say that they selectively framed it because the cavorting wild dances and the realization, the sexual splendor. My husband grew up in the Bay Area around this time and he's like, they're not showing the automatic weapons they were all carrying that whole time. They were heavily into gun trafficking and drugs. And the documentary also takes the focus off of Osho as if he was kind of blissfully going along. And his second in command was poisoning the salad bars.
53:34 Dax Shepard? Maana and Sheila, she's like my biggest crush ever.
53:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:37 Dax Shepard? God, what a powerhouse. Sitting like a 23 year old girl from India to the US and said, build me a city and she did? What a woman.
53:44 Speaker 01 Think about what she could have done if she didn't get swept up.
53:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:49 Dax Shepard? I kind of bought that because of my addiction background. So Osh is, as we learned, he's a benzo addict. He's like on a ton of value. I did buy into like, yeah, I bet he was checked out and fucking occasionally, but there's no way he would have bothered himself with any of the.
54:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, I suppose that's true, but he still was heavily involved in the manipulative practices.
54:09 Speaker 01 I mean, he had all the votes.
54:10 Dax Shepard? He did have the special access that no one had without him.
54:13 Speaker 02 He also had a lot of needs for all the Rolls Royces.
54:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:17 Dax Shepard? So incongruous, the whole flashy nature of him.
54:19 Speaker 01 It's always so wild. The big party conversation people have is like, would you be susceptible to a cult? But are we all susceptible to starting cults? Is everyone equally like, maybe you give someone enough power and we could all be that?
54:33 Dax Shepard? She's subtweeting me right now.
54:34 Speaker 01 No, I'm asking a real question.
54:37 Speaker 02 That's an interesting twist on the question. Not would you join a cult, but might you start a cult?
54:41 Speaker 01 Exactly.
54:42 Speaker 02 You can see people get carried away by a little bit of power. I used to say that with teaching assistants sometimes in graduate school. Give them a little bit of power, suddenly they're patrolling the classroom.
54:52 Dax Shepard? It's the prison experiment. They're guards.
54:54 Speaker 02 But not everyone did that in the Stanford prison experiments. But a couple of people show a real aptitude for it, like the John Wayne character in that one. So it's a complex condition that we're all involved in.
55:07 Dax Shepard? So can you tell us the steps of how it works in a cult? You enter, hey, my name's Dax, and then I wake up and I'm clearly a devotee of a cult. What things have to happen?
55:17 Speaker 02 If you're talking about an abusive cult, often there has to be a condition where you encounter a recruitment that you may not know is a recruitment, or you may be misinformed about the nature of the group. Sometimes it's just you're standing on one street corner or not another. You were waiting for one bus where they happened to be sending people out, but you're maybe misinformed, you attend a meeting, so you're drawn in to some degree. You are exposed to group activities. You're probably love bombed. It can happen extremely quickly, and I think many people are surprised by that.
55:47 Dax Shepard? Would it be fair to say they would be already over indexing and being ungrounded? Because that seems consistent when I look at the people who joined Nexium or the people who joined all these groups. They're already felt a little untethered or unmoored, and they were in search already of something.
56:01 Speaker 02 I think we underestimate how incredibly socially attuned we all are. When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I, on one of the first days of school, we saw a flyer that said, "Free vegetarian dinner," and we were very excited. We presented ourselves there. There was indeed a free dinner. And then afterwards, these members of the group said, "Could you just sign this piece of paper and just say, 'It's just pro forma, but you would be the vice president of our group.'"
56:26 Speaker 01 What?
56:26 Speaker 02 And we were two days into school and we signed it. And then the next day, the dean of the college called us and said, "Did you really mean to do this?" And we were like, "No."
56:35 Dax Shepard? What do you know what it means?
56:36 Speaker 02 We didn't even know what it meant.
56:37 Dax Shepard? What did it mean?
56:38 Speaker 02 It meant that they had the right to be on campus. They just wanted a toehold in campus. It was Krishna maybe, but they didn't really tell us what they were.
56:46 Speaker 01 They are vegetarian.
56:48 Speaker 02 So often, yeah, the vegetarian.
56:50 Dax Shepard? It feels so friendly, right?
56:51 Speaker 01 Be careful of vegetarians.
56:53 Dax Shepard? You get invited to like a barbecue, you're like, shit, there might be some fights. But you hear free vegetarian food and you just think, yeah, there's gonna be some peace.
56:59 Speaker 02 Well, there's many things that work quite well, especially for a seeker. Most people are seekers to some degree. An invitation to an environmental group or something that seems very benign or altruistic. And especially if it's misrepresented, just getting the person there, exposing them to these intense conversations, not letting them be alone, sometimes not letting them even go to the bathroom alone. If they'll agree.
57:22 Dax Shepard? Well, I was thinking of the Maoist stuff, the method that seems really present in a lot of these cult documentaries I've watched is like you have food restriction quite often. You have the narrative part where you're telling your own story. There's kind of a therapy aspect, the discussion where you're implored to talk about your childhood and explore that. It's like you can see that it has the same arc almost as the Mao.
57:42 Speaker 02 It really does. And that's why the experts who had studied the P O Ws recognize this. There's a revelation of the self. There's also exposure to texts and lectures and discussions. Oh, there's often sleep deprivation too. A famous cult deprogrammer from the seventies, Ted Patrick, his son at 14 was almost lured onto this school bus that was commandeered by the Children of God, which is one of the most notorious cults. And his son luckily escaped, but he then went the next day to see what was happening and he stayed overnight. And he said, even though he was a 45 year old veteran and a lot of experience and a man of God, he said, you're bombarded by so much information and this intense eye contact. And never getting to go to the bathroom by yourself, you're very sleep deprived.
58:27 Speaker 02 They're playing scripture over and over because they will mobilize biblical sayings to change the tone. Also being asked about your bank account simultaneously. He said he found himself being unmoored, even though he had explicitly come there to understand and demystify it.
58:43 Dax Shepard? Have either of you thought to yourself, I am in a cult, I have two personal experiences?
58:50 Speaker 01 I've had cult like, definitely not for real, but cult like experiences. I mean, part of that is a good business. Sometimes has that SoulCycle had cult-like things around it. Its own language. I know all of our tech companies have all of that. They have rungs in their own language and it's very culty. I wouldn't call it a cult though. And UCB, that was an improv school and theater, but it was culty. You wanted to rise in the ranks. You wanted to be beloved there. But no, not for real, for real.
59:22 Speaker 02 Or even Harvard, people say it resembles a cult in a certain way, just because there's certain language we use.
59:27 Dax Shepard? You're very in-group, out-group.
59:29 Speaker 02 It's a powerful experience just to be socialized in that way. And it can have resonances with a cult, but I'm curious.
59:35 Dax Shepard? For me, AA for sure, in so many ways, it is a cult. And then I definitely look at the methodology by which they get you is, A, anyone coming to an AA meeting for their first time is already ungrounded. That's why they're there. Their life is obliterated. They don't know who they are. They've been acting in all these ways that are inconsistent with their morals. So we did the work for you. We show up kind of deconstructed and it's a group and there's language and there's a text and it has a lot of built-in, non-falsifiable claims. Like you don't have to believe in God, but you do. There's a lot of clever.
1:00:17 Speaker 01 There's a lot of story building and sharing.
1:00:19 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. Yeah, it's almost exclusively sharing your story, exploring it, learning a new way to live. So it's interesting. I have been in it and I'm aware of that. And yet I go, well, the alternative for me was death. So this is far preferable. I can handle being in this cult. Now, forget cult. What I really think is brainwashing. What is a little bit unique and good about AA is there's no leader. I think that's what saves it from being potentially destructive because it's this very powerful mechanism that could destroy people if there were even a single leader. There's not even a person in charge of the room. So that's its kind of maybe built-in safety net. But the way I think over 21 years of being there.
1:01:06 Dax Shepard? Is I find myself recognizing, oh, it's very regimented. That's very myopic. That's very unflexible. That doesn't account for the variety of human beings there are in the world. There's a lot of things I have to confront. I was having a conversation with a great friend of mine who's been in it roughly the same time as me. He's older. He's a genius. And we were talking and we share a therapist. And the therapist comes from this very unique point of view, which is he was in the program for a long time. He was an addict. He stopped going. And he also treats a lot of people. And he's like, there are some givens we learned that I don't know that I believe are givens. And then hearing someone, an authority who is smart and trustworthy, even just that little poke.
1:01:49 Dax Shepard? And then I found myself saying to my friend the other night, like, this part's a little weird. And it's fascinating. To me, I would probably put it more in the brainwashing category. And I don't even think nefariously. Again, there's no one in charge, but I do recognize I have to weed through a lot of thinking that's pretty ironclad in my head.
