Ray Madoff (on how billionaires avoid taxes & threaten capitalism)

Ray Madoff (The Second Estate, Immortality and the Law, Practical Guide to Estate Planning) is a Boston College law professor, author, and tax-policy expert. Ray joins Armchair Expert to discuss being a proudly mediocre high school student, reluctantly trading philosophy for law school, and becoming a terrible Wall Street tax lawyer who loved teaching. Ray and Dax talk about America’s return to a pre-revolutionary aristocracy, how “salaries are for suckers” among the ultrawealthy, and why $50 trillion in wealth yielded only $28 billion in estate tax. Ray explains why high earners and wealth holders aren’t the same, how fair taxation could rescue capitalism, and why the problem is the system and not billionaires themselves. Thank you to our presenting partner Lilly. Lilly’s Foundayo™(orforglipron). Advertisement Disclaimer: Please see Indications and Safety Summary with Warnings for Foundayo™(orforglipron) at https://www.foundayo.lilly.com/risk Start your 2 month free trial today: https://youtube.com/premium . Terms Apply. Cancel Anytime. Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. My name is Daniel Shepherd and I'm joined by Monica Badman.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Wow, what if your name was Daniel? You would be so different.

• 0:09Dax Shepard?

  I would be a claims adjuster.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you'd be still wearing those glasses, though.

• 0:15Dax Shepard?

  I would. Well, I'd only have these glasses, I'd have to look at a lot of claims and I can't see anything anymore. Okay, our guest today, and this was, if people listened to the Ezra Klein episode, she was suggested to us by Ezra. And boy, was he right. Great lead. I'll take more suggestions from him.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Send them over, Ezra.

• 0:34Dax Shepard?

  Our guest today is Ray Madoff, and she is a professor at Boston College Law School, where she teaches in rights, in tax law, in policy, wills, and trust law, and estate planning. She is co-founder and director of the Boston College Law School Forum on philanthropy and the public good. Now, hold on, guys, don't run. It's not a tax law.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  No, it's so interesting.

• 0:59Dax Shepard?

  It's one of the most interesting guests we've ever had. Her book is called The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy. So, everyone's very understandable frustration with the huge income inequality. You know, one guy's got a trillion dollars and we find out what these people pay in taxes, it's infuriating. Well, we find out how that's happening.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yes, it's really necessary because she breaks it all down, how this, what the loopholes are, how this happened.

• 1:28Dax Shepard?

  And if you like capitalism, some of you don't, that's fine. I happen to like it. This is an enormous threat to capitalism.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  The billionaires not paying is a threat.

• 1:40Dax Shepard?

  It is, yes. It makes capitalism not work as a system, and our system has to work for everybody. So anyways, this is fascinating. The numbers in this are gonna absolutely make your head spin. Please enjoy Ray Madoff. We get support from Quince.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.

• 2:05Dax Shepard?

  I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  $60! $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is, because they go straight to the factories, they skip the middlemen, and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy, it's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 2:45Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time, and he looks iconic.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  It's a uniform. And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel-quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully-designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home, too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.

• 3:13Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is presented by YouTube Premium. YouTube was already great, but Premium supercharges it. If you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Now, let's get into today's episode.

• 4:10Dax Shepard?

  Oh, God. Oh, and you too are in uniform. I'm down.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I can't tell you how many outfits I cried before I got on.

• 4:18Dax Shepard?

  Oh!

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Very casual t-shirt. Nobody wears sandals. Nobody wears sandals.

• 4:23Dax Shepard?

  You haven't seen them yet on the show?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I've only seen sneakers.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Believe me, I went and tried on 50 pairs of sneakers.

• 4:30Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  I just looked like a man.

• 4:33Dax Shepard?

  You look super cute.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  No, sandals are great.

• 4:35Dax Shepard?

  Let's just start there.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Thank you, that's the most important thing.

• 4:37Dax Shepard?

  And you have a savage tan. Has the summer been treating you?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  I was on Martha's Vineyard. Okay, and here is the conversation that I didn't hear myself, but a good friend of mine heard at the Beach Plum Inn. I grew up going there my whole life. A friend of mine was eating breakfast at the Beach Plum Inn, and she heard somebody say to the guy that was running the breakfast, "You look just like Dax Shepard." And he goes, "Oh, my God, that's a huge compliment." And he's my favorite podcaster.

• 5:06Dax Shepard?

  No! I'm so delighted.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So nice.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Isn't that nice? Is there anything better than a compliment heard behind your back?

• 5:13Dax Shepard?

  Wait, how come you've been going there since you were young? Are you from Boston or something?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I'm from Boston.

• 5:18Dax Shepard?

  Wow, so you're from Boston, you teach in Boston?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  And even worse, I'm from Newton. I teach in Newton and I live in Newton. Really make me like the guy that, you know, is working at the gas station, never left.

• 5:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you end up with Ray? Disclosure, we have a historically male name given to our daughter, so I love that.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  You do?

• 5:38Dax Shepard?

  Lincoln. Our firstborn is Lincoln.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Wow, okay, here's the weird thing about Ray. So I was actually named after my grandmother, who was a sort of a huge figure in our family at large. And she came to this country and she was like Rivki or Rishki or something like that, but everyone called her Ray, and then she spelled it R-A-Y. The weird thing is, I have yet to meet a single Ray in my whole life spelled R-A-Y as a woman. And it's weird, because women are named everything. Women are named Joseph, women are named Frank. No women are named R-A-Y. You'd think it would be a good name.

• 6:13Dax Shepard?

  They name it R-A-E?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  R-A-E, or it's like, you know, Norma Ray, like a second one.

• 6:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Issa Ray.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  And here's the really weird thing. So there was a movie. It was one of these really lame rom-coms where somebody had to go into the witness protection program. A couple had to go to the witness protection program. They were about to get a divorce, and they witnessed a crime. Together, they had to go to the witness protection program.

• 6:36Dax Shepard?

  Great premise.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  And they went to Ray Wyoming. Okay, spelled R-A-Y. The penultimate line in the movie, because of course they end up getting together. And obviously, they have a baby, obviously, they have a little girl. And the penultimate line is, and we'll call her Ray, and the ultimate line, we'll spell it R-A-E. Literally, as if like, it would be too implausible. Everything else was very plausible, but the idea that they'd name a girl R-A-Y, that was just too much, beyond the limits.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  That is so funny.

• 7:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, willful suspension of disbelief would have been violated. So even though the town was spelled presumably R-A-Y.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  They could have changed the name of the town. I mean, it was probably a fictional town. Somebody obviously swept in last minute and said, "Whoa, this cannot be."

• 7:24Speaker 01

  No one will believe this.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  No one will believe it. It'll be an outrage.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Before everyone totally believed it.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Exactly, believed it all.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Do you walk into a lot of rooms and people expect to see a male?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yes, well, here's the problem. So originally, of course, and I think you're being very deft about this, and nothing I wouldn't expect.

• 7:42Dax Shepard?

  I know the definition of deft.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Okay, but well, you'll get there with the story.

• 7:46Dax Shepard?

  Context clues?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Whoa, your name. Tell me about Ray. And not your name, are you related to the biggest crook in the history of the world?

• 7:55Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's too pedestrian for me. That's on a silver platter, Madoff. I mean, that's what everyone is gonna say.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Of course, that's what everyone's thinking. No, no, they don't say it. They just think it. So let me just clear it up. So the Mediev's and the Megidowskis all came through Ellis Island, and they gave us both the name M-A-D-O-F-F. We have always been Madoff. We then found out, back in the day when we wanted to be related to them, because my uncle wanted to get Madoff.com, Madoff.org, remember, early in the internet, you could get them. And they said, "This guy from New York has hoovered up all of the M-A-D-O-F-F." Yes, but we didn't know who he was. And then, yes, the plot.

• 8:38Dax Shepard?

  So it's Madoff?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  We're Madoff, yes. But the problem is this. When I say it's Madoff, not Madoff, basically, it sounds like I'm saying that's Frankenstein. Like, literally, I'm definitely trying.

• 8:51Dax Shepard?

  What would be great is if I had dug up an interview from the early 90s of you where you were saying Madoff.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly. I can't even tell, I can't even correct people because I just sound like I'm being a big jerk and trying to be like, no, that's not us. We're Madoff, not Madoff.

• 9:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, my first question is, I would say it's kind of unconventional for you to be drawn to the field that you're in. You're a law professor and you specialize in tax law, estate law. How do we explain that interest?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know it. First of all, I need to say I am a proud member of the highly mediocre high school student.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Oh, good for you. Congratulations.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. Yes, super proud.

• 9:32Dax Shepard?

  Are you ADHD, do you think?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I think I probably am because all of the things like I do better if I'm doing two activities at once and that type of thing. Okay, so I was a highly mediocre high school student, barely in the top half of my public school class. Mediocre scores. I somehow thought that the SATs were sort of like a blood test. And I thought, well, I'm smart and it tests smart. Therefore, like any piece of crap answer I give must be the right answer because that's what it's testing. I was really out of it. And so I started at UMass, which was the best thing that ever happened to me because I found this philosophy class with this professor who was just tremendously influential in my life.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, I found this area that really spoke to me. I loved it. I loved everything about philosophy. I then had an identity. I became a really good college student because I like totally was into the subject.

• 10:30Dax Shepard?

  You were on fire for it.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  I was, yeah, loved it and I had an identity and it was great. And I eventually graduated college with a degree in philosophy and wanted to go on in philosophy and be a philosophy professor. But it was the era where somebody said to me like, you're insane. If you're lucky, you'll get a two-year position in no place, nowhere.

• 10:51Dax Shepard?

  So lots of competition, few slots for philosophy?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  No slots for philosophy professors when I graduated college. And so I did what I think probably 50% of my college class did, which is I went to law school. After a year of like, I don't want to go, I'm not going to go to law school. I'm not going to be pre-professional. I'm not going to do that. Anyway, I went to law school, which I shockingly loved. It was actually super interesting.

• 11:13Dax Shepard?

  I would imagine it was appealing because I think on the surface, when people think of law, they think of their interaction with jurisprudence as opposed to like, law is all about thinking.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:23Dax Shepard?

  It's all about structuring language, right? It's very philosophical.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Very much so. And I loved it. I loved law school. It was so fun for me, particularly because I had worked a year and I could see what types of jobs were available, which were things like a note from my supervisor who said, please call information and get the phone number for this person. It's like, okay, you could have done this in the time that you told me to do this stupid task. Anyway, but law school, very intellectually engaging. But the thing is, I thought that the value of law school for me was I would be able to do good. Because philosophy, I liked, but I also had that feeling of like I should do good in the world.

• 12:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Also, the questions, even in philosophy, were like, does redness exist?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not solving any.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  You're not solving any problems. Exactly. And so then I went to law school. I thought, I'm gonna like, and the issues back in the day were like saving the whales and battered women. I'm like, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna be like a hip litigator. I'm gonna be so hip in law school, applying my analytic philosophical skills and fighting the good fight. And in my second year of law school, I did a litigation clinic. And I also took corporate tax. I took it because it was in the 80s. And I was in at NYU law school where everybody was doing like a one-head, two-head test for the big law firms. Very easy to walk into the big law firms. And they were like, just take corporate. Anyway, so I took corporate tax and I was shocked to find that I had no feel for litigation

• 12:56Speaker 02

  because you couldn't just think your way through. My husband's a litigator. You have to get a deposition that has someone say it. Then you have to get a case that says it. Then you have to do something else. It's so much form.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Red tape.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  And for somebody who's like a little.

• 13:11Dax Shepard?

  Was it, did it feel tedious?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  It felt tedious and like I did not have the patience for that type of thing.

• 13:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tedium to me is a, that's my.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  No, no, it's absolutely. My bedmar, being bored, I cannot tolerate it.

• 13:23Dax Shepard?

  I mean, come on, I've diagnosed you. This is great.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  I didn't even realize. I should never have gone to anybody else but you. So are you also on the same personality type?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  I mean, at this point, it seems like every single person has it.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  First, we've all been come that way with our phones.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  I guess we all have it.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  I was actually thinking that one of the things I was looking forward to is I'm getting like a two-hour break from my phone here. Which I think is huge.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's age or I think it's just the times. We can't focus. None of us can focus.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  It's very hard.

• 13:51Dax Shepard?

  Our brains have been hacked with stimuli and they're responding accordingly.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  It's hard to know what's in you and what's from the outside.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  And I didn't like litigation. But what was particularly destabilizing was I found that I loved corporate tax. Now, one thing is I had a woman professor in corporate tax. So that does, I think, make a difference. She made me think like, okay, this is for you. You could do this. But also, it turns out that it's really very similar question. So like a big question in corporate tax is what's debt and what's equity? That's a lot like what is redness? Does redness exist?

• 14:25Dax Shepard?

  Sure, because it depends, right? Where you're viewing that from. It can change on a dime.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  What are the parameters? How do we conceptualize the world is a lot of what tax law is about. And I went off to Wall Street because that's sort of what everybody did. Super easy at the time. And I was probably one of the worst tax lawyers ever. I could do it, but I could not care less if my clients paid taxes or didn't pay taxes. Like, you know, what you want as a tax lawyer is somebody really, they treat your money like their money, their way. And for me, it was like a little intellectual exercise. Super interesting. And I definitely didn't have a preference one way or the other.

• 15:00Dax Shepard?

  Hardly interested in the outcome.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 15:02Dax Shepard?

  That's not what you want for your lawyer.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. Someone who finds it an intellectual engagement.

• 15:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I see that you're having fun, but do you have any sense of how this is gonna end? No.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. Nor do I care. You may owe $10 million. I don't care. But very, very luckily, I got a position in teaching, which I had long wanted to do. If you remember back in philosophy, I love school. I love fall in New England. I love that you put on your plaids, you go back to school. The whole thing about it, I love. I love students, campus. Campus. Now it's coffee. Now you walk around with your coffee all day long. What's up to life? It's the best.

• 15:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, it's dreamy. Okay, so we must get into your book. I'm gonna start with the title because my first question has to do with the title. The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy. So I think my first question for you is, can you tell us a little bit about pre-revolution France? Where this term originates? The Second Estate.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Can I tell you a little bit about how, what the book was supposed to be called in my dreams originally?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Yes, they always make you change the name, right?

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Yes. So when I put in my proposal for the book, it was called Why You Pay More Taxes Than Billionaires.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Cut straight to the chase.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  That's what I thought.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  And my editor, the person who'd become my editor, he said, love the book, but if you insist on this title, I will not use it. And so I'm like, all right, I want to publish with you.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Was he himself a billionaire and he felt offended?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  I don't think so, no. He didn't really give me a reason, but he did say, I think you should call it this. The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy. This was like in our original correspondence. And I thought to myself, there is no way I am calling it that. Like, I'm gonna yes him to death and say, yeah, sounds great.

• 16:54Dax Shepard?

  Kick it down the road.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. But I was thinking, forget it. It's bad enough that it's a book about taxes. And now I'm gonna layer on that it is a title that you don't understand at all. So now you'll be confused, then you'll find out it's taxes. Like, none of this was seeming to be work for me. But what happened was, I began to look more and more into this whole thing about the second estate. And I realized how unbelievably apt it was. And it actually came to me to be like one of my favorite things because he liked the idea that the title was a bit of a mystery. And in fact, I think if it had been Why You Pay More Taxes Than Billionaires, it just would have looked like every other book on this subject.

• 17:39Dax Shepard?

  We're gonna get into it towards the end of this. But yeah, there is a climate right now and people, a lot of people hate billionaires.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:46Dax Shepard?

  Across the board. They're the villains. So this book is more substantive than that. If I'm looking and I'm like, oh, here we go, there's another, let's kill all billionaires.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:54Dax Shepard?

  I'm off put by it. It doesn't feel thorough.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  That's right. So the second estate, let me go back to that for people who don't know, because I myself, and the most often thing people say to me is, second estate, like, the fourth estate is the journalist. That's all anyone knows. The fourth estate is the journalist. And that's true. The fourth estate here in the United States are the journalists. But basically, in France, in pre-revolutionary France, the first estate was the clergy. The second estate was the aristocracy. And the third estate was pretty much everyone else, right? Your bourgeoisie, your peasants, all of those people. And what was interesting about it was that the clergy, of course, didn't pay taxes and owned a whole bunch of land. But also, under the explicit French rules,

• 18:41Speaker 02

  the aristocracy had these special privileges, like they were the only ones who could carry swords and they were the only ones that could hunt in certain places. And their best privilege was they were explicitly written out of the tax system. So they didn't have to pay taxes just because they were aristocracy. And what's interesting is that you didn't have to be born into an aristocracy. You could actually buy your way into an aristocracy because people would sell their title. And so basically, there was this guy named Dupont, who was an economist in France. And he said, the only way to avoid taxes is to become very rich. And I thought, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because that is exactly the situation here in the United States.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  And I think what makes this a very good title, if I may, is because.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  The public doesn't really know this. The public doesn't know that the rich have been written out of the tax system.

• 19:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Because by its appearances, it seems to be heavily burdening the rich because it's heavily burdening a portion of the rich. But the real rich, it's giving a free pass.

• 19:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I think even in your book interchangeably, and I think we could use it going forward as like there's rich and then there's wealth. Often what we're talking about is like wealth being exempt from.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 20:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And I think that one problem that we've had is that there has been a conflation of high income earners and high wealth owners. And this has been caused by a lot of different people. In part, Democrats had a role to play in it. I think what they were trying to say was we're not going to raise taxes for people who earn less than 400 million. But people heard it as if you earn 400 million, you're the problem. And that is not the problem. People with high incomes are paying lots and lots of taxes.

• 20:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  And it's politically, I think, been a big mistake not to recognize the high burden carried by high earners.

• 20:39Dax Shepard?

  I agree.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  What do we qualify then as wealth versus high earners?

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Right, so basically, the issue is that if you earn money through work, you have a podcast, you do, you're an actor, you know. No matter what you do, when you earn money, you pay a lot of taxes. And it used to be the case, prior to 1986, that there were all sorts of ways that people with high income could avoid taxes because we had tax shelters. Remember, there was a lot of talk about tax shelters. You might be, you're giving me the fake nod of like.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  No, I've heard my parents talk about.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  1986, no.

• 21:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  You hear your grandparents talk about back in the day?

• 21:19Dax Shepard?

  She was born into a tax shelter free America.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:23Dax Shepard?

  I remember quite well, I was 11, watching 60 Minutes with my grandparents every weekend. And yeah, that was a regular topic.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yes, they actually, and this was under Reagan, closed the loophole that allowed high income earners to reduce their tax liability. My father was a doctor, so he was always being told to go into tax shelters. In any event, all that came to a crashing stop in 1986 because they closed that loophole. They said you can't offset your work income with what they called passive losses. So that closed that loophole, and it has been closed. So right now, you have lots of people who have high incomes and they're paying all the taxes.

• 22:02Dax Shepard?

  As I like to say.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:03Dax Shepard?

  I work for free until July 1st.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Ah, yes.

• 22:08Dax Shepard?

  I start getting paid July 1st.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:10Dax Shepard?

  Right, so yeah, I give away half of what I make across the board.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:14Dax Shepard?

  I'd like to go through it chronologically. So I think let's first talk about when we get a tax code in 1909?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  No, so the first tax code is earlier during the Civil War era. It has a very expansive definition of income. It has lots of really interesting stuff to it. But we have a very conservative Supreme Court and they find the whole tax unconstitutional.

• 22:34Dax Shepard?

  So it's gone?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  It's gone. And so the country is entirely relying on tariffs.

• 22:39Dax Shepard?

  Tariffs, yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Tariffs, so the early part of the 20th century. So let's place ourselves where the world is, right? We're post-Civil War, and then we have the rise of the industrial age. And with the rise of the industrial age, we all of a sudden have these super rich people that we didn't have before. We have Vanderbilt, we have Carnegie.

• 22:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  And then their kids are getting the money and they are acting like royalty. They're building mansions all over Newport, New York.

• 23:07Dax Shepard?

  This is really relevant, right? Because that was this unheard of explosion of wealth that the common people got to witness and like, hold on, what's going on? And that's currently happening again.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 23:17Dax Shepard?

  In a very dramatic way. So these are very parallel.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  That was the time, you might have heard the phrase conspicuous consumption because there was a book written by Veblen called The Theory of the Leisure Class. And it described about how they proved their worth in the social world by showing off their wealth. And they had these extraordinarily lavish parties. They had elephants serving champagne. They had cigars. They'd give you as a little party gift, a cigar that's wrapped in a hundred dollar bill.

• 23:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  And so you had this lavish lifestyle. But at the time, people were thinking, this is very un-American. America is a place of equality and America is a place without dynastic wealth. It's a meritocracy. And Jefferson wrote about his concern about this false aristocracy of wealth. We should have an aristocracy of merit, not an aristocracy of wealth. And yet, the country had become a place where we had this massive accumulation of wealth of people who were running around wearing crowns. And also was the time where, under our constitution, you can't have a title of aristocracy. But what they would do is because they so loved aristocratic life is they'd sell off their daughters, right? Downton Abbey, all these other shows.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  They were going to England and they were marrying off their daughters so they could bring royal titles to their family. And Cornelia Vanderbilt wore a crown around New York City.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Okay, so the problem is that there came to be a concern about the stability of the country and about capitalism itself surviving. And if you remember, McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, right? There was real concern that the country would be thrown over because socialism was so big, right? Socialism was running through Europe and Russia and leaders were being overthrown. What was this country going to do? And because of that, there was a big push to let's make sure we don't have this aristocracy anymore. Let's bring taxes into the picture. Because the other thing is, is that tariffs are an interesting type of tax because tariffs, what they do is they raise prices.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  And so they really affect, back in the day, they really affected farmers and regular consumers, both because of things that were imported, but also because of things in the United States that were produced in the United States. Now they could raise their rates because their competition was knocked out by the tariffs.

• 25:45Dax Shepard?

  And it's asymmetrically painful for lower class people. This is my issue with the gas tax in California. I'm like, this is a liberal state. Why are all of our taxes are punishing the people that it affects the most?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:57Dax Shepard?

  Like get rid of this fricking gas tax.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Exactly, okay. So that was the mess we were in. You had Carnegie writing in the Gospel of Wealth, "We've got to do something because we need to maintain the alliance between rich and poor. Everybody has to be in this thing together." And he said, "What we need to do is we need to have really, really heavy taxes on transfers of debt to make sure that we don't have a bunch of rich people running around and not taking, not contributing to the public."

• 26:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, it starts to threaten the core of capitalism.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:33Dax Shepard?

  Because we're all playing Monopoly. Anyone who's played knows, once you have Boardwalk and these other ones, the game can't be played. So if someone's starting life owning Boardwalk, how is this now capitalism?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so it's an effort to save capitalism ironically.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  To save capitalism, and that's why Teddy Roosevelt also advocated for taxes because he was worried that capitalism would crumble.

• 26:54Dax Shepard?

  I think we're in a, back to the parallel.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Believe me, exactly.

• 26:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, scary.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  And so, you know what? I think what we have had until now is scary. I think that this might be a solution, but I don't want to.

• 27:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't know, that's the end.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  That's the end, that's the end. But right now, you have all these people very concerned. And even the Wall Street Journal wrote, "We've got to do something about taxes here. We have to because we have all these rich people and they're an affront to what it means to be an American. Because what it means to be an American is to work hard." Even DeTocqueville, who was that, you know, famously reflected us about what the American culture was, said like, "What makes America, America is that everybody values work." Now we got a bunch of rich kids sitting around and they're showing off their money and this is very destabilizing. So the answer, even though Teddy Roosevelt was a big advocate for it, he never got it through. It wasn't until 1913 that we got first the constitutional amendment

• 27:50Speaker 02

  that allowed the new income tax, and then three years later, the estate tax. And then in 2024, the gift tax to back up the estate tax. So now we had a way that we were actually going to tax rich people. You have to realize that they had all these investments and the investments produced dividends. And so they were taxed on their investments during their life and they also produced interest. So like the two ways of profiting from your investments were to get interest and dividends. And then on top of it, there was this additional tax that was imposed whenever the property was transferred. And together, these taxes were designed to impose taxes on the richest Americans based on their capacity to pay.

• 28:32Dax Shepard?

  And was it always progressive? When did it become progressive?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Well, originally, it was just a tax that only applied to the richest 5% of Americans.

• 28:39Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  So 95% of Americans were completely exempt. Then, when it came time to funding World War II, we had to do another round of tax raising. And so they say it changed from a class tax to a mass tax. But then we had, to keep it that it was based on capacity to pay, we had these progressive rates, which meant that the later dollars that you earned, the higher dollars were taxed at a higher rate than the earlier dollars.

• 29:05Dax Shepard?

  So this was working pretty well, right? We had kind of a golden era between World War II and the 70s. And then things start to change in the 80s.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  They start to change, yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 29:20Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your teeth before walking into a meeting? You smiled at six people in the hallway confidently, full teeth? You felt great about it until you caught your reflection and realized you'd been carrying a piece of spinach like an accessory since lunch. Yeah, checking first is a good idea. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We get support from our presenting sponsor, YouTube Premium. Now, you already know I'm a big YouTube person.

• 30:02Dax Shepard?

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• 30:20Speaker 01

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• 30:21Dax Shepard?

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• 31:03Dax Shepard?

  and lets me continue watching on another device from right where I stopped. So I can start a video on my TV while brushing my teeth and pick it right back up on my phone on my morning walk. So yeah, YouTube was already great, but Premium supercharges it. If you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. We get support from Superhuman. I'm someone who wants to do big, meaningful work, but the small stuff eats up my day before I even get to it. The endless emails, docs, scheduling, follow ups that pile up. By the time all that's cleared, there's no energy left for the ambitious stuff. Most AI tools promise to fix that, but they require opening a new tab, re-explaining

• 31:48Dax Shepard?

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• 32:34Dax Shepard?

  So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 32:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 33:15Dax Shepard?

  Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age appropriate experiences for teens.

• 33:30Speaker 01

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

• 33:34Dax Shepard?

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

• 33:48Speaker 02

  So, but I just want to say one other thing about this period that was sort of relevant. So there were a couple of things that were going on that helped fortify this system. One of them is the fact, as I said, that there was a threat of socialism. And then in the 1940s, like when FDR was doing it, there's now a threat of communism.

• 34:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, even scarier.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was scary. And so there was a real understanding. If we want to have a capitalist country, capitalism has to prove that it serves the country as a whole. And the way that it serves the country as a whole is that when somebody makes a load of money, they share the wealth through taxes. And so that's the legitimacy. Taxes serve to legitimate a capitalist system when it's working right. And that's why it is so disturbing and concerning what's going on now.

• 34:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's very much threatening capitalism.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Yes, and in a way, this threat to capitalism, I think, is going to be the thing that saves us. Because without a threat to capitalism, you're not going to get the broad public support to actually impose meaningful taxes. Because people are going to grab as much as they can get away with. We've seen this over the past 40 years. This is what's happened. So what happened? Why did this change? The system worked well enough, right? We had high taxes on income and we had taxes on estates and gifts.

• 35:08Dax Shepard?

  Like estate, meaning you've accumulated all these assets and wealth. When you die, that's getting passed on. That's the estate. So at that point, the government would like to take 40% of that.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  This only applies to like the richest 1% to 2% of Americans. So a small slice of the country.

• 35:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, even currently, you can give away up to $15 million. So this all is active after $15 million.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 35:29Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  The current estate tax, $30 million per couple. But we'll see how it's not even active for that.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And sorry, gift is just giving any amount.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Except for, there's a bunch of exceptions. So you can give, this is the subject I teach, so now I'm all excited. I got to explain to you estate and gift tax in just three minutes. So basically, it applies to all transfers at a 40% rate, right? With a $15 million exemption, but there's a bunch of things that it doesn't apply to. So for example, you can make unlimited transfers to a spouse, unlimited transfers to charity, and then you can give to as many people as you want every year, $19,000 per person per year. So the idea of it is to keep it out of regular people's lives. So regular people can live their lives, but when we start talking about transferring

• 36:21Speaker 02

  massive amounts of wealth, we're going to have this system. And the important thing to be aware of that I want to say upfront, because I think the public has been duped about some of these things, is that the income tax system entirely exempts all money received by gift, inheritance and life insurance. Life insurance is the biggest scam going. So for example, let's just say somebody earns like, you know, $200,000 or $100,000. They pay about $30,000 in taxes. Okay, between payroll and income taxes. Somebody else is handed $100 million out of a life insurance policy?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  That person doesn't even have to tell anyone.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  They pay no taxes. They don't report it to anybody. It is entirely free. This is your business.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  So the system is so unfair on the income tax side. Because the other thing is, if somebody finds 100 bucks on the street, they're supposed to pay taxes.

• 37:24Dax Shepard?

  That's interesting. So if you find money, like a treasure or whatnot, you're supposed to, or you have a gold mine, you find the gold.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Treasure trove, we call it in the law. If you win a prize, if you win the lottery, if you get unemployment insurance, social security, right? You're forced to pay taxes on every way. If you do a barter exchange, if a plumber does plumbing for a web developer and a web developer creates a webpage for the plumber, they are both supposed to report taxable income on their tax returns. And the IRS has all sorts of like, here's how you do the barter exchange information.

• 38:00Dax Shepard?

  They have a table you can go to?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. And in one area, it's like, we're closing every single loophole. And another one, right this way, tax free, no worries, right? It's the real velvet world for the people who are lucky enough to get gifts, inheritance and life insurance. And like, who are those people? Those are the super rich. Those are not regular people. And there's been a big duping of the public about this. They have not been educated about, which is sort of why I'm a little bit of a crazy zealot these days. Because I do think that when the public knows, then they see how unfair it is and they're less likely to be duped.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Back to your question. So we're in the period where we have this system, where we have this estate and gift tax system. The income tax system gives a free pass because we count on this estate tax system to do a good enough job with the richest Americans, right? We carve out 99% of the public and then we say, here's where you're going to be paying the tax. We'll collect it at the person who's transferring it. Now, I think the reason for that is because back in the day, The way people transferred property, when they transferred property to death, it went through probate court. It was kind of an easy, convenient time to collect this information, right? We weren't living in the modern information age where we track everything. And so it kind of made sense

• 39:19Speaker 02

  to impose it on the person who died. But I think that that had a little bit of an Achilles' heel in it. Because then, as we'll see in the 1990s, as we're coming up to this point, it made it vulnerable because you're like taxing dead people. For some people, they'll already have paid a lot of taxes on it, right? So if you think of like Paul McCartney, he's probably a billionaire, but he's probably paid taxes along the way on the royalties and on all the things that he gets. And they really marketed it very successfully. So basically, let's talk about what happened, right? What happened to make this thing fall apart? And it's a couple of different things. I would say the most significant thing

• 40:03Speaker 02

  was the attack on the estate tax. So here's what's interesting, is that the estate tax was very non-controversial. And Congress used to do its job keeping it up. So in 1976 and 1986, one of the problems with the estate tax was that people could avoid it by creating multi-generational trusts. And it would go from generation to generation. And so Congress enacted a new tax called the Generation Skipping Transfer Tax that was designed to impose a tax at each generation. 1986, 1990, Congress was at it again. And they enacted a tax because people were finding a way to squeeze the value of their assets. So they were hiding value. Congress said, we can fix it.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  And they enacted something called special valuation rules. And what's interesting is both of these things happened under Republican presidents. This was not a political issue. This was a, this is a tax.

• 41:00Dax Shepard?

  We gotta fund this enormous government of ours.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  We have to fund the government. Exactly. And it's appropriate to have this tax and to maintain it. In 1990, what happened was a group of 18 of the country's richest families, the Waltons, the Mars, the Kochs, right? All of the, all of the favorites. They're all around still today. They funded this campaign to turn the public against the estate tax. Because if you think about it, they were already able to avoid the income tax by avoiding salaries. So one way people avoided is salaries are for suckers. You don't want a salary. And then the other way was through investments, which we'll talk about. They avoided, they stopped getting dividends. And they started to do stock buybacks, all of this type of stuff.

• 41:43Dax Shepard?

  They've gained all the other.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  This was the last stubborn one. And so they started a campaign.

• 41:47Dax Shepard?

  What was the man's name?

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Chester Thigpen.

• 41:50Dax Shepard?

  What a name. Chester Thigpen.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Chester Thigpen. A grandson of slaves who had a Christmas tree farm. Kids would come play in the farm. And the neighbors would hunt. And as my son said to me, I hope not at the same time. But in any event, he was this very idyllic figure, very sympathetic.

• 42:07Dax Shepard?

  He testified in Congress.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Matter of fact, he testified many, many times in Congress because he was a favorite. And he said, I have worked my whole life for this Christmas tree farm. And it's beautiful and I love it. I want to pass it to my family. And I'm going to be hit with the estate tax. It's going to become timber. It's going, the whole farm is going to be destroyed. And this was tremendously effective.

• 42:30Dax Shepard?

  I mean, just also, just picking that farming is so manipulative.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, marketing ad. And I want to get back to that point because it's really important. By focusing on family farms and businesses, if we think back to this whole thing, remember when I said that in the early part of the 20th century, there was a concern because we had all these rich people running around? And people thought of Americans as being people who had family farms and businesses. That's what it meant. But it was because it supported a livelihood. People would work on the farm and then their kid would work on the farm, right? Yeah. But what's happened is, is that the Mars, the Kochs, all of these people, they're trying to say that their companies, they're not saying it directly because they know it won't sell, is like a family farm. Right. We're just a family business, right? It would be like Carnegie saying that US Steel is just a family business. Yeah. You know, it's crazy.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  But this is what they have pulled over the American public's eye.

• 43:24Dax Shepard?

  And as it turns out, Thigpen would have not been affected at all because the estate tax already preempted that.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yes. When he died, he was not subject to the tax. Because he didn't make enough money.

• 43:35Dax Shepard?

  Because it was under the threshold.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  It was under the exemption. Because he had a Christmas tree farm. Exactly. Exactly. The exemption was big.

• 43:41Dax Shepard?

  It was wholesome.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:43Dax Shepard?

  Down home-y, yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  And also, we have all sorts of protections for family farms and businesses in the tax code, for real family farms and businesses that provide low interest rates and special valuation. And we could easily exempt real family farms and businesses. And back in the day, I testified in Congress, it was obviously a Republican Congress at the time because it was called the impact of the death tax on family farms and businesses. Anyway, and I got a call from some Democrats like, will you go testify in this thing? And I was like, it was ugly.

• 44:14Dax Shepard?

  Also, they've now rebranded it as death tax as opposed to a state tax.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they called it the death tax. And they basically made it seem, they ran such an effective campaign that even today, a huge portion of the public believes it primarily hurts low and middle income people. I mean, it's crazy. It was a tremendously effective campaign. So when we look at what happened since this campaign in 1990, right? One thing that happened was, so Bush was the big leader of repeal the death tax. I hear his voice in my head. H W Bush. No, George W. Bush. Oh. Yeah. H W Bush. H W Bush actually was the one under who we had the special valuation, actually fortifying the estate tax, right? But George W. Bush, he was part of this campaign. It was the era of government is bad. Let's get government off our back.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Like, it was all sorts of things that gave rise to all this stuff. But when George W. Bush enacted this thing, what he did was he said, okay, let's have a gradual increase of the exemption amount and a decrease in the tax rate. And in one year, we're going to have no estate tax at all.

• 45:24Dax Shepard?

  This is bizarre. I mean, I don't even really know functionally how this happened. It just went away for one year.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Because he didn't have the votes to have permanent repeal. Because we have these rules that anything that costs the government money has to be resolved within 10 years. This would have cost the government a lot of money. And so you had to fit it within the 10 years. So we had one year, and we called the Jubilee year for rich people to die. Oh, wow. And rich people died.

• 45:47Dax Shepard?

  Some people got lucky.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, some people, Steinbrenner got lucky.

• 45:51Dax Shepard?

  One of them had $20 billion or something.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, Steinbrenner had a load of money.

• 45:55Dax Shepard?

  God bless those kids, man. They just got the whole lot.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Did anyone kill themselves? No, that was the year, by the way, there was a lot of humor amongst the estate planners of like, things to get your relatives in that year, which were like, you know, warm chicken salad. Right. Hang gliding lesson. Yeah. You know, it was, we sort of had our day. The estate planners had their day briefly.

• 46:17Dax Shepard?

  Hang gliding. Let's get grandpa some hang gliding lessons. Also, granddad, have you ever tried heroin? You shouldn't leave the planet without trying that one time.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. But then next year, Obama was in office. The estate tax was scheduled to revert to its $1 million exemption and like a 60% tax, right? But Obama, he ended up just kind of continuing. He made a $5 million exemption. He continued it because he knew the public had been turned against the estate tax.

• 46:44Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  But then, of course, Trump came in and he doubled it to $10 million. And now it's $15 million. But that's not the real issue. And this is a super interesting part of the story, which is that the real way that they succeeded was that Congress stopped closing loopholes. The last time Congress has closed a loophole in the estate and gift tax was 1990.

• 47:11Dax Shepard?

  36 years ago.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  George H. W. Bush. And so the thing is, the way tax rules work is you count on Congress. Basically, Congress provides rules. Taxpayers find their way around rules. Congress is supposed to close the loopholes. Tax, right, it's a dance between taxpayers and Congress and the IRS.

• 47:30Dax Shepard?

  Cat and mouse.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Yes. But all of a sudden, Congress has engaged in quiet quitting. They are doing nothing. And so as a result, there has been an explosion. And so what's happened to the estate tax is instead of it being a well-maintained tax, it in fact has become a tax that is a tax in name only. And I'm going to give you two reasons why we know this is the case. One of it is because it raises basically nothing.

• 47:56Dax Shepard?

  I'll just hit you with those numbers. In 2000, there was 122,000 estate tax returns. In 2010, there was 47,000. In 2013, there was 32,000. And in 2021, there was only 2,584.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the number has gone way, way down of estate tax returns. But even more concerning is the tiny, tiny amount it raises. It raises hardly anything. Now only $28 billion. $28 billion, an amount that Elon Musk easily gains and loses in a single day. Yeah. Multiple days. It's nothing. But here is the biggest, in case you need any further proof that the estate tax now works for the benefit of the rich people rather than as a harm, is the fact that in 2025, when Trump is in office, he has the capacity to have whatever tax bill he wants.

• 48:45Dax Shepard?

  Because he has the Senate, the House, and he is in the executive. So they can pass anything they want.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  They can pass anything he says in his campaign as opposed to the death tax, the immoral double death tax, right? But guess what? Doesn't even mention it.

• 48:59Dax Shepard?

  He doesn't get rid of it.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  He keeps it in the books.

• 49:02Dax Shepard?

  So crazy.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  And the reason is, by keeping the estate tax, believe me, if rich people had wanted it repealed, it would have been repealed. But what happened is, is that rich people realize they benefit. Because if you actually repeal the estate tax, people would wonder, wait, wait, I don't understand. You can get $100 billion tax-free, never pay anything on it?

• 49:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  It's only because they're pretending they're subject to the estate tax. Yeah. It provides cover for the rich, no real tax burden.

• 49:29Dax Shepard?

  Blame the estate tax.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Look, I'm carrying 40%. Well, I'm paying them. And that's sort of the tricky, super interesting part of the story.

• 49:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so this is what I think the headline of all of it is. So in 2021, ProPublica published leaked IRS returns.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. By Charles Littlejohn.

• 49:46Dax Shepard?

  Who is now.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  These names are great.

• 49:47Dax Shepard?

  Imprisoned.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  I know it. You'd think I'd made it up. But if I was like a fiction writer, I'd be so proud.

• 49:52Dax Shepard?

  Very Charles Dickens, all the.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:54Dax Shepard?

  So in this article, what was revealed is that the true tax rate that Warren Buffett was paying

• 50:02Dax Shepard?

  Remember, the highest rate on income is 37%.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:07Dax Shepard?

  He was paying 0.1%. Bezos was paying 0.98%. Michael Bloomberg was paying 1.3% and Elon Musk was paying 3.27%. And now, this is my favorite part of the book, is how the mechanics work of them not paying any taxes.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Somebody who earns $60,000 a year pays in just federal taxes, $14,000 in taxes, okay? Can you imagine that? You're getting by on $60,000 a year. That can be the difference between having a car or paying your rent or buying food or health.

• 50:44Dax Shepard?

  Less than a thousand bucks a week to live on.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  You can't live like that.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  No, you absolutely can't. And yet, these people with their massive wealth are like, we're doing such good for society. I mean, or what they say is, I don't know if you saw the recent interview with Bezos where he was interviewed by Andrew Ross Orkin.

• 51:01Dax Shepard?

  Mm-mm.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  And there's a lot of perpetrating of this baloney. And they go, look, the top 1% are already paying 40% of the taxes, right? You hear this all the time.

• 51:13Dax Shepard?

  Which is true.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Which is true, but they're not talking about that.

• 51:16Dax Shepard?

  No, they're talking about everyone in Beverly Hills, all these neighbors here.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  They're talking about people with high income.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  The high wealth owners hide behind the high income earners

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  and make it seem like they're paying taxes when they're not.

• 51:29Dax Shepard?

  So I think we should go slow here and lay out some terms, but you have a couple of different kinds of taxes. One of them is income tax. Everyone listening virtually will be paying income tax. You receive a check on Friday, they withheld money, that is your taxes. The other kind of tax is capital gains.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought you were going to talk about the other very important tax, the hidden tax for the person who earns a paycheck.

• 51:48Dax Shepard?

  The payroll tax.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:49Dax Shepard?

  Which is 15%?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  15.3%.

• 51:52Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  It's a significant, when I talk about our person who earns $60,000, most of those taxes are payroll taxes. Payroll taxes start at dollar one, they're really burdensome, and they're entirely hidden from the public. Because if you look on your pay stub, they're called like contributions. Have you ever been confused by that?

• 52:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and then social security's in there. Don't they even break down?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  They call them FICA, FUTA.

• 52:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they break it into a few categories.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they put them in different pockets. You don't know what the heck they're, but they make it sound like, because they call it contributions, and then you get from social security, sometimes they'll send you these periodic statements, this is how much you have. They make you feel like you've somehow set this money aside for your own savings.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  And now, when they're going, we gotta cut social security, hey, all these people that are paying social security now, for current retirees, you're saying like, we're gonna screw these people?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  After they've paid for everybody else? It is so unfair.

• 52:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  So anyway, payroll taxes, I just want to make sure that we mention those because those are very burdensome. And, as you might recall, when Mitt Romney said 47% of Americans, they're takers, not makers. And they're gonna vote for Obama no matter what, because they're not giving to society. And they were not paying income taxes, but almost all of them were paying payroll taxes. And payroll taxes are so burdensome, when you actually look at the figure of non-payers, including payroll taxes, the number is like 16% of non-payers, which is basically the same number of people we have over the age of 70. So this story about the non-payers, and Republicans love this story, we have to have a skin in the game tax. I mean, these are the people who are actually paying taxes.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  These are the people who are actually paying double taxes, not the inherited wealth people who are paying no taxes. And that's the thing that the public, again, is being misled about.

• 53:40Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you have ceiling of 37% federal income tax, and then you have the payroll tax, and then you also have capital gains tax, and that is set at 20% plus 3.5%.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  3.8, yeah.

• 53:52Dax Shepard?

  3.8. And that is if you sold a house, you might have dealt with capital gains. You bought a house for 100 grand, you sold for 150, you have $50,000 of income, but that's capital gains tax.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:01Dax Shepard?

  And then the other place capital gains applies is investments. So I bought Nvidia, I 10x my money, I'm gonna pay on that 90% of, you know? And that's set at the 20% and then the 3%. We could debate all day long why that is capped at 20%. You're gonna find that I'll dance. I'm not in full alignment with you. I do think there's a global thing where we do need to protect people, but we'll get to that.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  You might think you're not in alignment with me, but we'll say.

• 54:26Dax Shepard?

  Maybe, maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  You are, but, okay.

• 54:28Dax Shepard?

  So at any rate, now, there are incredible ways that are so inventive to get around these, which is why we're seeing someone like Buffett pay 0.1%. So, if you never sell the stock, you've never realized the gain, there's nothing to apply the 20% tax to. So, anyone whose livelihood comes from ownership of a company, ownership of all these different stocks, as long as they don't sell it, they're not gonna be taxed on it. Which, again, I can make a great argument for, we'll get to that down the road. But, explain how people are living. How does Bezos have a yacht in many, many homes?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  How do they have any liquid money if it's all in?

• 55:11Dax Shepard?

  This is incredible.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Let's talk about Larry Ellison, because he's been spending like crazy.

• 55:17Dax Shepard?

  $30 billion he has in loans or something like that?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Maybe more, because he actually had to incur another 40 billion on his purchase of Paramount, which he's also been backing. So Larry Ellison is somebody who spends a lot. He bought the island of Lanai in Hawaii just for fun. By the way, on the island of Lanai, he bought all the businesses on the island, and he also owns all the property. And he put into his contracts, if you get fired from your job, I am throwing you out of your house.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the kind of nice guy he is. Anyway, so he runs this island, right, like a fiefdom?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  How is this legal to, I can't, okay, anyway.

• 55:54Dax Shepard?

  On the plus side, there's two Four Seasons on that island.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  There's two Four Seasons, exactly.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  That he owns?

• 55:59Speaker 02

  Yes, he owns the boat, he owns the property.

• 56:01Dax Shepard?

  Cause they're just a management company.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. He owns it all. Anyway, it's interesting actually, because I met somebody from Molokai, and they said that a rich person tried to acquire Molokai in a similar way, and the island of Molokai fought against it. And they're getting back at them by leaving everything just to be like waste. They're not taking care of the property, they've bought it all, they have abandoned theaters and everything else, and they won't sell it back. Sort of like, nice island you got here, you better, you know, it would be a shame if we didn't keep it up.

• 56:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Anyway, so that's just another story of billionaires run amok.

• 56:35Dax Shepard?

  And he owns Oracle.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  He owns Oracle.

• 56:37Dax Shepard?

  A big chunk of Oracle.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, he owns about 30%.

• 56:39Dax Shepard?

  Always in the top 10 richest people in the world.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, super rich. He owns tons of Oracle, he buys tons of stuff, he never sells his Oracle stock. But what he does is he uses his Oracle stock as collateral and enables him to buy loans. And because it enables him to get money to buy everything he wants to buy.

• 56:58Dax Shepard?

  I want everyone to go step by step. So Larry Ellison walks into a bank, and he says to them, hey, I'd like a billion dollars, and I will secure it with a billion dollars of equity, of my stock.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, or 1.5 billion of my securities.

• 57:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so a bank's primary mission is to loan out money. The risk they incur is what if the people don't pay? How do we get the money back? And that's all done with collateral. When you buy a house, the house is theirs, right? So, he says, let me just put this stock up as the collateral, I'm gonna borrow a billion dollars. And then what happens? So he starts receiving, does he get it all in one chunk, right up front, whatever?

• 57:33Speaker 02

  You know, I'm sure, whatever he needs, because remember, these people are in the business of lending money.

• 57:40Dax Shepard?

  The banks.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  The banks, or private lenders, you don't have to be a bank, you know, all sorts of people. They lend, and that's what their business model is, and they want to lend to Larry Ellison.

• 57:49Dax Shepard?

  It's risk-free.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Well, is it though? Cause even the collateral isn't an asset, isn't a tangible asset if the stock market crashed.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  So what happens is, they retain the right, and this has happened with some other owners of companies. And Oracle, by the way, it's gone down about 50% in value, in part because of over-leveraging of Oracle, and then add on to it Ellison's extreme leverage. The lender holds the stock, and so then, they're gonna make a margin call if it falls in value. They're gonna be like, give us more stock, or sell your stock, or we're gonna sell your stock because we're gonna protect ourselves.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  So they're able to sell it if it's a BO?

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can sell it.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Got it. So the bank can sell the stock?

• 58:29Speaker 02

  The bank can sell it. He doesn't return it, the bank can sell the stock.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Got it, okay.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  So they are well-secured, they're very well-protected, and they get more stock than they need to cover their debt.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  I see.

• 58:39Dax Shepard?

  So step by step, he goes into the bank, I want a billion dollars, great.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  They go, thank you, Mr. Ellison, here it is.

• 58:44Dax Shepard?

  Here's this amount of stock as collateral, he gets a billion dollars, he spends it. Now, he's on some schedule, what's the average terms of these loans? Are they one-year loans, five-year loans, 20-year loans, do you know?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Well, I think that the point is that they can be demand loans. So, most Americans think about loans in connection with their mortgages, right? Or their student loans. Okay, we're lending you money for some set period of time, then we wanna get our money back. But there's another way of lending money, which is called the demand loan, which is like, we're giving you money, no set time, you just pay the interest, and that's fine with us.

• 59:15Dax Shepard?

  Great, so he borrows a billion dollars, it's at 3%, so every year he's gotta give them $30 million back of this billion dollars. Now, at some point, he can then go to Bank B and say, hey, owe this bank a billion dollars. I need a billion and a half, I pay off that loan.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:34Dax Shepard?

  He gets his securities back, he gives them now to this bank, they can just leapfrog endlessly.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  And he doesn't need to leapfrog endlessly, because if you think about it, you're in the business of lending money. Who would you rather lend money to that you don't want it back? If you get it back, you gotta find another rich person to lend it to.

• 59:50Dax Shepard?

  You said this on Ezra Klein's podcast, like, they don't want the money back.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  They just keep going back to the bank. Asking him for more money.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. They love you to do that.

• 59:57Dax Shepard?

  So my question in all this was, I am unclear. Eventually, the bill comes due.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Says you.

• 1:00:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, at some point, either the bank's gonna have to sell those securities. I'm saying when he dies.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Why? I mean, the point is this, you're living in a world where you are imagining that this amount that he's borrowing is like bumping up against the total money that he owns. I think a more accurate way to think about it is like, imagine you needed $10 and you need to borrow $10 and you needed to be able to pay back $10 and then maybe you needed to increase it to $80. There would be no difficulty with you paying it back or passing that loan on and having your kids take over the loan, right? You have to realize the amount, as much as they borrow, I mean, this is crazy because of course he's borrowing enough literally to buy Paramount, Islands, everything. But his wealth is extraordinary.

• 1:00:53Dax Shepard?

  Yes, but here's my only question. So he borrows a billion, eventually he goes through that, right? He borrows a billion and now he's got to borrow another billion. And that's fine because now he's just still making the interest payment on the original billion.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  And he's by not having sold his stock. Oracle's an interesting case because it did plummet in value.

• 1:01:10Dax Shepard?

  That's why I like, like Bezos is an example.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  So prides himself, he wants to get all sorts of credit for not borrowing against his stock. He's actually occasionally sells his stock. He thinks that he should get a big pat on the back. This is what he was telling Andrew Ross, or again, me, I sold some stock.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess that is better than.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the point isn't whether people sometimes pay capital gains or not. The point is that we have people with multiple hundred billions of dollars and they are able to choose whether or not to pay taxes when nobody in this room can decide, you know what, I don't feel like paying taxes.

• 1:01:49Dax Shepard?

  There's no game for me to even play.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  There's no game for you to play. Here's what I want to do, and actually I have a little gift for you guys, even two if you'd like them. Okay.

• 1:01:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay. It's important to let people know from that original story we just told them about the borrowing, that you pay no income on a loan.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:04Dax Shepard?

  That's really important. So he gets a billion dollars from the bank. That's a loan, presumably he has to pay it back, so that's not income.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:10Dax Shepard?

  Because we might have missed that. People might not have realized, yeah, that billion dollars, he didn't pay one penny.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Right. Your congressman actually is working on a bill right now to tax borrowings. Say that then should be taxed. Some people think that that's way, I think there's other ways of solving it.

• 1:02:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Okay, but so we're talking about like debunking myths, right? One of the myths is like the top 1% are already paying 40%, no, that's high earners. And the other is 40% pay no taxes, no, they're paying payroll taxes. Okay. The third myth I'd like us to debunk today, here and now, is this idea that the rich don't have enough money to make a difference. We're gonna have to tax the middle class. You hear this all the time, right? We have to go up to the middle class because the rich simply don't have enough. So here I want to give some numbers, I'm gonna give broad, general numbers. In 2025, the government took in about $5 trillion. They spent 6.9, actually 4.96, so they had to borrow 1.8, add it to our debt.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  By the way, this year, today, it just came out, I don't know if you saw this, the highest interest rates that the government has ever had to pay on 30 year, 5.2%. We are paying so much money, a trillion dollars a year just to maintain this debt. This is when we have $7 trillion of expenses, 5 trillion of income, right? We are spending a full trillion just to maintain this debt. And the other thing is, by the way, if we go to back in the day, you used to not be able to go to war and not raise taxes. In the 20s, we raised taxes when we went to war. Now, it's in the 21st century, oh, we're going to war, push it on to our kids, our grandkids, let them pay for it. We don't have to pay for it. Okay, big problem.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  But so we had to borrow because we didn't raise enough money from the richest 1%. And as people like the Wall Street Journal and now the Washington Post like to say, and the economists like to say, that's because the rich people are already being heavily taxed, not true. And in any event, they don't have enough money. You know this already, so I can't say, I'd like to say, guess how much, maybe I could.

• 1:04:13Dax Shepard?

  Let Monica on.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Guess how much, we had to borrow just under $2 trillion. Guess how much the richest 1% owned at the end of 2025?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Guess how much the richest 1% owned?

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  So now you know, the total revenue that the government took in was 5 trillion, okay? From all sources, this is from corporations, payroll taxes, tariffs, estate, the whole, this is so mean of you to put Monica on the spot. The whole enchilada. Okay, so how much wealth do you think the richest 1% owned? Nobody knows the answer to this, by the way, so don't feel bad.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I'm scared to answer.

• 1:04:48Dax Shepard?

  But you say a reasonable number. What do you think's a reasonable?

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Poor Monica, this is mean.

• 1:04:53Dax Shepard?

  Not trick, which is what do you think the total value of the assets of all 1% are?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  But including the wealthy people.

• 1:04:59Dax Shepard?

  Just the top 1%?

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm sorry, the top 1% of wealth owners, not income earners, the top 1%.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Wealth owners.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Good, okay, Monica, you're an A student.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:05:08Dax Shepard?

  Always has been.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  You do not have ADHD, you're like, I can already tell because you're paying very, you're not just jumping to some obvious answer. No offense, but yes, go on.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  So 50?

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  You know what?

• 1:05:21Dax Shepard?

  50 trillion?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Dax Shepard?

  Is it 47 or 50?

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  It was 47 when I wrote the book because it was 2024.

• 1:05:30Dax Shepard?

  Okay, and now it's 50.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  50 trillion in 2025, 55 trillion now. Their wealth is growing astronomically. By the way, 50% of the country owns under 5 trillion.

• 1:05:40Dax Shepard?

  So right out of the gates, you just say, a logical first one say, okay, with a 40% state tax, if the youngest person in this lot is 40, in 40 years minimally, we are going to get back $20 trillion in estate tax. That's what the number should be. If there's 50 trillion out there, we should get 20 trillion in the estate tax.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  Or it should be subject to the income tax.

• 1:06:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but just alone that, that could solve the gap for 10 years.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:06:18Dax Shepard?

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• 1:07:00Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:56Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 1:08:12Dax Shepard?

  If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Do yourself a favor and just try it. Future you will be grateful. Visit betterhelp.com/tax to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash tax. We get support from our sponsor, Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for.

• 1:08:50Dax Shepard?

  Foundo is a once daily prescription GLP one medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

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• 1:09:45Speaker 06

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• 1:10:02Dax Shepard?

  This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace, and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing, and Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours, but at some point, you're ready to put it out there, and that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need

• 1:10:44Dax Shepard?

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• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  The other thing is that's going on is there's been enormous gifting that's going because that's where all the action is. And do you know how much the estate tax raised from this 50 trillion, now 55, but when it was 50 trillion? We had that number, 28 billion out of 50 trillion.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:29Dax Shepard?

  A trillion is 1,000 billions.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  So the middle class is making up for that other five trillion.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  I feel that this chart really shows it all.

• 1:11:39Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Gift, okay.

• 1:11:41Dax Shepard?

  Thank you.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  So this is this idea that it doesn't matter if these people pay taxes. We had to borrow 1.8 trillion dollars, and we know that many people in the top 1% of wealth owners don't have to pay taxes because they don't have taxable income, which by the way, is the reason why the Buffett rule was such a snow job on the public.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Yes. So back in the day, Warren Buffett said, when Obama's running and even before then, Buffett says, this is so unfair. I pay taxes at such a lower rate than my secretary. My secretary pays payroll taxes, income taxes, I pay capital gains taxes. But he was hiding the lead when he said that, because the problem, well, yes, it's true, rates probably should be the same. We might disagree about that. But the bigger point is that he didn't have any taxable income, because he only earned, his total salary was $100,000, including bonus. He would never take more than that, and he even reduced his salary for the private use of his office.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  He was like, I gotta pay the company back for that. So we got like a $90,000 salary, right?

• 1:12:54Dax Shepard?

  What was he living on? Was he selling occasionally?

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Well, he had a little bit of side investments that were his own private thing.

• 1:13:00Dax Shepard?

  Outside of Berkshire Hathaway.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  But and then Berkshire Hathaway, he had as the policy of Berkshire Hathaway to never issue dividends. If he was issuing dividends, he would have had regular taxable income, but he knew not to issue dividends, because just as salaries are for suckers, dividends, particularly in the 20th century, when they were subject to tax like ordinary income, were also for suckers. So now he didn't issue dividends, and that's why he didn't have any taxable income. So a rate differential wouldn't have made any difference with him.

• 1:13:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so the two things that blew my mind about this book was, A, how they function, learning about this borrowing against your money, never really paying, that was startling. But what's crazy is how the tentacles of this change everything about the whole financial sector, which is dividends, right? So you had an investment in a GE, they profited X amount of money. Well, they don't keep it, they distribute that to the shareholders in the form of dividends, which get taxed as income tax at the highest 37%. So slowly, these companies decide, well, shit, our shareholders don't really want to pay that income tax on these dividends. We don't want to pay taxes on it. What if we take that profit?

• 1:14:16Dax Shepard?

  We buy back shares from people?

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Let's just stop for a second, though. Up until 1982, the only way a company was allowed to share profits with its shareholders was to issue dividends. That was it. So a dividend is simply the way that the company earns money, they're worth 100, they earn 10, they distribute 10, and that was how companies worked. And then it was subject to that.

• 1:14:41Dax Shepard?

  And when I was growing up, when you were buying a stock and you were a middle class person, you were looking for a company that had a great dividend. That was the whole game.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  That was the whole game. And in the 1970s, 70% of returns of stock value.

• 1:14:54Dax Shepard?

  I think it was 74.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  74%.

• 1:14:56Dax Shepard?

  74%.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Came from dividends. It was all dividends. And what's really interesting is what the stock market looked like. It looked like a jiggly, like a sine curve that went in a very narrow margin. So in 1982, the stock market was at about 3,000. It was also about 3,000 in the 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, all the way back to the 20s, it had been 3,000. This is inflation adjusted. So the stock market just looked like a squiggly line, and that's because every time the company shared profits, it became profitable and their value went up, they shared the profits and the value went down because the money was sent out to people.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Okay? But then in 1982, something happened, which is that under Reagan, he had a Dean Witter executive be the head of the SEC. And one thing that companies were not allowed to do was to go out into the market and buy their own shares of stock, because when they did, what that did was it boosted the price. And they said, this is price manipulation.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  You can't just distort the value. But in 1982, pretty much on his own, this Dean Witter executive that became head of the SEC said, it's okay, we know it's price manipulation, we believe it, but we're just going to let people do it because they want to do it. And as a result, since 1982, it has never been more than like 16%, maybe 17% of profits have been shared through dividends.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  Because instead, companies are buying back their own shares like crazy. And last year, more than a trillion dollars was spent buying back your own shares. And when you buy back your own shares, rather than the stock price going down, the stock price stays up and maybe even goes up a little higher, right? Because you've reduced the total number of shares that are outstanding.

• 1:16:50Dax Shepard?

  More demand, less supply.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  And that's why one of my favorite charts in the book is this chart that shows the stock market from 1915 to 1982, looking like this squiggle line. And then in 1982, it takes off like a hockey stick, because, of course, there's a lot of reasons. This is not the only reason. I don't want to get like.

• 1:17:08Dax Shepard?

  No, we've had huge booms.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Booms and this and that.

• 1:17:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  But before, if you had booms, you'd be sharing profit.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  You still had to share the profit somehow. And also executives began to be compensated with stock and based on the value of stock price. So a lot of things happened to cause stock prices to increase. But the point is that from tax worldview, that we used to have a system that taxed, the big theme, we used to have a system that taxed people according to their capacity to pay. Now we have written the rich out of the tax system. We've created our very own second estate.

• 1:17:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Nice pivot.

• 1:17:47Dax Shepard?

  Beautiful. The way you wrapped it up, you took all the loose ends and braided it like Rapunzel. I wanna bring one more terrible thing that's happening into it, and then I wanna have some just fun questions, and then maybe it'll be pushed back, maybe it won't be. But the other huge thing that has to be addressed is step up in basis.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:18:05Dax Shepard?

  No?

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 1:18:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Isn't that what ultimately they're getting out of the estate tax with?

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  No. Step up in basis is a super giveaway that we shouldn't have. But it's not the nature of the problem. It's just like the, what we call in Boston, the Jimmy's on the ice cream. Jimmy's are the chocolate sprinkles. It's the garnish. You already have like all the benefits of caprica. So I'm gonna explain what step up in basis is. People love to say, the problem's step up in basis, let's fix step up in basis. That would be letting the biggest problems Remain.

• 1:18:38Dax Shepard?

  I got you.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Remain. So here's what, let me explain what step up in basis is. And we also call it the angel of death loophole. Okay, so, let's say you bought Nvidia stock, and it went up to $10 million. You bought it for like 50 cents, and now it's worth $10 million. If you sell it, you'd have to pay this 23.8%, but instead, if you pass it on to your kids at death, they're treated as if they bought it for $10 million, even though nobody's paying any taxes on it because we have an exemption amount. There's no estate taxes on it.

• 1:19:08Dax Shepard?

  How is this not the most enormous, if I'm trying to get $50 billion out of this person, and their $50 billion is solely held in stocks that have appreciated, and they pass it on to their children, the children inherit it, they're not saying, oh, 40 billion of that is profit. Am I misunderstanding?

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  You're misunderstanding, because the example that I gave was $10 million.

• 1:19:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so let's do that.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  This creates a problem, because it creates this problem of lock-in effect. Nobody wants to sell anything. People don't wanna sell their homes, they don't wanna sell their stock, they wanna pass it on to their kids because they can avoid taxes. The thing is, the cost of it is you have to pass it at death. And if you're passing property at death, it's much harder to avoid the estate tax. All of those things that arose, remember I said a whole bunch of loopholes arose, and they're called like crats and cruts and grats and gruts, and intentionally defective grant or trusts, and the flourishing of all of those things, they are all dependent on gifting. And gifting, when you give property, your kids get the same basis that you had, or whoever you give it to.

• 1:20:15Dax Shepard?

  Explain basis.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you bought your Nvidia stock for $50, it's now worth $10 million. If you make it as a gift to Monica, of course, just because you love her, she has your basis, which is the amount that you paid for it, $50. So when she sells it, she would have to pay gains based on subtracting $50 as the amount that she had invested. If instead, you gave it to Monica when you died, she would get a $10 million basis, so she could sell it for $10 million, and she'd have no taxes. Yeah. Okay. But when we're talking about where the real money is, which is our very rich people, and all of our private equity people, we haven't even talked about them, right?

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  They are all avoiding taxes because they're essentially creating zero value gifts. They are doing zero dot grats, and all these different things, that'll be too boring to explain, but basically what they're doing is they're finding a way to transfer property, make it look like it's worth nothing, and then it pops up, and the other person's worth all this money. But you can only do those during life. Very hard to do them at death. And that's why the step up in basis is something that people love to point to, like, because it's such an outrage. Where the real problem lay is in the fact that somebody can start a company, or do something that's worth nothing, they become worth several hundred billion

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  dollars, they never pay taxes during their life, they give it away, they never pay taxes, they give it at death, they don't pay income taxes, right? There's never a tallying of the gains. And that's the problem. It's not the step up in basis, which is kind of, yes, that's so egregious, but the bigger problem is that we should be taxing those gains to the person who earned them. And this was proposed by both Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. That is how common sense bipartisan it is. Exactly. And it's the rule in Canada, right? When you transfer property, that's the person who enjoyed the gains. Mark Zuckerberg

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  has enjoyed the gains. Larry Ellison has enjoyed the gains. Let them pay the gains when they transfer the property, not just when they sell it. That's how we should be addressing that.

• 1:22:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so here's my couple of questions, because I would say, if I had to plant a flag, I would say I'm a centrist.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  I'd say I'm a centrist.

• 1:22:39Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. So my fears are a couple of things. So, we've seen a huge impact on economies when they raise their lower business taxes, right? This is like, pretty well-established. England had a horrendous business tax for a while, and then Thatcher yes slashed that, and they kind of revitalized their financial sector. We are competing in a global economy with other countries that can host companies, I'm using just business taxes as an example. Because it's a global economy, and because many of these multinational companies can put themselves anywhere, countries have had to compete with business tax rates, right? What's the business tax rate? 15% or something, or 20?

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:23:21Dax Shepard?

  It's small, right? But it's small.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  Corporate taxes raised, they're at their own complexity, and there's a lot of reasons why they're complex. One is this issue of competing, right? But there are movements that there would be a global agreement to have a minimum.

• 1:23:36Dax Shepard?

  In the absence of that, though, we have to be competitive, is the point I'm making.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Maybe, I'm gonna leave that aside, because the point is that when you're talking about an individual, I mean, do you wanna move to Qatar? Because you'll get lower taxes there? I don't think we have to worry about Americans. First of all, we have a big exit tax for somebody who leaves the country. You can't just pack up all your stuff and

• 1:23:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, right, right. And they track you down, they're good at that.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  You have a big exit tax, and then you give up your US citizenship. Is that really something somebody wants to do? That's a big move. So I don't think we have to compete globally when we talk about personal taxes.

• 1:24:10Dax Shepard?

  But, the reason I bring it up is we're now starting to see attempts at that within the country, right?

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  That's an entirely different story. So this is the big question, I'm glad we're turning to it, because this is obviously the question of the day.

• 1:24:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  Is wealth taxes, both on the national level and on the state level. So we have talked about the fact that people are able to acquire $55 trillion of wealth, and there are all sorts of ways, and not pay any taxes on it.

• 1:24:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, zero, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  And so what are we gonna do about it? And so, a logical thing is, let's have a wealth tax. And first, we heard it on the national level, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, and other people are now pushing for a wealth tax on the national level. On the national level, the problem is, there's a very real risk that the current Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional for some very boring reason.

• 1:25:00Dax Shepard?

  And you're great at illustrating how almost impossible it would be to evaluate someone's total assets. What's that painting worth? What's that property worth? It's almost impossible.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  It's very difficult to do it on an annual basis, and there'll be a lot of incentives for people to start hiding their value on an annual basis. If you have an annual tax on all of people's wealth, people might find it's invasive, people might move out of the stock market. There's all sorts of reasons that it's a problem on the national level. So now, here comes California, and it is proposing this thing. And I think there's a really important piece that we've been talking about, but I want us to bring it back, which is that California is a hugely successful state.

• 1:25:40Dax Shepard?

  Fourth biggest economy in the world.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Dax Shepard?

  It's bigger than Japan.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  Yes, amazing, right?

• 1:25:45Dax Shepard?

  Why the hell our roads look like this is a mass.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Well, that's a whole, that's a separate question. But, the point is, that California should, it has a high income tax, right?

• 1:25:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  It has a lot of rich people.

• 1:25:59Dax Shepard?

  High property tax, high income tax, high sales tax, high gas tax.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  They should be able to raise a lot of money. What we've been talking about here is all the ways the federal government has betrayed California and every other state. And some of them has been that they have allowed a corrosion of the income tax base. So that, for example, we used to have a lot of dividends, now we don't have taxable dividends. So the other thing that California used to be able to have was an estate tax, its own estate tax. And every state in the country had an estate tax, and the reason for it is because the federal tax allowed a credit, allowing states to raise estate taxes, and people's overall tax bill wouldn't increase. What's interesting is that, the

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  federal government used to care about having strong states. And it allowed strong states by giving credits for states to be able to raise taxes and not lose its citizens. And that is something that we've moved away from. And the estate tax allowed states to raise money from its wealthiest citizens, because it had a credit for every state. George W. Bush changed the credit to a deduction, and then as a result, all the states began to run away, including California, stopped having estate taxes. So now California doesn't have an estate or gift tax. The income tax, you got all these people, Mark Zuckerberg's not taking a big salary, Sergey Brin not taking, but none of these people are taking big salaries, right? So they're not getting money on their salaries, they're not selling

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  their stock. And so what is California to do? Because we don't have the rule that whenever they transfer the stock, they're subject to tax. We've really sold the states out because the federal government has allowed the corrosion of the base. And so California now, which has a massive amount of wealth, Held in publicly traded stock, which is very easy to value. And now, by the way, the feds have just thrown in, say, oh, yeah, you know what? If that's not enough, we're taking your Medicaid, too. You know, we're not going to provide for anything. And so California has been backed into a corner. And even though I write about being opposed to wealth taxes as the answer for the federal government,

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  and I recognize that states have this problem of people can always pick up and move to another state. I come from a high tax state, Massachusetts, and I do think it's a problem. You know, we have this millionaire's tax now, and, you know, I'm a good lefty Democrat type, but I do worry that businesses are going to open in New Hampshire and not in Massachusetts.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Of course, we have to worry about that.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:28:27Dax Shepard?

  We're taxing the income earners enough.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:31Dax Shepard?

  For my money, as this center, we don't need to be raising the tax rates on people paying income.

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. But so then, what do you want California to do? They've got a big hole in their budget. They're not able to raise money with their high income taxes. If they continue to raise money, it's just like a leaky bucket. There's nothing that they're taxing. They're taxing the income enough. So then, the wealth tax, it's all this sort of there to see, for the public to see, the wealth, because it's all publicly traded stock. I'm quite sympathetic to it, even as I am opposed to wealth taxes generally. So I've gotten a lot of interest on the federal level on my tax proposals, particularly from moderate Democrats. And I think the reason for that is because of the pressure that's coming from the left. And if we go back to our story that we've been telling, it was the threat of socialism.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  It was the threat of communism. And what I worried about was that with capitalism reigning supreme, right? We no longer have real threats to capitalism. So this is something I talk about in the book. Franco Milanovich has written about this, and Tony Jude has written about this. Capitalism no longer has to prove itself because there's nobody competing with capitalism. But now we have these democratic socialists, right? And they're creating a little bit of a competition, tiny, with capitalism, and it's having an impact. And so that's why, even though I see the risks of the California wealth tax, I also see how we need to get a change of our federal system. We can't keep running up this debt for our kids and grandkids. It's so unfair.

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  And so we've got to find a way of raising money, and we have to do that by fixing our tax system. And I think that we're only going to fix our tax system when people worry that there's something worse out there. And that something worse is wealth taxes.

• 1:30:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay. So I was on a hike with my wife, and she was like, you know, yeah, why can't you just cap it at like a billion's the most someone can have? Which I think is a pretty common thought, especially for young people. And I was like, okay, but explain how that works mechanically to me, because you're Jeff Bezos. You start this incredible company. Every time his value goes up, do we reduce his ownership? And should we make it so this person who started a company and is pretty responsible for its success owns 0.01% of their own company so that they can be capped at a billion dollars? Like, how mechanically does this work? Go ahead.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  So I want to respond to that because I think that this is exactly why we have to be careful about what conversations we're having. And this is why I think conversations that like, every billionaire's a problem, the problem's a billionaire, is misleading us. Because it makes it seem like these are people who are paying lots of taxes along the way, and now we're going to punish them because they have more than a billion dollars. It's such a false narrative. If we start with the real narrative, which is these people have been able to acquire hundreds of billions of dollars and so far have contributed nothing, or at least if they have, they didn't have to, to all of our expenses. That's the system that we have. And so that's the system that we should be trying to fix.

• 1:31:38Dax Shepard?

  I want to make one argument, and I just want to hear what you think about it. Amazon's worth $2.9 trillion.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:44Dax Shepard?

  He owns 8.2% of that stock, which means he has made other people $2.6 trillion.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Dax Shepard?

  So I think a lot of people are like, kill the billionaires. It's like, okay, you killed Jeff Bezos, but what you've also killed is $2.6 trillion that is in pension funds, retirement accounts. Other people have made $2.6 billion off of this person. Sometimes you've got to step back, I think, and go like, okay, but what's the net result of this person we all hate? I'm answering the public right now, and I want your opinion on. What I hear is that everyone should hate Bezos, and he shouldn't have this much money. But what I'm saying is, remember, 92% of the money generated by Jeff Bezos, other Americans have.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  That's not what they're saying.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  That's not what they're saying, yeah.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  They're saying that he can make as much money, he can make all the money, but he has to give the money back, not just to other people who will make a lot of money and also not pay taxes.

• 1:32:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm not done with my point at all. So he has made $2.6 trillion for other people.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Dax Shepard?

  And he's done so by having 10% of this company being very invested in it and still leading it to make these other people $2.6 trillion. My ultimate question is like, what is the mechanism by which you're going to get him to pay taxes without him selling his shares of his own company to get the money?

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  What do I think we should be doing?

• 1:33:13Dax Shepard?

  How are we going to get the money from Bezos without forcing him to sell?

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  We do two things. One is that whenever he gives away the property,

• 1:33:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  he should tally the gains.

• 1:33:25Dax Shepard?

  That I'm with you.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  During life or at death. Okay, that's all that I want Bezos to do.

• 1:33:28Dax Shepard?

  So I'm with you on all this. And the estate tax.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Then the estate tax, we have to get rid of the estate tax. So here's the thing about the estate tax. The estate tax is dead, obviously. The fact that the Republicans kept the estate tax, it is dead.

• 1:33:42Dax Shepard?

  And you don't think you can save?

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  It will not be saved. It will not be saved because it has this Achilles' heel. We are looking at the wrong person when we're looking at the dead person. The question is, if it's the case that anybody who gets money in any way gets it tax-free, how much of a preference do we want to give to money received by gifts, inheritances, and life insurance? And I think what we should decide is like, fine, people can inherit a million or 2 million, whatever you want to say, tax-free.

• 1:34:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  Noting that it is a preference for inherited wealth. And then, after that, they should pay taxes like anybody else.

• 1:34:17Dax Shepard?

  Great, I'm with you. So would you not have a problem with Bezos having lived his whole life, accumulated $200 billion, never paid taxes on it while he was alive, so long as once that movie moved on? Okay, that's the solution.

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Dax Shepard?

  But all these people who want to immediately see Elon Musk pay taxes, I don't think is practical.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  But I don't understand, though, this, this seems weird to me. We have the plumber and the web designer, each paying taxes when they're doing barter exchanges. And you're like saying like, I don't want Elon Musk to have to pay taxes. What do you care if Elon Musk has to pay taxes?

• 1:34:53Dax Shepard?

  I want him to pay taxes if he borrows $2 billion to fund his lifestyle. I want that tax.

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  Oh, you want a tax on that?

• 1:34:58Dax Shepard?

  But I don't want to force somebody to have their stock holdings evaluated on a given day at this stock price and say, you know what? You owe half of that money to the government.

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  But the thing is, and this is why I'm so glad you're asking these questions, right? These are the types of arguments that are such red herrings about the actual reality of the situation, right?

• 1:35:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I agree. But don't you think that's what America's demanding right now?

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  No. I think that the problem is, the American public has been duped about the amount of taxes that are paid by the wealthy. Then they're thinking, okay, they're not paying taxes. How should we have them pay taxes? They're not tax lawyers. They don't know the details. And so they're, they're saying like, well, let's just do this, because this sounds good. I think that people simply are like, I'm paying a load of taxes every year. I'm looking around, these people are not paying anything. What is up with that?

• 1:35:52Dax Shepard?

  Agreed.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  The fact that Jeff Bezos claimed the child tax credit, which is what it showed, feels wrong.

• 1:35:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  It feels wrong. That's why they work.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  It's unfair.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  I disagree with how ProPublica chose to do it by saying it's this small percentage. That isn't how I would choose to describe it. But the point is, how is it that we are living in a world where all of the richest people have many, many years of no tax contributions?

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  And they're living luxuriously.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  And they're living luxuriously.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  If they're living in a one-bedroom apartment, like the other person, and just keeping the money in stocks, okay. But they're not. They have multiple houses, they're on yachts. They're spending money and they're not contributing it.

• 1:36:31Dax Shepard?

  I agree.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  That's a huge problem.

• 1:36:33Dax Shepard?

  They should get taxed on that money they're spending. But to your point earlier, that money they're spending is such an insignificant piece of their wealth.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  They should be paying some of the taxes. Our system should be fixed.

• 1:36:42Dax Shepard?

  This line of questioning was wonderfully revealing. We're in lockstep. You're not asking

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:47Dax Shepard?

  for them to be paying a six Significant portion of taxes year to year.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  No, I'm not.

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  But you are probably asking for them to pay taxes on the money that they're spending year to year.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it's an issue because the problem is paying taxes on borrowing.

• 1:37:02Dax Shepard?

  You can't have a law that applies to just them.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  They have to fix that.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  It's hard to fit it into the structure of the tax code.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Can it be if you borrow a certain amount, you have to pay on it?

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  What I worry about is sometimes you get like a fetishistic response to a problem and then the actual problem doesn't get solved.

• 1:37:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, or it's like Pennywise, pound foolish.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Yes, and so that's my concern. There's a lot of lack of information and lack of sophistication in the public for taxes. And you can't really blame them. Our system is really confusing. And we shouldn't be so confusing. We have to simplify it. I think that yes, the public might be speaking in broad terms, but not because it's a fundamental problem that we need to be getting at. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. No sensible person is saying that somebody should be subject to 50% tax every year and all of that.

• 1:37:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so we have the same thing, which is I want these people at the end of their life to have paid 50% of what they've made back to the government. That's what I want.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, good.

• 1:37:53Dax Shepard?

  We both want that.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:37:54Dax Shepard?

  And I just wanted to be clear on what mechanisms you think we're gonna get that. I think it's counterproductive to try to do it along the ride.

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  And I totally agree.

• 1:38:02Dax Shepard?

  Great. This is the point I'm making. It's like you can't really do it year to year. And you can't ask people to give up percentages of their company while they're running it.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  But I don't think that they would actually have to give up percentages of their company. They have plenty of access. They can borrow money, just as they borrow money to buy a super yacht, they can borrow money to pay for the taxes. So I don't think they would have to.

• 1:38:22Dax Shepard?

  You don't think it's impossible, but I don't think it's very plausible.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  I mean, it's certainly not with this 5% billionaire's tax, which as I say, I'm generally opposed to billionaire's taxes, but I can understand how California has been backed into a corner.

• 1:38:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Speaker 02

  And nobody's has gonna have to give up anything.

• 1:38:36Dax Shepard?

  Great. I'm just constantly like, what's the mechanism everyone's proposing to get these people to pay today? And I just don't see how that can happen.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  And you can't, because I do think, like we talked about with Oracle, it's lost 50% of its value. And I think the public is aware property goes up in value and down in value, and it's too complicated. That was the Biden proposal, a minimum tax on billionaires. It's hard. I think a lot of people had that type of reaction of like, you're taking money, then you're giving a credit. And what are you doing? It feels kind of hard to do.

• 1:39:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  So in an ideal world, we would be able to do it, but we can't do it. And I think it's impractical.

• 1:39:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I love your book. I love your message, and we could probably do another three hours together.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  It couldn't be so fun.

• 1:39:18Dax Shepard?

  Neither party, neither party is gonna step up and do this.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  It's hard though, because the people who are making $40,000 a year don't have time and energy to differentiate between in that 1%. Like to them, all of those people are on a different level.

• 1:39:35Dax Shepard?

  They're in a movie.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, whether you're a billionaire or you're a millionaire.

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. That's one of the things I talk about in my book is the difference. It's very hard for people to know.

• 1:39:43Dax Shepard?

  And I'll tell you my own baggage and my own personal, the reason it's heated for me is like, people are angry at just money now. I find it very ironic. We live in a country where the promise is you can make yourself into anything. And regularly, when we see people do that, everyone's mad about it.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:59Dax Shepard?

  Because they're conflating these classes that seem like the same from the outside that are dramatically different. Again, I pay 50%.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:40:08Dax Shepard?

  And so don't be mad at me.

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And but the mistake that I think that people make, and this goes back to our earlier discussion, is when they say, the problem is billionaires. No, the problem is, how did you acquire your wealth? The problem is the system, not the person.

• 1:40:25Dax Shepard?

  Agreed.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Some people are bad people, some people are good people, all up and down the thing. But like, we don't say to Jonas Sock, you created the polio vaccine, therefore you never pay income taxes. No, you pay income taxes, just like everybody else. Everybody should be paying taxes because that's how we have to support the country. It shouldn't matter. It's not about hating billionaires. It's about hating the system and having a fairer system.

• 1:40:45Dax Shepard?

  I adore you.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  So fun. I hope I don't get to see you guys every day.

• 1:40:49Dax Shepard?

  I want to audit your class. I want to have lunch with you in Boston, and I hope you'll come back for your next book.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Definitely. So fun. Thank you so much. Here, I have this.

• 1:40:58Dax Shepard?

  Can't wait. I'm a big coffee drinker.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  I heard that from my answer being correct.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  Was that?

• 1:41:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you nailed that, Monica.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  That was scary.

• 1:41:06Dax Shepard?

  I wouldn't have come close to that guess.

• 1:41:08Speaker 02

  You were a star.

• 1:41:09Dax Shepard?

  All right, well, be well. Everybody read The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy. All right, be well.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 1:41:19Dax Shepard?

  Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica. How do you feel about Diana Ross?

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  I feel good. I don't have too many opinions.

• 1:41:33Dax Shepard?

  You don't?

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 1:41:34Dax Shepard?

  Ain't no mountain high enough.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Love that song.

• 1:41:36Dax Shepard?

  It's a solid one, right?

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:41:38Dax Shepard?

  Uh, what else did we hear this morning, Aaron?

• 1:41:39Dax Shepard?

  Um, I'm coming out.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  Great song.

• 1:41:45Dax Shepard?

  Do, do, do, do, do. Upside down you're turning me.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  You're giving love and stinging me. I guess I love her.

• 1:41:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just came to this conclusion, uh, this realization too.

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:41:57Dax Shepard?

  I've been waiting for Aaron to join me on the 70's R and B train for 40 years.

• 1:42:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's been rubbing up slowly over a lot of years.

• 1:42:05Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh. Well, now that you're into astrology, it all makes sense.

• 1:42:09Dax Shepard?

  I know. I found myself dancing in the car the other day to Diana Ross.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  That's fun.

• 1:42:14Dax Shepard?

  My kids are even like, oh my god.

• 1:42:16Dax Shepard?

  What's happened to you, sir?

• 1:42:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 03

  Speaking of legends, we brought up a little bit yesterday, but Dolly passed away, and I thought it was so lo- like, just everyone is so sad universally.

• 1:42:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  And I think that's like just a, what an indicator of a beautiful life.

• 1:42:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's a good point. I know, she might be one of the least polarizing people in the world.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  Yes. Everyone is very like bereft, and I think, and she deserves that. She, um, but it's like such a lovely, beautiful thing. Um, and it was Sim. This part's gonna seem off color.

• 1:42:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I have a few as well.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  But I was at a store this weekend where they had vintage shirts. They have a very small collection of vintage shirts, so they're insanely overpriced, like crazy. So there was a Sinead O'Connor shirt that was $2,000.

• 1:43:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  A t-shirt.

• 1:43:09Dax Shepard?

  A t-shirt. That's crazy.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  It's, it's crazy.

• 1:43:13Dax Shepard?

  I bet my brother probably still has his from that era. I should ask him.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  I want that.

• 1:43:19Dax Shepard?

  He might be sitting on 2K up there in Portland.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  Seriously.

• 1:43:22Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna call him and go, good, good news for you, buddy. You're sitting on 2K.

• 1:43:25Dax Shepard?

  You're set for life.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  Okay, but there was a Dolly shirt.

• 1:43:29Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  And we were like, oh, this one's so cute too. This is so great. Um, and then I was like, then I whatever, left. And then today, yesterday, I was like, oh my god, that shirt's probably $10,000 today.

• 1:43:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it probably skyrocketed. What was the price?

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:43:46Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you weren't interested enough in it, uh?

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  No, because I didn't like love, love the shirt itself. Like, I think it was really big.

• 1:43:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Are you looking for a thinner or a thicker material in a sh- same, same. I want cheesecloth.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  You want it to be, um, basically see-through.

• 1:44:03Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  And.

• 1:44:04Dax Shepard?

  Transparent.

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  Couple holes if you can.

• 1:44:07Dax Shepard?

  With a hint of the old, um, screen print on there.

• 1:44:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's nice.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  Just a tiny hint.

• 1:44:13Dax Shepard?

  The unfortunate part is I would splash grease on it immediately.

• 1:44:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Dax Shepard?

  Like cooking oil or some butter, yeah, same.

• 1:44:21Dax Shepard?

  You know, someone.

• 1:44:22Dax Shepard?

  This shirt, this one in particular has been baking soda like five or six times.

• 1:44:27Dax Shepard?

  Mine has too.

• 1:44:29Dax Shepard?

  This shirt in particular loves to get oily stains.

• 1:44:32Dax Shepard?

  It sure does.

• 1:44:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33Dax Shepard?

  I agree.

• 1:44:34Dax Shepard?

  We should almost.

• 1:44:34Dax Shepard?

  I don't even think I went near the kitchen when I wore mine.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  Oh no, that's bad endorsement from a shirt.

• 1:44:41Dax Shepard?

  It's not great. This one. I don't find that to be the case with any of our other merch, but this one, it's like, every time I put it on, I'm like, oh my god, I did it again. And then I do wonder how many oil stains am I collecting on other things that aren't showing it?

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53Dax Shepard?

  That's what you gotta wonder.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  You gotta.

• 1:44:55Dax Shepard?

  You gotta sit there and wonder about it.

• 1:44:56Dax Shepard?

  I haven't, um, unfortunately haven't held on to anything from.

• 1:45:01Dax Shepard?

  Our youth?

• 1:45:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was very jealous when you were, when Lincoln started wearing the exploited shirt.

• 1:45:07Dax Shepard?

  And then, and I was saved, because I think I was like getting rid of those. And I think Kristen was like, secretly maybe was like, you can't be getting rid of these.

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:45:16Dax Shepard?

  But, but, um, do you know the whole thing with us and our t-shirts? This was a great hack.

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  Oh, you wore tiny t-shirts?

• 1:45:22Dax Shepard?

  I wore extra tiny t-shirts. Baby tees.

• 1:45:27Speaker 03

  You did, didn't you? You went to McDonald's and you had like tiny t-shirts on.

• 1:45:30Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:31Dax Shepard?

  The horse.

• 1:45:34Dax Shepard?

  Prince.

• 1:45:34Dax Shepard?

  Prince. And then Aaron had these baseball pants that were way too from when I was a little leaguer. No, but this was a great hack for my mom, who was, of course, on a huge budget, is that my brother and I loved these punk rock t-shirts. And we would take a trip every year before school. Our school shopping was going to Young Street in Toronto.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:45:56Dax Shepard?

  And we'd spent the whole day going into all these t-shirt shops.

• 1:46:01Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, this is great.

• 1:46:02Dax Shepard?

  Always in the basement and they were all, um, what do you call them? Fugazies. They were pirated, you know, they were, they weren't official merch from these bands.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:46:12Dax Shepard?

  And so they were super cheap. All these shirts were like, I don't know, eight dollars or something. And I would come home with six exploited shirts, GBH shirts, Dead Kennedys shirt, just all these cool shirts with all the, and of course, everyone was so jealous because you can't buy them anywhere but Toronto.

• 1:46:30Dax Shepard?

  Dude.

• 1:46:30Dax Shepard?

  But then, of course, I would give Aaron some.

• 1:46:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:46:34Dax Shepard?

  And it was really the uniform of junior high. It was these cheap shirts.

• 1:46:38Dax Shepard?

  The coolest shirts, for the most part, black and white.

• 1:46:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. Occasional splash of red.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  Um, but it was a hack for my mom because she could get our whole school clothes shopping done for like ninety dollars, you know?

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  That's so smart.

• 1:46:51Dax Shepard?

  It made the trip to Toronto free.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  Back to school shopping was really fun. I only got a couple of pieces. Oh, my, of course. Who doesn't love it?

• 1:47:01Dax Shepard?

  It gave me anxiety because you have one day to find every outfit you're gonna wear for a year.

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  It's not realistic.

• 1:47:07Dax Shepard?

  And then you're also worried you're gonna bump in. I was worried. Look, this is all luxury, right? Aaron, did you ever even go school clothes shopping? I feel bad. I've been complaining about this.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 1:47:17Dax Shepard?

  Please, yeah, no.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  I'm not complaining. I'm saying I'm grateful.

• 1:47:22Dax Shepard?

  No, she loved it, but I'm complaining because I would go there and it's like, generally, I'm kind of picky, even though I, you wouldn't think I am.

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  You are picky, yeah.

• 1:47:30Dax Shepard?

  So it'd be like, I hope there's a bum equipment sweatshirt I like. There's only three.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  Is that a band?

• 1:47:35Dax Shepard?

  No, that was like a popular brand in the, uh, early nineties, late eighties. But you don't remember bum equipment? B U M, these oversized sweatshirts. This is back in the Z Cavaricci's day.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  I also miss that thing. I miss it. I did yesterday buy an Ush.

• 1:47:52Dax Shepard?

  You'd look great in a pair of Z's.

• 1:47:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, absolutely. You'd freak.

• 1:47:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  Because they're so big. Yeah, I love a pant.

• 1:47:58Dax Shepard?

  Tons of pleats.

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  I love pleats.

• 1:48:00Dax Shepard?

  Like, the fact that I was like, loved a pair of jeans with tons of pleats is hysterical. I can't imagine getting into.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  The power of trends.

• 1:48:09Dax Shepard?

  And I got, um, one time I got the parachute pants. That was great. But anyways, I would go there and it was like, if you don't find your whole wardrobe today, then you're shit out of luck. And you go to my, there was only three stores I liked at the mall, and then you bumped up into your budget a lot. I just found it very stressful. Was yours protracted over like multiple days?

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  No, it was kind of, gosh, I mean, it depends on the age. Like, at some point, back to school shopping was just me and Callie going to the mall.

• 1:48:39Dax Shepard?

  And you got mom's credit card?

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  I had an allowance, twenty dollars a week.

• 1:48:43Dax Shepard?

  Wait, you were buying your own school clothes?

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Dax Shepard?

  That can't be.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  I was. No, I mean, I'm thinking more throughout the year. Like, maybe I bought like one, I don't think my mom and I went shopping for high school back to school. Like, I think at that point, I was sort of on my own, buying my own stuff.

• 1:48:59Dax Shepard?

  What about junior high school or middle school?

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  I know. Well, yeah. Limited Two was the place.

• 1:49:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  My mom never wanted to buy me anything from Limited Two, so I would like be begging and pleading. Sometimes she would give me like one shirt from there.

• 1:49:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  Um, that was it. Yeah, they didn't really, we didn't do a huge amount of back to school shopping, but like, she would, this is funny, we, um, just had this conversation. Do you guys know Upton's? Did you have Upton's?

• 1:49:30Dax Shepard?

  Upton Sinclair? No.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  No, it was a store. And we spent all week trying to figure out Upton's, my parents, when I was home. Because I, I told my mom, she used to shop at Goodies. I brought up Goodies. Did you guys have Goodies?

• 1:49:45Dax Shepard?

  These all sounds very southern, to be honest with you.

• 1:49:46Dax Shepard?

  Sam Goodies?

• 1:49:47Dax Shepard?

  Goodies in Uptown.

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  Not Sam Goodies. Goodies was a clothing store.

• 1:49:51Dax Shepard?

  Pinkly wings, Piggly Wiggly.

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  Piggly Wiggly, yes.

• 1:49:55Dax Shepard?

  Wiggly Woggly.

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  I have a Piggly Wiggly shirt that I do love. Um, anyway, yeah. I said something about Goodies because I vividly remember my mom bringing home leggings from Goodies for me.

• 1:50:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  They had hearts on them.

• 1:50:08Dax Shepard?

  Remind me on leggings again because I remember I got it wrong once.

• 1:50:11Speaker 03

  Leggings?

• 1:50:12Dax Shepard?

  Like, you wore what you called leggings and I thought leggings were like pantyhose.

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:50:17Dax Shepard?

  What do you think leggings are?

• 1:50:18Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think I, it's different now, isn't it? Just yoga pants now? But I, but, um, back then, I thought it was pantyhose.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:50:27Dax Shepard?

  Pantyhose.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  Maybe in the days.

• 1:50:28Dax Shepard?

  Do they call it that anymore?

• 1:50:30Dax Shepard?

  Does anyone wear panty hose?

• 1:50:32Speaker 03

  I don't think people wear panty hose. I know.

• 1:50:34Dax Shepard?

  Panty hose.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  It's disgusting.

• 1:50:36Dax Shepard?

  What does the hose mean?

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  Well, it is in the shape of a hose, yeah.

• 1:50:41Dax Shepard?

  Like a garden hose?

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it is.

• 1:50:43Dax Shepard?

  It's a panty and hoses?

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  It is sort of an extension of your panties because you're not supposed to know you're wearing those.

• 1:50:51Dax Shepard?

  But you are also supposed to.

• 1:50:52Speaker 03

  They're flat, they're nude.

• 1:50:53Dax Shepard?

  Are you, and they have a.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  And they're so tight.

• 1:50:55Dax Shepard?

  They have a grundle in them too. Are you not supposed to wear panties with them?

• 1:51:01Speaker 03

  I think you are.

• 1:51:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay, double up.

• 1:51:03Speaker 03

  That would be bad.

• 1:51:05Dax Shepard?

  They should be called second panty hose.

• 1:51:07Dax Shepard?

  I think they're sexy.

• 1:51:08Dax Shepard?

  Sorry, we interrupt you. Uptown shirts. Everything is sexy.

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  I don't think you would. Have you ever seen a woman with only panty hose on?

• 1:51:18Dax Shepard?

  I think I have. I think I've, uh.

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  And you loved it.

• 1:51:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, then it got done to business.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  That's nice.

• 1:51:23Dax Shepard?

  It was really popular in the eighties to have a woman, it was very common on the cover of Playboys. It would be panty hose, no top, looking over the shoulder. You couldn't show the boobs on the cover.

• 1:51:32Speaker 03

  I feel like I've seen Cindy Crawford in that look or something.

• 1:51:35Dax Shepard?

  It was a look in the eighties.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:37Dax Shepard?

  Black, generally, not like nude color.

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, because normally, because panty hose.

• 1:51:41Dax Shepard?

  Nude color, I think, I'd care. Nana.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  Nude is.

• 1:51:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, as you think of your grandma and their saggy.

• 1:51:47Speaker 03

  Nude is the main color. It's, they're invented because you like, weren't supposed to have your legs exposed. So women would wear it under their skirts and stuff for secretaries.

• 1:51:58Dax Shepard?

  Also though, for chilliness in the winter, when you want to wear your skirt to work, I think it was also supposed to be a little.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  They added that, yeah.

• 1:52:05Dax Shepard?

  The warmth.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also it's supposed to make your skin look smooth and stuff.

• 1:52:09Dax Shepard?

  It does, I mean.

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  Anyway, um, my, no, leggings in this case were like eighties leggings, like, they're like thicker, they're pants, basically. And then they had stirrups.

• 1:52:19Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:52:21Dax Shepard?

  Okay, nice.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  Anyway, my mom brought me some from, um, from Goodies and I brought this up for some reason and she was like, no, I've never shopped at Goodies. And I said, well, you did. I know for sure. I remember you bringing the bag and I was so excited. Sometimes my mom would go shopping on her way home from work and bring me items.

• 1:52:39Dax Shepard?

  She had a time crunch. She was a career woman.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But she wanted to shop. Then she said, no, there, I used to go to that one store a lot. And I was like, what? And we like, couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out. I was asking chat.

• 1:52:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  So many questions I was asking chat. And my dad then got very demoralized by AI. He was like, yeah, no, we're, we're not in any trouble here because it couldn't figure it out. It could not figure it out. And then I just went to straight up Google. I asked it a few questions and it got it.

• 1:53:13Dax Shepard?

  Uh, now, what's your dad's general feeling on AI? Does he have a take?

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, mm. I'm sure he does. He has takes. My dad's back to work.

• 1:53:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he's, oh.

• 1:53:27Dax Shepard?

  Do you know those where he is?

• 1:53:28Dax Shepard?

  I do.

• 1:53:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Dax Shepard?

  He had his retirement party.

• 1:53:30Dax Shepard?

  The last time I was even in here was when this was happening.

• 1:53:34Dax Shepard?

  He had his retirement party and then he was at work Monday. He was a consultant.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And now he's like picking up more hours. Um, I'm so happy for him though.

• 1:53:45Dax Shepard?

  Overdone.

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  He's gotta, he's gotta get that mind.

• 1:53:48Dax Shepard?

  Signing up for OT.

• 1:53:52Dax Shepard?

  So you figured out it was Uptowns with Google?

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  Upton's.

• 1:53:54Dax Shepard?

  Upton's.

• 1:53:55Speaker 03

  Very specific. It's U P T O N.

• 1:53:58Dax Shepard?

  Kate Upton.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  U P T O N.

• 1:54:01Dax Shepard?

  That's Uptown, no?

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  No, Uptown would be U P T O W N.

• 1:54:05Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay, we're missing a W.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay, then, okay, Upton.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Upton's. Um, shout out Upton's. I mean, it was a great place. It was like Kohl's before Kohl's.

• 1:54:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I mostly only know Ross and TJ Maxx.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  Love TJ Maxx.

• 1:54:19Dax Shepard?

  Is, is the other one you just said in that category?

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  Upton's, no.

• 1:54:23Dax Shepard?

  Not Upton's, Kohl's. Is Kohl's like a good luck to everyone, you know, like?

• 1:54:28Dax Shepard?

  When you walk into Ross, it's like, the greeter should say, good luck.

• 1:54:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:32Dax Shepard?

  No, Kohl's is much better.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:35Dax Shepard?

  It's like department store?

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

  It is. It's like a standalone department store. It doesn't have, because TJ Maxx and Ross are all like resale or like, you know, like, things that didn't make it. Yeah.

• 1:54:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  Exactly. Oh, my dad, my dad, he, he's not that worried about it.

• 1:54:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  Um, he just thinks this is what happens. Like, everyone was worried with the computer and everyone, you know, and then you figure it out. So he's not too worried.

• 1:55:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, this is probably too nosey about his finances, but I imagine when he retired, he got a, he has a retirement package.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:55:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so this, no wonder people go back to work as a consultant because he's probably getting some percentage of his original income. And then he gets to go in there as a consultant and also get wages there. So he's kind of like doubled his salary.

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  Hmm, I don't know.

• 1:55:23Dax Shepard?

  Let's talk, I'll get him on the phone and let's ask him how much he's making.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  I don't think he wants to share. They notoriously never, ever, ever will share their finances with me.

• 1:55:32Dax Shepard?

  They've never told you. What's your take on that?

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  That was a huge part of growing up. Like, they, I would ask all the time, what, how much money? Do you make if everything's so if we're just have to be so scared of money?

• 1:55:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, what how fucked are we?

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they just said it's none of my business.

• 1:55:48Dax Shepard?

  Really? My mother very much was like, I have to turn them out into the world with some financial literacy. So like they should know what I'm bringing in, what our expenses are, how this is all working.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  No, the literacy was just you should always be like scared.

• 1:56:05Dax Shepard?

  Paranoid.

• 1:56:06Speaker 03

  Put a ton of it, all of it away, maybe like one dollar you can keep. And that's what you should do.

• 1:56:13Dax Shepard?

  But if you were to ask them now, would they tell you?

• 1:56:16Speaker 03

  Maybe, like how much they made?

• 1:56:18Dax Shepard?

  How much they have saved?

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  Oh, I think they have alluded to to the number. But they wouldn't want me to say it on.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  Okay, I have a question.

• 1:56:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:31Speaker 03

  For both of you, you both have children. Let's say one of your children, this is like Jonathan Haidt, sort of. Let's say one of your children makes just a lot of money, is gonna be totally fine on their own. And independent of you, right? And then your other child. One of your other children does not.

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  Now, when you're doing your will.

• 1:57:04Dax Shepard?

  This is Davis Haderes.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  He didn't get any money.

• 1:57:08Dax Shepard?

  Cause that didn't give him a penny.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so when you're doing your will, are you guys, you're just even Stevens? Or are you thinking it like, well?

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  For sure what, even Stevens?

• 1:57:20Dax Shepard?

  No, no, if one kid's struggling, the other one is totally financially set. I will tell the one financially set like, hey, when I die, I'm gonna leave your sister some more money because she needs more help than you do. And it's not cause it's not any reflection on what I think you deserve. But it is a reflection of how well you've done and that I want to make sure you're both safe. Like that, that's easy, I think. And even I've told my mother, like, you know, I I bought half my mom's house. At one point, like one of the houses ago, a couple of houses ago. And I even said like, so, hey, when you, when you pass.

• 1:58:00Dax Shepard?

  I just want my half back. You can give David and Carly the other half. You don't have to like try to divide. That half into thirds so that I then get sixty six percent of it. Like, I just want my money back. And then I even changed that and I was like, you know, whatever you have, give to those two. It would be insane to give me more money. And so hopefully your children would just offer if they're financially.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess it, okay.

• 1:58:26Dax Shepard?

  Why? Cause are you expecting a fifty fifty split?

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  And they are going to do that. Like they are, and so that's an interesting. For me, it is has zero to do with the money. Yeah, whatever money I get, I probably will give it.

• 1:58:43Dax Shepard?

  To your brother.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  Uh, depends on where he is. This is the other thing. It's like you don't know what's gonna happen to people.

• 1:58:50Dax Shepard?

  Life is long as twisty turvy.

• 1:58:51Speaker 03

  Very, and if, and if something like. If, what if the rich sister lost all their money and then you've given?

• 1:59:02Dax Shepard?

  Ideally, they have a good enough relationship that she goes, hey, I know dad gave you all the money cause you didn't have any, but now I don't have any.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  I think, well, your children are different, but not necessarily different, but they're. This thing with money breaks up so many families.

• 1:59:19Dax Shepard?

  Post- posthumously, yeah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  Exactly. It causes so much damage and so.

• 1:59:24Dax Shepard?

  That's why you gotta do a will because you're, you're just, you're ensuring that they'll be fighting each other.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, and so for me, I think it's just. Necessary to prevent a lot of that to also.

• 1:59:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, you gotta go even Stevens. And my parents believe that too.

• 1:59:48Dax Shepard?

  Well, definitely if you're divvying up the money on who you liked more, that's a no-no. But but depending on who who needs it more, I think that's really relevant and has to be taken into.

• 1:59:58Speaker 03

  But it's just in that moment and you just don't know.

• 2:00:00Dax Shepard?

  I'm super envious of Aaron because he just, obviously he'll just give it all to his son. He has two daughters and a son and he'll give his whole estate to his son.

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  What about the?

• 2:00:09Dax Shepard?

  I wish I had a son to make it so clean.

• 2:00:11Speaker 03

  Or the husbands of your daughters.

• 2:00:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  They'll be getting.

• 2:00:21Dax Shepard?

  I've never, I've never thought about it besides. Be, everyone gets an even split, but if I run into some money and these. Kids start doing their, you know, right now they're not, they're teenagers, but.

• 2:00:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's tricky.

• 2:00:40Dax Shepard?

  Another thing you have to factor in is, is one of your children. Um, struggling with massive addiction. Yeah. The last thing you wanna do is give them enough money to kill themselves. So there may be a situation where. You have to say to the other sibling, look, I'm giving you all this money, but you gotta, you know, you gotta take care of your sister.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  That is of course a different situation. I mean, kind of just pending regular stuff.

• 2:01:08Dax Shepard?

  Fifty fifty.

• 2:01:11Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 2:01:17Dax Shepard?

  This episode is brought to you by Service Now. 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 Service Now'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?

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  They never are.

• 2:02:01Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

• 2:02:12Speaker 03

  You know, my brother just had a baby, cutest baby, Memphis. I love him. Um, I bought him a quilt yesterday.

• 2:02:20Speaker 03

  Oh, I wanted to bring that up. Okay, so I bought him a quilt that was originally. Ding ding ding, a thousand dollars, but it was a hundred dollars. It was on sale.

• 2:02:31Dax Shepard?

  It was on nine hundred dollars all.

• 2:02:34Dax Shepard?

  I gotta wonder if it was ever worth.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  That's what I wanted to bring up. I was like, do you think that was like a trick?

• 2:02:39Dax Shepard?

  Some moths got in there or something. Aaron and I, if we owned a quilt that was a thousand dollars, we would be selling it for a hundred. We just had this conversation that both of us are so bad at selling stuff. Like virtually the time, every time I sell something, I meet the person and I go like, God, they have less money than me. Like I remember I sold my Harley, remember? Yes, I remember that. I thought of that story yesterday. Dude, like I I forget what I wanted. Maybe I wanted ten grand for it. And he came and he and he had like six grand with him and he's like, okay, yeah, I really want it on. I gotta run to the bank and get a bubble on. I go, just fuck.

• 2:03:16Dax Shepard?

  Cause he worked at a treatment center and I was like.

• 2:03:22Dax Shepard?

  So it's like anything he would have shown up.

• 2:03:25Speaker 03

  I agree. I I'm more into the just giving.

• 2:03:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just want you to leave.

• 2:03:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:33Dax Shepard?

  Whatever that's. So quickly.

• 2:03:36Dax Shepard?

  How much do you want to take it? Just fucking get out of here. How much is that? Monica, I I'm so scared to make you mad, but I I kinda think like, I kinda think that they should give Neil a little more.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  I know you think that, but I don't.

• 2:03:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:03:52Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 2:03:55Speaker 03

  It has nothing to do with the money and it's, it's one thing, you know, you're like, you know, we love you the most, we the most. We love you equally, but it's like, it's just hard, it's, it's. It's too hard.

• 2:04:11Dax Shepard?

  That's what Sideris felt. He he didn't like it.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's painful. I think I understand, I understand logically where you are coming from. But emotionally, I I don't, I I think that would just be very hard. Regardless.

• 2:04:29Dax Shepard?

  There wouldn't be a world where you'd be okay with like sixty forty.

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  Again, it's, it's not even about.

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  It's not about the money at all. It's, it's, it's actually just a indication of like. These are my children. They get, you know what I mean?

• 2:04:50Dax Shepard?

  Let's take you out of it. Do you, what do you think my mom should do?

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  I think she should split it evenly and I think you will give it. Like, again, it's not. I don't think then you're gonna be like, yay, I got all this extra money.

• 2:05:04Dax Shepard?

  The only thing that's tricky though about that is your parents can pass on their money to you guys. But once you get it, you can't pass it to your brother without a tax penalty.

• 2:05:16Speaker 03

  I know, I'm just not all that, we, you know, we have the.

• 2:05:19Dax Shepard?

  Well, you'd have to make half of it disappear now. So basically of this pot that started. It could all go to you guys tax free, but if you transfer it to him, now we've reduced the pot twenty five percent of the total pot. And then it was like for a why? So that everyone felt good. It should have just all gone to who needed it tax free.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  But need, okay, again, okay, let's, so. The need is, I guess, relevant. If someone's poor.

• 2:05:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  And someone's rich.

• 2:05:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Speaker 03

  Yes, but also that's not right anyway. If like your sibling is poor and you have a ton of money. That's already a little bit like, what are you doing? Yeah, why aren't you helping out your sibling? But if your sip, if if if they're fine. Okay, I'm not talking billionaire, obviously, but even, okay, that's a good thought. So is, what if it was a billionaire?

• 2:06:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:06:15Speaker 03

  And then a, the brother is a lawyer.

• 2:06:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:06:21Speaker 03

  So it does well.

• 2:06:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:23Speaker 03

  But private practice.

• 2:06:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:06:28Dax Shepard?

  Personal injury.

• 2:06:29Dax Shepard?

  No, he does IP law. Okay.

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  He's making $300,000 a year.

• 2:06:33Dax Shepard?

  Good for him.

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, good job.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  Um, should the parents?

• 2:06:37Dax Shepard?

  What's the other brother?

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  A billionaire.

• 2:06:39Dax Shepard?

  Oh, oh, yeah.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. See? So we got a billionaire and then a lawyer making 300,000.

• 2:06:45Dax Shepard?

  No, the billionaire.

• 2:06:46Dax Shepard?

  You gotta give it all to the lawyer.

• 2:06:49Dax Shepard?

  It's insane. It's insane.

• 2:06:52Dax Shepard?

  It makes no sense.

• 2:06:55Dax Shepard?

  It doesn't make. He's gonna have a billion, one million dollars to feel good, like he's gonna feel good. Versus it's life changing.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Listen, here's part of the thing. I, I, I know. Listen, I, okay, in billionaire's situation, I guess I agree, but the up.

• 2:07:12Dax Shepard?

  But you know what's funny is I do think we all naturally go, everything more than what we have is obscene. So if someone only has $20,000 to their, or $2,000 to their name, and you have $2 million to your name, that is the exact same proportion as you having 2 million, someone having a billion.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  No, totally. But $2 million is not enough to like never, to feel totally safe.

• 2:07:40Dax Shepard?

  Depending on what age you are and where you live and how you manage the money.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I guess if you have $2 million and you're 80, like great, because you're probably, you won't need it all.

• 2:07:49Dax Shepard?

  Does remind me of one of the funniest things Aaron said to me, and he actually relieved me of this terrible fear I have. We were watching one of the many sports documentaries that always give me financial anxiety. Because virtually every sports documentary you watch of a big hero in the 80s, you find out that the city was aghast that he got a million dollar contract.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:08:09Dax Shepard?

  And then I'm sitting there with Aaron, and I go, every, that was like the most preposterous amount of money in 1986 when Isaiah Thomas got that. But dude, 1986 was 30 years ago and there's no way he still has a million, right?

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, that's why like no, no amount of money in 30 year, you know.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  Well, exactly.

• 2:08:29Dax Shepard?

  And then he goes, he goes, yeah, but you're not Isaiah Thomas's age. You're already 50. Like you're already at the finish line. I was like, oh yeah, that's super relevant.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  It is very relevant. It's very relevant.

• 2:08:44Dax Shepard?

  Make money last for another.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  How to stretch it.

• 2:08:46Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes. He pointed out that I'm old and that was like, gave me great relief. It's rare that be, that being pointed out gives you a lot of relief.

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  That is true. Yeah. Anyway, um, yeah. So I just think it's an interesting thought experiment. I'm definitely on the side.

• 2:09:02Dax Shepard?

  How does your brother feel? Have you talked to him about it?

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't get to decide.

• 2:09:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, he gets to have an opinion. I'm curious what it is. Let's call him.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:09:10Dax Shepard?

  Is this forever changing for the parents? Like, like you're calling up your guy, Lincoln's not doing well.

• 2:09:17Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:18Dax Shepard?

  Let's change.

• 2:09:19Dax Shepard?

  The will.

• 2:09:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Right. That's a good question.

• 2:09:23Dax Shepard?

  So I've done estate planning and it's, it's a lengthy thing.

• 2:09:28Dax Shepard?

  Probably, yeah.

• 2:09:28Dax Shepard?

  And then Chris and I are just so lazy about it. We're like, we don't wanna. I'll tell you what happens in this estate planning that gets tricky. Is you go, first things like, what happens if one of us dies? Okay. Well, that's obvious what happens. And then it's okay, what if both of you die?

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46Dax Shepard?

  And then you go, okay, well, I want my sister Carly to take over.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 2:09:51Dax Shepard?

  And then you go, what, and what happens if she dies, right? And then now we're on a third tier. And now by the time you get to the fourth person, we're now arguing over who should get this.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:10:02Dax Shepard?

  The responsibility of our children. And then at that point I go, this is fucking nuts. We're stressing ourselves out over something that literally statistically could not happen, which is all three people now have taken charge of our children. They've all passed and we're down to like who I knew in eighth grade. Like, what are we talking about?

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  The three of you could be in a car together? I hate that you said that. It's like, not that hard. Dude.

• 2:10:29Dax Shepard?

  So.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Okay, where am I in line?

• 2:10:32Dax Shepard?

  So we, we kinda tabled it over this one, like we couldn't decide on the fucking fourth person to get the kids.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41Dax Shepard?

  And then we just like, fuck this thing. And we put it off for a while. And then of course, um, we're getting urged, rightly so, by our financial advisor to finish this, because we fly together, I race motorcycles, you know, all this shit. Anyways, we finally got through it, but it's like, it's, it's, you know, it's like four sessions sitting with this estate planner for hours and hours and hours. And you don't like thinking about it, A. It's like not a topic.

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  Of course, it's horrible.

• 2:11:07Dax Shepard?

  All you're talking about is like when you're dead and your kids are gonna be without you and all that. And then you're also figuring out like, what age should they get? What, again, what happens if one of them's an addict? You need a lot of legal language to deal with that kinda situation. You're kinda trying to forecast every conceivable thing.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:27Dax Shepard?

  And the only thing that I was just dead sure against is I was like, let's make this very clear. Nobody gets a fucking penny unless they sign a prenup. I do not want some dead being burying my fucking daughters. And then getting divorced and taking a quarter of the money I worked my whole life. Or like, that to me was like, I'll come out of my grave and kill someone.

• 2:11:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, nice. Have you guys heard of doing a free, this is embarrassing, but I've, um, I don't have a will right now.

• 2:11:59Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:11:59Dax Shepard?

  And, yeah, and I, and I should, no matter.

• 2:12:03Dax Shepard?

  That, that would mean you don't want him to get one.

• 2:12:05Speaker 01

  No, I want him to not need it.

• 2:12:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, because I got you not because you don't want the thing that was just said to happen.

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  No, I, my knocks are, they, they know.

• 2:12:13Dax Shepard?

  They have, they're ambiguous. Multiple purposes, yeah. But this has come up a lot recently.

• 2:12:18Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:19Dax Shepard?

  And it's, yeah, it's out of laziness. It's what a lot of people do, I assume.

• 2:12:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:24Dax Shepard?

  So lazy. It never occurred to me, because I was like, whatever.

• 2:12:28Dax Shepard?

  Your motorcycle collection.

• 2:12:30Dax Shepard?

  Bit of shit. Yeah.

• 2:12:32Dax Shepard?

  Each kid gets a motorcycle.

• 2:12:33Dax Shepard?

  Fight for it. Yeah, they each get one motorcycle right now. Which is pretty good.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  That is good.

• 2:12:39Dax Shepard?

  That's more than I'm fucking getting.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  That is good.

• 2:12:44Dax Shepard?

  So we've been talking about it, but just haven't pulled the trigger. And I'm like, what do I do? Go to, because I'm a fucking jackass. I don't know how to do it. And I'm like, according to chat, who I'm.

• 2:12:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. But you should have chat make your will.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should.

• 2:12:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:12:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. It makes legal documents.

• 2:13:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And, um, yeah, so there is a way to do it without going to the lawyer.

• 2:13:07Dax Shepard?

  Do my tattoo contract.

• 2:13:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:13:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I had the whole contract made on chat. Sent it to my Eric, who's a lawyer, and he writing, he's like, this is like bulletproof slash aggressive.

• 2:13:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:13:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:16Dax Shepard?

  Um, well, that's, the answer's that then.

• 2:13:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Dax Shepard?

  Um, yeah, we looked into it. I'm like, oh, that's why I don't have to, like, I just take this to a fucking lawyer.

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  Now.

• 2:13:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Are you gonna give yours? So is it, so, okay.

• 2:13:31Dax Shepard?

  I like that you're whispering.

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, because this is, gets tricky.

• 2:13:36Dax Shepard?

  Twicky.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  So are, are you gonna leave your money to Ruthie or your children?

• 2:13:41Dax Shepard?

  That gets real tricky.

• 2:13:43Dax Shepard?

  Too dangerous to answer.

• 2:13:44Speaker 01

  I know. That's why I whispered it.

• 2:13:46Dax Shepard?

  It even gets more dan, or more dangerous, but, um,

• 2:13:53Dax Shepard?

  there's this life insurance policy on me that I don't know what it is. And this was bought by my ex-wife.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:14:01Dax Shepard?

  And with good reason.

• 2:14:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Dax Shepard?

  Um.

• 2:14:06Dax Shepard?

  She had a, she had a pretty good chance of collecting.

• 2:14:08Dax Shepard?

  Yes, a long time ago.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12Dax Shepard?

  Now.

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 2:14:14Dax Shepard?

  Now, since I've got sober, there was this one, there was a moment early on where I start trying to do the right, I'm like, okay, I have to be responsible and pay these bills and these bills and these bills. And she's like, yeah, you gotta start paying this fucking life insurance. But I've been paying it for years. And I'm like, cool. So I, I pay that, but I've never asked the question, like, does this go to you?

• 2:14:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, probably she's part of the beneficiary.

• 2:14:43Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, wait.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  This is tricky.

• 2:14:46Dax Shepard?

  In her mind, rightly so. She's like, yeah, if you die, like.

• 2:14:50Dax Shepard?

  And the kids were all babies when this happened.

• 2:14:52Dax Shepard?

  You still have to pay for half these kids. So yes, I should get it because I'm gonna now assume all the pain.

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  This is so confusing. Yeah, because when you remarry, what?

• 2:15:03Dax Shepard?

  Um.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  Do you have two? Can you get two?

• 2:15:06Dax Shepard?

  Double.

• 2:15:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so I don't know the answer to that.

• 2:15:08Dax Shepard?

  You could, you could, you could certainly amend that policy to have multiple beneficiaries.

• 2:15:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Dax Shepard?

  Which you'll never do, but you could.

• 2:15:19Dax Shepard?

  Which I'll forget when I walk out here. But, uh, yeah, I think, uh, sure, why wouldn't Ruthie get a piece?

• 2:15:30Dax Shepard?

  Hello, Rontown.

• 2:15:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she's not gonna be able to take care of herself without me. I'm joking. She does much better than me. I mean, this could be for 20 grand. I, I have no idea what it is. I've never seen details of it.

• 2:15:44Dax Shepard?

  When my dad died, um, obviously he just mostly had a lot of debt.

• 2:15:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Dax Shepard?

  But I did get a call that was like, your father had a life insurance policy. And I'm like, first of all, how? And then, you know, how much? And it was like, it was 1,500 bucks.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:16:05Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, where did this come from? What, what is, what kinda life?

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  Going to your mom?

• 2:16:11Dax Shepard?

  1500.

• 2:16:11Dax Shepard?

  No, to David and I, but I was like, just send it to David.

• 2:16:15Dax Shepard?

  1500?

• 2:16:17Dax Shepard?

  It's not a great.

• 2:16:18Dax Shepard?

  Swear on the.

• 2:16:19Dax Shepard?

  One cent?

• 2:16:21Dax Shepard?

  One cent a year?

• 2:16:22Dax Shepard?

  25 cent. Like, maybe he saw commercials, like for 25 cents a month, you could leave your loved ones 1,500, 1,500 dollars.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  He's like, it's something. It is something.

• 2:16:32Dax Shepard?

  Sure. Yeah, I'm just like, where did this come from? I think he must have like, it had to be a part of some other thing he got that just got lobbed on to the bill that you had to have if you had, I don't know.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:16:44Dax Shepard?

  Makes no sense.

• 2:16:45Dax Shepard?

  I joined AARP and, um, because I thought this was fun.

• 2:16:51Dax Shepard?

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  Isn't that for like 70 year olds?

• 2:16:55Dax Shepard?

  People, yeah. American Association of Retired Persons.

• 2:16:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but listen, um.

• 2:17:00Dax Shepard?

  You listen up.

• 2:17:01Dax Shepard?

  This probably went into your junk mail, but I got it in the mail and saw that I was. was eligible to be a member of AARP and I laughed really hard and I and I was reading through it for a very small fee of like fourteen ninety-nine for an annual.

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:17:25Dax Shepard?

  Anyway, so I was like, this can't be right. It was when I turned fifty. Then it got better as I was reading and it was like, so I'm like,

• 2:17:37Dax Shepard?

  okay, so the perks are you can get like a coffee at McDonald's. Discount at Denny's. Sure, sure, sure. So. Holiday Inn discount. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:17:48Dax Shepard?

  Travel. Then I see you can order a second card for seven ninety-nine to your for your spouse, which Ruthie's seven years younger than me. So I'm like, oh, this isn't even funny. This is worth twenty bucks, just to. For the laugh. For the laugh.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I wonder if that's part of their strategy when they. Totally. Doing their marketing budget. They're like, a lot of people are gonna buy this for a laugh. Yes. Works. So I order them and um.

• 2:18:19Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, it's not a huge mystery. Sometimes you have financial issues.

• 2:18:27Dax Shepard?

  So now I'm like pounded with um mail and um. Yeah, they know you're a soccer nut. Notifications from AARP.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  No, where is it?

• 2:18:38Dax Shepard?

  But one I've been seeing lately and I've set a couple aside but and haven't opened them was life insurance. And I'm like, well, I mean, I'll look into this, but um it might be one of those fifteen hundred dollars.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  But your focus is more on the AARP right now.

• 2:18:55Dax Shepard?

  I will. I really would love to go to a Holiday Inn out of town with my wife and and we both have to present our cards.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is really fun. That is fun.

• 2:19:05Dax Shepard?

  Did they give you the sticker for the back year window on your car? I got a lot of stickers. You should put them all over your car. It came with a lot of stickers. I'm trying to think if I'm more courteous and forgiving of people when I see the sticker or if I'm angry at them. Like, I can't remember if I'm forgiving or if the second I see it, I go, oh, they're gonna drive like shit. Well, you wouldn't. You wouldn't be forgiving if you pulled up and saw it was me.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  No, what the fuck?

• 2:19:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it'd be him.

• 2:19:36Dax Shepard?

  It's like when you see a guy jump out of his car in the handicap and sprint into Subway.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:19:41Dax Shepard?

  And he's got the fucking license plate and everything. But it's legit.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  Wow. Congratulations.

• 2:19:49Dax Shepard?

  Thank you.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 2:19:50Dax Shepard?

  I told you my father, like, he loved his placards so much. So he traveled with it and so often we would be like, we would pull up, there's nobody there. It's like we're going to Costco at eleven AM on a weekday.

• 2:20:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he had his knee replaced and you know, he was obese and stuff and uh he did put the spot directly next to the handicap would be open and I would start pulling in. You go, whoa, what are you doing? Go over one. And it's like, oh my God, why? This is now a weird obsession. Like, you have to be in this spot. You can, we're gonna walk all of Costco. You couldn't be one. You walk great when you think there's um fucking samples at the far end of the store.

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 2:20:36Dax Shepard?

  I love him so much. I love him the most. He is great.

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 2:20:41Dax Shepard?

  He's a great man.

• 2:20:47Dax Shepard?

  Backies?

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do. Well, I do wanna make one thing clear, because people might think that I'm very greedy.

• 2:20:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  Because I want half of my parents' money. Um, but my money will go to my brother.

• 2:21:00Dax Shepard?

  Which is all the more reason.

• 2:21:02Speaker 01

  No, more reason that like, okay, so, so, okay.

• 2:21:07Dax Shepard?

  I mean, all the more reason that you want them to have it all anyway.

• 2:21:10Speaker 01

  No, I want my money from my parents because I earned that money from them. Listen, part of the reason.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  I did. I did. Part of the reason I have this money is because I was trying to make them proud.

• 2:21:25Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  And I did it for them and them only. For them and them only.

• 2:21:32Dax Shepard?

  For you, I think for you too.

• 2:21:34Speaker 01

  No, for me too, but it, that is real. Like, they and um so I deserve that. I deserve to feel equally loved and cared for.

• 2:21:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Do you think they love you equally?

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  I'm starting to wonder now that we got a new baby in the mix.

• 2:21:54Speaker 01

  That's sort of how this started. I was like, oh, I wonder what's gonna, I wonder if this is gonna change.

• 2:21:59Dax Shepard?

  What if they left it just all to the baby, not to you or Neil? That baby didn't earn it.

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. That baby earned, that baby earned money from my brother and Emily.

• 2:22:12Dax Shepard?

  Well, he's made your grandparent, his grandparents extremely proud. They think he's a soccer star.

• 2:22:17Speaker 01

  Being born.

• 2:22:18Dax Shepard?

  Well, he's done more than three weeks.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. I had to do so.

• 2:22:22Dax Shepard?

  He's like a marine. He gets more done in three weeks than most people do in a lifetime.

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  Coming back with A after A after A. He didn't have to do shit. Anyway, well, it's gonna be great.

• 2:22:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  And it's not even gonna happen for like a hundred years.

• 2:22:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  All right, let's do some facts.

• 2:22:40Dax Shepard?

  I love Ray Madoff.

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 2:22:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I uh, once in a while, these these come up, I don't know, every fifteen, twenty episodes where I repeat all the data I learned in the interview to every single person I see for the next week. And that was this interview.

• 2:22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a.

• 2:22:57Dax Shepard?

  This is an alarm call.

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  Fantastic interview, alarm bell, great information. We all need to listen to this.

• 2:23:05Dax Shepard?

  Alarm calls are not a, alarm calls are not a thing, is not a saying, right?

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  It's just an alarm bell.

• 2:23:09Dax Shepard?

  An alarm bell?

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:11Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Sound the alarm.

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  Sound the alarm also an option.

• 2:23:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Yep. Uh huh. Okay, she said women are named all kinds of male names, you know, but not Ray.

• 2:23:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Um, she said they're named Joseph and Frank. I personally.

• 2:23:25Dax Shepard?

  Frankie.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  Frankie.

• 2:23:27Dax Shepard?

  I know Frankie.

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  Frankie short for Francis, generally.

• 2:23:30Dax Shepard?

  Is it?

• 2:23:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, and I would say Joseph, I've never heard Joe, but that's for Josephine. Yeah. But that was just funny that she said that, but then it made me wanna look up. Girl names were once more common for boys.

• 2:23:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  This is from.

• 2:23:46Dax Shepard?

  Great prompt.

• 2:23:47Speaker 01

  She knows.

• 2:23:49Dax Shepard?

  Uh oh. Ding ding ding. Knows.

• 2:23:52Speaker 01

  That's from a previous. Okay, Robin, that used to be a boy name.

• 2:23:57Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Robin Hood, sure.

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:02Dax Shepard?

  I definitely think, when I hear Robin, I definitely think female more than.

• 2:24:05Speaker 01

  Now, yeah. Um, okay, Jocelyn was a boy name.

• 2:24:11Dax Shepard?

  What?

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  I know. Medieval.

• 2:24:14Dax Shepard?

  Thirteen.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  Medieval times.

• 2:24:19Speaker 01

  Kim, these are good. Good job, she knows.

• 2:24:22Dax Shepard?

  Kim was a guy's name?

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. It didn't even appear on the female name charts until nineteen forty-four.

• 2:24:28Dax Shepard?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  At which time it was far more popular for boys.

• 2:24:33Dax Shepard?

  Well, Kimberly is Kim, right?

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36Dax Shepard?

  Was it Kimbo? The boys were named Kimberly.

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  They were just named Kim, Darcy.

• 2:24:41Dax Shepard?

  Was a boy's name?

• 2:24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's such a good name.

• 2:24:44Dax Shepard?

  I could just be at home and make a list, you know, I could be like Jennifer.

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  No, they have stats. Oh, my.

• 2:24:50Dax Shepard?

  They have sources?

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:24:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:24:53Speaker 01

  Okay, if you live in the United States, you probably think of Darcy as a girl's name. It's firmly entrenched on the feminine side, consistently within the top one thousand most popular girl names in the US from nineteen forty-nine to nineteen ninety-four, peaking at number three hundred and forty-nine in nineteen sixty-eight. It was on the most popular male name list in this country, too, fairly consistently from nineteen fifty-four to nineteen seventy.

• 2:25:14Dax Shepard?

  Whoa.

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Mm-hmm.

• 2:25:17Dax Shepard?

  I wonder what they went, they went by the full Jocelyn?

• 2:25:20Speaker 01

  No, Darcy.

• 2:25:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, Darcy.

• 2:25:24Dax Shepard?

  Have you said Jocelyn?

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:26Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:25:27Dax Shepard?

  So it's not out of nowhere that I just said Jocelyn. Okay, I'm just a few behind.

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, Aubrey.

• 2:25:32Dax Shepard?

  Kim?

• 2:25:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay, Aubrey was a dude's name?

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:25:37Dax Shepard?

  Okay, when? Eighteen ten?

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  Um, it didn't even make the list for girls until nineteen seventy-three. Up until then, it was far more popular for boys, having been in the male top a thousand names even prior to nineteen hundred.

• 2:25:51Dax Shepard?

  Eighteen ten probably peaked.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Probably. Um.

• 2:25:55Dax Shepard?

  Probably.

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  Dana, I know this one.

• 2:25:57Dax Shepard?

  You knew that one?

• 2:25:58Speaker 01

  Well, I know a male Dana.

• 2:26:00Dax Shepard?

  You do?

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. He was my teacher, uh, AP History, US History, and he was awesome. Shout out Dana Kane.

• 2:26:09Dax Shepard?

  You liked all your teachers, yeah?

• 2:26:10Speaker 01

  I had a lot of teachers I liked, yeah. I got a good.

• 2:26:13Dax Shepard?

  That's where Lincoln and I really diverge and I'm so grateful.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  She likes her teachers.

• 2:26:18Dax Shepard?

  She's a teacher spot.

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was like the bane of most teachers' existence and I didn't like them, they liked me.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:25Dax Shepard?

  And what a terrible way to go through. And she loves her teachers so much and I'm so happy and relieved.

• 2:26:30Speaker 01

  It's so nice to be liked by your teachers.

• 2:26:33Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  Um, Riley.

• 2:26:36Dax Shepard?

  I had a male teacher, Mr. Shade in seventh grade science. Aaron brings this up all the time. He grabbed one of those big metal heavy chairs, right? Like the whole base is metal, wood back. He grabbed it and he fucking swung it and threw it right at my head sitting at the desk. And I ducked and it hit the table behind me. He would have sent me to the hospital.

• 2:26:59Speaker 01

  What'd you do? Do you remember?

• 2:27:01Dax Shepard?

  Well, no, because then he immediately was sending me to the office.

• 2:27:04Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying, what did you do to make him throw it?

• 2:27:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I can't remember my infraction. I think I talked for the fifth time after he had warned me not to.

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  Might have been more egregious than that.

• 2:27:14Dax Shepard?

  We got even.

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  You did?

• 2:27:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. He in the summertime was a park ranger at Kensington State Park by our.

• 2:27:25Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Like, I don't like that he threw a chair at you, but I'm nervous.

• 2:27:29Dax Shepard?

  He deserves this. This motherfucker almost took my hat off. You can't throw a chair at a twelve-year-old.

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  I know, but you were probably being so.

• 2:27:35Dax Shepard?

  I wasn't mean to him. I think I was talking to Aaron.

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:27:40Speaker 01

  Park ranger.

• 2:27:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and we kinda knew he couldn't fuck around at that job. And so Erin and I found him a couple different times at that job and taunted him like crazy after we were out of high school.

• 2:27:53Speaker 01

  Okay, Riley.

• 2:27:54Dax Shepard?

  We're like, where's your pistol? Why don't you pull your pistol? They give you a pistol?

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  My god. Alright, um.

• 2:28:02Dax Shepard?

  Mr. Shade, if you're with us, I don't apologize. Most people I would.

• 2:28:06Speaker 01

  Imagine his life, dad.

• 2:28:07Dax Shepard?

  He tried to assault a 12-year-old child. No. I'm fine with, don't, we're not even, we're not even even yet.

• 2:28:14Speaker 01

  You were a bad kid.

• 2:28:16Dax Shepard?

  I wasn't a bad kid. I, I, I was an antsy ADHD kid. Who talked too much.

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  He though, let's be, he, let's take you out of it, pretend it's not you, okay? And it's just a teacher who's dealing, who's not good at being a teacher and who has all these kids and doesn't know how to control them and one will, is relentless and he lost his shit and this is a.

• 2:28:40Dax Shepard?

  Wasn't the first time either. He beamed me in the head with a fucking eraser one time too.

• 2:28:46Dax Shepard?

  He was on.

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  And he doesn't have enough money, so he has to be a park ranger in the summer and.

• 2:28:52Dax Shepard?

  Well, you've had it. Hold on, hold on, hold on.

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  What?

• 2:28:55Dax Shepard?

  What do you mean he doesn't have enough money? He lived in my cheap-ass town. He, he was middle-class in my town. He just had that job because he wanted to be a park ranger.

• 2:29:02Speaker 01

  If you were interviewing, yeah, it's okay. You can't see in, in, within it, okay?

• 2:29:07Dax Shepard?

  Listen, if it's 12, here's what you do. You stop, you go, let's go out into the hallway.

• 2:29:13Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:29:13Dax Shepard?

  Let's talk.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  No one's saying he did a good thing.

• 2:29:16Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  No one's saying his behavior was appropriate or right. But we can also have compassion for his circumstance, which is what we normally do always.

• 2:29:27Dax Shepard?

  I, I, um, yes, there are certain folks in my history that I have a hard time extending compassion to.

• 2:29:34Speaker 01

  You're, you're a human too.

• 2:29:36Dax Shepard?

  You know?

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  You've done, you have given, you have said that before. You have given some compassion. I mean, more than I would give.

• 2:29:43Dax Shepard?

  All I've said, the, the most I can extend is

• 2:29:48Dax Shepard?

  in the game of life, he, he suffered the most.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Horrible.

• 2:29:54Dax Shepard?

  That I can give him.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  I don't want to extend him any, but I do want to extend this teacher's.

• 2:29:59Dax Shepard?

  I don't know why. I wish you would meet Mr. Shade.

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  Teachers are just, it's, you know.

• 2:30:03Dax Shepard?

  Oh, it's so hard. I, I get it. It's so hard.

• 2:30:06Speaker 01

  It's too hard.

• 2:30:07Dax Shepard?

  But Monica cannot chuck metal chairs at kids. And, and, and if you, and if that's your disposition, you cannot be a teacher in public school. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:13Speaker 01

  But I don't think, I don't like that he got taunted.

• 2:30:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I do. I wish. I can always leave when I'm assaulted. I'm sorry.

• 2:30:21Speaker 01

  Okay, Riley. Shannon.

• 2:30:24Dax Shepard?

  Shannon.

• 2:30:27Speaker 01

  Shannon. Carol.

• 2:30:29Dax Shepard?

  There's a really tough, uh, hockey player named Shannon.

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, Shannon is, I have heard of this person. Carol.

• 2:30:35Dax Shepard?

  Carol.

• 2:30:35Speaker 01

  We know that.

• 2:30:36Dax Shepard?

  Do you know Carol? Girl. All these dads have these things. So, um, Bree's father, Greg, would always call for the mom. Always. It'd be like, this is such a family thing to do, I think. Like, stand up and go into the bed, you know, like.

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  Oh, no, everyone's shouting.

• 2:30:54Dax Shepard?

  Girl. So, I mean, he always, girl. So I always just make fun of him and I would just randomly yell Carol all the time.

• 2:31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:00Dax Shepard?

  And then Kristen's dad has a great one. You've heard her imitate that one. Kelly, gal, Galen.

• 2:31:05Speaker 01

  Oh, he is, he. Oh, that's funny.

• 2:31:08Dax Shepard?

  Just getting heated. It's so funny.

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  We all do it, right?

• 2:31:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we all do it.

• 2:31:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was very funny.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  Carol Morgan. We know him, Morgan. Yeah. Love him. Morgan Sackett, shout out. Hillary.

• 2:31:21Dax Shepard?

  Was a man's name?

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:31:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh, man, that's tough. If you're like a cowboy and you walk into the saloon.

• 2:31:27Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 2:31:27Dax Shepard?

  It's like, uh, I want you to meet my friend Hillary.

• 2:31:30Speaker 01

  I think they'd probably go by Old Hill, but Hillary, yeah, I love it. That was also 19, oh no.

• 2:31:37Dax Shepard?

  I, I would say that that's, that's tied with, with, with Shel Silverstein and Johnny Cash's boy named Sue. Hillary is, if you name your son Hillary, like, just, you gotta acknowledge, you're setting him on a real.

• 2:31:48Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do it.

• 2:31:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my god, I would fucking not allow it.

• 2:31:52Speaker 01

  Courtney. I have heard that. Lauren. Lauren.

• 2:31:57Dax Shepard?

  Lauren Michaels?

• 2:31:58Speaker 01

  No, that's Lorne. You do often say Lauren, but it's Lauren. L O R N E.

• 2:32:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  This is.

• 2:32:05Dax Shepard?

  He's Canadian, though, so maybe that's how they spell Lauren.

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Lauren, um.

• 2:32:10Dax Shepard?

  I mean, I don't hear the difference between what you're saying. Lauren, Lauren.

• 2:32:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 2:32:13Dax Shepard?

  Lauren, Lauren.

• 2:32:14Speaker 01

  No, Lauren.

• 2:32:16Dax Shepard?

  Lauren.

• 2:32:16Speaker 01

  Two, two syllables. Lauren.

• 2:32:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:19Speaker 01

  Lorne, one syllable. Lorne.

• 2:32:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:32:23Speaker 01

  I know. It is hard.

• 2:32:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:32:25Dax Shepard?

  We're splitting hairs, but.

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  Really not. Really, really not. Sydney.

• 2:32:30Dax Shepard?

  I think it's because his last name was Michaels. They're like, let's soften it up.

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  Sure, maybe.

• 2:32:35Dax Shepard?

  Lauren Michaels.

• 2:32:39Speaker 01

  Sydney. Sidney Poitier.

• 2:32:41Dax Shepard?

  Poitier.

• 2:32:42Speaker 01

  Allison. I have heard this. I have heard this. Um.

• 2:32:47Dax Shepard?

  Allison Crowley. Alastair Crowley.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Alastair, yeah, but still.

• 2:32:50Dax Shepard?

  Still Allison. Okay.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  Shelby, um.

• 2:32:54Dax Shepard?

  Shelby Silverstein?

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  Shelby from Peaky Blinders, but that's the last name, but still.

• 2:32:59Dax Shepard?

  Shelby Cobra. Carol Shelby. Oh, Carol.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  Carol, see?

• 2:33:03Dax Shepard?

  That's a man. Carol, Cheryl, Shelby.

• 2:33:05Speaker 01

  And Carol, there's a big actor. Carol from All in the Family.

• 2:33:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yeah. Uh, uh, um, Erby Bunkett. What's his name? Currie Bunkett?

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  Archie Bunker.

• 2:33:13Dax Shepard?

  Archie Bunker. Or something, Carol, something.

• 2:33:16Speaker 01

  What the fuck? Carol.

• 2:33:17Speaker 03

  Uh, Carol Burnett.

• 2:33:18Dax Shepard?

  Carol.

• 2:33:21Dax Shepard?

  Carol Channing.

• 2:33:23Speaker 01

  Carol.

• 2:33:24Speaker 03

  O'Connor.

• 2:33:25Dax Shepard?

  O'Connor.

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Lindsay. Kelly. Kelly. Beverly.

• 2:33:32Dax Shepard?

  Kelly Slater?

• 2:33:33Speaker 01

  Beverly. I've heard it.

• 2:33:35Dax Shepard?

  Again.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  Uh-oh, Meredith?

• 2:33:38Dax Shepard?

  Come on, guy. Alright, alright, alright, alright, alright. Alright, we got a lot.

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  Vivian.

• 2:33:42Dax Shepard?

  We got a lot, we got a lot. You're just naming every single girl's name now.

• 2:33:46Speaker 01

  There are a lot on this list. Okay, I will be done. Okay, um.

• 2:33:51Dax Shepard?

  Nancy. Cindy.

• 2:33:52Speaker 01

  The rom-com, what do you think is the most girly name?

• 2:33:57Dax Shepard?

  Lily. If you name a dude Lily.

• 2:34:01Dax Shepard?

  Again, I hope he can fight. That's all I hope.

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  No, you better stick up for that guy.

• 2:34:07Dax Shepard?

  I hope for his sake he can fight if he's named Lily. Boy named Sue. You pray he can fight, because he's gonna be in a lot of them.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  So you think I have the girliest name?

• 2:34:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 2:34:18Speaker 01

  Wow. Okay, um. The movie rom-com where a couple had to go into witness protection program and then they went to Ray Wyoming. That was, did you hear about the Morgans? It was in 2009.

• 2:34:32Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. Okay, I looked up what professors are the hardest to become. Like, what subject of being a professor is the hardest, because philosophy is how we got into this. Humanities and arts is extremely, it says extreme slash brutal job market competitiveness. So it's philosophy, history, English. Then very high job market competitiveness, one rung down, is pure basic sciences, biology, physics, chemistry. Then moderate accessible is professional schools, business, nursing, computer science.

• 2:35:08Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. Is there anyone that says easy? Like, I feel like physicists has gotta be up there.

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  No, physics is in, um, pure basic sciences. It's very high competitive.

• 2:35:18Dax Shepard?

  Hmm, okay.

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  Um, okay.

• 2:35:23Dax Shepard?

  I just feel like not a ton of people. Here's what I'm, this, I, just so you know, I'm doing this. Very few people major in physics. Everyone majors in communications. I'm just talking about how many people major in the thing that feels like it'd be telling.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  That might be additive, because if not, that many people are, well, first of all, though, everyone does kinda have to take it.

• 2:35:42Dax Shepard?

  That's what I'm saying. Every college has a physics professor.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:46Dax Shepard?

  Yet not a lot of people major and get their graduate degree in physics. A ton of people get their law degree. A ton of people do communications. So that's that many people you'd be competing against versus you, you graduate in something that very few people graduate in, that would have to increase your odds. Does that make sense?

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  I know, but also they just don't need as many professors in those then. If not enough people are majoring in it.

• 2:36:08Dax Shepard?

  That's a solid point, but they, there are certain things, like, they have to have a physics department, right? They gotta have like.

• 2:36:13Speaker 01

  But it might just be small. The physics department's probably smaller than, anyway, whatever. Um, is Paul McCartney a billionaire? Yes.

• 2:36:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that catalog is valuable.

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  Is California still the fourth biggest economy in the world?

• 2:36:27Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:36:30Dax Shepard?

  I wish you could do your hair that way. You keep it exactly how it is and then take a photo of you. This would be, you should figure out how to do this on Halloween.

• 2:36:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:36:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, hold on a second.

• 2:36:41Speaker 03

  Marge Simpson?

• 2:36:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yes, um, Lebanese Marge Simpson.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  Ew, ugh.

• 2:36:47Dax Shepard?

  Alright, I'm gonna send this to you.

• 2:36:53Dax Shepard?

  That's a different episode.

• 2:36:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you now have.

• 2:36:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I could probably do a pipe cleaner or something.

• 2:37:02Dax Shepard?

  You could figure it out. I could help with the physics. Ding ding ding.

• 2:37:06Speaker 01

  Okay, um, yeah. Gross domestic GDP surpassing 4.1 trillion.

• 2:37:12Dax Shepard?

  I mean, it's just nuts that a state is higher than, uh.

• 2:37:15Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:37:16Dax Shepard?

  Than Japan.

• 2:37:16Speaker 01

  Yep, and narrowly ranking ahead of countries like Japan, India, and the UK, but still. I'm pretty proud of it.

• 2:37:23Dax Shepard?

  I think it's US, China, Germany.

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  That is right. That is correct. That's what I just read.

• 2:37:28Dax Shepard?

  You didn't read that?

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  I read it in my, I did. I just didn't say it out loud.

• 2:37:32Dax Shepard?

  That's a, that's a good distinction. Alright.

• 2:37:34Speaker 01

  Alright, love you.

• 2:37:34Dax Shepard?

  Love you.