Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Mary Claire Haver (on menopause) About this episode Mary Claire Haver (The New Menopause, The ‘Pause Life) is a board-certified OBGYN, culinary medicine specialist, and best-selling author. Mary Claire joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how she ended up as one of eight children to restauranteur parents, the reason she became an OBGYN being that delivering babies never gets old, and how she misinterpreted her own menopause as grief amid the death of her brother. Mary Claire and Dax talk about the untenable claims of the study that HRT gives women cancer, her argument that hormone replacement therapy is the longevity drug for women, and a hormonal solution to reverse declining libido as one reaches menopausal age. Mary Claire explains why women can still get pregnant during perimenopause, the woeful lack of information and training received by medical professionals when it comes to women’s health, and the hive of practitioners she helped crowdsource to meet the needs of the menopausal community.
Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 26,204 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. We are joined today by Dr. Mary Claire Haver.
0:07 Speaker 01 Wow.
0:08 Dax Shepard? This is a long time coming.
0:10 Speaker 01 Big time.
0:11 Dax Shepard? Armchairs demanded it, and we have produced it. We actually leaned on Armchairs to tell us who their favorite menopause expert was.
0:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:20 Dax Shepard? And by unanimous, popular.
0:23 Speaker 01 Dr. Mary Claire.
0:24 Dax Shepard? She popped up, and she fucking delivered. I love her.
0:27 Speaker 01 I thought she was so great. This is so informative and helpful and needed. And I've brought this up, obviously, to a lot of my female friends.
0:37 Dax Shepard? What was the main thing you said? Cause I brought it up to some people, too.
0:39 Speaker 01 Oh, I'm, I'm just like, guys, we had a perimenopause, menopause expert on. This is really intense.
0:47 Dax Shepard? It's very positive. It's like the most hopeful.
0:49 Speaker 01 It is, it is. I was overwhelmed.
0:52 Dax Shepard? Okay.
0:52 Speaker 01 Um, in a good, in a way that I needed to be overwhelmed. We're like, there's a lot.
0:56 Dax Shepard? Hear everything coming your way.
0:57 Speaker 01 Exactly. There's a lot coming slash here.
1:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:01 Speaker 01 And, and there are real things to do, and so I gotta do them.
1:06 Dax Shepard? I've been telling people about the topical vaginal rub.
1:08 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:09 Dax Shepard? That's what I was most interested in.
1:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, we learned a lot. We learned a lot.
1:13 Dax Shepard? Okay, uh, so Dr. Mary is a certified menopause practitioner from the Menopause Society. She is a board certified in obstu- and obst- I said this in the episode.
1:24 Speaker 01 It's hard to say.
1:25 Dax Shepard? In obstetrics, obstetrics and gynecology specialists, and a certified culinary medicine specialist, and a bestselling author. Uh, two of her books, The New Menopause, uh, which is hugely successful, and The Gallaston Diet. I urge everyone to follow her on Instagram. She has really, really great videos that will be addressing all these little things that pop up. And also you could go to her website, thepauslife.com, which is a comprehensive approach to menopause education and support. Um, this is awesome. She was rad.
1:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Enjoy. Enjoy. We get support from Quince.
2:03 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself, because let's be honest, self-gifting is a love language.
2:22 Dax Shepard? Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high-quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. Full-on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.
2:38 Speaker 01 It's the dream. The cashmere sweater is starting at $60. Down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories. You and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.
2:49 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm gonna tell you this, it just got chilly for the first time this year in California, and I'm so excited, and I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.
2:56 Speaker 01 It's great.
2:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.
3:01 Speaker 01 Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel-quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef-grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here, and it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five-star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.
3:24 Dax Shepard? Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8.
3:54 Speaker 01 What?
3:55 Dax Shepard? Okay, I need to talk about something that doesn't get enough respect. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is not a casual burger. This is a crafted burger. We're talking 100% fresh beef cooked right when you order it. No artificial flavors, no fillers, no preservatives, just beef doing what beef is supposed to do. And here's a detail I love. There's a cowbell sound in the kitchen. When somebody orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a cowbell goes off and the grill master throws a fresh patty down. That's like having your own entrance music at McDonald's. I want a cowbell for everything in life. The onions are hand-topped by someone who just knows the right amount. Two slices of cheese laid out in a star pattern, so every single bite gets cheese. And two pickles, side by side, so you're never in a pickle desert.
4:40 Dax Shepard? Every bite is accounted for. Someone engineered this thing with love. I love a Quarter Pounder.
4:45 Speaker 01 Me too, that's my order. It's a Quarter Pounder with cheese. I love it. I didn't know they put so much effort that they did a star formation. I should have known because you can taste it when there's effort.
4:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the love. Don't tell anyone this, but I'll put two of them back.
5:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm not surprised.
5:03 Dax Shepard? The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.
5:38 Dax Shepard? Langwa Franca, what is it?
5:40 Speaker 01 Lingua Franca. So they hosted my book launch, my big New York, one of the deals, and she made this for me.
5:49 Dax Shepard? Will you wait 39 seconds?
5:50 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
5:51 Speaker 02 This is so nice. I feel left out because I do indeed.
5:55 Speaker 01 Hydro magic, I love it.
5:57 Dax Shepard? I'm told it's a wicked reference.
5:59 Speaker 01 It is, yeah.
6:00 Dax Shepard? And the colors are wicked.
6:03 Speaker 02 I'm going to a Mardi Gras ball that is Wizard of Oz wicked themed.
6:08 Dax Shepard? In New Orleans?
6:09 Speaker 02 In Galveston.
6:10 Dax Shepard? I love Galveston.
6:11 Speaker 02 You've been there?
6:12 Dax Shepard? I have.
6:13 Speaker 02 There's like three people and he's one of them. Yeah.
6:15 Dax Shepard? I used to work for General Motors and we had a car show there and our ride route ended there and we stayed at a very cool hotel. And each room was like kinda unique. You know the one I'm talking about?
6:24 Speaker 02 So that's gonna be the Galvez, more than likely.
6:26 Dax Shepard? Okay, very, very nice.
6:27 Speaker 02 On the water, old.
6:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, very old. Felt like vampires would stay there.
6:31 Speaker 02 That's it.
6:32 Dax Shepard? And you guys moved there. You're from Louisiana.
6:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, I grew up in Louisiana, went to undergrad. I was a raging Cajun, so at what, U S L? I'm dating myself. It's now U L L. They're fancy. And then I did grad school for a little bit, almost went the PhD geology route. Oh. My undergrad's in geology. I went to work for an oil company. Kinda had a change of heart and was like, what else can I do with this science degree? And I was moving towards the PhD and I'm like, if I'm not gonna do this PhD, I need to do something cool and big. Let me just take the MCAT and see what happens. So then LSU format school, which was in Shreveport, North Louisiana. And then I did residency in Galveston and we've stayed in the Houston-Galveston area pretty much since then. Do people tell you you look like Courtney Cox? Yes, yes. Especially back in the day. Yes.
7:18 Speaker 02 When she was on Friends, I was a resident and we would have Friends watch parties. And now it's kind of Tina Fey. Anyone with black hair and big glasses is me. Well, both are compliments. Yeah.
7:30 Dax Shepard? And we love them both.
7:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, we do.
7:31 Dax Shepard? Huge fan. You're one of eight.
7:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:34 Dax Shepard? What did mom and dad do?
7:35 Speaker 02 A lot of sex.
7:36 Dax Shepard? Well, clearly, yeah.
7:37 Speaker 02 Good for them.
7:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
7:39 Speaker 02 They weren't shy about it. I would walk into the parents, make it out in the corner. Really? Stop. So mom and dad were restaurateurs.
7:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, yes. They owned a Cajun restaurant.
7:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. We just called it food. You would call it Cajun and it was a little more upscale. It was steaks and seafood. And I grew up in a big restaurant family. My grandparents, my aunts and uncles, most of my siblings.
8:00 Dax Shepard? That's why they couldn't keep their hands off themselves because restaurant people party a lot and they're horny. That's a whole lifestyle.
8:06 Speaker 02 Lots of naps, work the lunch shift, come home, nap.
8:08 Dax Shepard? Nap, quotes. How do you choose obst-
8:11 Speaker 02 OB GYN?
8:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I want to say obstetric.
8:14 Speaker 02 It's a hard word.
8:15 Dax Shepard? I can say obstetrician, but-
8:16 Speaker 02 Obstetrics.
8:17 Dax Shepard? Obst-
8:18 Speaker 02 Obstetrics, that is tricky. Obstetrics and gynecology. So in your third year in most traditional programs, first two years are just in classroom and you get a little taste of different things, but you're mostly just getting the basics down. And your last two years are out in the wards where you're in the hospital rotating and figuring out what you want to do. I remember I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician. I was president of the Peds Interest Group, what they called PIG. And I did Peds first and I realized quickly, I love babies, but I don't love their parents. The whole dynamic, this is not my niche.
8:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:46 Speaker 02 So then you rotate through surgery. I really liked aspects of surgery, but I didn't like surgeons. They were kind of awesome.
8:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:53 Speaker 02 A and T was cool, but super competitive. I had the grades, turns out, but my last block was OB GYN. And that first night, I caught a baby. The block I happened to have first was labor and delivery. Wow. I have some awesome upper level residents who's like, we got this, come on, get in there. And I was like, ugh. And I remember calling my mom, like, I finally figured out what I want to do.
9:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
9:12 Speaker 02 I want to deliver babies. I didn't want to have anything to do with menopause.
9:15 Dax Shepard? What part do you think was so rewarding?
9:18 Speaker 02 I still could cry. It never gets old, being there for a birth.
9:22 Dax Shepard? Well, I wanted to dial in on it because two of my favorite experiences on earth are the second both of my daughters were born, holding them, looking in their face and going, "Welcome to earth." Like, there is something so crazy-
9:34 Speaker 02 And I get to see them before you.
9:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, right, right.
9:37 Speaker 02 And I'm just like, how about- You know, it's never gets old. It's a miracle. And I make a big production. We lay the baby on mom's tummy and I let the daddy cut the, I let, you know, he gets to cut the cord and everyone's crying. Through the whole birth labor process, I'm hanging out. Where'd y'all meet? Let's talk. Because you don't get that connection in a 15 minute visit all through the OB stuff. So I'm there for delivery. I'm not just rolling in to catch the baby. I'm there for the whole labor.
10:02 Dax Shepard? You're also getting to be a part of the most intimate thing that a couple will share, or one of them, for us, for sure. Like, oh my God, we made a thing and it's here. As opposed to a meter maid who has to give people bad news all day. This is like-
10:15 Speaker 02 The opposite.
10:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
10:16 Speaker 02 There's occasional bad outcomes and tragedies and I'm trained- For all the crazy stuff that could happen. But most of the time, I just get to be there and it's just such a cool experience. So that's what I fell in love with and I'm like, and I have to do surgery. And I have to do this menopause thing and do gynecology. But it's a necessary evil to do this baby thing.
10:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
10:32 Speaker 02 So this menopause thing was a sector of it? Yeah.
10:36 Dax Shepard? But not even, right?
10:37 Speaker 02 Not even. Medical school, right? We do four years, two years on the books, two years in the wards. And we had one one hour lecture in that first two years. This is menopause, just a basic overview.
10:47 Dax Shepard? One one hour lecture.
10:48 Speaker 02 I'm not shocked. I know almost nothing. That's why I'm here. I got you. Exactly.
10:53 Dax Shepard? And you pointed out, this isn't my realization, but we're going to do one hour to address a third of a woman's life.
10:59 Speaker 02 That 100% of women will go through. It's not optional.
11:04 Dax Shepard? And it's not a couple of weeks or a couple of months. It's a third of their life we're gonna just not worry about.
11:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, but you know, it wasn't put to me that way. This is just a transition and estrogen declines and off you go. And she might have some hot flashes. We've got medicine for that. Okay. Then in OB GYN residency, which is women's health, probably 55, 60% of what we did was to do with OB. Getting people pregnant, staying pregnant, un-pregnating them. All the trials and tribulations, important stuff. So proud of everything I learned. And then everything else gets shoved in the box of gynecology. And we have reproductive endocrinology, which is basically endocrine stuff that happens, weird chromosomal things, and getting people pregnant for fertility issues. We have pediatric gynecology, how to take care of smaller people with the same organs who have issues and need help. We have general gynecologies, well, woman exams.
11:53 Speaker 02 So menopause was part of our REI block, reproductive endocrinology, which we only did second year for six weeks. We had a one hour lecture each week. So I got six hours. So in eight years of medical training and education, I had seven hours of menopause. We had no menopause clinics. And then I was leashed onto the world, go be free and practice. I didn't know anything. Yeah.
12:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you've come to regret how many women were basically asking for your help. And in that paradigm, you pretty much were just turning people over to different specialists.
12:24 Speaker 02 I didn't know enough at the time to know that. Her palpitations, her frozen shoulders. Her, you know, myriad, oh, girl, wait, we're gonna get that. My mom? Oh, no. Our laundry list of complaints. I'm the well woman examiner and I got 15 minutes to get through this. So I'm like, we're gonna send you to cardiology for your palpitations. We're gonna go to the ortho for your shoulder. So I'm giving her six referrals.
12:45 Dax Shepard? Sleep specialist for your insomnia.
12:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, and a nutritionist for your weight gain. And we're good. Your pap is normal. See you next year.
12:52 Dax Shepard? And then you yourself started going through menopause.
12:55 Speaker 02 I was, policies, you know, I had an endocrine condition. I didn't ovulate regularly. Why I had fertility treatments for my kids. You had PCOS? PCOS. I had the two pay kids, finally got that done. I don't want to go through another miscarriage. We're done. So I go on birth control pills to manage my condition, which I did great on. That was fine for me. And then I get to about 48 and I'm like, okay, I think we're getting close to where we're gonna be. And I'm totally suppressing my period, so I'm not taking the inactive pills. So I'm totally replace all my hormones and shut it down. I felt better that way than PCOS. I was like, probably time to get off, see where we're at. So I talked to my nurse practitioner who took care of me and was like, I'm gonna get off the pill. We're gonna get some blood work in a month and see where I'm at. She's like, cool. Very same time, my brother dies.
13:39 Speaker 02 So I have six brothers from the same parents. My oldest brother died when I was nine from leukemia. So I was a kid when that happened. And then my next brother, Bob, had HIV and hepatitis. The HIV is actually really under control, but it was his liver just tanking, tanking, tanking. So I've stopped the pill, see where Marie Claire's at. And I'm in the OR, the phone's ringing, ringing, ringing. I'm like, get the phone. And they put it to my ear when they're like, Bob's in a coma. You probably should start heading home.
14:02 Dax Shepard? Did you know that was coming?
14:03 Speaker 02 Eventually, I'd sat the kids down and said, you know, Uncle Bob's getting sicker, but not like today.
14:09 Dax Shepard? It kinda was abrupt despite knowing it was coming.
14:12 Speaker 02 I thought we had a year, two years. Anyway, my partner comes down, we get to a good part in the case, scrubs me out and I go and prepare to go home and figure all this out. So here I am grieving this horrible thing and I am in full on menopause, but I don't know it. I'm gaslighting myself. I'm attributing all the things to grief and certainly grief was a part of it. But after like month six, I realized the grief is lifting. I'm not crying all the time on the way home. I'm like, when was your last period? Shit.
14:40 Dax Shepard? It must be so comforting to hear an OB be out to lunch on their own health.
14:44 Speaker 02 Yes. I didn't like menopause. I was like, ew. Right. I was like Samantha on Sex and the City, not the menopause. And so I was like, Dora, I'm gonna come get the blood work now. And so we did everything. And sure enough, I was fully, fully menopausal.
14:59 Dax Shepard? And that's detectable.
15:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, check your estrogen, check something called FSH. One's high, one's low. That's it.
15:04 Dax Shepard? So it's all in the blood work?
15:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. Perimenopause, no, we don't have. Okay, that's what I was gonna ask, cuz I think I'm in it.
15:10 Dax Shepard? I know, everyone your age does.
15:11 Speaker 02 I looked up all the stats for Southeast Asia. Oh, you did? Yes, I did. Thank you. Yeah, so we'll go over that. But I reluctantly go on hormone therapy cuz I'm like, I cannot live like this. I was still in the impression I would get breast cancer and die. It was gonna kill me.
15:25 Dax Shepard? Well, let's address that right now because I happen to know way more about this than I should cuz I love.
15:30 Speaker 02 Women.
15:31 Dax Shepard? Well, I do love women. But Dr. Atiyah, I love Peter Atiyah, and he's been such a vocal supporter of this. But so all of this, the hysteria that you probably received was based on the work of two people, virtually.
15:44 Speaker 02 So the WHO study was a large, multi-center trial. It was one of the biggest projects the NIH had ever taken on. And for the first time, they were studying women. We were so fucking happy. We knew from anecdotal evidence that women who were on HRT before the WHO.
16:00 Dax Shepard? Hormone replacement therapy.
16:02 Speaker 02 Sorry, hormone replacement therapy, 40% of women were utilizing HRT in menopause. So that was kind of the baseline. It was recommended by the American College of Physicians. I mean, it was like, everybody should consider this. We knew that women who chose it had lower heart disease, had lower certain risks. But that's not proof. That's an observational study.
16:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, correlation.
16:18 Speaker 02 If you follow Atiyah, you need a randomized, controlled, blinded, so NIH billion-dollar study. Wow. Let's study women. They got 37,000 women recruited. Half were placebo versus estrogen or estrogen and progesterone if they had a uterus.
16:32 Dax Shepard? Huge issue already right there if you're not combining the two.
16:35 Speaker 02 Particular estrogen that they were on was Primorin, which we don't use today very often. And then a very specific progesterone. It wasn't using modern HRT formulations. It was just looking at this one. But at the time, in the 2000s, that was the most common formulation. Nothing weird there. Because they were looking for heart disease as the outcome, is this really protective for heart disease? Or are just wealthier, healthier women on HRT and we're getting an artifact? The average age was 63 in the study. A little late. We know it works for hot flashes. We know it'll take care of menopause symptoms, but does it really help with heart disease? So they wanted to start later because it's expensive to go 20 years. So if we start later, then we'll start seeing the heart attacks in a quicker timeframe. They did have younger, they had some women in their 70s start. They went up to 79. Off they go with the trial.
17:20 Speaker 02 The women on estrogen only had a 30% decrease risk of breast cancer. And that was statistically significant. The women on the combo saw a slight increased risk, but it never reached statistical significance.