1:02:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've had similar experiences. A lot of former addicts gravitate towards Ashtanga yoga, which I did too. Well, I love yoga anyway for the last 35 years, but Ashtanga is this particular form that's very intensive. It did have a guru.
1:02:20 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:02:20 Speaker 02 Passed away. I wasn't interested in that personally, but it just felt like such a health giving practice. And even though I could hear the criticisms, it turns out he was making these invasive adjustments of women.
1:02:33 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:02:34 Speaker 02 Pelvic adjustments that he claimed were, it's a little bit like those gymnastics.
1:02:38 Speaker 01 Larry Nassar.
1:02:39 Dax Shepard? And like Bikram.
1:02:40 Speaker 01 I think he was just having sex with people.
1:02:41 Dax Shepard? He was doing it all, yeah.
1:02:42 Speaker 02 He was mandating massages.
1:02:44 Speaker 01 Right.
1:02:45 Speaker 02 But with Ashtanga was this interesting reckoning over the last five or six years, but I had already, for other reasons, modified my yoga practice. But people who were present when it was happening, but said they either didn't see it or didn't think it was what it was, or the person involved seemed fine, or they told themselves it was okay. Or, you know, this whole reckoning in the community, also the fact that the adjustments can be quite abusive and cause so much damage and so many injuries over the years. But people want an extreme experience and it will deliver that.
1:03:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:15 Speaker 02 So it's like a high. I think it's bringing awareness to whatever you do. You may feel like, I finally found this. This is the antidote.
1:03:25 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
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1:07:47 Dax Shepard? Okay, so all the things we've talked about are what we might call hard brainwashing. Tell us what's soft brainwashing and tell us what's pervasive in our current landscape that we need to be aware of and tell us how it works and what things are out there.
1:08:00 Speaker 02 The history is meant to bring us up to the present moment and give us some tools to think about our current destabilizing environment. I looked at the emergence of social media and some key moments that are often not talked about. So if you look at, there was a famous experiment Facebook ran in 2012, but it was published in 2014 where 700,000 users, they changed the emotional valence of their feed without telling them, although it's part of your user agreement that you could be experimented on, but people didn't know that. So some of the people received, they said, a more positive feed as judged by the word count and the emotional valence, and others received a more negative one. And those whose feed was adjusted negatively, they
1:08:43 Speaker 02 then counted how they reacted. Did they post more negatively or react more negatively?
1:08:48 Dax Shepard? Were they counting how much time spent on the app itself, maybe?
1:08:51 Speaker 02 They've counted engagement in subsequent experiments, but in this one, they mostly counted how they responded and they found that there was a statistically significant shift in the emotional content of the responses. When your feed was altered more negatively and sometimes to a greater degree than your posting or reactions would be more negative. And so this was confirmed as a case of proving or operationalizing emotional contagion at a distance. People just could be exposed to this change and then their internal states would then change. And so the interesting thing I found in examining this experiment was, first of all, that Facebook published it in a prominent journal, PNAS, and that is sort of a self congratulatory move, which they never really repeated because it caused so much controversy. But when you
1:09:35 Speaker 02 look at the actual article, they cite a 1990 definition where they get this idea of mass emotional contagion at scale. And this was from a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii. And if you look at how they defined emotional contagion, they were actually drawing on a memoir of trauma that was written by Vivian Gornick called Fierce Attachment. They say this is how we define emotional contagion is what happened between this woman and her mother, who was an extremely disturbed woman. And she had a really complex relationship with her daughter. And Vivian Gornick wrote this wonderful book, Fierce Attachment, which is kind of a masterpiece describing the spread of trauma between a mother and daughter and these intense emotions. And that's the definition that Facebook was
1:10:16 Speaker 02 using of emotional contagion. So it's kind of built into the experiment, I'm arguing. In a second way, when they use the word counting software that they drew on, which is called Luke, this software was based on the diaries of people who had been asked to write about the worst experience of their lives. And that was how they came to define the words they used. We focus on messaging, but what I want to show is that there's a level of trauma and intense emotional suffering that's kind of built into the operations of the app. There's also Catherine Lu, this interesting scholar at University of California, shows that trauma, I think she's writing a new book about this, but that it's very profitable in the apps, draws eyes, it draws traffic. Oh, yeah.
1:10:58 Speaker 02 So it's kind of like a trafficking and people who do content moderation are constantly exposed to it. Similar to the brainwashing episodes of classic brainwashing or hard brainwashing, there's a way it's steeped in trauma and yet not necessarily recognized as such.
1:11:11 Dax Shepard? And people will now point out, people voluntarily complied with that. We started just giving you a full time access to ourselves and filming everything we do. But both sides are working, right? Because people are posting their trauma.
1:11:24 Speaker 02 That's why I like the definition of brainwashing as coercive persuasion, because it's not pure coercion. There's an element of participation. There's a kind of a yes, even if it's unknown to yourself or not perfectly understood. There's a collaborative element, which I think is what makes it interesting and why it's uncomfortable to think about.
1:11:42 Dax Shepard? Well, we're a lot more comfortable with the notion someone chose to smoke cigarettes, and that's why they have lung cancer. They just loved a perfect life and they got lung cancer. We don't like that. That's very scary. I mean, we might get lung cancer. But we do love an element of complicity. It helps us not take on so much anguish, because you go, oh, they kind of. Elected to do that.
1:12:04 Speaker 01 But I think we also like a victim and a villain.
1:12:08 Dax Shepard? Oppressor.
1:12:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, but to know that everyone's kind of doing both things makes everything very complicated.
1:12:15 Speaker 02 Cults are perfect examples of that as well, because you forget that everyone except the leader at the top is both victimized but also victimizing. It's hard to know where to draw the line.
1:12:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're on mission, they're converting.
1:12:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:28 Dax Shepard? I have to say, and this sounds dismissive to other cult members, but NXIVM interested me the most because of all the subjects of these cults I had met in these other documentaries, so many of them were outwardly searching so hard for something. They were just waiting for a guru to walk in front of them. But the NXIVM crew, they were above-average intelligence, most of them. They were very critical thinkers, that's what they were bound by. And then I got obsessed with, well, what's this guy's magic spell on these very critically thinking, smart adults? And I think what I observed was, he weaponized that against them. Every time they asked him some big philosophical question, his response would be, "Well, what do you think?"
1:13:11 Dax Shepard? And they were so keen to impress him that they would come up with their very best explanation. And in doing that, they gave themselves the answer, and he just would sign off on it. He outsourced the actual dogma to them. He used their intelligence against them. And then, back to your point of people thinking they wouldn't be susceptible, or they would be, it's like, well, here's this group that he figured out how to get them to indoctrinate themselves.
1:13:36 Speaker 02 That's beautifully put. I completely agree. Because if you look at Keith Raniere, who presented himself as world's smartest man and world's most handsome man, it's hard to believe that. He also used to say that the rain didn't fall on him. He could be walking outside and it fell on other people, but not on him. So you'd think that an intelligent person wouldn't necessarily believe that. But he did attract, and they do say this, that cult members are often highly intelligent. Intelligence does not protect you. It actually can make the web tighter and more effective, because you're very good at convincing yourself and others. But Raniere, what he was really good at was turning them against themselves, turning their gifts against themselves.
1:14:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:14:14 Speaker 01 Well, in some ways, it's love bombing. Like you said, he's allowing them to feel like, oh, my God, I impressed him and he's the smartest person in the world. I guess I must be my best version of myself here. I think there's a lot of that, like, oh, my God, he's bringing out the best of me.
1:14:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And when you're watching those guys, they're on the Santa Monica Pier. Now, they've been deprogrammed and disillusioned and they're just chatting and they're recognizing some of the things they believed. And one of the guys just goes, yeah, he was a judo champ at seven. And they both are like, oh, my God, how did we?
1:14:47 Speaker 01 How do we believe?
1:14:48 Dax Shepard? Was it fucking me, a seven-year-old judo champ?
1:14:50 Speaker 02 It's like a spell is broken.
1:14:51 Dax Shepard? Yes. And the absurdity of these things they had heard now has come flooding out. And I imagine just the shame that that induces.
1:14:58 Speaker 02 So to continue that to today, it seems like the stakes are much smaller, but I argue that that's not the case, even though we're dealing with ordinary circumstances, yet they are always connected to the extraordinary. It's very easy now to silo yourself in terms of what you're exposed to and to find news or information that just confirms your predilections. So I think that if you are finding that, or if you're not exposing yourself to challenging material, or just things that don't agree with what you already think, that's something to be concerned about, or something to kind of disrupt. These dynamics can feed on your altruism and also your repository of unresolved emotions and then just crank them up to the point where you're not really paying attention.
1:15:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:38 Speaker 02 So bringing down the temperature and in whatever way you cannot contribute to polarization.
1:15:43 Dax Shepard? I hope everyone checks out The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion. I'm a slow reader and I was blasting through it. There's so much historical stuff in there. I love the history. I mean, there's just so many elements of the Korean War that I hadn't known about or properly sympathized with.
1:16:01 Speaker 02 Isn't that profound? It's such a forgotten war.
1:16:03 Speaker 01 No one talks about it.
1:16:04 Dax Shepard? Well, the sequel was so much longer. Everly protested.
1:16:07 Speaker 01 Cultural.
1:16:08 Speaker 02 The whole experience of researching it was amazing to me.
1:16:11 Dax Shepard? All right. Well, Rebecca, this was so fun. Thank you so much.
1:16:13 Speaker 02 It was so fun. Thank you both.
1:16:17 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. It's okay, though. We all make mistakes.
1:16:25 Dax Shepard? I screen grabbed something.
1:16:27 Speaker 01 Tell me.
1:16:28 Dax Shepard? I know if I want you to find this interesting, it cannot be about the Cold War.
1:16:34 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:16:34 Dax Shepard? So hopefully I didn't screen grab something about the Cold War.
1:16:36 Speaker 01 I hope it's about fashion.
1:16:38 Dax Shepard? Okay, fun to hear updates and the subject synthesized so well. For Monica's anxiety about death, you are on the right track with one of the ways to manage that response. I did CBT for anxiety about death and the training is what you say, look at probabilities and odds, focusing on stats and having self compassion when the worries override the stats and likelihoods. Also, acceptance that we actually have so little control from an existential standpoint and being truly zen about that from a place of gratitude for each day helps. It's tough to get to that place, though. It took me years. People like Monica and me are prone to rumination, AKA sticky brain. It sucks so much and is
1:17:20 Dax Shepard? tough to understand if you don't experience it. Similar to obsessional thinking, Monica's brain is micro obsessing about death now and making her anxious. Just a perspective since I know you don't suffer anxiety the same way.
1:17:34 Speaker 01 Wow, that was nice.
1:17:35 Dax Shepard? That was a nice comment. Someone really took some time to try to help.
1:17:38 Speaker 01 They did. Thank you. Sticky brain. I've never heard that.
1:17:41 Dax Shepard? That's what I'm gonna start calling you now. Sticky brain. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Darmchair expert. I'm Dan Rather and joined by Sticky Brain.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 I hate, I hate the way that sounds.
1:17:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I had a hunch it was gonna not sit right.
1:17:52 Speaker 01 I didn't like that. Is it rude for me to talk about this?
1:17:56 Dax Shepard? Oh, that's always a good start.
1:17:58 Speaker 01 When somebody is reaching out to you a lot about hanging out,
1:18:04 Speaker 01 but you don't really know them well.
1:18:07 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:18:07 Speaker 01 And so that's just not gonna be your priority.
1:18:13 Speaker 01 How do you handle?
1:18:15 Dax Shepard? Well, and this might tip you into...
1:18:19 Dax Shepard? Child ownership. I have much better built in excuses than you do and they're legit, which is I don't do anything. Every night of the week, I'm home with my kids, eating dinner and then watching TV, right?
1:18:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:34 Dax Shepard? So I can just always go like, oh yeah, I don't, which is true. Also, we get a babysitter like six times a year.
1:18:41 Speaker 01 Right.
1:18:41 Dax Shepard? So I really make it kind of clear. Um, I, I just, I don't, I'm not social and you really.
1:18:49 Speaker 01 It's not true though. Like you go to breakfast with people, you make time for the people that you are prioritizing.
1:18:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So I can do a breakfast.
1:18:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:58 Dax Shepard? Once every month and a half, I'll do a dude's dinner, maybe two months. Yeah.
1:19:03 Speaker 01 There are times that you prioritize it, but.
1:19:06 Dax Shepard? But that's like top tier best friend maintenance.
1:19:08 Speaker 01 That's, that's what I have time for.
1:19:12 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:19:13 Speaker 01 And I feel like I don't know, cause I'll say like, oh, sometimes I'll say, I can't for the foreseeable future.
1:19:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Now, so that I gotta put that on them. If I ask someone to hang out and they said, I can't for the foreseeable future. I would go, okay, yeah, they don't want to hang out.
1:19:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it's not okay. And I don't, it's not personal. It's not like I don't want to hang out with this person specifically. It's I, I, I just only have time for the people that I barely that.
1:19:51 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:19:51 Speaker 01 To prioritize. Yeah.
1:19:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:19:53 Speaker 01 And I want to use that time for those people and not, I like, you know, it sounds mean. It really sounds mean. And I understand that it sounds mean, which is why I find this to be troublesome.
1:20:04 Dax Shepard? Right. Get a kid.
1:20:07 Speaker 01 No, cause I, I.
1:20:10 Dax Shepard? I thought you were going to though.
1:20:11 Speaker 01 I haven't decided.
1:20:12 Dax Shepard? Oh, but after, uh.
1:20:14 Speaker 01 Mindy.
1:20:14 Dax Shepard? Mindy, you kind of were.
1:20:16 Speaker 01 I was thinking about it and I'm still thinking about it, but well, then this is like. Part of the overall thing. As a parent, you can say that, right? Like you can say like, oh, I just
1:20:30 Dax Shepard? I'm with the kids every night.
1:20:31 Speaker 01 I've been with the kids. I don't think I'll really be able to make it happen.
1:20:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:20:35 Speaker 01 And
1:20:36 Dax Shepard? And it's true, which is great.
1:20:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, but my stuff is true, too.
1:20:40 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, I'm just saying.
1:20:41 Speaker 01 No, I know.
1:20:42 Dax Shepard? It's an excuse and it's not an excuse. Like, I really am home every night.
1:20:47 Speaker 01 And you go to your meetings, you do, like, you prioritize the things in your life.
1:20:50 Dax Shepard? Sure.
1:20:50 Speaker 01 And so do I. And I guess that's like, it's the same thing, but if a single person says it, it sounds more like you're just saying you don't want to.
1:21:00 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:21:01 Speaker 01 And it seems more rude when really it's the same thing. It's like, I'm prioritizing the things in my life that are important to me.
1:21:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:09 Speaker 01 I don't think I can add anything new in right now.
1:21:12 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:21:12 Speaker 01 Same with parent, young parents and old parents.
1:21:17 Dax Shepard? Like me.
1:21:18 Speaker 01 I wasn't pointing to you.
1:21:19 Dax Shepard? Grandparent parents.
1:21:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. If I am working, that's one category, right?
1:21:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:25 Speaker 01 That's one category of things I have to do during the day.
1:21:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:27 Speaker 01 Category two is being by myself.
1:21:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:30 Speaker 01 I need some time to myself.
1:21:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:33 Speaker 01 That leaves a small amount of time for social.
1:21:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:37 Speaker 01 And there's two types of social. There is social with basically family, like friends who are basically family.
1:21:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:45 Speaker 01 You don't have to be or do anything but be yourself. Show up as you.
1:21:52 Dax Shepard? That's right. Come as you are.
1:21:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:54 Dax Shepard? BYOB.
1:21:54 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:21:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:55 Speaker 01 Then there's the other bucket of social, which is you have to be on a little bit because you don't know them as well.
1:22:06 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes.
1:22:06 Speaker 01 You just have to be like the best version of yourself. Yes. Let alone the category of dates, which we haven't even thrown in the mix.
1:22:15 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure, sure.
1:22:16 Speaker 01 Okay?
1:22:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:22:17 Speaker 01 So currently, my time is only for
1:22:22 Dax Shepard? Your voice got high.
1:22:23 Speaker 01 Currently, my time is
1:22:26 Speaker 01 Apparently.
1:22:27 Dax Shepard? Counted for.
1:22:28 Speaker 01 Because we also have to be on during this job quite a lot.
1:22:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, many hours a week.
1:22:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, and so I'm a little spent of that mode.
1:22:36 Dax Shepard? You want to be a dud. You want to be able to be a dud.
1:22:39 Speaker 01 And my, my close friends will allow that.
1:22:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they accept the dud version.
1:22:45 Speaker 01 My fear is I'm have, I'm telling people like, I don't have time to do this, I'm sorry, basically. And then those people are gonna see me out.
1:22:56 Dax Shepard? Sure, with Jess and Anna.
1:22:58 Speaker 01 Exactly, with my friends.
1:23:00 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:23:00 Speaker 01 And be like, fuck you, you said you couldn't. And for me, what I want to say is like, that's a different category.
1:23:09 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:23:10 Speaker 01 That I do make time for because I need that restoratively.
1:23:14 Dax Shepard? I don't think any of these people are entitled to all that information. I think you just need to relieve yourself of the guilt.
1:23:21 Speaker 01 Like, write a note, make 80 copies, and then pass it out?
1:23:24 Dax Shepard? Well, look, I do have a set thing in my notes that I have. Yes, because I get asked very often to ask Kristen to do things.
1:23:35 Speaker 01 Ah, you mean go out?
1:23:38 Dax Shepard? No, uh, hey, I've got this project Kristen would be great for. Hey, this charity event, can Kristen help?
1:23:44 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:23:45 Dax Shepard? And it's a very sincere, and it's true, which is, I won't be a conduit of requests.
1:23:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:52 Dax Shepard? To Kristen. She gets it all the time and it's not gonna come from me.
1:23:55 Speaker 01 Right.
1:23:55 Dax Shepard? It's damaging to the relationship.
1:23:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:23:58 Dax Shepard? For us to be not wanting to hear what each other has to say.
1:24:00 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:24:01 Dax Shepard? So I took the time at some point to write out a very thoughtful version of that. But I don't want to have to do that every single time, so I have it in my notes and I just copy and paste.
1:24:11 Speaker 01 Oh my God, do you want to read it?
1:24:13 Dax Shepard? So maybe, I wonder if I can find it now that I've said that.
1:24:21 Dax Shepard? Not if you've received this, then you know.
1:24:23 Speaker 01 See.
1:24:23 Dax Shepard? That's okay, cuz it's all it's legit and I stand by it. No, I can't find it.
1:24:28 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:24:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think the parents deal with it the most.
1:24:32 Speaker 01 What do you mean?
1:24:33 Dax Shepard? Like, my mom gets a lot of requests. I think Kristen's mom gets a lot of requests. And I get it cuz you're like, oh, a parent can ask their kid anything.
1:24:41 Speaker 01 Right.
1:24:42 Dax Shepard? Right?
1:24:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's true.
1:24:43 Dax Shepard? Like, if I wanted Ace to do something, I'd be like, I just ask Charlie, he'll, he'll ask him.
1:24:48 Speaker 01 Probably.
1:24:49 Dax Shepard? He's got no autonomy. He's gotta listen to this request.
1:24:52 Speaker 01 Child.
1:24:52 Dax Shepard? I should ask Ace if he'll host a gala.
1:24:55 Speaker 01 He'd be great.
1:24:56 Dax Shepard? He would, if he danced.
1:24:57 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, he's such a good dancer.
1:25:00 Dax Shepard? He and Lincoln were so cute at Disneyland.
1:25:02 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:25:02 Dax Shepard? It's so fun to watch. They really get along, really. They weren't dancing. That's the problem. That's the annoying and attractive thing about Ace is he's the world's best dancer, but he won't.
1:25:13 Speaker 01 I know, I love that. I get it.
1:25:15 Dax Shepard? Like, if I were him, all I would do is dance.
1:25:17 Speaker 01 I know, and then people would be like, can you stop?
1:25:19 Dax Shepard? I know, I would exploit it and wring it out for every bit of attention I could, and he doesn't. He's like, he was, he was right to be trusted with that superpower.
1:25:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:28 Dax Shepard? Although he needs to lighten up the reins a little bit. I think, like, on Thanksgiving, he should do a dance performance for us.
1:25:32 Speaker 01 No.
1:25:32 Dax Shepard? Once a year, he should put on. We sit through these other talent shows with the kids.
1:25:37 Speaker 01 I know.
1:25:38 Dax Shepard? And the videos they make. We got an actual bona fide talent in the mix, and he's not showing us.
1:25:43 Speaker 01 But he is, it's exactly correct cuz we are like, oh, I just wish he would dance for us.
1:25:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:50 Speaker 01 That's what you want. You want people to want you bad.
1:25:52 Dax Shepard? Do you think it's weird? I think everyone does this, but do you think it's weird to look at a kid and go like, oh, my God, he's, he's gonna do so well with the ladies? Like, every time I'm around Ace, all I can think is like, God, this guy's the, every option's gonna be available to him.
1:26:05 Speaker 01 Um.
1:26:06 Dax Shepard? Great dancer, sweetheart, gorgeous.
1:26:10 Speaker 01 Um. I do think that's your first instinct.
1:26:13 Dax Shepard? Everyone's or Dax's?
1:26:15 Speaker 01 Dax's.
1:26:15 Dax Shepard? Okay, yeah.
1:26:16 Speaker 01 Um, it's not my first instinct.
1:26:18 Dax Shepard? It's not?
1:26:18 Speaker 01 No. I think you put a lot of emphasis on dancing.
1:26:22 Dax Shepard? Romantic love. Oh, dancing. Yeah.
1:26:25 Speaker 01 Dancing's hot, but it's not like...
1:26:27 Dax Shepard? You don't think it's a silver bullet?
1:26:29 Speaker 01 I don't.
1:26:30 Dax Shepard? I do.
1:26:31 Speaker 01 I know you do.
1:26:31 Dax Shepard? If you look good dancing.
1:26:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:33 Dax Shepard? It's not like you can just know the running man. If you look stupid doing the running man.
1:26:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, but there's just so few opportunities in this world to dance. It's not like when we were in college and everyone was dancing every night.
1:26:44 Dax Shepard? Well, no, if you're into dancing, you go out dancing and people see you, they see you.
1:26:49 Speaker 01 But when you're an adult, when...
1:26:51 Dax Shepard? I see you, your dog, Charlie.
1:26:53 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:26:54 Dax Shepard? Rottweiler.
1:26:56 Speaker 01 And I, as an adult, um, there are so many adults I know that I've never seen them dance. I have no idea what they look like dancing.
1:27:08 Dax Shepard? Well, you know what everyone in the pod looks like dancing?
1:27:10 Speaker 01 No.
1:27:11 Dax Shepard? Sure, we've been to weddings, we've been to...
1:27:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, but like, nothing stands out.
1:27:17 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:27:17 Speaker 01 At all.
1:27:18 Dax Shepard? Come on, roller skate parties.
1:27:20 Speaker 01 Roller skate parties isn't dancing.
1:27:22 Dax Shepard? You could name the great dancers. Erica, great dancer, we know it.
1:27:27 Speaker 01 She's a great dancer, but that's, I know that because she posts videos of her dancing in a dance class.
1:27:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and you've seen her.
1:27:33 Speaker 01 But not like, she's not, that's not...
1:27:35 Dax Shepard? Matt and Laura's wedding?
1:27:36 Speaker 01 It doesn't resonate with me.
1:27:38 Dax Shepard? It's not a priority for you.
1:27:40 Speaker 01 At all.
1:27:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:41 Speaker 01 And in fact, like you say, Matt and Laura, I'm like, I don't know what Laura looks like dancing.
1:27:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, cause you, maybe because you never were, that wasn't anything you were into personally. Like, you were never like, I'm a great dancer.
1:27:51 Speaker 01 Every, we went out five times a week.
1:27:55 Dax Shepard? Well, I think a woman that dances well is very sexy.
1:27:57 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:27:58 Dax Shepard? And it's a way to look cool.
1:28:00 Speaker 01 Um, yeah.
1:28:02 Dax Shepard? You know, that's not for you. That's okay.
1:28:04 Speaker 01 It's not not for me. It's not like I'm not attracted to it, but it's, it's not on my...
1:28:11 Dax Shepard? But what about Anderson Paak?
1:28:12 Speaker 01 Top five.
1:28:12 Dax Shepard? If she can't dance, then she can't, ooh!
1:28:15 Speaker 01 Okay, I don't think that's true.
1:28:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think you can have sex if you can't dance.
1:28:20 Speaker 01 Right. So that's a lie that he said that.
1:28:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but I do think someone who's very in touch with their body and knows how to move their body, it's a good signal. Let me just ask you this, there's two guys, they're identical twin brothers.
1:28:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:28:32 Dax Shepard? They look the same, they have the same personality.
1:28:34 Speaker 01 The exact same personality.
1:28:35 Dax Shepard? Yes, one of them is dancing like a dad.
1:28:39 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:28:40 Dax Shepard? And the other one is dancing very well.
1:28:44 Speaker 01 Okay, listen, that's not a good.
1:28:45 Dax Shepard? It's a perfect one.
1:28:47 Speaker 01 No, it's not because you made them the same. You made them the same.
1:28:50 Dax Shepard? The only different, the only variable is their dancing.
1:28:53 Speaker 01 Obviously.
1:28:54 Dax Shepard? So which one do you want to get in bed with?
1:28:55 Speaker 01 No, that's not how you play this game. You have to give me different sets of, of good things. And one of them is dancing on one person.
1:29:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:05 Speaker 01 The other has other stuff and I have to pick. If obviously they're the exact same and they're, they're dancing, I'm obviously going to pick that.
1:29:13 Dax Shepard? Great, because you would, you would say it's a tra, it's more attractive than not.
1:29:17 Speaker 01 Yes, I, I already said that. I said it is.
1:29:20 Dax Shepard? I thought it was like a, who cares?
1:29:22 Speaker 01 No, you're not listening.
1:29:23 Dax Shepard? Okay, I'm trying.
1:29:24 Speaker 01 I said, I said it's not that it's not attractive, it is attractive.
1:29:28 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:29:28 Speaker 01 But it's not on my list, it's not like top five things.
1:29:33 Dax Shepard? Great.
1:29:33 Speaker 01 So yes, of course, if top five things are met with two people and they're the same person and they look exactly the same and have the exact same personality.
1:29:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:41 Speaker 01 I'm not going to say no to good dancing.
1:29:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:43 Speaker 01 But if it's like guy A.
1:29:45 Dax Shepard? And really quick. When you look at them and you're like, I wonder who's better in bed. Would you not assume that the guy that's coordinated and on rhythm is better in bed?
1:29:56 Speaker 01 If they have the exact same everything, yeah.
1:30:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, okay, good. Anyways, Ace is a spectacular dancer. Lincoln and he were having so much fun together.
1:30:06 Speaker 01 That's fun.
1:30:06 Dax Shepard? And we were, again, we were gay dads, as you know.
1:30:13 Speaker 01 Great.
1:30:13 Dax Shepard? Uh, at Disneyland.
1:30:15 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:30:16 Dax Shepard? But we were not as built this trip, we're not as big.
1:30:20 Speaker 01 You are.
1:30:22 Dax Shepard? Well, just keep it neutral.
1:30:23 Speaker 01 This whole episode is a disaster.
1:30:32 Dax Shepard? I'm a little bigger than Charlie at the moment, which is very rare. First time in our total, in our whole friendship, I'm a little bigger than him. So I think the, what people assume changed. Remember the last time he was like, he was an Adonis and they thought, I must be an architect. Do you remember this whole thing?
1:30:49 Speaker 01 Only vaguely.
1:30:50 Dax Shepard? They're like, oh, the, the one man's much older than his husband.
1:30:54 Speaker 01 Right.
1:30:55 Dax Shepard? Um, but he looks kinda cool. He looks artistic, he's got tattoos, he must be an architect. This is what they thought.
1:31:03 Speaker 01 Now, you think that when people look at tattoos, they think artsy.
1:31:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think if you're seeing someone who is heavily tattooed and successful.
1:31:12 Speaker 01 Well, how do they know that?
1:31:14 Dax Shepard? Cause we have a guide.
1:31:16 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:31:17 Dax Shepard? I mean, that's a giveaway.
1:31:19 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:20 Dax Shepard? Right?
1:31:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:21 Dax Shepard? I'm just being honest.
1:31:22 Speaker 01 But maybe, but maybe your hot husband.
1:31:24 Dax Shepard? Okay, great. So yes, we're just going with like most people think. So you see an older dude with a younger man, they have a guy.
1:31:30 Speaker 01 Got it, okay. And he has tattoos.
1:31:32 Dax Shepard? Ninety plus percent of people are gonna go, oh, the older dude's got some money.
1:31:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:37 Dax Shepard? Oh wow, he's made some money, but he's also heavily tattooed. So he's either owns a restaurant?
1:31:42 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:31:43 Dax Shepard? You go to a-
1:31:43 Speaker 01 This is very LA.
1:31:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, most likely, yeah, if you were in the Midwest and I saw a dude heavily tattooed and I knew he was rich, I'd go, oh, he owns a tool and die shop. Like this is-
1:31:53 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:31:54 Dax Shepard? What environment could he make a ton of money, but also-
1:31:57 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:31:57 Dax Shepard? Look like a fucking junkie.
1:32:00 Speaker 01 Scary guy.
1:32:01 Dax Shepard? Yes. Okay, so that was last year's scenario that we both thought was most likely. People definitely thought it was an architect.
1:32:08 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:32:08 Dax Shepard? And this was my boy toy.
1:32:10 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:32:11 Dax Shepard? But now it's a little bigger this year. So now I'm not sure what they think. And I didn't have as clear of a conclusion of what people thought. Other than people, again, were very excited and happy that we had a family. That seems to be consistent.
1:32:25 Speaker 01 That's nice.
1:32:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:27 Speaker 01 It, it, families are great.
1:32:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:28 Speaker 01 What do you think about the fact, did you notice that during this whole time we've been talking? Um, I've picked at my fingernail.
1:32:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:37 Speaker 01 And now I have this piece and I've been putting it places.
1:32:39 Dax Shepard? Different places in hopes that you'll remember it. I see you grab your phone, which is disheartening, so I'm like, oh, she's checking her phone in the middle of this story about me being an architect.
1:32:48 Speaker 01 I wasn't.
1:32:49 Dax Shepard? And now you're, yeah, you should eat it, just eat it.
1:32:52 Speaker 01 No, I've never eaten it.
1:32:54 Dax Shepard? Oh, you dropped it between your legs.
1:32:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was worried about that.
1:32:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. Well, there it is. One of our guests will be sitting there and be like, God, I just keep stabbing my butt cheek.
1:33:03 Speaker 01 See, some people are real, will be like so disgusted by what just happened.
1:33:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, well, remember you would put your feet on the couch and people would really lose their marbles.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 And I am not that grossed out by nails. And I guess I'm not that grossed out by hair. I guess I'm like very chill.
1:33:22 Dax Shepard? You are. You're afraid of death, but everything before then, you're kind of fine with.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay.
1:33:27 Dax Shepard? Pooty nails.
1:33:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, actually, I'm proud of myself for that.
1:33:31 Dax Shepard? You're cool.
1:33:33 Speaker 01 You're cool.
1:33:33 Dax Shepard? You're cool.
1:33:35 Speaker 01 Can't dance, but you're cool.
1:33:36 Dax Shepard? Can't dance to save your life, but if you shave that side, you'll pull it off.
1:33:39 Speaker 01 I was a good dancer.
1:33:40 Dax Shepard? Well, no one will ever know.
1:33:42 Speaker 01 I had a, I danced well with this one person. We danced a lot together. Okay. Oh, I pulled this up to show you something and now I have forgotten. Phew, I'm all over the, well, we just did Armchair Anonymous. This is what happens. Our brain gets a little jammy. That's an Easter egg.
1:34:02 Dax Shepard? That's an Easter egg for?
1:34:03 Speaker 01 No, don't say that. Okay.
1:34:07 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:34:14 Dax Shepard? We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.
1:34:28 Speaker 01 I love matching pajamas. I'm literally gonna be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season. Because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate and be cozy.
1:34:49 Dax Shepard? It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.
1:34:59 Speaker 01 I have a bunch of different pajama sets. One of my favorite is the organic cotton sleep long sleeve set.
1:35:06 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:35:06 Speaker 01 It is so comfortable, very chic, too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multi-purpose this and look super cute.
1:35:19 Dax Shepard? Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.
1:35:28 Speaker 01 All the nostalgia, none of the discomfort. 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 Armchair Expert in the dropdown menu that follows. If you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.
1:35:54 Speaker 01 This is for Rebecca Lemov. And this was interesting because this was brainwashing and eesh, scary.
1:36:03 Dax Shepard? You think you've been brainwashed?
1:36:05 Speaker 01 By you? Oh, you tried. You tried to brainwash me into thinking dancing was the best quality.
1:36:13 Dax Shepard? I just think it's a very hot, attractive quality.
1:36:15 Speaker 01 It's hot and it's attractive.
1:36:16 Dax Shepard? It turns things sexual. I guess that's really what I'm saying. It breaks through, like you could meet a dude and you may like, oh, he's good, but I'm in the friend zone. You could see him dancing, you go, you know what? It's definitely an inroot.
1:36:29 Speaker 01 You're right about that.
1:36:30 Dax Shepard? Thank you.
1:36:30 Speaker 01 But it's not going, well, it's not a bad dancer if I like them.
1:36:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's fine.
1:36:36 Speaker 01 Is not a deterrent. But I guess you're right. A good dancer can be an additive.
1:36:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it could change the dynamic of everything.
1:36:43 Speaker 01 That's true.
1:36:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:36:44 Speaker 01 Like if.
1:36:45 Dax Shepard? That's been my experience, which is I think some girls were like, whatever. I don't know, he's loud. And then on the dance floor, like, oh, this is interesting. He is.
1:36:55 Speaker 01 Loud.
1:36:56 Dax Shepard? Very loud, louder.
1:36:57 Speaker 01 As a dancer.
1:36:59 Dax Shepard? Even louder.
1:37:00 Speaker 01 Okay. Population decline. You said California's population is declining and everyone else's is on the rise. Now I'm going to read you the list here.
1:37:10 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:11 Speaker 01 This is most decline.
1:37:15 Speaker 01 All the way up to most pro- most growth.
1:37:19 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:20 Speaker 01 Okay, so the most-
1:37:22 Dax Shepard? You do like the top 10 and bottom 10?
1:37:24 Speaker 01 Sure, but I'm not gonna count.
1:37:26 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:26 Speaker 01 I'm gonna read them all. Um.
1:37:27 Dax Shepard? All 50 states?
1:37:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, so the most, the most decline, New York.
1:37:33 Dax Shepard? They're hemorrhaging people.
1:37:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, .91% population change downward.
1:37:38 Dax Shepard? Point 19?
1:37:39 Speaker 01 91.
1:37:40 Dax Shepard? Oh, 91, almost 10% of the state left? Or 9.1 out of 100,000 people?
1:37:45 Speaker 01 .91%.
1:37:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, .91, sorry.
1:37:50 Speaker 01 Change in population.
1:37:51 Dax Shepard? Okay, so almost fell a percent.
1:37:53 Speaker 01 Okay, New York, so that's the worst, then Illinois, yikes.
1:37:57 Dax Shepard? Sorry, Rob.
1:37:57 Speaker 01 Cause Rob left.
1:37:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's-
1:37:59 Speaker 01 True. You're part of it.
1:38:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it makes it look good.
1:38:02 Speaker 01 New York, Illinois, Louisiana, West Virginia, Hawaii, Oregon, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, California. So already, there's a lot worse off than us, I'm just gonna say that.
1:38:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:16 Speaker 01 Then Maryland, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Alaska, New Jersey, Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, Vermont, Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota-
1:38:27 Dax Shepard? All losing people.
1:38:29 Speaker 01 Uh oh, fuck, Michigan is the last loser.
1:38:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:38:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:38:32 Dax Shepard? Last of the losers.
1:38:33 Speaker 01 Last of the losers is Michigan.
1:38:35 Dax Shepard? Switches first place in losers.
1:38:36 Speaker 01 That's right, .03%.
1:38:38 Dax Shepard? Oh, that's nothing.
1:38:39 Speaker 01 Population decline.
1:38:39 Dax Shepard? That could be a miscount.
1:38:40 Speaker 01 No, it wasn't, they, this is on World Population Review.
1:38:44 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:38:45 Speaker 01 Very trusted brand.
1:38:46 Dax Shepard? I'm always on there.
1:38:47 Speaker 01 Now, we're gonna go neutral up, okay? So Vermont has .1% growth.
1:38:55 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:38:55 Speaker 01 In population change.
1:38:57 Dax Shepard? Could be a statistical error, go ahead.
1:38:58 Speaker 01 Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Indiana, Virginia, Wyoming, Alabama, Colorado, New Hampshire-
1:39:11 Speaker 01 Washington, Maine, Oklahoma, Nevada, Georgia, ding ding ding, Tennessee, ding ding ding, Utah, North Carolina, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana, South Dakota, Texas, South Carolina, Idaho, Florida.
1:39:27 Dax Shepard? Man, I would have definitely thought Tennessee and Texas were higher on that list.
1:39:32 Speaker 01 Tennessee's pretty high.
1:39:34 Dax Shepard? How many, what's the percentage change?
1:39:36 Speaker 01 It's the 12th.
1:39:37 Dax Shepard? But what percentage?
1:39:39 Speaker 01 1.19%.
1:39:40 Dax Shepard? 1.1? So that's more, that's higher than the Biggest Loser.
1:39:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:45 Dax Shepard? The Biggest Loser's 0.9.
1:39:46 Speaker 01 Florida is 1.91% population growth.
1:39:50 Dax Shepard? 2% a year. Wow.
1:39:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I just, as a Californian.
1:39:56 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:39:57 Speaker 01 People are worse off than us.
1:40:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:00 Speaker 01 And I just want that to be known.
1:40:02 Dax Shepard? Okay. You want more people to come, or you want it to stay the same, or you want people to leave?
1:40:07 Speaker 01 Oh, I don't have an opinion on that.
1:40:09 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:40:09 Speaker 01 Okay. Infanticide among Inuits. Until recently, certain Eskimo groups were reported to practice female infanticide, in the belief that the time spent suckling a girl would delay the mother's next opportunity to bear a son, males being preferred to females because of their future role as providers in a hunting economy. From sex ratios and census data, rates of female infanticide of up to 66% for some groups have been inferred, leading some-
1:40:40 Dax Shepard? 66%?
1:40:41 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. Leading some ethnographers to conclude that these groups were headed for extinction. Eskimo beliefs regarding the effects of infanticide on fertility, however, are in accord with the results of research on the relation of fertility and lactation. The cessation of lactation following infanticide would significantly shorten the expected interval until the next birth. Given this fact and available field data regarding the parameters of Eskimo population growth, the present computer simulation indicates that Eskimo populations could sustain a rate of 30% female infanticide and still survive.
1:41:16 Dax Shepard? You reading that just reminded me I have something much better. That is what I screen grabbed to tell you.
1:41:22 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:41:22 Dax Shepard? Can I interrupt this portion?
1:41:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was it.
1:41:25 Dax Shepard? That was it?
1:41:26 Speaker 01 I mean, it's sad.
1:41:27 Dax Shepard? Okay, this is, this is really something. And I probably need to send these to Rob right now so he can get them up on the TV.
1:41:34 Speaker 01 Oh, great.
1:41:34 Dax Shepard? Okay, so for the listener who can't see this, it's a picture of a very white woman on the left and a very, very black woman on the right. Thirty-six-year-old German model, who now identifies as black, plans to move to Africa after taking melatonin injections.
1:41:53 Speaker 01 No.
1:41:53 Dax Shepard? She and her partner are now preparing for the move with the influencer stating, "My husband and I had already planned to emigrate a few years ago, but then the pandemic hit. It hasn't been easy choosing where in Africa, but we currently have Kenya and Namibia on our shortlist." Now scroll through the other pictures there, Rob.
1:42:15 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:42:17 Dax Shepard? This is, uh...
1:42:20 Speaker 01 This is...
1:42:20 Dax Shepard? Wait till you see the one in her and her tribe outfit.
1:42:24 Speaker 01 Are we sure it's her? It is her.
1:42:26 Dax Shepard? It is her. And she's dressed like she's a Messiah or something. Um, this is nuts. Do you think this will be like, will people sign on to this? Yeah, so that's, there's a peptide you can take.
1:42:40 Speaker 01 No.
1:42:41 Dax Shepard? Bodybuilders use it to be darker, so they don't have to use as much self-tanner. And apparently she's just on an elephant dose of it. And she is black and identifies as black.
1:42:52 Speaker 01 Skin, um...
1:42:54 Dax Shepard? You can't identify as black.
1:42:56 Speaker 01 No.
1:42:56 Dax Shepard? Right?
1:42:57 Speaker 01 No.
1:42:58 Dax Shepard? Do you think it, is there any conceivable way in the future this will be a very protected group?
1:43:03 Speaker 01 No, because this isn't fair to black in a marginal, a very marginalized group.
1:43:09 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:43:10 Speaker 01 I mean, unless, unless, okay, look, here's how it, this is the only way it could happen.
1:43:15 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:43:16 Speaker 01 If the black community was like, great.
1:43:19 Dax Shepard? We love it. Send us your whites.
1:43:21 Speaker 01 Then?
1:43:22 Dax Shepard? Send us your previous whites.
1:43:24 Speaker 01 I guess we can't have a problem with it.
1:43:26 Dax Shepard? I'm actually, I'm more okay with her just dying herself black.
1:43:31 Speaker 01 No.
1:43:32 Dax Shepard? Over saying, "I identify as black." My issue is the identify as black.
1:43:37 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:43:38 Dax Shepard? Not, I don't really care if you take too many peptides.
1:43:40 Speaker 01 Okay, what did exactly, what did she say? Hold on, let's go back real quick.
1:43:44 Dax Shepard? Okay. She said.
1:43:46 Speaker 01 Who now identifies as black.
1:43:49 Dax Shepard? Oh. Has announced plans to move to Africa after injecting melatonin, a synthetic or melatonin, yeah, a synthetic hormone to darken her skin. But yeah, I guess people probably, there's no way people who can't see this are imagining her skin is as dark as it is. And she is as white as it gets on the left. This is nuts, right?
1:44:11 Speaker 01 This is.
1:44:12 Dax Shepard? This is like something you used to see in the old days in the Inquirer. This happened, remember with the woman that was somehow became president of the NAACP? And she said she identified as black.
1:44:22 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. It is called melanatin. It is peptide hormone stimulating. Like.
1:44:32 Dax Shepard? Go ahead.
1:44:33 Speaker 01 I mean, no. But then is it okay to make me white? I mean, I don't want to anymore.
1:44:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:44:41 Speaker 01 But like.
1:44:42 Dax Shepard? I don't care.
1:44:43 Speaker 01 Then gets into that where to me that's way worse. What she's doing is way worse than.
1:44:49 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:44:49 Speaker 01 The other way around.
1:44:51 Dax Shepard? Yes, because.
1:44:53 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:44:54 Dax Shepard? I would say imply, yes, she also has ginormous augmented breasts, which is interesting. If you've not experienced racism your entire life.
1:45:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:05 Dax Shepard? Um, to say you identify as black.
1:45:08 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:45:09 Dax Shepard? Is, how could you?
1:45:11 Speaker 01 It's unacceptable.
1:45:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:45:14 Speaker 01 It's unacceptable.
1:45:15 Dax Shepard? I just think it's white entitlement to the nth degree.
1:45:18 Speaker 01 It is.
1:45:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Like as Joy would say, the caucasity.
1:45:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:22 Dax Shepard? The caucasity to say you identify as black. Oh, I can't believe I haven't sent this to.
1:45:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, you have to.
1:45:27 Dax Shepard? I gotta send all this right now.
1:45:29 Speaker 01 You know what's kind of, obviously, I think this is atrocious. This is a no-no. This is bad, bad, bad. But what you just said, like, if you are a white person, you can't say you identify as black because you've never experienced what it's like to be a black person in this country. I will say, she's not going to be a black person in this country. She's going to be a black person in Africa. Where racism is gonna be not look.
1:45:55 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, that's fair. And that's kind of, that was Kirby's kind of, what she illuminated for us was like, it's different in England because people chose to come there. The whole dynamic is completely different.
1:46:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:09 Dax Shepard? And yeah, I don't know. I guess if you, I mean, now we're trying to pick maybe what's the best place to do this in.
1:46:15 Speaker 01 I mean, this is insane. Like, it's insane to do. It's entitled. It's wild.
1:46:23 Dax Shepard? I guess also, who cares? A little bit of who cares? Like, she wants to, she's on some weird journey.
1:46:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:29 Dax Shepard? She's not hurting anyone. I guess I shouldn't care.
1:46:34 Speaker 01 Well, I care on behalf of a marginalized group that has experienced a lot of hardship and racism.
1:46:41 Dax Shepard? They're not marginalized. And she's from Germany.
1:46:45 Speaker 01 I don't know. I hate her.
1:46:47 Dax Shepard? Complicates everything. Okay, you can resume your facts.
1:46:50 Speaker 01 Also, I don't, as someone with brown skin, God, I mean, this is like, what are we doing? What are we doing with peptides?
1:46:59 Dax Shepard? What if a white person, me, and I said, I'm Indian.
1:47:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:06 Dax Shepard? I want to identify as Indian, and I took this peptide?
1:47:10 Speaker 01 Like.
1:47:10 Dax Shepard? What would you, what would your action?
1:47:12 Speaker 01 But you're not. Like.
1:47:13 Dax Shepard? But I identify as.
1:47:17 Speaker 01 Stop.
1:47:17 Dax Shepard? Ever since I went to India, I realized, I'm Indian.
1:47:21 Speaker 01 Okay, I guess I'd say, what, what about India? What makes you feel Indian?
1:47:26 Dax Shepard? I like the food.
1:47:27 Speaker 01 Okay, so you like Indian food?
1:47:29 Dax Shepard? And it feels like I was designed to eat that food. It made me think, huh, that's weird. Why does this food sit so right? It's like I've evolved to eat this food.
1:47:38 Speaker 01 Oh, I don't.
1:47:39 Dax Shepard? And then I realized, oh, my God, I know what's going on. I'm from Bombay.
1:47:43 Speaker 01 Okay, it's actually Mumbai.
1:47:44 Dax Shepard? But not when I left. It was still Bombay.
1:47:47 Speaker 01 You, cuz you didn't leave cuz you are never.
1:47:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I was there. Clearly, I was there.
1:47:52 Speaker 01 Oh, okay. Also, you think what, what do you think happened? Do you think that you were born there?
1:47:59 Dax Shepard? I was assigned the wrong ethnicity at birth. I was assigned Caucasoid, but I'm Indian.
1:48:05 Speaker 01 And were you born there?
1:48:05 Dax Shepard? I'm reincarnated. I'm a Buddhist too. I have a lot.
1:48:09 Speaker 01 You can be Buddhist.
1:48:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:48:12 Speaker 01 I'm fine with that.
1:48:13 Dax Shepard? But I was an Indian Buddhist and I was reincarnated in this stupid Caucasoid body. I'm Indian and the food tastes so good to me.
1:48:22 Speaker 01 So you might.
1:48:23 Dax Shepard? And I'm of a high caste. I found out.
1:48:26 Speaker 01 From?
1:48:27 Dax Shepard? Because of course I am.
1:48:29 Speaker 01 Okay, so you might have been, you might have been an Indian Buddhist. And you have been reincarnated. I can't deny that. But you have been reincarnated as an American white person.
1:48:43 Dax Shepard? The oppressor? No. Maybe you wanna be the oppressor, but I don't.
1:48:47 Speaker 01 I am the oppressor. I dropped my.
1:48:50 Dax Shepard? Your nail again? I can't believe you even found it. I thought it was lost to the.
1:48:54 Speaker 01 I feel complicated about melatonin or melanatin, okay? And I feel, we were talking about this yesterday, like
1:49:08 Speaker 01 peptides are a lot of the rage right now in LA.
1:49:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:49:15 Speaker 01 And there, like, there is the real chance that you can just change your whole being with them.
1:49:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:49:23 Speaker 01 I
1:49:26 Speaker 01 am very skeptical of it. And now with this, this makes me like even more.
1:49:35 Dax Shepard? But this, hey, this is the most extreme case imaginable.
1:49:39 Speaker 01 But it's a real peptide.
1:49:40 Dax Shepard? I love peptides.
1:49:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:42 Dax Shepard? And I feel like this is a little reminiscent of your initial.
1:49:46 Speaker 01 Ozempic.
1:49:47 Dax Shepard? Ozempic issue, which is like.
1:49:51 Dax Shepard? Why not? Like, I don't, who cares?
1:49:53 Speaker 01 Like, no, like, no, I don't think it's fair for you to decide tomorrow to take melatonin, melanatin, and then become my color. Like, I don't think that's...
1:50:06 Dax Shepard? Well, that's a very extreme version of peptides. But do I deserve to take a peptide that elevates my HGH levels naturally? Well, it's not naturally, I'm taking a peptide.
1:50:17 Speaker 01 Nothing's natural.
1:50:18 Dax Shepard? But my thyroid, my pituitary gland's making the HGH. It's not exogenous HGH. What's the problem?
1:50:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, I just think, I just think all of this is, is a really, really, really intense obsession with anti-aging and optimization that I find overall, just like, not you, this, this overall conversation about it, obsessive and very the substance.
1:50:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but let's take me as an example.
1:50:53 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:50:54 Dax Shepard? Like, I have a crazy workout regimen and a diet regimen, and I'm gonna take anything that doesn't have bad side effects that's gonna help me in that pursuit.
1:51:05 Speaker 01 In the pursuit of what?
1:51:06 Dax Shepard? Being as physically fit as I possibly can.
1:51:09 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:51:09 Dax Shepard? And, and I can afford to.
1:51:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:13 Dax Shepard? Right? Now, is it fair or not that I can, other people, that's a side conversation? But just assume everyone has access to everything.
1:51:21 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:51:21 Dax Shepard? And I'm 50. I just was at COTA, and I rode a motorcycle all day long on the racetrack.
1:51:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:28 Dax Shepard? And I felt great, and I was able to do that, and primarily because of my fitness.
1:51:33 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:51:33 Dax Shepard? A lot of the 50-year-old dudes are not doing the sessions like I can do.
1:51:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:37 Dax Shepard? So I am, my life is really good, because I can still pursue my hobbies with vigor, and it makes my life better. And that is solely an outcome of how I've taken care of my body. And this is yet another tool, like eating well is, or like that protein is, or vitamins are. It's just another thing, it's a very arbitrary line between should I take vitamin D or take a peptide?
1:52:04 Speaker 01 Well, there's, there is a difference in that a lot of these peptides aren't, like, approved.
1:52:12 Speaker 01 I looked on the website yesterday of one and it, they all say not for human use.
1:52:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so that, I go to a doctor. So, yes, without a prescription, you're gonna get on a website and it's gonna say for animal use or something. I, I have no claim on that, but I'm, I'm talking about going to a doctor and having a real, the human version of a peptide prescribed to you.
1:52:34 Speaker 01 I guess if, if a doctor is prescribing it.
1:52:38 Dax Shepard? And I get blood panels every two and a half, three months that monitors everything.
1:52:43 Speaker 01 Look, I don't, I don't think it's like amoral. I, I think it's, I, I think society is, has become really obsessed with anti-aging.
1:52:59 Dax Shepard? You think more than?
1:53:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is extr- I mean, to me, injecting yourself with a massive concoction of things and you're, you're, you're tweaking to opti- like make you look thirty for the rest of your life, to me is literally the substance, like that movie.
1:53:15 Dax Shepard? Yep, well, but the substance was robbing your
1:53:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:20 Dax Shepard? futures, your, your current self. So there was a heavy price to pay.
1:53:25 Speaker 01 There was a price to pay.
1:53:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I just, I'm not seeing the price to pay other than the financial.
1:53:30 Speaker 01 We don't know.
1:53:31 Dax Shepard? Well, no, anything I'm on has been in the market and being, has been used on HIV patients for thirty-five, forty years.
1:53:39 Speaker 01 I know, but you don't have HIV.
1:53:41 Dax Shepard? No.
1:53:41 Speaker 01 So you don't know technically, I mean, there's a reason these things aren't FDA approved. They have not been tested for long enough.
1:53:50 Dax Shepard? No, no, all of these are FDA approved if you get a prescription and they're also a category that can be used in lab testing, which is what you're seeing on the website. But no, all of, any peptide I am on from a doctor has been FDA approved and used in medical trials, one in this case I'm referencing as HIV patients.
1:54:13 Speaker 01 Got it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I, um, I think it's fine, obviously. I'm, I have no say in what other people do, but it is, it does, it sprouts all this interesting, all these interesting questions because I don't. Want to.
1:54:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:54:33 Speaker 01 But then I think, but if literally everyone else is doing this.
1:54:38 Dax Shepard? You feel pressured to do it.
1:54:39 Speaker 01 I, it's not even that I feel pressured. It's like, I'm gonna look so old.
1:54:45 Speaker 01 Or I'm gonna look so, even though I'm actually aging naturally.
1:54:50 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:54:50 Speaker 01 I'm gonna be left behind.
1:54:52 Dax Shepard? Well, you're aging naturally, but with botox and injections.
1:54:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:58 Dax Shepard? It's an identical argument for someone who's like looking at you and going like, well, fuck, do I have to get botox? Cause everyone's doing it and I don't want to get botox, but Monica's getting it and now I have to. So it's like, that's the same argument as this peptide thing to me.
1:55:12 Speaker 01 It is. I mean, that's why I did that.
1:55:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:55:15 Speaker 01 Cause over time, it's like, oh my God, everyone is doing this.
1:55:19 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:55:20 Speaker 01 And I guess if everyone is, has a face that looks wrinkle free and I'm the only one rocking around with wrinkles. That's gonna look insane now, when it used to look normal.
1:55:34 Dax Shepard? Well, this is an interesting side thing that will take too long, but I more think about, yes, I've talked about this with Eric and stuff. It's like, well, everyone's gonna be on trisepotide or some GLP one at some point. It's gonna be over the counter.
1:55:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:55:46 Dax Shepard? Let's just say everyone's gonna be on it's four cents. Everyone's skinny. Let's just say everyone's skinny.
1:55:51 Speaker 01 I know.
1:55:52 Dax Shepard? But what I think is like, well, in a world where everyone's skinny, people that aren't skinny will be very interesting and exciting. So if no one has wrinkles, it's all interesting. You think of just, if everything's neutralized.
1:56:03 Speaker 01 But it, I guess that's my whole, I'm like, we're becoming one thing.
1:56:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:08 Speaker 01 And that is boring.
1:56:10 Dax Shepard? Uh huh. But.
1:56:11 Speaker 01 And I don't.
1:56:12 Dax Shepard? Also we're not.
1:56:13 Speaker 01 But we kind of are. It's like, if everyone can get the exact same coloring.
1:56:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:19 Speaker 01 If you can change your features, if you can make yourself not age, if you can be all one body weight, like.
1:56:28 Speaker 01 That is so boring, really, I think, for me, anyway.
1:56:32 Dax Shepard? Or you might, silver lining, it might actually be, well, then all you'd be deciding on is personality. Everything else has been neutralized.
1:56:42 Speaker 01 I guess, I mean.
1:56:43 Dax Shepard? I mean, that, doesn't that sound like utopia a little bit?
1:56:45 Speaker 01 No. Yeah, sure, sure.
1:56:48 Dax Shepard? I don't know, it's just, it's, it's interesting, it's fascinating. If mine was, I don't think I'd look any hotter. I don't think my face looks better. I don't, there's like, nothing I'm taking to look, to look better.
1:57:01 Speaker 01 But there are peptides like that. There are.
1:57:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, I want them. What are they? Let me see, ask my doctor if I can be on those. Um, but yeah, I'm, I'm up for everything that, that makes me feel better and doesn't have a big cost associated with it.
1:57:18 Speaker 01 You know what's wild is the other day, a old video popped up on Instagram of, do you remember from the Hills, Heidi, Heidi and Spencer?
1:57:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.
1:57:29 Speaker 01 And do you remember she got so much?
1:57:33 Dax Shepard? Surgery?
1:57:34 Speaker 01 Plastic surgery.
1:57:35 Dax Shepard? I didn't know that, but?
1:57:36 Speaker 01 It was a huge thing. She like, got a ton of plastic surgery. They did this episode where she was basically like, talking to her mom and her sister.
1:57:44 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:57:45 Speaker 01 Her mom and her sister were bawling.
1:57:47 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:57:47 Speaker 01 And she was explaining everything she did and she was like, talking kind of weird and like, it was sad. Like, it was, it was presented as, oh my god, cautionary tale?
1:57:58 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:57:59 Speaker 01 And this popped up and I was like, that is not how I remember it. She looks kind of like so many people now.
1:58:08 Dax Shepard? Oh, nowadays.
1:58:09 Speaker 01 Like, her, her, in quotes, like, crazy things she did.
1:58:14 Dax Shepard? This is kind of standard.
1:58:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:58:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, well, I will say when I'm in Beverly Hills, I will pass like, six or seven women in a row that have identical shaped faces.
1:58:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:24 Dax Shepard? Cause the filler ends up making every face.
1:58:26 Speaker 01 And they get nose jobs, that their noses are the same and lip injections that make their lips all the same.
1:58:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:58:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:34 Dax Shepard? I just don't care.
1:58:35 Speaker 01 I mean, I am gonna get chin filler again.
1:58:37 Dax Shepard? Right, right, yeah. I just don't care.
1:58:39 Speaker 01 About what?
1:58:40 Dax Shepard? That people do that stuff. It doesn't bother me.
1:58:43 Speaker 01 I don't care individually. Like, I don't care that that person in Beverly Hills is doing it. I, but societally, I start to like pull back and I think, oh, my God, we really are shifting into this other realm, and that is where I start.
1:58:59 Dax Shepard? I just think people have always been doing everything they could. So they wore perfume when that was invented, and they got hairbrushes to keep their hair pretty, and they got combs, and they got hairstyles, and everything that was ever at your disposal.
1:59:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:11 Dax Shepard? People have been pursuing looking the best they can.
1:59:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:15 Dax Shepard? And we're just, there's more and more products in the mix.
1:59:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:20 Dax Shepard? But I do think people have been trying to look their very best for, I don't think that's new.
1:59:25 Speaker 01 I haven't brushed my hair in like four days, so.
1:59:27 Dax Shepard? Well, we pick what things, but I know me too. I like, my jeans are dirty, but I need to work out.
1:59:33 Speaker 01 Anyway, that's all very interesting.
1:59:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:36 Speaker 01 Okay, that's it.
1:59:38 Dax Shepard? All right, love you.
Previous Dove Cameron Next Armchair Anonymous: Haven’t Confessed to Parents Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated