Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard David Sussillo (on foster care and neuroscience) About this episode David Sussillo (Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of Mind) is a technologist, neuroscientist, and professor at Stanford University. David joins the Armchair Expert to discuss growing up with two parents that were addicts, experiencing extreme poverty throughout his childhood, and the joy of finding a best friend during that time. David and Dax talk about how the immersion and rules of video games amid the chaos of his life became the precursor to his research today, ending up in a series of group foster homes for several years, and his dream of going to college functioning as a protective shield for his future self. David explains being orphaned by the living while in foster care, the elation of receiving a full ride to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science, and the deep learning neural network research he now leads at Stanford.
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Transcript 22,586 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? Today, we have David Cicillo. He is a neuroscientist, a technologist, and an author. But don't let that sway you. This isn't a tech-heavy.
0:17 Speaker 01 No.
0:18 Dax Shepard? This is a very personal story.
0:19 Speaker 01 Correct, and a very moving one.
0:21 Dax Shepard? Incredibly moving one about really growing up in a lot of public housing or
0:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:28 Dax Shepard? boy homes and
0:29 Speaker 01 Homes.
0:29 Dax Shepard? Homes, yeah.
0:30 Speaker 01 It's very connected to the episode we had on foster care.
0:36 Dax Shepard? Yes.
0:36 Speaker 01 He mentions that a lot. He felt very seen by that episode. And this is kind of like, that episode, a personal story.
0:43 Dax Shepard? Yes, mixed with turning out to be a neuroscientist.
0:46 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:46 Dax Shepard? Uh, he has a book out, uh, it's a memoir. It's called Emergence. A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mystery of Mine. It's, uh, quite an incredible story. I was riveted. It's very moving and touching. Please enjoy David Cicillo. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete, all-access, live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying, and sprints, all in one place. Watch every race live, only on Apple TV. We get support from Quince.
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2:23 Speaker 01 It's a uniform.
2:24 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
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3:19 Speaker 02 I just want to say, I watched that episode with Claudia Rau. Oh, the foster. Yeah, with the foster kid. What a great episode.
3:25 Dax Shepard? I'm so glad you watched that because that's gonna come up.
3:28 Speaker 02 I felt so seen. I was like, you go, girl. Oh, good. No one had really just all put it in one place. I was like, wow. So props to you. Thank you. No, props to her. She is incredible and we're so happy that we were helpful in telling that story.
3:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, her two kind of novel things for me that blew my mind is one, that poverty looks a lot like neglect. Half the kids, by her count, are in there probably when they're just poor. So that's really troubling.
3:57 Speaker 02 That's really troubling. I agree.
3:59 Dax Shepard? And then what we know, yeah, about brain development and knowing we can't get the result we need with this system, just acknowledging that.
4:07 Speaker 02 It's a great framing. It's simple, too. It's a very straightforward thing to say. This is pathological because X, Y, Z. Yeah.
4:13 Dax Shepard? It almost can't get a different outcome. And if you do, it's gonna be an anomaly.
4:17 Speaker 02 That's right, yeah.
4:20 Dax Shepard? So David, where do you live normally?
4:22 Speaker 02 I live in the Bay Area. I live right near Stanford University.
4:25 Dax Shepard? How do you like it up there? How many years have you been there?
4:27 Speaker 02 I've been there since 2010. I moved out for a postdoc at Stanford University. My wife and I had been in New York City, in Manhattan, for the last 10 or 12 years, and she really didn't want to go. But we went out and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming.
4:42 Speaker 01 Oh, you love it.
4:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. First off, it's California. But you know, it's a place that's filled with innovation, filled with smart people. You don't have to apologize to be a nerd. It's multicultural in its own sort of technical way. So I really like it there.
4:55 Dax Shepard? So you and I are both children of 1975?
4:57 Speaker 02 I saw that. Yes, that's right.
4:59 Dax Shepard? What month?
5:00 Speaker 02 March 26. You precede me by two and a half.
5:02 Dax Shepard? I'm your elder and I expect to be treated as such. You beat me on the height.
5:06 Speaker 02 How have you done with turning 50? I have to admit, it hasn't been great for me psychologically.
5:10 Dax Shepard? Tell me.
5:11 Speaker 02 Well, just feeling like you see the end. I want to be measured here because I'm not 70. But for all of that, you know the fantasy you live in about life going on forever. You can't have that at 50.
5:22 Dax Shepard? There's something really, really troubling about knowing in the best case scenario, which I doubt I'll make it to 100 or more than halfway there.
5:28 Speaker 02 That's right.
5:28 Dax Shepard? That's a bummer. You were an adjunct professor? You're still an adjunct?
5:32 Speaker 02 I'm still an adjunct professor.
5:33 Dax Shepard? What is an adjunct?
5:34 Speaker 02 An adjunct professor just means you're affiliated with the university. It's a credential. So in my case, there's a dean or even a provost that had to actually sign off on it. But you're not a tenure line professor. So professors in today's academic world are largely leading research groups based off of money they get from the government through grants and also through private foundations. And so as an adjunct, I cannot lead those.
5:58 Dax Shepard? Okay.
5:58 Speaker 02 I can be on them and I can participate, and that's largely what I do. Everyone thinks I teach. I don't teach. I lead research.
6:03 Dax Shepard? Okay. So you'll join an existing grant?
6:06 Speaker 02 That's right.
6:06 Dax Shepard? And then your professional work was Google Brain and is now Meta?
6:10 Speaker 02 That's right. At Google Brain, this was like the early skunk works of neural networks. Then it became deep learning and now it's called AI. Maybe we'll get into some of that. I'm not sure where you want to take the conversation, but that was for about six years. And then I joined Meta Reality Labs. You've seen these classes that they have. The new version has this wristband, and that wristband reads out your Muscle signals. It's basically like controlling a device just by gesturing or like writing.
6:34 Speaker 01 So you can text with your fingers?
6:36 Speaker 02 Exactly.
6:36 Speaker 01 Whoa, that's wild.
6:38 Dax Shepard? That doesn't seem on prima facie that hard in that we know what signals are going to get sent to the messages to move the hands in some way. Conceptually, it doesn't seem that abstract.
6:49 Speaker 02 Conceptually, if the signals are there, you can machine learn them and pull it out. There are reasons it's hard, but first let me meet you on the conceptually. No, it's not. It's not like doing brain machine interfaces where you have no idea what's going on.
7:00 Dax Shepard? Right, because it's very like end of river.
7:02 Speaker 02 Exactly right. It is true that your motor cortex projects to your spine, the spine projects to your wrist. The muscle is driven by electricity when you move and that's an aggregate signal of neurons. Those are the cells in your brain that fire electrically and cause you to be you. But to meet your point, what's coming down the line here is not your pancakes that you had for breakfast. It's the stuff that you do to move your hand.
7:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:23 Speaker 02 And so in that sense, it's an applied problem.
7:25 Dax Shepard? The body has simplified it quite a bit by the time we get to the wrist.
7:28 Speaker 02 That's right. The challenges of it are how do you get something to work on every single person when they put it on the first time? That's a really hard application problem.
7:37 Dax Shepard? Because it has been determined that people won't have the tolerance to let it learn from it for some period. The consumer doesn't want a learning phase?
7:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, we call that personalization. So we so far have not gone down that road. We've just have a general model. You put it on and it works. And what that means is you have to collect quite a bit of data. We wrote a paper, actually published it in Nature about some of this work. And so what we learned was that if you get a bunch of people come in and you have them do the gestures and you machine learn the hell out of it, then with a lot of effort and clever engineering, you can make it work.
8:06 Dax Shepard? So what probability, like what percentage would you say it's accurate?
8:10 Speaker 02 For the things that we've released, it's very, very accurate.
8:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the 99 something.
8:14 Speaker 02 Oh, yes. I don't actually know what the numbers are, but they're very high because you want to have something out there that's quality.
8:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:20 Speaker 01 When is this getting released?
8:21 Speaker 02 It is released.
8:22 Speaker 01 What?
8:22 Speaker 02 It was released in the fall. So the Ray-Ban Metas, the glasses that have been around a while, and the Meta Ray-Ban displays, they actually have a little display in there, right? So you control that with a wristband that comes with it. I think it's sold out now, but I think it's out there.
8:35 Dax Shepard? You've landed in all these places and it's quite improbable and. Your story is heartbreaking and hopeful and wonderful, and I enjoyed it so much. When I was listening, do you say it verbally? You were on some kind of a Zoom in 2022.
8:49 Speaker 02 That's right, yeah. Growing up in science lecture, Professor at NYU, Weiwei Ma, started this. And so lots of people are out there telling their stories about how they got into science, and I was invited to do one of them.
8:59 Dax Shepard? But, okay, so mom and dad are both addicts.
9:01 Speaker 02 Yes, that's right.
9:02 Dax Shepard? So maybe I guess we start with you at probably five. At that point, they're still married. You guys live in Albuquerque?
9:07 Speaker 02 So my parents were both Christian hippies. They may have actually lived on like a Christian commune.
9:11 Dax Shepard? They took the only fun part out, free love, I guess.
9:14 Speaker 02 That's right.
9:15 Dax Shepard? It's just dirty. It's just all you got left is the dirt.
9:20 Speaker 02 By the time I'm coming online, I only know this in hindsight, they're using drugs regularly. They're crashing drugstores and stealing, grab and run type of stuff. If there's heroin, they're taking it. If there's painkillers, they're taking them. They were just legit addicts.
9:35 Dax Shepard? In a pinch, they're making your older sister pretend she has a cough so we can get a prescription for Cody.
9:40 Speaker 02 That's right.
9:40 Dax Shepard? And is he second generation Albuquerque? Your mother is.
9:43 Speaker 02 My mother, she was actually born in Bakersfield. She grew up in Albuquerque.
9:46 Dax Shepard? Her parents, your grandparents, live there?
9:48 Speaker 02 My father is from Brooklyn. There's definitely tragedy on his side of the family. My grandfather, I think he was a captain in the Navy, and he died in a plane accident over Phoenix in the 50s. My grandfather, on my father's side, and my grandmother, these are serious practicing Catholics. So they had a family of five kids, very serious. He passes away, and now my grandmother is left with five kids aged seven through three months.
10:13 Speaker 01 Oh.
10:14 Speaker 02 Woof, right? Holy moly. So she hauls back to where she's from, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and that's where my aunts and uncles and my father grew up. Father, the middle child, bigger pain. So basically, what happened is the two oldest were sort of saddled with, hey, you need to help me raise this family. And the two youngest were very young, and so my father, as middle kids do, fell through the cracks.
10:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:35 Speaker 02 So, you know, my father was 100% messing around with heroin by the age of 13.
10:39 Speaker 01 Wow.
10:40 Speaker 02 I am certain, based on talking to my aunts and uncles, he was addicted to heroin at 15. It's really early, right? And so I grew up in the 80s. There was this War on drugs. We can talk about that from a political point of view, but it succeeded in helping me understand that there are places and things you don't want to go and things you don't want to do.
10:58 Speaker 01 Yes.
10:59 Speaker 02 And I don't know if my father had access to that information. And so he got busted with an ounce of marijuana at seventeen. They told him to go to juvie. He said, screw that, I'm out. And he split to New Mexico, never to return.
11:10 Dax Shepard? OK, so he was absconding from justice.
11:13 Speaker 02 That's right.
11:13 Dax Shepard? When you're five, there's an incident?
11:16 Speaker 02 Yes, so briefly with my mother. My mother's story is a mystery. I don't know why she ended up as she did. The one story I have came from my sister was that they used to have a jar of pills at school. Keep in mind, this is the sixties. I don't mean free love by that. I mean a sense of ignorance about how powerful pharmaceutical drugs are. They'd just have a jar and they would go take them out of the jar. Fuck that, right? That's crazy. So to the degree that that story is true, you can point at something. But largely speaking, I don't know why my mother ended up with the problems that she had. By the time I'm five, my father already tried to kill himself. He gets really, really high. And he threatens to set the place on fire, the apartment on fire.
11:53 Dax Shepard? Breaks a bottle, is bleeding out. Cops have to come, the ambulance comes.
11:57 Speaker 01 Do you remember it?
11:58 Speaker 02 I don't remember it well, but I have vague memories of it.
12:00 Speaker 01 And you have an older sister?
12:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have an older sister.
12:02 Speaker 01 So she probably remembers more.
12:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. So what happened there is the whole thing fell apart because my father is like, I'm gonna burn the place down. My mother is like, we're out. And so that resulted in a divorce. So I ended up living alone with my mother, near my grandparents for that year. And I never really lived with my father again, although he would come in and out of my life here and there.
12:21 Dax Shepard? Right. Mom decides she's gonna start the nursing program up in Santa Fe. And then you guys up and moved to Santa Fe. And you're in extreme poverty at this point.
12:29 Speaker 02 The way I would say it is, we weren't like Albania in the sixties poor. But for the United States, we were poor on a level that many people have a hard time relating to.
12:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:39 Speaker 02 Where like, there's a constant gnawing corrosive worry about making ends meet, about eating.
12:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, all day consumed by this anxiety.
12:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right.
12:50 Dax Shepard? And then your buddy Shiloh, who you meet, they don't have water at home.
12:52 Speaker 02 Right, so I meet my buddy Shiloh, who is like immediately my best friend. In the book, very briefly, I talk about my experiences in. At some length, because it was this period of just pure, perfect childhood. I had one year of childhood, right? And that was this year when I'm in second grade and I have this buddy Shiloh. He's my best friend. You can look at like all the things that happened to me. You know, Dave, what are the interventions? It's a complicated question, but surely making a best friend when I'm at such a young and shapable age was one of the major things in my life to happen to me. So, you know, we're out there just cutting up and just being crazy.
13:25 Dax Shepard? Well, what I would argue, because I'm a big proponent of best friendship. Because I think when you have that buddy and things are tough, the way that you can elicit joy and ride joy and how much that's a needed medicine. It's really quintessential to. And you think he really learned to ring joy out of things in a very specific way.
13:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, I agree with that.
13:48 Dax Shepard? And your guys' was video games, yeah?
13:50 Speaker 02 We were obsessed with video games. So my age here is really relevant. I'm born in seventy five. So I'm five years old when Pac-Man is coming out.
14:00 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
14:00 Speaker 02 Which means I'm seven years old, roughly speaking, when Ms. Pac-Man is coming out. Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, all these absolute gem video games. We were poor, we couldn't afford them, but you know, we'd scrounge up quarters and try to get quarters, just do crazy things. But we were obsessed with video games. And as I talk about in the book, video games became this escape from all the things that were happening in my life. You know, and I could just always just space out and go try to drum up a quarter to go play a video game.
14:26 Dax Shepard? Yes.
14:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:27 Dax Shepard? Have you thought about what the appeal is? I know, I'm sure you have a lot of connection between the technical aspect, which you became enthralled with your whole life. But just the notion that in this little box, the rules were the same all the time.
14:40 Speaker 02 Yes.
14:41 Dax Shepard? They were immovable. I know the rules and then if I'm clever enough, I can outsmart this is very satisfying in a world of a lot of variables.
14:48 Speaker 02 I totally agree with that. When you're seven, you're not thinking that, right?
14:50 Dax Shepard? Right.
14:50 Speaker 02 But it is still a thing. And so just to list it off there quickly, deep concentration, nothing else exists. You're right here for as long as you can make that quarter last. The fun of it, the challenge, ecstasy through sensory overload. You know, I'm a researcher, right? Like, I actually think, when did I start researching? How to play video games better? How to make a quarter? Last longer. That whole spectrum is how I think about it now. When I was doing those things as a kid.
15:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
15:14 Speaker 01 Was your mom still struggling during this whole time with drugs?
15:17 Speaker 02 Yes, because of divorce. She went to try to get a nursing degree and really pull herself together. She really gave it a shot. And you know, the whole thing was sort of financed at a very low level by my grandparents. She went there and it started off all right. It didn't really go very well. You know, honestly, she met Shiloh's mother and they would just go get high together. It just kind of fell apart.
15:35 Dax Shepard? You move back to Albuquerque, though, at seven or?
15:38 Speaker 02 Just before third grade. So we moved back to Albuquerque. We moved to a neighborhood that is formerly on the map called La Mesa. In the colloquial like rebranding, it's the international district. And everybody in Albuquerque calls it the war zone.
15:53 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
15:54 Speaker 02 We're talking about a very, very bad neighborhood. I don't even have the words.
15:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:58 Speaker 02 It's dangerous. People are murdered there. In fairness to Albuquerque, it's one of those large, spread out towns where it just depends on where you live.
16:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's also got wonderful, incredible areas.
16:06 Speaker 02 I'm not in one of those wonderful, incredible areas. And so it felt unsafe and it was unsafe. And during that time, my mother's mental health was really falling apart. Turns out she was really suffering from severe depression. It's so bad, she doesn't even enroll us for school. So we get these teachers coming, you know, you gotta enroll your kids in school. And so we ended up going to school and that fall, we had somebody come take care of us. I think her name was Karen. Why isn't my mother here? She's taking a break.
16:32 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
16:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, so what happened was I was not used to Karen's care, which was frankly excellent.
16:39 Dax Shepard? And like, I didn't know how to handle that.
16:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:43 Speaker 02 I didn't know how to handle it. So I'm getting into trouble. For me, neglect is the thing here. I legitimately believe both my parents loved me and my sister. These people are serious drug users and that comes with major spectrum of problems. I decide to run away after getting in trouble. I had no plans of actually running away. I was just trying to piss this woman off.
17:02 Speaker 01 Right.
17:02 Speaker 02 But she freaks out and she calls my grandparents. And the next thing you know, both my sister and I, Esther, are in a car, our clothing in a trash bag, going to the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home.
17:13 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
17:14 Dax Shepard? Now, so I had a question here. What is your judgment of your grandparents? When I read that they were called and their solution, or their combined thought was, well, let's get them in this home. And they lived in Albuquerque.
17:27 Speaker 01 Instead of taking you guys in.
17:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know. It's hard not to look at their behavior as, at the very least negligent.
17:34 Speaker 01 Abandonment.
17:35 Speaker 02 Abandonment, and if there are villains in that book, it's hard not to point that out.
17:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and then also maybe it explains a bit of why mom had problems. If that's the vibe that existed at that point.
17:47 Speaker 02 That's right. The only thing I could say is, when you retirees, I've shared this book now with the early readers, right? And like, to a person, any woman of grandmotherly age has said, fuck that, I would have taken you.
17:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's hard to swallow.
18:02 Speaker 02 So there's that.
18:02 Dax Shepard? That is my knee jerk. And I can't imagine my children would have children and I would say, yes, and I'm off to a home. Also, I have means. Also, I've not been dealing with a troubled child for 11 years.
18:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:14 Dax Shepard? Which they probably were. So I don't know their fatigue and their.
18:18 Speaker 01 Capacity.
18:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, how overwhelmed they felt with just the first kid. And now this kid has got two other kids.
18:25 Speaker 02 It's hard to know where their mind state was at.
18:27 Speaker 01 So was Karen a foster?
18:29 Speaker 02 Karen was just a friend, a friend of my mother who came to visit.
18:32 Dax Shepard? And did the best she could. But I think David is honest, admirably so. You were also a shithead. You never had rules or anything. You were a feral kid.
18:40 Speaker 02 I was feral.
18:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:42 Speaker 02 Two things can be true. I felt like I was good at heart, and yet, behaviorally speaking, a total piece of shit.
18:48 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, your context, how could you not be?
18:51 Speaker 02 One of the things I resonated in the conversation with Claudia Rau was these kids, I include myself here, right? Maybe not to the same degree as some of the people she was talking about. They're coming with major, major problems.
19:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're not the easy kids to deal with.
19:05 Speaker 02 No, but to say it that way isn't giving it the truth. When people sign up to do foster care, they're not signing up to like, have their daily lives induced with constant, nonstop stress for 10 years. It's just very hard. And so when I try to forgive my grandparents, it's in that light.
19:22 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
19:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:23 Speaker 01 But it's a huge undertaking.
19:25 Dax Shepard? Now, I don't know if you related at all to this, but I also think at a very young age, as social primates, we are justice machines. We look around and why did they get that and I didn't get this? That is how the whole system functions. You're monitoring who's getting what. And my status entitles me to this. And so I think even when you're young and you're looking around, like, some kids have all this shit. And I don't. I think you feel deputized to get what's yours.
19:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I was not blessed with that thing. And I should say I was not cursed with that thing.
19:58 Dax Shepard? Cursed, yeah, yeah.
19:59 Speaker 02 Because I just had my head down. I was just too young and dumb, or too into the video games, or whatever it is that little boys of eight years old are. My sister, especially as we got a little bit older into middle school, we were going to a public middle school, and she would look at these girls, and way before the word "privilege" became this word, she was like, "These girls are privileged."
20:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:18 Speaker 02 "They have these things. I want to be a pretty girl. I want to have these things."
20:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:23 Speaker 02 And so for her, this constant comparison, this justice machine thing, I think was a huge, huge problem.
20:30 Speaker 01 I mean, middle school is hard enough.
20:33 Dax Shepard? If you've got all the shit.
20:34 Speaker 01 If you have everything, like, ugh.
20:36 Dax Shepard? So, yeah, you go to this Christian home, you make an incredible analogy. Try to remember the feeling of being lost at the mall as a kid.
20:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:45 Dax Shepard? And if that went on for an hour, how absolutely dysregulating and uncomfortable that was. Now imagine that goes on for two days.
20:53 Speaker 02 That's right.
20:53 Dax Shepard? And imagine that goes on for a week, in two weeks, in two years. And you were there for five years?
21:00 Speaker 02 I was there for five years.
21:01 Dax Shepard? Oh, man. David, I am so sorry.
21:03 Speaker 01 Me too.
21:04 Dax Shepard? That's fucking rough to feel.
21:06 Speaker 01 Lost, I mean, that's a great word for it.
21:08 Dax Shepard? Completely lonely and scared, and who's coming?
21:12 Speaker 02 How do you even write about neglect? Because it's all the things that aren't happening. It's all the things that didn't happen, you know, you just fill ten pages with, "And then I stared at the wall. And then I stared at the wall again."
21:21 Speaker 01 Right.
21:22 Speaker 02 So what happens is you deal, right? And part of that is you work within the little social system that you have there, which is you make friends if you can, figure out what the house parents are all about, right? Part of it is your emotions begin to change in ways that even an adult, I don't think, would fully understand what was happening to them. The other thing that's hard to relate to is you're a child. So you don't know what's happening.
21:47 Dax Shepard? You have zero say in any of this. You can't construct a plan that's gonna get you out of this.
21:51 Speaker 02 No, but we would, though. I ended up meeting a kid named Omar, a few years older than me, Mexican-American.
21:56 Dax Shepard? He was Miguel at one point?
21:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I got his permission.
21:59 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
22:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Omar is from downtown Albuquerque, also a very bad neighborhood. As an adult, he would say, you know, I was just a scared 12 year old and I was doing the things that I would needed to do to survive. But the perception that I had of him was this like fucking gangster who would literally kick the shit out of me and happened many times. But through all of that, we became friends. Speaking of being powerless or how do you think you can get out of it? We would think about this. At this point, he's probably 13, I'm 10. I really planned my escape at 10 years old. We would just sit down, well, you know, Dave, smart kid, maybe you could go to college. I'm like, college? Oh, you know, what's college? You can get money for college. The funny thing about the ACCH or volunteerism in general is people do it for a short amount of time. So for about a month, we had this karate instructor come and teach us a few moves of karate.
22:45 Speaker 02 He went to college on the GI Bill.
22:47 Dax Shepard? That karate instructor had.
22:48 Speaker 02 Karate instructor had, yeah. You can get scholarships is the upshot. And so from that moment on, the way I describe it is it's like in Harry Potter, the Patronus spell. I had like a shield. Yeah. I did a future guide, a sense of self pride, dare I say self love about this thing, my intelligence. From that moment on, I was gonna make it no matter what, come hell, come high water. You know, this idea of like having a future or of thinking about what the future could mean for you, I think is a big differentiation in some of the kids. This came up in that other interview.
23:23 Dax Shepard? The frontal lobe stuff.
23:24 Speaker 02 And I was like, yes, this is exactly right.
23:26 Dax Shepard? Like some inability to model the future seems to be the outcome. Why would you? It gets atrophied. Why model out the future? Nothing's gonna happen. I'm gonna sit in this fucking Christian home for the next seven years. I'm not planning whether I start racing BMX or I try to do this or that.
23:40 Speaker 02 Just a quick caveat about the ACCH and also it goes the same way for Milton Hershey School, which I was in in high school. These institutions, if you read my story, they don't come off particularly well. But these are basically practicing Christians doing very, very difficult work. I would've been on the street otherwise.
23:57 Dax Shepard? Self-funded involuntarily.
23:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's just a little bit of nuance there.
24:01 Dax Shepard? What you need is a sense of permanence with a caregiver. There's one dude first six Sixteen kids and one woman for sixteen kids and three houses of sixteen kids.
24:11 Speaker 02 And the house parents turn over. We thought, I don't know if it's true, but we had the idea that we would have loved to be in foster care. That we thought that was a better outcome than the situation that we were in. So sixteen kids, very depending, but a lot. And the house parents come and go because the job is impossible. It's too much. It's too hard.
24:31 Speaker 01 It's just built for failure.
24:33 Speaker 02 It's just built for failure. So when I was there, maybe seven or eight different sets of house parents in five years. And so this sense of impermanence and the ACH, I don't know what it's like now, but in the eighties, it was not meant to be a permanent living facility. It was meant to be a transitory care.
24:46 Dax Shepard? Well, mom got done resting.
24:47 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah, exactly. But for some of us, we were there longer than the admin staff was there. Nobody knows what your situation is, right? Like, literally, nobody knows that in the second grade, you freaked out in the middle of the night because you thought some person was going to come kill you. And then in the third grade, you were in a fight. Nobody knows any of this.
25:08 Dax Shepard? And I think deeper than no one knows, no one cares.
25:10 Speaker 01 That's the fear.
25:11 Dax Shepard? That's the heartbreaking part.
25:12 Speaker 02 The people working there care.
25:14 Dax Shepard? But I'm saying when they leave and you're there and no one present knows anything about your history, I think the conclusion you make as a kid is like, yeah, no one cares at all about me.
25:24 Speaker 01 And how is your sister faring?
25:26 Speaker 02 She's passed away.
25:27 Speaker 01 Oh, she has?
25:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm sorry, you're asking the past tense, but so she's since passed away. No, she's doing terribly at the time. One of the major outcomes of the kind of neglect that she and I suffered from is emotional dysregulation. For me, that became anger. For her, ice or hot. She loves you or she hates you. It's very hard for her to regulate her emotions in and around other people.
25:49 Dax Shepard? Kind of like borderline personality.
25:50 Speaker 02 Kind of like borderline personality type.
25:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, terrified, everyone's going to leave her, overly attracted to people immediately.
25:56 Speaker 02 That's right, it's all of that. I'm just not making the diagnosis.
25:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, leave that to me.
26:03 Dax Shepard? You were asked to tutor.
26:04 Speaker 02 I was, yeah.
26:05 Dax Shepard? And it's insane what that can do to your life trajectory.
26:08 Speaker 02 So basically through school, in a number of different ways, I was invited to the gifted and talented program. I was asked to be a tutor here and there. I became known as the smart kid. And so I sort of have this simplistic psychology that all these kids in these circumstances have their survival strategy. Omar was the tough kid. My sister Esther was like the pretty girl and so on and so forth. And you know, what ends up happening is you take those behaviors into adulthood and some are more or less adaptive than others.
26:35 Dax Shepard? Yes. You must have looked forward to going to school.
26:39 Speaker 02 Oh, my God, yes.
26:39 Dax Shepard? Right? Like, that's the sanctuary.
26:41 Speaker 02 I was good at it. I actually enjoy knowledge. It did not come hard to me. I got a kick out of it. I got attention.
26:47 Dax Shepard? You had self-esteem.
26:48 Speaker 02 Positive self-esteem. And so, you know, I was one of these loud mouths who never shut up. So I'm sure my teachers really couldn't stand me. But I was personally getting a lot out of it.
26:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, again, we should add, you had behavioral issues.
26:58 Speaker 02 I had major behavioral issues.
26:59 Dax Shepard? How'd you get on with other boys?
27:01 Speaker 02 Well, the way that usually worked was we'd have a fight. I would lose.
27:07 Speaker 02 And then we'd either be friends or we wouldn't be friends. I was not a fight in my life that I couldn't lose.
27:17 Dax Shepard? And you were tall, so I got to imagine like, were you always tall?
27:20 Speaker 02 No.
27:20 Dax Shepard? Oh, you weren't.
27:21 Speaker 02 One of the great curses of my life, I didn't start growing until I was 17.
27:25 Dax Shepard? Oh.
27:25 Speaker 02 17.
27:26 Dax Shepard? Wow.
27:27 Speaker 02 The math teacher in high school, he's the basketball coach, and I'm a senior in high school. It's like, if I had known you were going to be this tall, I would have coached you in ninth grade. I'm like, yeah, it's too late. Come on.
27:39 Dax Shepard? Okay, so around this time to, well, let's say 7th grade, your mom dies.
27:43 Speaker 02 That's right.
27:44 Dax Shepard? You've gotten a got even now yet another round of some sense of permanent loneliness on your plate.
27:50 Speaker 02 When my mother passes away, it's a huge catastrophe for me. And what's interesting about that is like, if you would have asked me at that time, I'm like, I don't give a shit about my mother. She's not my life. She's been in my life for five years. She would take us out on weekends here and there. There is a sense of connection there. It's a very thin tether, but it's a tether. And that has a couple of knock on effects. Number one is turns out I really loved my mother. And so she dies. Like, where's my emotional space at this point? I have no way of relating to this. So I basically start having minor panic attacks. I just don't even know what's going on. I have no one to talk to. Therapy would have been completely culturally untenable at the ACH in the 80s. Not that they could have afforded it in the first place. I am just completely out of control.
28:33 Dax Shepard? You're now on an island by yourself.
28:34 Speaker 02 My sister and I didn't really get along. That possibility was not really there. But the only person I was talking to, though not about my mother, was Omar, my buddy and my roommate. So she passes away and it's a good thing in some sense. This is the tether. I have this phrase, it's not my phrase, but I use it, orphaned by the living. In any functional sense, my sister and I and many of the kids in the ACH were orphans, except that our parents were alive.
28:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:58 Speaker 02 But functionally, they were unable to take care of us or unwilling to take care of us, be it mental illness, drug addiction, incarceration, you name it, right? So she passes away. All of a sudden, my aunts and uncles feel like they can get involved. These are my father's brothers and sisters.
29:14 Dax Shepard? Who didn't want to intervene with mom, who express goal was to have them. But now she's out of the picture.
29:21 Speaker 02 In hindsight, I can't help but wonder, again, I'm sort of casting shade on my grandparents. If the situation was reversed, if we were not kept around on the hopes of making my mother better. But one way or the other, there was a symbiosis there that's severed. And so my aunt and uncle Elliot and Moira, they had come out a couple of years earlier. Seventh grade is when my mother dies. I'm backtracking to say fourth, fifth grade. They come to check us out. They're like, ah.
29:45 Speaker 01 This isn't good.
29:46 Speaker 02 This ain't great. An adult could easily observe our sort of intellectual and emotional stagnation. They start lobbying then over the summers for my sister and I to come out to the East Coast, basically centered in and around New York City, where all of my father's siblings live. So we start doing that in the summer times. This happens a couple of times before then my mother passes away. So because of this, some of my aunts and uncles, I guess all of them have, I've gotten to know. And I pretty well. So my mother passes away and my uncle James, he was one of the older kids who was tapped to raise his siblings. He took responsibility seriously as an adult. He joined the Navy. He's like, I'm doing this.
30:25 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
30:25 Dax Shepard? And you're already 12.
30:27 Speaker 02 And on top of that, he's a newlywed.
30:28 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. Okay.
30:29 Dax Shepard? Tell his brand new wife, hey, so my brother.
30:33 Speaker 01 I know, but it's also hard because I'm also like, why didn't they do that sooner?
30:36 Dax Shepard? But the mom was
30:37 Speaker 01 I know.
30:38 Dax Shepard? In theory wanting her children.
30:39 Speaker 01 When you saw your mom on the weekends, was there all these promises of like, I'm gonna get you guys out of here soon?
30:47 Speaker 02 I think that stopped. My mother was very ill and I think she knew it. She was in and out of a psych ward. I came to know as an adult that she was basically under constant suicidal ideation.
30:56 Dax Shepard? She's probably medicated the fucking hill.
30:58 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. That's ultimately what she died from is a mix up of methadone and whatever she was on.
31:06 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
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31:26 Speaker 01 I know you will.
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34:17 Dax Shepard? Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time, but even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts, the stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?
34:55 Speaker 01 They never are.
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35:07 Dax Shepard? When I hear your story, my first thought without knowing more about Esther is, I can't believe they just took you.
35:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:15 Dax Shepard? That seems cruel.
35:16 Speaker 02 I'll go into that.
35:17 Dax Shepard? But now then I'm hearing a little bit more about Esther, maybe that was just more than they thought they could handle.
35:22 Speaker 02 I'm 12. I've got, I would say, moderate behavioral problems. My sister, on the surface, looks fine. On a closer examination, is beginning to have major behavioral problems in and around her relationships with other people. She regularly threatened suicide. She's one of those people who would just go, I will ruin my life to ruin yours.
35:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
35:43 Speaker 02 To hurt you. She's 14. So Sophie's Choice type of thing. Who can we help here? And so my aunt and uncle chose to take me in. I still bear guilt over that.
35:52 Dax Shepard? I was gonna say, you didn't get along with her great, but did you still have guilt?
35:56 Speaker 02 Totally.
35:57 Dax Shepard? But they had a solution for her. They sent her to a boarding school.
35:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there's a number of aunts and uncles flying around here. Just view them sort of collectively as finding a solution for the two of us.
36:06 Dax Shepard? You can imagine them all having family dinner and they got together to discuss this.
36:09 Speaker 02 Can you imagine that? So she ends up at a boarding school called the Darrow School, which is actually a really nice school. It's a private school. It was funded by Elliot and Moira, I believe. It's just a boarding school. It has nothing to do with financial instability, or kids at risk, or however you want to say it. So I go to live with my aunt and uncle. It's an immediate disaster.
36:28 Dax Shepard? What kind of things were you doing that made it hard for them?
36:31 Speaker 02 I was obsessed with no longer being poor. We got toys from like going to the retirement home and we'd get handouts from the retirees. It was Poor. And so I'm in Virginia. I'm like, there's a pool here. There's a fitness center over there. There's a community garden. So I kind of won't shut up about it. And so I think that just kind of irritated them. They're short to anger. My uncle has never raised children before.
36:58 Dax Shepard? Right, right.
36:59 Speaker 02 So it didn't quite work out. The other strange thing that happened was he was a go getter. He went to school, PTA meetings, like, OK, David should have 20 minutes of homework every night. Except I didn't need it. I do my homework in school. So all of a sudden, there's a major lie. I'm lying to them about this thing.
37:15 Speaker 01 Oh, God.
37:15 Speaker 02 So he settles that I should sit at the table for an hour a night to do my homework. It's just one anecdote, except it happened all year long. So it was this constant source of tension between us.
37:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:25 Dax Shepard? Well, I can say for me, not having a dad around and then intermittently having step dads, I just fucking hated men. I hated mal authority. I was so stubborn and I would die over these power struggles. I just hated outside mal authority. Were you having any issues now with having an authoritarian father figure?
37:45 Speaker 02 I think of it more as me needing more from my aunt. She was not my blood, wasn't her family. You know, my mother has just passed away.
37:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
37:54 Speaker 02 And she agreed to do it, but did she really sign up for that? I think that's where a lot of the tension that I felt came from.
37:59 Dax Shepard? That makes sense. Yeah, you were probably expecting something that that wasn't coming.
38:03 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
38:04 Speaker 01 Also, you would just come from a situation where you had way too much independence.
38:09 Speaker 02 It's funny because I didn't know how to live alone. I was always around other kids.
38:13 Speaker 01 Oh, that's interesting.
38:14 Speaker 02 So all of a sudden, I'm I'm living alone by myself. I have a bedroom. I mean, paper sounds great, but like I'm used to bunking with three other boys.
38:21 Dax Shepard? Lonely as fucking there.
38:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally.
38:23 Speaker 01 It's the opposite of everything you've.
38:24 Speaker 02 It's the opposite of everything I've ever known. So it was really difficult.
38:27 Dax Shepard? They send you to the Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
38:33 Speaker 02 That's right.
38:33 Dax Shepard? I like the history of this. This is lovely.
38:36 Speaker 02 So this is the. In some sense, the Hogwarts you're looking for.
38:40 Speaker 01 Oh, it is?
38:41 Speaker 02 For the listeners, Dax made a point like, hey, maybe all these foster kids should have a place like Hogwarts that they can go and be nurtured.
38:48 Speaker 01 So great.
38:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there's almost a lore to this at this point. Milton Hershey, the chocolatier, became very successful, stupendously wealthy, and discovered that he and his wife couldn't have children. So they start an orphanage, I believe it's 1906, called the Hershey Industrial School. By 1909, he's left effectively all his money to this school, which back then, I believe, was $60 million, which today is about $17 billion.
39:13 Speaker 01 Wow.
39:13 Dax Shepard? And he's that currently has a $15 billion endowment.
39:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, exactly. Frankly, they're so wealthy, they don't know what to do with the money.
39:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They still want me to get in there and start Hogwarts-ing up the place.
39:23 Speaker 02 Exactly.
39:23 Speaker 01 I love that.
39:25 Speaker 02 Give me my wand. So that's the backstory there, and it just grew from that through the 60s. Basically, black kids were let in and girls.
39:33 Dax Shepard? There's like about 2,000 kids that are there?
39:35 Speaker 02 That's right, yeah. No, there's 2,000 kids there. When I was there, it was more like 1,000. But yeah, it's a big place. It dominates the town of Hershey. There's basically the chocolate factory and Milton Hershey School.
39:43 Speaker 01 Wow.
39:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah. This is all very Willy Wonka.
39:46 Speaker 01 I know, it is.
39:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally.
39:47 Dax Shepard? It's crazy how fucking rich the candy folks were, like the Mars family, the M&M's, and the Wrigley's, and they had these mansions in Pasadena. Like, there was so much money in candy at the beginning of the 1900s.
39:58 Speaker 02 And Milton Hershey left his money to kids.
40:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's really sweet, but it wasn't a sweet place. Alas.
40:05 Speaker 02 No, so again, I want to be nuanced here. It's a huge school. There are lots of experiences. It's almost like when you work at a company, your experience is almost purely dictated by your manager. At a place like Milton Hershey School, your experience is almost purely dictated by your house parents. And my house father was a true piece of work. He was a control freak. You know, now that I'm an adult, I look at it like, you know, what happened in his life as a child that made him the way he was.
40:32 Dax Shepard? Why did he want to control a bunch of young men?
40:34 Speaker 02 That's right. He was universally despised by the boys. So because he was so difficult, there was this weird sort of spiral where all the worst kids in school, keep in mind, this is aggregating over all of the northeast corridor. All the basically fucked up families, right?
40:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:51 Speaker 02 So you take all the worst kids and you put them into one student home because you know the house father can handle it.
40:57 Dax Shepard? He's a warden.
40:58 Speaker 02 Yes, he's a true piece of work.
41:00 Speaker 01 How old are you at this point?
41:01 Speaker 02 I'm there from early in my freshman year until I graduate high school. Yeah, so it was a very bad place. I was beaten badly. I was beaten multiple times by many boys, you know, like full on gang beating type of stuff, without the racial connotations there, just multiple boys kicking the shit out of me.
41:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
41:18 Speaker 02 So it was not a great place. I checked out.
41:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you start really kind of disassociating now.
41:23 Speaker 02 Disassociation is a big word. I would say I was just medicating. So keep in mind, I had an idea that I was going to college. I found the classes at Milton Hershey School to be quite easy. I didn't work at them and I only got all As, so I'm just waiting it out. In all honesty, I feel like the best outcome would have been for me in a perfect world, just to send me up to college at 16.
41:43 Speaker 01 Right.
41:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
41:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:46 Dax Shepard? Get you away from all those boys.
41:47 Speaker 02 That's right. God, they can be so rough.
41:49 Speaker 01 So this controlling man wasn't good at his job either then, if you're getting beat up all the time?
41:54 Speaker 02 Well, so, I mean, he basically sicced these boys on me once.
41:56 Speaker 01 Oh!
41:57 Speaker 02 At Albuquerque Christian Children's Home, there were four kids per room. At MHS, there were two kids per room, and the standard rule was you could not enter anyone's room ever. My house father felt like that was too strict, so he allowed his own ad hoc room privilege, where if you could, on their permission, one kid go in. Three all in, right? So one day after church, I'm like farting around and like I'm leaning against the door jams and my tie is going into the room and he busts, that's right, he walked his beat about once every hour. So he catches me leaning into the room. A technical sense, I was certainly violating his rule. In a spiritual sense, I was definitely obeying the spirit of this rule.
42:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
42:34 Speaker 02 And so through what he considered to be a little bit of backtalk, he cancels the room privilege for everybody. It was a sort of group punishment for one person's actions.
42:44 Dax Shepard? Setting up a code red, basically.
42:45 Speaker 02 Exactly. And so then, I'll never forget it. We had these student home meetings, truly boring. He's like, you know, you guys should teach him a lesson. So that night I woke up to half the student home kicking the ever living shit out of me.
42:56 Speaker 01 Oh my God.
42:56 Speaker 02 And that's what that place was like for me, especially the first two years. It got easier in the second two years.
43:00 Dax Shepard? Okay, I watched a lot of kids get bullied into oblivion. Now, there seems to be some predictable outcomes. A lot of kids try to make themselves invisible. And then another branch of kids weirdly become agitators.
43:13 Speaker 02 Yes, that was me.
43:14 Dax Shepard? I had a hunch.
43:15 Speaker 02 So my roommate, Bob, you know, he was this really heavy kid. He had no chance of competing in the social hierarchy. He just didn't do it. In hindsight, I'm looking at that. I'm like, that is really noble. That is one way to go, but it wasn't in my personality. I was raised around kids my whole life. So I became a suck up to exactly these fuckers who had kicked the shit out of me. And that's who I was in high school, just not even close to the kid I was beforehand. The last year or two definitely got a little easier, but it was really, really tough spot.
43:45 Dax Shepard? You're doing a lot of dust off.
43:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:47 Dax Shepard? And for people who haven't done dust off, this is where I'm going to extend great compassion to you. It's a terrible high.
43:51 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:52 Dax Shepard? You have to have a really shitty resting state of consciousness for that to be an improvement.
43:57 Speaker 02 The air duster, yes. My memory is not fabulous and I look back at some of those experiences.
44:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you blast it and then all of a sudden you get a wall.
44:05 Speaker 01 Blast what? Sorry, I know nothing about.
44:06 Dax Shepard? Dust off, you know, when you clean like a keyboard.
44:08 Speaker 01 Oh, like the aerosol.
44:11 Speaker 02 Turns out now they're hip to it. So they add a bitterant so you can't do it. But in the nineties, now this is 91, 92, something like this, you could just.
44:18 Speaker 01 Inhale it.
44:19 Dax Shepard? And it's a little bit like a nitrous eye, but not nearly as nice. And you're just, all of a sudden you're getting into like the wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. You've left your current time and space, which is what the relief is.
44:29 Speaker 02 That's right.
44:30 Dax Shepard? But then the headache that ensues after a dust off bench is excruciating. Cost benefit on dust off is terrible.
44:37 Speaker 02 Just terrible. I'll tell you why I stopped doing it. I did so much of it, I passed out and I fell off my bed. I laugh now because I survived. So this is a process that makes the can cooler.
44:48 Dax Shepard? Or like it gets ice on the outside.
44:50 Speaker 02 It's spraying on my leg and I freeze my leg solid, basically like frozen chicken.
44:55 Speaker 01 Oh, God.
44:56 Dax Shepard? Flash freeze it.
44:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, and like, okay, I'm out.
44:58 Dax Shepard? End of my dust off career. Okay, so again, you're still hell bent on this college fantasy, which is great. And you are specifically hell bent on MIT.
45:09 Speaker 02 I had read all these magazines, basically Caltech, Stanford and MIT end up as like almost characters in these stories about these scientists who do all these amazing things. I viewed programming and coding and physics and chemistry and biology.
45:24 Speaker 02 And math as basically magic. This was a form of power through some grace of God that I was given the ability to comprehend.
45:33 Dax Shepard? It's the Prometheus.
45:34 Speaker 02 And I'm going for it, right? So from a very early age, I hear about this place called MIT. And I'm like, I'm going to MIT. Newsflash, I did not get into MIT.
45:42 Speaker 01 Oh, MIT, dumb for them.
45:45 Dax Shepard? You have your first experience and there's waves of realizing this. There's a big gap between intelligence and preparation.
45:51 Speaker 02 The first thing I noticed is when I'm applying, I'm in the academic system now. I know how this stuff works. I just went and took my SAT. I had no idea that people prepared for an SAT. No one had ever told me this.
46:03 Dax Shepard? Monica had like four or five workshops.
46:06 Speaker 01 I did go to a class, a Kaplan class.
46:10 Speaker 02 And you should. Or the application, I just like ballpoint pen right there, just started writing about like swimming.
46:16 Dax Shepard? No outline, no.
46:17 Speaker 02 Nothing, no outline, no nothing.
46:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, no one's telling you.
46:20 Speaker 02 I had no idea. It was completely lost on me that my own experiences in my childhood might reflect well on me if I explain them in the right.
46:28 Dax Shepard? You've been in a fucking group home for the last nine years.
46:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:31 Dax Shepard? That could help, but you're gonna focus on your swimming.
46:33 Speaker 02 That's right.
46:34 Speaker 01 Did you do well on the SATs?
46:36 Speaker 02 Did okay.
46:36 Dax Shepard? Thirteen, twenty.
46:37 Speaker 02 Thirteen, ten, yeah, good.
46:38 Speaker 01 Thirteen, ten, going in blind is really good.
46:41 Dax Shepard? Six, ten in English.
46:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
46:42 Speaker 01 Wow.
46:43 Speaker 02 Nice.
46:44 Dax Shepard? But people at MIT have fifteen hundred.
46:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, it's not even in the ballpark.
46:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're not getting it.
46:48 Speaker 02 I'm not getting into ten. So I was accepted to Carnegie Mellon, which it turns out to be a fabulous school. I worked probably a little too hard, but it was this moment for me of just absolute freedom, self-realization. I had a really hard time my first semester.
47:03 Dax Shepard? Let's first, though, talk about the euphoria. I think it's really rad. You get put in a dorm, you have a cafeteria to eat at, you're allowed to sit on the roof of your dorm.
47:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:12 Dax Shepard? And you just sit up there and you get to gaze upon this campus that you're now a part of and you're out of prison.
47:18 Speaker 02 Yes.
47:19 Dax Shepard? That is so profound. I can't even imagine the elation you felt.
47:23 Speaker 02 My first buddy, Sport, I think he walked by me. He's a lifelong friend. I met him the first day of college and I'm like sitting, I'm cackling. Like, I'm like, oh my god. I don't know how to explain it, like pee after a five hour car ride, right? Just like this huge sense of relief.
47:41 Dax Shepard? You hadn't even let yourself fantasize that you could now have it as good as you currently have it. That's quite a unique feeling.
47:47 Speaker 02 That's a unique feeling and it was amazing. I was going to make the best of that circumstance, right?
47:53 Speaker 01 And you had a scholarship, I assume?
47:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, full ride.
47:55 Dax Shepard? For swimming?
47:58 Speaker 02 I was the worst swimmer in high school. I couldn't stand it. I was terrible at it. My uncle takes me to Penn State just to look around. It's a prospective school and we sit down with a financial aid advisor who clearly had some very broad authority. So this guy starts asking me about my life and he's kind of dumpster diving through my childhood, but I tell him all this stuff. You get independent status. Now, I'm no longer associated with my family from the perspective of the government. So I'm going to get the maximal amount of financial aid from the government. I'm going to get the maximal financial aid from Carnegie Mellon. And when I say full ride, that's what I mean.
48:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you go there with the original intention of doing physics, but quickly you get into computer science.
48:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
48:39 Dax Shepard? You've timed this kind of nicely.
48:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. Tell me if you can relate to this. We're the same age. I feel like my whole life has been riding on the crest of a technological wave. I'm five years old when personal computers come out. Before personal computers, working with a computer was a colossal pain in the ass.
48:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
48:55 Speaker 02 Right? Then the video games come out and then all of a sudden you can tinker with basic programs. And then there's Pascal and then I get to college and there's the internet.
49:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, you weren't ever playing catch up.
49:06 Speaker 02 No.
49:07 Dax Shepard? You were learning at the same time everyone else was.
49:09 Speaker 02 It was always just happening.
49:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's a huge advantage. I imagine now if you're 17 and you imagine entering this thing and you've now got 40 years to catch up on.
49:18 Speaker 02 Well, now with AI, maybe not.
49:20 Dax Shepard? Maybe not, yeah. Up until 18 months ago, it was incumbent upon you to catch up and that must have felt a little overwhelming.
49:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:27 Dax Shepard? You're already right at the precipice. So a new thing comes out and you're interested in that and you already kind of understand the preceding thing. And so you're like really well positioned for this.
49:35 Speaker 02 So I'm taking my classes really seriously. Now, computer science classes, just mind bending, just awesome. Now, what starts to happen is That the negative side of my childhood survival strategy starts to show itself. Basically, when I'm 10 years old, to survive these truly desperate circumstances, I'm telling myself I'm a fucking genius. So there's a fine line between self-love and narcissism, right? And so I get to Carnegie Mellon and I'm like, wait a minute. There's a lot of very smart kids. And I mean, like even after the first semester where I sort of acculturate and begin to figure out how to get things done. I'm just like, okay, I was big fish, small pond, that whole thing. And now I'm in the big pond. So I begin to go into self-prove mode.
50:19 Speaker 02 I'm certainly not going to fail my classes. I have to convince like no matter what group I'm in, I'm the smartest and all this just weird like pathological stuff.
50:26 Dax Shepard? Hard to be around maybe a little bit.
50:27 Speaker 02 I'd like to think I wasn't too hard to be around, but I was definitely intense.
50:30 Dax Shepard? Okay.
50:30 Speaker 02 The thing about living in group homes, you learn how to be around people.
50:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, adapt.
50:35 Speaker 02 Like right now, what's going on between the three of us? I know you guys are picking up, I watched a bunch of your episodes. I'm also doing that.
50:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:41 Speaker 02 And so that's keeping me from being a complete jerk.
50:45 Speaker 01 That's a good skill.
50:47 Dax Shepard? A A says it best, like alcoholics are megalomaniacs with an inferiority complex. Or the piece of shit that the world revolves around. Like I can very much relate to these dramatic swings in my ego. Like I'm either worthless or now I'm promiscuous.
51:02 Speaker 02 Totally, yes.
51:03 Dax Shepard? And I think it's like to buff it and get you out of this other cycle. I just think this weird bipolarity of it is a little predictable.
51:11 Speaker 02 You're describing my experience perfectly. And I'm guessing quite a few people's given social media and all the other things that are going on.
51:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one or the other. I'm the worst or the best.
51:21 Speaker 02 That's right.
51:21 Dax Shepard? There's no middle ground whatsoever.
51:23 Speaker 02 Gotta try.
51:25 Dax Shepard? So as these things start bubbling up, how are you coping the fact that you're not an addict? Or you're not a sex addict, or you're not a gambling addict? The well-worn modulators of these feelings, you're not really using.
51:37 Speaker 02 To be perfectly clear, in college, I did a lot of drinking. Maybe just because my parents were heroin addicts, but the word addict to me has very specific meaning.
51:44 Dax Shepard? Very extreme definition for you.
51:46 Speaker 02 Well, you know, I'm drinking on Friday and Saturday night.
51:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that's like, you're in college.
51:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm not binging or anything. So I had a couple of friends. To hang out. And the other thing that I was doing was I'm busy all the time.
51:58 Dax Shepard? There we go. So you're kind of maybe regulating with kind of a work addiction. Something's.
52:03 Speaker 02 That's right. Yes. Yeah, no, that's insightful. Because, you know, when I stopped going to college, things really fell apart.
52:08 Dax Shepard? Right, because you're in discomfort and humans don't sit in discomfort forever. They figure out something to alleviate that. And so obviously, when you were killing yourself working. And then you meet somebody and this is a match made in heaven, right? You have a professor that very much from your perspective, you're developing kind of a father-son.
52:28 Speaker 02 That's right. So the beginning of my junior year, and it is there. And now people are starting to think about how can we do stuff with this? He had this at the time, what I thought was a brilliant idea. In hindsight, it would never have worked. It's like a social media company for exchanging information where like you ask a question. And if anyone in the world knows it, then through your social network, you'd potentially get an answer and everyone along the chain would get a cut. Very clever idea, never ever going to work. We didn't know it at the time.
52:55 Speaker 01 Kind of Reddit.
52:57 Speaker 02 Really?
52:57 Speaker 01 I mean, don't you think it's sort of like Reddit now?
52:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you could even say Wikipedia in some fashion.
53:02 Speaker 01 That's true. That's true.
53:04 Dax Shepard? Self-generated knowledge.
53:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:06 Speaker 02 I put down my math, closed my textbooks and I go to the computer lab. We start building this thing out. It becomes a company and I'm like the tech lead.
53:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, wait, Cham.
53:16 Speaker 02 Home. All of a sudden, I'm like the big man on campus. I cannot tell you how great like to have money. My classes were paid for and like I could go to the cafeteria to eat, but I was truly scrimping by.
53:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:27 Dax Shepard? And you've never had money.
53:28 Speaker 02 And I've never in my life had money.
53:30 Dax Shepard? You're like a basketball player.
53:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, all of a sudden, like no idea what's going on like, ah. So Pittsburgh is a beautiful and very inexpensive city. I don't even have to spend my money. My classes, like I'm just like buying pianos.
53:42 Speaker 01 Wow.
53:44 Dax Shepard? Catching up.
53:45 Speaker 02 Just doing it all. So.
53:47 Dax Shepard? That's Freudian, because your mother drug a piano around everywhere she went.
53:50 Speaker 02 So that was the experience, and I started burning out after two years of this.
53:54 Dax Shepard? And this relationship was not what you were hoping it was really gonna be additionally, right?
53:58 Speaker 02 That's right. So I think this is probably very common. I found this person to be like a father figure. And I don't know where his mental state on that or emotional state on that was. He was a hotshot in computer science. And he had pivoted from like a theory career to a more applied career. So we're building out this company. It turns out that he did not, I believe, have this same sense of mentoring me. Father figure is a funny word. There was clearly some kind of transference on my part of feelings that were not really meant for him.
54:30 Speaker 01 Right.
54:30 Speaker 02 But I was giving them to him.
54:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
54:32 Dax Shepard? And then unwittingly forming expectations of how that would be reciprocated, I'm sure.
54:39 Speaker 02 And when it wasn't, I felt hurt, and the company is, you know, very stressful. I mean, it was a very empowering experience.
54:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:45 Dax Shepard? You had a team of like 20 kids working under you?
54:47 Speaker 02 15 kids under me. I'm 22, 23.
54:50 Dax Shepard? What kind of money are you making? I need to know.
54:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, by that point, I'm making 50,000 bucks.
54:54 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God, in college in 96? That's insane.
54:56 Speaker 02 It's so much money.
54:57 Dax Shepard? That's like 200 grand a year right now.
54:59 Speaker 02 It's so much money, yeah, totally. I get burnt out and I rage quit. And it was the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life. Because now I still have to take classes, but I'm past my senior year, so I gotta pay for it myself.
55:11 Speaker 01 Oh.
55:11 Speaker 02 How do I pay for it? All my grants are gone. Before, when I was making that 50K, I could swing it, no problem. But now I can't swing it. So in a very rash and dumb move, in exactly the kind of shit you wouldn't do if you had parents to talk to. People don't understand, these kids, me, I'm not talking to someone.
55:27 Dax Shepard? You get to come up with every dumb idea you have.
55:29 Speaker 02 And execute it. So I moved to Boston, four credits short of graduating.
55:35 Dax Shepard? After this whole life goal of I'm gonna graduate, isn't this heartbreaking? It's so predictable.
55:39 Speaker 02 I know. I had educated myself, right? I didn't actually care about the degree per se. So in my mind, I had viewed it as basically done.
55:46 Dax Shepard? Because you were employable now.
55:48 Speaker 02 I was employable now, yes. And I followed a AI and video game company to Boston. They wanted to relocate from Pittsburgh to there. And so I followed them up, and I had... Without a doubt, the worst year of my life.
55:59 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
56:00 Speaker 02 I discovered that there is hell on earth. So I'm living alone for the first time. I think a lot of this, again, I just want to emphasize, was so avoidable. And if I had anyone to talk to, I'm not in therapy at this point. I'm not talking to any of my aunts and uncles. Obviously, no parents. I'm just raw dogging the entire experience.
56:19 Dax Shepard? Well, by the way, for me, my ego would have been saying like, you know what? I didn't need any of you. I'm here now. I didn't get a fucking chance and no one was here. And now I'm doing it all on my own. That would have been fuel for me. You didn't have that.
56:30 Speaker 01 It doesn't seem like your personality.
56:32 Speaker 02 It was that way my whole childhood. That was just ingrained in who I was. It wasn't like saucy. It was just like, yeah, I'm gonna go do it myself.
56:39 Dax Shepard? Right.
56:39 Speaker 01 Right. But you knew you needed people because you also grew up doing that.
56:44 Speaker 02 So I discovered in Boston. And so when you go to college, even in the 90s, there's orientation. They set you up. Here are your friends. My still best friend in life is my first buddy from my first day of college. So they really work hard to make these environments successful, right? Socially successful. I moved to Boston. I'm living in a suburb by myself for the first time ever. At like a truly nerdy 12-person company. I'm not really relating to anyone there. The job is without a doubt the hardest thing technically I've ever done.
57:16 Dax Shepard? What do they call the thing you were building?
57:17 Speaker 02 Compiler.
57:18 Dax Shepard? A compiler.
57:18 Speaker 02 So a compiler translates the high-level human code. 10, print Monica is cool. 20, go to 10, run Monica is cool, Monica is cool, Monica is cool. Turn that into machine code that runs.
57:29 Speaker 01 Wow.
57:29 Speaker 02 That's a very difficult program to write or reason about. And so I ended up working as the junior guy with one of these like fucking geniuses who had written this thing. So I have to learn what he did. He's gonna go off to become an assistant professor. He's a PhD. So I have to learn all of this. I'm basically just well beyond my abilities here. And so within three or four months, my life just starts falling apart. I start having panic attacks. This is one of those things you've either experienced it or you haven't. Because you can't explain to people what a panic attack is if they've never had one. They won't get it. This is a thing that happens where it has the prominence of overwhelming pain. Whatever you were thinking about before, you don't care about that anymore. It's like you're being tortured, except it's coming from inside of you.
58:14 Speaker 02 And you don't know why you're having it. For me, it lasted anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. And then after that's done, you sort of have this overwhelming exhaustion because your body is just like Fatigue.
58:24 Speaker 01 On overdrive.
58:25 Speaker 02 Complete freak out. And so I started having these panic attacks once a day.
58:30 Dax Shepard? Well, then you talk about the cycle of your fear of having one.
58:34 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, I've had them. And that's the worst part. It's like, when's it coming today?
58:38 Speaker 02 You know it, like, oh, my God. So I'm alone. I don't have any support whatsoever. I don't even know what to do. Like, should I go to a hospital? But what I learned is that I don't need to go to a hospital. I can just keep going and keep going. And as the year progresses, I moved there in early fall. And now it's maybe spring or so. My panic, I start doing like this, completely uncontrollable.
58:58 Dax Shepard? You're short circuiting.
58:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, right on the edge of being able to function in society.
59:02 Speaker 01 Oh.
59:02 Speaker 02 So I go up to the top of the roof, another roof story, and I'm smelling the trees and the flowers in bloom. I'm like, look over the edge. I'm like, I could do this.
59:12 Speaker 01 Oh.
59:13 Speaker 02 And I immediately realized I have a problem.
59:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, we're here now.
59:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, I did not have suicidal ideation forever and ever. I had it once, and I was like, this means something. I'm fucking smart. I'm gonna take this seriously.
59:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:27 Speaker 02 Right? Because I'm just miserable. And I'm thinking, if I throw myself over the roof, I'm gonna cease this pain.
59:33 Speaker 01 Yes.
59:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the suffering will stop.
59:34 Speaker 02 Couple of things I try. Try a little bit of acupuncture, which is actually fairly helpful in the short term. I ultimately reach out to my Uncle Elliot, who's a therapist. Uncle Elliot, my Aunt Moira, they were the first people to come check out with a situation for my sister and I at the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home. They're therapists. They knew right away. They were like, you need to get into therapy. And I really didn't want to get into therapy.
59:56 Dax Shepard? Can you remember your reservation or the story you had about it?
59:59 Speaker 02 Some combination of I knew it wouldn't be much fun. I was just in so much pain. But because I am, I am gonna do this. This guy, Dr. LaCuaixa, one of my Uncle Elliot's close collaborators. So I give this guy a call, and he agrees to see me. And so that really is like The chapter because everything that happens afterwards. My life just starts taking off. And so the first thing that happens, it takes a while, actually six months to about a year. It's the cessation of this absolutely unbearable panic. I quit that job and I moved to New York. This is where my aunt and uncle live. I'm just trying to be close to anybody. I am full on tail between my legs. I don't know what's wrong with my life. Something's messed up. I need to figure this out.
1:00:44 Dax Shepard? Also, can I say you have no more stories? So you had a story that was getting you through the previous 15 years, which is I'm gonna go to college and I'm gonna acquire this knowledge and that is going to liberate me. And now you have it. You have the solution, which is kind of the scariest point. When you have the solution and yet things are at their worst point. It's, I would say, triply scary. This is a moment in an addict's life when you have all the medicine you're supposed to have and it's no longer fixing the thing is very, very, very discouraging.
1:01:12 Speaker 02 You nailed it. This is exactly right. I'm in Boston. I'm done. I did the thing. I know I had four classes left, but in my mind, I've achieved the goal. And it turns out that it was the having the goal was the solution. So now I just have lots of goals.
1:01:30 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
1:01:42 Speaker 02 So I moved down to Manhattan and a couple of things happened. I start going to therapy on a weekly basis. That's very, very helpful. I tried a little bit of Prozac, didn't like how it made me feel, so I discontinued that. But right around the same time, I started running. I was a nerd. I never really got into fitness. And all of a sudden, I'm like, hey, I felt really good after running.
1:02:04 Dax Shepard? It buys me three, four hours of feeling good.
1:02:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I discuss it with my therapist. We agree, we should probably turn this into a habit. So between exercise and this therapy and being closer to family, I start to pull myself out of a very, very dark place. And things really start going much better for me after that.
1:02:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you start a master's program at Columbia.
1:02:24 Speaker 02 A scholarship.
1:02:25 Dax Shepard? What were you doing over there for three? Because you weren't accomplishing anything towards your PhD. I know that.
1:02:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I have to finish up my degree. Got to get those four classes. Luckily, my student advisor at Carnegie Mellon was helpful with that. So I get the degree a couple of years later. Now, I actually did a chief technology officer. It was a grossly overblown title. But anyways, we were building some dot com thing. That blows up in the dot com bubble. So now, like everyone else, I got to go back to school. I want to go back to school. I go up to Columbia University and I get a job as a Unix systems administrator, just fixing the computers. And they'll pay me a living wage and they'll let you take free classes.
1:03:00 Speaker 01 Oh, nice.
1:03:01 Speaker 02 Great gig. Be an administrator on a university campus, get a free master's degree. It's a very good way to go. So that's just what I was doing. I then apply for a PhD program in neuroscience.
1:03:12 Dax Shepard? The breakthrough hasn't happened yet, right? To remind people, we had the godmother of AI.
1:03:16 Speaker 01 Fei-Fei Lee.
1:03:17 Dax Shepard? Fei-Fei Lee.
1:03:18 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, sure.
1:03:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and AI had all these stutter stops. It had like big periods of progress, then total stagnation for years. But the last big breakthrough, which we're on the shoulders of, is starting to design AI in the same way a neural network works in the brain.
1:03:31 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
1:03:32 Dax Shepard? Had that happened yet?
1:03:33 Speaker 02 No, it's all earlier than that.
1:03:35 Dax Shepard? But again, convenient you get interested in neurology.
1:03:37 Speaker 02 It all goes back to, I want to do something that helps the world. That sounds a little cliche, but damn it, I'm earnest.
1:03:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:44 Speaker 02 This is what I want to do. And well, what are my gifts? I'm technical. So there's this branch of neuroscience called computational neuroscience, which is sort of like the math of how brains work. The brain is a complicated thing, and so it's an organ. It actually builds itself. It grows. So there's all kinds of things that happen as like a purely sort of organ. But there's this other thing, this view, I can say, hey, Monica, count to 10. You can do it.
1:04:06 Speaker 01 Some days.
1:04:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally. We can figure out the rules of Scrabble together. So and so this arbitrary ability to reason about new things that you've never, ever thought about before, that sure sounds like a computer. So I was interested in getting into that kind of work.
1:04:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, maybe. Did you have the realization like, oh, yeah, it's a big gooey biological entity, but it is in fact very mechanized. It's a machine. It runs on electricity. We know the parts of the electrical circuits. It's actually more mechanical than I think. You grew up thinking of the brain.
1:04:38 Speaker 02 So I think that's right. I'd say there is a machine in there. It's an electrical machine.
1:04:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:04:42 Speaker 02 But how does that work is one of the great mysteries of our time, and I want to think about it. I think that's super interesting, and maybe it'll help. Maybe mental illnesses, maybe drug addictions are, we would say, like a networkopathy. That is to say, even though some of these things change because of molecules, how the neural network function breaks and the pathology is at the network. So if that's really true, of course, you can go try to fix the molecules, but you could also try to understand what's broken about the network.
1:05:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:05:10 Speaker 02 Sort of how the machine is no longer functioning.
1:05:12 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:05:13 Speaker 02 Right. So I found that very interesting. I applied to a bunch of schools. I got into Columbia. Columbia, it turns out, has a truly world-class neuroscience program.
1:05:22 Dax Shepard? It's now called the neural.
1:05:25 Speaker 02 Right. So it's a big program. They have a sub-program called the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.
1:05:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is now very reputable.
1:05:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's very, very reputable. It was started by my mentor, my PhD advisor.
1:05:35 Dax Shepard? Larry?
1:05:35 Speaker 02 Larry Abbott, yes, and another researcher, Ken Miller. And so they start this. By now, we're in 2003, 2004. I join, and this is just the best thing ever. And the Fulbright was part of that.
1:05:46 Dax Shepard? Okay. So then you get your PhD. You start working with Larry, who you guys hit it off famously. You had another advisor that you guys did not work out so well.
1:05:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
1:05:58 Dax Shepard? And then you leave, and then you go and you work at Google Brain. But you have a desire still to be in academia.
1:06:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:06:05 Dax Shepard? How do we figure out how to go from Google Brain back to academia?
1:06:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. So to answer that, I want to just back up a little bit and talk about where is the state of AI in neural networks?
1:06:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, let's do that.
1:06:16 Speaker 02 The broad consensus moment for when people thought that neural networks are here. There was a neural network that had a name. We gave it a name. It's called AlexNet after Alex Kraszewski. Ilya Sutskevich gave her Jeff Hinton. Anyways, they built this network that beat hand-designed networks at a really hard image recognition task. This is 2012.
1:06:36 Dax Shepard? This is ImageNet?
1:06:37 Speaker 02 This is ImageNet. Fei-Fei Lee, her lab, collected that data.
1:06:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:06:40 Speaker 02 Right. So this hugely impactful thing she did really drove all of this work in neuroscience. So that happened in 2000. But the real moment, something called a restricted Boltzmann machine. This is like 2006, 2007, 2008. Again, out of Jeff Hinton's lab, I believe. Apologies if I don't have that exactly right. Nowadays, we don't use any of those approaches. But it was this moment where like, OK, when you combine these simple systems, these simple neurons together, an artificial neuron is really simple. It takes inputs, adds them up. And if they're above a certain value, it emits a one. And if they're below a certain value, it emits a zero. And so that's a very simple computational device. When you connect a gajillion of them together in just the right way, it turns out you can compute anything that is computable.
1:07:24 Speaker 02 That's what our brains are doing on some abstract level. And so that's where it's all coming from. I'm finishing my PhD and this restricted Boltzmann machine happens. And I'm thinking about what are called recurrent neural networks, which had feedback loops. Feedback loops are important because that's actually how your brain is working. Instead of a feed forward processing of like an assembly line of information processing, it's people talking back at each other and all this really complex chaotic.
1:07:46 Dax Shepard? Could you give like a literal example of how it works?
1:07:49 Speaker 02 If I wanted to make a system that could flexibly pick up my soda, that is going to be a recurrent system. We call it a dynamical system where what's happening as I lift this can is coming back through so-called proprioception, through signals that are telling my brain what's actually happening as well as my vision. So that's all one big feedback.
1:08:12 Dax Shepard? It's like self-correcting at all time. The information's flowing both directions.
1:08:16 Speaker 02 That's right.
1:08:16 Dax Shepard? So it's sending info and it's receiving info and it's making adjustments real time.
1:08:21 Speaker 02 That's right.
1:08:21 Dax Shepard? It doesn't send like the full blueprint down to the hand to accomplish that task. It's going to check in all the time to see how we're doing.
1:08:28 Speaker 02 Exactly. So this is the kind of thing that I'm thinking about right as these networks are starting to become prominent. So I then apply those approaches in a postdoc at Stanford and then I go to Google Brain. And in Google Brain. This is when people with money, it was because of AlexNet, now we're like 2012. The top brass at Google figured out that neural networks.
1:08:47 Dax Shepard? We gotta be in this.
1:08:48 Speaker 02 Number one, are going to work. There's been this long, many decades history of promise with no delivery. That is changing. They knew that then. They basically purchased all the talent on the planet, give or take. They get all these researchers together and just like, go do what you want. Develop these neural networks. Neural networks, because we started stacking these networks together, it became known as deep learning, deep neural networks. That was the catchphrase from like 2015 to 2020.
1:09:15 Dax Shepard? Deep Mind was one.
1:09:16 Speaker 02 And Deep Mind was all built off of deep networks. So, sorry, the naming is playing off of that cachet.
1:09:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:09:21 Speaker 02 I'm part of that scene. And now coming finally back to your question, I wanted to apply all of these neural networks approaches to understand actually how brains work. I care about the brain.
1:09:33 Dax Shepard? Now, we're in this weird zone currently, right? Where it's like, we were trying to understand the brain to design the machine, but now the machine's kind of working in a way that we might be able to answer some of the ways that the brain work.
1:09:41 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. Modern AI, AI is sort of the rebranding of deep networks. There's some technical changes there. Applied to language. Because the big surprise was that, it's a really interesting thing, actually. If you ask a neural network to spit out the next word in English and you do that for all of the text on the internet, it learns something about the world. You can think about it in terms of context. Like, I'm going to the... Now, asking to fill in the next blank could be fridge, bathroom, store. But if you said, I need some milk, I'm going to the... Then you know it's going to be the fridge or store. Now, you just expand that out to a full thing.
1:10:18 Dax Shepard? And the computer has the capacity to go through every single written word in the world and come up with the most probabilistic next word in that sentence. Whereas a human can't scan the known written language. But the computer can.
1:10:30 Speaker 02 We don't learn anything like this. But this is how the computers are learning, is just to predict one step ahead. That's really the magic of large language models. And that's where we've now rebranded to AI because it turns out doing this makes these things intelligent in some way.
1:10:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:10:43 Speaker 02 So, coming back to your point, the origins of AI really go back... Back to studying the brain, all the way back to McCulloch and Pitts. They made this artificial neuron in the 40s. And they showed that if you connected them, you could build an arbitrarily powerful computer. And it was revolutionary because no one had ever figured out. They abstracted away the details, but these squishy neurons in your brain could actually behave like a computer. It was just a revolutionary idea. And that began decades of research to study that ultimately, through neuroscience results, sort of led to different types of networks and so on and so forth. So where are we today? It's exactly what you said, it's the opposite.
1:11:22 Speaker 02 I'm a huge proponent of using artificial intelligence for science discovery. And it's much broader than neuroscience. My particular love is neuroscience. I think we're in for some huge and positive changes here. If you look at it that way, there's a whole other conversation to be had.
1:11:39 Dax Shepard? We built a device that can help us understand our own intelligence.
1:11:41 Speaker 02 That's right, yes. So now forecasting in the future, which is always dangerous but super fun. You could imagine that, once we know how the brains work, we begin to actually include even more detail to align these AI models to more how we think.
1:11:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because there was a single thing I read I wanted to bring up to you, which is, I do think people misunderstand AI a little bit. And maybe I'm wrong about this, but I read this interesting thing they did. It doesn't think. They're not going to create, they're going to predict. So the example that this article I read was is that they trained an AI model on all of the known scientific literature of the 1300s. And then they asked the AI, do we revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the planet? Is it a heliocentric or a geocentric model of the universe?
1:12:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:12:27 Dax Shepard? And the AI said, it's geocentric, the sun revolves around us. So in that way, it's not super intelligent. It can't be Galileo. If you give it the information that was known at that day, it's going to give you the highest probability prediction of that information. But it can't be Galileo. It can't think beyond what it knows, at least currently.
1:12:46 Speaker 01 For now, yeah.
1:12:47 Dax Shepard? So what do we think about that? Like, how do we define thinking? And then is that just one category within intelligence? And how do we account for that?
1:12:54 Speaker 02 I have a different opinion. So I want to be really nuanced here because I can't stand AI freak out and I don't want to be a part of that.
1:13:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 But I don't think these AIs are alive. I don't think they're conscious. So to the degree that this makes any sense, I do think they're thinking. I think they're like the first example of like Descartes being dead wrong in that sense of like, I think, therefore I am. These things are thinking in a reductive sense of manipulating language for the purposes of reasoning and conceptualizing. I think they're doing it, but there's nothing behind the machine.
1:13:24 Dax Shepard? Correct.
1:13:25 Speaker 02 There's just automated process.
1:13:26 Dax Shepard? But how can they go forward, I guess is my question, unless we command them in a certain way? It's our original thought that was creative in what I would put in quotes, thinking. And then we'll now use this device as a great pattern recognition machine to substantiate this creative thing we had, but on its own, it can't come up with the heliocentric.
1:13:44 Speaker 02 I acknowledge your example. That's a very hard example. But if we pull back, I do think that there is quite a bit of novelty that these things are capable of generating. But I agree with you that there are unsolved problems in and around that kind of scientific progress. So this is an enormous conversation.
1:14:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:14:02 Speaker 02 But what I would say is it's in the air right now that like something has changed in AI. I don't know if you caught wind of this, right? Like in the last, say, three or four months, all of a sudden, these things are coding much better. And all of a sudden, there's this sense that the top brass at major tech companies are taking it much more seriously. Again, I'm hesitant to make predictions, but what's happening is that these tools are becoming much, much better, but there's still a real sense of supervision of these tools.
1:14:26 Dax Shepard? They're compounding, though, is the point, right?
1:14:28 Speaker 02 Exactly. So the question is, if you believe that, you know, they've moved on from single token prediction to other more technical methods involving reinforcement learning, it's another conversation. But the idea is that if they're self-improving, at what pace and so on and so forth.
1:14:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:14:44 Speaker 02 And what we've seen, at least in early 2026, they are getting better. And that I think a lot of the discussion that's happening is really more about people adjusting to this idea than it is the technology itself.
1:14:57 Dax Shepard? What is your signpost you look at? So for me, obviously, egocentrically, I'm really tracking AI's progress through what I see that is digitally created. We just had an ad nauseam talk about getting sent videos and should you tell the person, hey, I think that's AI or not?
1:15:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, totally.
1:15:15 Dax Shepard? Because they're at the level where two people in film and television.
1:15:18 Speaker 01 Can't tell.
1:15:19 Dax Shepard? Can't tell. And so that bridge has been crossed. Now, I still think they don't have the human voices when they do dialogue and they try to do the cadence of humans speak. That, to me, is still the giveaway. But fuck, the visuals, there's no more six fingers. That's my layman's version of tracking where we're at, just what I'm seeing done visually, digitally. What are the things you look at?
1:15:39 Speaker 02 In my world, it's all coding.
1:15:41 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:15:42 Speaker 02 So if there is just interface, like, I'm gonna go build a little web browser to go make a little video game. AI is just gonna do that for you.
1:15:49 Dax Shepard? In a second.
1:15:50 Speaker 02 In a second, yeah, a couple of minutes.
1:15:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:15:52 Speaker 02 Right, so where these things, I think, are still struggling is if it's, we would say, technically out of distribution. If it's not something it's seen a lot of before, if it's integrated into a much, much larger code base, is what you see at these large companies. But it's getting better at those things, too. And so we're still, I think, in this mode where, like, the human and the computer together, the human and the AI together, are really the best.
1:16:15 Speaker 01 The good call, yeah.
1:16:16 Speaker 02 And so what I would look for, in your shoes, very similar in my shoes, actually, is when does that clip become a movie? For me, it's when does that chunk of UI code, user interface code, become the whole program?
1:16:30 Dax Shepard? And a product.
1:16:31 Speaker 02 Exactly. And to be honest with you, I just don't see humans leaving that process anytime soon. I think that's a risky opinion.
1:16:37 Dax Shepard? Well, there's a lot of money been bet on the fact that they will get more efficient.
1:16:41 Speaker 02 There's a lot of hype out there. But in some sense, you have to take it seriously because these tools are getting much, much better. And, you know, what I'd say to any of your listeners is, like, if you're not checking these things out, you absolutely should be. I really mean it.
1:16:54 Dax Shepard? You can't sit it out.
1:16:55 Speaker 02 In a positive way.
1:16:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:57 Speaker 02 Like, imagine all the things that you could do with these kinds of creation tools. For me, in my science career, so there's this thing called Google Scholars, where academics have their papers listed. Just go read every one of my papers and tell me what you think I should work on next.
1:17:11 Dax Shepard? Wow.
1:17:12 Speaker 02 I shit you not, it gave me the same idea that I had.
1:17:14 Speaker 01 Whoa.
1:17:15 Dax Shepard? Really?
1:17:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, really.
1:17:17 Dax Shepard? Now, I don't wanna be disagreeable, but...
1:17:20 Speaker 02 Go ahead.
1:17:20 Dax Shepard? Therein lies also an Achilles' of it.
1:17:23 Speaker 02 Which is?
1:17:24 Dax Shepard? Which is, it came to the same conclusion you came to.
1:17:27 Speaker 02 Ah.
1:17:29 Dax Shepard? Because it made a probabilistic prediction about you, which it can do well.
1:17:35 Speaker 02 I gotta say, I find it pretty impress. I don't view that as a fair.
1:17:38 Dax Shepard? Well, but.
1:17:39 Speaker 02 Because it had to be that way. It was like the only thing it could have done, right?
1:17:41 Dax Shepard? Well, no, no, that's not actually my concern is that, I'll make it more artistic. So yeah, go read the 35 scripts I've written. What should I write next? All that that would ensure is that I stay within my creative pattern. And in fact, what I probably need to do isn't the thing that was obvious to me. I mean, this is very philosophical.
1:18:02 Speaker 02 I accept that critique.
1:18:03 Dax Shepard? But you know what I'm saying?
1:18:04 Speaker 02 I see where you're coming from.
1:18:04 Dax Shepard? What it can do is advise on more of the same in some sense. And depending on what your career is, if your career is to disrupt yourself and your work should constantly be trying to 180 at all times, oh fuck, well, let's jump way over here for this perspective and see what I can bring with that and come up with a new thing. And that way, I think it can be stunting for progress.
1:18:23 Speaker 02 I see. In science, jumping around 180 too many times is not fabulous because it's one step to the next.
1:18:29 Dax Shepard? You lose your reputation.
1:18:29 Speaker 02 It's hard. It's hard, right?
1:18:31 Speaker 01 I mean, same in art too. We don't like to think of it like that, but we have skills.
1:18:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:37 Speaker 01 We have things we're better at than others. And what it's doing is saying, you're best at this, so maybe you should do more of that. I think that's not a bad idea.
1:18:46 Dax Shepard? I might be able to articulate it better by saying, I fear that it could be a reproduction instead of an iteration. Does that make sense?
1:18:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, it makes sense.
1:18:53 Dax Shepard? Does it get us out of the true creative mindset?
1:18:56 Speaker 02 Right. I'll tell you the one thing that I am aligned with, with people who are thinking about this more deeply than I am is, I think the world is in for some very large changes.
1:19:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:19:05 Speaker 02 And especially like the science discovery optimization process, business to business applications.
1:19:11 Dax Shepard? It's all on the table.
1:19:12 Speaker 02 It's all on the table.
1:19:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:19:14 Speaker 01 We had a guy on, David Faganbaum, he has a foundation where they're repurposing drugs that are already out on the market for other cures. He cured himself with this disease and it's an incredible story. And they're using AI, obviously, to like process all these drugs and see exactly what they do. And they just got like a huge. Grant, he emailed me.
1:19:34 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful.
1:19:35 Speaker 01 That's so amazing. Well, cured diseases that cannot be cured based on this. It's happening. It's not like something in the future. It's currently going on. It's awesome.
1:19:46 Dax Shepard? We're going to see this experiment play out. Like it or not, that's what's gonna happen. So I don't even sit around, well, what if, what if? I'm like, well, let's see. Allow myself to be as optimistic as I would be pessimistic. We don't fucking know. So why am I gonna have an opinion on something that none of us really know?
1:20:02 Speaker 02 It's true. Nobody knows.
1:20:03 Dax Shepard? You know what's so fun? We're gonna see.
1:20:05 Speaker 02 That's right.
1:20:06 Dax Shepard? We happen to have been born in a period of time where we're going to see.
1:20:10 Speaker 02 That's my mentality for sure.
1:20:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, David, this was lovely.
1:20:13 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me.
1:20:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for sharing your story. I think it's obviously so important.
1:20:18 Speaker 02 I appreciate that. Thank you for hearing it.
1:20:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Such a pleasure. Anyone ever tell you you look like James Hatfield?
1:20:24 Speaker 02 These days, probably once every three months.
1:20:27 Dax Shepard? There we go.
1:20:28 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:20:28 Dax Shepard? Great. I would be flattered.
1:20:30 Speaker 02 I think it's the beard. I actually took a close look. We don't actually look anything alike.
1:20:36 Dax Shepard? Well, every three months, some people disagree.
1:20:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a thing. I'm like, yeah, man, let's shred.
1:20:41 Dax Shepard? David's book, please, please read it. It's beautifully written and very, very honest. It's called Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of the Mind. Be well, David.
1:20:52 Speaker 02 Thank you very much.
1:20:55 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at.
1:21:02 Speaker 01 Um, did you get my text?
1:21:04 Dax Shepard? Which one?
1:21:05 Speaker 01 I just sent you a very important text.
1:21:07 Dax Shepard? Oh, my goodness. No.
1:21:08 Speaker 01 About five minutes ago.
1:21:09 Dax Shepard? Oh. I don't think that was me.
1:21:12 Speaker 01 Rob, was it Rob? Were you in, not in the clubhouse?
1:21:15 Dax Shepard? I was in the clubhouse.
1:21:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I could hear you.
1:21:17 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow. I don't even remember. If anything, my current assessment is I haven't been blowing my nose much.
1:21:25 Speaker 05 Oh, I heard that too. There was a loud one at the end there.
1:21:27 Dax Shepard? There was a big one?
1:21:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it really.
1:21:28 Speaker 05 It sounded like you might have died.
1:21:29 Speaker 01 Exactly. So the text I sent was, are you okay?
1:21:33 Dax Shepard? I hear your extreme throat clearing. More extreme than normal.
1:21:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, I can confirm.
1:21:40 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:21:41 Dax Shepard? Okay. Because I subconsciously.
1:21:43 Speaker 01 It was real.
1:21:44 Dax Shepard? It's hard to be me.
1:21:45 Speaker 01 It was, it was scary sounding.
1:21:47 Dax Shepard? Oh, really? Like you thought you might need to come perform the Heimlich maneuver?
1:21:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, it sounded like something was stuck in there.
1:21:52 Speaker 05 It's like you're wrestling a bear, maybe.
1:21:54 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay.
1:21:55 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
1:21:56 Dax Shepard? So it's really.
1:21:56 Speaker 01 But he would poke his, he would put his finger in his butt and poke their eyes out.
1:22:00 Dax Shepard? I had that fantasy at the airport in New Orleans. At this restaurant, I heard a woman coughing slash choking.
1:22:09 Speaker 01 Someone to need the Heimlich?
1:22:10 Dax Shepard? I don't want that. But I heard this.
1:22:13 Speaker 01 Lady.
1:22:13 Dax Shepard? I didn't know if it was choking or coughing. It was like three tables over.
1:22:17 Speaker 01 Uh oh.
1:22:18 Dax Shepard? And I just thought, I bet no one in here is gonna be willing to do it. Like, that was just my first thought. Not that I want to, just like, I got a hunch. If I look over and I see that she's choking.
1:22:29 Speaker 01 Right.
1:22:29 Dax Shepard? I think her female companion she's dining with isn't gonna jump behind her and start.
1:22:35 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh.
1:22:36 Dax Shepard? Ratcheting her diaphragm.
1:22:38 Speaker 01 She just didn't give a fuck?
1:22:39 Dax Shepard? Well, I looked over and she had a, like, paralyzed look on her face.
1:22:44 Speaker 01 Wait, which one? The coffer or the friend?
1:22:46 Dax Shepard? The associate.
1:22:47 Speaker 01 Oh, shit. Okay.
1:22:49 Dax Shepard? So I was like, she ain't getting up. And then I found myself just trying to evaluate, like, is this a cough or a choke?
1:22:56 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:22:57 Dax Shepard? And then it passed.
1:22:58 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:22:59 Dax Shepard? But I did have a whole thing. I was just like, you know, your mind thinks so fast. It's like, I saw that. Is that that? That's her from, she not gonna help. Look around the restaurant. I don't see anyone, like, else paying attention. Fuck. If this is, this is a joke, I gotta get on the move.
1:23:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. I will say, I'm grateful that there are people like you. I really am in, in the world and at restaurants. Because, um, I don't know what happens to me, but I, like.
1:23:26 Dax Shepard? You wanna disappear.
1:23:27 Speaker 01 I do. I really don't wanna act. It's like when I hear what I think is a car crash.
1:23:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:23:33 Speaker 01 And you, of course, run towards, as a lot of people do, and you should. You should go check and.
1:23:39 Dax Shepard? Well, it's not everyone's nature.
1:23:41 Speaker 01 But I'm like, I'm just like. Praying some, but what if no one's, I have to. I could be the only one. It's like bad.
1:23:49 Dax Shepard? You do have to assess, cuz look, I'm thrilled if a doctor stands. Up inhale. I don't know that I know how to do the hymn like I know some attempt at it'll be better than nothing. That's all I think.
1:24:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:02 Speaker 01 You do know, okay, I can relate to being the friend.
1:24:05 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, okay.
1:24:06 Speaker 01 It's so.
1:24:07 Dax Shepard? Was this like running into that store that time with Callie?
1:24:11 Speaker 01 Oh, that was horrible.
1:24:12 Dax Shepard? Assaulting people?
1:24:13 Speaker 01 He was assault, he was, she was coming towards us and screaming at us and I.
1:24:16 Dax Shepard? And you left her.
1:24:17 Speaker 01 Well. No, she was supposed to come with me.
1:24:21 Dax Shepard? Okay, I just thought that might be the example you were thinking.
1:24:23 Speaker 01 No, no, thanks for bringing that up.
1:24:24 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:24:24 Speaker 01 No, I, I.
1:24:26 Dax Shepard? There's more than one occasion.
1:24:28 Speaker 01 Everyone can relate to this when you're at dinner with somebody and then they get like the water down the wrong pipe.
1:24:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure, sure, sure.
1:24:34 Speaker 01 And then the coughing and then like they can't stop and. And you wanna, you don't wanna make a big deal cuz you know that I get very codependent. I'm like, they feel so embarrassed.
1:24:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:24:45 Speaker 01 So I'm just gonna act like I don't even notice and I'm gonna keep talking and like, I'm not even.
1:24:50 Dax Shepard? That's a good, I like, I approve of that technique.
1:24:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then, cuz when it happens to me and then people are like, are you okay? I hate that.
1:24:57 Dax Shepard? It's worse, yeah.
1:24:58 Speaker 01 And then it gets worse and you have to say, yeah, like you're like dying and you're saying, yeah.
1:25:05 Dax Shepard? Really quick question, it just popped into my mind. Do you think that? I would turn blue before you would because you're brown and I'm white. Do you think like?
1:25:14 Speaker 01 Fuck.
1:25:14 Dax Shepard? I have some evolutionary advantage in a choking situation where it would be obvious. More obvious that I'm, no, I have an airway obstruction.
1:25:23 Speaker 01 Um, maybe.
1:25:25 Dax Shepard? Do brown people turn blue?
1:25:26 Speaker 01 Well, of course. I mean, if there's no blood. Oh, no. Oh, my God, ever.
1:25:35 Dax Shepard? Hey, is your chat getting to know you in a way that like? You like? Without any effort, like here's an example.
1:25:43 Speaker 01 What is Sam?
1:25:44 Dax Shepard? Oh, you wanted to talk about something just like that?
1:25:46 Speaker 01 Something written down.
1:25:47 Dax Shepard? Okay, then I'll save it. Oh, earmark it, I won't put a pin in it.
1:25:50 Speaker 01 For the listener, we have a, we have a difference of opinion of what those two mean.
1:25:55 Dax Shepard? We have different interpretations.
1:25:56 Speaker 01 Um, hold on, I think we should put a pin in the blue skin and go to.
1:26:02 Speaker 05 It says no.
1:26:04 Dax Shepard? No, what? They can't turn blue or?
1:26:05 Speaker 05 Uh, they do not turn blue.
1:26:06 Speaker 01 No, that's not what it says.
1:26:08 Dax Shepard? You got two different answers?
1:26:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:10 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. His white, his chat knows he's white. Yours knows you're brown.
1:26:14 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. It says brown skin people can turn blue or grayish blue due to a.
1:26:18 Dax Shepard? They just have to be dead.
1:26:20 Speaker 05 Uh, I searched Indian people specifically and it told me Indian people do not turn.
1:26:25 Speaker 01 You're lying.
1:26:26 Speaker 05 I can, I'll put it on my screen.
1:26:29 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Literally.
1:26:31 Dax Shepard? Is it on white nationalist.com?
1:26:32 Speaker 01 It says it occurs when blood is low and I, yeah, get off that site.
1:26:36 Dax Shepard? Oh, this is just the, uh, Google AI.
1:26:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:26:39 Dax Shepard? Indian people do not turn blue with no blood as a natural or racial trait. Well, certain Hindu deities like Krishna or Shiva are famously depicted with blue skin to symbolize divine cosmic nature or the absorption of poison. This is not a representation of a living biological condition. However, there are rare medical conditions that can cause anyone, regardless of race, to appear bluish.
1:27:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:27:04 Dax Shepard? Argaria, a rare skin condition caused by silver buildup. Yes, we've seen this. Too much silver. There was this, there was a movement. I feel like it was primarily in the deep right where people were drinking colloidal silver.
1:27:18 Speaker 01 Oh, I remember that.
1:27:19 Dax Shepard? Right? It was like, it was real heavy in the right.
1:27:21 Speaker 01 It was during COVID.
1:27:22 Dax Shepard? I just love how these medicines are political.
1:27:25 Speaker 01 I know.
1:27:26 Dax Shepard? Right? Like if you, anyways.
1:27:27 Speaker 01 Okay, but wait, hold on. Then now there's pins everywhere. Okay?
1:27:32 Dax Shepard? No, there's bookmarks everywhere.
1:27:33 Speaker 01 Earmarks.
1:27:34 Dax Shepard? Earmarks.
1:27:36 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, this says, yes, brown skin people can turn blue or grayish blue due to a medical condition known as cyanosis. That was on there.
1:27:44 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:27:45 Speaker 01 Which occurs when blood is low in oxygen.
1:27:47 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:27:48 Speaker 01 So that's what's happening when you're choking.
1:27:50 Dax Shepard? Blood is low in oxygen.
1:27:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so same sitch.
1:27:54 Speaker 01 Oh, Rob, your AI is literally racist.
1:27:57 Dax Shepard? I think your lips also can turn blue if you have too much oxygen.
1:28:02 Speaker 01 Let me look it up.
1:28:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, okay.
1:28:05 Speaker 01 Do brown people's lips?
1:28:06 Dax Shepard? Brown. Do lips turn blue?
1:28:10 Speaker 05 Your AI knows you.
1:28:11 Dax Shepard? That's right.
1:28:11 Speaker 01 Well, mine's telling me, don't worry, like, you can turn blue, like, don't.
1:28:15 Dax Shepard? Good news.
1:28:17 Speaker 01 Turn lips turn blue with too much.
1:28:20 Dax Shepard? Oxygen.
1:28:21 Speaker 01 Blue lips can result from a lack of oxygen in the blood. This may happen when we're at a high altitude, or if you are choking. Or chronic underlying condition. Bringing up cyanosis again.
1:28:33 Dax Shepard? Have you ever seen cyanosis? That's a recurrent?
1:28:35 Speaker 01 I'm not seeing much about, um.
1:28:37 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:28:38 Speaker 01 Too much. Okay, back to.
1:28:40 Dax Shepard? Your AI knowing you.
1:28:42 Speaker 01 Yes, that was so simple that you brought it up because today I used email AI for the first time.
1:28:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, how does that work?
1:28:51 Speaker 01 You don't have this yet? Like, when you compose, when you're responding to an email, it gives you an email response?
1:28:56 Dax Shepard? Oh, suggests an entire email?
1:28:58 Speaker 01 Yes, and by the way, I don't know how to turn it off, and I actually hate it. Because then I keep having to delete it.
1:29:04 Dax Shepard? This little button, Monica?
1:29:05 Speaker 01 You, that's where you can turn it off?
1:29:07 Speaker 05 That's the AI thing. So if you click that, it should give you settings for it.
1:29:10 Dax Shepard? Oh, oh.
1:29:11 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, because.
1:29:12 Dax Shepard? God, I'm so good with computers.
1:29:13 Speaker 01 I know, he is very good at computers. Normally, I hate it, I delete it, and it adds a step, and I'm already like rushing emails, so I'm mad at it. But today, the email was perfect.
1:29:23 Dax Shepard? Perfect, yeah.
1:29:24 Speaker 01 And so I sent it.
1:29:26 Dax Shepard? Oh, here's an, okay, God, the earmarks are flying. So we had a real life experience that was hilarious in this exact space, which is. I wrote to you, Amy and Ryan. A night in the Seven Kingdoms at 7:00 PM tomorrow. Stu, question mark?
1:29:45 Speaker 01 Right.
1:29:45 Dax Shepard? You wrote back, yes, please. Ryan wrote back, by trumpets calling clashing goblets, we shall attend the revelries. Cheer mightily for the valiant knight of the Seven Kingdoms and partake joyfully of the most noble and steamy stew.
1:30:03 Dax Shepard? I mean, I want to see the delay here. Okay, so he wrote that it's okay. I wasted no time. That's came in at 6:56 PM and at 6:56 PM said, did AI write that? It's a masterpiece.
1:30:15 Speaker 01 It was so clearly.
1:30:16 Dax Shepard? And you go, I was just about to ask that. And I love Ryan Hansen. He wrote absolutely.
1:30:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:24 Dax Shepard? And then we got into why you for you was most notable and steamy stew is the giveaway. And I said, I thought revelries was the smoking gun.
1:30:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:36 Dax Shepard? But that's the first time I caught someone cold blooded.
1:30:39 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:30:39 Dax Shepard? It was so good. I mean, he's so clever, but it was too fast and good.
1:30:44 Speaker 01 It was too fa- it was too old timey words. He would have had to take time to look up a lot of those words.
1:30:50 Dax Shepard? I didn't think he knows how to use the word revelries.
1:30:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, and whatever I said.
1:30:55 Dax Shepard? I I'm I'm not I don't I wouldn't throw out around revelries.
1:30:59 Speaker 01 You would want to look it up first.
1:31:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'd have some hesitation.
1:31:03 Speaker 01 I did think that was so funny.
1:31:04 Dax Shepard? Different AI issues, but okay.
1:31:06 Speaker 01 Exactly. So you do need to make sure it's something you could have done.
1:31:12 Dax Shepard? If you're trying to fool people.
1:31:13 Speaker 01 Right.
1:31:16 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
1:31:28 Dax Shepard? And then you're being asked to assess how other people assess you. This is this is this is theory of mind and metacognition. I can think about how you think about how I think. Ooh.
1:31:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:38 Dax Shepard? And so you better be good at that if you're gonna try to sneak one by us.
1:31:42 Speaker 01 You know what was kind of interesting? So it's signed by name with a lowercase m.
1:31:46 Dax Shepard? Oh, cool.
1:31:48 Speaker 01 Which I don't do.
1:31:49 Dax Shepard? Okay, yeah.
1:31:50 Speaker 01 But I am pretty willy nilly about my sign offs. Sometimes I'll sign MP. Sometimes maybe just M, sometimes no sign off. So maybe it was trying to mimic being casual.
1:32:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think so. Look, it's good. There's no question about it.
1:32:08 Speaker 01 It's like, yeah.
1:32:09 Dax Shepard? But here's what I loved. Um, I, I, I, I'm gonna screw up the details precisely, but it went something like this. Lincoln and I were looking at a map of Italy.
1:32:17 Speaker 01 Hmm, mhm.
1:32:19 Dax Shepard? And we stumbled upon, and I'm so embarrassed, I've already forgotten the name of it. But there is a country inside of Italy. Do you know this?
1:32:27 Speaker 01 Well, I don't know.
1:32:27 Dax Shepard? And it's like forty-eight square miles. Other than the Vatican. So you have the Vatican, which is its own country inside of Italy. But then you have this other country, like Santa Maria or something.
1:32:37 Speaker 05 San Marino.
1:32:38 Dax Shepard? San Marino.
1:32:39 Speaker 01 Marino?
1:32:40 Dax Shepard? San Marino.
1:32:41 Speaker 05 Republic of San Marino.
1:32:42 Dax Shepard? We're like looking at places to visit and then there's like, you know on a map where it says Italy on one side, it says Italia? And then it says San Marino, but it looks like a city. And I'm like, why is the city, we're both like, what is the city? And she's like, I think it's a country. I'm like, I don't think there's a two-mile-long country in the middle.
1:32:56 Speaker 01 Right.
1:32:57 Dax Shepard? And so we look it up. Sure enough, it's a country. It had been a country since the thirteen hundreds. And Italy only became a country in the eighteen hundreds. And they had all these diplomatic relationships, so they never absorbed it. They always honored it. So there's this tiny little country.
1:33:10 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:33:11 Dax Shepard? So then we got interested in what are the five tiniest countries in the world?
1:33:16 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:33:17 Dax Shepard? And the Vatican's, of course, it's less than a square mile. San Marino, I think, was fourth.
1:33:22 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:33:23 Dax Shepard? Uh, Liechtenstein is in there.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 Really? It's that small?
1:33:26 Dax Shepard? It's very, very, very small. And, um, Monaco, of course.
1:33:29 Speaker 01 Oh, sure. Been there.
1:33:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's a tiny little country. And then, once it had that list, it said, knowing how much you like F1, would you like me to tell you what drivers live in Monaco?
1:33:41 Speaker 01 Oh, no. And you weren't even talking about F1?
1:33:44 Dax Shepard? No, but I loved that, because that could have been a next search. So it's like, it wasn't just answering my question, it was encouraging me to learn more, but it knows my interests. I loved that.
1:33:56 Speaker 01 Oh, God.
1:33:57 Dax Shepard? You don't like that?
1:33:58 Speaker 01 Well, because it's like, it's like, it's, it's telling you what to think. Oh, now you're gonna think about F1 right now.
1:34:04 Dax Shepard? No, it's, it's trying to predict what I'll be interested in, and it's doing a good job.
1:34:08 Speaker 01 What if it didn't know that you had a New Year's resolution, Lunar New Year's resolution?
1:34:13 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:34:13 Speaker 01 To never think about. F1 ever again. It was destroying your life. You were addicted and
1:34:19 Dax Shepard? Then it would have said, why did you ask what the schedule was yesterday for the F1?
1:34:23 Speaker 01 Cause you slipped off the wagon, but you're trying to get back on.
1:34:26 Dax Shepard? I could tell it, hey, I'm trying to quit my obsession with F1. It would immediately adjust.
1:34:30 Speaker 01 I know.
1:34:31 Dax Shepard? And it carries out whatever your desires are.
1:34:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, but your desire versus your, your need versus your want might be different.
1:34:39 Dax Shepard? Your first order versus your second order priorities.
1:34:42 Speaker 01 Yeah. Wow.
1:34:44 Dax Shepard? Wowzers. What else did we put up?
1:34:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, there are a few pins.
1:34:48 Dax Shepard? You're freaking out when people cough. Uh, you go invisible. Yeah. So your friend was coughing and you kept asking questions.
1:34:58 Speaker 01 Oh, just if.
1:34:59 Dax Shepard? Could you turn blue?
1:35:01 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:35:02 Dax Shepard? And we're not, and we haven't determined.
1:35:03 Speaker 01 But also, you know, if you're choking choking for real choking, need the Heimlich choking. There's no air through your path.
1:35:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:35:13 Speaker 01 Um, and so you can't cough. So you could still be in a lot of distress.
1:35:17 Dax Shepard? I also think you could have reduced air. I think you could have 80% blockage, 90, 100.
1:35:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, but if you have 100, then you need the Heimlich, right? If you have 50, there are other things you can do to get the thing out and you don't need the Heimlich. Cause you can still get oxygen.
1:35:33 Dax Shepard? Do you, when you hear Heimlich, do you not think about how close it is to Heinlich?
1:35:39 Speaker 01 No, I don't.
1:35:39 Dax Shepard? Do you, Rob?
1:35:40 Speaker 05 No, like a, like a buttlick?
1:35:42 Speaker 01 What even is that?
1:35:43 Speaker 05 Like a Heine lick?
1:35:44 Dax Shepard? Like licking someone's Heine.
1:35:45 Speaker 01 What? No.
1:35:46 Dax Shepard? The Heinlich maneuver. Type in Heinlich maneuver, see how many results there are.
1:35:55 Speaker 01 Okay. First of all, I've never heard it called Hind. Only Heine. Heine is not a hind.
1:36:01 Dax Shepard? You're hindquarters. You've heard that?
1:36:03 Speaker 01 I thought that was H I N D.
1:36:06 Dax Shepard? You're hindquarters?
1:36:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay. Well, Heine is H E I N E Y or something like that.
1:36:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I don't know a lot about Heine, but I, I know hindquarters. And so hind lick maneuver sounds like in that someone's choking you quickly lick their Heine, which freaks them out. And then they spit out the cube. I always picture a cube of steak in someone's throat. Do you have a, do you go to a specific item?
1:36:31 Speaker 01 Oh, food? Oh, that's funny. No, I don't really think specifically, but yeah, in the movies, it's always steak.
1:36:36 Dax Shepard? A big cube of steak.
1:36:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:36:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, or chicken or something.
1:36:40 Speaker 01 Um. Wow, Hein.
1:36:43 Dax Shepard? Heinlich. The Heinlich maneuver. I should patent that.
1:36:49 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Um, oh, guess what?
1:36:52 Dax Shepard? What?
1:36:53 Speaker 01 Chicken butt.
1:36:56 Speaker 01 I started creatine last night.
1:36:59 Dax Shepard? You did?
1:36:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:00 Dax Shepard? Oh, tell me more.
1:37:01 Speaker 01 How do you think I look?
1:37:04 Dax Shepard? Like you have a lot of water in your muscles and in your brain.
1:37:07 Speaker 01 Oh, it brings water there?
1:37:09 Dax Shepard? That's what it does.
1:37:11 Speaker 01 Well, fuck, that's antithetical to my water drinking.
1:37:16 Dax Shepard? No, I would argue with your reduced water consumption, you should have something helping you keep water in your muscles.
1:37:23 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:37:24 Dax Shepard? And then I don't know the function of how it has all these huge impacts on your brain, which
1:37:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I'm doing.
1:37:31 Dax Shepard? tons of data about it, but I don't know if the mechanism is also allowing more water to be in your brain cells or not. But I do know that that's why it works for muscles.
1:37:41 Speaker 01 Do I have like big muscles today?
1:37:44 Dax Shepard? Did you lift? You can't just take it. I am curious how much you've used your gym. Because Monica's a nice gym now.
1:37:51 Speaker 01 I know, I want to use it.
1:37:53 Dax Shepard? Want to.
1:37:54 Speaker 01 I've only lived there a month. Give me a break.
1:37:57 Dax Shepard? You haven't like thought, oh, I should wander down there.
1:37:59 Speaker 01 All the time. I just don't do it.
1:38:02 Dax Shepard? You don't do it?
1:38:03 Speaker 01 My dad used it.
1:38:04 Dax Shepard? He did?
1:38:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:05 Dax Shepard? Oh, great. Did he get a good pump in?
1:38:07 Speaker 01 He used the treadmill.
1:38:08 Dax Shepard? He used the treadmill.
1:38:09 Speaker 01 So I took it last night after my long walk.
1:38:13 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:38:14 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:38:14 Dax Shepard? You were feeling like you're now you're on a virtuous cycle.
1:38:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:18 Dax Shepard? A upward trajectory.
1:38:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. And also it's mainly
1:38:22 Dax Shepard? How long was the walk?
1:38:23 Speaker 01 It wasn't that long. Oh, why are you doing this?
1:38:25 Dax Shepard? I didn't know.
1:38:26 Speaker 01 You're poking holes in my virtuous cycle.
1:38:28 Dax Shepard? That is, that presumes that I think it was low. That's not my position.
1:38:33 Speaker 01 I felt like it was not a long enough walk.
1:38:35 Dax Shepard? Okay, did you walk in the neighborhood?
1:38:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:38 Dax Shepard? Oh, fun, right?
1:38:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I love it.
1:38:40 Dax Shepard? Oh, what a blessing.
1:38:42 Speaker 01 It was really hot out last night, but it was great. I walked for 35 minutes.
1:38:48 Dax Shepard? You did? That's great.
1:38:49 Speaker 01 It's not my Normal. I like to go an hour, but I was getting too hot.
1:38:54 Dax Shepard? So it's been very warm here in California.
1:38:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:56 Dax Shepard? And so we have taken two walks this last five days in down to Hillhurst to have dinner.
1:39:04 Speaker 01 Oh, nice.
1:39:05 Dax Shepard? Which is shockingly fun.
1:39:07 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, it's it's easy.
1:39:09 Dax Shepard? It's shockingly fun. And on the way home two nights ago, you know, all I do is scan for threats. And one of the threats I scan for is like paparazzi. I don't want any pictures of our kids. So I'm constantly looking, oh, that dude got a camera. Is that right? A little bit of a preoccupation. So I said to the family, we're all walking. I said, gang, okay, here is the game plan. If I spot a paparazzi ahead of us, I'm gonna scream, baby duck formation.
1:39:38 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:39:39 Dax Shepard? And then mom gets directly behind me. Lincoln, you get behind mom. Delta, you get behind Lincoln. And all the photographer will see is a picture of me walking down the street. I said to them, which is valueless.
1:39:51 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:39:51 Dax Shepard? So there no one's gonna buy a picture.
1:39:53 Speaker 01 What about from the side?
1:39:54 Dax Shepard? So we baby duck formation can just pivot to wherever the photographer tries to go.
1:40:00 Speaker 01 Okay, got it.
1:40:01 Dax Shepard? So that became this hilarious game. They wanted me to run drills. So it just became me screaming baby duck formation. A lot. And everyone scampering to get in position. And it didn't go well. I'm glad we ran drills.
1:40:14 Speaker 01 Oh shit.
1:40:15 Dax Shepard? Lincoln constantly was, you know, she wanted to be directly behind me, I think.
1:40:18 Speaker 01 Oh, she wanted to be his number two in the line?
1:40:20 Dax Shepard? Yes, he's like, he's a first place finisher type of person. So it's like, whatever. I'm supposed, you know.
1:40:27 Dax Shepard? And then I forget why we had to do a reverse baby back baby duck.
1:40:30 Speaker 01 Reverse back?
1:40:31 Dax Shepard? Reverse baby duck formation.
1:40:33 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:40:34 Dax Shepard? That one doesn't make any sense, but we had to run it just to get good at the drill.
1:40:38 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, you gotta practice lots of iterations because you just don't know what will happen.
1:40:41 Dax Shepard? It was very fun.
1:40:42 Speaker 01 Anyway, I love walks and I took, so I took my walk, my hot walk. It was about thirty five minutes. And then I got back and I did, I was like, I'm tired. And then I was like, ugh, like I'm really have not been moving my body enough. If I if I feel tired.
1:40:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:58 Speaker 01 Um, and then I took a hot bath.
1:41:00 Dax Shepard? Oh my gosh, went the other direction.
1:41:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. Um, cause I wanted to continue my sweat.
1:41:06 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:41:06 Speaker 01 So I took a hot bath, which is really nice, also shorter than I wanted.
1:41:11 Dax Shepard? Because?
1:41:12 Speaker 01 I was hot.
1:41:13 Dax Shepard? Too hot.
1:41:13 Speaker 01 And then I took my creatine.
1:41:15 Dax Shepard? To remind the listener also, you don't ever feel hot.
1:41:17 Speaker 01 I know.
1:41:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:20 Dax Shepard? If I were you and I was feeling hot, I might have like health concerns.
1:41:22 Speaker 01 Well, I, yeah. So I took, um, my creatine.
1:41:30 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, to cool yourself down.
1:41:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:32 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:41:33 Speaker 01 And I'm, I guess I'm taking it for my brain.
1:41:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:36 Speaker 01 More than my body. So I can take it without lifting. I should still lift.
1:41:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's great for your brain regardless.
1:41:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I want to do. And for perimenopause.
1:41:46 Dax Shepard? But, um, you should definitely start lifting.
1:41:48 Speaker 01 I know.
1:41:49 Dax Shepard? It's in your house.
1:41:50 Speaker 01 I know.
1:41:52 Dax Shepard? I'm sorry.
1:41:53 Speaker 01 I know. Okay.
1:41:56 Dax Shepard? Okay. I want to start seeing some like, some guns.
1:42:00 Speaker 01 Look.
1:42:02 Dax Shepard? I want to be like, oh wow, Monty's got some fucking guns.
1:42:06 Speaker 01 Oh, I have a new freckle. Ugh. I probably got it last night because it was hot out. Pissed. Um, okay.
1:42:14 Dax Shepard? Want to do some facts?
1:42:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're gonna do some facts now.
1:42:17 Dax Shepard? Now you don't know if I'm looking at your hair or your shoulder.
1:42:23 Speaker 01 You're looking in neither.
1:42:25 Dax Shepard? You passed the test. I was looking in you directly in the eyes.
1:42:28 Speaker 01 Yep. You can see more than you think.
1:42:31 Dax Shepard? It's not as fun as I want it to be. I need some mirror. I need some like cop mirror sunglasses.
1:42:36 Speaker 01 Okay. This was another huge sim. Unexpected. This really is doppelganger month. At the end of this episode, you said, does anyone ever tell you you get James Hatfield?
1:42:50 Dax Shepard? Oh my god.
1:42:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, once every three weeks.
1:42:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, you're right. God, I hope it continues.
1:42:57 Speaker 01 Me too. And that was a pop out. I mean.
1:43:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:43:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:03 Dax Shepard? Speaking of which, I already told you that Metallica's going to the Sphere?
1:43:07 Speaker 01 That's exciting.
1:43:07 Dax Shepard? Oh my god, me, Erin and Erin.
1:43:10 Speaker 01 You're gonna go?
1:43:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, fuck yes. I can't imagine a funner night to be had than the three of us at Metallica.
1:43:17 Speaker 01 That's a great plan.
1:43:18 Dax Shepard? Oh, I can't wait. I gotta wait all the way to November.
1:43:21 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:43:22 Dax Shepard? Or October. I think they're there like October through something.
1:43:25 Speaker 01 Okay. That's so fun.
1:43:27 Dax Shepard? You didn't happen to see him, it wouldn't be in your algorithm. The announcement when they did it, when they made the outside of the globe Metallica.
1:43:33 Speaker 01 Oh, that's cool.
1:43:34 Dax Shepard? Oh, and the song they played. Oh, it's so cool.
1:43:36 Speaker 01 I'm trying to think, like, what band would I see there? That would like get me there.
1:43:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I mean, you should go be willing to see anybody there.
1:43:44 Speaker 01 I know, but.
1:43:45 Dax Shepard? Cause, cause, cause I went to see U2.
1:43:47 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:43:47 Dax Shepard? And although I was a great U2 fan in my youth, I wouldn't necessarily go see them in concert.
1:43:52 Speaker 01 Right.
1:43:52 Dax Shepard? But I was like, well, I want to go to the Sphere, and the Sphere makes it.
1:43:55 Speaker 01 I know, I'm just like, the Sphere makes.
1:43:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, look at that.
1:44:01 Speaker 01 That'll be really fun.
1:44:02 Dax Shepard? That's so cool, isn't it?
1:44:04 Speaker 01 It is. I just feel anxious about the Sphere for some reason.
1:44:08 Dax Shepard? Lot of stimuli.
1:44:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm a little nervous I'll have a seizure, I think.
1:44:12 Dax Shepard? That's a fair, maybe you should.
1:44:15 Speaker 01 Rob!
1:44:15 Dax Shepard? You should do mushrooms or acid to help with that.
1:44:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe. Um, so, I would, I would maybe see Coldplay there.
1:44:26 Dax Shepard? There you go.
1:44:26 Speaker 01 I love Coldplay. You know what? Everyone wants to shit on Coldplay.
1:44:30 Dax Shepard? Who does?
1:44:31 Speaker 01 As if like, they didn't also love Coldplay.
1:44:34 Dax Shepard? Who doesn't like Coldplay?
1:44:35 Speaker 01 You'll just hear when people talk about it, like, they're the type of person that likes Coldplay. And I'm like, oh my god.
1:44:42 Dax Shepard? So you're, they're every type of person?
1:44:44 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:44:44 Dax Shepard? The only knock on Coldplay I've ever heard is from like, super music nerds that are like, they're just radio, they just ripped off Radiohead, right, Rob?
1:44:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
1:44:54 Dax Shepard? That's the complaint against Coldplay in the music geek world.
1:44:58 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:44:59 Dax Shepard? But I'm like, get real, everybody.
1:45:00 Speaker 01 Whatever. I'm here to say I love Coldplay.
1:45:03 Dax Shepard? Oh, I love Coldplay. I would say, as a group, they have had more songs that have ended up on repeat for me for months on end.
1:45:12 Speaker 01 Same. Um, okay, well, anyway, so if Coldplay goes, then maybe I'll go.
1:45:18 Dax Shepard? You'll be there.
1:45:19 Speaker 05 Taylor Swift you'd see there, right?
1:45:20 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yep. Um, okay, the Hershey School, Milton Hershey School.
1:45:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:45:26 Speaker 01 Cost-free boarding school for low-income children is supported by a massive endowment exceeding seventeen billion dollars.
1:45:33 Dax Shepard? Oof.
1:45:33 Speaker 01 Funded by a controlling stake in the Hershey Company, established in nineteen oh nine. The trust holds approximately 28% of the company's stock, generating immense wealth for the school's operations. It's really cool. I mean, I know it was complicated, but man.
1:45:48 Dax Shepard? He had a bad experience, but I think he was also good about saying there are other experiences to have there.
1:45:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I thought that was really great.
1:45:56 Dax Shepard? Although I don't know why it's not Hogwarts. It sounds like it's funded enough to be straight up Hogwarts. But the experience didn't sound Hogwarts.
1:46:02 Speaker 01 Well, his guy.
1:46:04 Dax Shepard? Maybe like way more advisors. But that kind of money, wouldn't we get like, you know, a buddy for every four kids or something?
1:46:10 Speaker 01 Well, in Hogwarts, they have a headmaster, you know, they have like a house per lady or whatever. Sometimes they're bad, even in Hogwarts.
1:46:21 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:46:21 Speaker 01 Remember that bag, Umbridge? Remember Umbridge?
1:46:24 Dax Shepard? Totally. That's all I think about is Umbridge.
1:46:28 Speaker 01 That's all I think about. Um, you talked about how rich the candy like entrepreneurs were, yeah.
1:46:34 Dax Shepard? Wrigley's.
1:46:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:46:36 Dax Shepard? Mars.
1:46:36 Speaker 01 Mars is still, the Mars are the second richest family in America.
1:46:42 Dax Shepard? Family.
1:46:43 Speaker 01 Family, yeah, not person, but family. That's from Business Insider.
1:46:49 Dax Shepard? Behind the Waltons, right?
1:46:50 Speaker 01 I don't know.
1:46:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the Walmart dynasty?
1:46:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know that.
1:46:54 Dax Shepard? Okay, sorry I brought it up.
1:46:55 Speaker 01 I already know that, but I don't know if that's the one, but it probably is.
1:46:58 Dax Shepard? They always make like, when there's a top 100 billionaire, there's like five Waltons on the list.
1:47:04 Speaker 01 Oh, here are the 25 richest families in the US. This is from Yahoo Finance. This is 2021. A lot's changed.
1:47:09 Dax Shepard? Sure.
1:47:10 Speaker 01 Okay, I'm gonna go to the front here. I gotta go from 25, it won't, the Ga- Gallo.
1:47:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, Ernest Gallo Wine.
1:47:17 Speaker 01 Ja- Joseph Gallo.
1:47:19 Dax Shepard? Wine people, right?
1:47:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, wine business drink prohibition. That was good. How'd you know that?
1:47:24 Dax Shepard? Thank you. Ernest Gallo.
1:47:25 Speaker 01 It says Joseph Gallo.
1:47:27 Dax Shepard? I know, but the brand is Ernest Gallo.
1:47:29 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, Ernest, yeah.
1:47:32 Speaker 01 Cutting that, you shouldn't, you should know more about wine than me. Um, the Rollins family, do you know what that is?
1:47:41 Dax Shepard? Rollins?
1:47:42 Speaker 01 Or Rollins, maybe?
1:47:43 Dax Shepard? Rollins family? No.
1:47:45 Speaker 01 Rollins broadcasting.
1:47:47 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:47:48 Speaker 01 A radio and TV biz.
1:47:49 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:47:50 Speaker 01 Okay, then the Goldman family.
1:47:53 Dax Shepard? Goldman Sachs?
1:47:54 Speaker 01 I'm guessing, yes, Sol Goldman. Stryker family, they're from Michigan.
1:47:59 Dax Shepard? Are they an automotive supply company?
1:48:01 Speaker 01 No, this makes no sense.
1:48:03 Dax Shepard? Lear seating?
1:48:03 Speaker 01 An orthopedic surgeon? Oh, decided to invent his own medical devices to meet his parents', his parents', his patients' needs. One of them is the mobile hospital bed.
1:48:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy.
1:48:16 Speaker 01 That's like when the people made the Ziploc bag, you know?
1:48:19 Dax Shepard? Or the Styrofoam cup that drops down in a coffee machine?
1:48:22 Speaker 01 Oh, that's cool. Okay, the Kathy family, Chick-fil-A.
1:48:28 Dax Shepard? Ah.
1:48:29 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:48:30 Dax Shepard? Great.
1:48:31 Speaker 01 Ziff family, media conglomerate Ziff Davis LLC.
1:48:36 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:48:36 Speaker 01 Okay, Dorance family, do you know what this is?
1:48:40 Dax Shepard? Dorance?
1:48:41 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:48:42 Dax Shepard? No?
1:48:42 Speaker 01 Condensed soup.
1:48:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay, but not Campbell's? Campbell's? Oh, sure.
1:48:48 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:48:48 Dax Shepard? Trusted fucking brand.
1:48:50 Speaker 01 Very.
1:48:50 Dax Shepard? The most trusted.
1:48:51 Speaker 01 Um, Hunt, the Hunt family.
1:48:55 Dax Shepard? Family?
1:48:56 Speaker 01 Actually, Cotton Trader, let's see, Oil.
1:49:00 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:49:00 Speaker 01 This is a different Hunt.
1:49:01 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:02 Speaker 01 Ah, DuPont.
1:49:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:49:05 Speaker 01 We know that.
1:49:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, 3M.
1:49:08 Speaker 01 Ooh, scary.
1:49:08 Dax Shepard? Bell Laboratories.
1:49:10 Speaker 01 What was it called again?
1:49:11 Dax Shepard? Foxcatcher.
1:49:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, great.
1:49:14 Speaker 01 Steve Carell, Channing Tatum.
1:49:15 Dax Shepard? Beautiful film. Oh, Mark Ruffalo, bringing all the heart.
1:49:19 Speaker 01 God, I know. Okay, Bush family.
1:49:22 Dax Shepard? Beer, ding ding ding ding ding.
1:49:24 Speaker 01 That's right, Anheuser-Busch. Oh, no, Butt family, B U T T. He invented farts.
1:49:30 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow, those are free, aren't they? I'm rich if they're, if you can charge for them.
1:49:37 Speaker 01 I guess it's a grocery store.
1:49:39 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:49:40 Speaker 01 But like, I've never heard of it.
1:49:42 Dax Shepard? Maybe they own like, they own Kroger or something.
1:49:44 Speaker 01 I know, but it doesn't say that. Um, yeah, it says H E B, celebrated as one of America's top grocery chains.
1:49:50 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. H E B, that's a southern chain.
1:49:52 Speaker 01 Never heard of it.
1:49:53 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:53 Speaker 01 I've never seen one.
1:49:55 Dax Shepard? You haven't seen a H E B?
1:49:56 Speaker 05 I think it's Texas.
1:49:58 Speaker 01 Oh, that makes sense. Uh, Marshall Family, Marshall's the discount store.
1:50:05 Dax Shepard? Well, originally a department.
1:50:07 Speaker 01 It's not that.
1:50:08 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:50:08 Speaker 01 Brown Family.
1:50:10 Dax Shepard? You, what if it's UPS?
1:50:16 Speaker 01 Jo- uh, Brown Foreman Corp. Kentucky-based spirits and wine producer that gave us Jack Daniels, Finlandia.
1:50:25 Dax Shepard? Ooh.
1:50:26 Speaker 01 Um, that's cool. And George Foreman is involved, or you know, is part of that. Hearst.
1:50:31 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:50:32 Speaker 01 Duncan Family.
1:50:34 Dax Shepard? Not Dunkin' Donuts.
1:50:35 Speaker 01 No. Pipeline Giant Enterprise Products Partners.
1:50:39 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:50:41 Speaker 01 Newhouse Family.
1:50:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, clue.
1:50:43 Speaker 01 Advanced Publications, a publishing company that owns Condonast.
1:50:47 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:50:48 Speaker 01 That's cool. Pritzker.
1:50:50 Dax Shepard? Oh, I feel like I should know that one.
1:50:52 Speaker 01 Hyatt, created the Hyatt.
1:50:54 Dax Shepard? Hyatt Regency chain?
1:50:55 Speaker 01 And it invested in industrial holding company Marmon Group.
1:50:59 Dax Shepard? Okay, I don't know.
1:51:00 Speaker 01 Cox Family.
1:51:01 Dax Shepard? Cable.
1:51:02 Speaker 01 Evening News, yeah. Johnson Family.
1:51:06 Dax Shepard? Fucking Johnson, yeah. Very trusted brand. Cotton Swabs.
1:51:10 Speaker 01 Well, I don't, I don't know if this is Johnson and Johnson, because it's, the Johnsons own half, almost half of mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments.
1:51:18 Dax Shepard? Okay, not those Johnsons.
1:51:19 Speaker 01 Huh. Oh, S C Johnson is next.
1:51:22 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful.
1:51:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. Windex, Glass, Ziploc, oh.
1:51:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're basically Procter and Gamble size.
1:51:31 Speaker 01 Thirty-seven Bill.
1:51:32 Dax Shepard? Bill.
1:51:33 Speaker 01 Thirty-seven Bill.
1:51:34 Dax Shepard? Bill.
1:51:34 Speaker 01 Lotter. Estee Lauder.
1:51:38 Dax Shepard? Nice.
1:51:38 Speaker 01 Cargill McMillan Family.
1:51:42 Speaker 01 Grain storage business in Iowa.
1:51:45 Dax Shepard? Of course.
1:51:45 Speaker 01 Wow. Um, Mars family number three, we got there.
1:51:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:51:51 Speaker 01 Ninety-four billion.
1:51:52 Dax Shepard? Nice. Congratulations, guys.
1:51:55 Speaker 01 Two, the Koch family. Hundred, hundred billion.
1:51:58 Dax Shepard? Mmm.
1:51:59 Speaker 01 Wow. Number one, you got it. Walton family, two-hundred-and-forty-seven billion.
1:52:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:52:07 Speaker 01 I wish the Costco family, um, had more. Cause they're a really upstanding place.
1:52:14 Dax Shepard? They are. They're great. They're great.
1:52:16 Speaker 01 Um, alright, let's see. That was unexpected. Didn't mean to do that.
1:52:21 Dax Shepard? I'll add a cool thing to Waltons, too.
1:52:23 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:52:24 Dax Shepard? To get their inheritance.
1:52:26 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:52:27 Dax Shepard? They have to do a public works project in Bentonville.
1:52:30 Speaker 01 Mmm.
1:52:31 Dax Shepard? Where they're headquartered. So Bentonville has all this impossibly great stuff because of this weird.
1:52:36 Speaker 01 Oh, that's funny.
1:52:37 Dax Shepard? So they have like a crazy good museum with like an impossibly good art collection.
1:52:41 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:52:42 Dax Shepard? They have a crazy public parks bicycle network. Like, they have a bunch of cool things. Because they have to take on a public works project to get their money. I like that.
1:52:54 Speaker 01 That's cool.
1:52:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:52:55 Speaker 01 I wish it could be countrywide. And not just in Bentonville.
1:53:01 Dax Shepard? Well, you know, that's a conservative liberal thing where conservatives
1:53:06 Dax Shepard? believe you make your community good. And if everyone makes their community good, the whole place will be good.
1:53:11 Speaker 01 Well, not everyone can make it good because we don't have two-hundred-and-forty-seven billion dollars.
1:53:16 Dax Shepard? Well, then you gotta move to Bentonville.
1:53:17 Speaker 01 Oh, my god. Okay, how much was fifty thousand dollars? That's what he was making in ninety-six.
1:53:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said like two-hundred, maybe?
1:53:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, a hundred and three thousand, six-hundred-and-forty-nine dollars.
1:53:28 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:53:29 Speaker 01 Okay, well, look what we haven't done in a while. Bitcoin.
1:53:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. Well, we missed a huge cliff.
1:53:36 Speaker 01 Oh, and we missed, I know.
1:53:38 Dax Shepard? Around the Super Bowl, it lost like half of its value and we did not report on that. Which is probably smart. It's too, too sensitive at that time.
1:53:45 Speaker 01 Oh, well, it's up today.
1:53:47 Dax Shepard? What's it at?
1:53:48 Speaker 01 It's at seventy thousand, three-hundred-and-ninety-two.
1:53:50 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:53:51 Speaker 01 But when we were talking.
1:53:51 Dax Shepard? It was like one-oh-six or one-twelve or something?
1:53:53 Speaker 01 Okay, um, the restricted Boltzmann machine. He said he thought it was out of Jeff Hinton's lab, but wasn't a hundred percent sure, but he is right.
1:54:01 Dax Shepard? Oh, good.
1:54:02 Speaker 01 Um, but I'm gonna give credit to Paul Smolensky.
1:54:07 Speaker 01 He rose to prominence after Geoffrey Hinton and collaborators used fast learning algorithms for them in the mid 2000s. Okay, and then, that's it.
1:54:17 Dax Shepard? That's everything.
1:54:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, the last one was doppelgangers, but I already talked about it.
1:54:21 Dax Shepard? Covered, he covered that.
1:54:22 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:54:22 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
1:54:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, really good stuff.
1:54:24 Dax Shepard? Love you.
1:54:25 Speaker 01 Love you.
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