17:33 Dax Shepard? Really quick, the reason it was kind of irrelevant statistically is that the control group had an abnormally low rate.
17:41 Speaker 02 That's it.
17:41 Dax Shepard? Which was not even considered.
17:43 Speaker 02 So when you compared the two groups, whoa, this is really causing. It was four guys.
17:47 Dax Shepard? Chlobowski, Aragaski.
17:49 Speaker 02 I can't even pronounce their names. And they still stand by, it's crazy.
17:53 Dax Shepard? Just recently, they're back at it.
17:55 Speaker 02 There were 17 centers involved in the study. There were multiple PIs, primary investigators. And these two or three guys wrote this paper and said estrogen causes breast cancer, HRT causes breast cancer. And they called everybody in the room and said, take a look at it. You have one hour to make changes. They rejected all the changes and then they went to the breast.
18:13 Dax Shepard? There's no peer review.
18:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, no. They just said it and it was like letting a genie out of a bottle. Flawed interpretation and hysteria. There was no viral for internet back then, but it was the number one medical news story of 2002. It was on the cover of every magazine. Nancy Snyderman is on ABC saying, don't give anyone estrogen. I was a chief resident. I remember the day it came out and we were like, what? I was terrified to give people HRT. What I didn't know in the ensuing 20 years, being board certified, getting my recertification every year, reading every article they put in front of me. I was the straight A student. They never walked it back to the OB GYNs. And the guidelines have not been changed in American College of OB GYNs since 2014. And they still say only for severe symptoms, smallest amount for the shortest time.
18:59 Speaker 02 Possible. Wow.
19:00 Dax Shepard? And in pre-study, it was at forty percent, what you said.
19:03 Speaker 02 And then last year in 2023, we just got this published in the menopause society. It was four percent.
19:07 Dax Shepard? Four percent.
19:08 Speaker 02 Wow. Four percent of women who are eligible are receiving FDA approved. Now, there's probably more with compounded. It's hard to track that because they don't report. So maybe seven, but still.
19:18 Dax Shepard? There's a great bit of context around this. So you start having the symptoms, you decide you want to do some investigation in this. In your investigation, you quickly find out if you were to search medical peer reviewed articles and journal entries about pregnancy.
19:33 Speaker 02 Almost 1.2 million.
19:34 Dax Shepard? And if you look at menopause at that same period, 94,000 articles were.
19:38 Speaker 02 Do you know how much brain power we're talking about? How much NIH funding, how much private funding, how many labs? That's 10 to one, and more women will go through menopause than bear children. Exactly.
19:47 Dax Shepard? And the bearing children process will last them however long you want to say that window is.
19:52 Speaker 02 Average of two kids, nine months each.
19:54 Dax Shepard? Thirty years? No. So pretty nuts. And maybe now's a fun time. Because I actually want you to explain menopause, but I think now would be a fun time to just talk about men versus women here.
20:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:05 Dax Shepard? Because my father, at the same time that's being published about HRT for women, my dad is being advised to be on testosterone because his level's low and it improves his life. He goes off of antidepressant. It's fine.
20:16 Speaker 02 So men have a slow decline from like 18 or 19 down till they die. But for most, it's still detectable. Now, you might function it better at a higher level and no one's going to deny that to you. It would be as if your testicles shriveled up and died at the average age of 51 and your empty ball sack is flapping in the breeze for the next 30 years.
20:37 Dax Shepard? And we're not going to do anything about that.
20:38 Speaker 02 Yes, and good luck to you, dude. Yeah, exactly.
20:40 Dax Shepard? We're never horny again.
20:41 Speaker 02 Here's a sleeping pill. Here's something to improve your libido, maybe. Here's a palpitation medicine. Here's an antidepressant. Yeah, it's just like get through the rest of your life. They're talking about over-medicalizing menopause, the critics, and I'm like, bitch. Yeah. I'm giving her six drugs or I can wipe the whole thing out with just replacing her estrogen that's gone missing. Yeah.
21:01 Dax Shepard? Right. And it'll actually increase her bone density. It'll actually have real results.
21:05 Speaker 02 It is the longevity drug for females. Nothing's going to work. Better than that. Wow.
21:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot in there.
21:12 Speaker 02 Now, you can raw dog menopause. You know what's making you go on it?
21:15 Dax Shepard? You can't underestimate the layers of sexism that exists within the fact that it would take however many years before we would acknowledge, oh, yeah, women are really suffering from this. And they have a bunch of symptoms from a bunch of different issues arising from this. And better to treat those than to get to the core of what's going on.
21:33 Speaker 02 When you look at why menopause hormone therapy was developed, it was to treat a hot flash. And forever, the pathognomonic, the post your child symptom was hot flashes. What we call medicine vasomotor symptoms. What was never taught to me ever, and I learned like three years ago, was we have estrogen receptors in every single organ system in this body. And what I also was taught is in peri-menopause, it's a slow, gentle decline. That's all I learned, one sentence, decline until full menopause, when you lose function. It is a rocking roller coaster. And your worst symptoms tend to be the mental challenges, the brain fog, the cognitive disorders, the frozen shoulder, all of it is peri and late peri and early menopause.
22:11 Dax Shepard? That's when you're accelerating your loss of.
22:13 Speaker 02 Bone and muscle.
22:14 Dax Shepard? And the eggs, right?
22:15 Speaker 02 We were born with all of our eggs.
22:18 Dax Shepard? A million, though. That was a shocker to me.
22:19 Speaker 02 So one to two million at birth?
22:21 Dax Shepard? One to two million eggs.
22:22 Speaker 02 But isn't this a weird, it's like that thing where you're born with all your eggs. So really, your grandma's eggs are your eggs? Yes, when your grandmother was pregnant with your mother, the egg that made you was inside of your mother, inside of your grandmother. In some ways, women have always existed. So there's all this knowledge, wisdom and drama.
22:41 Dax Shepard? Also the mitochondrial eve.
22:43 Speaker 02 That this imprinting that goes on through a traumatic pregnancy. Okay, a million to two million eggs. One to two million at birth. We lose eggs two ways. One, and from the minute they form, we start losing it through atresia, which is like an aging process. And it's kind of survival of the fittest because not all eggs are good eggs that you want to fertilize. So we want to leave the healthy ones behind to catch the sperm. So atresia is happening, boom, boom, boom, and it accelerates at 35. We see a big drop off. And then just from ovulating, we lose about 10,000 to get one to like pop off. Every ovulation. Every ovulation.
23:13 Dax Shepard? Is that in your menstrual discharge? Where are all those eggs?
23:16 Speaker 02 They just kind of dissolve. So when one egg pops out, the. Fallopian tube picks it up and it gets swept like a chimney through the fallopian tube and it's fertilized or not in the fallopian tube and then it goes into the uterine cavity. And sometimes they can pick it up in the men's, you know, when they've done studies, but sometimes it just kind of dissolves. But it's tiny, tiny microscopic. Yeah.
23:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but I wrote it down. By the time you're...
23:37 Speaker 02 Thirty, you're down to 10%.
23:39 Dax Shepard? Down to 10%.
23:40 Speaker 02 So how old are you now? Thirty-seven. Okay, so at forty, most women, and this is different for you and I'm going to explain why. Don't shoot the messenger.
23:46 Dax Shepard? She already knew.
23:47 Speaker 02 Most women are down to 3%. This is for people who look like me. This is the average American white girl. Are you Indian or Southeast Asian? Yes. Okay. Average age of menopause is 46.5. For me, it is 51. Okay. So that's average. The window, 41 is still normal for an Indian descent. And then that goes up to 51. You start younger. And then perimenopause back it up seven to 10 years before that. Am I in it? Maybe.
24:12 Dax Shepard? I bet you have a mix of emotions, validation and depression.
24:15 Speaker 02 No, I don't want, yeah, this one is not good to be validated. I don't, oh God, okay. Well, how would I know? That's a great question. Certainly if your cycles were starting to become irregular and if you had hot flashes, if you had the kind of cliche symptoms, but those are usually late in the game in perimenopause. I don't have that. The most common symptoms, actually, now that these online telemedicine companies have developed for menopause and they are doing scoring systems on hundreds of thousands of women, because everybody goes to their website, Am I in Menopause? And we have all these quizzes and things you can take. Fatigue, out of the ordinary. Nothing has changed. Your diet hasn't changed. Your stresses haven't changed. New onset mental health changes. We have a 40% increase in depression and anxiety across the menopause transition with no real environmental changes. We have weight gain.
24:58 Speaker 02 So it's a steady state weight gain, but what's happening in the background with body composition is we have this acceleration of muscle mass loss and an acceleration of body fat gain, typically in the viscera, so the intra-abdominal fat. So my patients used to come in and grab their tummies in their little paper gowns and be like, what the fuck is this? Mary Claire, I worked in a small town and we all went to church together. What is this? I knew her. I worked out with her. We ran together. I know this woman. I know what she eats. That's when I was like, why are all my friends and now me gaining weight in weird places? Uh huh. None of us have gone off the deep end. We're not secretly eating bonbons at night.
25:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:32 Speaker 02 And then bone density is another key thing. So we're seeing acceleration of bone loss. And so I'm telling my patients, let's get early bone densities. Let's not wait till 65.
25:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:41 Speaker 02 Especially if you're programmed to go through younger than what's expected.
25:45 Speaker 01 Okay, can you get pregnant?
25:47 Speaker 02 You absolutely can get pregnant.
25:48 Speaker 01 During perimenopause.
25:49 Speaker 02 It's just a little harder because your supply and the quality of the egg goes down, which you knew.
25:53 Speaker 01 I did know.
25:54 Speaker 02 You know, the older you are.
25:54 Dax Shepard? She's frozen some eggs.
25:56 Speaker 01 I have.
25:56 Dax Shepard? Did you all the way up to speed?
25:58 Speaker 01 I've done two rounds, but it wasn't great. There's already been some telling, but it is still regular periods. But as you said, maybe that's the later end of it.
26:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, towards the end of peri mean you're getting close to exhausting the whole deal.
26:09 Dax Shepard? Combattiveness with coworkers?
26:11 Speaker 01 My God, that's, that's specific to who you're working with.
26:15 Speaker 02 Brain fog, you know, suddenly you lose your words. We all do it from time to time, but this is consistent. Get in the car and you're like, where am I going? You walk into a room, what was I doing here? You know, everybody does that from time to time.
26:26 Dax Shepard? Okay, we should have done this at the beginning, but now I'm going to make you do it now. Were you unique as an animal?
26:31 Speaker 02 There's a pod of certain whales that do it and elephants are very matriarchal. But when you look at like the anthropologists and they're like, why do women go through menopause? So from a survival standpoint, it behooves a woman to not keep being pregnant over and over again. You kind of have your batch of children and then you have better survival rates if you stop. The anthropologists also think that women served as the source of wisdom for the tribe. They were the passers on of knowledge. The dudes tended to die younger because they're getting killed by saber toothed tigers. The grandma stayed back. Now, remember, these people were still very young compared to when we think of a grandmother now. We also die a lot sooner. Things that don't take people out now, like vaccines and childhood diseases. We have a reason why we live longer.
27:11 Speaker 01 You're right.
27:12 Dax Shepard? There was a very predictable role for the grandma. She was passing on all this wisdom, helping with children. Now we have all these things. We have childcare and we farm things out to strangers. And this whole role that once served our genetic fitness.
27:29 Speaker 02 We've industrialized our way out of it. We've evolved past our genetics.
27:34 Dax Shepard? Yes.
27:35 Speaker 01 Wait, so we're saying the reason that human women didn't die. Is because of their
27:40 Speaker 02 Well, those who kind of ran the gauntlet of disease and being killed by accidents, if they survive, they seem to take on these very wisdom creating, teaching the next generation. You know, if you look at whales, they're teaching the babies to hunt while the moms are hunting gathering with the dads.
27:55 Dax Shepard? Or grandma elephants, they're very involved.
27:57 Speaker 02 They're very involved.
27:58 Dax Shepard? And I guess too, would I be wrong to say this, I'm assuming childbirth gets more dangerous as you're older?
28:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's harder to do and it's harder to stay healthy doing it. In general, we would lose more women to cardiovascular issues, hypertension, preeclampsia, that kind of stuff. Before modern medicine, we had medications to help manage those conditions, diabetes.
28:18 Dax Shepard? So that's how we got there. We're kind of unique. As you say, there are a couple of other people. But let's talk about what physically happens during menopause. Let's talk about the endocrine system. What is it? What does it do and how does it change?
28:31 Speaker 02 So let's talk about what you're going through right now. A healthy woman who has a regular menstrual cycle, nothing is ever steady state. It's an EKG-like ebb and flow of some key hormones. And ovulation starts in the brain, not in the ovary. In order to ovulate, the brain registers that our estrogen level is low. So you have your period, estrogen progesterone drop off. The brain gets that signal, whoa, we're low. The hypothalamus is testing, says, all right, it's time. Sends a signal to the pituitary, next gland underneath. And pituitary is like, all right, boss, I got it. The pituitary then sends LH and FSH. So if you've done any fertility treatments or you know these words or had the shots, you know, I did all that too. So those two hormones go down and bind to the ovaries to stimulate the ovulation.
29:14 Speaker 02 Around each egg are a set of cells, follicular and granulosa cells, and then produce our sex hormones. Estrogen in the first half of the cycle, which peaks at ovulation. After ovulation, we see progesterone rise. And that cycle is unbelievable and goes month after month after month in perfection. Unless you're ill or you're pregnant.
29:32 Dax Shepard? Crazy athlete.
29:33 Speaker 02 There are things that we can do to mess it up, but for the average woman, the cave woman, this worked very well month after month after month.
29:39 Dax Shepard? And is testosterone going up in preparation?
29:42 Speaker 02 That's the one steady state that we have. It might mildly fluctuate, but really testosterone starts high in our twenties and thirties. And then, just like a man.
29:51 Dax Shepard? It seems it would be evolutionarily advantageous if it upped your testosterone when you were fertile.
29:56 Speaker 02 When you're ovulating, but we just don't really see that. Female male drives are a little bit different. So then, what happens in perimenopause? In the background, we're losing eggs, losing eggs, losing eggs. We reach a critical egg threshold level, which is different for every human, where the signals coming from the brain no longer work. We become resistant because the quality and the quantity of the cells around the eggs available are declining. So the brain's like, where is my estrogen? The pituitary is like, boss, I sent the signal. He's like, send more. You start pounding the ovary with the gonorrhoea to the pituitary. Pituitary is like, fuck, all right. Shoots out FSH and LH. We see the stimulating hormones start to rise much higher than they ever, ever were in a premenopausal woman.
30:38 Dax Shepard? Just trying to kickstart this system.
30:40 Speaker 02 Right, and just take it in the ass. So we see delayed ovulation, so the period starts to become irregular. And then, because you were just pounding that egg, we end up with higher estradiol levels than we ever had before. That's why twins are a little bit more common towards the end of your fertility. Oh, interesting. Yeah, than they were when you were younger because you're getting your self-made fertility drugs, basically. Right, right, right. To push that egg out. And then progesterone never quite gets to where it was before. So it used to look like this gorgeous EKG each month. Now is literally a zone of chaos. Interesting. So you have estrogen doing this. Progesterone's like, I'm trying to keep up. FSH and LH are all over the place. And that's why we don't have a great blood test for perimenopause. I can't do a one-time blood test and say, obviously.
31:23 Speaker 02 Now, for post, when you run out of eggs, FSH and LH, the brain is always looking, always pushing, always trying. And now we know, we have FSH receptors in other areas of our body. We think the bone, we know the liver. So sometimes it's not just the loss of estrogen, but it's these high FSH levels that are leading to the cholesterol changes that we see. A new study just, just, just came out two weeks ago that was looking at using a specific cholesterol marker, LDL marker, called super dense LDL as a marker for perimenopause. Like, we don't have a good blood test, but would AMH be helpful? Which is one of the fertility. Things that we check, which is ovarian reserve hormone.
32:02 Dax Shepard? Would you have needed a baseline test prior to any of this?
32:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. So that's a great question. People ask me all the time, okay, so if I'm going to replace my hormones in my menopausal journey, would it have been good for me to know in my 30s where they were? I'm like, where in the month would you like me to check? Probably not the high, because that's when we have the breast tenderness. We worry about stimulating the uterine lining too much. Right. So one of the problems with menopause treatment is we've just titrated to get rid of hot flashes. But now we know women absorb very differently and not everyone's therapeutic on our transdermal doses. So in my clinic, we're starting to check three months out. What are her levels? How is she absorbing? We know that women who start HRT in the first 10 years have a 50% per year lower risk of new heart attack, cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis. It's very protective of the endothelium. What we don't know is what
32:48 Speaker 02 were those levels? We just know she was on it or she wasn't. Right. Yeah. So should we be taking estrogen during perimenopause? I think so.
32:56 Dax Shepard? Wow. Yeah, there's quite a big group of data for that.
32:59 Speaker 02 We can decrease your risk, but it's just how? Do we suppress and replace, like what's in a birth control pill? Or do we just support? Give you just enough to calm the brain down and make your symptoms better, but allow the process to proceed in the background? Right. There's tons of debate in my world about what's better.
33:14 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
33:20 Dax Shepard? We get support from Gusto. So here's the thing about running a small business that nobody romanticizes. It's not the big idea that wears you down, it's the payroll, the tax filings, the wait, do I need workers comp for this stuff? That's the part that quietly eats away your whole afternoon, which is where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use so you can pay onboard and support your team from anywhere. They handle automatic tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, 401k, all of it. And you get unlimited payroll runs for a one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. If something tricky comes up,
34:03 Dax Shepard? you've got direct access to certified HR experts who actually know what they're talking about. And they're ranked number one. On G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 entrusted by over 500,000 small businesses. That's not nothing. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/dax and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/dax. Again, that's gusto.com/dax. 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 Gleepran. Foundo is a once daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet
34:48 Dax Shepard? 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.
34:59 Speaker 04 Foundo should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundo is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundo if you're allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had major lary thyro cancer or multiple endocrinoplasia syndrome type two. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills, and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundo with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once daily Foundo is available by prescription only in 0.8 milligram, 2.5 milligram, 5.5
35:43 Speaker 04 milligram, 9 milligram, 14.5 milligram, and 17.2 milligram tablets. Learn more at foundo.lilly.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.
35:55 Dax Shepard? We get support from NoBull. The holidays can get hectic. You finally hit a post-summer routine and suddenly you're on hosting duty every week.
36:05 Speaker 01 That's when you really need to ground yourself.
36:08 Dax Shepard? Exactly. And that's why I keep my training routine through the holidays. It's the whole No Bull idea. There's a no bullshit training brand built around consistency, honesty, and just putting in the work. It's not about adding more pressure to an already packed schedule. It's about having the gear and the habits to move through the season your way. My personal favorite, all three of the shoes are fantastic. The Outwork, the Outwork Flex, and the Drive 2. I like the Drive 2 because it's a hybrid. And I lift, of course, but I also like to do what's called box jumps. Right? I do a lot of jumping onto a little platform and I want a little more flexibility. And boy, do they deliver.
36:45 Speaker 02 And if you're a cardio person and you're running and you also need to be lifting.
36:49 Dax Shepard? And the style is banging. I don't know what to say. Beautiful style, very breathable, very, very comfortable, lots of support. They were built for lifting.
36:57 Speaker 02 They also make a great holiday gift. You know, I love gifting, a purposeful one that actually supports someone's goals and routines. And it's not a gift that just ends up in the back of the closet.
37:06 Dax Shepard? Stay stronger than the season. Head to nobolproject.com all holiday season to shop new deals every week.
37:14 Speaker 05 With the Venture X Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, big purchasing power means you can spend more and earn more. The Capital One Venture X Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details.
37:36 Dax Shepard? Okay, so 6,000 women reach menopause every single day in the United States. And there are only 2,300 providers certified in menopause medicine. So, once this occurs to you and you're going through it and you start getting serious about your own reluctance to go through this, which is a great motivator. How do you approach it? What do you start looking at? How do you even begin assembling what becomes the toolkit?
37:59 Speaker 02 I wish that I could tell you, you could confidently walk into your OB-GYN, your family medicine, your internal medicine doctor, and have a reasonable, logical conversation about your plan of care in perimenopause and menopause. That is not possible right now. It is not the fault of the individual doctor. They may have been excellent in your birth. In your pregnancy, every aspect, but because of the six hours. So right now, they surveyed residents coming out three years ago. Only 30% felt barely adequately trained to treat menopause. It's awful. So at least they're honest. Call ahead, look on the Menopause Society website, which is menopause.org, and see who has passed the test and is certified there. It's not perfect. There's always people out there who aren't great doctors who took the test, but it's somewhere to start.
38:43 Speaker 02 We crowdsourced with my followers. I've got thousands of testimonials and we organize them by country, city, and state to help people, they don't pay me, just to go find a provider who might be able to help you. And right now, it's pretty slick. There's some great telemedicine companies that have been developed, mostly female founded, who saw a gap in care and they saw a need and they developed these telemedicine companies. I have women calling me from New York, LA, London, the most well-connected you would think, who have the same basic questions and the same worries and the same fears and cannot find help as the woman sitting on the couch in Iowa. Yeah.
39:18 Dax Shepard? Okay, so as you start focusing on it and kind of pledging to get competent in it and start treating women, are you yourself even shocked with the amount of symptoms? Because I wrote down symptoms and it's about the longest list of symptoms I've ever written.
39:33 Speaker 02 I was shocked and most of that was driven by questions I got on social. As my little social media platform was exploding, when 10,000 women ask you about frozen shoulder or palpitations or vertigo, you're like, they can't all be lying. Then I'm digging and I'm like, somebody who did the study, there's clear data here. So I go online and I make a little video talking about the correlation between menopause and vertigo, menopause and frozen shoulder, menopause and palpitations, and the world goes crazy. Wow. I get 10,000 comments, why didn't my doctor know? Again, we're doing a terrible job of teaching, but I was literally learning alongside my followers.
40:06 Dax Shepard? Right.
40:07 Speaker 02 As I learned, I'd make a video and teach. And that's what inspired me to write the book. And they're like, please write a book. I don't want to chase you all over social media, it's too complicated. Just put it all in one place. Frozen shoulder, that is scaring me. My mom had it, my grandmother had it.
40:20 Dax Shepard? One of my mother-in-laws has been dealing with it for the last six months.
40:23 Speaker 02 So this is a great story and I hope I get the lore right, but the story goes. The first study on frozen shoulder in menopause, I know it came out of Duke University, I read the paper. And it was the head of OB-GYN and the head of orthopedics who both happened to be women. And it was something like they were sitting in the doctor's lounge or in the cafeteria and just shooting the breeze over, can you believe all these women with frozen shoulders? You think there's a correlation? I don't know. Let's look into it. They started pulling charts and they were like, fuck me. Look at this. Women who are on HRT have a lower incidence of frozen shoulder and they do better. They're getting it, but they're getting it less than women who aren't and they're having a better course. So they go to get it published. They go to orthopedic journals first. Nobody would touch it. Nope, this can't be right. Nope, this is an artifact. Nope, nope, nope, nope. So one of the menopause journals published it.
41:08 Speaker 02 And so then I have a friend, Vonda Wright, she's an orthopedic surgeon, she does a ton of teaching and she wrote the paper on the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause.
41:17 Dax Shepard? How's that all work?
41:18 Speaker 02 Estrogen receptors and probably progesterone here as well are all over the musculoskeletal system. We know bones, we got bones down. We've known about osteoporosis since I was a resident. I know that one really well. But what wasn't understood was tendons, muscles, and the connections between bones and muscles and how that all works together. And frozen shoulder is adhesive capsulitis. There's a capsule around the ball joint in the shoulder that gets absolutely adheased and frozen and it's an inflammatory condition. You can't put your arm behind, like go to take a picture. Yeah. And it's very, very painful. You need early intervention, you need physical therapy, there's needling, they have to break it up. And that we can delay the onset and the duration and probably prevent several cases for women on HRT.
42:01 Speaker 02 Because estrogen is protective, so it's an anti-inflammatory. But my mom, I've never heard her once say she had that because of menopause. Well, no, most women don't know. Most orthopedic surgeons don't know. We're working to change that. That paper was written a year and a half ago. Oh, wow.
42:15 Dax Shepard? Okay, so ringing in the ears?
42:17 Speaker 02 Yeah. Tinnitus, tendinitis, I still don't know how to say it correctly.
42:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I had it for a minute and I didn't know what to tell people.
42:23 Speaker 02 I've had it once and man.
42:24 Dax Shepard? People kill themselves from it.
42:26 Speaker 02 Maddening.
42:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
42:28 Speaker 02 So again, this is an estrogen receptor problem. The vertigo is that the crystals break off quicker is basically osteoporosis in the ear.
42:34 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
42:35 Speaker 02 And the crystals break off and then float around and then you're dizzy, but the tendinitis, the inflammation around the nerve and around some of the auricular bones that they feel like is leading to it and that all these studies say age-matched women, pre-menopausal women definitely have it less than post and women on HRT are less likely to get it.
42:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, wow.
42:51 Speaker 02 What are some other?
42:52 Dax Shepard? Dry skin.
42:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, in the skin and tegumentary skin and the hair follicles.
42:57 Dax Shepard? I like tegumentary. I've never heard that word. That's nice.
42:59 Speaker 02 All the follicles and oil and sweat glands. It's a whole system.
43:02 Dax Shepard? Largest organ in the body.
43:03 Speaker 02 It is. Most absorbent. So we lose 30% of our collagen. You don't have to tell a woman that. She knows. In the first five years of menopause, we can attenuate that with topical or systemic hormone therapy. Topical works better, actually, which is why I'm on my vanity cream. Is it a retinol? No, it's estrogen for the face. Wow. So it's compounded. Some people take the vaginal product and will mix it in their moisturizer and put some on their face. But you should talk to a doctor before you do. You shouldn't do that on your own.
43:31 Dax Shepard? Don't do any compounding at home.
43:32 Speaker 02 So, yeah. Mix it up. A little mortar and pestle. You lose oil production in the skin. You lose thinness and the transepidermal water loss is much greater. So you're just losing all of your barrier, your protection. So the skin is less healthy.
43:47 Dax Shepard? Dry mouth? That's the same?
43:48 Speaker 02 Dry mouth, same thing. So mucus production, the salivary glands dry up. We have tremendous dry mouth and dry eyes, dry mouth. That's the same.
43:57 Dax Shepard? Guys, I don't want menopause. This is fucking miserable. Body odor. What's creating body odor?
44:02 Speaker 02 Early in menopause, as the estrogen levels decline, something that's made in the liver called steroid hormone binding globulin, SHBG, which binds our sex hormones and carries them around the blood and renders them inactive until they let loose and then they bind to go do things. When we lose the binding hormone, the activity of our androgens increases, even though your total testosterone may not be different, but the free is higher.
44:25 Dax Shepard? So when I first got a panel for testosterone, my overall numbers were like, fine, not alarming. My free was super low.
44:33 Speaker 02 Your SHBG was high.
44:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I had the binding globulin.
44:36 Speaker 02 So you had some, but they were bound and you couldn't use it. It's a balance because you can eat certain things, take certain things, certain supplements to increase, decrease. But then sometimes you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. And so in women, when the activity of their androgens increases, we see male pattern baldness. They start getting chin hair and their odor changes. They smell like onions and it's a really kind of weird. Yeah, I hear the onion thing a lot. This is so awful. I am living my best life. You just stick with me. Okay, so I like to hear that because my mom actually said the same thing. I don't think she did any hormone therapy, but I was like, when did you hit menopause? She said 50 and I was like, oh, man, well, I'm nervous. I'm in perimenopause after I read this book. And she was like, well, I like it.
45:20 Dax Shepard? I smell like onions.
45:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:22 Dax Shepard? My mouth is dry and I'm happy as a clam.
45:24 Speaker 02 I don't want to scare people. Yeah, so many women just go blindly into the night and they have no idea. And so one of my critics have said, you're just fear mongering. You want to scare people, whatever. I'm like, no, I want to educate. So you're not blindsided. Imagine the cortisol levels that will come down where they're like, oh, This is what's going on. This might be my menopause. Fine, whatever. Okay, we got this. I'm not going crazy. Especially the cognitive changes in the mental health. The divorce rates, the suicide rates are all right in there at this age.
45:51 Dax Shepard? They kind of peak there?
45:52 Speaker 02 Peak suicide rates are 45 to 55 in women.
45:56 Dax Shepard? Wow, and that should be the kind of transition in life where you're like, oh, I made it.
46:00 Speaker 02 Exactly. I'm made it. I'm gonna lean into work. We're gonna go off in the sunset here. No. Wow.
46:05 Dax Shepard? That's heartbreaking.
46:06 Speaker 02 And is that hormonal too? The neurotransmitters in the brain are heavily influenced by estrogen progesterone levels. And the brain doesn't like the chaos. So the real mental health that we see, the big, big problems are in peri. Post, things tend to calm down, both cognitively and mental health. You still may need your, sorry, you know, whatever, but we see this wild uptick in peri.
46:29 Dax Shepard? So decrease sex drive. I think this is also something that people have just taken for granted.
46:35 Speaker 02 I learned this much about sex drive.
46:38 Dax Shepard? She's holding up a zero for the listener.
46:39 Speaker 02 Holding up a zero, sorry. I get my little diploma and I graduate and I'm at the top of my class. I win lots of awards and off we go. I'm gonna go be the best OB GYN. So the pregnant people come and then these other people come. I'm like, ew. So like as you're walking out from the well woman exam, I'm like, okay, we'll see you next year. She's like, can I ask you one more thing? Sure. I have low libido. I don't want to have sex. It's really affecting my marriage. And I was just like deer in the headlights. You're like, I don't know.
47:04 Dax Shepard? So you're old. That's probably what you're thinking like.
47:06 Speaker 02 Oh, please. So I go out in the hallway and I find my boss, who's our mentors when we first get out, keep us out of trouble in those first couple of years. I'm like, hey, so Ms. Smith, you know, everything's fine. She's healthy, but you know, there's sex. I can't even say it, you know, I'm deep south and taboo. He's like, oh, tell her to have some wine. She just needs to relax. And it'll be fine. Just pat on the knee, but she's gonna be okay.
47:29 Dax Shepard? Tell her to anesthetize herself so she can get through it.
47:31 Speaker 02 Exactly. Women just go through this at this age. So many people were complaining over and over again. I started looking for resources and I read Venus and Mars in the bedroom. Like that was my bible. That was the only thing I knew how to do. No one taught me. I was going back in my textbooks. Nothing was talking about sexual desire, drive. I didn't even know all the causes of female sexual dysfunction. It was never a lecture. No one ever talked about it. Here I am, the expert going, "I'll be right back. Let me see what I can find." So I ended up making little handouts for my patients on what I could dig up on desire and herbs. And I didn't know about, well, they came out later, but Addy and Vilese and testosterone and all these things that might be helpful to a woman and counseling and therapy and looking for orgasmic disorders and arousal disorders and pain disorders and pelvic floor dysfunction.
48:16 Dax Shepard? It's common for sex to get more painful, right?
48:18 Speaker 02 When we go through the menopause transition, 100% of us are gonna lose the protective effect of estrogen in the vagina, the vulva, the bladder, that whole what we now call the genital urinary system, pubic bone all the way back and up to the bladder. We lose elasticity. We lose the ability to produce mucus. So if you biopsy to pre and post-menopausal vagina, pre-menopausal, it's this thick, velvety, full of mucus glands, very resilient. It'll take a beating and be fine. Baby comes through there. It's traumatic, but they'll make it. And then post-menopausal looks like a desert. You went from this gorgeous, thick, multi-layered tissue to six cells laying on top of each other with no mucus, no nothing, like a desert. All we have to do for those women is give them back estrogen in the vagina and all that tissue will grow back, even at 70.
49:02 Speaker 02 You can absolutely prevent and reverse this condition. So I recommend lubricants for all of my patients on every sexual encounter. Just get used to it. Do it proactively. Normalize this.
49:14 Dax Shepard? Yes.
49:15 Speaker 02 And then I'm advising not to wait until you start having symptoms to use vaginal estrogen. It's very safe. It's like skincare. Doesn't absorb much. There's very much risk-free. If you have active breast cancer, you can still use it. It will save your life. I mean, it prevents UTIs. The best treatment for recurrent UTIs for a menopausal person is vaginal estrogen, not recurrent antibiotics.
49:36 Dax Shepard? And it's just topical.
49:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, they have creams, gels, they have a suppository, they have a ring. There's multiple ways, but generic and cheap, the cream works for most people.
49:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
49:45 Speaker 02 Wow.
49:46 Dax Shepard? Where's testosterone in the drive part?
49:48 Speaker 02 So, we look at female sexual function, we have five buckets where she may not be happy. First of all, it has to bother her. Some women are like, I don't care, and I'm never gonna care, and I'm like, okay. Then you're good. Other women are like, I used to have it, I miss it.
50:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
50:02 Speaker 02 So you have to make sure she's not having pain, there's a pain disorder. She's not having a relationship disorder because no amount of testosterone is gonna fix a bad relationship. Can she have an orgasm, or is the plumbing still working if she puts her mind to it?
50:14 Dax Shepard? Does that drop off?
50:15 Speaker 02 You see arousal disorders, it's more of a blood flow issue. I kind of had that. I was having delayed orgasm, like, hello, everything's working, I'm ready. I was like, okay, fine, I need vaginal estrogen now. And it took about eight years in menopause because I was on systemic, but I wasn't quite getting enough, and everything's fixed. Libido, which is desire, in medical we say hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSDD. That is a mood. It's totally in the brain. Everything's working down here, but it's the thought of it. And most women will come to say, once we get going, I'm fine. So if a female has an arousal disorder, vaginal Viagra might work for her.
50:48 Dax Shepard? What does that do?
50:49 Speaker 02 Increases blood flow, basal dilator, specifically to the corpus spongiosum. So that's the squishy part that gets erect. We have exactly the same tissue in the clitoris.
50:58 Dax Shepard? Well, your clitoris becomes my penis.
51:00 Speaker 02 Same anatomy, except ours looks like Gumby, and yours is like a little rocket. So we've ruled out all the things, and she's like, I love him, I'm not going anywhere, I miss it, please help me. So we have two classes of meds that we talk about. One is testosterone. It works great for these women. If it doesn't help her in three months, that's not the answer.
51:19 Dax Shepard? And the options for testosterone are?
51:21 Speaker 02 So, we don't have FDA-approved option for women, so we're either having someone cook it up in a lab, and a compounded cream generally.
51:28 Dax Shepard? Right there, red flag, ridiculous, right?
51:30 Speaker 02 Ridiculous, we have studies that prove the safety and efficacy and all the things. And she's so much happier. There is anecdotal evidence that also her stamina is better, her mood is better.
51:40 Dax Shepard? Muscle mass goes up.
51:41 Speaker 02 Muscle mass, osteoporosis. So all that works together. So I don't want to say it's a chandelier. So I have low muscle mass genetically, and I'm doing the things, eating the protein, working out. It's a full-time job, wearing my weighted vest, and I was like, what if I tried some testosterone off-label for myself? Did not have a libido issue, and no one was complaining. And then start some testosterone.
52:03 Speaker 02 And I see an uptick in the area. Uh huh. A little more interested. He's not cuter. He's not pissing me off less.
52:09 Dax Shepard? He's very less cute.
52:10 Speaker 02 He's not my poor husband. But I'm just like, okay. A little more often, or maybe I'm even initiating, which that not happened in a long time. And we've just reached a different level now. And I think I would miss it if it was gone. Of course. So I'm like telling my patients this. Certainly if you're distressed, let's go for it. But here's my experience. So that's a topical. You don't want to do oral. There's no form available in the US that will not affect the liver. There's one they use in Australia, Unductinowit, but it's not available here. So you're going to look at a non-oral option. So some people are doing some compounded injectables. What we're doing in our clinic is either T-STEM gel or AndroGel. So we're doing the FDA-approved gels for men. We're just using them off-label for women. Interesting.
52:51 Dax Shepard? You can also get a capsule.
52:52 Speaker 02 So there's Trokis that dissolve that are submucosal. So you put them under your tongue.
52:57 Dax Shepard? Oh, you mean the pellets. The pellet.
52:59 Speaker 02 Pellets are commercially available. They're not FDA-approved. There's a problem with pellets that we see kind of in the ethical realm. Two problems with pellets. If you go to a doctor and they are trying to talk you into pellets and they won't discuss any other form of hormone therapy, that is an ethical red flag. They're financially benefiting from the sale of the pellets.
53:17 Dax Shepard? Got you.
53:18 Speaker 02 And I just think you can do better because pellets are very hard to manage. You have this rapid rise. And I've seen females with testosterone levels in the 400 and 500s, and I am not kidding. They'd never made a female-level pellet. They just give females the low level and say, you're running 200, you're fine. You're not going to die.
53:33 Dax Shepard? They don't slowly dissolve at a predictable rate.
53:35 Speaker 02 They're supposed to. I've never seen a decay curve, have you? They don't publish them. They're not FDA-approved, so they don't have the same regulation. So I'm like, listen, we don't need to be doing this. Yeah. And I can take it away tomorrow. If you have a pellet, you are stuck until it's gone.
53:47 Dax Shepard? Three months generally or?
53:48 Speaker 02 Generally. I think we can do better for our patients. I don't need to make money putting pellets in people. It's a cash cow for a lot of practices. And I'm just really hesitant. If your doctor is really railroading you, if they say, I only do pellets, I would probably bounce. Interesting. Okay.
54:02 Dax Shepard? Good tip. Okay. So back to, so we can do an injectable.
54:06 Speaker 02 Injectable. You can do a cream. You just rub it, pick an area.
54:09 Dax Shepard? You'll get really hairy wherever you rub it, but that's fine.
54:11 Speaker 02 You could. So I'll tell patients. To put it here.
54:13 Dax Shepard? Oh, I was amazing. Is that real?
54:14 Speaker 02 There's no hair follicles here. I was studied on the shoulders. Okay. We want to monitor them to see how they're absorbing, make sure we're not going over, checking their free and total testosterone levels and just seeing how they're doing.
54:26 Dax Shepard? I'll say I started on a cream. The only thing I didn't love about the cream is you have this dispensary for it.
54:31 Speaker 02 Click, clicky?
54:33 Dax Shepard? The amount that comes out per click per day did not seem very consistent to me. It seemed a little all over the map. I much prefer just an injection. You know exactly what you're getting.
54:41 Speaker 02 Another option to think about would be to do the T-stem gel or the andro gel. It's in a pump. So a full pump is 20 grams. For women, we need five to 10 grams. So that's like a half pump or a pea sized amount. I tell my patients to put it on their inner arm where there's no hair follicles so they can see the pea. And then you just rub it in.
54:57 Dax Shepard? Do a little rub.
54:58 Speaker 02 Wow. Okay. So you're doing testosterone on your arm, estrogen on your vulva. What else? I think I replaced my hormones like five ways, you know? Yeah. For estrogen, there's oral and non-oral. And in non-oral, patches are what we usually prescribe in my clinic.
55:14 Dax Shepard? On your Instagram, you're a fan of those, right?
55:16 Speaker 02 They're very inexpensive. We have multiple strains. So I have a lot of options for patients. But sometimes people have a reaction to the adhesive, tape allergies. So we have gels and creams. It's just the expense goes up. The vaginal ring is great because you get two for one. You get systemic and vaginal. But they're like 200, 300 bucks. They last for three months. It's nice. You just throw it up there and forget about it.
55:35 Dax Shepard? Toss it in.
55:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I get scared of them. Yeah, it's not for everyone. Even like the Diva Cup. It's not for me having something.
55:41 Dax Shepard? You don't want something in there?
55:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't.
55:42 Dax Shepard? You have an outsized fear of toxic shock syndrome.
55:44 Speaker 02 I wouldn't say outsized. I have a real fear of it. Yeah, as you should. Yeah, scary as hell. It's scary and you die. And then there's local estrogen options for the face and/or the vagina. And then your progesterone. So progesterone is typically given in the menopause. We're giving oral micronized progesterone. It's the safest.
56:02 Dax Shepard? I believe I understand a lot about testosterone and estrogen and estradiol. But I don't know that I know a ton about progesterone. What is it doing?
56:09 Speaker 02 So progesterone is mandatory if you have a uterus, if you're doing estrogen, because the inside lining of the uterus, the endometrium where the blood would be made each month, is sensitive to estrogen. If we let estrogen play in there unopposed with progesterone, you'll develop. Hyperplasia and potentially malignancy.
56:24 Dax Shepard? This is where some of those studies were misleading because
56:27 Speaker 02 That was in the early, early days of hormone therapy and the like get your wife back sexy movement with estrogen. They were doing just estrogen and women were getting into metrial cancer. So we learned that lesson. You give her a progestogen, you will negate that. So if she has a uterus without the Marina IUD, which has progesterone in it, you must give progesterone to not potentially give her cancer. Turns out progesterone is amazing for sleep. It upregulates GABA in the brain and it is our sleep, sleep hormone. So when patients are coming in an early perimenopause, still having regular cycles, but they can't sleep. They're waking up at two or three in the morning. Progesterone might be your new best friend. It's fine to start with progesterone without estrogen. We do that in a lot of cases.
57:09 Speaker 01 I have so many things to take.
57:10 Speaker 02 No, I do. I do. I need you. Anxiety thoughts. It's great for that 2:00 AM wake up. I'll just take an extra one if I still have that.
57:17 Speaker 01 I mainly have a hard time just falling asleep.
57:19 Speaker 02 I mean, it's worth a trial. It's not going to hurt you. It's a natural hormone.
57:23 Speaker 01 And none of this is a problem with getting pregnant.
57:26 Speaker 02 If you're in perimenopause, your chances of getting pregnant are lower.
57:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:30 Speaker 02 But if you are trying to spontaneously get pregnant, you have to make sure you're giving low enough doses where you're not going to inhibit a standard ovulation. And menopause hormone therapy really was not high enough to suppress ovulation. So the biggest difference between birth control pills and menopause hormone therapy, you think about why they were created. Birth control was formed for contraception. We need a high enough dose to shut the signal down from the hypothalamus to tell the hypothalamus, we're cool. We got enough estrogen, no signals, no signals, no ovulation. Menopause hormone therapy was developed to simply stop a hot flash. You don't need nearly as much. Got it.
58:03 Dax Shepard? So it's lower.
58:04 Speaker 02 Formulation, though, is different because of big pharma. Formulation is tends to be ethanol estradiol, which is cheap and easy to make, and it's 100 times as potent as estradiol. And that's why you have those little tiny birth control pills. Whereas estradiol in its natural form, which is body identical, it's much less potent than its cousin ethanol estradiol. But it's got a great safety profile and you don't need much to stop the hot flash. Now, how much do we need to prevent cardiovascular disease? You don't need much to help your bones. They did study those numbers. We're all kind of debating if we're going to check levels, what's therapeutic?
58:36 Dax Shepard? Okay, wow. Okay, so we really covered HRT, hormone replacement therapy. I'm so glad you're an advocate for it. I think it's insane that women have been just left out of this. What I have experienced being on hormone therapy, which has made me want to work again, made me want to do my hobbies again.
58:52 Speaker 02 Right.
58:53 Dax Shepard? Made me mentally, and then my fitness, everything.
58:56 Speaker 02 All the things.
58:56 Dax Shepard? I remember Kristin going like, this is bullshit. I'm like, you're right, it is. This is insane.
59:02 Speaker 02 How many doctors did you go to?
59:03 Dax Shepard? Oh, one. I mean, they're dying. I have to police them.
59:07 Speaker 02 A woman on average has to go to six to eight doctors before her menopause is diagnosed. This is how bad the problem is.
59:13 Dax Shepard? Well, I'll be clear. The general practitioners tend to still be pretty adverse across the board in my experience. But we have hormone clinics on every 10 feet for men. Most of them don't see women. So all one needs to do is go there. You actually need to police them, I think, is my tip.
59:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that's kind of the pellet. It's the bio T really, that got into, whoa, let's put these in women and see what happens, you know?
59:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and you don't need to be at 1100.
59:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know. I mean, these women are coming in, they're like, I don't know why my hair is falling out of my beard, and I check her level and it's 450. I'm like, hmm, I might have a clue.
59:46 Dax Shepard? Because women, what, naturally in their 30s would hover around what?
59:49 Speaker 02 So around 40 to 70-ish.
59:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so that's a good 8x.
59:52 Speaker 02 So, you know, most of them come in in menopause, 12, 15, 20, 25. Let's get you up. So I'm trying to titrate my patients 60 to 70. Let's overshoot just a little bit and see if this is going to help with your libido. But there are two FDA-approved medications for libido that are not testosterone. One is Vilese, and it is an injection you give yourself 45 minutes before. And it causes a massive dump of melanocortin that then stimulates dopamine. And when our dopamine levels are higher, it makes us want to do things.
1:00:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:00:22 Speaker 02 So unfortunately, most of my patients don't choose that. Because they're like, there's a praying mantis on the other end of this waiting, the 45 minutes going, is it working?
1:00:31 Dax Shepard? Well, additionally, it's almost the wrong medicine for the arousal type that women are. Which is like, that's great for a man, because a man's sitting around thinking about wanting to fuck in an hour, and he's like, oh. Do this, or the woman needs to be brought into arousal.
1:00:46 Speaker 02 Romantic.
1:00:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so it's almost like a counterintuitive solution.
1:00:49 Speaker 02 For the women who like it and can unlock that part of their brain, it's great. Is it a base dopamine? Like, don't give it to an addict. I've not seen those studies. I've not had a patient yet who was like, yes, please. Addy is another. So Addy was studied in mood and they saw an uptick.
1:01:07 Dax Shepard? Tell us how Addy works, because they're a sponsor.
1:01:09 Speaker 02 Addy works, same thing. It's gonna increase your dopamine levels and it's something you take every day. It was studied in mood. It works by increasing happy sexual encounters a couple of more times a month or however they measure it. So the detractors of Addy are like, well, that's not enough. And the women are okay with it.
1:01:25 Dax Shepard? Right, right, right.
1:01:26 Speaker 02 If you were having none or one, go into four.
1:01:28 Dax Shepard? That's enormous.
1:01:29 Speaker 02 Great. I'm like, let the patients decide. Most of my patients choose testosterone purely because of cost and potentially the other benefits for bone and muscle. Even though we don't have great studies yet, but the anecdotal data is looking very positive in that area.
1:01:42 Dax Shepard? Right, so if you just kind of reverse engineer, as I understand, or if you believe Atiya, and I do, the best way to combat osteoporosis.
1:01:49 Speaker 02 Is to not get osteoporosis. Well, yeah, that'd be great.
1:01:52 Dax Shepard? Is to not get it. But your bones respond immediately to muscle and strain. So if you can work out heavy, you're putting a lot of strain on your bones and they will react. They will make themselves stronger. And for you to do a lot of strenuous and high intensity heavy lifting, you're gonna benefit from testosterone with your muscles. They're all related.
1:02:16 Speaker 02 The musculoskeletal unit works together. It's not like it works in isolation. So testosterone will help a little bit. We looked at, one of the things from WHI, when the Women's and Health Initiative, is they followed these women forever. And they followed them into nursing homes and they looked at protein intake and frailty scores. And the women who ate the most protein, like 1.6 grams for every kilogram of lean body mass, had much lower frailty scores. I'm drilling down. We're gonna prevent your osteoporosis. We're gonna consider hormone therapy and estrogen. We know will prevent 50% of fractures.
1:02:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:02:44 Speaker 02 So she's on HRT. We're gonna work out heavy, we're gonna lift heavy, and we're gonna eat the protein. We're gonna give some creatine on board. So all of that works synergistically. I call it my nursing home prevention program because once I put out the fire for menopause and she's functional and she's your mom and me. Now we're like, I don't want to be my mom. My mother is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's and a broken hip. She just got out of rehab. She's not doing well. Right. It's gonna take a long time.
1:03:06 Dax Shepard? And all of these four horsemen are metabolic disorders.
1:03:10 Speaker 02 Alzheimer's is not the natural course of aging brain. There's 14 risk factors. So of course, the easy stuff. Don't smoke. Eat a balanced diet. Stay away from processed foods. Don't get diabetes. Don't get insulin resistance. All of that. But then it's social connection. Keep your brain moving, thinking, working. Do the puzzles. When my dad died, mama had lost Bob in 2015, one of my brothers. My second birth of esophageal cancer. The third one, they lost the one when he was 18, when I was nine. She'd lost two kids and a husband in five years. And she was like, I'm out. She locked herself in the house and started drinking. Yeah. Which I can't blame her. What I've seen it do to her, the relationships with her kids and this long, protracted course she's gonna have until she goes. And all the talking of the children on how to manage and who's doing what.
1:03:55 Speaker 02 I don't want that. Exactly. You know, I want to die like my dad. He was great until like the last month and then he kind of slowed down. And then we all gathered around and we sang songs and told stories and we're there and sang to him and he slipped into a coma and then it was over. Yeah, that sounds great. That's not what happens to women. We have this nursing home. She's frail and she breaks and yeah. Yeah.
1:04:16 Dax Shepard? Boy, that's so true for my grandparents. The men just collapsed.
1:04:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:22 Dax Shepard? And the women just struggled for five years.
1:04:24 Speaker 02 Struggled for five to 10 years.
1:04:26 Dax Shepard? More miserable.
1:04:27 Speaker 02 My patients are not interested in option B. Yeah.
1:04:30 Dax Shepard? Okay, so we have diet and I'm glad you're flagging protein.
1:04:33 Speaker 02 Top nutrition tips for aging and longevity for women in menopause. Is she limiting added sugars? So the whole keto movement, sugars got demonized. But it turns out that sugars added to stuff are much worse than found naturally in fruits and vegetables because the sugar in a fruit is wrapped in a fruit which has fiber and vitamins and minerals. And this is a doctor who sells supplements. But I think everyone should be able to get everything they need from food. That just doesn't happen. That would be amazing if it happened.
1:04:58 Dax Shepard? That's ideal.
1:04:59 Speaker 02 So I'm here to help you fill in the gaps where you need it. Fiber, vitamin. D. Eighty percent of my patients are deficient in vitamin D. We're checking everyone's levels. We're telling them to supplement. I'm giving prescription doses if they're super low. We're trying to give them loading doses. Magnesium is really great for a lot of patients. I've been taking magnesium. I have a specific collagen product that was studied in menopausal osteoporosis that seems to have some benefit. So we're talking about that. For movement, most of my patients are walking, minimum. You have to meet her where she is. If she's sedentary, just walking thirty minutes a day will decrease her risk of diabetes by fifty percent.
1:05:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:05:30 Speaker 02 That's it. If she's walking, let's put on a weighted vest. If she's doing that, let's get in the gym. You have to meet them where they are. All the fitfluencers, they're lifting and all that. I'm like, that scares the shit out of most women.
1:05:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it seems insurmountable.
1:05:42 Speaker 02 So we're easing them into it. I love to run these challenges for my followers. We'll get a hundred thousand people who are lifting weights for the first time and I'll have a fitness person in there. I didn't know either. I was injuring myself.
1:05:52 Dax Shepard? Of all theologies, you can do chemios.
1:05:53 Speaker 02 Chiropratology is not on my list. So I will hire someone to come in and show my followers how to do a squat. You say, you don't have to do a lot of different exercises. Just the really basic push, pull.
1:06:04 Dax Shepard? There's some real key ones that are super beneficial, particularly for osteoporosis.
1:06:09 Speaker 02 Squats, lunges. For osteoporosis, good studies with walking with a weighted vest, doing yoga with a weighted vest, balance training with a weighted vest is super helpful. Fibre tory plates, again, you're stimulating that musculoskeletal unit. I tell patients to brush their teeth on one foot because you're working on balance, to always be decreasing your risk of fall with balance training. And then lifting, they were putting eighty year old ladies in the gym from nursing homes and they were seeing all these gains.
1:06:32 Dax Shepard? And grip strength, a big indicator.
1:06:34 Speaker 02 Grip strength is a proxy for the rest of your body.
1:06:37 Dax Shepard? Right. If you do deadlifts, you will inadvertently get.
1:06:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. So it's not the grip strength. It's, that's an easy thing to measure. I got it. That's an indicator.
1:06:46 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Walden University.
1:06:56 Dax Shepard? You know that feeling when you've been thinking about making a move, going after the degree, the promotion, the thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to someday? Walden University is built for that moment. For over 50 years, Walden has helped working professionals get the W, the knowledge, the skills, and the confidence to create real change in their careers and communities. Their programs are designed around your life, not the other way around. With Tempo Learning, available in select programs, there are no rigid schedules or set weekly deadlines. You move at your own pace. And Walden's faculty aren't just academics. They're practitioners who bring real-world experience into everything they teach. From your first class to career coaching and beyond, Walden is your partner the whole way.
1:07:41 Dax Shepard? Take the first step and learn at a pace that works for you. Visit waldenu.edu. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to Operate by CHEV.
1:07:59 Dax Shepard? So that's exercise diet. Now, where do GLP-1s fit into this?
1:08:03 Speaker 02 We do use them in our clinic, and probably 20% of our patients end up on them. When they come to us, it's usually, "Hi, I'm in menopause. Help me, I'm dying." Probably 50% to 60% of them now have a weight problem. They have either always had it, or they have new weight gain. So the first thing we do is break down where their fat is, if they have it. Because some patients come in, they're just muscular, and they've been told they're obese their whole life, and they're crying their eyes out because, "Oh, my God, I'm healthy." What? If they have a visceral fat problem, I really don't care about subcutaneous fat. It's not metabolically that active. It's just storage. It's the intra-abdominal fat that'll kill you. And so, we are working on that number. And what do we know works for that? Starvation, but that's not why they're there. High-fiber diets, low added sugar, diets rich in probiotics, or a probiotic supplement, zone 2 training, all of that works.
1:08:47 Speaker 02 So we're focusing on that, and we get her start in HRT. Across the menopause transition, a woman will go from 8% of her total body fat being visceral to 23 on average, just from becoming menopausal. No changes in diet and exercise. I have the unusual circumstance of most of these people follow me, have read the book. It's an investment to come and see me because I'm outside of The insurance model.
1:09:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:09:07 Speaker 02 So they've done their homework.
1:09:08 Dax Shepard? They're dedicated.
1:09:09 Speaker 02 Yeah. So they're like, okay, let's do this. We start HRT. We bring them back in three months. If her cardiometabolic risk factors are still there, and she's like, I want to give it a try. I'm like, let's go for it. A GLP-1 needs a lot of counseling to be done well.
1:09:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because you're taking on a lot of risk of muscle mass loss, which is so important for your
1:09:27 Speaker 02 And they know that.
1:09:28 Dax Shepard? Although there's supposed to be a new one coming out.
1:09:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's three. So there's simaglutide, which had just the GLP-1, and then terzepatide, which is what we usually start with now, which has the GLP-1 and the glucagon agonist. And then this new one has, I forget what the third ingredient is, but I'm excited to see when it comes out.
1:09:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's supposed to reduce the loss of muscle mass.
1:09:46 Speaker 02 In our clinic, if the patients eat the protein and do the resistance training, we are seeing some muscle loss expected, but not this massive loss. And they are able to maintain. And then it's like that first three months, if they lose 20 pounds, maybe five is muscle, maybe 20%, but then that just levels out and it's all fat loss after that. It is absolutely the coolest thing to watch because we bring them back every six weeks to check their muscle mass. We stay on top of it. We're checking in with them. They're doing this not to look great in a bikini. I mean, maybe that'll happen and that'll be great, but they're doing this to decrease their risk of all these diseases they don't want to die from.
1:10:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:10:22 Speaker 02 Or plague their children with.
1:10:23 Dax Shepard? Protect the last 15 years of their life or 10 years of their life.
1:10:25 Speaker 02 And be happy during those. They're so motivated to avoid the diseases that plague their elders.
1:10:30 Dax Shepard? As you might expect, my wife, knowing that I was interviewing you, had some specific questions. Are there any ways to predict when onset will be? Kristin Heard, your mother's sister can be a guide.
1:10:42 Speaker 02 There is a genetic component. So there's an ethnic genetic component. So I was telling Monica, for me, it's 51 is average. For her, it's 46.7. African Americans is about 18 months behind Caucasian. Asians get a little bit longer. Interesting. Does sexual activity impact that? Trauma does. So we know lots of things that speed it up. You were born with X amount of eggs and they're gonna go before you die. If you live a normal lifespan. But what do we know speeds up the process of egg loss? Yeah. Smoking, chemotherapy, radiation, abdominal surgery. You have a hysterectomy, leave the ovaries behind, but we've cut a significant blood supply to the ovary. We're gonna lose average of four years off the life of the ovary. A lot of women undergoing necessary hysterectomy, aren't getting that counseling. There's nothing they can do about it, but wouldn't that be nice to know?
1:11:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have a friend's friend who had to have a hysterectomy. She's like, I'm about to be in menopause.
1:11:31 Dax Shepard? My mom had one when she was 30.
1:11:33 Speaker 02 My mom had one after baby number eight. They were like, this is your Catholic birth control. Time for that uterus to come out. So does it instigate menopause? It cuts the blood flow. So you lose the shelf life of the ovary, where you may have gone through a 51, now you back that up four years on average. Okay, but it's not like you have the hysterectomy and then... No, unless they remove the ovary, right? Exactly. So that's surgical menopause. And we have premature menopause and early menopause. So those are a little bit different animals. Premature ovarian insufficiency is usually with an autoimmune condition. So it has its own set of risks. And then surgical menopause, you don't get a trial period. It's like boom. So whenever I had to take out ovaries for medical reasons, I was putting a patch on them in the OR. Yeah, that makes sense.
1:12:16 Dax Shepard? Okay, so ethnic is a predictor.
1:12:18 Speaker 02 Ethnicity and then family history. You look at the women in your family, when did they go through it?
1:12:22 Dax Shepard? But on your mom's side, is she right about that?
1:12:24 Speaker 02 Mom's side and sometimes dad's side. I mean, you're half genetically...
1:12:27 Dax Shepard? She compared it to male Potter and Baldness, which we know comes from your mom. But I was saying, well, that's because it's on the 45th chromosome and you can only get an X from mom.
1:12:35 Speaker 02 So this isn't a chromosome only thing. It's more of a general health and kind of how things are gonna go. Certain tribes in Africa have a lot of twins or certain cultures are more prone to twins. That's more of a general than a chromosome thing.
1:12:47 Dax Shepard? There's a couple of things happening. A, it was completely understudied, as you pointed out. It's beginning to get studied, but also we're seeing an art. What do you think about the impact of all fours?
1:12:57 Speaker 02 I'm literally on 79% of the chapter. First of all, I hate the protagonist.
1:13:03 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:13:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, so she's not my girl.
1:13:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:13:06 Speaker 02 But I'm researching and writing the new peri-menopause. It's not coming out till 2026. I'm in the middle of it. And so Gretchen, who's my co-writer, I write like an asshole. I am so clinical. My collaborator will take my disgusting prose and spin it into something that sounds
1:13:20 Dax Shepard? digestible.
1:13:21 Speaker 02 Like a human, not a normal person could read, not geek. And Gretchen's like, read it from the perspective, this is resonating. And that just flipped the switch for me. I read for entertainment. I read about fairies and dragons and lots of sex. And my daughter reads all the dystopian novels, so I read to read with her and talk about stuff. And then I read medical journal articles. So to pick up a book that is outside of my usual and not have a 15-year-old little girl who turns into a princess with magical powers was like hard.
1:13:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:13:45 Speaker 02 I'm trying to identify this, and she says, stop trying to identify. Read it and figure out why the hell the world is resonating. And then I'm like, oh. So then the doctor in me is like, she's having palpitations. That's a panic attack. That's menopause. That's menopause. That's menopause. Now, have an affair and redo this room in this weird hotel. That's a whole nother thing, but I'm getting it now. It is so hard resonating. Movie rights are done. Oh, yeah. All my friends write it. Did you love it? I loved it.
1:14:10 Dax Shepard? I haven't read it. I've been told what it's about from Monica, who loved it. To me, it's like, I was prescribed a role I don't want, or I want to test, or I want to shake up, or I want to break because I just prescribed it and now I want to decide.
1:14:23 Speaker 02 I don't want to do it anymore.
1:14:24 Dax Shepard? That's so perfectly parallel to, hey, guess what? I don't want to live a third of my life in discomfort.
1:14:28 Speaker 02 That. So what I'm finding, and I think why the divorce rate's so high, is that women, and myself included, and thank God, my relationship is better than it's ever been, and we're working together. We have a small business through the supplement company, and he's now running it. I've never liked him more. But yeah, she's getting to choose the last third of her life, and so did I. I chose differently than her, and that's okay, but women are circling the wagons around themselves. Menopause is fucking them so hard. They are giving themselves permission to put themselves First.
1:14:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:14:57 Dax Shepard? To me, it's I've had enough on all the levels.
1:15:00 Speaker 02 And now it's a survival thing. If I don't do this, for me, my journey was quit a job that didn't serve me, stop serving a system that was broken, absolutely get the hell out of Dodge, figure out what the fuck I wanted to do with my life, put my own oxygen mask on first.
1:15:14 Speaker 01 It's time for you.
1:15:15 Speaker 02 And I really didn't give a shit if the kids or my husband cared, but I had to do this. Thank God it all worked out and look where I am now.
1:15:21 Speaker 01 But that's what it is. It's I'm making choices for the first time that are for me that aren't just handed societally to you. But what's scary about that book is now is the time I get to make the choices and my body is disintegrating. That's the part that I think everyone was like, oh my God, we have to wait till then and it's coinciding with that. What do we do?
1:15:42 Dax Shepard? How do we prevent ourselves from getting to the too late?
1:15:45 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:15:46 Speaker 02 Too late to celebrate. Well, educate yourself as soon as possible.
1:15:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:50 Speaker 02 That's part of my mission is just vomiting all over social media.
1:15:53 Dax Shepard? I think a lot of people think of HRT as being what you do after you have all the symptoms.
1:15:57 Speaker 02 Right.
1:15:57 Dax Shepard? That's the next wave, I think, is preventative.
1:16:00 Speaker 02 Where some of the hardcore, old school menopause people are like, don't say prevent, they come after me every time I talk. Look, FDA approved for the prevention of osteoporosis and that is enough for me. But let me tell you, the US preventative services tax force needs to get their shit together because you have a window of opportunity for cardiovascular disease prevention and the data coming out clearly for mental health. We can prevent the suicides, the job loss, the brain fog, unless you're on the dementia spectrum with early and judicious hormone therapy, not allowing your body to withdraw and go through that chaos.
1:16:34 Dax Shepard? Why wait till you have all the symptoms?
1:16:35 Speaker 02 Why wait till your vagina is broken?
1:16:37 Dax Shepard? But there's no other condition that we don't think early detection and treatment is beneficial.
1:16:42 Speaker 02 It's never been thought of like that. It's wait till you're miserable.
1:16:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:46 Speaker 02 And then it was severe symptoms only. A doctor's going to tell me if my symptoms are severe enough.
1:16:51 Speaker 01 What does that even mean?
1:16:52 Speaker 02 What does that even mean?
1:16:53 Dax Shepard? And why? It's like some old vestigial Protestant suffering something.
1:16:58 Speaker 02 Look, women have been taught to minimalize. Did you read the WW story?
1:17:02 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. Whiny women.
1:17:03 Speaker 02 The whiny woman. This is just what women go through. They tend to whine a lot.
1:17:06 Dax Shepard? Early in her residency, they'd come to her and say, we got a WW in room 305.
1:17:11 Speaker 02 The woman with a laundry list of complaints, very vague, weight gain, brain fog, low libido. And they're like, check her thyroid, get these tests, make sure you're not missing anything, but you're not going to be able to help her.
1:17:22 Dax Shepard? It's just a whiny woman.
1:17:23 Speaker 01 Just one of those whiny women.
1:17:25 Speaker 02 I've talked to other doctors across the country and in California, they called it whiny guineas.
1:17:29 Dax Shepard? Oh, nice.
1:17:30 Speaker 02 And on the east coast, around New York, it was TBD, total body delore. And in Miami, it was Madame Dolores.
1:17:36 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:17:37 Dax Shepard? What is that?
1:17:38 Speaker 02 Pain.
1:17:39 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:17:39 Speaker 02 Like, she's got a lot of pain. Women who come in and complain a lot, kind of vague, libido, go have some wine, you'll be okay.
1:17:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God.
1:17:48 Speaker 01 This is wild.
1:17:49 Speaker 02 I don't want to scare people, but when it's a no.
1:17:52 Speaker 01 We don't know anything.
1:17:54 Speaker 02 And your doctor, not their fault, may not know anything.
1:17:58 Speaker 01 None of us know, even the smart people who are educated. I do these girls dinners and we just had one recently and we were talking about something random. We were like, why don't we know the answers to any of these questions that keep popping up about our own bodies?
1:18:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, because it was never studied. Women in medicine have been treated as small men, so excluded from studies till 94 because of thalidomide and what happened. If there's a chance in hell she might be pregnant, we need to exclude her. And, oh, we probably shouldn't study them anyway because hormones are hard.
1:18:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:26 Speaker 02 They didn't even study female rats in the law.
1:18:29 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:18:30 Speaker 02 Because they have estrogen.
1:18:31 Dax Shepard? They too.
1:18:32 Speaker 02 So they too will fuck up your study.
1:18:34 Speaker 01 It'll be confusing.
1:18:35 Speaker 02 The cardiovascular data is awful for women. You go into the ER with a heart attack, if you're a woman, you have a 50% higher chance of dying than if you're a man. Because we have atypical chest pain. So men have the classic clutching their chest, going up their neck, sliding down their arm. You're an actor and they're like, pretend you're having a heart attack. I know exactly what you're going to do. A woman has fatigue, abdominal pain, it's very vague. Because men have the LED, the widow maker, the very large vessels that immediately come out of the aorta to dive into the heart muscle, to feed that heart, that's where the plaques happen. Women, it's way down below that. It's the diffuse microvascular disease.
1:19:12 Dax Shepard? You're always shoving it down.
1:19:15 Speaker 02 Oh, another way to speed up your menopause is trauma. So there was a study that looked at women who were sexually abused, who then had kids who went on to be sexually abused. And they went through menopause nine years sooner.
1:19:26 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:19:27 Dax Shepard? My mom must have hit menopause at like 35 because she had a hysterectomy. She got the trauma, then the kids with trauma.
1:19:33 Speaker 01 Her libido's okay.
1:19:35 Dax Shepard? That somehow is, well, I think it's trauma related, but yeah.
1:19:39 Speaker 01 That's true. There's a million factors.
1:19:40 Dax Shepard? Your book's a bestseller, The New Menopause. You have the Mary Claire Wellness Clinic.
1:19:46 Speaker 02 It's my little baby clinic in Galveston.
1:19:48 Dax Shepard? You have many millions of followers that are interested in this subject.
1:19:52 Speaker 01 You were the person people wanted to come on the most.
1:19:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we turned it over to Americans. So who's your favorite menopause expert? And you were voted on. You were elected.
1:19:59 Speaker 01 And we were like, who do you want to come on Experts? And your name came up over and over and over and over.
1:20:03 Speaker 02 That's, you know, it's a different audience, but is it? It's all women.
1:20:06 Dax Shepard? I don't know. Yeah, we have a lot of, a lot of women.
1:20:08 Speaker 01 Just people need to know. People don't know anything.
1:20:11 Speaker 02 Well, I appreciate being on here. And actually, my kids now think I'm cool.
1:20:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful. Two daughters?
1:20:16 Speaker 02 Two daughters, 21 and 24.
1:20:18 Dax Shepard? Okay, cool.
1:20:19 Speaker 01 Are they on? Oh, that's a question. How early can someone get on these things?
1:20:25 Speaker 02 Well, it's a little early for them. So Catherine's in med school. She's tough, man. She has guaranteed me she's not doing OB-GYN. But talk about having someone hold a mirror up to you and keep you in line and double check your facts behind your back.
1:20:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:38 Speaker 02 So I'm like spitting out studies and she is literally looking at it to make sure I am toeing the line. She's talked about it. She's a little freaked out and wants to freeze her eggs now for the highest quality.
1:20:48 Dax Shepard? I think that's the move.
1:20:49 Speaker 02 So I did a talk. I was at Reese's event, Hello Sunshine. I was the MC for the first time. That was fun, of a panel. And one of the panelists started this, where you go and you donate your eggs, but you get to keep some.
1:21:00 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:21:00 Speaker 02 So it's a way for the younger women with these juicy gorgeous eggs to afford.
1:21:05 Dax Shepard? Oh, it gets paid for by the donor.
1:21:07 Speaker 02 She gets to keep a few for herself.
1:21:09 Dax Shepard? Oh, I like it. A little for you, a little for me.
1:21:12 Speaker 02 I'm a terrible host because I forgot the name of the company, but you know.
1:21:15 Speaker 01 We'll find it in the fact check.
1:21:16 Speaker 02 So cool. And so I went home and told Catherine about it because she's starting to think about that kind of stuff.
1:21:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:21:22 Speaker 01 I love that.
1:21:22 Dax Shepard? I'll be whispering that to my. My girls.
1:21:25 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:21:25 Dax Shepard? Then the time clock.
1:21:26 Speaker 01 I have a friend in Telluride who gifted his daughter with egg retrieval. Yes. Again, I didn't even know about this. I didn't even know about egg freezing, really. Like, you kind of hear about it. And then my best friend works at Netflix. They pay for that. And so she was like, oh, I'm getting this done. That's a covered benefit. That's amazing. It's amazing.
1:21:45 Dax Shepard? I mean, it's smart for them, too.
1:21:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is.
1:21:47 Dax Shepard? They have someone in the prime of their career who doesn't want to necessarily take the time at that moment.
1:21:51 Speaker 01 It's so smart. But I was like, why are you doing that? She was like, well, they're paying for it and you might as well. And I was like, interesting. So then that's when I started thinking about it. But my age person did not think about it at all. Did you just do it? I did it at thirty five. Okay. And then thirty six.
1:22:08 Dax Shepard? It's ubiquitous and common knowledge to go like, at thirty five, you're officially in a geriatric.
1:22:13 Speaker 01 They act like you fall off a cliff and all that, but it is a steady state. But I did better the second time, weirdly. Amazing. But I wish I had known so much earlier and just done it and felt insurance. My twenty one year old is not on the radar. She's just trying not to be pregnant and is living her best life.
1:22:29 Dax Shepard? I know, you're trying not to get pregnant. It's kind of intuitive.
1:22:32 Speaker 01 That girl gets to college. My oldest is by the book, straight A's, pre-med. I'm like, go to the party, have fun, come on. I'm like, so worried about her social life. My second one has rolled with twenty kids her whole life, you know? She gets there, within October, she's like, I'm out of money. Like, she went with her summer money and her graduation money. I'm like, what? I check her account. I'm like, bars, beers, clothes. That's about right. Fast food. I go, you have a meal ticket? She goes, I don't like it. So I'm like, you're out of money. You still have an allowance. I'm not gonna let you starve. But she went and got a job and now she's a nanny. Oh, that's great. The funniest stories ever. It's her taking care of other people's kids. That is so. These Baton Rouge moms, you know? That will definitely not get her to freeze her eggs nannying. I will say that. She's not at all worried. Yeah. To any young people, I'd just really encourage it.
1:23:17 Dax Shepard? I think a lot of people get a ton on your book. It's wonderful, the new menopause book. And please follow you. What's your handle on Instagram?
1:23:25 Speaker 01 Dr. Mary Claire. D R M A R Y C L A I R E.
1:23:28 Dax Shepard? You're very cute in your videos. I watched a hundred of them today and they're so cute.
1:23:32 Speaker 01 Most no makeup.
1:23:33 Dax Shepard? She's in her.
1:23:34 Speaker 02 brought glam with me and I'm like, no one's gonna recognize me. Who's this girl?
1:23:39 Speaker 01 Oh my god, that's so great. And you're doing all these fun things. You mentioned Reese. I know you're doing something tomorrow that's very cool. Love it.
1:23:45 Dax Shepard? We're grateful for you.
1:23:46 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:23:47 Dax Shepard? The women I know are so grateful for you.
1:23:49 Speaker 01 Big time.
1:23:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so everybody, read the book, follow you on Instagram. This was awesome.
1:23:54 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thank you so much.
1:23:58 Speaker 06 Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at.
1:24:06 Speaker 01 Hi.
1:24:06 Dax Shepard? Hello.
1:24:07 Speaker 01 Cute jacket.
1:24:09 Dax Shepard? Well, thank you. Instagram impulse buy.
1:24:11 Speaker 01 Really?
1:24:12 Dax Shepard? Got one in this color and one in blue.
1:24:14 Speaker 01 From where?
1:24:16 Dax Shepard? Marine layer.
1:24:18 Speaker 01 We like Marine layer.
1:24:18 Dax Shepard? Right?
1:24:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:20 Dax Shepard? That's a place.
1:24:21 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:24:21 Dax Shepard? That's a thing.
1:24:22 Speaker 01 We are sweatshirts were from Marine layer for a little while.
1:24:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I like this quilted thing.
1:24:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, quilted is nice.
1:24:28 Dax Shepard? That's what we call. Well, what one's quilted for comfort? The toilet tissue.
1:24:34 Speaker 01 Oh, uh.
1:24:36 Dax Shepard? Charmin?
1:24:36 Speaker 01 Charmin.
1:24:38 Dax Shepard? The quilted quicker. Well, that's a paper towel, right?
1:24:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a paper towel.
1:24:42 Dax Shepard? The quicker picker. This is Mandela effect. We've created.
1:24:46 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:24:46 Dax Shepard? People are like, do you think there's a product called Charmin's quilted quicker picker upper?
1:24:52 Speaker 01 People would say yes, definitely.
1:24:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:24:55 Speaker 01 Cause it's Bounty.
1:24:56 Dax Shepard? Bounty, the quicker picker upper.
1:24:58 Speaker 01 But Bounty doesn't have the same alliteration as Charmin and quicker.
1:25:03 Dax Shepard? Charmin quicker picker upper. How's your morning?
1:25:06 Speaker 01 My morning is, was good. Um, every two weeks I get a flower delivery on Friday.
1:25:14 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:25:14 Speaker 01 From Flamingo Estate.
1:25:16 Dax Shepard? Uh, okay.
1:25:17 Speaker 01 And it's really exciting.
1:25:19 Dax Shepard? It is. You've signed up for a bi-weekly annual Sitch?
1:25:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:24 Dax Shepard? Do they spice it up? Is it a different bouquet every time?
1:25:27 Speaker 01 Yes, so you don't know what you're gonna get.
1:25:29 Dax Shepard? So you have anticipation, what will it look like?
1:25:31 Speaker 01 Yes. And it's always from a cool, like, farm.
1:25:36 Dax Shepard? They find a guy who just has one flower bed in his backyard.
1:25:39 Speaker 01 Very limited a dish.
1:25:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, extra, extra small micro business.
1:25:44 Speaker 01 Today it was ranunculas. And they're orange.
1:25:47 Dax Shepard? That's the name of something.
1:25:48 Speaker 01 Flower.
1:25:49 Dax Shepard? Ranunculus?
1:25:50 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. And they're orange and they're so pretty. I did lose a little track of time because I was cutting the ends and I was, you know, cleaning up the stems.
1:26:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:26:01 Speaker 01 And, uh...
1:26:03 Dax Shepard? He's straight. We just learned a fascinating fact from somebody. It's a, a rule in sketch comedy.
1:26:10 Speaker 01 Uh-huh.
1:26:11 Dax Shepard? It's not our rule.
1:26:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:13 Dax Shepard? But it's if, if a man comes in to pick a woman up on a date in a sketch.
1:26:17 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:26:17 Dax Shepard? Have her, have him bring chocolates, not flowers. So if you bring flowers, the audience starts getting very distracted.
1:26:24 Speaker 01 Well, they gotta put them in a vase.
1:26:25 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. She's gotta get those in a vase, gotta give them in water, and you can't even pay attention.
1:26:28 Speaker 01 I know. It's so smart. These delivery services.
1:26:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:26:33 Speaker 01 They can really brighten your day. I would recommend that for a gift.
1:26:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that sounds like a good gift.
1:26:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:26:41 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, I did try to gift this exact thing today.
1:26:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, just today?
1:26:46 Speaker 01 Today's Callie's birthday.
1:26:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, happy birthday, Callie.
1:26:49 Speaker 01 Happy birthday, Callie. And I was gonna get her this weekly bloom bundle.
1:26:54 Dax Shepard? Right. The gift that keeps on giving.
1:26:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, but, um, it's sold out.
1:26:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, right. Alright.
1:27:00 Speaker 01 So I can't.
1:27:01 Dax Shepard? That's the problem when you go with these micro growers that only have one flower bed in their backyard.
1:27:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, they run out.
1:27:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah. It's a really great idea, but then in practice.
1:27:09 Speaker 01 It's part of the fun. It's part of the limited edition element.
1:27:12 Dax Shepard? Okay, so I don't wanna say this, and I just really can't control myself to not say it.
1:27:18 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:27:19 Dax Shepard? Ah, cuz I gotta get out of the habit of addressing commenters.
1:27:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would prefer not because I, that's why I don't look at them.
1:27:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. But I just wanna make this simple point because, um,
1:27:34 Dax Shepard? people, you know, they'll, Jonathan Haidt will be on. So people will be like, you know, he's so anti-technology and he doesn't know and it brought people together, blah, blah. Great, great, great, great. Um, but I was just thinking, you know, what I like about our show is we have Reid Hoffman on. He's a techno-optimist.
1:27:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:52 Dax Shepard? You get to hear the full sales pitch for why technology's great. And then we have Jonathan Hyde on and you get to hear the full sales pitch on why it's bad.
1:28:02 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:28:03 Dax Shepard? And instead of being like angry at these guests who have a different point of view, I would really wish people would be grateful that they got to hear the counterpoint to what they believe. I mean, that's, that's what I so enjoy about the show.
1:28:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:17 Dax Shepard? And guess what? I don't know which one I think.
1:28:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:20 Dax Shepard? It's like I half believe what Reed's saying and I half believe what Jonathan's saying. I don't agree with Jonathan.
1:28:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:26 Dax Shepard? But I'm so grateful to hear a very smart person.
1:28:30 Speaker 01 We gotta hear.
1:28:31 Dax Shepard? Tell me the opposite point of view that I have. And I just wish people could click into like, yeah, that's a gift to hear someone with a different point of view tell you what the opposite side thinks. It's not shut that person down and get them out of here and I don't like what they're saying.
1:28:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree.
1:28:46 Dax Shepard? Now, if we only had one sides of all these debates, I think that would be a pretty reasonable criticism.
1:28:51 Speaker 01 Yep, I agree.
1:28:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah. That was burning a hole in my... Go ahead.
1:28:59 Speaker 01 You know what I'm gonna say?
1:29:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I wanna hear it.
1:29:01 Speaker 01 It might sound disrespectful to the audience, what I'm about to say.
1:29:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:06 Speaker 01 And I don't mean that. I love our audience so much. I love the Arm Cherries. I'm so grateful that people listen to us, but I don't care.
1:29:18 Dax Shepard? Right, that's healthy.
1:29:20 Speaker 01 If they don't like an episode, I also personally, I don't believe it. I don't believe that what you're reading is indicative of what people think. And that, it bums me out that you get, you get like.
1:29:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:37 Speaker 01 Ensnared.
1:29:38 Dax Shepard? Well, some woman told me, I need to apologize for saying young men are disenfranchised. And I said, apologize to who? Like, who am I apologizing to?
1:29:47 Speaker 01 I know, but this is the... Like...
1:29:51 Dax Shepard? I know, I know, it's really tricky. Now, I'd say the good news is like, I'm not gonna change at all what I'm doing.
1:30:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:00 Dax Shepard? So it's not like I'm subject to altering how I'm going to invite Jonathan on and invite Reid Hoffman on. This is gonna have no impact on how I do the show.
1:30:11 Dax Shepard? I think I have a, I do have maybe an arrogant, delusional belief I could explain the value of hearing this and people might lock into it and go like, oh, you know what? You know, I'm gonna stop blasting everyone I disagree with. It's okay to disagree with people. You don't have to hate them.
1:30:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:29 Dax Shepard? Jonathan's a great guy. I totally disagree with a lot of what he's saying, you know?
1:30:32 Speaker 01 But...
1:30:33 Dax Shepard? So I have this stupid belief I can encourage people to embrace this. And that's, that's my own delusion.
1:30:43 Speaker 01 It is, it's a delusion, but you're only seeing like one piece of the whole puzzle.
1:30:48 Dax Shepard? You're so right.
1:30:49 Speaker 01 You don't know who you're even talking to.
1:30:52 Dax Shepard? No, you're absolutely right. And I do think about that. So like naturally, you're in a nice debate about men and women.
1:30:57 Speaker 01 Obviously.
1:30:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, it was very polarizing. I expected that, and that's totally fine.
1:31:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:01 Dax Shepard? And I get it. I get it from both. I totally understand from both sides.
1:31:07 Dax Shepard? But yeah, it's like 50 people.
1:31:13 Dax Shepard? You know, on either side, out of, out of millions of people.
1:31:16 Speaker 01 It could literally be one person. This is what I'm saying.
1:31:19 Dax Shepard? Oh, that's got 30.
1:31:20 Speaker 01 Yes, this is my point. Like, to get wrapped up in it, your strongest trigger is getting taken advantage of. But when you react like this.
1:31:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:31:31 Speaker 01 I think you've been taken advantage of.
1:31:34 Dax Shepard? Cause I got wound up about it?
1:31:36 Speaker 01 And you don't even know.
1:31:38 Dax Shepard? But, but what's, what's perfect about it is...
1:31:43 Dax Shepard? It is a facet of this thing I obsess about without the comments.
1:31:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:49 Dax Shepard? Right? So I, your big concern is women's reproductive rights, which is, makes total sense.
1:31:55 Speaker 01 It's a concern, yeah.
1:31:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but it's like a very paramount concern, and rightly so.
1:31:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:59 Dax Shepard? And you'll think about that a lot, you know?
1:32:01 Speaker 01 If it feels threatened. I don't think about it on a regular basis. But if it's, if it's threatened, yes, of course.
1:32:07 Dax Shepard? And I'm regularly so scared about the inability for people to listen to one another.
1:32:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:15 Dax Shepard? I'd like, think about it too much. Uh, and it really frustrates me and it scares me. I'm scared of the future where there's two camps on the planet and they don't talk to each other.
1:32:27 Speaker 01 Can, can we deep dive?
1:32:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:30 Speaker 01 Why is that so scary to you? Like, of course it sounds, it sounds, it's bad, right? Like, I think it's bad too. I'm like, this is a huge problem. But it does, I don't have this reaction that you have, and, and I wonder, I mean, obviously, we know that if anything's like causing that much of a reaction, it's something else. It's something about us, or our past, or our, like, the fear is about us.
1:32:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I guess probably dysfunction. I grew up in dysfunction. I grew up in two parents that hated each other till they got divorced, like dysfunction.
1:33:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:03 Dax Shepard? Um, not rising to one's best self to navigate these things. We have gotten embarrassingly dysfunctional.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:13 Dax Shepard? And I see the total root of the dysfunction is us against them.
1:33:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:18 Dax Shepard? And, and I see that as such a toxic quality. And I have children that are entering a world and I care about the world for them. So, yeah, it really bothers me really deeply. Cause my childhood was plagued by dysfunction and two people not communicating, and it's winner takes all. And I hate that situation.
1:33:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:40 Dax Shepard? I don't, it wasn't compromise. It wasn't working together to, it was, you know, as I always say, the paradigm everyone needs to wrap their head around is, we're married. The left and the right are married. We all live in the same country. And so we have a Gottman approach through this marriage, or we have a fucking, um, what's the famous War of the Roses version of this marriage? And I lived through the War of the Roses versions of the marriages. And so for me, I didn't want that in my life when I grew up. And then when I feel ensconced in a whole society that's way. And then I put out a show and I see people saying, you know, heights of conservative, whatever. Like they've just written him off. I think I've said this before, but it's like one time we went out to, and this is a ding ding ding.
1:34:25 Dax Shepard? It came up on an episode yesterday we recorded, but Ted Olson, you know, this, um, he was the most successful Supreme Court. He argued in front of the Supreme Court more times and more successfully than anyone else. And he, very confusingly, from my perspective, both won Citizens United, which is a very right cause, giving businesses personhood. But he also defeated DOMA. And he believed in both of those deeply. We had a dinner with him and there was three of us liberals and then him. And we started kind of hitting them, him with all of our points of view. And I, I said, hold on a second.
1:35:07 Dax Shepard? We have an opportunity to be with one of the smartest people in the world who has a different point, point of view from us.
1:35:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:13 Dax Shepard? What an opportunity to hear the best version of this point of view that I disagree with.
1:35:17 Speaker 01 If you want to look at it in a way that's selfish, it's good to hear the other person's point of view so that you know how to combat it.
1:35:26 Dax Shepard? Well, you'll find if you combat it, some of their pushback will make some of your points fall flat.
1:35:32 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:35:33 Dax Shepard? And those are points you need to rethink.
1:35:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:35 Dax Shepard? Or jettison or figure out another way. But it's as much as you can learn from them, you also learn the weaknesses of your own point of view.
1:35:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:43 Dax Shepard? Which I like. I'm arguing with people all the time and I get to one and, and I'm like, mm. That's not a good point. I gotta get rid of that and that can't really be a part of my.
1:35:52 Speaker 01 I also think you are in a program that requires self-reflection, growth, checking yourself. And so I do think you're extra.
1:36:08 Dax Shepard? I'm extra.
1:36:09 Speaker 01 Hurt. No, no, no, no. It, it bothers you more when you see people who aren't doing that or don't care to do it.
1:36:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:36:16 Speaker 01 But there's just a lot of people who don't and. I I guess I respect that that bothers you. To me, I think if that bothered me, I would die. Like, that'd be too much. Like, I can't take on that people don't want to change. That's not my job to make people want to change. And, you know, like, I can only do me.
1:36:41 Dax Shepard? I just wish everyone thought I have, I'm holding all my beliefs in my hand right now. And they're certainly not the best version of my beliefs. They're gonna evolve. Hopefully, that's what they're supposed to do.
1:36:54 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:36:54 Dax Shepard? So you don't have the complete finished version of your beliefs and your points of view in your hand.
1:37:01 Speaker 01 People really have a huge problem with wishy-washiness.
1:37:07 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:37:07 Speaker 01 I've heard that a lot, like.
1:37:09 Dax Shepard? Flip-flopping.
1:37:10 Speaker 01 Flip-flopping and a lot about politi- they say that a lot about politicians. That, oh, they said this and now they're saying this.
1:37:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, if you catch them having changed their opinion.
1:37:19 Speaker 01 Right. I find that so strange.
1:37:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's really disappointing.
1:37:23 Speaker 01 Why can't, they should be changing their opinion. It's so weird to me. I, it's so much worse to me that they would have said something so long ago, felt stuck in saying that, and now they just have to believe that forever. That's a big problem. But both sides hate that.
1:37:42 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:37:43 Speaker 01 Which I, I really do not understand.
1:37:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:37:48 Speaker 01 It feels very backwards, but, but again, like, I can't get that riled up about other people feeling that way, because I can't change them.
1:37:57 Dax Shepard? But I think you're right. I think, I think this whole thing feels like dysfunctional family to me.
1:38:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:02 Dax Shepard? And I hate it.
1:38:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:04 Dax Shepard? And I want everyone to be a bigger version of themselves, myself included.
1:38:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:09 Dax Shepard? And it's disheartening to live in a dysfunctional family, which is this country.
1:38:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think that it's because when your dysfunctional family ended in, I mean, it ended in pain for you specifically and pain for your mom and pain.
1:38:25 Dax Shepard? All involved.
1:38:27 Speaker 01 Pain for all involved.
1:38:28 Dax Shepard? The stepdads were miserable afterwards, their children were miserable.
1:38:32 Speaker 01 Because I think ever, not everyone, I'm sure, I'm sure some people are spared this, but there's a fair amount of dysfunction that happens in a lot of families. And I, I think I also grew up with
1:38:44 Dax Shepard? Some dysfunction.
1:38:45 Speaker 01 Dysfunction amongst the adults. But they didn't split up over it. Obviously, for me, having grown up and seeing things I didn't like, I think, well, I can't do that. Like, for my life, that I don't want to replicate that. But I also am kind of like, eh, like, it's sort of worked out and it's kind of fine. And I don't, I don't know.
1:39:09 Dax Shepard? If I were you, I might want to challenge me by saying, maybe everyone's happy with this. Which is also possible, you know? Maybe right now, the right's super pumped and they're pigs and shit. And the left is vindicated and validated and feeling even more self-righteous. Maybe, maybe everyone's getting exactly what they want out of this. And so that's an interesting thing for me to consider. Like, you're trying to fix something that people will like. As much as
1:39:37 Speaker 01 That's true.
1:39:38 Dax Shepard? They might not want to say they like this, maybe they do.
1:39:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:43 Dax Shepard? Maybe the person that's like, Jonathan Haidt's a monster, felt awesome.
1:39:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:47 Dax Shepard? And told nine of their friends they did that, and they love it.
1:39:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:52 Dax Shepard? It, it's hard for me to
1:39:53 Speaker 01 I also think people, I mean, again, the generous offering is that they want their opinion
1:40:00 Dax Shepard? To be heard.
1:40:01 Speaker 01 Heard and seen.
1:40:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:03 Speaker 01 And they want to feel, people just want to feel like a person
1:40:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:06 Speaker 01 Who's, who's, who exists. I mean, we all just want proof that we exist.
1:40:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:40:11 Speaker 01 And that is a version of it.
1:40:13 Dax Shepard? I will watch them exist and validate them without that approach. They don't need that approach.
1:40:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:21 Dax Shepard? You know? But I know, I sound like, and, and that's why I said I didn't want to say anything. I, if I were not, it's really just, hey, shut the fuck up about the counters. Just stop reading. I fully get that criticism, and it's, it's true. It is true. But yes, it is this, it is a perfect little encapsulation of this other thing I spend too much time obsessing about. And if I were really working my AA program, I would just accept this.
1:40:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:51 Dax Shepard? I would accept.
1:40:54 Dax Shepard? But that's how it is.
1:40:55 Speaker 01 There's nothing you can do.
1:40:56 Dax Shepard? And if someone's attracted to my approach, that'll be appealing to them.
1:41:00 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:41:01 Dax Shepard? More so than me saying someone should have this approach.
1:41:05 Speaker 01 Yes, I agree.
1:41:06 Dax Shepard? And I should just have faith in that.
1:41:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:10 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny that you brought up hating because on my ride here, I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about Meghan Markle. And they were, they weren't saying that they hated her, but they were saying like, there is this like vitriol around her. And there is, and it was,
1:41:29 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:41:29 Speaker 01 It was interesting because it did make me think.
1:41:33 Dax Shepard? People really dined out.
1:41:35 Speaker 01 They like.
1:41:36 Dax Shepard? On her show.
1:41:37 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. But people like really hate strangers. Like it, to me, that is so interesting. And then I was thinking, I was like, who do I hate?
1:41:53 Dax Shepard? Well, I think we're hardwired to do it right. We're hardwired to extremely punish someone who has values and morals outside of our in-group.
1:42:02 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:42:03 Dax Shepard? And make a, make a emblem of them, right? So I do think when someone represents some, you know.
1:42:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:11 Dax Shepard? I don't even know how they articulate why they hate her, but.
1:42:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:14 Dax Shepard? She's interesting, though. I have a story about this, but I, I want you to expound more.
1:42:19 Speaker 01 No, I was just gonna ask if you hated anyone.
1:42:21 Dax Shepard? When they first, when, when you were gonna ask if I hate her?
1:42:24 Speaker 01 Hated anyone.
1:42:25 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:42:25 Speaker 01 Cause I was like, I don't, when I really think about it, I, I mean, I don't hate any strangers and even people in my life who I like, who, who I, I do have like friction or cause stress.
1:42:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:42:38 Speaker 01 I don't hate them. I don't think I hate anyone, actually.
1:42:42 Dax Shepard? I hate a couple people in public. I hate Tucker Carlson.
1:42:48 Speaker 01 Right.
1:42:49 Dax Shepard? I just think he's a smug bully. I don't even really give a fuck about his politics.
1:42:54 Speaker 01 Right.
1:42:54 Dax Shepard? Is this a smug bulliness about it?
1:42:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:57 Dax Shepard? Is there anyone else?
1:43:00 Dax Shepard? Like, I'm trying to imagine, and if you're saying you hate them, you have to take it to the, like, literally, you hate them to the degree if you saw them in person, you'd go, you're a fucking asshole.
1:43:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:43:09 Dax Shepard? And so I think the only person I, I can think of him, that if I met him in real life, I'd go, you're a fucking piece of shit.
1:43:15 Speaker 01 Right.
1:43:15 Dax Shepard? Would be him.
1:43:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel like, I remember one time, years and years and years ago, probably when I was babysitting, and we were playing games and stuff, to Tan, um, I think, I said something like, ugh, I hate this. And you said, you say, you say hate a lot.
1:43:33 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, we've talked about this before.
1:43:35 Speaker 01 Well, it's been a minute, probably. I was, was saying it just ra, as a random word, really.
1:43:41 Dax Shepard? As an adjective.
1:43:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, it didn't, it didn't carry the weight that it was carrying for you, but then I was like, yeah, that is a big word to be sort of throwing around. And I think I don't really say it as much.
1:43:54 Dax Shepard? No, not at all.
1:43:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think I used to say it too. I think that's one of the aspects of my
1:44:01 Dax Shepard? point of view shifting of moving to California that I liked a lot.
1:44:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:05 Dax Shepard? I think when I was in Michigan, I had a very long list of enemies, you know, people we hated.
1:44:10 Speaker 01 Right.
1:44:10 Dax Shepard? Lot of, lot of people we were against.
1:44:13 Speaker 01 Interesting. Uh, wait, back to the question.
1:44:15 Dax Shepard? Okay, back to Meghan Markle.
1:44:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:17 Dax Shepard? So, I saw, I didn't even see it, but I saw some of the Oprah thing. Their very first interview, right? And a friend of mine from England,
1:44:30 Dax Shepard? like, let it rip on her, like, can you fucking believe this, blah, blah, blah, like, just outrage, right? And so, and this friend, I really respect.
1:44:39 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:44:39 Dax Shepard? Their intelligence, their empathy, the whole thing. This, this person's a very admirable person.
1:44:46 Speaker 01 Yes, I agree.
1:44:47 Dax Shepard? And so I had to really force myself to imagine, well, how could he have this strong of a reaction?
1:44:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:56 Dax Shepard? And the scenario I painted in my head was, and I think I've already told you this.
1:45:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:01 Dax Shepard? When Obama was in office, a Russian kid go, comes to the DC, falls in love with Malia, takes her to Moscow, he and her go on their biggest television show, and shit all over Obama, and accuse him of being racist, and just trash the country under the guise of this Ameri, or this Russian dude, and I was like, Yeah, I would fucking hate that guy. I would absolutely hate him. And there's a layer of patriotism that has to be acknowledged.
1:45:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:36 Dax Shepard? That we all carry. And if I do think of that scenario, I just know I would hate the Russian guy who took Malia to Russia for the rest of her life and they go on TV all the time and shit on America. I would hate that guy. I don't understand the Americans who hate her so much, but.
1:45:50 Speaker 01 Right.
1:45:50 Dax Shepard? I do understand the British backlash. They took the prize son. They all liked him more than the other one.
1:45:58 Speaker 01 Right. But he taking is so like, like he didn't have a mind of his own.
1:46:06 Dax Shepard? Oh, I know.
1:46:06 Speaker 01 I mean, that's so.
1:46:07 Dax Shepard? But then I'd be saying Malia doesn't have a mind of her own. But if Malia left with this Russian dude.
1:46:12 Speaker 01 Made the choice.
1:46:13 Dax Shepard? Never to return.
1:46:13 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah.
1:46:15 Dax Shepard? And then went on Russian television and shit on America.
1:46:17 Speaker 01 But I mean.
1:46:18 Dax Shepard? I'd hate the whole scenario.
1:46:19 Speaker 01 I guess, I don't know. I don't know that I would. I think I would be like, yikes. She like.
1:46:25 Dax Shepard? No, but him, you gotta evaluate him. You gotta evaluate the dude.
1:46:28 Speaker 01 That's the part I actually can't relate to. Like for me, Harry made a choice about his life and his family.
1:46:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:38 Speaker 01 And I don't see it as this woman like took him away. I.
1:46:43 Dax Shepard? A siren who called him to the rocks of America.
1:46:46 Speaker 01 Exactly. I see it as, as a man who made a choice based on a lot of things, including the death of his mother.
1:46:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:54 Speaker 01 And so I don't have a problem with him being like, there's a lot of fucked up shit over there and I had to leave it.
1:47:02 Dax Shepard? But I think we have, we have clarity on that one because we don't have the in-group patriotic bias.
1:47:10 Speaker 01 True. But I think if Malia left and married this Russian person.
1:47:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:47:17 Speaker 01 And then they went on Russian TV and they were talking about it and she was saying like, look. The White House was horrible and the media in America was horrible. And this is what they did and this is what happened.
1:47:32 Dax Shepard? But really quick, if that, so I'm not talking, I'm not talking about Harry and Meghan.
1:47:39 Speaker 01 Right.
1:47:39 Dax Shepard? I'm talking about this theoretical Malia and this guy.
1:47:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah.
1:47:44 Dax Shepard? I would go, oh, you hate the media? You're on the biggest fucking show in Russia. You can't hate the media and then willingly participate in their biggest media outlet.
1:47:55 Speaker 01 Well, they hate the media.
1:47:57 Dax Shepard? You're such a fucking hypocrite.
1:47:57 Speaker 01 Well, no.
1:47:58 Dax Shepard? That's what I would say to this imaginary people who's on the biggest media outlet in Russia complaining about media attention.
1:48:06 Speaker 01 But I'm saying they speak specifically about British media.
1:48:10 Dax Shepard? Tabloids.
1:48:11 Speaker 01 Yes, and we have had enough people on who have corroborated that the British.
1:48:16 Dax Shepard? I want to be clear. I understand why. I am not, none of this opinion is about those two.
1:48:21 Speaker 01 No, I know, I know.
1:48:22 Dax Shepard? But I do have strong knee jerks about this theoretical defecting of Malia to Russia. And being on TV complaining about being on TV.
1:48:31 Speaker 01 I guess I don't. I just don't. Like, I think if they were, if they were like, because we have to make it equal. I don't, because I don't, I mean, look, we have obviously media issues, but it's not the same.
1:48:44 Dax Shepard? Well, let's just say it's, the scenario I painted is actually less impactful than the one that really happened. Because Malia was never going to inherit the presidency.
1:48:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:55 Dax Shepard? Harry could inherit the kingship.
1:48:57 Speaker 01 No.
1:48:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, his brother would have to die.
1:48:59 Speaker 01 No, then it goes to the son, William's son. Harry can't be the king.
1:49:04 Dax Shepard? Okay, but the son dies. He could be the king.
1:49:07 Speaker 01 Okay, it's a, it's.
1:49:08 Dax Shepard? There's a long list?
1:49:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:10 Dax Shepard? Okay. Would they give the kingship to a seven-year-old? I don't think.
1:49:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, like Joffrey.
1:49:15 Dax Shepard? I'll do a little digging on this.
1:49:16 Speaker 01 Joffrey.
1:49:18 Dax Shepard? There's no inheritance in the presidency, so the scenario I'm painting is even less impactful.
1:49:22 Speaker 01 I agree. I mean, that's why we don't, it's like hard to make this equivalency, but, but also like, why should he possibly stay in this thing that he sees as fucked up?
1:49:36 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:49:36 Speaker 01 Like, I, I, I don't know. I just commend.
1:49:40 Dax Shepard? But an outsider came in and then the beloved person left.
1:49:46 Dax Shepard? And that's easy correlation to get upset about.
1:49:50 Speaker 01 I mean, look, I, I.
1:49:51 Dax Shepard? Like, maybe Harry would have defected on his own without a wife that was American. That's possible.
1:49:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:59 Dax Shepard? But we don't really know, because it didn't happen that way.
1:50:02 Speaker 01 But we also, we also, you know, more than anyone, that like, if someone, if you're in love with someone and people around you are not treating that person well.
1:50:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you gotta protect them.
1:50:17 Speaker 01 You're gonna protect them and you're gonna say, ultimately say, fuck this. Like, this is a problem. We're gonna go now.
1:50:24 Dax Shepard? Yes, but, um, yeah, so I already agree. I understand why he left and I would have left.
1:50:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:31 Dax Shepard? A thousand percent.
1:50:32 Speaker 01 You're just saying you understand why people don't like it.
1:50:34 Dax Shepard? I totally understand why people don't like her that are English.
1:50:37 Speaker 01 Right.
1:50:38 Dax Shepard? I don't, it's not hard for me to understand.
1:50:39 Speaker 01 It's not hard for me to understand. I do wish they would take a second look at it. Like, it doesn't affect them. It really doesn't.
1:50:46 Dax Shepard? Well, they lost their cutest royal family member.
1:50:48 Speaker 01 Get over it. Like, I mean.
1:50:51 Dax Shepard? And I, I hate royalty.
1:50:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:54 Dax Shepard? But I understand something you value getting, quote, taken from you. Oh, no, you say taken. I understand losing something you value. So it's like, they do value that. I, I, I can't understand it.
1:51:08 Speaker 01 No, sure.
1:51:08 Dax Shepard? The notion of like.
1:51:09 Speaker 01 I actually can understand that weirdly.
1:51:12 Dax Shepard? Right, you like royalty.
1:51:13 Speaker 01 I can buy into the royal family and thinking that's cool and that's a part of your history. I'm like, I, I do get that. Even that, like, I, even feeling that way, I don't think I would feel personally injured by one of them going to live their life. I think differently. I think people don't like her because they think she's fake. People think she's fake. People think, um, she's mean, but she pretends to be nice. Like, there's a lot of, and then with the new show, they're like, what is this? She's just moving pretzels from one bag to another bag. This is stupid.
1:51:53 Dax Shepard? I don't know that reference, but I'm laughing right now because the description was really funny. I just, Meghan Markle, I didn't see that, so I'm not laughing at.
1:51:59 Speaker 01 I, you know what? I'm not laughing either, because it's clear that.
1:52:07 Speaker 01 She does like it. She, it's not, I don't think it's fake. It may seem ridiculous to someone who's like, living a life, going to work and having to come home and then turning that on.
1:52:22 Dax Shepard? Paycheck to paycheck.
1:52:23 Speaker 01 Exactly. Turning it on and seeing that her day is spent moving pretzels from one bag into another bag.
1:52:30 Dax Shepard? Well, now I really want to watch this episode.
1:52:32 Speaker 01 She, it's like, that's a very, uh,
1:52:35 Dax Shepard? Simple.
1:52:37 Speaker 01 Simple explanation. She's having a guest over and she's gonna put together this like cute little tray by the bed for the guest. That has like flowers and stuff. And then she like buys these pretzels, I think with peanut butter. They look delicious.
1:52:52 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:52:52 Speaker 01 And she put them in another, she took them out of the bag. She put them in another cute little bag and put like,
1:52:58 Dax Shepard? So you've watched it.
1:52:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, oh yeah.
1:53:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:53:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. And put them like, you know, wrote, peanut butter pretzels and like tied it up, made it cute.
1:53:07 Dax Shepard? Cute, yeah.
1:53:07 Speaker 01 She made it cute.
1:53:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:53:08 Speaker 01 And I think that does bring her joy.
1:53:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, sure.
1:53:14 Speaker 01 I don't think that's a lie.
1:53:16 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:53:16 Speaker 01 And, and so it's kind of what we talked about before with the, with the, you know, podcasts, the like men's podcasts and stuff.
1:53:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:53:24 Speaker 01 If you don't like it, just don't watch it.
1:53:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:53:27 Speaker 01 If you think this is sort of offensive because your life, it's not reflective of your life.
1:53:34 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:53:47 Dax Shepard? I bet the core thing that people are triggered by is like, why does this woman get a show about the things she likes?
1:53:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:53:58 Dax Shepard? Why don't I have, like, why would, I actually build birdhouses.
1:54:02 Speaker 01 Right, right, right, right.
1:54:03 Dax Shepard? I actually do X, Y, or Z.
1:54:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:06 Dax Shepard? And I do think it's easy to think in some abstract way, she got something that you deserved more.
1:54:13 Speaker 01 Right.
1:54:13 Dax Shepard? As if her thing took from you.
1:54:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:18 Dax Shepard? And that in general, people who don't deserve things are taking opportunities.
1:54:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:23 Dax Shepard? That should go to deserving people.
1:54:25 Speaker 01 Right.
1:54:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:27 Dax Shepard? Can I quickly get into some very large moral imperative stuff?
1:54:32 Speaker 01 Well, yes, because who deserves anything? Like, we, do we inherit, I mean, we deserve like dignity?
1:54:41 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:54:42 Speaker 01 But to me, other than that, we as people don't like come out deserving of
1:54:51 Speaker 01 money, or I don't know, it's a weird thing.
1:54:54 Dax Shepard? I'm yes and no.
1:54:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:57 Dax Shepard? I'm yes and no. There's like a nihilist version of me that I can tap into pretty easily, which is like, who's kidding who? We're all staying busy on this circular globe until we die.
1:55:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:55:08 Dax Shepard? There's no God, there's no one is evaluating what should and shouldn't and better and worse. Like, we're just all distracting ourselves in the most entertaining fashion we can manage until we're dead.
1:55:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:55:19 Dax Shepard? So there's that version. It's like, yeah, what are you talking about? You don't deserve, you deserve for 300,000 years, you deserve to come out without clothes on and be ill-equipped for this world. In the best-case scenario, you ate and had a kid. So the notion that you, at some point, a TV show was a human right.
1:55:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:55:40 Dax Shepard? Or a cellphone's a human right, or I hate to say it, that healthcare is a human right. These are all really, really incredible, modern privileges.
1:55:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're advanced privileges, yes.
1:55:50 Dax Shepard? Okay. And now also on the other side, yes, Brene Brown deserves a podcast more than a lot of people because she has spent a good chunk of her life acquiring knowledge that is useful to other people.
1:56:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:07 Dax Shepard? And yes, she does. I would, I would have to be lying to say that the guy in front of 7-Eleven, who's repeating the same sentence over and over again, is, should have the same level of success on a podcast that Brene Brown has. I can acknowledge, some people do deserve the success more than others because they've put more effort into it and they have more dedication and they have more skill. Jordan deserves his six titles
1:56:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:36 Dax Shepard? more than a lot of the players.
1:56:40 Dax Shepard? It's not like everyone who entered the NBA deserves six titles.
1:56:43 Speaker 01 I just mean, we don't all deserve to be a basketball. That, I mean, like, that's the whole, my whole point. We don't come out deserving everything. We have different skills and, and privileges and things that allow us to like, live the life we're gonna live. But I don't know that we deserve. Like, I don't know that, I don't know that Brene, I mean, of course, I love her, so I, I think she deserves.
1:57:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we're biased.
1:57:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. But the 7-Eleven guy, if, if.
1:57:14 Dax Shepard? If his one sentence repeated over and over again.
1:57:17 Speaker 01 If his one sentence repeated over and over and over again has a massive impact on people.
1:57:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:22 Speaker 01 And it changes their life and it like makes them think about the world differently. He deserves it!
1:57:28 Dax Shepard? Absolutely. But what I think is even more interesting is, so I feel that way about that topic. But what I can admit and acknowledge is, there's another scenario you could paint that is the same principle at hand.
1:57:41 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:57:42 Dax Shepard? And I'll go the other way.
1:57:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:57:44 Dax Shepard? I think that's what's much more fascinating and more fun to pay attention to is this illusion that I have a consistent policy.
1:57:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:57:52 Dax Shepard? And I don't.
1:57:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, none of us do.
1:57:54 Dax Shepard? And what really happens is I look at the person and generally I like them or I don't like them on some weird gut level. And I'm generally accepting of the things that people do that I like and I'm critical of the things from people I don't like.
1:58:07 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:58:07 Dax Shepard? And I frame it under this well-thought-out logic I have.
1:58:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:12 Dax Shepard? And it's just so inconsistent that I have to acknowledge.
1:58:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:15 Dax Shepard? There's a lot of going on.
1:58:17 Speaker 01 I do think so much of dislike, though, is jealousy.
1:58:21 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:58:21 Speaker 01 In general, and for all of us. If we dislike a lot, not always. Of course, there's like people who do horrible shit to other people.
1:58:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:58:30 Speaker 01 You're gonna dislike that, but like. When, when you're just like irked by someone who you don't know.
1:58:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:58:39 Speaker 01 It's probably because there's something that you're triggered that you wish you had, or, I mean, again, this, this thing she's presenting is, is perfection, right? Like she has, she's able to make her own honey. She has this bee farm.
1:58:53 Dax Shepard? She has her own bees?
1:58:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, she has her own bees and she makes her own honey and then she makes these like.
1:58:57 Dax Shepard? Have I told you bees have rebounded?
1:58:59 Speaker 01 Really?
1:58:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:00 Speaker 01 Really?
1:59:01 Dax Shepard? It's like great news. Remember that panic we were on? They've totally rebounded.
1:59:03 Speaker 01 Cause of her.
1:59:05 Dax Shepard? Perhaps.
1:59:06 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:59:07 Dax Shepard? So we all owe her a debt of credit.
1:59:08 Speaker 01 Wow. That's, that is good news.
1:59:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:11 Speaker 01 Um, but like she makes her own like raspberry preserves and like, cause she has a raspberry bush. And so people are like, I want a raspberry bush and I want.
1:59:21 Dax Shepard? I want to spend my day doing this nice fun stuff.
1:59:23 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:59:23 Dax Shepard? Well, there's probably that. And then there's also Martha Stewart.
1:59:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:28 Dax Shepard? There's Martha Stewart who has spent her entire life really becoming a master at all these things.
1:59:33 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:59:34 Dax Shepard? And then she has a show and by God, it's very, very helpful and useful to people because she's a master.
1:59:39 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:59:39 Dax Shepard? And so if you're comparing these two people and they both have a similar sized show, I can understand people being a little frustrated.
1:59:46 Speaker 01 Right.
1:59:47 Dax Shepard? It would appear that one person really is now benefiting from their dedication and love for their whole life.
1:59:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:55 Dax Shepard? To something. That's a good story.
1:59:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:59:59 Dax Shepard? Versus like, and I could do this. I'm not a good woodworker. But I bet your ass I could sell a show to Netflix tomorrow about me with a wood shop, building things.
2:00:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:08 Dax Shepard? And if I was a master woodworker, I'd be like, this is bullshit. Why is, and that would be fair. And also, if I want to do a show about woodworking and I think it's fun and people are interested in it, why, why can't I do that?
2:00:20 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:00:21 Dax Shepard? So I think all these things are true. So Kristen came home to me.
2:00:25 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
2:00:25 Dax Shepard? And she said, oh my God, I got like five texts from people. Like I could, they were salivating to share this news about Meghan Markle's show. And she started calling people out, like.
2:00:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:39 Dax Shepard? It seemed a little too excited about what you determined was a failed attempt by somebody. That's like a, if you're taking a lot of joy out of a failed attempt on somebody. Is that who you want to be?
2:00:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:53 Dax Shepard? Bigger question.
2:00:54 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:00:55 Dax Shepard? And I also think it's worth delineating because I'm critical, as you know. I'm, I'm trying to shut the fuck up about it, but I am critical of people that are allowing someone to make them miserable. As I've said, right?
2:01:06 Speaker 01 Circles back to what I said earlier.
2:01:08 Dax Shepard? Sixteen to now, if you've been miserable for nine years or, or an hour of your day is spent in anger. I just think that's a rough use of your life. Now, if you're seeing the thing, the Meghan thing, and you're excited and you share it with your friends and you all gossip and you all have a good time doing that at dinner. I guess I'm not critical of that in a weird way. I feel bad for the subject of ridicule, but I also can just, again, in a utilitarian way go look at, oh, these five people had a really fun dinner for two hours gossiping, which is a, which is an adaptation of social primates. Like, we're wired to do it.
2:01:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:01:47 Dax Shepard? I guess I also can go, yeah, okay, you guys had fun shitting on somebody. Everyone felt better for some reason about themselves.
2:01:54 Speaker 01 I mean, that's the part.
2:01:55 Dax Shepard? That's a bummer.
2:01:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:01:56 Dax Shepard? But if, if the end result was you all did that versus you all got together and you like, this motherfucker and I can't believe this. Yes, outrage and, and feeling defeated and overwhelmed and all that. I weirdly have a distinction between those two things.
2:02:11 Speaker 01 One's harmless and the other one is causing harm, personal harm to them, the people who are doing it. And I mean, I do think it's, it's a privilege to be Kristen or be me. And I'm like watching this, you know, I'm just watching the show and I'm like, oh yeah, like.
2:02:28 Dax Shepard? I want that bag.
2:02:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm like, oh my God, like I should order some of those tomatoes and make that.
2:02:36 Dax Shepard? Cause you're not frustrated with the outcome of your life.
2:02:38 Speaker 01 Exactly. I am not like, well, why does she get to have that?
2:02:42 Dax Shepard? You have plenty.
2:02:43 Speaker 01 I have plenty.
2:02:44 Dax Shepard? That's right. That's right.
2:02:46 Speaker 01 I have more than I should have.
2:02:47 Dax Shepard? That's right. And, and, and I do too. And I'm not as bothered by a lot of things that people are bothered by, and I know it's a privilege. What is so tempting to tell, try to tell people is it is a product of your own. You think this person's objectively one thing.
2:03:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:05 Dax Shepard? And it's helpful to understand, no, if my cup was full, actually, and shockingly, I wouldn't feel the same way.
2:03:12 Speaker 01 I know.
2:03:13 Dax Shepard? And you kind of want people to know that. Cause I think it is helpful for development, which is like,
2:03:20 Dax Shepard? my opinions of things are dramatically impacted by how I feel about my own self and my own.
2:03:27 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:03:27 Dax Shepard? Outcome.
2:03:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:28 Dax Shepard? And I would probably be best served trying to love this version of myself.
2:03:35 Speaker 01 Hmm.
2:03:36 Dax Shepard? Hmm. Enough that I don't feel anger when other people.
2:03:42 Speaker 01 Are doing well. Real quick facts, this is for Mary Claire Haver. Great episode.
2:03:48 Dax Shepard? Solid.
2:03:48 Speaker 01 My assumption is it's.
2:03:50 Dax Shepard? Get that topical vaginal cream, everybody. Go out right now and just start smearing it all over.
2:03:56 Speaker 01 She already, she posted about it.
2:03:57 Dax Shepard? She did.
2:03:58 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
2:03:59 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:03:59 Speaker 01 It was really sweet and cute, cause it was out early.
2:04:04 Speaker 01 And she said it was really, she had a good time with us.
2:04:06 Dax Shepard? Can I Easter egg that? I got the text of my life last night that I shared with you guys.
2:04:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. We can't say anything else.
2:04:15 Dax Shepard? I urge people to hang on to the show a little longer. I know a lot of people are thinking about quitting, but just, just hang out for a couple more months. Wow, wow, wow. Wow.
2:04:23 Speaker 01 I'm gonna have to get a facial.
2:04:24 Dax Shepard? Hard as a rock. I'm gonna have to jerk off before the interview so I can last during the interview.
2:04:29 Speaker 01 Same.
2:04:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:04:32 Speaker 01 I'm gonna have to wear really strong pants, not ones that can explode.
2:04:36 Dax Shepard? You're gonna have to be in fucking steel trousers.
2:04:39 Speaker 01 Woo.
2:04:40 Dax Shepard? Might want to go short skirt. I say you go all the way.
2:04:44 Dax Shepard? If ever there was a time to take the biggest shot of your life.
2:04:47 Speaker 01 This is.
2:04:47 Dax Shepard? You might want to go skirt.
2:04:50 Speaker 01 Bra top.
2:04:51 Dax Shepard? Braless, see-through top.
2:04:55 Speaker 01 I do have a new top that is pretty see-through.
2:04:59 Dax Shepard? Oh my God. If you, if you did, and this person's a fashion icon, so they would just be like, oh yeah, fashion.
2:05:07 Speaker 01 Oh my, I could maybe get away with it.
2:05:09 Dax Shepard? I think you should go.
2:05:10 Speaker 01 You'd have to blur it, Rob.
2:05:12 Dax Shepard? Oh, they could.
2:05:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, that could be done. On YouTube.
2:05:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, no problem.
2:05:16 Speaker 01 But for, for.
2:05:17 Dax Shepard? For him.
2:05:18 Speaker 01 For him.
2:05:19 Dax Shepard? Or for her.
2:05:19 Speaker 01 For her.
2:05:20 Dax Shepard? Whoever our guest is.
2:05:23 Dax Shepard? Wow, I can't wait for that. That's a, that's an even more fun element to think about is coming.
2:05:28 Speaker 01 How I'm gonna show up?
2:05:29 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, and how aggressive you'll be. And I just want you to know that I am encouraging you to go up above and beyond
2:05:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:05:37 Dax Shepard? the realm of what you think is tasteful.
2:05:41 Dax Shepard? And you'll be sitting directly across from this person?
2:05:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, but you know, my instinct is to just like play it so cool.
2:05:47 Dax Shepard? No, go for it.
2:05:48 Speaker 01 I know, I don't know though. I think this person, I think this person might be more intrigued by someone playing it so cool.
2:05:58 Dax Shepard? I don't think so. Let me just, let me give you some inside baseball on guys.
2:06:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:06:05 Dax Shepard? There is no guy who's gonna see a rockin' bot on display and think, mm, not for me. I mean, there'll be no straight guy.
2:06:16 Speaker 01 Right.
2:06:16 Dax Shepard? Who thinks that.
2:06:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, Jess is, he's starting to turn. The more he hangs out with me.
2:06:21 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. So you guys might end up.
2:06:23 Speaker 01 Might end up together, after all.
2:06:26 Dax Shepard? What a great time. And then you guys bring back money and Jess love boys, but it's like money and Jess are married.
2:06:32 Speaker 01 Oh. That would be more, that'd be boring.
2:06:37 Dax Shepard? Well, no, you'd be fighting. All this fun you're having would quickly turn to fighting. So that could be entertaining.
2:06:44 Speaker 01 Oh, man. Anyway, okay. Well, that's TBD for people.
2:06:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's exciting.
2:06:49 Speaker 01 Okay, some facts. Okay, Rob, can you help me? What did you type in to get the names of those guys who did the W I H. study?
2:07:02 Speaker 07 I looked at Dax's notes for the episode.
2:07:04 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:07:05 Speaker 07 And saw what he wrote down.
2:07:07 Speaker 01 That is, I, for the life, I was trying so many ways of typing this into Google and I can't.
2:07:15 Dax Shepard? It won't.
2:07:15 Speaker 01 It's, that's not coming up for me.
2:07:17 Speaker 07 Yeah. Um, give me the spell.
2:07:20 Dax Shepard? Slabowski.
2:07:21 Speaker 07 Yeah, let me find it again.
2:07:23 Dax Shepard? Slabowski and Trabowski.
2:07:25 Speaker 07 C H L E B O W S K I.
2:07:29 Dax Shepard? Chlobowski.
2:07:32 Dax Shepard? And A R A G A S K I.
2:07:37 Speaker 01 Okay, so these are for the Women's Health Initiative. This is who you say was a part of the study. And this is who.
2:07:44 Dax Shepard? I could be conflating. I just want to be clear. The stuff I was saying that both Atiya and Lane Norton are all over.
2:07:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:07:55 Dax Shepard? Is Chlobowski and Eras.
2:07:57 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:07:58 Dax Shepard? They're the ones that keep doubling down on this bad data.
2:08:00 Speaker 01 Okay, so maybe they've doubled down. But they, I don't think are part of the original study.
2:08:06 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:08:07 Speaker 01 Dr. Bernadine Healy. This is in 91. She was the female director of the NIH. And she announced her plan for the Women's Health Initiative. There was a ton of people involved in this. Um, and it was a 15 year study. I mean, and it was wrong.
2:08:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Not right.
2:08:26 Speaker 01 It was not right.
2:08:27 Dax Shepard? It led to a mass panic.
2:08:29 Speaker 01 Okay, now, peak suicide rates for women. Uh, female suicide is concentrated in the 35 to 64 year age group. That's 64.8%.
2:08:41 Dax Shepard? I don't know why that's so weird for me. I mean.
2:08:43 Speaker 01 I get it. I get why it's weird. I wouldn't have expected that.
2:08:46 Dax Shepard? Obviously, we were just given the explanation, which is menopause. But it is, yeah, it's just not the time. You're, you think that's the time of your life. You start fully accepting who you are and what reality is and start transitioning. Yeah.
2:09:01 Speaker 01 But so's hormones. Brain changes. Scary.
2:09:06 Speaker 01 Um, but good to know. Like, if you're starting to feel.
2:09:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that know you're in, when you're in the danger zone.
2:09:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
2:09:14 Dax Shepard? Higher to the danger zone.
2:09:18 Speaker 01 Okay, now, male pattern baldness.
2:09:21 Dax Shepard? M P B. I say one thing?
2:09:23 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:09:25 Dax Shepard? I was eating at a restaurant this morning.
2:09:26 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
2:09:27 Dax Shepard? With Nate.
2:09:28 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
2:09:28 Dax Shepard? He left, I paid. Woman came over to the counter, parts of my table. And she said, I just wanna thank you for the Blaze episode.
2:09:39 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:09:40 Dax Shepard? I have BPD.
2:09:41 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh.
2:09:42 Dax Shepard? And I think that episode probably saved me like two years of my trajectory to dealing with this.
2:09:51 Speaker 01 Great. So she realized she had it because of it?
2:09:54 Dax Shepard? No, I think she already knew, but she, hearing from him, something he did, you know, she's like, it just kinda like, fast forward her two years in the process.
2:10:02 Speaker 01 Amazing.
2:10:03 Dax Shepard? And it was very good for me to meet her. Because I think a lot of times you're like, ma, BPD, they fuck up the person's life who loves them. And you villainize them. And it was very helpful to look at this young woman who's so grateful for help.
2:10:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:22 Dax Shepard? For this thing she doesn't want. Yeah, I was very happy to.
2:10:25 Speaker 01 That's lovely.
2:10:26 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:10:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I like that.
2:10:28 Dax Shepard? So fucking good luck, BPD survivors.
2:10:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:10:33 Speaker 01 Wow, it's the first time you've ever said survivors.
2:10:37 Speaker 01 You don't say survivors.
2:10:38 Dax Shepard? I don't like that term.
2:10:39 Speaker 01 I know.
2:10:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:10:44 Speaker 01 This is like the most PC you've ever been.
2:10:47 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
2:10:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:10:50 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:10:50 Speaker 01 Male pattern baldness doesn't exclusively come from the mother's side. It can be influenced by genes from both parents. The AR gene is located on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. However, other genes and environmental factors also play a role. If your mother's father has male pattern baldness, you're more likely to have it too. If your father is bald, you're twice as likely to have it.
2:11:14 Speaker 01 Hormonal fluctuations, fluctuations, nutritional habits, stress level, and lifestyle choices can impact the onset and progression of baldness. Yeah, genetic factors from both parents significantly influence the likelihood.
2:11:25 Dax Shepard? I'm fighting for my life.
2:11:27 Speaker 01 You're doing fine.
2:11:28 Dax Shepard? I think I'm, I'm doing fine in the battle, but I'm fighting, I'm fighting with all I got.
2:11:31 Speaker 01 I see, I see.
2:11:32 Dax Shepard? It's morning and night, that fucking topical that I hate. Hate how it makes my hair feel.
2:11:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:11:38 Dax Shepard? I gotta hold my head back so it drips, but it's, I, it's, it's embarrassing to see me at night in the mirror dealing with, trying to keep my hair.
2:11:45 Speaker 01 Do you wanna do that thing that Ike did?
2:11:48 Dax Shepard? What did he do?
2:11:48 Speaker 01 The PRP?
2:11:49 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:11:51 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:11:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah. What I really want, more than anything, is for them to figure out how to clone hair. And I want to go in and get my hair cloned and have massive surgery. And get the thickest lion mane head of hair and have long braided hair.
2:12:09 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
2:12:10 Dax Shepard? Like a Viking.
2:12:11 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:12:11 Dax Shepard? And maybe I'll be in my Viking outfit for our guest and you'll be in your outfit. And we'll let the chips fall where they may.
2:12:21 Speaker 01 We'll both be.
2:12:22 Dax Shepard? Maybe I'll be wearing a kilt.
2:12:23 Speaker 01 We'll both be topless.
2:12:24 Dax Shepard? I'll be in a kilt, crossing and uncrossing my legs repeatedly.
2:12:28 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:12:29 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:12:29 Speaker 01 Oh, we're gonna be competing.
2:12:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, this is great. It is. So, uh, nineteen seventy.
2:12:39 Dax Shepard? We're doing the Riverdance. I know, this poor guest.
2:12:42 Speaker 01 Oh, my god. Um, okay. And then, oh, real quick. So she, she said that, um, there are, there are places that you can donate your eggs for free and keep some.
2:12:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:12:57 Speaker 01 Like, so that's cool. And there's one place called Co-Fertility that does this. I don't know if this is the one she was talking about. I can't endorse this. I don't know much about it, but it is one of the places.
2:13:07 Dax Shepard? It is something that came up in a Google search.
2:13:09 Speaker 01 Yes, if you'd like to look into it, that's a place. Um, all right, that's it for Mary Claire. Thank god she came in. That, she really rattled me.
2:13:19 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna use another word I don't like.
2:13:22 Speaker 01 Say it.
2:13:22 Dax Shepard? I'm on a roll. She's a rock star.
2:13:25 Speaker 01 You don't like that?
2:13:26 Dax Shepard? No.
2:13:26 Speaker 01 I feel like you say it.
2:13:27 Dax Shepard? Ah, no.
2:13:28 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:13:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, sorry. This is, the list is long. It's hard to keep track of all the things. Atelier, artisanal, rock star.
2:13:35 Speaker 01 Atelier, um, this past weekend.
2:13:38 Dax Shepard? I hate the word cuck.
2:13:39 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:13:40 Dax Shepard? It's a thing that, like, aggro dudes use to try to emasculate other men. They call them a cuck.
2:13:46 Speaker 01 Cuckold?
2:13:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:13:48 Speaker 01 Oh, weird.
2:13:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:13:49 Speaker 01 Last weekend, I was, um, doing a long walk. I walked on Sunset. I was doing this whole thing. And I, um, passed a new coffee shop and I went in and I tried it and I texted Rob and I asked if he had tried it yet. And then he went the next day and he reminded me there was a merch there that said atelier on it.
2:14:14 Speaker 01 Did you buy it?
2:14:15 Speaker 07 No, I almost did.
2:14:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:17 Speaker 07 To put in, to put in here.
2:14:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. I considered it too.
2:14:21 Dax Shepard? Should we have a t-shirt that says Armchair Atelier?
2:14:24 Speaker 01 I've been saying that.
2:14:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, just, I was just repeating what you said. Just doubling down on what a great idea that you had.
2:14:30 Speaker 01 I've been saying that. Okay.
2:14:34 Dax Shepard? All right, love you.
Previous Andrew Schulz Next Armchair Anonymous: Children's Party Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated