Matt Murphy (homicide prosecutor)

Matt Murphy (The Book of Murder) is a former Homicide prosecutor and current legal analyst for ABC News. Matt joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the importance of telling the victims stories over the killers, the craft of picking a jury, and his nerves the first time he was at a crime scene. Matt and Dax discuss the parallels between their childhoods, the experience of working with detectives, and the horrific crimes of Rodney Alcala. Matt discusses how his job skews his worldview, the mental toll of not having enough evidence when you know someone is guilty, and if murder is reflective of the times. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. This is a real departure from previous experts in the most exhilarating way. This was riveting.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. And it's a ding ding ding from Monday's episode.

• 0:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes, from Anna Kendrick because of her new movie, Woman of the Hour. Our guest, Matt Murphy, was a technical advisor on it as well as an actual prosecutor on the case. Matt Murphy is a former homicide prosecutor and a current legal analyst for ABC News. Maybe you've seen him there. And he spent two decades assigned to the sexual assault and homicide units of the Orange County District Attorney's Office, which you'll learn in this, is the third biggest in the country, 3 million people under their purview.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:48Dax Shepard?

  He has tried some of the most headlinie murder cases of all time. A lot of shit was happening in Orange County that I kinda didn't realize.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like Golden State Killer, a lot of them.

• 1:00Dax Shepard?

  Dirty John.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02Dax Shepard?

  He has a book out called The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death, which is fantastic. It's so good. And he profiles all these different cases he's worked on as well as educates you a ton on how the actual mechanics of that job work, which I find fascinating. And then, and then his own personal journey, which is it, this job took an enormous toll on the rest of his life.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. This was awesome. I loved Matt Murphy. I hope you do, too.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:39Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Quince.

• 1:42Speaker 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, because let's be honest, self-gifting is a love language.

• 2:02Dax Shepard?

  Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high-quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongol.

• 2:10Dax Shepard?

  Only in cashmere, 14 karat gold in Italian leather, full on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  It's the dream. The cashmere sweater is starting at $60. Down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories. You and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.

• 2:29Dax 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.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 2:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.

• 2:41Speaker 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.

• 3:04Dax 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 Quince. Okay, so I have a confession. I'm the worst holiday shopper on the planet. I wait until the last possible second, I panic, and then I end up buying something nobody wants. But this year I've cracked the code and the code is cozy. And Quince's bedding makes it so easy because the quality is exceptional. It's the kind of gift people actually use in love long after the holidays.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay. Can we talk about their European linens? Because Quince's 100% European linen gets softer with every wash. Most bedding peaks the day you buy it and then it's all downhill. This is the opposite and their organic cotton bedding is breathable and incredibly soft. It's hotel quality comfort for your own bed.

• 4:05Dax Shepard?

  You crawl into bed and you're like, wait, did I accidentally check into a Four Seasons? Quince just makes it easy to create a bed you'll actually look forward to getting into. And their quilts, coverlets and duvet inserts make any bed and any gift feel complete.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you can get and give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag.

• 4:30Dax Shepard?

  I mean, guys, I put these on the bed of my children. They are wrapping my little babies and I feel great about it.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Mine are striped. They're so cute. They're very fashionable and very comfortable. And it's not just bedding. Quince has everyone on your list covered with Mongolian cashmere sweaters, fine jewelry, leather bags, chef-grade cookware, five-star luggage, and more.

• 4:50Dax 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 you where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show.

• 5:27Dax Shepard?

  We're pretty willy-nilly, Matt. Don't let this nice set fool you. We're kind of, um...

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Just my speed.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Cattywampus.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Cattywampus is a good word.

• 5:35Dax Shepard?

  Now, you're handsome. Let's start with the fact that you're very handsome.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Devilishly, devilishly so.

• 5:39Dax Shepard?

  And I'm being sincere now. It has to be a little bit of an advantage when you're a prosecutor to be handsome. It'd be preferable that the jury likes to look at you, right?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  You know what's tough is for the women, pretty women prosecutors, it's brutal.

• 5:52Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Because people don't take them seriously.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  As a guy, you walk in, the bailiff's your buddy, you talk about fantasy football, the court clerk wants to set you up with her divorced friend. And a lot of the women have it tougher because half the women on the jury will want to hate her for her suit. And the court reporter is jealous.

• 6:10Dax Shepard?

  The men feel emasculated that she's smarter than them, so they hate her on the jury.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  It's a minefield.

• 6:15Dax Shepard?

  So Matt, this will be a fun interview for us because we've not had anyone weirdly in this realm. We've had a lot of defense attorneys on, as they tend to write books. Yeah, so we've not had a prosecutor on, and I can't tell you how immediately, how many questions I realized I had.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I love it.

• 6:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. First of all, you're a California native, which is weird.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I grew up, actually, we were just talking about it, not far from here.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Really?

• 6:36Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I grew up in Beverlywood.

• 6:38Dax Shepard?

  Why don't I know where Beverlywood is?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Nobody knows where it is.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  It's not Beverlywood.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  You know where Rancho Park is, by Fox Studios?

• 6:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  So, literally, Chev-.

• 6:46Dax Shepard?

  Chev-ate Hills, yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Okay, so it's the second part of Chev-ate Hills, on the other side of motor.

• 6:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  So, it's basically Chev-ate Hills.

• 6:52Dax Shepard?

  And what did mom and dad do that you were living there?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  My dad was a doctor, mom was a nurse, met at LA County General.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a bit cute.

• 6:59Dax Shepard?

  They were working together?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  They were working together, yeah, it sounds cute. I don't think two humans have hated each other more.

• 7:05Dax Shepard?

  Ah, sure.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I should not exist. I'd kind of nerd out on some of these astronomy things. And somebody tried to calculate the odds of humans existing with like Jupiter and absorbing all the asteroids and like, whatever that list is, I'm the least likely person to actually exist.

• 7:22Dax Shepard?

  How long did they stay married?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  They're married for 10 years, probably talked to each other for at least one.

• 7:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Well, my sister is two years younger than me, so at least eight years, they, you know.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay. What kind of doctor was he?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  GI. He started doing rehab centers.

• 7:35Dax Shepard?

  Probably made a lot of money doing that.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  He did, and he got in like in the late 80s, was one of the pioneers, Anthony Kiedis and Scar Tissue. Did you ever read that book?

• 7:42Dax Shepard?

  I haven't, but I know Anthony and I know his story.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  That's a good read. So, he actually talks about my dad in that book.

• 7:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he did? What drove him, maybe working in the county?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  No, no, no, he's like the hopeless alcoholic for a long time.

• 7:54Dax Shepard?

  Your dad was?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Both my parents, yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  I'm a thoroughbred baby.

• 7:57Dax Shepard?

  Did your dad get sober?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:59Dax Shepard?

  And then he wanted to open a treatment center?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. He was sort of like a passion life, big AA guy. In 1975, he got a DUI, and it was undignified experience for him, and he was a prominent dude, and he got sober.

• 8:11Dax Shepard?

  My dad got his fourth DUI, he was gonna go to prison, and he went to rehab.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  And it stuck?

• 8:16Dax Shepard?

  It stuck. Yeah, he died sober. So, it's an interesting experience to grow up in AA, right?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  I was an AA kid.

• 8:22Dax Shepard?

  Me too.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Really?

• 8:24Dax Shepard?

  Did you go to like Alateen?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Made me go. I lived with him in high school, because my mom was still drinking, and he was a legit god. He was all in, it was like a religion to him.

• 8:32Dax Shepard?

  Was he in The Course in Miracles, or ACOA, or all the other fringe outgrowths of the 80s AA?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  ACOA?

• 8:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, adult children.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. When I moved in, that was the condition, I had to go to Alateen meetings.

• 8:44Dax Shepard?

  Matt, you've heard me say this.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:45Dax Shepard?

  So I never lived with my dad. They got divorced when I was three. And then in ninth grade, he had gotten in a terrible car accident and he needed someone to help him. And I was about to get murdered at the new high school I was gonna go to. So many kids hated me. So I moved in with him and he said, yeah, come in. There's virtually no rules, you have no curfew, but you have to go to one meeting a week.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Holy shit, this is so funny.

• 9:07Dax Shepard?

  And so I started going to like Alateen or whatever it was. He encouraged me to go to like the Al-Anon portion. I was like, these aren't my folks. I'd rather be in an actual AA meeting. So I was going to AA meetings before I ever had a problem. I ultimately did have a big problem.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  So I moved in in ninth grade. That was the rule, no curfew, no nothing. I had to go to an Alateen meeting a week. And the rules basically were, I mean, this is kind of bad, but don't get caught with whatever I was doing because I heard a thousand times, I'm not gonna bail you out of jail. And I mean, we used to go to punk shows down the street from where we are right now, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers back then.

• 9:39Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, they were more funk back then.

• 9:41Dax Shepard?

  We are both tall, lanky gentlemen that were in the punk scene, living with dad, having to go, hey, this is pretty fucking nuts.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Private school?

• 9:48Dax Shepard?

  No, I went to public school.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Okay, so I went to public school up to ninth grade. And then I went up going to Loyola with actually a bunch of Los Vitos kids.

• 9:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:56Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Do you live here still?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Manhattan Beach.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then I'm splitting time between here and New York now.

• 10:01Dax Shepard?

  You are the correspondent for ABC News?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  ABC for true crime, all things murder and mayhem.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 10:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so let's find out. So this is incredible that you had that experience. Because the group of friends is so unique. The kids I met in there were a blast because they were already fucked up and got sober.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Totally. And a bunch of kids that you could really relate to. I had friends that came from really nice families. And my family was so fucked up that when I got in there with those kids, they were sort of my people.

• 10:27Dax Shepard?

  Did mom ever get sober?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  She got sober at 75.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 10:30Dax Shepard?

  No way.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Right when I thought I was completely done. And she was a nurse, so she retired. And like a lot of retired people, she went off the rails completely.

• 10:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  And a friend of hers called in a welfare check. And they went in and she was a 4-2 blood alcohol level. And that's what finally kicked in.

• 10:48Dax Shepard?

  I can't believe she was in a coma.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  They found her passed out?

• 10:51Dax Shepard?

  At seventy-five before.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  At seventy-five, four-two.

• 10:54Dax Shepard?

  She would have lived to be one-sixty if she had been.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Scotch iris jeans, you know, and she had to be a five-oh at least at her peak.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  For that event.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Was she in your life?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I love my mom forever. She died a couple of years ago.

• 11:08Dax Shepard?

  Well, you have to because dad leaves and now he's the bad guy and she's.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  But he lived with his dad.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  I lived with her and then I moved in with him in ninth grade because she was a mess and my brother and sister too.

• 11:17Dax Shepard?

  How do you get college bone from this childhood?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  I wanted to get the hell out.

• 11:22Dax Shepard?

  Where'd you go to college?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  UCSB. So I'm fifteen years old. I grew up surfing here. I took a surf trip with a bunch of buddies, like when your first friend gets his driver's license?

• 11:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  You know, and then you're packing like eight kids into the car because now you have freedom.

• 11:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  We went up there and there's a place called Campus Point at UCSB. You lived in Santa Barbara for a spell.

• 11:38Dax Shepard?

  For one year, yeah, yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:40Dax Shepard?

  And I was lured there by visiting Ivy right out of high school and I was like, get real.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Disneyland has nothing on happiest place on earth.

• 11:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, it's impossible.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  And I went up there. I'd never been. I'm fifteen years old. Then we roll on. It's like one of those classic Southern California days. And the one day of the year that Campus Point is firing. So it's the best wave I've probably ever seen at that point. And there's beautiful girls everywhere.

• 12:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  On bikes and it's like, where the hell is this? And that was it. All I wanted to do. It's like I found the next phase.

• 12:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you got BA at UCSB and then where'd you go to law school?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  San Diego. Went down there, lived on the beach for another three years.

• 12:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you were just chasing beach lifestyle.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I was. I got the sun damage to prove it unfortunately now.

• 12:18Dax Shepard?

  And when you were going after a law degree, was it your intention to be a prosecutor or a defense attorney?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I kind of stumbled into it. I started a sexual assault education program as an undergrad because we could make fraternity pledges and sorority pledges go. So like I got your classic women's center orientation and where they were yelling at alls for being men. And then I had a friend that got sexually assaulted. It was actually somebody I was dating when I was on Semester at Sea and I came back and it was a horrific experience. So I thought I could maybe take a different approach. It caught on. So that caught the eye of the FBI. And this woman Kathy Harper, her whole thing was sexual assault. That was her background with the DA's office. I got recruited by the FBI and by her.

• 12:56Dax Shepard?

  In law school or undergrad?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  In law school.

• 12:58Dax Shepard?

  In law school, yeah, okay.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  It was kind of cool. And this fancy P I firm offered me a track to make a bunch of money. I'd said I'd give the D A's office a whirl.

• 13:06Dax Shepard?

  Boy, really quick, you ask twenty-three-year-old me, I'm probably going to F B I. I wanna kick some doors down.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  It looked really, really cool, but the rule back then was that they wouldn't assign you to an area where you went to college, where you grew up, or where you went to undergrad. I'm a talentless surfer. Trust me, way too lanky, but I loved it and I just wanted to keep doing it. So at age twenty-three, it was like, this means I can't surf anymore, which is the logic. Totally. Friggin', you know, twenty-three going on fifteen-year-old. So I thought, D A's office, my plan was to do it for three years. And then at the end of my first day as a junior law clerk in nineteen ninety-two, I was hooked. I knew it's what I wanted to do. The longer you stay, the more interesting it gets, the more skill you get as a trial lawyer. And that office back then, it was a trial philosophy. So they really wanted you to get as skilled as you could.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  It's like a craft, picking a jury. And I sucked so bad when I first started, but it starts getting more and more fun and stressful. And then you start doing felonies and then it gets more interesting. I kinda resisted mentors for a long time. And then, I don't know what it was, but I had a couple of these guys take me under their wing. And then I really felt like I had an actual teacher, so I'd go in and try things in a courtroom. And then you'd start dealing with real victims. I went to sexual assault and I spent four years there. And when you sit down with a crying mom whose kid has been sexually abused. Sexual abuse is so ubiquitous and so many of us have had that happen to us over the years. I've had juries where the judge, they'll ask a question, you know, have you or anybody close to you been a victim or experienced something similar? I've had every hand go up in the box, twelve out of twelve jurors. So then you start dealing with that.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  And with real pedophiles, the predatory ones especially, you do some good when you get one of those guys on a tough case, when you win those, you are impacting the lives of all the victims.

• 14:48Dax Shepard?

  Dozens of people, probably, yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  And then you get homicide, which is varsity, and that's where it gets fascinating. That's what I wrote my book about, was that journey, showing up and knowing nothing about murders and starting at ground zero. And I tried to take the reader through my experience on that.

• 15:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, let's set the stage. First and foremost, you're here because we just interviewed Anna Kendrick and we just saw her movie, which is great. It is a factual case. Of course, it's been artistically interpreted, but it's a real life case from the seventies. And as it turns out, you were on that case in an iteration of it. But you were with the DA's office in Orange County, which I think this shocked me even knowing about Orange County, but it's the third largest DA's office in the country. And under your purview is three million people.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:33Dax Shepard?

  I don't think people would really know that.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  New York, and then you got LA, and then Orange County, and advised for third, depending on the population of, I think Detroit. I think Atlanta had a really big one for a while. But yeah, it's up to the third largest DA's office in the United States.

• 15:47Dax Shepard?

  And so you had a 27 year career there, 17 of which was with homicide. And in that 17 years, you prosecuted and or worked on a lot of the cases we know about from pop culture. And we're out of the gates, Dirty John, I read. I was like, what are the fucking odds that we'll meet the person? So that's pretty wild. But I think we start at the beginning because it's a wild ride. First and foremost, when you were working the sexual victims unit, you were warned by an early mentor. You said the move is to find a buddy. Hopefully you have one to have someone show you the ropes. And they said to you, your love life is going to be in shambles after this. And you're like, not a chance.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Because of SVU?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  The subject matter. I think it's for a variety of reasons.

• 16:32Dax Shepard?

  But Matt was like I would have been like, get real. I'm mid twenties. What are you talking about?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Superman.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  No, stop it.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  And it was the buddy of mine. He's a couple of years older than me in the office, still one of my best friends. And he's like, dude, forget it. And basically, the women tend to do a lot better in that unit, for whatever reason, than the men do. There's a thing called pornography, not that I've ever watched it before. However, it's like one.

• 16:53Dax Shepard?

  You know it exists.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  I know it exists. I read about it. Anyway, it's like 10 hours a day of anti porn. You're immersed up to your eyeballs in the worst stuff you can imagine. And it doesn't take you long before you realize it's 99.99% men, you know, male sexuality. It really does kind of screw with your head a little bit. That line between normal sexual drive and healthy relationships.

• 17:15Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's a continuum and you're like, huh, I'm here. Where does it get pathological?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  It screws your head like nothing else. It's hard not to bring home.

• 17:23Dax Shepard?

  I'd very rather see murders, for sure.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Honestly, it's a lot easier. And I mean, a lot of murders, there's a sex element to them.

• 17:29Dax Shepard?

  I want to get into that.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Golden State Killer was one of mine as well.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  A lot of the serial killers start out with a sex crime fundamentally. And I talk about this a little bit in the book. My next book, hopefully, if I get another deal, it's gonna be about serial killers specifically because I feel like there's so much meat on that bone.

• 17:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're gonna build to that because I have a lot of sexual questions around that. It does seem, I mean, truly, it seems like, at least from the stuff I consume, there seems to be a really ubiquitous sexual insecurity driving a lot of this.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  That's an interesting observation. I've never heard anybody say that before.

• 18:01Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  I think you're exactly right. An insecurity element, I gotta think about that.

• 18:05Dax Shepard?

  Like, let's just say, my penis is so small, I can't be with anyone in the normal way. But I can force myself on this and then I can end their experience.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I can give you kind of a newsflash here that nobody knows. And I don't mind saying it, and I hope he's listening. Joseph Danzler, Golden State Killer.

• 18:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Tiny dick.

• 18:22Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Like, micropenis, small.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Really?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  I don't think that's ever come out in any of the books, but yeah.

• 18:27Dax Shepard?

  I intuitively know that's part of some of these things.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  There's something to that.

• 18:31Dax Shepard?

  It's gonna work in tandem with my other hunch I have about all them is they're kind of all smart and they're underachievers.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  A lot of them are really smart.

• 18:38Dax Shepard?

  And they think they're supposed to be someone important because they were intelligent enough to be so. And then they underperformed, if they had this entitlement, I should have been this, and I'm fucking angry.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  You have no idea how right you are. It's entitlement. And there's a myth out there with a lot of serial killers that they're a product of abuse. I've had an issue with it. I showed up looking for Buffalo Bill, thinking all serial killers, like I saw Silence of the Lambs, I know what it is, you know? And I got there and a lot of serial rapists tend to be super arrogant, entitled, just like you were saying. They're very, very smart, a lot of them are spoiled as kids. They were told they were great and then they get out there in the real world and women aren't so interested in them. And there's a component of that, for sure, and they feel entitled to do it.

• 19:14Dax Shepard?

  I was owed this.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  And I'm gonna take it. And they get off on it. There's kind of this myth out there. One of the most common questions you get when you're actually prosecuting those cases is, what made them do it? And the answer is, they fucking want to do it. And a lot of times, can I swear on this?

• 19:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  They want to do it, it turns them on. And they get off on it and they feel like they're entitled to do it.

• 19:33Dax Shepard?

  Powerful.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  That's right. They get off on the power.

• 19:35Dax Shepard?

  And they're proving to everyone.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Right. The more sadistic fear and pain they can inflict on their victims, the better. Alcala, you know, Anna's movie.

• 19:43Dax Shepard?

  How do you see his last name?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Alcala. He grew up in East LA, actually Cantwell High School, which is another college prep school.

• 19:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Guy was a varsity letterman.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Genius level IQ, Mensa certified, the whole deal. Brother went to West Point, hero in Vietnam. Totally successful, mother who loved him, never abused or bullied by anybody. And the guy probably murdered 100 people. Anna Kendrick, I gotta tell you, so I get a call in the middle of COVID from her people and it's, hey, Anna Kendrick wants to talk to you about a movie. Of course, I'll talk to her right away. She was super sensitive about the victims and wanted to make sure that they were making a movie. She was sensitive to that. And the way Orange County works is a little different than most DA's offices. It's called a vertical system. So I was assigned Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach, Newport and Irvine. And then I became one of the two cool case deputies, which is how I got Alcala. And we start the night of the murder. So we'd go to the crime scenes ourselves.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  We'd help with warrants, work with the detectives from the minute the murder happens all the way up. And then the detective that you're with that night is with you at counsel table when the jury comes back and they're for sentencing. So it's a real team thing. So as a result of that, first thing I would do is meet with the victims' families after I filed charges and whatever kind of murder it was. And you bond with those people, you get really protective of them. So when she said she wanted to make a movie and wanted to make sure she did it right from the victim's perspective.

• 21:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she's telling their story, not his.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 21:05Dax Shepard?

  Which I think is admirable, but it left me with a ton of questions about him, which you were gonna answer.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can answer him.

• 21:10Dax Shepard?

  No, I think it's a very cool and respectful approach to it.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  The new serial killer to me is the mass shooter. Cause it's to me very similar, the type, the insecure boy, almost always, who has trouble with women or girls, but feels entitled and is on this power trip. I feel like serial killers have moved into that realm and it's the same type of person.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  So the FBI would say that's a spree killing and a little bit different, the psychology. And I like your theory on that for the true blue. Serial killers like the Bundy's, the Jack the Ripper's. There's a sexual component. The school shooter tends to really be that outcast, kind of picked on, bullied kid.

• 21:49Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, the way I've seen those folks is a little different. And I witnessed it so much growing up in the way I did in the time I did, which is the system ruined a lot of kids that didn't fit in. There's a lot of kids that are so hurt by that. I'm not justifying it, but I think it's a different motivation. It's not, I'm entitled, it's that you guys are making me suffer so much, I'm gonna make you suffer back. It's like a revenge.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  It's a different animal. And I go through kind of the taxonomy of murders. A domestic violence murder is very different than a child abuse murder, which is very different than like a tweaker robbed the 7-Eleven murderer. You know, like the conspiracies to kill for money. So they're all a little bit different. You always wind up with a dead body at the end, but you start seeing some of the same things over and over if you do them long enough. Like serial killers love to collect trophies. It's almost like they go to school for it.

• 22:36Dax Shepard?

  Well, again, they're proud of themselves. They've proved that they're smarter than everyone else.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  For anybody that's interested, I got into probably the all-call a chapter more than anything else in the book. Because the deeper you look in serial killers and the psychological motivations, to me anyway, the more fascinating it gets. And when you get into the history of them, I always thought it was a product of modern American life. Sort of the disaffected youth and all that. And then you get into, I read Mindhunter by Douglas, who was the FBI agent who wrote Silence of the Lambs originally.

• 23:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  And then from that, there's a great FBI paper. And they talk about the first real attempt to get a handle on him. And it was this guy, Dr. Von Kraft Ebbing. And he wrote a book in the 1880s, he was a contemporary of Freud. And he was a German psychiatrist, never been to America. It's a whole section full of serial killers that we've never heard of, going back hundreds of years, Europeans. So it's not an American thing.

• 23:25Dax Shepard?

  It's timeless.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's timeless. It's something in the human community, psyche, whatever it is, that there are those guys.

• 23:32Dax Shepard?

  The only primate that we have that kills for pleasure, other than us, is chimps. And what do chimps have in common with us? They're incredibly intelligent and they have a very stratified hierarchy. So if they're low status and they feel low status, the outcome of that. That is often homicidal or chimpocidal.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  What is it, like 98.9% of our DNA is?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. Did you see Chimp Crazy?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you must on HBO or Max Now. Everybody's face gets ripped off.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Again, look how chimps kill people. Tigers, they get you around the neck, they kill you. They want to eat you. A chimp unleashes fury. It's a crime of passion. They want to make you suffer.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  They don't even really necessarily want you dead.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  They want to maim you and mangle you.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:19Dax Shepard?

  So disturbing.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  It is.

• 24:20Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  It's in us all.

• 24:22Dax Shepard?

  It gives you that sense. It's just so close at all times. Circling all the way back, what was it about the being in the sexual? Do you think you could articulate specifically? One is like you're seeing horrific graphic things. That's disturbing and that will not make you, that'll make you anti horny.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Anti horny, yeah.

• 24:39Dax Shepard?

  But I think deeper, more interesting is coming in terms with where you're at in this weird thing. You possess the same weird drive and we all have levels of perversion. Is it almost like seeing a glimpse, your own sexuality gets scary to you?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  That is a real effect of that. Your job is taking down the guys that are hurting people with their sexuality. Right away, you become so paranoid of your own sexuality as a man.

• 25:04Dax Shepard?

  You have to govern this drive and you maybe get a sense of like, wow, ungoverned, I'm afraid of who I would be or who anyone would be.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  That's a huge part of it. And also for me, as a guy, we all have to learn, you have to control those urges. And that's something that I think men in a sort of traditionally masculine way, we learn that very early on. And among other men, a lot of people don't talk about this, the dude who can't control his urges becomes an outcast if he doesn't get his ass kicked very quickly by the other men and whatever little crew he's in, if he's surrounded by any sort of decent group of guys. So you learn to control it and then in that unit, what happens is you overcompensate. And I think that I became, I mean, this is probably way more information than anybody.

• 25:43Dax Shepard?

  But what's great about your book is it's your personal story interwoven with your professional one.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I became passive sexually, probably to the point of being a lousy partner. My girlfriend at the time was gorgeous, got her master's in architecture and graduated from UCLA. She was a catch in every way. And then here I am.

• 26:01Dax Shepard?

  You're retired from sex.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  It's scary.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I retired at age 28. Probably didn't do much for our relationship, actually.

• 26:10Dax Shepard?

  You're in that unit for a while and then you get called up to the big leagues, which is homicide and everyone's aiming towards that. And you have this kind of well-worn stereotype or trope, which is you're nervous the first time you go to a crime scene because you know of these people who've come before you who show up and throw up. And we see it in movies.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  I just rewatched Seven.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  It's a great movie.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Such a good movie.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Masterful.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  So good.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I mean, Kevin Spacey, who I think is getting uncanceled now.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Is he?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  He just did a Broadway thing.

• 26:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  I don't pretend to know how any of that stuff works, but amazing actor, if nothing else.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that is true. I won't take that from him.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  But Brad Pitt in that was amazing. Morgan Freeman was amazing.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  They're incredible.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  It'd probably be the equivalent of you're an actor and you have just wound up doing your first scene with somebody like a Morgan Freeman. I had the biggest imposter syndrome ever.

• 27:03Dax Shepard?

  You were normally young for the position as well.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  I was on a rocket and I looked like I was 12. And I go to the crime scene and come on, everything you see on TV, the new guy always pukes, right? I'm literally walking into that going, don't puke, Murphy, don't puke. Because if anybody's capable of throwing up on a dead body or doing something that dumb, it's me. I'm 33. I was surfing that morning trying to get over a broken heart from the UCLA grad because she...

• 27:25Dax Shepard?

  She moved on.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, she moved on to a guy who was my buddy.

• 27:27Dax Shepard?

  She wasn't retired sexually quite yet.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  She was not. She was not. And my buddy Greg, as he put it, the guy she wound up marrying, he's just like you, dude, just a little better in every way. I walked into that crime scene. We had a dead guy on his back in a kitchen. And the majority of the crime scenes are inside. And a lot of them are domestics, which is what this wound up being. But I walk in and it's like, don't puke, don't puke, don't puke. And I looked down and he had a folding knife in his left hand and a wallet chain into his right back pocket. And immediately jumped out at me like, why would a right-handed guy have a knife in his left hand? Or a left-handed guy have his wallet in his right back pocket? And here's another thing that isn't in the book. First thing, the detective, Byington, who wound up being one of my best friends and he wound up being the lead in so many of the stories I talk about and so many of the cases. But he lifts up the shoulder because what happened was the killer,

• 28:13Speaker 02

  who was his mistress, I guess we could call her.

• 28:15Dax Shepard?

  He was married, having an affair with her. She had just gotten broken up with by her boyfriend, who she still lived with.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Right. And so she starts seeing our guy, and I don't know if he's still living with his wife, or if they were separated. And this is super weird, and this is also not in the book. His brother had a dream. His brother is a really deeply religious guy, to the point of being kind of out there a little bit. Has a dream where his brother is killed. Again, my whole thing with the family, so he told me this. He has a dream that he sees his brother's death. And so he talked to him and said, "God came to me in a dream, and showed me your death, and he's gonna strike you down if you don't end this sinful relationship and go back to your wife and kids." That's true story. And if that isn't the weirdest frigging thing, and I'm not religious. We always kind of thought he had this talk with his brother, and he went over to end it. And she couldn't handle two breakups, so she shot him. He was hauling ass for the stairs, and there was one gray wind to his arm.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  And we see all these bullet holes on the wall upstairs, broken glass. As he's going down the stairs, she got him once in the back. Then he goes down, and he's on his back, and she shot him twice in the heart. Once in the temple, once in the mouth. So the detective, I'm 30, this is my first murder scene. I'm just thinking, don't throw up, don't throw up. He lifts up his shoulder to show me the two bullet holes in the wood underneath, which is significant because it indicates degree between a first and second. Also, it was a six-shot revolver, and there were eight holes, so she had to reload. Which legally is all very significant. He lifts up the shoulder, and I'm in the don't puke mode, and the guy groans.

• 29:44Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  The air came out of his mouth. Came out of his mouth, and it's like, ugh. I mean, it's like on and out.

• 29:50Dax Shepard?

  You're just trying to act like you've been in this situation a thousand times.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  I've seen this a million times, so it's like, are we sure this guy's dead?

• 29:55Dax Shepard?

  Dead men don't talk. Sometimes they do, sometimes they do.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that was my first one. And then what happened? She bails out. This is my first week in the unit.

• 30:03Dax Shepard?

  I want to add, she is financial manager.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Financial planner, 41 years old, never been in trouble a day in her life. Ties to the community, grew up in Newport Beach area. So she's got a right to bail. And back then, it was $250,000, and she can make it. And I've got no arguments to keep her in, and this is statutory bail. She gets out and tracks down the ex-boyfriend, who had just broken up with her, and they were still living together. He's in a hotel, and he falls asleep. Unbeknownst to him, she brought in a tire iron from the car, bludgeons him to death. In his sleep.

• 30:35Dax Shepard?

  Next night.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  What?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, right after bailing out and then goes to the place called the firing line in Huntington Beach, rents a gun and

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Kills herself?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Suicides, yeah.

• 30:44Dax Shepard?

  In a firing range.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  This is my first week and I think I've got the shortest career in the homicide arena because I must have screwed something up. My boss, who is wonderful, he's like, how is this your fault? You know, he's like, she had a right to bail.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:54Dax Shepard?

  I hate to tell you this, I'm so relieved that was the first story. Cause I'm so sick of us men killing everyone and hurting everyone. Anytime a woman's a piece of shit, I'm like, well, thank God there's a couple of them.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Somebody on their team is doing something wrong.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  It is weird because normally women kill themselves. Normally she would have killed herself first before killing everyone else.

• 31:13Dax Shepard?

  It's the tire iron where I go, oh, bitches can get down too. Boy, we can all be nasty. If you can go in and bludgeon someone to death with a tire iron, I mean, that is a dude move.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  And not only like, she didn't hit him once or twice until he was shaking. She bashed his face into the point that we needed fingerprints to identify him. We had a pretty good idea who it was because he rented the room.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  She went Tonka.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Full Tonka. That's one of the chimps from the doc.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  You'll learn.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Full Tonka.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 31:48Dax Shepard?

  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. 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

• 32:31Dax Shepard?

  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, entrusted by over 500,000 small businesses. That's not nothing. Try Gusto.

• 32:46Dax Shepard?

  Today at gusto.com slash DAX and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash DAX. Again, that's gusto.com slash DAX. We get support from NoBull. The holidays can get hectic. You finally hit a post summer routine and suddenly you're on hosting duty every week.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  That's when you really need to ground yourself.

• 33:12Dax Shepard?

  Exactly. And that's why I keep my training routine through the holidays. It's the whole NoBull idea. There's a no bullshit training brand built around consistency, honesty, and just putting in the work. It's not about adding more pressure to an already packed schedule. It's about having the gear and the habits to move through the season your way. My personal favorite, all three of the shoes are fantastic. The Outwork, the Outwork Flex and the Drive 2. I like the Drive 2 because it's a hybrid and I lift, of course, but I also like to do what's called box jumps. Right? I do a lot of jumping onto a little platform and I want a little more flexibility. And boy, do they deliver.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  And if you're a cardio person and you're running and you also need to be lifting.

• 33:54Dax Shepard?

  And the style is banging. I don't know what to say. Beautiful style, very breathable, very, very comfortable, lots of support. They were built for lifting.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  They also make a great holiday gift. You know, I love gifting, a purposeful one that actually supports someone's goals and routines. And it's not a gift that just ends up in the back of the closet.

• 34:11Dax Shepard?

  Stay stronger than the season. Head to nobullproject.com all holiday season to shop new deals every week. This episode is brought to you by Dell. Gifts mean more when they have the power to give more. They can inspire more discovery, give more confidence and unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 laptop with a beautiful design and cutting edge performance. It helps you unlock more possibilities. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet with touchscreen, a backlit keyboard and long lasting battery life to power you through your day. Built with a durable aluminum chassis, weighing just 2.2 pounds and Intel Core processors. It's fast.

• 34:56Dax Shepard?

  Reliable and portable enough to keep up wherever you go. Visit dell.com to explore the possibilities of XPS. While shopping, you'll also find great perks like Dell Rewards. Fast free shipping, premium support and financing with flexible payment options. Plus you can find great deals on monitors and accessories. That means you can score a whole new setup now for less. This Black Friday sale is one you don't want to miss. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 35:30Dax Shepard?

  This episode is supported by Helix.

• 35:33Speaker 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.

• 35:44Dax 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.

• 35:55Speaker 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.

• 36:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Recently.

• 36:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  That doesn't have a Helix mattress on it. And I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.

• 36:18Dax Shepard?

  Temperature was all over the map.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  It was a mess.

• 36:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I need a new one.

• 36:21Dax Shepard?

  Look, they've got over 20 mattress models. So whether you sleep hot, need extra back support, or you've got a partner who moves around all night, there's one built for you. Plus free shipping and a 365 night happy with Helix guarantee. That's a full year to decide.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Helix has been named the most awarded mattress by Forbes, Wired and more. So it's not just us being enthusiastic, the experts agree.

• 36:42Dax Shepard?

  Right now, Helix is running their Black Friday sale with up to 30% off. Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 37:06Dax Shepard?

  What is the experience working with detectives? Can maybe delineate that you guys have different roles. What the detective has to do versus you have to build a case? These are kind of separate things. So what are the pros and cons of those relationships?

• 37:16Speaker 02

  First of all, beginning with the FBI, I got to work in some of those task forces over the years. And the FBI agents, in my experience, are some of the best people I've ever met.

• 37:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're so cool.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  They are so cool. A lot of people don't know this, a lot of them are lawyers. They tried to get me out of law school. The FBI as an administration, like when they want to tell you no, and there's no logical reason for it, you hear the word "protocol", and you deal with some of the most ridiculous shit dealing with the FBI.

• 37:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  And the agents were wonderful. So they made up for some of the negative experiences you deal with with the admin.

• 37:44Dax Shepard?

  With the bureaucracy.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  So the philosophy of the vertical unit, there was a guy named Francisco Bersenio, who just passed away, he was a pro court judge, but he used to be head of the homicide unit, Vietnam War hero, came back with a guy named Ed Freeman, who back in the early 80s was a WWII war hero. So you've got these two guys, and they built the homicide unit, and they came up with this vertical concept. And what they wanted was for their young women and men in the homicide unit to be able to bond with their detectives to eliminate a lot of those problems. So especially Southern California is a patchwork of small cities. My cities of Newport, Costa Mesa, Laguna, and Irvine are all small police departments. And when you go in, it's like that day, I think in a way, Byington was trying to freak me out a little bit. It was a little bit of a hazing the new guy and can this guy hang sort of thing.

• 38:28Dax Shepard?

  Rite of passage.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  It's a rite of passage. And right when I walked in the door, and I left this out of the book, they were literally, it was like seeing straight out of TV, they'd forensically processed the living in a part of this town home, and they were eating a pizza.

• 38:39Dax Shepard?

  And the guy said to Matt, he goes, "She killed the shit out of him."

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically stapled him to the floor. And this guy is, a lot of detectives are funny as shit.

• 38:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you got to. You have no choice.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  The gallows humor, another interesting thing about the best detectives, and the best prosecutors too, I think, it's the guys that are one bad decision away from being the same people they're investigating.

• 39:00Dax Shepard?

  A thousand percent.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Those are the ones.

• 39:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, because you can understand, I have this too, I'm a scumbag, I'm a recovering addict. I can drop into a mindset pretty easily of feeling like I'm owed something, I'm justified for this.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  As far as detectives. There are detectives who literally are Boy Scouts that live this very Joe Friday life, you know, just the facts, ma'am. And you encounter those and they're great at the documents, the police reports, there's no spelling errors in them, and they have their advantages when it comes to the really bad, the serial killers you gotta catch, the cases that are impossible, that nobody else wants to take around. Give me the mutant that almost got fired a couple of times.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta get in their head.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Well, that's the person that's gonna win it for you. And that's the one that you can also, when they're sitting next to you during jury selection, that's the person you can lean over to. I keep saying, guys, a lot of these are women. Some of the best investigators I worked with were women.

• 39:48Dax Shepard?

  But I'm sure increasingly so over the course of your career, 92 or 93.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Even then, they're the women that have been divorced a couple of times. It's the same thing.

• 39:57Dax Shepard?

  They're paying the same price everyone else pays for that job.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  100%. And they're the ones that, the more twisted they are, that's the one you can lean over to and go, jury number 10, what do you think? And you need that kind of guidance, especially when you've been doing it for a while. I needed as much help as I could get. But you know, it's interesting, we would do these juror questionnaires on the really heavy stuff, like the serial killers and the death penalty cases.

• 40:16Dax Shepard?

  This sounds crazy, but I do think we should just mention for people who are 25 years out of jurisprudence, when the case begins, you're starting with an ample amount of juries and you're gonna get to kick some off as the prosecutor and the defense is gonna get to kick some off. So you're trying to figure out who's gonna be helpful, right?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  You get 20 challenges on a life case for no reason. They're called peremptories. So I can boot a jury for any reason other than race. But if they come in and they're wearing a shirt you don't like, you're allowed to kick them if you get a bad feeling in your gut. And so when you come up through the ranks, like I did 37 misdemeanor jury trials before I touched my first felony, and you don't get to do questionnaires in any of those. And questionnaires, you get to ask them all kinds of things. And I learned over the years that you gotta trust the gut, not the paper version, because they can look really good on paper. It's kinda like dating in a way.

• 40:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, also, people answer questions in a way they think they're supposed to answer versus there's a ketrillion bits of information coming at you that are nonverbal.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Which is the most important thing, from chimpanzees on up.

• 41:08Dax Shepard?

  But back to, oh, so the police, they're very helpful.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Right. So those detectives, yes, sorry, I took us on a tangent. The thing about a vertical unit is you get a relationship with them. You win a couple tough ones and pretty soon those cops are listening to everything you have to say because they want... I would meet with the families, but these cops would do the death notifications. And imagine that. I think the most extreme emotion I've ever experienced is, of course, for the dads too, but for the moms who have had a child that's been murdered. And imagine you're a cop who has to break the news to them.

• 41:39Dax Shepard?

  No thanks.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  And that cop, when they go through that, you talk about tolls on relationships and alcoholism and all that. When they got the right guy and they know they got the right guy, they want to win that case. And when you bring it home for them and then you win a tough one.

• 41:50Dax Shepard?

  It was this beautifully symbiotic relationship, which is you gotta gather everything perfectly. And then I'm gonna slam dunk this.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  And when you're in the foxhole like that with somebody and you go through a really hard trial, that detective sitting next to you, you come to love them. And they love you back and they wind up being some of your closest friends.

• 42:07Dax Shepard?

  I would imagine that y'all's integrity gets tried probably more than almost any other job. I'd imagine it's quite tempting. I bet it's presented all the time that you could massage something. And you would know I'm kind of violating this person's right, but I know they're guilty and it's worth it. I bet that comes up a lot.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  It definitely happens. And as a defense lawyer, I've seen more of that. I defend a lot of police officers and I'm dealing with a case right now where they pulled some stuff that I've been shocked as a former prosecutor. I can't believe that anybody did.

• 42:35Dax Shepard?

  That the prosecution's doing.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. However, when you do it long enough and they let you actually be a pro as a prosecutor, you learn pretty early in your career that the only thing worse than a family losing a love on is losing love on getting a conviction and then having to do it all over again because somebody doesn't turn something over.

• 42:53Dax Shepard?

  Cause here's a hypothetical I could imagine happening. I could imagine finding a bit of evidence. And now if I take that on, I'm legally obligated to turn that over to the defense, right? And I might go, I'm just gonna skip that altogether. I didn't see that. I don't have to incorporate that because I don't really want to turn that over. Those little question marks probably arise.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  So I came through, there's a guy named Chris Evans, who's now a superior court judge, real world guy. He was a fireman who went to law school at night. And so he was a citizen of the actual world, uniquely gifted as an actual trial lawyer. And I used to go watch him when I was a law clerk. What he told us was make sure the defense has everything and then beat them with it. That was what we got taught. And so for anybody that's holding evidence back, number one, it's totally illegal. To California, it's actually a felony. But the people that do the dirty tricks as defense lawyers or prosecutors, they're trying to compensate for a lack of game. Yeah. And if you've really learned the craft and you've studied it, as a prosecutor, if you can't convince a jury, you shouldn't win the case.

• 43:46Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Even if you're convinced the guy did it, you can't cheat to win.

• 43:49Dax Shepard?

  You have to have a level of respect for the system.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  You really do, and your reputation's all you have in that business. The best prosecutors really are kind of like, my buddy Jim Madison was an actual fighter pilot before he went to law school, and they're gunslingers. They want to fight.

• 44:00Dax Shepard?

  They don't want to cheat and win.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  No, there's a spectrum of talent in anything. But like the guys I was in the unit with, and you know, guys including women, they were some of the most twisted, diabolically genius people. They were superheroes in my eyes. And they would turn everything over, the ones I worked with, because they would never admit they sweated any defense lawyer they were coming up against. They wanted to beat them, and the tougher the case, the better, as weird as that sounds.

• 44:23Dax Shepard?

  Now, if they were prone to be problematic, where was it generally going to surface?

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Muni Court, and doing misdemeanors. The ones who suck are never going to get to homicide in the first place. And so you wind up with kind of the exact opposite. You wind up with a bunch of people who are kind of brazen, sharp-elbowed, who relish the challenge. As a prosecutor, though, one of the tough parts is there are three things alleged on every appeal. The appellate defense counsel will always accuse the trial lawyer, defense attorney of being incompetent. So they get accused of incompetence. The judge gets accused of some sort of malfeasance and forgetting to instruct on something, some sort of incompetence. And the prosecutor always gets accused of misconduct. Right now, the police have had a hard time, and some of that goes over into prosecutors. And there's people that are open to that idea.

• 45:06Dax Shepard?

  And also, what gets made, what do I watch? I'm very heartbroken and interested when I see on frontline the confessions. And they got seven confessions from seven guys who are all below a third-grade reading level that were scared. That sting of injustice on that level and innocence is so strong that obviously you could probably misevaluate how prevalent, who knows?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  I sit on a board with Purdue University. It's a post-exoneration board. Our whole task is trying to find people in Indiana that have been falsely convicted. And I work with a guy named Timmy Donald on that, who's an exoneree. I freaking love this guy. Of all the people on the board, and there's a bunch of- Rich, fancy, famous people. Timmy's the guy. So he did 21 years for a murder that he actually did not commit. And that's coming from a career prosecutor, actually innocent. There's a bunch of mistakes that were made. And they kept offering him deals and refused to take it because he really didn't do it.

• 45:57Dax Shepard?

  What a proposition to present to somebody.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Talk about a devil's bargain. And he's like, no, I'll stay in prison before I'll admit something I didn't do. And talk about a man of integrity.

• 46:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely, it happens. And if you got a heart, which you clearly do, it's the worst injustice imaginable.

• 46:10Dax Shepard?

  It's why our system's set up the way it is. To let many guilty people go is preferred to a single innocent.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  That's right. And that's the way it should work. It gets problematic when we get into the serial killers that are going to victimize other people.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:22Dax Shepard?

  I think it gets into a problem there. And I think where jurisprudence is most problematic is in sexual assault. It's still almost impossible to prosecute.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 46:31Dax Shepard?

  In my opinion, let me hit you with this. I was reading Missoula, the John Krakauer book on the kind of rape epidemic at Missoula. The problem prosecuting these kids, and then the problems with the juries, even if they get the stuff they need. It needs degrees like murder. I think that's one of the problems, is you have these jurors looking at these young people, and there's no degree, so it's all in or all out. And they have a hard time finishing a young person.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:58Dax Shepard?

  Not that they shouldn't be finished, that's not what I'm saying. But I think if there were degrees within it, it could move the needle.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  It's a really interesting idea. Because you're absolutely right. Like a 288, that's sexual abuse of a minor. There's one charge. I mean, there's different subsections of rape, but that word is a heavy thing. And a lot of jurors, you're right. I prosecuted, my niche was date rapes. And you don't want to tag a kid as a rapist for life for a misunderstanding or a drunken miscommunication.

• 47:24Dax Shepard?

  You have two people in a blackout, or reconstructing two people's blockouts.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And it's a really tough thing. Words are important. Maybe if there were degrees.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  But who's gonna come up with the degrees? That's very tricky, too. To me, there's some things that are worse. I'm gonna get in trouble for just saying that, worse than others.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  But there are.

• 47:40Dax Shepard?

  Look, I was molested. There's worse versions of the way I was molested. I can tell you if someone was molested, if that was my parent, that's fucking worse. If it were reoccurring for years, yes, if there was violent. For me, there's degrees of what I experienced. For sure.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  But you know what's interesting about that? A lot of people, you encounter that, not to spin off on a tangent. A lot of people think that that's like a zombie bite. So many people have been molested. I still don't think the public understands that.

• 48:03Dax Shepard?

  I admit it, I say it out loud. I didn't know of an actor when I was a kid that said he'd been molested. I thought I was the only person. Now people are talking about it.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  I will bet a majority of men in Hollywood were the victims of sexual abuse at one point or another. Cause I'm ready to come to terms with the idea that a majority of men in general in America, at one point or another were sexually abused as a kid.

• 48:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the conservative estimates are like 25% of us that grew up in the eighties were.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  And our parents, they were smoking and drinking and we were wildings in our generation, for sure.

• 48:31Dax Shepard?

  Completely unprotected.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  But one of the things about it is there's a weird stigma that needs to be relaxed, especially when it comes to men. A lot of people think it's like a zombie bite. We know it happens when you get bit by a zombie, right? Or bitten by a vampire.

• 48:44Dax Shepard?

  Like you will then become a predator. Yeah, I grew up with that paradigm.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Right, so a lot of people keep quiet and that is not the case at all. In fact, it's the exact opposite. A lot of people that have been sexually abused know how fucking awful it is, so they would never do it. And I understand that there's some psychology behind it and some people that are horrifically abused affects them. But the vast majority of time, and this is four years in sex and 17 in homicide, which half are sex cases anyway, the majority of the offenders were never victims themselves. And I'm here to tell you, that is a pervasive myth. I think that's another part of the stigma, that people are gonna be like, oh, I don't wanna leave him around with my kids.

• 49:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I wanna hear about a few. You do a dozen or so cases throughout your long career in the book. I guess since it was prompted by Anna's movie, let's talk about him for a minute. The notion that this motherfucker was on the dating game blows my mind.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:36Dax Shepard?

  So tell us about him a little bit.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  So he grew up loving home, never abused or bullied by anybody. And this is the best investigators, he went through three different capital trials, which means you have A through K factors is what it's known in a bifurcated jury system in California. Those are the factors the jury gets to consider in weighing whether there's any mitigation. So A factors like circumstance of the offense, how brutal it was. B factors, other crimes of violence. You go down the list and essentially a serial killer is motivated in a life or death sort of way. To come up with any sort of abuse possible as a mitigating factor presented to their jury. So he had three great defense teams. They were unable to uncover a single instance. So he grows up in a loving home, successful siblings, mother who loved him, aunt very

• 50:18Speaker 02

  much in the picture, father died when he was young, but went to prep school, varsity letterman, on the yearbook committee, graduated from UCLA film school, genius level IQ and handsome for the day and charming.

• 50:31Dax Shepard?

  For the days. I mean.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  He needs a haircut in 2024.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  But yeah, he's a good looking dude.

• 50:38Dax Shepard?

  Back then. Is the part in the movie where he worked at the LA Times as a photographer?

• 50:42Speaker 02

  He was a typesetter and he worked for the LA Times, gainfully employed. So this guy, actually not far from where we are, 1968, he kidnaps, rapes and almost murders an eight-year-old girl named Tali Shapiro. So anybody that wants the background, Anna's movie was wonderful. The detectives who were involved in it, I give it an A+. And the final scene, the only way it could have been more true to real life is if she'd made it longer. Phenomenal job. So anyway, so he kidnaps this eight-year-old, good Samaritan sees it, follows him to this little Hollywood bungalow and all of this is in the book. I think people would be interested in it, I hope, but this cop, his name is Camacho, LAPD officer, hero cop, shot in Vietnam, comes back from the war, shot in the Watts riots, it's his first day back at work.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  And he gets a welfare call and nothing about it seemed any more right in 1968 than it would today. So he knocks on the door and he hears one second, kicks the door in and Alcala's going out the back naked and he finds this little girl, eight years old, she's been raped, she's in a coma for 32 days.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Stop.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  She's got a barbell across her throat, seconds away from death. So this cop saves her life.

• 51:47Dax Shepard?

  Whoa.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Alcala gets away, gets to the East Coast, enrolls in NYU film school, already graduated from UCLA.

• 51:54Dax Shepard?

  After that event, he decided to get out of town.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  He fled and inside his apartment, they find hundreds and hundreds of photographs of young women and boys in positions of vulnerability, out in the woods, in rooms with him, some of them are sexual, some of them are pornographic, some of them are modeling, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things.

• 52:13Dax Shepard?

  What age is he at that point?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  So this is 1968, mid twenties, I think at this point.

• 52:17Dax Shepard?

  So he's like prolific.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  This guy is the real deal.

• 52:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Okay, so goes to New York, they catch him, he's working at an all-girls sleepaway camp in Vermont. And there's a rainstorm and two little campers go running into the post office to get out of the rain. FBI 10 most wanted list. They look up and they're like, that's weird. That's Mr. Berger. Cause he's a counselor at the camp. They catch him, they extradite him back to California, winds up kidnapping and near death of an eight-year-old and he raped her. There's a photo in that. This is one of the scenes that sticks with me even though I wasn't physically there because I was 12 when it happened. The little white Mary Janes in more blood than should ever be able to come out of an eight-year-old at the scene. So she survives miraculously. They extradite him. The prosecutor decides to give him a straight child molester case.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  And he goes in, he gets a life sentence. They paroled that guy after 34 months. And that is a cautionary tale. So he gets out and they violate his parole. They catch him with a 13-year-old girl that he was certainly on his way to killing. But they had marijuana. They went prosecuting her for possession of marijuana. Oh my god. 13-years-old. So he gets about a year and a half. They release him again. It's like Forrest Gump, again. Gets out and then he kidnaps Monique Hoyt. She's 15-year-old runaway, rapes her, sodomizes her. She wakes up, he probably thought she was dead. She comes to and says, we can't let anybody know what we did. He then had a moment of emotion, broke down crying and then transported her wherever they were going.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  And she jumped out and called the police. And then the court has an obligation legally to presume the rape and kidnap is true and assess danger to the community. And knowing all the background, the judge lowered his bail. He got out and he kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl out of Huntington Beach named Robin Samso. So he gets convicted, goes up, case gets reversed once by the California Supreme Court. Convicted again in 1986, goes back up. Now it's the Ninth Circuit that reverses it. So the case has been twice gutted. Then it winds up on my desk. So we don't know anything at this point. This is late 2002, 2003. I get it assigned to me because I'm one of the cold case deputies and this poor family has had to go through this twice now. Every time a case gets reversed.

• 54:33Dax Shepard?

  They re-interview everybody.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Well, we gotta figure out what kind of evidence we have. Police in 1979 got into his storage locker and again, different batch, found hundreds and hundreds of photos. How can he be let out? So he killed a hundred people after he was released from California State Prison. So he killed a 21-year-old computer programmer in Burbank, very close to where we are right now, named Jill Parento. We didn't know that, so it went up on my desk and I talked to my old mentor and I'm like, what do we do with these? Because the case got gutted twice and there was a photo found, this is kind of cool, of a girl named Lori Wertz. She was on roller skates in a place called Sunset Beach, that's right next to Huntington Beach. That was in a storage locker and it turns out that was from the same day that Robin Samso went missing. So we can put him in the area and then we're kicking it around like, how do we friggin prove this thing?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  And there were signs in the background that were still in the cement. And we found some guy in the Navy of all places that was able to give us an exact time that that photo was taken, based on the shadows. So I'm locked and loaded, I'm ready to go again. No sooner do we make the decision that we're going to retry this fucker.

• 55:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  That we start getting DNA hits out of LA County for unsolved murders because California just entered the CODA system. So we get three DNA hits in LA County, plus a fourth, he was a suspect in one, Jill Parento, the computer programmer. So now we got five, so we constructed a whole thing and then, like a lot of good serial killers, because he's a psychopath, they can't resist the control. So he wound up representing himself.

• 55:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, this is a big move, isn't it?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:01Dax Shepard?

  They over-index him representing themselves, don't they?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  100%, 100%, which is awesome because they all suck at trial. Whatever disconnects them, that makes them want to do it the first place.

• 56:09Dax Shepard?

  Talk about admission of their arrogance.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Oh my God, and it's the greatest.

• 56:11Dax Shepard?

  If I were you, I'd just go like, so this guy's representing himself, I think that tells you everything you need to know, we rest our case.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  There's a great adage, and I threw this in the book, that you learn in law school. Anybody who represents himself as a fool for a lawyer and a jackass for a client. It was surreal, but I had to deal with them every day, I had to go in and talk to them. Oh my God. Because you gotta move things along.

• 56:29Dax Shepard?

  You gotta talk to counsel, right?

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and for me, being kind of twisted, it was fascinating.

• 56:33Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I would have enjoyed.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  What was he like? Well, first of all, so there's this moment like they don't give us any training on how death row actually works in California. And I just thought it was one big prison yard, like a prison within a prison, it's all in San Quentin. And I didn't know yet that they subclassify them. They have a yard they call themselves and they divide it up into yards called the weenie yard, which are the guys that aren't dangerous to staff or other inmates. And so we just sentenced this guy, big white supremacist gang leader, super gnarly dude. He'd just gotten the death sentence out of Orange County. So he goes up, I'm sitting there waiting for the judge one day and I literally had to talk to this guy several hours every day for six months, you know, because he's representing himself. So you develop a rapport.

• 57:13Dax Shepard?

  Can I ask you one hard question?

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 57:15Dax Shepard?

  Because we interviewed the defense attorney that was representing the victims for Epstein. And he had several lunches with Epstein while he was representing those people. And he said, he's so fucking charming. I'm there experiencing what they experience and leaving going, boy, that was fucked up. Did you have any of that?

• 57:34Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. That's why the actor who played Rodney Alcala in Anna's movie was friggin'

• 57:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he, yeah, he's so good.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Brilliant. He won the dating game.

• 57:41Dax Shepard?

  Of the three bachelors?

• 57:42Speaker 02

  By being charming and funny. And the actor nails it because it's like, who would get in a car with that guy? The answer is almost everybody because they're so frickin' charming. But that's the thing with Alcala. So I'm like, hey, Rod, just out of curiosity, what do you do when a guy like Billy Joe, talk about a cartoon character and this guy, it's frickin' swastika tats everywhere, the whole deal. Aren't you worried that a guy like that is gonna get to you? He goes, Matt, buddy, you know me. I'm on the weenie yard. I'm not violent. I'm never gonna see that guy. He was offended that I would think that he was a violent guy. This guy murdered a hundred women and smashed their faces in with rocks.

• 58:14Dax Shepard?

  And that other guy's a Philistine.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Are you like, me?

• 58:18Dax Shepard?

  That guy's a racist.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Cronkla diet? What are you talking about? He's got swastika tattoos. What do you mean? Do you think that he believes that in the moment, right? Oh, yeah, totally in the moment. And that's the charm. Watch the Bundy tapes where he's getting interviewed. It is fascinating. Bundy has a moment where the reporter says, hey, what's it like to know you're gonna get executed tomorrow? And Bundy's response, I'll never forget this. He's like, my odds of getting executed tomorrow are about the same as yours getting killed in a car accident on the way home. He goes, God forbid that shit happened.

• 58:44Dax Shepard?

  He's so much concerned for him.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  So much to talk about, Fred. What a horrible analogy to use. Like, I'm concerned with you, and they did. They frickin' juice Bundy the next day to the betterment of all mankind. The really smart psychopaths, they understand intuitively where that good heart opening is, and they take advantage of it.

• 59:00Dax Shepard?

  Well, no one likes this, but sociopaths over-index in empathy. They're very, very good at knowing exactly how you feel and what you want to hear.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. That hypersensitivity to it is connected to their love of inflicting pain. Even for the sociopaths that haven't killed anybody, like the ones that are running businesses, there's that little element of cruelty that so many of them have. They get off on it.

• 59:20Dax Shepard?

  I want to go through a couple more, because the book is just full of so many riveting cases that you've covered. I didn't realize Orange County was such a hotbed of activity.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Seriously?

• 59:30Dax Shepard?

  But Skylar DeLeon?

• 59:31Speaker 02

  Skylar DeLeon, yeah. So he was a Power Ranger. He had a speaking role. He's a child actor.

• 59:36Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, he was, of all of the guys I dealt with, all the fraudsters, Ed Shin was one of mine that I talk about in the book. Skylar was the best liar of anybody I'd ever seen.

• 59:46Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Because his name rhymed with it, or?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Skylar's a liar.

• 59:50Dax Shepard?

  Good job, mom.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Couldn't help myself.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 59:52Dax Shepard?

  She's got a Numesoni sweater on. She's feeling pretty good today.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  This guy, he was in the Marine Corps for about a second and went AWOL. A lot of them also joined the military and go AWOL. Al Cola did. My Nyeri guy did. My last one. That's another common thing that you see on the psychopaths. So he wants to put together this scheme to basically murder people to get their money. And there's this beautiful couple, retirees, Tom and Jackie Hawks. Jackie was in a motorcycle accident. She was in her twenties, couldn't have kids of her own. Marries Tom. He had two young kids at the time, so she got to be mom. And then one of them had a baby. So they'd retired under the ocean and sailed around on a yacht. Now they got a grandchild, and Jackie just wants to experience that. So they decide to sell the boat, and they go out for a sea trial, which is basically a test drive for a yacht, never seen or heard from again.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  And so Skylar is there with all the bill of sale paperwork, fingerprints that we sent to the FBI. It was Tom and Jackie's fingerprints. They actually signed all the stuff. And there was one problem. The S on her signature didn't match, but everything else did. That became... They show up with these documents indicating they bought the boat. There was a notary that notarized the documents. They'd filed it with Prescott, Arizona. Everything legally they could do indicating they'd purchased the boat, they had done. And so we had to untangle that. I do an annual surf trip with a bunch of buddies to Indonesia. And you sit on a charter surf boat for 12 days or whatever. I was gonna skip that year. And anyway, I catch my girlfriend making out with a groomsman at a wedding. So that's bad. That's bad.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  So I decided at the last second, I'm gonna take this surf trip. And I wind up on this boat, this guy Gary Burns, who was a part of the boating world. He's a totally legit guy. But he had seen sort of the underbelly of it and met some smugglers and actual pirates along the way. There's Tom and Jackie like three months later. They're missing. It's a Newport case. I'm working with Byington again, that same detective who moved the body and made the guy groan. And we were at a dead end and we suspected something bad had happened. But we did two forensic workups of the boat.

• 1:01:50Dax Shepard?

  So the boat was found.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  Boat was found.

• 1:01:52Dax Shepard?

  They're not on it.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Tom and Jackie are missing and you got Skylar and Jennifer saying, hey, we bought the boat. And here's all the documents indicating we bought it. By the way, when you find these people, they promised to teach us how to operate it properly. We would hate to have to sue them.

• 1:02:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, this is a pretty good, that's a cool angle.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  So I watched his interview. Credit to the detectives. I believed everything he was saying.

• 1:02:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  He was on probation for burglary at the time. And he goes, look, this is cartel money. My dad was involved in the cartels. You can look it up. I can't tell you where I got it or they'll kill my family. It was so convincing. And it's like, I was buying this in a money laundering scheme. That's why I was buying the boat. It's all cash. It came up. This could almost work. Like this almost makes sense. And the thing is, there's a difference between what you suspect and what you can prove. And we had friggin' nothing. And we had a weird story, but it was convincing as hell. So I called Gary in Australia, the charter boat captain. And I'm like, dude, what are we missing? And without skipping a beat, it's almost scary how fast he said it. I don't even think I finished the sentence. He's like, missing anchors. Look for missing anchors. If there's murder on a boat, there's gonna be a missing anchor. Everybody thinks they invented the wheel. Everybody gets tied to an anchor. That's how they do it.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  And we go back to the boat for like the 20th time. Sure enough, been staring at us in the face the whole time. There should have been two anchors. On the bow, there was one and so we hook him the next day and the whole house of cards fell down.

• 1:03:10Dax Shepard?

  So what had they done? How had they?

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  So what they did is they lured him out to sea. They brought in this guy. It was a Long Beach insane crip. But yeah, they got muscled. They went out. They lured him out to sea. They tasered them both. They threatened to beat her if he didn't sign. They threatened to taser him again if she didn't sign and they tied him to the anchor begging for their lives and threw him overboard.

• 1:03:30Dax Shepard?

  Was the intention just the capital gain? Did they just want the boat?

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they wanted the boat and they also had a power of attorney indicating that they should have had access to their bank accounts too.

• 1:03:42Dax Shepard?

  All money motivated?

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  All money motivated. And then when we got the search warrant, we found an LAPD Interpol liaison card to a totally separate murder. The year before in Mexico, a guy from Southern California named John Jarvie, who got into drugs, he was a pilot, had back issues. A lot of people have experienced that where he's sober, goes back on painkillers, fucks him up and he gives him $50,000 in cash. Skylar cut his throat.

• 1:04:05Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Did you watch this newest Zodiac doc?

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  I haven't. And you know, here's my problem with Zodiac.

• 1:04:12Dax Shepard?

  Please.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  They never catch him. It is maddening to me.

• 1:04:14Dax Shepard?

  Well, the Zodiac doc is really, really well done and I think it's exploring a different aspect, which really hit home is the guy, the Zodiac, was a school teacher in Atascadero.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Wait, did they finally figure out who did it?

• 1:04:27Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they know.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:04:29Dax Shepard?

  Thousand percent who it is.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  He just got away with it? Died before he got caught?

• 1:04:32Dax Shepard?

  He died. He was on dialysis. He died at like 58.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  And why was he called that again?

• 1:04:36Dax Shepard?

  He named himself that. Very smart guy. He was a champion diver. He was a scuba guy. He was an enormous man. He's a teacher in Atascadero. He meets these kids. There's seven kids. The mom of the seven kids' husband is in Atascadero State Mental Prison because the dad had molested the kids. Or one daughter in particular.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:05:01Dax Shepard?

  She's in silver her head. She's got seven kids. This teacher shows up and he starts taking them to the movies some nights. He's their teacher. She trusts him. He develops this relationship with the whole family. What's neat about this doc is it's not focusing as much on. Him like the other ones have is this crazy thing where you can know somebody who's been so generous and benevolent. This is the duality that can exist between what you think is a serial killer. And then the absolute torture of getting presented evidence after evidence, but you know this man and he was kind to you. And it's riveting. People want everyone to be a cartoon character of a serial killer. They don't want to be the teacher that was kind to you and you know.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  That's the thing.

• 1:05:40Dax Shepard?

  And to see what they had to deal with. There's the victims, but then there's this whole family that it tore them apart. And one brother finally admitted, no, no, it's him. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's heartbreaking for this family.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, Rex Huherman, that's the latest, that's the Gilo Beach one, another huge guy. That's more east coast news, but he's kind of the modern, I think he represents the next wave because he figured out a way to defeat modern forensic science.

• 1:06:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  They made a DNA hit on a hair and it's mitochondrial, the N S, and the numbers are like one in 50 as opposed to one in 18 octillion. He killed probably 19, they think, and he was an architect in Midtown Manhattan, wife, kids, the whole deal. Yeah. And they would wrap him in burlap, which probably had something to do with fingerprints. And yeah, you got away with it for years and years, but so did my Golden State Killer case. That guy got away with it for years.

• 1:06:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:06:37Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:07:22Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:07:47Dax Shepard?

  And Zodiac, so he would teach the kids ciphers, right? He'd teach them how to do ciphers. Like you draw a grid, A, B, C, D, E, F. You drew a symbol and taught them how to write code letters. And he was submitting these to the San Francisco Chronicle and they were running them on the front page. And there was these ciphers, they couldn't break. One of the ciphers got broke last year. 50 years long, his cipher didn't get cracked.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  He was like, I'm the killer.

• 1:08:11Dax Shepard?

  He was writing nonstop, I'm the Zodiac.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:08:14Dax Shepard?

  Figure out this cipher, it'll tell you what I'm gonna do next. I mean, it was so twisted.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:08:19Dax Shepard?

  And he's a very smart dude and very competent. And a pedophile, as we come to find out.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Did he kill all those kids?

• 1:08:27Dax Shepard?

  He killed teenagers who would be making out at make out points.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're equal opportunity, these guys.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Oh my.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Boys, girls, women.

• 1:08:36Dax Shepard?

  He was into self-aggrandizement. He killed a cab driver for no reason because he wanted to kill the guy in front of a movie poster of a movie he loved and he used to teach the kids. I mean, it is so dense with craziness. You gotta watch it. And my heart to this family. I can't help but try to think of it in terms of addiction. And I think about like, are they like me buying coke? Like, okay, we're buying coke this time, but we're not gonna buy coke anymore after tomorrow. Are those deals being made in their head? Are they trying to quit?

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Here's the difference in my mind. And I mean, everybody in my family's an addict. For the addict, we can have sympathy. It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know, Stevenson, right? The duality of man. The vehicle he had to use was spontaneous transformation. Like Dr. Jekyll was a noble man, working for science. Mr. Hyde was the monster they would kill. And when you know it turns you into something and you know that you're hurting other people, addicts only hurt themselves, typically.

• 1:09:27Dax Shepard?

  There's collateral damage, but in general.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Sure, there's collateral damage, but it's not predatory. It's secondary.

• 1:09:32Dax Shepard?

  I just wonder, are they trying to quit?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, is it like a compulsion and then they feel guilt?

• 1:09:36Dax Shepard?

  Or they're like, I'm doing this till the day I get caught? I'm just so curious.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  There's an arrogance that goes along with it. I don't think you see in addicts. And also, sadism is an inherent part. It's a thing called the hair psychopathy checklist. It's like the most common traits of actual psychopaths. And grandiosity is on that list. With the very first serial killer case I did. Was a serial rapist in downtown Huntington Beach. Finally killed one of his victims named Victor Miranda Guerrero. And he was living in a tiny little place and he had a notebook. He wrote Victor King self portraits with a crown on his head.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Textbook type stuff addicts it's a little different, right?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:10:11Dax Shepard?

  I only meant the element of trying to quit.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  For a lot of those guys, they get off on it so much. It's more the opposite. They can't wait to go out and do it again. And I don't think they feel guilty about it at all.

• 1:10:20Dax Shepard?

  OK, I had some questions that have just kind of always been on my mind about someone with your job. How do you deal with the frustration of knowing you have someone and you don't have the evidence? And you're not gonna have it. What does that do to you? How do you compartmentalize that? Or how do you process that?

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the answer is not very well. I lost a lot of sleep over those.

• 1:10:41Dax Shepard?

  I'm almost shocked there's not more vigilante justice. I bet back in the day there was.

• 1:10:45Speaker 02

  It's funny you raise that. People forget there's a social compact. And one of it is somebody murders your family member or somebody you love. The deal is we don't exact revenge because the state is supposed to do it for us. And that's what a lot of people forget as we tack back to like early release. And I'm as pro reform as anybody. But for the sexual predators and the really bad guys are the ones that unnecessarily hurt a family or victim.

• 1:11:08Dax Shepard?

  Is the biggest predictor, I have to imagine rapists are just en route to that.

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  And all rapists don't want to be serial killers, but virtually all serial killers were rapists. They start out with like peeping or flashing and they work their way up. They'll steal some underwear. The beef I have with the FBI definition on serial killer is it's too broad. It's two or more victims by the same perpetrator at different events. That encompasses gang members and mafia hitmen and drug dealers they get in beefs. The real predatory guys are the sexual offenders.

• 1:11:37Dax Shepard?

  I watched this great documentary about chess masters. And there's this very common pattern for chess masters. This happened to Bobby Fischer. It's happened to a lot of them. They spend their whole life anticipating doom and they exercise their brain in that way.

• 1:11:56Dax Shepard?

  And when they are not concentrating on just a huge percentage of these chess masters, become paranoid. It's a liability if all your focus. So are you aware that you have had a unique view of life? And do you attempt to correct for that?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  A lot of bad guys.

• 1:12:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You have a little bit of a misleading worldview, I might argue. In the same way, let me add one other one. So my wife's mom was a nurse and she came to me on the first time we met and she said, oh, great, I'm glad I'm meeting you. You have to help me get Kristen off of birth control. And I said, well, I don't think that's my position. Do you know how many strokes I see at the hospital from birth control? And I said, I bet you see more than anybody. That's who they come to.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Dax Shepard?

  But if we look up right now, car accident deaths per 100,000 in strokes from birth control, I would be more apt to get her to quit driving a car. It's not a realistic, but I understand why to you it is.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  No, I think you're exactly right. Of course, there's this nice old man that we were on the same schedule and he would ride his bike past this elementary school in Manhattan Beach as I'd be on my way to work. And for years I'd pass by this guy a couple of times a week. And after about a couple of months in sexual assault, it was like, there's that frigging pervert, I know what he's up to.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  You know, like, you definitely get shaded, for sure. And you're right, I would have a very skewed worldview.

• 1:13:14Dax Shepard?

  And I don't think anyone could. So I have zero judgment.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'd be weird if you didn't.

• 1:13:18Dax Shepard?

  I'm skewed by my weird experience in life, right? I travel around, I meet a bunch of artists all the time. I think the world's full of creative, wonderful people. I'm delusional.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I've stepped over 100 dead bodies over the course of my job.

• 1:13:29Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  That definitely gives you a viewpoint.

• 1:13:31Dax Shepard?

  Now, here's a great question. So I have a tolerance and an appetite and a capacity to understand gnarly stuff still needs to go on in life. People gotta do gnarly jobs. Some cop answers a call to domestic disturbance and they walk through a door to a house they've never been in, they know violence is happening. That is a very intense gnarly situation and we need people to go do that. I think some people have lost their appetite for the reality of what has to go on.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  They have.

• 1:14:01Dax Shepard?

  And so to those people, I'd argue like, hey, you have to have some understanding. That gnarly shit's gotta get done. And guess what? Gnarly shit getting done goes wrong often. You have to have some tolerance for how ugly and gnarly all this is.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  And split second decisions too, that police were put in all the time.

• 1:14:18Dax Shepard?

  And that is not to excuse any of the clearly racially motivated horrific things that have happened. Just, everything's happening.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Dax Shepard?

  And you have to have some tolerance for this. And you also have to have some self correcting if you're you. And I'm wondering how one even does that.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  You know, I scuba dive a ton. I still surf every morning I can, even though I'm getting rickety in my old age. But this is gonna sound weird to say. I started shark diving a few years ago.

• 1:14:42Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Nothing quiets your mind more than casual shark diving. And it's a lot safer than anybody would think. And sharks get a bad rap.

• 1:14:49Dax Shepard?

  I'll take your word for it.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  I'm going to Cuba in two weeks to go shark diving there. And it is a friggin blast. That's been really zen for me. And like you, I gotta be very careful about using anything chemical to balance that out. Cause that's a very slippery slope in that job.

• 1:15:01Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Well, okay, great. That was one of my questions, funny enough. The rate of domestic violence is really rough. It's over indexed. The rate of alcoholism is really fucking high among police officers. Do all those same things plague DAs?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  Yes, I don't think to the same degree though, as cops. And I think that we still have it a lot better than they do. And it's rough to be a police officer right now. You're putting your life on the line for $80,000 a year in a community where

• 1:15:26Dax Shepard?

  You're hated.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  Where the community is being taught to hate you. That's I think what really gets them.

• 1:15:30Dax Shepard?

  As you even pointed out in the book, most of your colleagues aren't in thriving, long-term relationships.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  No, not in homicide, they're not. And my mentors, and I don't really mention this because I kept them out. The rule is you're either a genius, and there are a few that came through the unit that are able to balance that and be great husbands, wives and fathers and mothers. But generally you go into that unit, if you're single when you go in, you're single when you come out. And if you're married, you're probably getting divorced.

• 1:15:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Cause you can't do the job, at least me, I wasn't smart enough to have good bandwidth on both. And I decided that I had to go all in.

• 1:16:03Dax Shepard?

  Well, how can you be at dinner not thinking about this thing that has to get done in order to get this person off the street? Like to be able to leave that at the valet is a tall order.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you have the responsibility to the moms, that's what it always came back to me is when you meet the mom and they want you to bring it home for them. And for me, I'd wake up in the middle of the night. What's hard about the dinners is when you get the call outs. You know, I talk about this in the book. I had a notorious case out of Costa Mesa and I got the call in the middle of the woman I was dating at the time is her birthday. And for me, being awesome boyfriend that I was, it was just like, all right, we're out. That's tough on relationships, but in retrospect, I was a lousy romantic partner for a lot of that time.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Obviously, it's hard to watch people you know are guilty and you don't have the evidence. But what about the opposite? Is there ever a time where you're like, God, I hope it's the right one?

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  So that's a great question, and thank you for asking me that. The answer is no, because your ethical obligation, your sacrosanct duty is to do justice. It's not to get convictions. And when you entertain a doubt, especially if you're working for a good office like I was back then, it is understood as soon as you say I have a doubt. But a lot of times, it's not just whether the person did it or not. A lot of times, it's on an enhancement. Like I had a case where we go and it was a very wealthy couple, Newport Beach, about to get divorced. And I filed a murder for financial gain because you only need any part of the motive being financial. That satisfies the element. And the guy was so rich, we were afraid he was going to run anyway. And UK citizenship and all that. And then we get into the computers and as soon as the forensic analysis comes back, like six weeks later, FBI. So maybe eight weeks if we were asking for it in four.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  The real problem is he was going out, visiting the services of sex workers, I believe is the politically correct. And he was bringing home STDs. That's what they were fighting about. So now I knew what they were fighting about and it wasn't money. And we also learned in the course investigation, each side of the family had tons of cash. So I had to dismiss that right away. Ethically, even though concerned that he might run, and what did he do? He fricking ran. But yeah, so ethically, whenever you entertain a doubt, you got to dump it. And I had another one, a guy I actually charged with murder. He was a choker. He had a whole history of domestic violence where he would choke his ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. So it was his third fiancee and they get in a big argument and she's found dead. He calls 911. The rigor's already set in. She's been dead for hours. She had bruising to her strap muscles, which happens in strangulation.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  Catigil hemorrhaging in the eyes, which is when the blood vessels burst. There's always telltale signs for when somebody's And strangled, so he fought with her, choked her, cause of death was asphyxia. Easy, charge him with murder. We get the tox back. Toxicological results for blood, turns out she took about 500 sleeping pills. And you die of asphyxia.

• 1:18:37Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, yeah.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  So that's one, had to dump it. You don't pass go, you immediately call the court, you go in and you dismiss it. We prosecute him for the domestic violence, he went to prison for that. But yeah, so that's part of the job.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay, is murder reflective of the time and culture, the way everything is? Is there a trend in murder? Is there a style in murder? Has it changed since the eighties?

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  That's a really interesting question. So murder itself, I think, the motives have been the same for a hundred thousand years. Jealousy, greed, anger, lust. It's like the four horsemen that you keep seeing over and over. Throw a little booze in there, Fourth of July barbecue, dispute with the neighbor. Next thing you know, the gun comes out and somebody gets killed. So it's the same thing over and over again. What we're seeing now, and I think that this is kind of a weird byproduct of the fascination with true crime, is you're getting guys like Rex Hume, who are figuring out, they don't want to get caught. So they're getting smarter about it, almost like a Dexter type thing. And that's the new thing. Most of them aren't smart enough. The vast majority of murders are one offs. It's situational.

• 1:19:37Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Never to be repeated again, but for the real predators, they are getting smarter. So that part is a yes. There's also social media impact on the way some of the psychopaths are able to manipulate the public. And we've just seen a big example of that. I don't want to necessarily go down this rabbit hole, but the Menendez brothers. You know, that's a fascinating thing. We got Netflix and we've got this outpouring of people that feel very, very strongly because they think they were sexually abused.

• 1:20:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Therefore, we gotta let them go. And it's a dicey area.

• 1:20:07Dax Shepard?

  In keeping with my normal, trying to always find the middle ground. What's interesting is there's two options on the table in this debate. They either were not molested and they belong there, or they were molested and they don't belong there. Here's my position.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  They're molested and they still belong there. I know where you're going, right?

• 1:20:22Dax Shepard?

  Yes. I watched the trial and what is undeniable is their testimony would be seen so much differently today than it was then. And I'm grateful it would be seen the way it should be today.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:20:34Dax Shepard?

  I think that was a fucked up family. And I think really bad shit happened to him. I don't think either of them are that good of actors. And I know that world and I believe them. Does that mean you can cut down mom on the shotgun?

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  Therein lies the rub. Remember, and this is one of those things that forensically, it's Mossberg 12 gauge. That is a six cartridge weapon and there were 13 shots.

• 1:20:53Dax Shepard?

  And it takes a while to load a shotgun.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  It sure does. It takes a while to load a shotgun.

• 1:20:57Dax Shepard?

  It's a pain in the ass. You cut your thumb sticking them in there.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  That's right. It's a pain in the ass and they practiced with them. They bought them with fake headies. But Lyle Menendez went out to that car, got ammo, reloaded the shotgun and literally put the gun to his mom's face and blew her face off. We can say everything we want about whatever Jose did or didn't do.

• 1:21:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  Great. Unless you're after the money, why do you kill mom? In that debate, nobody will come up with a good answer.

• 1:21:18Dax Shepard?

  How about this? I can even make that argument. You were supposed to protect me. You turned your eye. You could have saved both of us from all this. Still fine.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  But then we're talking about a revenge killing, not self-defense.

• 1:21:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's just interesting. Again, to me, what's frustrating is it lines up the way every fucking thing lines up, which is it's binary. You're on this side or you're on the other side.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, because your middle ground also has a flip, right? Your middle is they're abused, they should serve time and maybe it's time to let them out.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  That's not an illegitimate position at all.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how I feel. I think they've done enough.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  They're not strangers. They killed their parents. They raised them. I've got no issue with that. My problem is the zeal that everybody's gone into it with. They've all forgotten the first trial and they've all forgotten how Lyle was bragging about how he lied on the stand in the first one. There's so many nuanced pieces like reloading and shooting mom in the face.

• 1:22:07Dax Shepard?

  Buying two Porsches, Rolex's, spending spree that started four days after the murders, all that, right?

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all rough.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Not good. No one's, I mean, I guess some people maybe are saying it's good.

• 1:22:16Dax Shepard?

  Some people love them.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Bill Maher has a great thing. I'm going to butcher the quote. It's brilliant. It's basically, America never reacts. It just overreacts.

• 1:22:22Dax Shepard?

  Right. We don't have act. We have overreact.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Which is exactly what you were just saying. There's a middle ground that everybody ignores.

• 1:22:28Dax Shepard?

  It's because everything has to line up politically. So it's like all of a sudden, once you find out what your identity is, what's our team doing? Well, I don't want to lose my team.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:22:37Dax Shepard?

  It's not a coincidence you're presented with two options because there's two fucking parties and there's two identities in this country.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  Which is madness.

• 1:22:42Dax Shepard?

  It is madness. Covid, you gotta act like there's not a disaster. To be a member of your group? That's nuts. You gotta act like we gotta be separated forever to be a member of your group? You can't let it go?

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  What happened to the great rational middle that I still think exists?

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  It does.

• 1:22:56Dax Shepard?

  It does.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  And see with juries, that's a job as a DA. You have to get a disparate group of people who are across the spectrum and get them to agree on something basic. Especially for murder. This stuff predates Democrats and Republicans. It predates empires and kings. This goes back to Hammurabi, Q uniform, like what happens when you kill somebody? Well, there's degrees of badness in it.

• 1:23:15Dax Shepard?

  One of the first laws they wrote down.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  Literally the first laws were dealt with killing people.

• 1:23:19Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  The Ten Commandments, that's a sequel to a lot of the first writings. How do we deal with each other as human beings? And I can tell you from my experience, the grief of a mom or a dad losing a kid to murder is the same now as it has ever been. And together as a society, like if we can't all agree on that, we're lost.

• 1:23:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  I think that that might have something to do with the fascination in true crime because it's kind of a refuge where people can get away from the screaming heads. It's one of the last areas where people, regardless of their political affiliation, can agree.

• 1:23:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Have you been involved in any penis chopping soaps?

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  I have been involved in penis chopping soaps?

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  You have?

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  No, you haven't. Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:58Dax Shepard?

  I thought you were being funny.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  I was kind of being funny, but also I wondered.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I've had a couple.

• 1:24:03Dax Shepard?

  What? A couple?

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been involved in a couple, but my last trial was a Hussein Nairi case. This is actually a great story.

• 1:24:10Dax Shepard?

  It's a good one to go on. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  It was a marijuana dispensary owner gets kidnapped and the marijuana world in California is still like the Wild West. So the way it works is you can't bank from marijuana proceeds, so it's all cash.

• 1:24:24Dax Shepard?

  Really quick, so people understand, the federal government hasn't legalized it. So any proceeds that were in a federally FDIC insured bank, you could go in and get all the money.

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  That F in the FDIC stands for federal, which is a federal crime, so they can't use Visa, MasterCard. So we legalized marijuana in the state of California without a plan in effect to deal with that. So the result is it's all cash.

• 1:24:45Dax Shepard?

  You immediately open up the door to an actual narco trafficker saying, I own a dispensary. Here's how I explain this million dollars of cash. I put it in the bank.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  are involved in so many dispensaries in California.

• 1:24:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's just sitting there as a great laundering situation.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  But you got legitimate business guys that are coming in and they're squeezing out and they're lowering the margins for the criminal element that's been responsible for that business. It's like the old bootleggers for years and years. Like those guys weren't Seagram's whiskey makers. They were criminals that were willing to fill the need of bootlegging back in the 30s. As a result, the bad guys in the marijuana world know who's selling a lot of product and they know who's got a big pile of cash at the end of every day. So this guy, he owns a dispensary in St. Anna, totally legit, super licensed. And in fact, the guy didn't even use weed himself. So he's like a legit business guy. They put tractors on his car and they surveilled him and they took him. He was out in the desert on a meaningless trip with a friend and they got it in their little brains that that must be where he's burying Alibaba's treasure.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  So they kidnapped him out of Newport, they drive him out, they torture him the whole way out. They get him to the GPS coordinates where they'd stopped. They're like, give us the money. And he's like, I told you for the last time, the money's in the safe because why wouldn't it be in the frigging safe?

• 1:25:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't need to use the desert.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  But again, psychopath in love with his own brilliance. They've tortured him and he's like, for the last time, it's in the office. It's not out here. So he's like, fuck you. And he cut off his penis. And he took it with him. What? They also kidnapped his roommate's girlfriend. So imagine this, she's along for the ride, basically. They didn't torture her. So in the middle of the Mojave Desert, they dump her out. They're still bound. They throw a knife down. And they're like, if you can cut your way out, you might be able to get out. If you can't, you can just fucking die. So the van drives off. So she manages to get this blindfold off and sees lights off in the distance and she's in her pajamas. And goes running through the California desert. First car she sees is an off-duty sheriff's deputy going to work. And so they're able to get to him before he dies. And now the search is on.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  And so, long story short, our mastermind fled back to Iran where he was originally from. And he grew up in California, a California kid, but he still had citizenship and he still had family back there.

• 1:26:55Dax Shepard?

  We don't have a great extradition policy with Iran.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  They're not real big on that, which is a huge problem. So we've got the mastermind of this thing. We wound up, and this is kind of cool, they do a canvas of the scene. So a canvas is just when the cops go and knock on doors, right? So they knock on a door. You're old enough to remember Bewitched. You're too young to remember Bewitched. No, I know Bewitched, yes. This is Travis, always looking out, knows her.

• 1:27:15Dax Shepard?

  Monica's 59 years old.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  Do you believe, look how good she looks.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  They've got a neighbor, and you never get anything on a canvas. It's when you're out of leads, it's a due diligence thing. But she's like, as a matter of fact, I did see something. I saw these boys, it looked like two went up on a ladder into the house where the kidnapping happened, but I didn't see them come out. They were wearing hard hats and looked too clean to be real. And the cops are like, please tell us you can describe the truck. And she's like, well, with a license plate, dude? She wrote down the plate number. And of all the brilliance and all the planning that went into this, we had a really smart psychopath guy, and he had helpers. And one of the helpers was a stunk and moron.

• 1:27:53Dax Shepard?

  You gotta do everything yourself.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  Right. That's why if you're gonna kidnap, you're gonna kidnap somebody doing something.

• 1:27:58Dax Shepard?

  Cause someone's penis up, you better be doing the whole thing.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  So anyway, he used his own truck for that event. So we catch one of them, the other guy flees to Iran, and we get pretty much everybody else, including the wife of the mastermind. So we've got her, she was in law school at the time.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  And now the game became, can we lure this guy out of Iran? It was one of the coolest things I ever got to do as a DA. So we flipped her to help us lure him into the Czech Republic. And I still can't believe it worked, but we threw a net on him, the Czech border police. And that was a case where the FBI were heroes. So the former Soviet countries absolutely will extradite to the US because they actually trust our legal system. The UK is terrible, France is even worse, Spain not so good.

• 1:28:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh really?

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Surprisingly so, but yep. Pain in the ass to get him beat out of those countries. So we could pick any country in the world, the Czechs. We get him here, extradition is successful, we put handcuffs on him in New York, transport him back, we're preparing for trial, and he friggin' escapes from the Orange County jail with two guys that were in there for murder. And they were on the loose. You read headlines about this back in the day, you don't remember, but for a week they're out.

• 1:29:03Dax Shepard?

  You got this guy out of Iran now? You've lost him? I don't know how present you were at whatever girlfriend's birthday it was happening that week, but I'm sure you were not fucking thinking about.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  That was not popular either. He's out, and he left my photo on his bunk, along with my trial partner Heather Brown, who I loved to death. And it was escape from Alcatraz. They tunneled out through these plumbing tunnels behind, rappelled off the roof, literally something out of a movie. Leaves my photo on his bunk, and Iran. A lot of people don't know this, have pretty warm diplomatic relations with Mexico because they're both OPEC countries. And they have a full-blown embassy in Tijuana, like about 15 minutes from the border. So all he has to do is head south. So I'm convinced, the guy we spent a year outsmarting.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  That we got outsmarted by, and instead, for whatever reason, he went north. And so we got him in San Francisco. A week later, they recaptured him. That was my last trial as a prosecutor, and he took the stand. And that was my final question to him was, dude, tell us, why couldn't you just leave it there and give the poor guy a chance that it would be reattached? And...

• 1:30:07Dax Shepard?

  You have to have a court stenographer type that question.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  And he was enraged by that question. I mean, he was so pissed, which is the goal. You want the violent guys to flash in front of the jury. Which allowed me to argue in the end, ladies and gentlemen, I asked him something he didn't like. And his answer was, you're done. Personally, you're done. You're done.

• 1:30:27Dax Shepard?

  You got a movie moment out of it?

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  I had a movie moment out of it.

• 1:30:30Dax Shepard?

  You can't handle the truth? You got it?

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  And then the beauty is, you connect that to closing, where it's like, ladies and gentlemen, think about this. In between you, a group of people who are deciding his fate, a superior court judge, and in a courtroom full of armed guards and bailiffs, he threatens to kill me.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  Or whatever "you're done" means. Imagine what he's like in the back of a van when he's not getting the million bucks that he thought was buried out there.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Nuts.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Hussein Nairi.

• 1:30:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Did he ever say what he did with the penis? Did he Lorraine Bob it and chuck it out the window of the van?

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  He flipped one of the three guys in the van, and he said they threw it out the window down the road. Now, I never called him to testify, but it was one of the co-conspirators.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Weird.

• 1:31:11Dax Shepard?

  What does one do if they're walking down the side of the road and they see a penis there? I mean, immediately, you should call the authorities, right? No one misplaces them intentionally.

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Dax Shepard?

  Well, Matt Murphy, this was awesome. The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death. There are a dozen of those stories in there, as well as your own. And what else I want to add about it is, it's a great education on a district attorney's job. You learn a lot about jurisprudence while you're hearing about all these crazy cases.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Hopefully, an interesting way for the reader. The audible's doing really well. I narrated it myself, learned how to write in tongue-twisters. But thank you for saying that.

• 1:31:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so everyone, check out The Book of Murder. And I look forward to your next book. This has been incredible. Thank you so much.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so much, thank you.

• 1:31:57Dax Shepard?

  All right, good.

• 1:32:00Dax Shepard?

  I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong. Just real quick, what if I was, people do this. Some people wear sunglasses inside.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Anna Wintour.

• 1:32:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so you might like it. What if I wore sunglasses?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  I don't like not being able to see your eyes.

• 1:32:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a bad look for me, but just what if? Try to wrap your head around the fact that I'm the type of guy that like, I'm always wearing my shades, you know? I'll catch up, I'll be the dude in my shade. I'm always in my shades. I should have worn my leather.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  This is tricky, okay? This is a deep.

• 1:32:32Dax Shepard?

  This can change exactly how you feel about somebody, right? This little accoutrement.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  You putting that on is gonna change your whole personality, right?

• 1:32:39Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  So what do I do if I hate your new personality, but I love you? What?

• 1:32:47Dax Shepard?

  What happens?

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  What happens?

• 1:32:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  I mean, really, like, people do change over time.

• 1:32:53Dax Shepard?

  Well, also, remember my uncle, he had had that procedure for his epilepsy, where they told, they warned he and his wife, like, he may have a radical shift in his personality. That was on the table.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting question.

• 1:33:06Dax Shepard?

  Do you have a friend, though, that had a, like, do you think a radical shift in their personality? Because I could be that friend to some degree from where I grew up.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Uh huh, to those people?

• 1:33:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 1:33:18Dax Shepard?

  Like, wow, this guy's like, he's sober and he's liberal.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Do you think your personality's changed? Because those are just, those aren't, to me, personality things. They are, we might confuse them as personality things, but those are like some beliefs and some just ways of walking through the world.

• 1:33:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I imagine you have a, I have a bias where it's like, I think I'm aware of the things I've gotten better at, and I'm not necessarily sure which ones I've gotten worse at. So I think a lot of people that were friends with me in my early twenties, like, they got me, but I would alienate certain people, or I was too provocative, or I'd get drunk. And then I think a lot of my friends were often having to apologize for my, who I was to their friends that didn't know me. I think it was a little too much for some people. So of course, I would chalk that up as like, well, now I'm, I'm, I'm better.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:11Dax Shepard?

  But maybe some people would be like, he's boring. Now, I like the guy that was a little too, a little crazy.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:18Dax Shepard?

  This guy's a fucking yawn fest now. I just thought of an idea for a furniture line called...

• 1:34:25Dax Shepard?

  What word did I just say?

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Yarn Fest. You wanna do Yarn Fest?

• 1:34:28Dax Shepard?

  I wanna do Yawn Furniture, like lawn furniture.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:34:33Dax Shepard?

  But it's comfy furniture for taking a nap in.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 1:34:36Dax Shepard?

  Yawn Furniture.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Is it still for outside? I think it should be.

• 1:34:40Dax Shepard?

  Sure. I feel like you must be in a really good mood today because you have your hair up and you have a bow in. And that to me is usually a cue. Like you got up this morning and you're like, I feel pretty good. I'm gonna do a thing. And now here it is.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  That's a great guess. That's not what happened.

• 1:34:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  I put my, I just grabbed the first clip I saw and put my hair up to do my makeup.

• 1:35:02Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  And then when I was done with my makeup, I was about to take it down and I thought, oh, I'll just leave my clip in.

• 1:35:07Dax Shepard?

  It landed right.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  It landed right. It's hard to.

• 1:35:10Dax Shepard?

  Sometimes you just get lucky, right?

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  It's hit or miss.

• 1:35:12Dax Shepard?

  Throw it up and then you pull off an orna.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:35:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  I should have taken one braid out.

• 1:35:17Dax Shepard?

  Accidental perfection.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  That's right. Okay. So I guess you don't really wanna talk too much about personalities.

• 1:35:22Dax Shepard?

  No, I love talking about personalities. Do you think you've changed a lot?

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah?

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  I did a pod, I did an awesome podcast yesterday called She Pivot.

• 1:35:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  It was really fun, awesome host, Emily Sussman. And she asked me what my personality was like as a kid. Like was I, I must have been very wanting a lot of attention. Yes, because I went into entertainment.

• 1:35:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  And could not be further from that. I was so shy.

• 1:35:50Dax Shepard?

  You were shy.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  So shy.

• 1:35:52Dax Shepard?

  But you always made a lot of friends. That's a little.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  I did make friends. I did it.

• 1:35:57Dax Shepard?

  But quietly and slowly.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Right. I did it in the way I still make friends. Like I'm not at a party out.

• 1:36:04Dax Shepard?

  Taking huge swings like me.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Taking big swings, making, yeah, loud noises and like.

• 1:36:09Dax Shepard?

  Drawing attention.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  I'm not drawing attention. You know, I hate that. I hate audience participation. And like Jess is very like you, right?

• 1:36:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Here I am.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I love that. Like I, I do joke with him though, that the first time I ever met him ever was at one of the Hanson Christmas parties.

• 1:36:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  And he was like, had his like shirt off or something. It was doing a dance.

• 1:36:33Dax Shepard?

  I think those heightened events could bring out an even heightened version of himself, so.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  And I was like.

• 1:36:39Dax Shepard?

  This guy's dangerous.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  I'm scared of that person. I'm not, but I, I want. Distance from that person.

• 1:36:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I think that's what a lot of people's reaction to me was in my twenties.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and that's so funny because I obviously have a pattern of thinking like, ah, I'm scared of that. I don't want that near me. And then I always find my way towards those people.

• 1:37:01Dax Shepard?

  Moths with a flame, Germany.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Opposites attract.

• 1:37:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, laws of attraction. I read that fascinating article about how they're like, they're so buttoned up and responsible, and yet they keep, they get drawn to the chaos.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Mix messies.

• 1:37:16Dax Shepard?

  Inexplicable.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  One of our old school go-tos.

• 1:37:18Dax Shepard?

  Our tropes.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Anyway, so I used to be very shy.

• 1:37:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  And I'm not shy anymore.

• 1:37:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh, congratulations. But no one would, I can't imagine anyone would miss your shyness.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great ques- my mom probably misses it because I was probably nicer.

• 1:37:36Dax Shepard?

  I know what you're about to say, and I, I don't think you've ever been shy to your mom.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Well, no, I wasn't, but I was stuck to her hip.

• 1:37:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay, oh, that would have been nice. Yeah, like a little monkey.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but actually, this is probably a lesson for her. She probably didn't like that. She was probably like, can you like, go away? No, she never said that to me, but she was probably like, I need some space. I've been working all day and there's this kid here.

• 1:37:57Dax Shepard?

  Yes, stuck glued to me.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Glued.

• 1:38:00Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's sweet. You were, you were glued to her?

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Well, mainly in public.

• 1:38:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you kind of hide behind her body, the way kids do?

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  I guess. She, she would describe it as, yeah, I was like, always kind of glued to her.

• 1:38:16Dax Shepard?

  My cousins, Mandy and Kelly, who are the funnest people on planet Earth. You'll remember they visited not too long ago and we had a blast. Mandy is the younger sister, and she has same personality I do, right? Look at me. And then Kelly, who's my exact age, was very, very shy. And she would just move through the world hiding behind Mandy at all times, which she was much bigger. But I have such a clear image in my head of anytime we would leave our little bubble and be at a Kmart or a thing, Kelly would be behind Mandy. Like, go ahead, you do, do all this stuff I don't want to do for us.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:38:51Dax Shepard?

  Again, maybe a birth order thing. Oh, my God, you would have loved this. So the update no one's asking for is I went to the dentist. Oh, right. And my hygienist was five X's into astrology as you are. Wow. And she was really mad that you hadn't told me what my rising was. I've asked you. I said, I think she has. I think she made me take a test to find out my rising, but I forgot it. I only remember Capricorn, but she was a Capricorn, but she had like five. And this is the thing about you guys are really into it. All of a sudden you have like all the signs. Cause she's like, I'm such and such rising and I'm this waning and I'm like, well, you've got now a fourth of the signs. Yeah, no, it's. I loved her, by the way, very fun hygienist. She was swearing and stuff, which I love.

• 1:39:36Dax Shepard?

  That's fun. And of course I asked her, cause it had been almost to the day, seven years since I had been there last time. Sure.

• 1:39:46Dax Shepard?

  And she was like, whoa, seven years. I go, no, and I'm going to ask you to do something that's really maybe even impossible to do. Cause you already know the seven years, but I'm going to ask you to pretend you don't know that. And objectively assess my mouth to see how long you think it's been. Cause this is what I asked last time I was here. And this is when she started swearing. She was like, oh my God, shit. Yeah. You're just genetically lucky. You don't have any tartar. She's like, you have no tartar. And you know what she told me, which I find really fascinating is remember my calcium heart score, which I brag about all the time. Yeah, you do a lot of bragging. I do a lot of bragging. It's unbecoming of a gentleman. Do you think that's a personality change or has that always been there?

• 1:40:28Dax Shepard?

  Well, no, in fact, when you, what I was going to say of the grody part of myself that I think is diminished is I used to, if not directly brag, I was really trying to brag all the time.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  It's gone down.

• 1:40:43Dax Shepard?

  It's gone down.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 1:40:44Dax Shepard?

  And even now, there's a zone of things I'll brag about, and there are things that I should be in trouble for, but I'm not. So that's the brag. So my calcium score, I was terrified to get it because of my diet. It's just me. And so I was so relieved and delighted that it was zero.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:01Dax Shepard?

  Similarly, I haven't been to the dentist in seven years. I've been one time in 17 years.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  That's disgusting.

• 1:41:07Dax Shepard?

  Because it was 10 years before the last trip. I know, it's foul. Everyone is throwing up their tuna sandwich in their car right now. I am bragging about it. And then here's my other justification. This is what I told her. She's like, yeah, some people genetically are lucky. They don't build up a lot of tartar, and that's you. And I said, I'm going to take it because I have some other genetic stuff. That's like, sorry, arthritis and stuff. So these things that I have that are just blessings from above.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Dax Shepard?

  My teeth.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  We all have a grab bag.

• 1:41:36Dax Shepard?

  Yes. What a great genetic lottery I hit with my teeth.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:41Dax Shepard?

  I'm really lucky because I hate going.

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Speaking of bragging.

• 1:41:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Something that you've bragged about recently that I've been excited to bring up. So the cognitive test.

• 1:41:54Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yes, yes. Now it's your turn in the catbird seat.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  But there was a huge revelation that happened. I got my test results back. Hour and a half long with Dr. Richard Isaacson. Fascinating, fascinating. All the cholesterol stuff, you know, I started my statin, I told you that.

• 1:42:14Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  All the cholesterol stuff, all the other stuff. Turns out, minus the cholesterol, which is really, really, really bad, but we're working on it. Everything's tip top.

• 1:42:23Dax Shepard?

  Wonderful.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything's great. My liver's great, which I was worried about.

• 1:42:27Dax Shepard?

  I would be too.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's fine. So I can keep powering through.

• 1:42:30Dax Shepard?

  You're built for it.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Then the cognitive test results. And of course, I was. Was very anxious about this part of it.

• 1:42:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you thought you'd convince yourself you did bad.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, even during it, I think I said on here, I said, this is very, very humbling. And she said, I had had people walk out and we got it, you know, and I was like, yeah, this is really bad. I'm doing horribly, I'm doing horribly. And then when he, and what I didn't even realize, we were taking an IQ test. I didn't realize that.

• 1:43:03Dax Shepard?

  Were we?

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Yes, the the number is an IQ score.

• 1:43:07Dax Shepard?

  It is?

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:08Dax Shepard?

  Because there was none of the fun riddles that I love from IQ tests.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  The kid ones may be different.

• 1:43:14Dax Shepard?

  No, no, the standard like to get into men's IQ test has a ton of computation and long form, uh, pattern recognition and prediction.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  Well, this is pattern. We have, there's a lot of pattern, or maybe not pattern recognition.

• 1:43:28Dax Shepard?

  There was identifying, but there was no, it's not like they would go A, D, H, what's the next letter? I love those.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Okay, well, whatever. Anyway, it is what it is.

• 1:43:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay. So it's an IQ test?

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Dax Shepard?

  Why didn't he give us an actual number? Did he give you a number? He did. He give you a number?

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  That's my whole thing.

• 1:43:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so he said cognitive test, don't worry, your cholesterol hasn't affected your brain yet.

• 1:43:52Dax Shepard?

  Or, or if you were even smarter.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Okay, well, we'll get to that. So, um, he said, hasn't affected your your brain yet. You did fantastic. The guy, you know, who evaluates it said words like superior, excellent, wow.

• 1:44:08Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Um, so I was just so relieved at this.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  And he said, you did a teeny bit better than your co-host. And I said, yes, that's so exciting. He's been bragging so much.

• 1:44:22Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  And he said, well, actually, I don't have the numbers. One of you did a little bit better. I was like, ah.

• 1:44:27Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay, so one of us did a little bit better.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Oh, man, well, if if it was him, I think this is because of the seahorse and racism.

• 1:44:34Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh, sure.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  And there was an Indian man also on the call and I was asking him about seahorses. He also was very hazy.

• 1:44:40Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was like, sea monkeys.

• 1:44:43Dax Shepard?

  You had two people on your call?

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  I had like eight people on my call.

• 1:44:46Dax Shepard?

  Why did I only have one?

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  I think I'm a very interesting case.

• 1:44:50Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. They brought in the.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  He did say I'm an interesting case.

• 1:44:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so anyway, while I was commiserating with the Indian man.

• 1:44:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  On seahorse, sea monkeys. Dr. Isaacson told Holly to pull up the, our actual numbers.

• 1:45:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  And when he was doing it, he goes, oh my God. Are you serious?

• 1:45:11Dax Shepard?

  It took his breath away?

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Holly, are you serious? Is this, is this real? We scored the exact same score. To the tenth of a point.

• 1:45:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh my God, nothing could be better.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:45:25Dax Shepard?

  No one's hurt feelings.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:45:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  I think my dad did that for us. And obviously, we both definitely scored differently in parts, but it all added up to the

• 1:45:37Dax Shepard?

  That's kinda crazy.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  Same number.

• 1:45:39Dax Shepard?

  Because again, there's all these, um, columns of intelligence and some of them I know I did terrible on. So the fact that like our terrible things evened out to be the same. So they give you an IQ score? We'd cut it out, but I want.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Um, I wrote it down, but now I forget it, but hold on, I, I sent it to air.

• 1:45:55Dax Shepard?

  I still don't think it's an IQ test, but I'm gonna, unless it's great, then I'm gonna say it's a really good IQ test.

• 1:46:02Dax Shepard?

  Do you know what I'm saying though? Where you have to get those really good riddles.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  This is an IQ test.

• 1:46:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Sorry. It felt like a memory test.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Oh my God. Okay, the, our number is.

• 1:46:17Dax Shepard?

  First, before you tell me, have you taken a bunch of IQ tests? I've taken a bunch.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  So I told my mom the number.

• 1:46:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  And my dad, I was like, good news is my brain is doing well. This, you know what, whatever. I explained the whole thing and I was like, this is my score. And my dad was like, yay, that's great. And my mom was like, well, when you, you were five, you got five points higher than that.

• 1:46:43Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Or seven, when I was seven. So I was like, okay, well, she's keeping me humble, you know? Um, wait, wait, I, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.

• 1:46:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, reject that.

• 1:46:59Dax Shepard?

  I'm not trying to make you mad. This is my own self-preservation.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  That was your score.

• 1:47:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  I don't know what to tell you.

• 1:47:09Dax Shepard?

  That's lower than I want.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and actually, this is, I wasn't gonna say this, but now I'm gonna say this based on

• 1:47:16Dax Shepard?

  My reaction.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  your reaction.

• 1:47:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  To me, it's so telling about men and women.

• 1:47:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Because I'm taking this test, and I'm like, I'm fucking this up. I'm doing so badly.

• 1:47:29Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  I, oh my God, this is so embarrassing. I'm stupid.

• 1:47:34Dax Shepard?

  The self-doubt.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then my score is

• 1:47:39Dax Shepard?

  Exemplary.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  high, and I think men don't do that as much. Or let's take you, who ended up with the exact same score as me.

• 1:47:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay, this is a great comp.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Because after we, you know, we talked after your test, and you didn't think that. I mean, you weren't like, I did amazing, but you weren't

• 1:47:56Dax Shepard?

  I wasn't, remember, there were quite a few that I thought I did bad on. I don't think I was like overly bullish about it. I think, I thought I definitely nailed a few things, that F thing, you know, I bragged about that.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  You did some bragging.

• 1:48:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I didn't feel like you, for sure. On the spectrum, I didn't feel like you.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I just think it's an interesting takeaway of

• 1:48:17Dax Shepard?

  Doubt and confidence.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  how men and women walk through the world, and when they're put through tests, like, what is happening in their brains?

• 1:48:25Dax Shepard?

  I'm teeming with testosterone, which like is the chemical that convinces you, you can do things you can't.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Right, and it's just funny.

• 1:48:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  My brain was more what you were thinking, Monica, after I took the test.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Right, as a comp, we got the same score, which is why I can say that.

• 1:48:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Because I I didn't do poorly.

• 1:48:45Dax Shepard?

  Right. And yet you thought you did.

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  And I wish I could do these things with more confidence.

• 1:48:54Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  Borrow some of of that feeling.

• 1:48:59Dax Shepard?

  I wonder, um, like if we dug into it, what's under that, you know? Is it for you that being smart is is a very defining characteristic? And so here's this thing that has the potential to destroy your identity. I'm just throwing something out. This isn't what I think per se, but I'm just like spitballing now. Is it that the stakes were higher for you? Whereas for me, it's like, well, I know I'm gonna tank a lot of this and.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  You don't. In fact, that's what our just fight just now was. You're like, I reject that number. I'm higher than that.

• 1:49:34Dax Shepard?

  Well, because I've gotten better scores than that. And so of course I'm gonna believe the one that made me seem the smartest. That's like my self interest.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  You don't have what you're saying you have. You think you're, you think, you believe and think.

• 1:49:47Dax Shepard?

  That's a paradox.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:49Dax Shepard?

  It's a paradox. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  I think also like when a lot of girls are told like, oh, like girls don't score as high on tests or girls aren't good at math or girls aren't X, Y, and Z.

• 1:50:01Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I don't, I am in there thinking like, well, I, I, I mean, it's all subconscious. But it's like, yeah, I can't be very good at this.

• 1:50:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And it'd be interesting to know what young girls now, because yeah, when you grew up, the admission rate for men in STEM at universities was still in the eighties probably, right? But now it's completely flipped. So now like two thirds of girls are getting into college and only one third of boys or whatever the number is, it's pretty crazy now.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:32Dax Shepard?

  I watched the, um, I guess it was a holiday concert.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:50:37Dax Shepard?

  Last night at Lincoln School.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Nice.

• 1:50:41Dax Shepard?

  And um, as you would expect, lots of bawling.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:47Dax Shepard?

  I'm watching all these little girls. It's all girl's school.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  So cute.

• 1:50:51Dax Shepard?

  And they're singing and it's so beautiful.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Dax Shepard?

  And I'm crying.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:50:56Dax Shepard?

  And then I look at Chris at one point and I go, you know, daughters are really the best thing this planet has to offer. The best thing that this planet has to offer is little daughters.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Dax Shepard?

  Fuck me. They're all, I was looking at all of them. They're so cute and oh yeah.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Gotta protect them.

• 1:51:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Oh man, it was so touching. I was also tripping the fuck out that I have a daughter in a Catholic school outfit. Like I, in a bazillion years.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  That is so funny.

• 1:51:30Dax Shepard?

  That is not what my fantasy of having kids was.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:51:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was, it was great.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  That's sweet. Do you think a lot of men feel that way?

• 1:51:39Dax Shepard?

  About daughters? I think a lot of men want to have a son. And I could spitball for an hour on why that is, just historically, what that has meant until recently. But the second you have a daughter, every man I know that has daughters, the first thing we say to each other is like, aren't we so fucking lucky? Like, we got so lucky that we have these girls. And you know that study that just came out that adds like 1.5 years to your life per daughter you have and it's cumulative. It does something very good for us.

• 1:52:13Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:52:28Dax Shepard?

  Tell me, makes you love your dad?

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I love my dad, yeah. But no, it's like, it makes me so happy to hear that and yet.

• 1:52:36Dax Shepard?

  And then you have a disconnect.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  I have a disconnect. Why do we stop caring about women? After a certain, like, really? I mean,

• 1:52:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  Not to be political, but women, I'm gonna say for me, just took a big hit.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  And from men and women, right?

• 1:52:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  So that is so curious to me, how we can like, look at these, be so proud of our daughters and, you know, want the best for them. And I believe that, I believe that. I believe that most people want the best for their children and half of their children are girls.

• 1:53:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  To me, there's just like a hypocrisy, not you, obviously, but there's a hypocrisy where it's like, oh, I gotta protect my family and I gotta, and then you don't.

• 1:53:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but and this is where you and I often disagree, which is like, yes, if your conclusion is that it was an opportunity to vote for women, and that was the thing that drove your voting, then it's very disheartening.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  But I mean, more just, well, that too, but also just rights.

• 1:53:48Dax Shepard?

  I personally think that it wasn't a vote on women, as much as maybe it should have been, and I voted that way, but if I just look at the exit polls, that's not what people were saying was their concern.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  That's my point. That's actually my point, is it was not their concern.

• 1:54:04Dax Shepard?

  But let's just be as generous as we can. If you are somebody who is having an impossible time feeding your family, and your conclusion, right or wrong, is that it's because of the left, well, feeding everyone and keeping everyone safe would trump other things. It's like, first order of business is like food, shelter and water.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Dax Shepard?

  Once we have that, then we move on to these other things. So it could be that they very much want those, well, we know 70% of the country wants those rights for women, but they may have said to themselves, but I am more scared about my income currently, and that's gotta be what I'm gonna vote to. And then we can disagree on what the best route to that is.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Those people who truly are like, well, again, I, yeah, I. I think there's some misinformation about what would help those people.

• 1:55:00Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  But they, to those people who really, they're in like, I can't put food on the table.

• 1:55:08Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  I'm not, I have no judgment of those people. I, I, I don't.

• 1:55:14Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  That's a very specific situation. I am not talking about that group.

• 1:55:19Dax Shepard?

  And it's, you know, tens of millions of people.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  It is, but there's a huge percentage of people that, that did not vote for women's rights, that do not have trouble putting food on the table and chose to still, just like, in my, again, the most generous thing I can say is chose to pick their tax dollars over women's rights.

• 1:55:48Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  And that is, there is, just to me, there's a, there's a disconnect between the way we think about young girls and then what happens.

• 1:55:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Overall, it's just interesting.

• 1:56:00Dax Shepard?

  I think people just triage their priorities, you know, I think.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:03Dax Shepard?

  It's, and then, and then, and for you, which is totally understandable, that's, that's number one for you on all the issues that were being voted on was, that was the number one one. And there's some other stuff you totally care about that went to number two. And if.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  Well, everything I cared about, unfortunately, not unfortunately, but was, belonged to one party.

• 1:56:24Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  So I didn't have to make big sacrifices.

• 1:56:27Dax Shepard?

  But let's put it this way, I do believe if you had virtually two centrist candidates, on the right and the left, and, and on the right, they were pro reproductive rights.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:56:36Dax Shepard?

  And on the left, they were anti, and they wanted to extend, I think you would have flopped, you would have.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  A hundred percent I would.

• 1:56:42Dax Shepard?

  Right. So I do think it was, in the same way that for the people that were, are pro life, that that, that one always trumps all the other ones, I think we often have certain issues that trump a lot of other stuff we care about.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, just bums me out. I can feel. I can really feel it. I don't know if you can sense this too, but I've been around a lot of women lately.

• 1:57:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  And like, everyone's in a tough spot.

• 1:57:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I, I feel it.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's like.

• 1:57:16Dax Shepard?

  Well, I talked to my ex-girlfriend Carrie. I sent you the text.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Dax Shepard?

  Then I FaceTimed her. And we haven't had a FaceTime. Like, we just check in with each other once every few months. And, um, or she'll send me a song she likes, or I'll send hers. But we had a full, like, hour and a half FaceTime to talk about this, all these issues.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she doesn't need that from me normally. Like, that's not something, she's not reaching out to me to go like, "How are you not freaking out?" kind of a situation, you know? And so, yeah, I can see in, I can see, I see it.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, you brought this up, and I think it's right, that a lot of men, young boy, young men, feel not seen or not spoken to and, and, and I really, I guess I'm just, to our male listeners who are in a position of influence at all, it's on, it's on you, not you, but you as a group to help these men. It's, if, I don't think it's on women to do it.

• 1:58:22Dax Shepard?

  It's not on the, it's not on women. It's on the party. The party has to have a plan for.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm, I'm saying the way to change the, the seed, the culture, it happens from within. And we had Sharon on, and she was like, "It's not that. It's not the government that's gonna come in on a white horse and change people's opinions and change..." Exactly. It comes from within.

• 1:58:45Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  And I was also thinking about this, speaking of daughters and fathers, Kerala, where my parents are from, is a very matriarchal society because originally it was the, the, um, wealth was passed down through the female.

• 1:59:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, matriline, local.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  So, there isn't this, like, cause I was like, "Why is it, like, why doesn't my dad have this?" And even my grandfather, who was much, you know, of a old generation, he didn't have that at all.

• 1:59:16Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  And I was like, "What is it?" And I was like, "Oh, it's not that they're, like, special. They didn't grow up in a patriarchal environment."

• 1:59:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  And it's, it's. For everyone to start moving more away from that.

• 1:59:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, so much of it too is just you're kind of a product of your environment. And as you know, Keith Payne said, it's like, yes, we all believe we've thought through all the issues and come to the best conclusion, but it isn't suspicious. I can predict 90% what your conclusion is going to be. I think that's relevant. And so like, I don't deserve applause because I'm a feminist. I was raised by a force of nature woman and there was no dad around. I was seeing no lowered status. I just am the lucky beneficiary of having grown up with a gangster mom. And I was just on a trip with a dude who's also only dated and is now married to gangster women. And I said to him, your mom must be a gangster, was she?

• 2:00:14Dax Shepard?

  And he's like, oh yeah, she's like the ultimate gangster. It's just like, yeah, that boy is the beneficiary of that. And I was the beneficiary of that. And that's just, we got lucky, you know, he was born into a house.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  You got lucky, but also there's societal things that make it harder or easier. Like when there's equal pay, it's easier to grow up in a household where your parents are equal.

• 2:00:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  You know, there's, that's what these systemic things are about. Change, you know, that's why we have to change some of these things. Cause it, you're absolutely right. It's what you literally are born into.

• 2:00:45Dax Shepard?

  Also, some people dispute this data, but let's just say for one second, it's true that, that men will date laterally and below them and that women date laterally and above them. Yeah. Or even like status wise, educational attainment, these different metrics, right? But on social dating platforms, that it's really pretty staggering. And I was like, why is that right? Why is that? And what occurred to me is like, oh yeah, for a guy who grew up in the eighties, his dad worked and the mom didn't work or make money and probably didn't go to college and have a degree. So like his, the primary love in a boy's life was this woman who probably had less status than the man

• 2:01:30Dax Shepard?

  and on the scene. So of course that makes sense. Whereas if you're a girl, dad had more status and money and power than mom. And you're trying to marry dad. So like, boys are trying to marry mom and girls are trying to marry dad. So of course this pattern exists. That's exactly what you saw growing up.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Maybe for a large swath, but for a woman who has a level of success, a certain level, has hit a certain level of success. I don't think that's, they're not looking for someone with more. That's hard. Like, that's really rare and hard to find.

• 2:02:09Dax Shepard?

  But like, a lot of women would not want a, I'm gonna use these air quotes, a deadbeat boyfriend. But there's so many rich dudes that are happy to have a wife who's never done anything but look gorgeous. That's weird to me. Like, what, why is, why, how could that be? Why is that like, not triggering for a guy? And that would be hugely triggering for a woman.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  Most of the people in my life are with partners that are 100% on par.

• 2:02:35Dax Shepard?

  Comparable, right.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  They're, they're all working. They're all working and make around the same amount of money.

• 2:02:43Dax Shepard?

  I guess my conclusion's hopeful for me, which is like, oh, well, as this primary structure evolves, perhaps the baggage of both those things will go away. Like, I think this is very much product of like 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s family structure, but it, more and more and more people have either a mom who makes the same as dad, or more. Or, I know a ton of people here, which I didn't exist in Michigan in the 80s. There was no stay-at-home dads. I never met a single kid whose dad stayed at home. But here, I don't know what the percentage is, but I, all the time I'm meeting men at school, who, that's what they do.

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Dax Shepard?

  So conceivably, their daughters aren't gonna think that a guy who, you know, that that's, that would never be an issue for them. Cause the other, the other conclusion is, it's just so bleak. Like, there's the kind of, you know, Scott Galloway, who I love so much of what he says. His is pretty bleak, right? Well, this is just gonna get exacerbated, cause less and less men are going to college, so less and less men are even gonna achieve something laterally significant or above, so it's just gonna continue to self-perpetuate. Which I can see, that's a very defendable position. But I'm, I'm hopeful that as people's role models and parents evolve, that they'll just, it'll maybe take care of itself.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  But why, what's his take on like, why it would? Self perpetua- why can't men get themselves to college anymore?

• 2:04:07Dax Shepard?

  Well, they're being outperformed by girls, very simply. They're, they're, they're getting, you know, now that the reins are off of girls and the shackles are off of girls, well, lo and behold, they perform better. They, they, they test better, you know, they're, they're more mature. There's all these things.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  But it's, I don't think it's that like, I don't think the stat is that boys are getting rejected from college. It's that they're not going.

• 2:04:34Dax Shepard?

  No, well, in these elite schools with hard admissions, way more boys are applying than are getting in.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42Dax Shepard?

  And, but metrically, girls are doing much better. They're getting in at a much higher rate.

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I, I mean, we, I guess that's an outlier, right? Like trying to get into an Ivy League school. I mean, just a regular public college institution. There, there's no reason other than from within that group that they shouldn't be able to go. Like that's what I, what is happening? But.

• 2:05:10Dax Shepard?

  What if though, they, what if they can't compete?

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think there, there literally would be affirmative action for men. Like if, if, I think that if 90% of women, if it was like every school is turning into 95% based on five because of merit.

• 2:05:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what Malcolm was saying.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that Tulane is becoming a.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:05:31Dax Shepard?

  A women's only college.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  But, and then, then that gets into, is, but then why? Because is it then draw more women and draw less men? You know, that whole thing, whatever. There's so many factors to it, but there would definitely be fixes for that. Currently, I don't, I just don't know why.

• 2:05:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, how about just anecdotally, your high school experience and I'll say my high school experience. So on average, girls were much better students than the boys. Like the boys were highly distracted. You know, they were distracting in class. I was one of them.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07Dax Shepard?

  And I think the only reason they weren't before blasting boys out of the water is that they didn't apply. Or they weren't expected to do that, or they weren't encouraged to do it, or they were discouraged to do it. But like, once that, I think once that, like when everyone's aims were the same, I'm not shocked they've blasted by boys just from sitting in classes my whole life.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:06:28Dax Shepard?

  Boys were kinda, you couldn't get them to fucking. Settle down for 10 minutes.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Dax Shepard?

  I don't know what's happening there.

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:36Dax Shepard?

  Physiologically, but I'm not shocked that now that the governor's off, girls, that they're doing better. That doesn't shock me at all.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Well, it's not shocking to me that they're doing better, but it doesn't explain to me why men are just dropping off the map.

• 2:06:53Dax Shepard?

  I think what men are feeling is we made a very specific decision about 30 years ago, where we said, okay, our economy is transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a brain economy. We're going to invent stuff, or we're going to administrate, and we're going to do all this stuff. And then, so NAFTA is a very appealing policy because we're not going to be manufacturing anymore. It'd be better to get cheap labor in Mexico. And a lot of, a lot of decisions were made to pursue that goal of a brain economy. And we have the results. So I think, at least when I was going to high school, if I can tell you my, um, I told, I, I, a month or two ago, I said I reconnected with them. Joey Ricciardi, Joey Ricciardi wasn't a good student. His dad was a bricklayer. He had a work ethic like no one's business.

• 2:07:38Dax Shepard?

  He owns this incredible excavation company now, and he's done incredibly well. He could have never, he was not going to go to college.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:44Dax Shepard?

  There used to be a lot more avenues like that, the trades. The trades were bigger. They trade, you know, um, manufact, I'm from Detroit, like most people went into manufacturing. And they had great lives and they had ski boats and, you know. So that is really falling out, so, um, that's a real issue.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  It is a real issue, but in the same way that when we talk about AI here, and if I say like, well, I think we should put regulations. And you're like, well, we can't because we have to compete with these other countries. They're not going to stop.

• 2:08:15Dax Shepard?

  And I say that not because I don't agree with you. I say that because I think I'm working backwards from a reality. I don't think we should do that.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  Yes, so I'm making the same equivalency. Like if we, if we said we're not going to be a brain economy. How the fuck are we going to compete with China and India and these other countries that are full brain economies?

• 2:08:34Dax Shepard?

  But luckily, we have some models. So it's like Germany is doing both things. Germany is leading in tech and in engineering. And yet they also have this huge manufacturing base, you know.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  I don't think they're leading in tech. Germany isn't leading in tech.

• 2:08:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay, they're very, they're a very high-tech civilization.

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:54Dax Shepard?

  And they have a, their own stock market that's, you know, they, they have all the things we have. They're kind of winning on both fronts and they have a, they've made a lot of legislative decisions that the skilled, A, when you're in school, they drive you if you're a boy to a vocational school.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's very smart.

• 2:09:13Dax Shepard?

  And you pick up an actual trade there that you will make forty-five dollars an hour. Like you'll be a middle class, whether they're unionized or not, they just culturally.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Dax Shepard?

  I think because we have at least a model of it where it works, where you can have both things. You can have a brain economy and a manufacturing economy. I think we need to do a lot better.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  I do too, but so that, that's sort of, how do we get those people to hear? Cause this is the truth, the, the, the party that wants to do that, the party that wants to do free community college, to offer retraining and vocational skills is not the party they're voting for. So I don't know how to get those people to understand that what is in their best interest and this country's best interest of that, of actual training that group to be middle-class or above. And there is an avenue for that.

• 2:10:08Dax Shepard?

  Now, look, some of these things are dog whistles. I'll totally agree with you, but it's very simple messaging. It's like two thousand and sixteen, Trump's the only person in America that's like fighting for coal jobs. We're going, we gotta get into green energy.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  But what else did she say? And so we have to retrain. Hillary said retrain. I heard it so many times.

• 2:10:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Retraining, retraining, and that's correct.

• 2:10:33Dax Shepard?

  But listen, you can totally disagree with it on an environmental stance, but you had one side saying, we're gonna get into green energy, which is a very high-tech energy. It's all happening in Silicon Valley. It's like the solar panel companies, the wind turbine companies. And then you have oil and gas drilling, which is North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota. All these places where dudes are roughnecks and they can go make sixty dollars an hour. And that thing they can do, solar and wind sounds like they're never, that's never gonna be for them. But coal mining and, and gas and oil, which the right is very in favor of gas and oil. And the left's very against gas and oil. You just got to acknowledge that that's a whole sector of jobs that a lot of these guys

• 2:11:16Dax Shepard?

  were going to have. And they think that once I want to get rid of all those jobs, the last of their high paying jobs. If you can just table the environmental aspect for a second, I understand the appeal that that's not like hard for me to get. Is one side saying I'm going to protect all these jobs that the left says are too dirty for the world. And the other side is saying we're going to green, which is high tech in Silicon Valley. That all makes sense to me.

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:41Dax Shepard?

  And it's a lot simpler to understand than

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  Than the reality.

• 2:11:45Dax Shepard?

  Something more complicated.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  Um, all right.

• 2:11:49Dax Shepard?

  Here we go.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  So this is for Matt Murphy.

• 2:11:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, this was a fun one.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. The percentage of DNA that we share with chimps, 98.8%.

• 2:11:57Dax Shepard?

  Almost our temperature.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:59Dax Shepard?

  That'll be our, my new way of remembering it, remembering it.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Okay, great. Um, alcohol, blood alcohol levels, his mom was five and point oh eight is the legal limit. So that's really bad, really, really bad.

• 2:12:10Dax Shepard?

  That's insane.

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  Very bad. On the Wondry Plus episode.

• 2:12:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  We do a little fact check now for the Wondry Plus episode. So for the Matt Murphy Wondry Plus episode, the facts are a little different than, they're the same, but they're different because I have, I found a different fact.

• 2:12:27Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. You keep going.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, because in that episode, I said that he, Kevin Spacey is currently in a play and he's not.

• 2:12:36Dax Shepard?

  He's not.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:12:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  But I guess.

• 2:12:40Dax Shepard?

  He's unemployed currently?

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  Well, I guess he's set to appear in a movie, Peter 58.

• 2:12:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  And where he got the standing ovation, he was at a theater in Oxford, which is why I guess I was confused. It says his first stage appearance since being cleared of sexual assault after performing a brief scene by Shakespeare. So he just did a scene.

• 2:13:02Dax Shepard?

  A little one off.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. He did a five minute scene.

• 2:13:05Dax Shepard?

  And that received a standing ovation.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  I guess so. All right. So he's not currently in a play.

• 2:13:10Dax Shepard?

  Okay. There was a standing ovation last night.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  Oh, that's nice.

• 2:13:15Dax Shepard?

  Do you call it a standing O?

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  I used to, yeah.

• 2:13:17Dax Shepard?

  No, you know, you're off of it. Am I doing something dorky?

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 2:13:22Dax Shepard?

  Go ahead, is it a little dorky?

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  No, it's fine. Okay, you said 25% of boys are molested-ish. And the last time we talked about this, I was like, yes, I found that stat. Now that stat's gone.

• 2:13:35Dax Shepard?

  They took it off the internet?

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Yes, it's gone and what's left is 1 in 6. I guess that's this big number. And then there's a site called 1in6.org. Then all these other places are saying 1 in 6. I looked a lot for the other thing and I couldn't find it and I kept finding 1 in 6.

• 2:13:52Dax Shepard?

  One could be data from today and one could be data from the 80s. Like, I'm always referencing Body Keeps a Score. And that stuff was all about the generation in the 80s.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  But one is data from today and the other's data from last week?

• 2:14:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, that's, I don't have an explanation for that. But I could see where, from my generation to my kids, that it has dropped.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Dax Shepard?

  Also, that's nuts. If you're at a football game and you're looking at those many thousands of people and you're seeing 1 of every 6 people you see?

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  Awful.

• 2:14:21Dax Shepard?

  It's crazy.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:22Dax Shepard?

  That's more than that have been in a traffic accident.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:25Dax Shepard?

  I don't know those stats.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so are you more likely to be sexually abusive if you were sexually abused? Again, some conflicting info. There's stopitnow.org, which we talked about. That basic, stopitnow.org says, no, you're not more likely to be. There is a study by the NIH. Among 747 males, the risk of being a perpetrator was positively correlated with reported sexual abuse victim experiences. The overall rate of having been a victim was 35% for perpetrators and 11% for non-perpetrators. Of the 96 females, 43% had been victims, but only one was a perpetrator.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  A high percentage of male subjects abused in childhood by a female relative became perpetrators. Having been a victim was a strong predictor of becoming a perpetrator, as was an index of parental loss in childhood. And that is all.

• 2:15:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, I love you. This was fun.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Dax Shepard?

  Um, you rose to the occasion of your bar rap.

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  Thank you. I rose to the occasion?

• 2:15:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  It's a rose.

• 2:15:37Dax Shepard?

  Oh, it is.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:39Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my Lord. All right. Love you.

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  Love you.

• 2:15:57Dax Shepard?

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