Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Patrick Radden Keefe (investigative journalist) About this episode Patrick Radden Keefe (London Falling, Empire of Pain, Say Nothing) is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, and staff writer for The New Yorker. Patrick joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in a deeply intellectual household, developing a childhood obsession with writing for The New Yorker, and navigating a winding academic path through Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale Law. Patrick and Dax talk about the years-long reporting process behind London Falling, how a chance encounter led him to the story of Zac Brettler, and the challenges of investigating a mysterious death tied to hidden identities and extreme wealth in modern London. Patrick explains how proximity to oligarch culture and social media can warp ambition, why digression can be the soul of storytelling, and how to hold empathy for people navigating unknowable circumstances.
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Transcript 26,728 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? Today, we have an award-winning investigative journalist. He writes for The New Yorker on staff. Patrick Raddenkeef is a writer for The New Yorker. He's also written a couple of, well, several incredible books. Rogues, Empire of Pain, Say Nothing, The Snakehead. And he has a new book out now that we're talking about. London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City in a Family's Search for Truth. I fell in love with Patrick.
0:31 Speaker 01 He's fantastic, and he's such a good writer. I loved Empire of Pain.
0:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he's also stunning to look at.
0:38 Speaker 01 He is a handsome man.
0:40 Dax Shepard? And very charismatic. And then he has stumbled upon this absolutely mind-blowing story that took place in London. So please enjoy Patrick Raddenkeef. We get support from Quince.
0:53 Speaker 01 I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.
1:02 Dax Shepard? I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a T-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.
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1:51 Speaker 01 It's a uniform.
1:52 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
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2:10 Dax Shepard? Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that too.
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4:16 Dax Shepard? Dex.
4:16 Speaker 02 So good to meet you.
4:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, great to meet you.
4:18 Speaker 02 Patrick.
4:18 Dax Shepard? Okay, good.
4:20 Speaker 02 What's gonna say?
4:20 Dax Shepard? Do you want to... Pat or Patrick?
4:21 Speaker 02 No, I go by... It's funny, so to this day, if I'm walking down the street and somebody says, "Pat Keefe",
4:26 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
4:27 Speaker 02 I know it's someone I went to high school with.
4:29 Dax Shepard? Okay, sure, sure, sure. You're in Massachusetts, Dorchester?
4:32 Speaker 02 I'm from Dorchester.
4:33 Dax Shepard? What's the vibe in Dorchester? We certainly know what it is in Boston.
4:37 Speaker 02 Dorchester's its own kind of very specific place. It's the biggest neighborhood in the city of Boston.
4:41 Dax Shepard? Oh, it's in Boston proper?
4:42 Speaker 02 It's in Boston proper.
4:43 Dax Shepard? Okay.
4:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a city kid. I grew up a block from the end of the Red Line, basically. Dorchester's very ethnically diverse, very socio-economically diverse. It's just a weird place. It's a weird, wonderful place. I loved growing up there. At times, it has had a kind of a bit of a reputation in Boston.
4:59 Dax Shepard? What's the bad rap it gets?
5:01 Speaker 02 Violent crime.
5:02 Dax Shepard? Oh, great. I love that.
5:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, that kind of thing. But the thing is, I grew up in a great big Victorian house. They could afford that house in Dorchester in 1979.
5:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Do you remember what the price of that house was?
5:12 Speaker 02 It was less than $40,000.
5:13 Dax Shepard? Isn't that mind-blowing?
5:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:15 Dax Shepard? Our neighbor's just a thousand feet behind us is our first house. And next to us, I can see the tax record. And their house was $48,000. So they're paying tax on a $48,000 house. That's probably worth $4 million. It's so wonderful.
5:28 Speaker 02 Incredible.
5:29 Dax Shepard? What did your mom and dad do?
5:30 Speaker 02 My dad sort of had two careers. He got into urban planning. And so he was in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is where I was born.
5:37 Dax Shepard? I know this, and he worked for Dukakis?
5:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
5:39 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay.
5:40 Speaker 02 And so he was like Director of City Planning for Lowell, then Director of City Planning for Boston, then Director of State Planning for Massachusetts. And then he ended up kind of working for Mike Dukakis. And then Dukakis lost in 88, and my dad went into the private sector and did real estate stuff.
5:52 Dax Shepard? Was he a part of any of the planning of The Big Dig?
5:55 Speaker 02 He was.
5:55 Dax Shepard? He was?
5:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:57 Dax Shepard? Which was the biggest thing to hit Boston ever, right? The Big Dig?
6:00 Speaker 02 Well, and it was funny, because at the time, so I, in what was probably a nepotistic arrangement, I spent two summers in college working for The Big Dig when it was still in process. And everybody hated it. It was like the biggest construction project imaginable.
6:14 Dax Shepard? And everyone was irate about it, right?
6:15 Speaker 02 It was a nightmare. People hated it. There was an elevated highway that ran through the city of Boston and really divided the city in two. It was a eyesore. If you see old movies, you see it. And we used to drive on it when I would go back to Dorchester when I was a kid from the city. They basically took it down and built a tunnel underneath it. And it was massively expensive and all these kind of cost overruns, and it took forever. And everybody was incredibly angry about it. And the funny thing is, the closer you were to the alignment of it... So I worked in like community relations.
6:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful.
6:46 Speaker 02 Go to the North End and there'd be these irate old Italian grandmas who had an apartment that like abutted this construction site. And we would have to pay for soundproof windows and all that kind of stuff. But the funny thing is, of course, the day they cut the ribbon, they were the ones who benefited the most. Like suddenly you're looking out on this.
7:02 Dax Shepard? It's a greenway.
7:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's hilarious that they were the most opposed.
7:07 Speaker 02 It was really something. Exactly.
7:09 Dax Shepard? Maybe it was always planned and charted this way, but from my perspective, you have a very circuitous route to The New Yorker. You go to Columbia first.
7:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:20 Dax Shepard? And you do history.
7:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:21 Dax Shepard? Okay, a specific history?
7:23 Speaker 02 Modern European. I ended up writing a lot about World War I and World War II.
7:26 Dax Shepard? World War II is more fun, yeah.
7:28 Speaker 02 Than World War I?
7:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
7:29 Speaker 02 Nothing's more fun than World War I.
7:31 Speaker 01 Okay, I love that.
7:33 Speaker 02 Come on.
7:33 Speaker 01 Hot take.
7:35 Dax Shepard? Trench warfare.
7:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, I loved it. I loved it.
7:38 Dax Shepard? We missed mom. Mom was a philosophy professor?
7:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, which is actually in Dorchester, the neighborhood I grew up in. But with a kind of focus on, be interesting to you guys, focus on the philosophy of psychiatry. So looking at various psychiatric ailments and the way they map on to philosophical conceptions of the self. So multiple personality disorder and depression and more recently, she's been writing about anorexia. I mean, all kinds of different things.
8:02 Dax Shepard? She's still active.
8:03 Speaker 02 So she's retired from teaching, but she still writes and she has these kind of great, because my dad's retired too, and my mom will get these visiting gigs where some university in New York or in Perth in Australia, they went to, or Bari in Italy, where they'll basically say, come for six weeks. And my dad goes to.
8:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:19 Speaker 02 What a great life.
8:20 Dax Shepard? Dreamy.
8:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:21 Dax Shepard? Conversation at dinner must be very stimulating. You've got a couple of very bright parents. Do you have siblings?
8:27 Speaker 02 I do. I have a little brother who lives in Dorchester and is a farmer. He's an urban farmer.
8:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
8:32 Speaker 02 And in my neighborhood that I grew up in. And my sister lives in Zurich and is a writer and an art historian.
8:38 Dax Shepard? I just feel like if I could pick something I'd want my mom to be an expert in, it'd be philosophy, because it's just kind of an endless maze you can follow.
8:46 Speaker 02 I think so. I mean, everybody read, everybody talked. If we want to see a movie, we would argue about it afterwards. It was that. Kind of house. It wasn't a thing where everybody had to like do a book report. There wasn't any kind of performative like smarty pants stuff. It was more just kind of.
9:00 Speaker 01 Thinkers.
9:00 Dax Shepard? No, your parents are interested in the world.
9:02 Speaker 02 Totally. The thing that I take from her that is, you know, maybe a quality of a philosophy professor is that she's just the most skeptical person. Any idea, any argument, she always wants to kind of look at it and turn it around.
9:15 Speaker 01 Contrarian a little bit?
9:17 Speaker 02 Absolutely contrarian. I mean, and to this day, my parents, I won't mention the movies, but it's just hilarious. There will often be some best picture winning movie that my parents will walk out of after 20 minutes and say like, this was the most terrible movie, you know, as though everybody felt this way, you know, and in fact.
9:31 Dax Shepard? She likes to call bullshit on things.
9:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, completely.
9:33 Dax Shepard? Okay, so Columbia history and then you go to Cambridge?
9:37 Speaker 02 Yep.
9:37 Dax Shepard? And now it gets confusing for me. So at Cambridge, you do?
9:41 Speaker 02 International relations.
9:42 Dax Shepard? And then you also go to London?
9:43 Speaker 02 School of Economics.
9:44 Dax Shepard? And what do you study there?
9:45 Speaker 02 This kind of bullshit degree. It was a time when the London School of Economics was doing, from a business perspective, a really smart thing, which is that they realized that there were all these foreigners who would come and pay higher tuition fees for master's degrees than the English students. And so they would invent these new degrees, not by creating new classes or bringing in new professors, but just by taking requirements from other things and kind of putting them together into a bespoke thing that looked like you. Yeah. When I was at Cambridge, I desperately wanted to leave. Cambridge is very bucolic. It's very pretty. I found it stifling. I had never lived in a place that small and I wanted to get into London. I was going into London every weekend and I just felt like, get me out of here. I want to be in London. So I was on a two-year fellowship. I wasn't paying for it. It was all paid for.
10:25 Speaker 02 So I thought, okay, I'll go to the LSC and I was interested in electronic spying by the National Security Agency.
10:32 Dax Shepard? This is your NSA book?
10:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. And this kind of interest had started. And so I was looking in the LSC catalog and they had some, again, in retrospect, just ridiculous thing where it was like new media and information and spying and electronic stuff. And I was like, it's me.
10:47 Dax Shepard? Really quick, did Michael Lewis go there to the London School of Economics? Is that where he was at when he had that fearful, I don't know? He might have.
10:56 Speaker 02 No, because he went to Princeton and then he was a banker. He was a young banker in London.
11:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I thought he started as a master's degree there or something that then he
11:05 Speaker 02 Could be.
11:05 Dax Shepard? Went with a cousin to a dinner and then.
11:07 Speaker 02 Oh, no, maybe you're right.
11:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, got.
11:08 Speaker 02 That's right. There was some weird connection.
11:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, London School of Economics.
11:12 Dax Shepard? Wow. Thank God I wasn't going crazy. I just remember this felt very.
11:16 Speaker 02 Familiar.
11:17 Dax Shepard? Familiar, thank you.
11:18 Speaker 02 I should be so lucky.
11:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Have you hung with him?
11:21 Speaker 02 I have once.
11:22 Dax Shepard? He's a charming motherfucker, isn't he?
11:23 Speaker 02 He's totally great. So it's funny, I had done his podcast, but it was via Zoom and it wasn't a real hang. And then I was in London, I had to fly to Dublin because I had done this TV series and we were up for the Irish Academy Awards. And so I was flying, it was a short flight from London to Dublin, and I ended up seated next to Michael Lewis.
11:39 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God.
11:39 Speaker 02 Kid, I think, went to Trinity or something, or they were visiting Trinity. We talked the whole way. It was great.
11:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what a fun surprise. Great seatmate, yeah.
11:47 Speaker 02 It was great.
11:47 Dax Shepard? Okay, so none of this is leading towards law or was it always leading towards law?
11:53 Speaker 02 No, no, no. The thing you're missing here is my sort of secret and maybe not so secret desire, really from when I was in high school, but then especially when I was in college, was to write for The New Yorker.
12:03 Dax Shepard? Really?
12:03 Speaker 02 What I wanted to do.
12:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
12:04 Speaker 02 Started reading The New Yorker in high school. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I kind of messed around with fiction. I turned out not to be very good at fiction.
12:10 Dax Shepard? Who did you love as a writer at that time?
12:12 Speaker 02 It was like the mid 90s and I was writing short fiction. So I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver, people like that.
12:17 Dax Shepard? Oh, the greatest Raymond Carver.
12:18 Speaker 02 I mean, amazingly great, but also at the time, everybody.
12:21 Dax Shepard? It was the thing to be doing. Cliche, are we cliche?
12:24 Speaker 02 Maybe a little bit.
12:24 Dax Shepard? I don't think so.
12:25 Speaker 02 But not anymore. The thing is, if you wait long enough, it's not cliche anymore.
12:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, if you ask 100 people, maybe three people have read Raymond Carver. But I think if you're into literature and you're a guy at that time.
12:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:34 Dax Shepard? But he's a master.
12:35 Speaker 02 He's a total master. I guess what I mean is for me and for like 1998, Patrick, to say I love Raymond Carver would be a certain kind of guy talking about infinite jest today, right?
12:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, totally.
12:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. So ended up really wanting to write for The New Yorker. I started pitching them in college. My parents have always been fantastically supportive of anything I wanted to do, but there was never any version of this where they were saying, why don't you move to New York and we'll, we'll help pay for an apartment. It was very much, we love that you're doing this, but.
13:01 Dax Shepard? You're on your own.
13:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you want to be a writer, it's not a matter of sitting around in a cafe and saying, you're a writer, go out and be a writer. And that took a while. I loved being in school. I found it easy and stimulating and fun and way better than working. And so I just kind of stayed in school.
13:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, law comes.
13:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was in college, went to grad school for two years in England, which was free, so who wouldn't go?
13:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:24 Speaker 02 Met the woman who's now my wife there. We started dating. She was going to Yale Law. I was sort of like, I've been pitching The New Yorker now for years. They won't take my pitches. I don't have another plan.
13:36 Dax Shepard? You didn't have an agent, did you?
13:37 Speaker 02 No, not at that point.
13:38 Dax Shepard? So you're just like sending them things with the S A S E.
13:42 Speaker 02 Exactly.
13:42 Dax Shepard? Yes, I mailed a million of those out.
13:44 Speaker 02 It's so nice to talk to a contemporary, yeah.
13:46 Dax Shepard? Yes.
13:47 Speaker 02 So you did it too?
13:48 Dax Shepard? Well, I was trying to get short stories published. So I was submitting to all of these journals that would have never had me. You know, I was 20 and I thought I was Ray McCarver.
13:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, we were probably competing with each other at a certain point.
14:00 Dax Shepard? They might have came across our same short, same day.
14:03 Speaker 01 These guys again.
14:04 Dax Shepard? And by the way, rarely did they return them, in my experience. But occasionally they would.
14:09 Speaker 02 You get the little note?
14:09 Dax Shepard? You're just looking for any sentence that will encourage you.
14:12 Speaker 02 No, oh man, I'm so with you on this. First, it would be the little form thing, which is like, thank you, this does not meet our needs.
14:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
14:17 Speaker 02 And then occasionally, what I know now to be some like 22-year-old who is a month out of college, would write in tiny letters in the margins like, please keep pitching.
14:26 Dax Shepard? Something encouraged?
14:27 Speaker 02 Something encouraged, some tiny little thing.
14:28 Speaker 01 That's sweet.
14:29 Dax Shepard? That's all you need?
14:30 Speaker 02 That was like a huge down payment for me on my future.
14:33 Speaker 01 They make a difference.
14:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm so delighted we both had that stack.
14:36 Speaker 02 My first rejection letter for an article for The New Yorker, not a story, is framed in my home office. It's from 1998.
14:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
14:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a good reminder.
14:46 Speaker 02 It is. I mean, what my wife says is, you were a junior in college. What the fuck were you thinking? Did you think that they would?
14:52 Dax Shepard? But you have to think that? What are you gonna wait till you're 26 to start thinking that?
14:55 Speaker 02 Exactly.
14:56 Dax Shepard? Okay, but the law degree perplexes me. Why did we want that? Just to stay in school?
15:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, just to stay in school.
15:01 Speaker 01 She was already going.
15:02 Speaker 02 She was going.
15:03 Dax Shepard? You guys both went, right?
15:04 Speaker 02 We both went. But there's two things I would tell you, both of which are true, and one of which probably doesn't reflect particularly well on me.
15:11 Speaker 01 Those are my favorite.
15:12 Dax Shepard? That's the one I like the most.
15:13 Speaker 02 Okay, all right. So I'll give you the first one, which is that I wasn't totally confident that I was good enough or that I was gonna make it or the stars were gonna align for me. I wasn't completely confident that there was a life. As a writer and I wanted a backup. I knew I was a relatively smart guy who could kind of grind it out and work. And I was thinking about what would the alternative be if the dream version of your life doesn't happen, which I mean, the reality is for most people, you don't get that. Whatever they're doing is probably not the thing that when they were 17, 18, 19 years old and they closed their eyes that they dreamed that they were going to do. And so it wasn't that I had a shortage of self-confidence. I was a confident guy, but I also knew that just statistically.
15:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you are realistic.
15:47 Speaker 02 I should think about having a backup plan. The other thing that's kind of more interesting and reflects maybe poorly on me is that I did really well in college. I didn't get into college when I applied the first time. I didn't get into Columbia, which is where I really wanted to go. And I took a year off and I worked. And when I got to Columbia, I had gotten some of my sort of teenage, no, I'm not in high school anymore, energy out. And I also had a big chip on my shoulder because I knew that they had turned me down the first time. So I got to college and I worked really hard and I did really well. And there's a thing that happens to that kind of kid, which is that you start getting sort of channeled into certain activities where you're always chasing the next brass ring just because it's in front of you.
16:29 Speaker 02 And worse than that, you know, there's this idea, Erving Goffin had triangulated desire, which is there's nothing about that candle that's particularly appealing to me, but I feel really competitive with you and you want that candle and now that candle is looking great to me. In fact, I need that candle. There's a lot of that kind of thing. And so I worked really hard in college and did really well and then got a fellowship to go to kind of prestigious competitive fellowship to go to the UK and did that. And then there were a whole bunch of people where it's like, well, what's, what's the next smaller hoop that you have to jump through? And everybody's applying to law school and what's the best of the law schools and hardest to get into? It's a law school. And so I just kind of did that in a robotic way. And then I showed up in law school and thought, what have I done? You know, why am I here?
17:09 Dax Shepard? I would argue you're regulating your self-esteem with some accomplishment in place of not getting the thing you want to be doing. You're just kind of booing yourself on this other thing.
17:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. One of the things that I think is actually great about doing the work that I do, not just writing, but actually reporting, because that's most of my job, is that I think if you're good at it, it gives you a kind of daily dose of humility because no matter how successful you've been or how old you are, how long you've been doing it, most of your job is getting rejected. So most of the day I'm calling people who don't call me back or hang up on me or don't want to talk. It was good for me to learn really early on that in some ways. If you want to succeed in this line of work, you need to learn how to metabolize rejection. You need to learn how to kind of just take it in and keep moving. My wife's a big tennis player and she talks about the idea of like the best players, they lose a point, they immediately just erase from their memory that point that they lost and they're kind of always pressing into the future.
18:04 Speaker 02 So I had all of that, but even so, you're absolutely right. At a certain point, you're like, I've been pitching The New Yorker for six years.
18:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you passed the bar in 05, right?
18:13 Speaker 02 I did.
18:13 Dax Shepard? But you do, you finally get published in The New Yorker in 06?
18:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. It's more dramatic than that.
18:18 Dax Shepard? Oh, great.
18:18 Speaker 02 I mean, so in fact, I passed the bar and I had an offer from a law firm to go and work at this law firm on Wall Street. It gets worse. I was out of money and they would give incoming associates no interest loans. And so I borrowed $10,000 from them and meanwhile, I'm pitching The New Yorker and pitching, pitching. I was supposed to go and work at the law firm and I kept pushing back the start date. And then in October 05, they accepted my first pitch.
18:43 Dax Shepard? Ah.
18:43 Speaker 02 It took me a while to pay back the $10,000, but I did pay it back. To jump ahead in the story, you know, I ended up getting that assignment at The New Yorker, but they didn't put me on staff. And so between 2010 and 2011, I went to the Pentagon. It's about a year at the Office of the Secretary of Defense on a kind of a fellowship thing. And there I was, pure anthropologist.
18:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I bet.
19:00 Speaker 02 I knew this is not my career. It's not what I want to do. I was just looking around.
19:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And what was the vibe?
19:06 Speaker 02 It's funny because I'm trying to remember if Veep had come out yet at that point. It may not have.
19:11 Speaker 01 I don't think so.
19:12 Speaker 02 Maybe not.
19:13 Dax Shepard? That's 16 years ago, so no.
19:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it was soon after.
19:18 Speaker 02 After that.
19:18 Speaker 01 It was soon after, I think.
19:19 Speaker 03 2012.
19:20 Speaker 02 Okay, so it was right after.
19:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
19:22 Speaker 02 I got to the Pentagon expecting it to look roughly like seven days in May. And I got in there and it was the office. I was so shocked by the level of pettiness. I don't even mean it in a demeaning way, but it's people with jobs and they're trying to make their mortgage work out and they're thinking about their kids. Because the Pentagon is so sort of overstuffed with people and there's all this money sloshing around, but then you have all these people who are basically doing redundant stuff. Everybody's kind of got their little rice bowl and they're protecting it. I sort of thought that the whole thing would be this big august.
19:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, impressive.
19:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. And in fact, it was just... More middle managers than you've ever seen in your life.
20:00 Dax Shepard? Do you know Mike Judge's Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, all of it?
20:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:04 Dax Shepard? He was a physicist before he was a cartoonist.
20:06 Speaker 02 Oh, I didn't know that.
20:07 Dax Shepard? Yes, and his take on everything, which is what Office Space came out of, is he's like, it doesn't really matter what echelon you enter. In that workplace, someone's birthday was forgotten and that's all that's going on. It like, doesn't really matter.
20:20 Speaker 02 It's so true.
20:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's like that humanity just seeps into anything, which is kind of awesome, too.
20:27 Speaker 02 I mean, it is, and it's funny because I made a lot of friends during that year. But as a citizen, it was not the most encouraging thing.
20:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yes, that's a little terrifying. Okay, so 2012, you become full time at The New Yorker. I guess my question before we get to say anything is so often we have these fantasies and these dreams. I had one, even when we were talking to Mike, sure, he got into that secret society at Harvard, the Lampoon's. You know, it's very hard for these things to live up to what our expectations are. And what was the experience like getting the dream you had since 16 years old?
21:03 Speaker 02 I mean, it's funny, it was sort of the opposite of Pentagon. It turned out to be so much better than I had even imagined.
21:07 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful.
21:08 Speaker 02 Those six years when I was freelancing were hard because I felt like I was doing really good work. I feel like I'm a pretty decent judge of my own work. I look back at my first book, Chatter, and I think that is not a very good book. You know, there's an opportunity to reissue it and do translation rights and all that stuff. And I haven't just because it's fine, it's an artifact, it's a part of my life, but it's not something that feels of a piece with what I've done since. So I feel as though I can tell in retrospect when the work is good or the work is not good. The New Yorker at the time, I thought it was good. In retrospect, I think it is good.
21:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
21:37 Speaker 02 I think you can stand those pieces up during those years against any of the pieces they published. But for one reason or another, they felt like I was not seasoned enough. By the time they put me on staff, I had two kids. I was a grown up.
21:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, was your wife, she's a smarty pants, was she?
21:51 Speaker 02 She was doing all kinds of different things. We moved to DC. The reason I did that Pentagon thing was we had moved to DC in 09 because she went and got a job at the Treasury Department. She's like a proper lawyer.
22:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, she does financial crime, international.
22:03 Speaker 02 I mean, she doesn't do the financial crime.
22:04 Dax Shepard? Right. She doesn't commit financial crime. She should think about it. Maybe one day.
22:08 Speaker 02 Exactly. I mean, honestly, she would have the expertise for sure if any international criminal organizations are hiring.
22:14 Dax Shepard? Not to bore you, but we did interview this guy who wrote this incredible book and it was an expose on Fort Bragg.
22:19 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, I know that.
22:19 Dax Shepard? Oh great, so the Delta Force running drugs. Well, one of the most prolific and successful was the guy in South Carolina who had been the state trooper who had busted the most amount of people on 95 and then he wrote a drunk driving ticket to a guy and he got fired over it and then he became this fucking super successful drug smuggler.
22:38 Speaker 02 You gotta know the rules to know how to break them.
22:40 Dax Shepard? So tasty.
22:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. She always had gainful employ. I wanted a full-time job and for me, it's the best job in the world. Some of the people that are my colleagues and my friends now are people who years before I knew them, I would read their articles and take them apart the way you would try and figure out a magic trick and to get to know those people. And now my new book, when it was in drafting, there was five or six of my colleagues I sent it to.
23:04 Dax Shepard? And they're the best.
23:05 Speaker 02 And they're incredible and they read it and give you feedback. Not everybody has the same fixations I do, but for somebody like me.
23:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
23:13 Speaker 02 This is just all I could ever ask.
23:15 Dax Shepard? Okay, so in 18, you write Say Nothing, which is about a group of young folks joining the IRA. During the troubles, I didn't even know this term, the troubles, until interviewing Amanda Peet recently. And she said, yes, we lived in England during the troubles.
23:28 Speaker 02 During the troubles. I listened to that interview.
23:30 Dax Shepard? Okay, so it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was made into an FX show. The thing I'm most jealous of, it won a Peabody.
23:36 Speaker 01 Oh, we want one bad.
23:38 Dax Shepard? I want a Peabody so bad.
23:40 Speaker 02 You know, I'm in the Peabody fold now, so I'll speak to someone. That's the way it works.
23:44 Dax Shepard? Just one of the mixers is going, you know what, I'm shot.
23:48 Speaker 02 Guys, your ticker's off here. What's going on?
23:50 Speaker 01 Well, I just sent you something. Did you get it on Instagram? I don't know if they just got announced or something, or maybe it was misinformation, but it was like the new Peabody people and like Kimball.
24:02 Dax Shepard? Is a part of it?
24:02 Speaker 01 Is nominated, I guess. Is it nominated or has won? I don't know.
24:06 Speaker 02 I don't know what just happened.
24:07 Speaker 01 Something happened.
24:08 Speaker 02 The nominations definitely come before you win.
24:10 Speaker 01 Okay, so I think that and heated rivalry.
24:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm not even sure how one wins one. I think that's why I want one so bad. I don't really understand what the criteria is.
24:19 Speaker 02 I don't either, honestly. We had a great night.
24:21 Dax Shepard? Is it a nice statue?
24:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, you get this little kind of bronze looking guy.
24:25 Dax Shepard? Is it directly under the rejection article?
24:27 Speaker 02 They can see each other.
24:29 Dax Shepard? Okay, now, this is where I become aware of you. In 2020, I presume during COVID.
24:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:35 Dax Shepard? You do Winds of Change. It was an eight-part podcast. Did you know about it?
24:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, really good.
24:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and it starts exploring this rumor that the CIA had actually written the song, "The Winds of Change" by The Scorpions. How on earth do you get on to that as a story to tell?
24:50 Speaker 02 I have this friend, Michael, who ended up being kind of my opposite number in the podcast. He's unlike anyone I've ever known. He's one of my closest friends. He just seems to sort of spin a little bit faster than everyone else. He's got a million ideas. He knows everyone. He's had a whole bunch of different careers. He would tell you, and he's not completely wrong, that a bunch of my best ideas are ideas that he's given. He started a kind of a private intelligence company and then sold that. And he worked for Madeleine Albright for many years. And he knows a lot of spooky people. And he had this kind of weird thing where he became sort of a totally informal thing, where you would have these spies who had had cover identities and fake jobs. It's a real dilemma.
25:31 Speaker 02 Like, if you work at an oil company for years, but in fact you work for the CIA with the understanding of the CEO of the oil company, that you have this kind of cover job. And then you need to leave the CIA and you want to get another job. But you're not able to tell people. You can't put on your resume, "Oh, actually, I didn't work at an oil company. I mean, I sort of did, but secretly I was working for the CIA." Somebody like Michael, who can kind of see both sides, becomes helpful in helping you find a situation after the fact.
25:58 Dax Shepard? To suit your skills.
25:59 Speaker 02 Yes.
25:59 Dax Shepard? Okay, right.
26:00 Speaker 02 And so he basically called me years and years ago and said, "You know that song, Wind of Change? For those who don't know, it's a power ballad by the West German hair metal band, The Scorpions. Came out just after the Berlin Wall fell and became kind of the soundtrack to the collapse of the Soviet Union." You think you don't know it, but you would recognize it as...
26:17 Speaker 01 It's a person that everyone knows of.
26:20 Speaker 02 Michael called me and he said, "I just talked to this guy from the agency who said that that song wasn't written by the Scorpions." This slightly ridiculous German metal band. It was secretly written by the CIA. So crazy. Yeah. And I spent years and years and years trying to get to the bottom of it with Michael.
26:38 Dax Shepard? Really quick, on prima facie, did you think that was possible at all?
26:41 Speaker 02 Well, when he first told me, I said, "No, it's completely bananas."
26:44 Dax Shepard? Like, I don't doubt that the CIA would want to do that, but what I doubt is that anyone there could write a huge hit song. That seems impossible.
26:52 Speaker 02 Well, yes. When you sort of squint your eyes and you think about like the Hollywood version, the fantasy version, you want there to be some frustrated musician who, you know, actually always wanted to be in a metal band, but like me, they were worried about getting the rent. Yeah, exactly. And so they end up going and working at the agency. I don't think it was that. I mean, often what happens is, it's a little like the Argo situation, where what they do is they find people who are outside who really do have skills, and then they enlist them. I will say, when he first told me, I said, "No way, that's crazy." And then I started looking into it, and when you look at the history of the CIA, they were doing all kinds of stuff in culture. The really crazy thing is that actually because the CIA in the 50s, 60s, 70s was all these guys who went to Yale and were named Prescott, what they were doing was promoting abstract expressionism and jazz.
27:35 Speaker 02 I mean, it was this sort of pretty high-minded stuff.
27:38 Dax Shepard? Some of them had done acid, certainly.
27:39 Speaker 02 There you go.
27:40 Dax Shepard? I also would imagine, too, it's an incredible hub for you to tell all kinds of crazy other CIA stories.
27:46 Speaker 02 This is very often the case for me. I'm always thinking about sort of digression, and I think indulgent digression is bad, but I love to come right up to the line.
27:57 Dax Shepard? Where you start going, "Wait, hold, what's this book about?", and then you're back.
28:00 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I will say, there's always some people who feel like, "My stuff is too digressive." They're like, "Oh, could I just get the executive summary here?" All the stuff that you're kind of hanging on the line, that's the fun of it.
28:11 Dax Shepard? Okay, so that's great, and people should listen to that. Winds of Change, it's wonderful. And then, of course, Empire of Pain in 21. And that brings us to London Falling, which I love. Again, I love the digression. For me, the story of Zack is great, and it's intriguing, and I must get the answers, but... What I'm learning about London, what I'm learning about the Thames, what I'm learning about the influx of all the money that's happened, this is the meat for me. So I know it starts as a New Yorker article. And how does it come across your desk? Why do you get interested in it?
28:42 Speaker 02 It's one of these funny things where when I go looking for ideas, I almost never find them. But I do try to be out in the world and talk to people and stay curious. I have a pretty firm conviction, more so now than ever, that you're not going to find the good stories on the internet. So in this case, I was living in London. After Say Nothing came out, we turned it into this limited series. And I was a producer on the series. I was very involved and it's a nine month shoot. And for much of that, I was kind of flying back and forth between New York, where I live, and primarily the UK, where we were shooting. But during the summer, when my kids got out of school, my wife and I just moved to London. And the production got us an apartment. And so we were living in London that summer. And I was on set one day and I met a guy. It was a fascinating conversation, this guy Andrew. He was visiting the set for the day. He was a guest of the director.
29:26 Speaker 02 I could have just played Wordle on my phone, but I do have this tendency to wanna.
29:32 Dax Shepard? See what's going on with this guy?
29:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, my poor children, anytime we get in the back of an Uber, I have to know the whole life story of the Uber driver.
29:39 Dax Shepard? Our children would have a lot to bond over.
29:41 Speaker 02 Their shared humiliation. So I start chatting with this guy. He's Jewish. He started talking about how the Jewish community in London is different from the Jewish community in New York. This was kind of a funny moment because I'm not Jewish, but I grew up in Boston. I went to prep school in Massachusetts. I went to Columbia. I've lived in New York on and off since the 90s. There was just a part of me that was sort of like, my dude, I've been to more bar mitzvahs than you have. You know, like, don't patronize me. And so I sort of name dropped and I said, oh, well, you know, there's this woman in London who's a rabbi, who's an old friend of my family. Her name is Julia Neuburger. And that was the moment that the whole conversation took a different direction. Because he knows Julia Neuburger. And Julia Neuburger was the rabbi to Zach Bretler, this kid. He suddenly made this connection and he said, I think I might have a story for you.
30:25 Dax Shepard? Oh, he was that upfront?
30:27 Speaker 02 Absolutely. He knew at that point that I wrote for The New Yorker and he said, I might have a story for you. And I should say, like, most of the time when people say to me, I might have a story for you.
30:35 Speaker 01 Yikes.
30:36 Dax Shepard? It's like someone saying they got a movie idea.
30:38 Speaker 02 And it's hard because it's just like, you have a story. It's just not for me. You have to kind of listen to them and hear them out. His whole pitch was, he said, there's a family here in London. I'm very close with them. They had a terrible tragedy in 2019. This is 2023, when we're having this conversation. They had a 19-year-old son, Zach. He died in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of this luxury building overlooking the Thames River. And after he died, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened. And they made this discovery, which is that unbeknownst to them, he had been leading a secret life. And as a teenager, he'd been moving around London pretending that he was the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch. And he basically had said that much, and I knew, I'm in.
31:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I need to know a lot more is probably the next thought.
31:24 Speaker 01 Whoa.
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34:37 Dax Shepard? That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.
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35:54 Dax Shepard? Yes, so Zach is the son of Matthew and Rochelle.
35:59 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:59 Dax Shepard? Who they themselves are both the children of Holocaust survivors. And her father was a rabbi, right?
36:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, her father Hugo Grand.
36:08 Dax Shepard? And they have two boys. They have Joe and Zach. They're a couple of years apart.
36:13 Speaker 02 Exactly.
36:14 Dax Shepard? And initially, it's pretty honky-dory till 13, right? They're mildly competitive. I think one of the pivotal things just is that at first, of course, the older brother is much better at tennis, but Zach really focuses on tennis and he ultimately beats his brother and then his brother just stops playing tennis. So they had a little bit of competitiveness naturally. And then Joe starts attending, what's the name of the school?
36:37 Speaker 02 University College School, UCS.
36:39 Dax Shepard? And Matthew's also in finance, so they're doing well. They're upper middle class. And he gets into this school and then when it comes time for Zach to apply for the school, he does not get in. And then he tries again to get in and does not get in. And to me, this is where, who knows where this life story is without this moment.
36:54 Speaker 01 The gorillas, we just, we just had a gorilla expert on.
36:58 Speaker 02 Oh, did you?
36:58 Speaker 01 It's like the exact same story.
37:00 Dax Shepard? I brought this up.
37:00 Speaker 02 How so?
37:01 Dax Shepard? There's a group in Rwanda and there's a male that's about to make a run at the silverback, the alpha. And in doing so, he's exerting his strength. So he starts bullying this younger one. Pretty bad, opens up his head, you know, it's gruesome. And then he does overthrow the dominant male. He becomes that. And then the bullied one kind of gets excommunicated. And he just kind of wanders the periphery for a while. And then a new female comes and he sees that she's been accepted. And he's got no place and then he murders the baby. And then we learn from her census doc, this one has killed now four infants. He got deranged from the rejection and the emasculation in a sense.
37:44 Speaker 01 Humans are so similar in so many ways.
37:46 Dax Shepard? How it can warp you.
37:47 Speaker 02 I think that's right. I mean, it's interesting. This is a whole other tangent. It's an interesting thing that I've noticed where there are people who, I was just listening to some conversation about this on a podcast. But there are certain people over the last 10 or 15 years whose politics have changed really radically. And you can often trace the change back to some kind of in-group, out-group rejection where they get canceled or they get marginalized in some way, or the group that they thought they were a part of kind of cast them out. And that it completely reorients them politically.
38:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you know, the sovereign citizens, they've killed police officers. They won't carry a government ID. They sue municipalities. They're a pretty big group of people. And what they discovered was that without exception, all of the members at some point had really stable trades jobs. Or manufacturing jobs and those went away in their town. And so, yeah, they've been rejected by a system. So the system must be broken or flawed if it would reject me. And that makes sense. I'm empathetic to it.
38:47 Speaker 02 I think that's right. I mean, I think with Zach, there was something slightly different going on. It would be familiar to anyone with, do you have siblings?
38:52 Dax Shepard? Yes, older brother.
38:53 Speaker 02 Do you?
38:53 Speaker 01 Little brother, yeah.
38:54 Speaker 02 Okay, so I think there's this thing, and the tennis story kind of speaks to it. I had this with my siblings, I see it with my own kids, where there's a kind of sense that in a sort of almost unspoken way, often siblings will kind of pick a lane. If one of them occupies the lane and there's a thing that they're better at or they're going to excel at, it's sort of natural at a certain point for the other one to feel like, okay, well, you're laying claim to that. I'm going to have to find another way. There's going to be another version of life for me.
39:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't think that's the pivotal thing. I just think it's a moment of embarrassment for Zach and failure.
39:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:26 Dax Shepard? And he is a bright kid, but maybe not academically. He ends up going to, is it the Mill?
39:32 Speaker 02 Mill Hill.
39:32 Dax Shepard? Explain Mill Hill as a school.
39:34 Speaker 02 So Mill Hill, in some respects, it looks like university college school in the sense that it's a fancy private school. It's expensive. It's a beautiful campus. It's on the outskirts of London, but it's not as hard to get into. And, you know, the way it was explained to me is in the environment that Zach Brettler grew up in, which is a kind of highly educated bourgeois, fairly sort of elite London milieu. If you say, I go to Mill Hill, or if you say my kid goes to Mill Hill, everybody knows without anybody having to say anything, oh, so he clearly got rejected from this school and this school and this school. And that's how you end up at Mill Hill.
40:08 Dax Shepard? But you also still have money, so he's at Mill Hill.
40:10 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And I think part of what's so intriguing about this story is that Zach, this kid who ends up pretending that he's the son of a Russian oligarch and basically entering into the underworld in London, probably could have done anything. Like, he had parents who loved him. He did have a competitive relationship with his brother, but ultimately, like, Joe was a good big brother who also loved him. They stayed close. He was part of a kind of larger family network and friends and all the rest of it. And he had, I think, an incredible series of natural gifts that maybe didn't express themselves in being able to get into a certain school at age 13. But he could have gone a long way with them. He ends up at Mill Hill, and he's surrounded by these children of oligarchs. And so Mill Hill, like a lot of schools in London, I should say, realized at a certain
40:54 Speaker 02 point that there was a kind of a demographic, which was the offspring of super wealthy foreigners who had kind of made a second home in London. And so Zach, at 13, finds himself surrounded by these kids. He's pretty impressed.
41:10 Dax Shepard? And this is a great moment for the history of London post Margaret Thatcher deregulating the banks. So talk about the waves in London, because this is kind of now a part of what London is.
41:21 Speaker 02 I mean, it's funny, because I tried in the book, because of that thing we're talking about with digression, all this stuff is in the book, but I should say for people who haven't read it, it's done with a pretty light touch. There's no point in the book where I give you 30 pages of history on one.
41:33 Dax Shepard? No, this is three pages.
41:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. However, the way I thought of it is almost in a Movie, the way you occasionally will get the kind of sped up seeing the Brooklyn Bridge get built.
41:39 Dax Shepard? A montage.
41:40 Speaker 02 So there's this to me really fascinating thing, which is that if you were to go to London in 1950, say, it looks basically like it did a century before. It's a big industrial city. There's factories lining the Thames, kind of smoke and coal and laborers working, making things. It's a manufacturing town. It's also a huge port city because the Thames is one of the most important ports in the world. And the first thing that really changes, interestingly, it happens in North Carolina. There's a trucking executive in North Carolina who in the mid 1950s invents the modern stackable shipping container of a sort that we've all seen.
42:13 Dax Shepard? Some people might be in a home made of shipping containers right now.
42:15 Speaker 02 Exactly. There you go. Yeah. So he invents these and it completely revolutionizes global trade because previously a city like London would have had these huge warehouses for the storage of goods that are going on to ships and coming off of ships. And if you go to London today, those beautiful buildings are still there, these big old warehouses. But with the new system, essentially you can have a container on top of a train that arrives at the port and it goes fluidly onto the ship. And the ship goes to another port and it comes off and it goes right onto the back of a truck and off it goes. And you don't need those warehouses anymore. Everything's standardized. And it means you can make bigger ships, which can hold more containers. And those ships are too big to navigate the Thames. So in the space of 20 years, this whole industry, basically everywhere kind of east of Tower Bridge,
42:58 Speaker 02 if you know London, had been a shipping town and suddenly it's not in 20 years. Every single dock closes.
43:04 Dax Shepard? So it has 30 plus years of kind of stagnation.
43:07 Speaker 02 Yes. I talk in the book about the movie The Long Good Friday, incredible crime thriller with Bob Hoskins from 1980. Highly encourage people to watch it, but that's filmed right at the point where the changes are starting to happen. So basically that's at the like the maximum blight point. They make this Bob Hoskins like crime movie with a young Pierce Brosnan, I think in his first role as an assassin. And the other thing that happens is all the factories close. And so London has to kind of reinvent itself in the eighties and it decides we're going to be a money town.
43:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint what the catalyst to Zach's kind of crazy story is, but the thing that to me feels most relevant is, I don't want to call it income inequality simply because his family was of means. In the book, The Broken Ladder talks about like these fights that happen between first class and coach. And what's funny is it's not a story of the haves and the have nots because the people in coach-
43:55 Speaker 02 The have and the have more.
43:57 Dax Shepard? So this is like a very extreme case of this. So he's entering with a little bit of shame of having not got into that and now he's seen absolutely fabulous wealth.
44:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
44:05 Dax Shepard? Kids with private planes and cars and all this stuff. And then simultaneously he's starting to consume media. I think some people will read this book and they'll want to point a finger at War Dogs and The Wolf of Wall Street, probably because of my industry. I'm not as inclined to go down that road.
44:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
44:21 Dax Shepard? All adolescents find these movies, but at any rate, I think that's really a profound experience to feel dead broke among all these people.
44:29 Speaker 02 Totally. And actually not that unique. This book started as an article in The New Yorker and after it came out, I heard from all these people, but also Zach's parents heard from all these people who were parents who said, obviously our kid's situation is different, but I am experiencing this with my own children in New York or LA or Miami or Dublin or, you know, wherever it is that they live, where there's not just a kind of concentration of extreme wealth, but also, I think particularly by English standards, like when Matthew and Michelle were growing up, there was a sense that there was nothing more unclassy than being super blinged out and showing your wealth.
45:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it was a new money thing. It was a bad look.
45:07 Speaker 02 Completely. Now it's all new money and there's no shame about it and in fact, kind of pride in it. And I hear you on the movies that Zach watched. Interestingly for me, there's a version of the story where you say, oh, look, you kind of blame the Hollywood movies because Zach was obsessed with Wolf of Wall Street and War Dogs, watched them again and again and didn't watch them as like cautionary tales. He really thought this is what I want to be.
45:29 Dax Shepard? In particular, he wanted to be Jonah Hill, who was like-
45:31 Speaker 02 Yes.
45:32 Dax Shepard? The grodiest of the pair.
45:33 Speaker 02 And he had a kind of a sense of you do anything that you can to just get yours.
45:37 Dax Shepard? I understand Zach's state of mind, which is like- This is bullshit. They have it and I don't. Why wouldn't I have it? Like, he's looking at people who aren't more deserving of it. And he's going, well, fuck, if I'm not gonna get given it, I'm gonna take it.
45:52 Speaker 02 His is an extreme case, but I think that is just in the water now. I think that is a part of our culture. I mean, it's interesting because we're roughly the same age. I was having a conversation with a guy I went to high school with the other day, and we're talking about how in the 90s, there was a notion that you didn't want to sell out.
46:06 Dax Shepard? The punk rock.
46:07 Speaker 02 Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. And occasionally, people like that could be obnoxious, but there was a sense of like, if it's corporate, it's bad. You want to preserve your integrity, even if it means living in poverty. Like, at least I've got my pride.
46:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:18 Speaker 02 And that is totally alien to young people today. There is no concept of that.
46:23 Dax Shepard? They have no romantic notion of that.
46:25 Speaker 02 At all. No.
46:26 Speaker 01 No, it's the opposite. It's like, who can I?
46:29 Dax Shepard? Get on the private jet.
46:30 Speaker 01 Sell myself to.
46:32 Speaker 02 Absolutely. Yeah. In fairness to people, I have teenage kids. I think it's hard for them to imagine what the future's gonna look like 10 years from now or 5 years from now economically, in terms of higher education. What does that look like? In terms of employment, AI, climate change, I mean, you name it. There's any number of ways in which it's kind of anybody's guess what your life is gonna look like.
46:49 Dax Shepard? This is got a very House of Cards feel right now.
46:51 Speaker 02 It does, but I think that as a consequence, it means that some people have this sort of slightly all or nothing at the house.
46:57 Dax Shepard? There is no long term, so let's go short term.
47:00 Speaker 02 Totally, and I think Zach had that.
47:01 Dax Shepard? He's also a teenage boy, and he doesn't have a girlfriend. That's the conspicuous thing about this book. It's like, what's going on with him romantically?
47:08 Speaker 01 Like, kind of manosphere style?
47:10 Speaker 02 A little bit. I mean, I think some of it with Zach was that he was a really extraordinary kid from a very early age. He was almost like a stand-up comic. He had a kind of zingy way of talking. He was extremely uninhibited and comfortable talking with adults, comfortable talking with anybody. He would sort of make jokes, he would tell stories. But from a really early age, he was also embroidering the truth. I think of it again as like a stand-up where you have your lived experience, but then you're always re-scrambling it and telling the story and trying to figure out the math of it, and you're trying it out on people and seeing what works.
47:38 Dax Shepard? And an incredible information retention.
47:40 Speaker 02 Unbelievable memory, which his dad has as well. Very helpful for me in working on the book, that his dad has this incredible memory. Zach had that too.
47:47 Dax Shepard? He's charming.
47:48 Speaker 02 Very charming. But I think to the point about girlfriends, he had this thing, which is that he could make friends really quickly because he was entertaining and he could sort of find points of commonality with people. But then he lied, and...
48:01 Speaker 02 There's a sort of weird thing in this story, which is that all the young people I talked to could see through him. The adults completely bought what he was selling, including gangsters and various people who should have known better. But young people would have a thing where he would get to know them and they'd be charmed and they'd be like, God, get a load of this guy. He's got so many great stories and what have you. And then they'd start to get a little uneasy. Just they'd feel like, I don't completely buy it all.
48:21 Dax Shepard? Well, at one point, a friend of his called him out and said, "You're a pathological liar." And he said, "I am. I had this brain trauma."
48:28 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Another lie. Oh, my God.
48:30 Dax Shepard? You're doing it again.
48:31 Speaker 01 That's like literally a joke.
48:32 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
48:35 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
48:36 Speaker 02 Incredible.
48:37 Speaker 01 Wow.
48:38 Dax Shepard? There is something, obviously, quite corrosive about the extreme wealth.
48:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:43 Speaker 01 That's why people hate billionaires. I mean, there's some truth.
48:46 Speaker 02 There's another thing, too. This book is not an op-ed. It's not an argument. It's a story about people. And so there will be different interpretations of it.
48:54 Dax Shepard? But you're gonna, as a reader, why could this happen to this kid? You're gonna feel that, obviously. It's so many things. And it's four percent this.
49:00 Speaker 02 That's exactly the point that I'm making. He was on Instagram from an early age. This is a kid who was born in 2000. Social media absolutely played a role. I don't want this book to sort of be part of the moral panic about social media. Like, I am morally panicked about social media, but I don't want this book to function in that way.
49:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
49:14 Speaker 02 It's what you're talking about, where it's billionaires, the kind of reverence for it. I think about my own younger son, who's now 13. When he was about six, he came home one day and he started talking about Elon Musk. And I was just like, how the fuck do you even know who that is?
49:26 Speaker 01 Exactly. Why do you know about this?
49:28 Speaker 02 In what universe should a six-year-old know the name? Something is wrong with our society. If he's part of your kind of Marvel universe.
49:33 Dax Shepard? I didn't learn Warren Buffett's name until I was like 25.
49:36 Speaker 02 Exactly, exactly, exactly. But I think that the thing about Instagram or social media in general, Zach wasn't delusional, but I do think that if you grow up on these apps and you're an adolescent, your ability to draw like a really fine dividing line between real life and fantasy life, it's a little blurry.
49:53 Speaker 01 Yes.
49:53 Dax Shepard? You also have tools now to help with a persona as all kids, and especially him with a fresh start at this Hill School. It's an opportunity. It's a reset.
50:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:02 Dax Shepard? Okay, so when does he start the child of an oligarch persona?
50:08 Speaker 02 It happens gradually. I mean, I interviewed a bunch of people he went to high school with. And I should say, his parents were... Aware that he lied and embroidered, but they had no idea that he had kind of gone full bore and invented this persona. He would tell kids he went to high school that his dad was an arms dealer. He told some of them that his mother was dead.
50:28 Dax Shepard? That's a common theme for him.
50:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, the arms dealer thing.
50:30 Dax Shepard? Well, and the mother.
50:31 Speaker 02 And the mother being dead.
50:32 Dax Shepard? Or the mother hating him and being in Dubai.
50:34 Speaker 02 But then he also tells the story about his father being dead. Part of it was Zach, what his parents told me is that from an early age, he was the kid who would claim a migraine. He was always faking injuries of one sort or another. I think what he wanted, pity.
50:45 Speaker 01 Kind of Munchausen-y a little bit.
50:47 Speaker 02 A little bit, but I think most people are compassionate or most people are good. And I think that there is a sort of sense in which if you're him, you realize if I'm the new kid at school and I don't know a soul and I'm 15 years old and I don't have money and I meet a girl and I tell her, oh, my mother recently died. That is a shortcut to a kind of intimacy that might take me forever otherwise. And he sort of intuits that. So he starts telling these lies. My dad drives two Range Rovers, little things. He would lie about where he lived. He would say, oh, my family bought a mansion.
51:14 Dax Shepard? I just gotta say. He told his buddy that his dad had two Range Rovers and then they had to go to tennis practice together. And Matthew, his dad was gonna drive in a Mazda. So he's like, listen, both Range Rovers are in the shop. Don't bring up the Mazda to my dad.
51:25 Speaker 02 He's not happy about it.
51:27 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. The gymnastics, but I guess you probably get addicted to that, I'm sure, also, the like high of figuring out.
51:34 Speaker 02 This is where the memory comes in, though, that he had an amazing memory and an amazing ability to kind of keep it all straight.
51:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he defied Lincoln's statement, no man's memory is so good that he can afford to be a liar. In this case, he was.
51:45 Speaker 02 Again and again. But I think I found patient zero. I think I found the first guy that he told the son of an oligarch story to. And the irony is that it's the last person you would want to try it on because it's a guy who actually worked for Chelsea Football Club, which at the time was owned by Roman Abramovich, a real Russian oligarch, kind of the biggest of them all.
52:05 Dax Shepard? What's that guy's name, Mark or Colin?
52:07 Speaker 02 Mark Foley.
52:07 Dax Shepard? How did he meet Mark Foley?
52:09 Speaker 02 So randomly. There was an art exhibit at the Chelsea Arts Club. It was an invitation-only thing. To this day, I don't know how Zach got in, but he got in there. And we've all been in this situation, but he's there on his own. And there's this guy, Mark Foley, who's also there on his own. He's been invited. And so you can imagine, everybody's kind of milling around, there's a bar, and you're sort of sitting there thinking, you know, am I just gonna bail? And you're looking at the art.
52:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, so much.
52:32 Speaker 02 And two of these guys are there on their own and they fall into conversation. He realizes who Foley is. And the funny thing is, in a way that Foley couldn't have appreciated, when Zach says, "Oh, what do you do?" And Foley says, "I work for Chelsea Football Club." For Zach, Roman Abramovich is his god. So he meets this guy who works for his idol.
52:51 Dax Shepard? He kind of idolizes Putin at this time, too.
52:53 Speaker 02 He does, yeah. He does. He's into Putin. There are family photos from this time where he's kind of doing this thing where he thrusts his chest out and he sticks his shoulders back and he kind of glowers into the camera in this very Putin-esque way.
53:04 Dax Shepard? Putin-esque, as if on horseback shirtless.
53:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And Zach, I think, just kind of takes a flyer and says, "I'm actually the son of an oligarch myself. I've come from a very wealthy Russian family here."
53:17 Dax Shepard? Big swing. You're talking to a guy who works for an oligarch. And he himself is Russian? Is Foley Russian?
53:22 Speaker 02 He's not. He's English. But Foley is exposed to the real thing. And Zach tries it out. And to this day, I think, there might have been a universe in which none of this would have happened if Foley didn't buy what Zach was selling in that conversation. But Foley, I interviewed him subsequently, and he said, "He seemed pretty convincing." He was sort of talking the talk. He was dressed in a very laid-back way, but he said that's exactly the way the kind of offspring of an oligarch, you know, he's like tracksuit, whatever. Yeah. And so Foley suggests that they get coffee and they chat. And then they do. And then Foley says, "Oh, you know, there are these guys I know who are looking for investors in this real estate project. Maybe I can introduce you to them."
53:57 Dax Shepard? Because he's also said, "I'm in charge of managing my father's money for investing purposes."
54:02 Speaker 02 I still think that if Foley had just sort of been like, "Ah, this kid is clearly full of shit," and walked away, I could see Zach retiring the story and feeling like, "Okay, well, this one doesn't work."
54:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there's so many Monday quarterbacking you can do. It's like, if he had a girlfriend, in my opinion, if he had a real girlfriend, if he didn't go to that school, then he doesn't meet Foley.
54:20 Speaker 02 But here's the thing, Zach, the parents, Matthew and Rochelle, who I got to know so well, working on this book, I spent hundreds of hours talking to these people. The awful thing for them is, especially Rochelle, has spent...
54:32 Speaker 02 Every day since 2019, thinking about what are the off-ramps that we missed? Did we drive past the exit? Where could we have gotten off along the way? And it's a kind of torture to think that way.
54:42 Dax Shepard? And I gotta say, as they're described in the book, I don't know that I've ever related more to parents. I feel like every choice they made was one I would make.
54:51 Speaker 02 I'm so glad you said that.
54:52 Dax Shepard? Oh, 100%. So he's becoming obsessed with money. And he's telling them, you guys need to buy a fancier car. Mom, you should buy these fancy dresses. You know, it's a little bit repugnant. And they know better than to shut him down entirely because they want to keep him connected in a way that it can still be a voice of reason. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what I would do. If you shame him out of this scenario, now he's excluded from you. It's just gonna get worse. Trying to just walk that line of there might be a better path for you. And also, hey, I love you and if this is what you want to do.
55:22 Speaker 02 It's so hard. And one of my worries with the book was that there's a certain kind of cynical read, self-flattering, self-comforting read that a person might do where they look at the story and they think, oh, well, this is just a story about bad parents who were checked out and didn't see what was going on. And I think it's self-comforting because it's like, that would never happen to me. Whereas my whole experience of dealing with this family has been, what would I do? I think I would be facing exactly the same dilemma.
55:46 Dax Shepard? I'll be honest, the one judgmental thing I had is I think this whole private school thing's a fucking joke. And I think the fact that he had to go to someone that was still prestigious, even though it was for dropouts, that to me is the one thing that I personally am like, what the fuck are we doing?
56:00 Speaker 01 But that's just very you, but-
56:01 Dax Shepard? I know, I got a whole war with all these LA private schools.
56:03 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah, depending on where you live. Here, here it is a huge part of education.
56:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I'm just like, hold on, timeout, it's a racket. Everyone I'm working with who's successful, they went to shitty fucking schools. And then you're just exposing them to this crazy competition with a bunch of rich kids. So that is my failing. I try not to be judgmental. That is one thing I'm a little bit-
56:21 Speaker 02 But I think anybody would concede that those environments are. It's funny because my kids go to public school. I went to a fancy private school of this sort.
56:27 Dax Shepard? And your parents weren't loaded?
56:29 Speaker 02 No, well, I'll put it to you this way. They were comfortable enough to send three kids to that private school, but not comfortable enough that all these years later, the nature of my parents' retirement is not what it would- Be had they not on some level they're still paying.
56:44 Dax Shepard? You didn't come back from spring break with a tan from skiing in Aspen and some of your classmates did.
56:48 Speaker 02 Absolutely, but I also lived in Dorchester. I mean, the thing for me was that I lived 10 minutes away from Milton Academy, the fancy private school I went. They were very, very different worlds. And so, you know, I may be attuned to these things. I send my kids to public school.
57:00 Dax Shepard? You also had a healthy mechanism of tall poppy in Boston that would have probably prevented the kids that were super rich from.
57:07 Speaker 02 Oh, that's interesting.
57:08 Dax Shepard? Like, there's also a cultural force there that probably helped dampen.
57:12 Speaker 02 The really rich kids that I went to high school with, it was flannels and jeans and listening to Nirvana. I mean, it was the 90s again. So it was the last thing that they would do.
57:18 Dax Shepard? They would get their ass kicked if they posted a picture of themselves on a private plane. They would get the shit kicked out of them.
57:22 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And it would have just seemed kind of gauche. I remember, I'm thinking, I don't want to be outing anybody here. I briefly dated a girl who was from New York when I was a senior, maybe in high school, possibly junior. Over the winter break, I went and visited her and her family on the Upper East Side. And this was a neighborhood where a lot of kids who I went to high school with, and it was actually a moment where you kind of rack focus. And I realized like, holy fuck, these people are all incredibly rich. But I hadn't actually caught on to that. In Massachusetts, in boarding school, you know, everybody's sort of seeing roughly the same level. And then you go and you actually see the apartments where these people live and the lives they live.
58:00 Dax Shepard? My favorite story of that kind is I'm talking to some kids of a friend of mine and it's two girls, they're sisters. I love them. One of them's dating a new guy, she's a man at school. She was visiting the family in New York. I'm like, what do they do? And she's kind of pussyfooting around it. And then the younger sister goes, they have this green painting in their apartment.
58:18 Speaker 02 There we go.
58:18 Dax Shepard? Tells me everything I need to know.
58:20 Speaker 02 Say no more. Yeah.
58:22 Speaker 01 But if you value education and you come from people who do, I totally understand why you would send your kids. If you had the opportunity to give them the best education in quotes, whatever that means.
58:34 Dax Shepard? But again, Mill Hill wasn't that.
58:36 Speaker 02 I think that the idea was also that he could go to Mill Hill for a period of time. And if you excel there, then maybe you transfer someplace else. The other thing is, to your point, this is a family where both Matthew and Rochelle, their mothers were English, but their fathers were immigrants, refugees, Holocaust survivors. Guys who had actually very different histories in terms of their kind of educational backgrounds. But there was a sense in both families that education really mattered.
58:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:00 Dax Shepard? I'm not judgmental of the parents.
59:02 Speaker 02 It's the environment. You can see how toxic it is.
59:04 Dax Shepard? I don't like the institutions.
59:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:06 Dax Shepard? They know they're living on the oligarch, and they know these kids aren't good students.
59:10 Speaker 02 When I tried to interview Zach's teachers, people who knew him well, including people who had written nice notes to the Breitlers after his death, nobody would talk to me, to a point where it felt to me like a decision had been made.
59:22 Dax Shepard? Institutionally, from above.
59:24 Speaker 02 Which is pretty gross.
59:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
59:25 Speaker 02 You know, you have a student and he dies. And the thing for me is, I'm not digging for dirt. I just want to talk to teachers who knew him. I want to kind of try and bring him back to life a little bit and sort of see who he was. When you say, "No, thanks. We have nothing to say," it's a little gross to me.
59:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Okay, so he's going down this path. He's getting more obsessed with it. And it's important to say that Rochelle and Matthew, although they are seeing this turn in him, they have no clue that he has this persona.
59:47 Speaker 02 No.
59:48 Dax Shepard? But some weird things are now happening. He seems to have money. He tells them, "I'm moving into Riverwalk," which is this insanely expensive high-rise on the Thames. They're wondering, is he dealing drugs? He has a weird phone. He shows his father this HSBC bank account, and the interface is the same as his father's, and he says he has £850,000.
1:00:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:11 Dax Shepard? So it's getting really quite confusing for them, and they're getting more scared. And again, they want to keep connected to him. And they're like, "Okay, this kid's not going to go to school. He's going to try to be an entrepreneur. Maybe it'll work for him."
1:00:25 Speaker 02 People do.
1:00:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I can imagine being in a situation, being like, "All right, if you want to prove to me that you're going to be a billionaire, go with God. I just want to talk to you."
1:00:32 Speaker 02 Totally. And also, you're 18. It seems that you have money. You could just leave if you wanted to. I don't want you to completely take off. Obviously, the bank statement with £850,000 is probably the most extreme example of what kind of parental intervention would you have? But I have to say, in fairness, to Matthew, I think part of him wanted to believe. He talked to Zach, "What are the different business deals you're doing? How is this? Are you paying taxes?" You know, kind of walked him through this whole thing, and Zach told these somewhat credible stories. But then there was also a part of him that thought, "Maybe he's lying, but if he's lying, the reason he's lying to me is that he wants to impress me and he wants me to feel like he's okay."
1:01:07 Dax Shepard? I was thinking of this dance. What would I tell my child? Like, "You want to hear I'm proud of you?" I'm proud of you because you are you, but they need you to be proud of them for this thing. They've convinced themselves it's such a
1:01:17 Speaker 02 And what they don't want is for you to confront them and say
1:01:20 Speaker 01 We know what you're doing.
1:01:21 Speaker 02 Bullshit.
1:01:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:01:22 Dax Shepard? You need, moreover, I don't even like this.
1:01:24 Speaker 02 Right.
1:01:24 Dax Shepard? It's not something actually I would be. How do you tell a kid that I wouldn't be proud?
1:01:29 Speaker 02 Well, that's the thing, and I think in Zach's case, and again, I don't think that this is actually all that unusual. There's a sense that he's got these false gods. And I think Matthew and Rochelle are pretty sophisticated people, and the thought occurred to them, maybe the reason that he loves Vladimir Putin or Roman Abramovich is that it's the opposite of who we are. This is what adolescence is, is he's trying to kind of break away from us. So what are you doing? Is it really going to be that fruitful in that situation to say, we hate those people, be more like us?
1:01:54 Speaker 01 Right.
1:01:55 Dax Shepard? Okay, so through Mark Foley, though, he meets these two characters. They're really important characters. Tell us about Akbar a little bit.
1:02:02 Speaker 02 Akbar Shamji. I'll tell you about him as he at first appears to Zach and to Zach's parents eventually. He's in his 40s. He's very well off. He's a very good looking guy. He's charismatic. He's got great kind of manners. He's got a cut glass accent. He went to Cambridge University. He comes from an extremely wealthy family. They're South Asian, I mean, they're ethnically Indian, but from Uganda. So you have this community that came over to build a railroad, basically, in East Africa.
1:02:30 Dax Shepard? Like 40,000 of them?
1:02:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, but long time ago. And then they stay. And what happens is that the Ugandan economy ends up dominated by essentially the ancestors of these people who'd come over to build a railroad.
1:02:43 Dax Shepard? To the tune of like 90% of the total economy.
1:02:45 Speaker 02 They control, yeah, by this tiny minority. And then Idi Amin comes in and in 1972 says, we're going to expel all the Asians from Uganda. So this family, the Shamjis, gets expelled. Akbar's father, Abdul Shamji, was one of the richest men in Uganda and arrives in London and has to kind of rebuild. Akbar grows up basically in great comfort, goes to Cambridge University and sort of goes from business to business to business. There's a whole episode, actually, in L.A., funnily enough. And when he meets Zach, he's this kind of middle aged guy. He lives in Mayfair, which is one of the fanciest neighborhoods in London, but he actually lives on Mount Street, which if you I know Mayfair is like the fanciest street in Mayfair. I told a friend of mine at one point that one of the guys I was writing about lived on Mount Street.
1:03:29 Speaker 02 He sort of said, "Nobody lives on Mount Street." You know, it's not a thing.
1:03:32 Dax Shepard? Wow.
1:03:32 Speaker 02 His wife is a designer who makes these kind of elegant gowns. And she's dressed with Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama and the royal family.
1:03:41 Dax Shepard? This is what Zach wants his mother to buy.
1:03:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's showing her the dresses. Zach meets him, and Akbar is the guy who's got the real estate development in Lisbon that he's looking for investment in. Now, it will later emerge that Zach wasn't the only one pretending that he was something he wasn't, that actually with Akbar, he's not the guy that he's pretending to be. And in fact, just before he met Zach, he had declared bankruptcy and he was getting chased by creditors.
1:04:05 Dax Shepard? But he's still driving a Benz.
1:04:07 Speaker 02 And he's a member of all these private clubs in London. There's a whole kind of world around Mayfair, which is private clubs, private casinos, supercars.
1:04:14 Dax Shepard? Everyone's talented, Mr. Ripley. Yeah, literally.
1:04:17 Speaker 02 Everyone. On the night that Zach dies, he's in that apartment, and there's two guys with him. Akbar is one of them, and we'll talk about the other. But it is this interesting thing where it turns out that all three of them are pretending to be something that they're not. It's like the Spider-Man meme.
1:04:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. So the other guy is Indian Dave.
1:04:32 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:04:32 Dax Shepard? What's his last name? Sharma? That's his full name?
1:04:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:34 Dax Shepard? Well, that's his kind of-
1:04:35 Speaker 02 Verinder Sharma.
1:04:36 Dax Shepard? Street name.
1:04:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:37 Dax Shepard? What does he think Dave is?
1:04:39 Speaker 02 What happens is that when Zach meets Akbar, he tells Akbar that he is the son of a Russian oligarch, that he has hundreds of millions of dollars to invest, and he's gonna invest in Akbar's project. They become fast friends. I think Akbar gives him a kind of access. What Zach needed was to get past the velvet rope. And they're going to fancy clubs and hanging out and spending a lot of time together. The catch is that Zach's never coming up with the money. He never actually wants to sort of sign a term sheet. Just at the point where Akbar might have been wondering, you know, is this kid for real, Zach says, "I've got terrible news. My father has died, and my mother, who lives in Dubai, has kind of disowned me, and I'm in a fight over my inheritance. I don't have access to the money." And he had claimed to live in the most expensive real estate development in London. This place, One Hyde Park.
1:05:24 Speaker 02 And actually, when Akbar would meet with him, Zach would always be waiting out in front of the building. Like, he never saw him come out.
1:05:29 Dax Shepard? Pick them up there, always.
1:05:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. They'd be like, "Oh, come meet me at my place." And he'd be standing outside. And so Zach claims essentially to be temporarily homeless. So he's this billionaire kid who's fighting with his mom, and his dad is dead, and he has no place to live. And Akbar says, "I have this friend who has this luxury apartment. His name is Verinder Sharma. And he's this kind of retired guy who lives in this big apartment overlooking the Thames." So he introduces him to Verinder. I don't know, to this day, how and when Zach learns the real identity of Verinder. The kind of face that Verinder put on for the world is, he's this sort of retired businessman in his 50s, just kind of hanging out. He works out a lot. He boxes. He lives in this nice apartment.
1:06:08 Dax Shepard? Drug user.
1:06:09 Speaker 02 Doing a ton of drugs.
1:06:10 Speaker 01 Unmarried, I assume.
1:06:11 Speaker 02 Unmarried.
1:06:12 Dax Shepard? But he has children.
1:06:13 Speaker 02 So he has two children. And the truth is, Verinder was a gangster, better known as Indian Dave, who had been around for a long time. He was an extortionist. He was like a leg breaker.
1:06:21 Speaker 01 Huh?
1:06:21 Speaker 02 He was a debt collector, heroin importer. He was involved in a pretty significant murder, implicated in other murders. He was the guy who famously would dangle you off of a building if you weren't paying money.
1:06:33 Speaker 01 Indian people are so...
1:06:35 Speaker 02 I mean, this guy, Indian Dave, is really quite a character.
1:06:38 Speaker 01 So embarrassing.
1:06:40 Dax Shepard? He gave it kind of an edge.
1:06:41 Speaker 01 No.
1:06:45 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We get support from Scottsdale, Arizona. Monica, with summer ending, or heading into fall, I've been researching a nice, quick getaway location, and I keep coming back to Scottsdale, Arizona.
1:07:02 Speaker 01 Ooh, Scottsdale's good. What's drawing you to it?
1:07:05 Dax Shepard? Well, first of all, I have this wonderful memory of going there as a kid, when I would go see my stepdad when he was working out there. The weather is perfect in fall. Warm, sunny, no humidity. And you can really do whatever you want with your time there. I want to do a sunrise hike through the Sonoran Desert, be surrounded by Saguaro, and then at the same afternoon, just completely melt into a spa treatment at one of their luxury resorts.
1:07:30 Speaker 01 Oh, that sounds amazing. Want to do that. Also, I was there visiting my brother once and I loved Old Town Scottsdale. It's so walkable. They have galleries and cute little restaurants and shops. The food scene alone is worth the trip.
1:07:44 Dax Shepard? What I keep reading is that it's luxurious, but not stuffy. There's no pressure to do it a certain way. You can explore public art, check out the architecture, go off-roading in the desert, or just sit and watch a sunset.
1:07:55 Speaker 01 It really is the perfect fall reset.
1:07:57 Dax Shepard? Learn more about all Scottsdale has to offer at unwindinscottsdale.com. We get support from ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. So I went down this rabbit hole the other day on real holiday jobs that exist and I couldn't stop. Somebody out there is hiring a ham glazer, a professional ham glazer. Another place is hiring a lead elf, implying a whole hierarchy of elves I had never even considered. Here's the thing, these jobs need real skills. People like that are hard to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is on ZipRecruiter.
1:08:39 Dax Shepard? And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/dax. Plus ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/dax. That's ziprecruiter.com/dax. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.
1:09:11 Dax Shepard? 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 and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.
1:09:37 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 majorary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. 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 self-funiluria 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 milligram,
1:10:23 Speaker 04 9 milligram, 14.5 milligram, and 17.2 milligram tablets. Learn more at foundo.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.
1:10:34 Dax Shepard? We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So, we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?
1:10:50 Speaker 01 Which is a fair question.
1:10:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts, and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So, anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.
1:11:18 Speaker 01 Sleep mode is genius.
1:11:19 Dax Shepard? Right? And here's the thing. For anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on, and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age-appropriate experiences for teens.
1:11:34 Speaker 01 I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.
1:11:38 Dax Shepard? Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.
1:11:53 Speaker 02 He and Zach become roommates, essentially. Zach's living in the same apartment, in another room, in that building overlooking the Thames. The three of these guys develop this kind of intense friendship.
1:12:03 Dax Shepard? And they're looking to do deals.
1:12:05 Speaker 02 They're looking to do deals.
1:12:05 Dax Shepard? Everyone's trying to get rich. And I'm sure even Indian Dave doesn't have nearly the money.
1:12:09 Speaker 02 It's funny, because I saw this when I was writing about the IRA as well, and I've written other stories about criminals. You know, the thing about that line of work is there's no pension. It seems like the party's gonna last forever when you're in your 20s and 30s. But when you're in your 50s and your daughter's just had a child, you're a little old to be a leg breaker.
1:12:25 Speaker 01 Right.
1:12:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and you're not profiting from accounts over years. You've put it, there's no residual income. It's like, you're either committing the crimes or you're not.
1:12:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
1:12:33 Dax Shepard? And they all blow the money.
1:12:34 Speaker 02 And they blow the money like crazy. It was even more so with Indian Dave in the sense that he sort of made a point of not owning property, in his name anyway, because that would expose, there were hardly any traces of him on the internet. Like, one of the big questions in this story is, and I asked, when these guys met Zach, because Akbar, he wouldn't meet with me or talk with me, but I emailed with him a lot. I said, "So you meet Zach, he says my name is Zach Ismailov, and the sound of Russian all right, did you Google him?"
1:12:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm like, no one's checking in.
1:13:00 Speaker 02 How did you not do any due diligence? And Akbar's response was, "Oh, you have to understand, like, the really powerful plugged-in people, they're not on the internet."
1:13:07 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:13:07 Speaker 02 And I'm sure you will have encountered this, but there's a certain kind of celebrity who has an AOL email account, you know? More like a Hotmail.
1:13:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:15 Dax Shepard? So, they're all now together. Now, I think the night of his death is relevant. And I think we should go to, so that MI6 is directly across the river from this Riverwalk apartment complex that is Indian Dave's, where he's staying. And they have an outward-facing camera. And you can see, on the balcony of this fifth-floor apartment, a man runs and jumps, on his own accord, into the Thames.
1:13:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's not pushed.
1:13:43 Dax Shepard? When this happens, it's coinciding with Rochelle and Matthew have kind of lost contact with them. There's an email late at night, like, "Where are you?" At 2:00 AM, he says, "We're all good, everything's fine." And now they're left to try to figure out, like, what happened in that apartment. The initial story that Indian Dave tells and responds is- He was at my apartment. He had just admitted to us that he was a heroin addict. I went to bed at 12:30. I woke up at 8:00 AM and he was gone. My assumption is he went out to get drugs. And he told this to me and my daughter Dominique, who's Indian Dave's daughter, and Akbar. That is their story. How do we start unfolding?
1:14:24 Speaker 02 Yeah. The first thing I should say, so you know, I write nonfiction. Everything has to be true. They're not novels. You can go to the end of my books. Nobody ever does, but there are these end notes. You can sort of check the work. But I am trying to make them read the way a novel would. I want it to be a story with characters and scenes. I want you to feel as though you can see things in your mind's eye. And so you're always trying to kind of reconstruct scenes. And that's hard because a lot of the time you're relying on people's memories and so forth.
1:14:48 Dax Shepard? For you to just figure out what pieces you're gonna reel out at what times has got to be the most complicated math of the book.
1:14:55 Speaker 02 Completely. I always think of it as like, I have the whole deck of cards and I'm not just gonna kind of throw them at you and I'm not gonna give them to you in order. I want to sort of hand them out to you in a way that both you'll be able to kind of digest it in a fluid way. You won't feel overwhelmed, but also that it'll be pleasurable. And it's funny, I sometimes get these questions about, you know, people don't read the way they used to. And I think certainly the stuff that I do in a long New Yorker article or a book, the pleasure of it is actually that it takes longer. I can kind of take you down the pathways before I get to the switchback. You sort of have to have a bigger canvas to do that kind of thing. So what I was gonna say is a lot of the time I'm relying on people's memories. In this case, Rochelle and Matthew, before they even know that Zach is dead, they start having these conversations with people.
1:15:38 Speaker 02 I didn't even know this at the very beginning, but I subsequently learned they record all the conversations on their iPhone. At a certain point Rochelle said, you know, we have the recordings. Do you want them? And if you're a journalist, it's just, you know, better.
1:15:51 Dax Shepard? I can't imagine how excited you were in that moment.
1:15:52 Speaker 02 Oh, and so after Zach has gone missing, she connects with Akbar, who she'd never met before. She knew that they were friends, but they'd never met. And he says, I want to meet you guys at this hotel on Piccadilly. They meet there and Akbar then calls Indian Dave on his phone and puts it on speaker. And I have the audio of this whole long conversation that they have.
1:16:13 Dax Shepard? Right, because if they were to just tell you what was said, what you need to hear is like, what was their tone? How confident were they?
1:16:20 Speaker 02 It's more than that because this is what's so fascinating. You know, now, certainly in recent decades, it used to be the case, here's the lawyer in me coming out. This is like the one good use for law school. If you're on a jury and it's a murder trial or it's a, I don't know what, an assault or something, and there's an eyewitness, there was a sense that nothing is better than eyewitness testimony. You get an eyewitness, they go on the stand and they say, I saw it and here's what it was. We now know that actually eyewitness testimony is unbelievably unreliable.
1:16:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's almost useless.
1:16:45 Speaker 02 To some degree, the more dramatic the thing that has been witnessed, the less reliable you are. And even in the moment, you know, like five minutes later, you're already kind of rewriting your memories. This fascinating thing happened with Rochelle and Matthew where, remember, they don't know much about their son's friends. Zach was very secretive about this. They knew this guy, Verinder Sharma, they thought he was like a rubber tycoon. They thought he worked for Pirelli Rubber and he had a lot of money and he let Zach stay his place. Akbar seemed like this nice guy who had a whole bunch of different business interests and was kind of mentoring Zach. And then they go and they meet with Akbar and they talk to Verinder on the phone. And what they told me when I asked them about that conversation was I said, what did you think? And they said, oh, we thought they were really shifty and they seemed unreliable and we thought that they were lying to us. But I subsequently realized that was because their memory of it was colored by
1:17:29 Dax Shepard? What they know now.
1:17:29 Speaker 02 What they had subsequently learned. Right. Then I got the recording and it's the most heartbreaking thing because what Rochelle and Matthew, who are desperate, they don't know their son is dead, and Akbar lies to them and says, Zach just must have gone off to score drugs. We all have to find him, we're going to get him and bring him back safely to you. I now know, and if you read the book, you'll see why Akbar knew in that moment that Zach was dead. And Indian Dave gets on, they don't know his name is Indian Dave, they think he's this rubber tycoon. And what they keep saying is, we're so grateful to you guys, thank you. Like you've been such incredible mentors to our son and you're going to help us find him. And it's so poignant to listen to it because when you know the whole thing, you know that these guys are lying. But it's a crazy scenario.
1:18:09 Dax Shepard? Well, you're so desperate and anyone that presents themselves as an ally that would help you find your child. You're gonna be so grateful for.
1:18:17 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:18:18 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:18:18 Speaker 02 But there's another thing, too. You get this wild thing where Rochelle and Matthew have no idea about Zach having pretended that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. Until they meet these guys who say, oh, we didn't know that his name was Zach Breitler at all. We thought his mom lived in Dubai and his dad was dead.
1:18:31 Speaker 01 I know.
1:18:31 Dax Shepard? So they are learning a lot about.
1:18:33 Speaker 02 All at once.
1:18:34 Dax Shepard? I mean, you've got the panic of where is he? And you have the panic of who is he?
1:18:38 Speaker 01 Right.
1:18:39 Dax Shepard? There's so much happening.
1:18:40 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. This is horrible.
1:18:42 Speaker 02 It's funny. I think a lot of people in America still think of Scotland Yard as this great place where they watch police procedurals on BritBox or something. And it's about how Scotland Yard really royally fucks up the case. And then the Breitlers essentially have to become detectives themselves and kind of do the investigation.
1:18:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, suffice to say, you gotta read the book. But Indian Dave was not asleep at 12:30.
1:19:00 Speaker 02 No.
1:19:01 Speaker 01 There's more to the story.
1:19:01 Dax Shepard? Akbar did not leave for the night. There's a lot.
1:19:04 Speaker 01 This is a show. You're gonna make a show?
1:19:06 Dax Shepard? It's already been out since 24.
1:19:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:19:09 Dax Shepard? It's riveting.
1:19:11 Speaker 01 It's so sad. It's real. I wish it could be just fiction, you know?
1:19:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I will say, part of the reason when I finished the article that I did a book is that I was delving into their lives. And I realized that there were these backstories. Akbar's family, Indian Dave's kind of criminal history, but then also Zach's family. And when I first learned about these two grandfathers who had survived the Holocaust, with my writer brain, what I'm thinking is, my whole story is about reinvention. Zach is this kid who reinvents himself. And he's doing it in London, this city that has reinvented itself. And then you go back and he has these two grandfathers who, virtually their whole families are killed in the Holocaust. They arrive, both of them, solo, as middle teens in London, in the 40s. And they have to decide, who am I gonna be?
1:19:58 Speaker 02 It's tabula rasa. I have to kind of invent myself now. And when I first encountered that, as a writer, what I thought was, this is perfect. It's a kind of literary echo of Zach's experience. And in my book about reinvention, that's the role that these guys will play. And one of my closest friends, when I sent him the book as soon as I finished the manuscript, he read it and he said, you know, it's so interesting. The book starts as kind of a thriller and a mystery, but then halfway through I realized, no, this is actually a book about parenting and it's about grief.
1:20:27 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:20:28 Speaker 02 I had this amazing dinner with the Breitlers and this kind of clued me into how to end the book. I'm not giving anything away here. Where we were talking at one point and I just said to them, if I were in your situation, I think I wouldn't have gotten out of bed since 2019. I don't know how I would do it, but you still have a kind of active social and professional life. They travel, they go to concerts, they love live music. They're great parents to Joe, who they're incredibly close with, the surviving son. And they both said, oh, you know, it's because of our fathers. There was a thing that Rochelle's sister Gabby said to me at one point. She said, when I looked into my father's eyes, I never saw barbed wire. I only saw a loving father.
1:21:03 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:21:04 Speaker 02 They had these fathers who'd lost more than we can really conceive of losing, lost everything and then somehow kind of forged ahead in the future. And you're living with the loss. You're not erasing it, you're not denying it, but you can live joyously. You can hold both of those things in you. What kind of knocked me out is I'd been thinking of those grandfathers purely in that sense of reinvention. And what I hadn't realized is that the Breitlers are going to be okay. And part of the reason they're going to be okay, actually, is that they had that lesson, that example.
1:21:31 Dax Shepard? I have had more than one Jewish friend tell me this, that when they've been struggling with something that feels disrespectful to their grandparents, who just made it out and got here to give me this life.
1:21:46 Speaker 02 Totally.
1:21:46 Dax Shepard? And I'm now gonna waste it. I don't think that's a unique experience for folks that are the progeny of survivors of the Holocaust. So yes, it makes sense to me that they could go. It kind of dishonors them for what they went through to give us this opportunity in this life. And we're gonna now quit living because we had our first challenge.
1:22:04 Speaker 02 That's the thing. I mean, they both said, you know, they're not particularly religious, but they both kind of invoked, you know, the biblical choose life. And I will say, they've read the book. It's funny to bring it back to Michael Lewis. On that flight, he said, unprompted by me, he didn't even know that I was thinking about this, but I had this big question, which is when do I show the Breitlers the book?
1:22:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:20 Speaker 02 Because I've never shown a piece of work to the people it's about until it was published. But I felt like I Needed to show it to them before it was published, but also I needed to show it to them after it was done. The cement had to be completely dry at that point. And Michael Lewis on the flight said, you know, there have only been two or three times in my career when I've showed a piece of writing that people was about before it was published, and I've regretted it every time. And I was like, oh, God, what am I gonna do? So I showed it to them without getting into the whole thing. There are family secrets in the book. There are things that they probably would have, if they had editorial control.
1:22:50 Dax Shepard? Zach choked his mother at one point during all this. I imagine that's a very hard thing to have known because you love your child so much and you might go, yeah, go ahead and tell all of it, but you don't need to tell that part.
1:23:01 Speaker 02 My point is, obviously, I feel enormous compassion for these people, and I became very close to them as I was writing. But nevertheless, when I sit down to write the book, I'm not writing it for them. I have to have that stuff in. You know, we launched the book last week in New York, and they came to the launch. And Joe came as well.
1:23:14 Dax Shepard? They seem like really incredible people.
1:23:16 Speaker 02 They are. I think they are.
1:23:18 Dax Shepard? And then some part of me just is willing to chalk it up to, I don't know that it was any of those external forces. That might have been the path this brain was on. I don't know that blame needs to go to the school or to the parents or to anybody. I think also sometimes this stuff just happens.
1:23:33 Speaker 02 Somebody asked me the other day, you know, did I get any parenting lessons from this or something? And I pushed back a little and said, if anything, it just teaches me a kind of humility where I think that obviously you want to do everything you can to help your child and support your child. But I also think there's this fantasy that we have that your child is a piece of clay that you can just mold.
1:23:52 Dax Shepard? Couldn't agree more.
1:23:53 Speaker 02 There is a limit to what you're able to do. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
1:23:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:23:58 Speaker 02 And I think we're all kind of fumbling our way through as parents, trying to figure out this solution. The idea that, I mean, somebody had sort of said, it was just all a little too pat, right? It's like, what parenting lessons do you take from this?
1:24:07 Speaker 01 There's so many factors.
1:24:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Telling them this or that, I reject.
1:24:11 Speaker 02 Well, and it can backfire.
1:24:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:24:14 Speaker 02 One of my dear friends back home, he's a few years older than me, and he's got four kids and a wonderful family life. And I think I was expressing some frustration that the didactic lessons that I give to my kids, they just kind of roll their eyes.
1:24:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:24:25 Speaker 02 It was in a spirit of kind of, I'm thinking, look, how did you pull it off? His kids are older and it's all worked out, and they have a really close family. We're in a restaurant, and he said, all the lessons you teach your kids aren't gonna add up to a hill of beans. But Watching the way you deal with a waiter in a restaurant. It's gonna be things like those little moments of observation will shape who they are more so than any words that come out of your mouth in a kind of directed, do this, don't do that.
1:24:46 Dax Shepard? Because if you're saying behave this way and then I'm witnessing you not behave that way, guess what? You're also a hypocrite. You've lost all credibility.
1:24:54 Speaker 02 You've depreciated everything else that you might say.
1:24:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm like, okay, great. So what I know is like, don't listen to a thing this guy says, because that's not at all what he's doing.
1:25:02 Speaker 01 But that's such a good example of the restaurant, because it's not like, what did they accomplish? Those aren't the observations. It's the little ways of being that you just are sponge to when you're a kid.
1:25:12 Speaker 02 I just think there's a decency that has gotten lost in recent years. I don't mean to sound like an old fuddy duddy saying it was better when I was young, but I think, I think most people would agree. I think COVID was part of this. I think everybody interacting on screens is part of it. But I just feel as though there's a kind of fundamental decency in terms of the way you treat other people that has been devalued to some degree.
1:25:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree.
1:25:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, my anecdotal experience with that is we spent the whole summer in Nashville, where we built a house and it's a small town. And I noticed right away, oh, I can't drive like I drive in LA, because I'm gonna see these people at the Tasty Freeze.
1:25:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:25:47 Dax Shepard? I'm not anonymous. I just started really computing all the different behaviors I have in LA that I could not have in this small town. I was seeing the value of that and the danger of anonymity. So the internet is that squared.
1:26:00 Speaker 02 Completely.
1:26:01 Dax Shepard? And then what percentage of my time am I spending in this totally anonymous way where no one's gonna look me in the eyes and go, wait, you just said that to another human being? And so, yeah, normally I would be like, yeah, we're just getting old and we're blah, blah, blah. But no, when you're spending a good chunk of your time in a world where you're completely anonymous, I think that's problematic.
1:26:18 Speaker 02 Well, here's my question. Here's what I wonder, and you guys can tell me how optimistic I should be. In my moments of optimism, what I tell myself is that we as humans are pretty bad at when a new thing comes along, thinking in a very deliberate way about the role that it should fill in our lives. We tend to allow technological change to just kind of wash over us. We kind of drink it all down without actually asking any sensible questions about it. But that over time, you start to recalibrate and think a little more carefully. My really optimistic case is, you know, whether you date it to the internet, so sort of late 90s, basically, or you date it to the advent of smartphones, so sort of 2010s. These new things come along, they completely rewrite.
1:27:05 Speaker 02 Really, almost every aspect of how we deal with each other. But that there may come a kind of reset where people say, kind of, all right, well, that was a, you know, I mean, it's a little bit, honestly, like, there's probably a drugs and alcohol sobriety kind of thing, where it's kind of like, okay, I did that, and I really went sort of whole hog there for a while. But on reflection, it fucked up my life, and I had to rewrite my relationship with this stuff.
1:27:31 Speaker 01 I think a lot of people right now are having that conversation. They're saying, the internet's bad. Like, I mean, you're just hearing a lot of people say that. The internet is scary. It's a scary place. Whether you're changing your actions based on it, I think more people right now are starting to be like, uh-oh.
1:27:48 Speaker 02 I guess the thing I wonder is, I feel as though everybody's having that conversation, but then not actually changing their behavior. I mean, I'm the most guilty of all, right? But I'm like, God, this is terrible. Where's my phone?
1:27:56 Speaker 01 But first it comes in understanding, so I think maybe hopefully down the road.
1:27:59 Speaker 02 The first step.
1:28:00 Dax Shepard? My optimism comes from this pattern that's never broken, which is young people watch old people and do not want to do what they do. Minimally, you've got a whole group of young people that are watching the dumb, embarrassing older people live on the internet. It'll be not cool in some sense. That's the nature of things. And then to your moral panic thing, because I push back on, like, Jonathan Haidt and a lot of these people. These are also anomalies. Zack is an anomaly. That's not a normal story. It's a spectacular story, why it's worthy of a book. And back to the Manosphere doc, it's a terrifying doc.
1:28:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:36 Dax Shepard? That is a tiny percent. There are not boys walking around calling women bitches and all that. I don't think that's an epidemic or a pandemic. I think this is a small group of people that you could make a doc about.
1:28:47 Speaker 02 The one thing I would say on that, and I admit I haven't watched the doc, though I did have a whole conversation, I feel like an idiot, because I did Louis Theroux's podcast and talked to him for like two hours about Zack, not having watched his Manosphere doc. And I realized I should have done my homework. But what I would say, as a father of two teenage boys, is that I agree with you. I think that the Manosphere looks max or incel extreme, particularly the guys who like have publicists and are in documentaries and so forth. They're way out there. I do think that downstream of that, it changes the culture. It changes the way that people talk and relate to each other. I think it's changed.
1:29:23 Dax Shepard? I fear, but I'm around Lily's sixteen year old boyfriends. They're lovely boys. When I'm meeting sixteen year old boys, I'm not seeing the dudes in this doc. So I'm just constantly trying to remind myself, like, have I met some dudes recently that were doing pushups and talking about bitches? I haven't, and I meet a lot of kids. Yes, I can find enough to make a doc about, but I'm not as panicked. If I started seeing it in real life, but I don't see it in real life, and maybe I'm naive.
1:29:49 Speaker 02 This goes back to the question I raised, is that I have very similar feelings. What it means for me is when I step away from the computer and I step away from my phone and I interact just with regular people. It's like ten cities, ten nights. I'm seeing the whole country right now.
1:30:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:30:02 Speaker 02 And it is amazing the way you get out there and you talk to people. And most people fundamentally, even people who I, in some cases, have really vehement political disagreements with, fundamentally are pretty decent.
1:30:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:17 Dax Shepard? That's the danger, I think, is that we're letting ourselves believe that the internet world is the real world.
1:30:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:30:23 Dax Shepard? And it's actually downgrading our assessment of everyone. And I don't think that's true or fair.
1:30:28 Speaker 02 I guess here I'll dabble in the moral panic stuff, but these technologies are so addictive. And I'm speaking purely for myself here. I feel the twitch. And what's so insane, right, is it's like, something could have come in in the last twenty minutes. Nobody has a life less full of emergencies than me. And I'm like, there's actually nothing very significant or dire that I need to be checking my phone every twenty minutes for. So I've got it, but I just hope that we are able to overcome. I think we're in that phase now where we all know this is bad for us, but it's still really hard to.
1:30:58 Speaker 01 Yep. It's chemical at this point, so it's gonna take some real effort.
1:31:02 Speaker 02 For me, it is this physiological thing where I feel myself just kind of reaching.
1:31:05 Dax Shepard? I had to get a new screen put on my phone. But also, if you would have asked me prior to dropping my phone off how much I'm on my phone or how addicted, I'd be like, you know, I got it, but I think I'm a low grade. And they were changing my screen. I had two hours to kill at the mall while they changed my screen. I'm in the store, I'm like, oh, I see something I think my wife would like. I go for it to take a picture to send to her. Even if it's not like me checking things, I was like, holy fuck, hon. I probably grabbed for my phone like twenty times.
1:31:27 Speaker 02 Well, in part because it's now like the Swiss Army knife of life. I use it to pay for things. I use it to take pictures. I use it to listen to music. Music, et cetera, et cetera.
1:31:34 Dax Shepard? I was a little troubled by how much muscle memory was grabbing for an empty pocket. Well, I love the book and I know you're a little nervous about the digressions, but I don't think you should be. One of my favorite books is The Devil in the White City. Like, what a book. I get a fucking serial killer. I get the whole history of the world fairs. I get the architectural history of Chicago. Let's go.
1:31:53 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah, what you did with the Purdue family was so great. You get to learn so much. That's making it feel more fiction wise. Like, you're learning about the characters.
1:32:02 Speaker 02 I mean, that's my hope. I think done right, certainly what I'm trying to do is give you all those little asides in a way where it never feels as though you're kind of stuck in quicksand. It's more that I've just dropped a little something in your pocket and you didn't even notice you got it. Those are the stories. Those are the books I love to read.
1:32:16 Dax Shepard? I think we're all also pretty all interested in London as a place.
1:32:19 Speaker 02 It's fast.
1:32:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it is. It is. It's a great city.
1:32:23 Speaker 02 I'm going there in a few weeks. We'll see how it goes.
1:32:25 Dax Shepard? Well, Patrick, London Falling, A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth is terrific. I hope everyone checks it out. It's been a delight to meet you. You're very much that Louis Charme.
1:32:37 Speaker 01 I know, so.
1:32:37 Dax Shepard? He was a model. He modeled.
1:32:39 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:32:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he's got that.
1:32:41 Speaker 02 Catalog model.
1:32:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:42 Speaker 01 Catalog. That's great.
1:32:44 Dax Shepard? It was a prestigious brand. What was it? Come on.
1:32:45 Speaker 02 J. Crew.
1:32:45 Dax Shepard? J. Crew. Ding, ding, ding. You gotta be handsome being fucking with J. Crew.
1:32:51 Speaker 02 Come on, come on.
1:32:52 Dax Shepard? It's a delight to meet you and I do hope you'll come back with your other books.
1:32:55 Speaker 02 I will. This was so fun. Thanks for having me, guys.
1:32:57 Dax Shepard? Absolutely.
1:33:01 Dax Shepard? Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact that it's Miss Monica.
1:33:08 Speaker 01 We gotta discuss something.
1:33:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:33:10 Speaker 01 So.
1:33:11 Dax Shepard? We just did Armchair Anonymous.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 We just did Armchair Anonymous and there was a guest.
1:33:18 Dax Shepard? A man.
1:33:19 Speaker 01 Who was a man.
1:33:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:33:20 Speaker 01 Who popped on and he was so attractive.
1:33:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it was shocking.
1:33:27 Speaker 01 It was shocking.
1:33:28 Dax Shepard? Like Paul Newman level attractive.
1:33:30 Speaker 01 From the second I saw him, and this plays out in real time, I knew he was in Georgia.
1:33:37 Dax Shepard? You did. Within four words, you said, are you in Georgia?
1:33:40 Speaker 01 Well, I said, where are you? Are you in the South?
1:33:44 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:33:45 Speaker 01 But I knew it was Georgia.
1:33:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but you were trying to play it a little safe.
1:33:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:50 Dax Shepard? I was like, go for it, you know?
1:33:51 Speaker 01 I know, you're right. Because he was wearing the, a shirt that I feel like all my friends in, in the South wear.
1:33:57 Dax Shepard? It's interesting how there are regional uniforms.
1:34:01 Speaker 01 Yes, absolutely.
1:34:02 Dax Shepard? That's why I had to get out of Michigan. I was gonna hit a certain age where I was gonna have to start wearing golf shirts.
1:34:06 Speaker 01 No, you were.
1:34:07 Dax Shepard? And I was like, I gotta get out of here. I can't wear golf shirts.
1:34:10 Speaker 01 That's where you drew the line there?
1:34:11 Dax Shepard? I could see it on the wall.
1:34:12 Speaker 01 Look, you might have to bring him back now that you're in Nashville. You might reevaluate this.
1:34:17 Dax Shepard? No, I think they think it's charming. I, or at least I tell myself that they think it's charming that I dress like a scumbag.
1:34:22 Speaker 01 Oh, all right.
1:34:23 Dax Shepard? And then I have tattoos, but I'm friendly.
1:34:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think they find that charming. That I'm a heathen, I'm godless, but I'm still friendly and, and offer my services.
1:34:32 Speaker 01 The celebrity helps.
1:34:33 Dax Shepard? It probably doesn't hurt.
1:34:36 Speaker 01 Okay, back to Will.
1:34:37 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:34:37 Speaker 01 So, he was very, very, very hot.
1:34:41 Dax Shepard? Startling.
1:34:42 Speaker 01 He also, what we noticed, and this isn't why, I, I didn't notice this at first, but then he had UGA paraphernalia in the background and I, and then it was like, oh my god, he went to Georgia.
1:34:54 Dax Shepard? Dream husband.
1:34:55 Speaker 01 God. It then came out that...
1:34:58 Dax Shepard? What years you both graduated?
1:34:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:35:01 Dax Shepard? And there was an 11-year gap. 12, 12-year gap?
1:35:04 Speaker 01 I graduated in 2009, he graduated in 2021.
1:35:07 Dax Shepard? 12-year gap. Yeah. You, you, you were taken aback by that.
1:35:13 Speaker 01 Really.
1:35:14 Dax Shepard? Rattled.
1:35:14 Speaker 01 Rattled, yeah. Um, and a lot happened in my brain.
1:35:18 Dax Shepard? He's so young or I'm so old or a combo?
1:35:21 Speaker 01 Exactly. Okay, so normally when this happens, I think, oh my god, they're so, he's so young.
1:35:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:35:28 Speaker 01 And this time, I was like, I'm so embarrassed. Like, I'm so embarrassed by my age.
1:35:37 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
1:35:38 Speaker 01 I'm so embarrassed that like, I think he's cute and I'm like, an old lady.
1:35:44 Dax Shepard? No, you...
1:35:45 Speaker 01 And I was like, I'm a cougar.
1:35:47 Dax Shepard? There's, no, there would be something really wrong with you if you didn't find Will attractive.
1:35:51 Speaker 01 But I had like, PQs.
1:35:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, of course you did. He was, he was very horny and...
1:35:55 Speaker 01 To be fair, he's married.
1:35:56 Dax Shepard? And you were being very forward up to that point. You were like, well, it's a shame I didn't meet you. Before you got married.
1:36:04 Speaker 01 I think because.
1:36:05 Dax Shepard? You were basically saying, I wanna fuck. It was the most aggressive I've ever seen you with a collar and I loved it.
1:36:10 Speaker 01 I felt myself in that whole conversation, like being a cougar, like being like a old lady with a cigarette who's like hitting on young.
1:36:22 Dax Shepard? Show me your abs.
1:36:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:36:24 Dax Shepard? What kinda abs do you got?
1:36:25 Speaker 01 I felt like her.
1:36:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, good.
1:36:27 Speaker 01 No, I don't wanna be her.
1:36:29 Dax Shepard? I know, this, this is, well, this is what I've been relegated to permanently. If I'm talking to any woman under forty, I'm like, watch your Ps and Qs, you're gonna seem like a gross old lecherous man.
1:36:44 Speaker 01 I know.
1:36:44 Dax Shepard? I'm glad you had that experience.
1:36:46 Speaker 01 I am not glad. I feel very, I feel weird right now. Like, I feel, I feel old, I feel um, cougar-y as we said. I mean, he's so hot and then the whole time he's talking, yeah, spoiler, yeah. And that's a hot thing for me to be hearing and and he's talking about my old school and he's got great hair.
1:37:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:37:15 Speaker 01 And I was like.
1:37:16 Dax Shepard? You were certain he's tall too, which is funny.
1:37:18 Speaker 01 I know he's tall.
1:37:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're seated.
1:37:21 Speaker 01 And like, I just feel very conflicted about what, what happened. Oh, because also my rule generally is that I would never date anyone younger than my brother. My brother's thirty.
1:37:32 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:37:33 Speaker 01 He's younger than my brother.
1:37:34 Dax Shepard? Twenty seven.
1:37:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I was also like, hmm, like, should I change my rule?
1:37:40 Dax Shepard? Absolutely. If a will comes across your radar.
1:37:44 Speaker 01 One other thing.
1:37:45 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:46 Speaker 01 Was happening during this.
1:37:47 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:37:47 Speaker 01 He was also triggering some old insecurities.
1:37:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:37:54 Speaker 01 Yes, because he will.
1:37:59 Speaker 01 From U G A is Will from U G A. Like, there are, there were so many Wills around when I went to school.
1:38:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, handsome, southern gentleman.
1:38:08 Speaker 01 Handsome.
1:38:09 Dax Shepard? White.
1:38:10 Speaker 01 White as a.
1:38:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he was very white.
1:38:11 Speaker 01 Oh, white bread.
1:38:13 Dax Shepard? White as the driven snow.
1:38:14 Speaker 01 Gorgeous hair. He spoke about his mom. His mom's a southern belle.
1:38:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:19 Speaker 01 Um, this is the type of person I could never have.
1:38:23 Dax Shepard? Right. You told yourself you could never have.
1:38:25 Speaker 01 And I was like, I felt a little bit back there.
1:38:28 Dax Shepard? Little insecure.
1:38:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. I was like, oh, my God, I'm so ugly, like, in front of Will. Like, I shouldn't.
1:38:34 Dax Shepard? Is it a fun feeling, though?
1:38:35 Speaker 01 No.
1:38:35 Dax Shepard? It's not like you enjoy the reminiscent feeling of youth? Like, no part of it is like.
1:38:43 Speaker 01 Feeling bad about myself? No.
1:38:45 Dax Shepard? I know what you're saying, but I think anytime I can touch my feelings from 20 years ago, I also appreciate it. Does that make sense?
1:38:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, but no, no. I, I like not feeling like that. I like feeling confident and feeling like good, good, I'm good around people. But Will, um.
1:39:06 Dax Shepard? Uh, Will? Excuse me, Will?
1:39:09 Speaker 01 Will triggered some old stuff of like, oh, my gosh, like, this is.
1:39:14 Dax Shepard? He'd never like me.
1:39:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I'm feeling a little insecure about my looks and my body and my age and, um.
1:39:24 Dax Shepard? Pretty much the whole package.
1:39:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:27 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
1:39:28 Speaker 01 Wow, Will.
1:39:29 Dax Shepard? I think if he wasn't married, he would applaud you.
1:39:31 Speaker 01 I.
1:39:32 Dax Shepard? I don't think he needed any of those feelings.
1:39:33 Speaker 01 So because he, he is Will from U G A. Was I being so embarrassing?
1:39:40 Dax Shepard? No, not at all. You weren't embarrassing at all.
1:39:42 Speaker 01 I really feel like I was.
1:39:43 Dax Shepard? Your, your flirty, aggressive self is very appealing. It's why I urge you to use it more.
1:39:48 Speaker 01 But I think it was too much. It was like cougar.
1:39:50 Dax Shepard? Very confident. And confidence is attractive.
1:39:53 Speaker 01 I know, but.
1:39:54 Dax Shepard? But not for you.
1:39:55 Speaker 01 But I wasn't that.
1:39:55 Dax Shepard? You're so unique.
1:39:56 Speaker 01 No.
1:39:56 Dax Shepard? This is for everyone else.
1:39:57 Speaker 01 That's what I'm saying. I'm saying I actually wasn't confident, and so I think I was overcompensating.
1:40:02 Dax Shepard? Bread is confidence. This is why men nag women. It's like, they can tap into this while they're insecure. They can tap into their.
1:40:09 Speaker 01 I wonder if Will will hear this.
1:40:11 Dax Shepard? No, he didn't listen to the show. His sister.
1:40:13 Speaker 01 His sister Claire, my sister-in-law.
1:40:15 Dax Shepard? Your new sister-in-law. Yeah, she'll, she'll.
1:40:18 Speaker 01 She'll relay this.
1:40:20 Dax Shepard? She, she's been down this path for 20, let's say she's two years younger than Will. For, for 25 years, she's seen Will's effect on women and she understands this entirely.
1:40:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I thought it was a joyous experience.
1:40:34 Speaker 01 It did something.
1:40:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:40:37 Speaker 01 Thank you, Will.
1:40:38 Dax Shepard? Thanks, Will. I enjoyed it.
1:40:39 Speaker 01 We appreciate you.
1:40:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're coming hard at him.
1:40:41 Speaker 01 Dak, stop saying that. Stop saying that. That is making me feel so weird.
1:40:47 Dax Shepard? It does?
1:40:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, I was so proud of you.
1:40:50 Speaker 01 Why? What did I say?
1:40:51 Dax Shepard? This is what I'm begging, this is what I'm.
1:40:52 Speaker 01 I blacked out.
1:40:53 Dax Shepard? This is what I'm always begging for.
1:40:55 Speaker 01 What did I say?
1:40:55 Dax Shepard? It's like, get in the driver's seat. You think someone's hot, fucking, get at them.
1:40:59 Speaker 01 In the South, they don't like that. They like demure.
1:41:01 Dax Shepard? No, yeah, no.
1:41:05 Speaker 01 What, what did I say that was the most aggressive? Cause I think I blacked out.
1:41:09 Dax Shepard? There was just some moment that you were like, if you hadn't met your wife. I don't know, the way you rolled it out, you basically.
1:41:16 Speaker 01 I think you said it and then I agreed.
1:41:18 Dax Shepard? No, no, you, you said.
1:41:20 Speaker 01 I did?
1:41:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what you've never said. You're so respectful. And you, you, you weren't in that moment.
1:41:26 Speaker 01 This is what men are like.
1:41:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, welcome to the show.
1:41:28 Speaker 01 Oof, it feels weird, so.
1:41:30 Dax Shepard? It's a lot to handle. Yeah. I mean, you shouldn't have compassion for us, but also you should understand.
1:41:37 Speaker 01 These are, um, southern gentlemen.
1:41:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:39 Speaker 01 Oh, okay. That adds a new layer to the cougar element. It's like your mom.
1:41:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you got like more of a mommy fetish.
1:41:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's not.
1:41:48 Dax Shepard? Will, what have you been, you're messy again, Will.
1:41:53 Dax Shepard? What have you been into? I told you, Will.
1:41:55 Speaker 01 Will.
1:41:56 Dax Shepard? Will.
1:41:56 Speaker 01 What did you get?
1:41:57 Dax Shepard? Pull your pants down, Will.
1:41:59 Speaker 01 Will, did you make a doody again?
1:42:03 Dax Shepard? Have you done, you are naughty, Will. You know you have to use a toilet, big boy.
1:42:08 Speaker 01 Ew.
1:42:09 Dax Shepard? Guys, we're talking about a full grown adult, in case you're triggered. Yeah, this is a, this is not a teen. This is a 27 year old man in the South. He had his own office decorated with memorabilia.
1:42:20 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:42:21 Dax Shepard? He has a degree.
1:42:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, he probably has a child on the way.
1:42:24 Dax Shepard? It's just fun to watch a new paradigm emerge, which is like, yeah, you have a new age class now. If the dude looks like Will and he's 27, play ball.
1:42:34 Speaker 01 It is interesting.
1:42:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, don't rule anything out.
1:42:37 Speaker 01 Maybe he changed my life.
1:42:38 Dax Shepard? On this topic, a commenter pointed out, and I think it's a brilliant comp. Someone said.
1:42:47 Dax Shepard? Monica trying to convince you to wear loafers. Was identical to you trying to convince her to shave her head. So now you know what it feels like.
1:42:58 Speaker 01 And now you know what it feels like.
1:42:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I was like, that's a great observation and it's spot on.
1:43:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, cuz it's like, this is just not me.
1:43:06 Dax Shepard? Not a loafers dude.
1:43:06 Speaker 01 And it's great, it's great.
1:43:08 Dax Shepard? I could wear them. And maybe even people wouldn't point at me and laugh, but it's not for me.
1:43:15 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:43:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so I thought that was.
1:43:18 Speaker 01 Thank you, listener.
1:43:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:19 Speaker 01 Thank you, I appreciate that.
1:43:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I thought that was a solid point.
1:43:23 Speaker 01 And I guess I'm sorry for trying to convince you to wear a loafer.
1:43:26 Dax Shepard? I'd almost rather make a different truce, which is like, I still wanna keep begging you to shave your sides and you're free to keep begging me to wear loafers.
1:43:33 Speaker 01 No, because you know what? I, when you said it, I was like, that's true.
1:43:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:37 Speaker 01 It's not you. I don't want you to be anyone who's not you.
1:43:41 Dax Shepard? You like, and it's great, it's fine, you do like preppy. Like as an aesthetic.
1:43:47 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:43:47 Dax Shepard? You like a man who's preppy.
1:43:49 Speaker 01 Oh, a man.
1:43:50 Dax Shepard? Yes, and to me.
1:43:52 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting.
1:43:53 Dax Shepard? All of my class warfare baggage. Preppy was the last thing I ever wanted to look.
1:43:58 Speaker 01 I think you have good style. I don't think you have, I wouldn't, I'm not like, I don't look you and think like, God, we gotta do something about Dax's style.
1:44:05 Dax Shepard? Make some effort.
1:44:07 Speaker 01 I, you are very, you know you.
1:44:10 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:44:11 Speaker 01 You know your style. You have style.
1:44:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, right or wrong, I have a specific lane I'm in.
1:44:18 Speaker 01 Exactly, you have a perspective about.
1:44:19 Dax Shepard? A point of view.
1:44:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what style is.
1:44:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:44:22 Speaker 01 And so I'm not ever gonna try to change that.
1:44:25 Dax Shepard? I'll have you know, though, that I'm regularly going, how consistent is this style? Cuz even today and yesterday, I ordered some pants cuz they look comfortable. But I was in like drawstring, kind of clam diggery, east coast, on a beat, like. But I decided for whatever reason that those pants are fine if I wear Converse and they're not that thing. And I recognize how arbitrary it is.
1:44:50 Speaker 01 Whatever, you liked them.
1:44:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, whatever it is, I like it. And then I just stick with it, but it could vary from jumpsuits. Two red wings, work boots and cuffed Levi's.
1:45:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you've also, uh, at one point you're wearing some seersucker. And that's very northeast.
1:45:10 Dax Shepard? I think that's south, that's southern.
1:45:12 Speaker 01 It's also, I think it's also like.
1:45:14 Dax Shepard? Clambakes?
1:45:15 Speaker 01 No, it's like Ivy League.
1:45:17 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay. I really associated with the south.
1:45:20 Speaker 01 Rhode Island, Maine.
1:45:21 Dax Shepard? Probably like Tom Wolfe, that writer.
1:45:23 Speaker 01 Hmm, hmm.
1:45:24 Dax Shepard? That's who I wanna look like next Easter. I've already proclaimed, yeah.
1:45:28 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:45:29 Dax Shepard? Full thing.
1:45:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:30 Dax Shepard? Maybe like a flower in my lapel.
1:45:35 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.
1:46:19 Speaker 01 You know, I love therapy more than anything. Gets me through. Often I'll wanna cancel because I'm like, I don't really have anything to talk about. And then I'll go and I have some major revelation.
1:46:30 Dax Shepard? You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds once it's out into the world. You gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.
1:46:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, you do.
1:46:46 Dax Shepard? If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Do yourself a favor and just try it. Future you will be grateful. Visit betterhelp.com/dax to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash DAX.
1:47:20 Speaker 01 Who do I like that's preppy?
1:47:22 Dax Shepard? JFK Junior.
1:47:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:25 Dax Shepard? Apex preppy.
1:47:26 Speaker 01 Hot as fuck.
1:47:27 Dax Shepard? But he's like the standard of preppiness.
1:47:29 Speaker 01 That look, JFK Junior look.
1:47:31 Dax Shepard? You love it.
1:47:31 Speaker 01 I, I think it's great.
1:47:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:47:33 Speaker 01 Um.
1:47:34 Dax Shepard? It's the look, right? That would be number one.
1:47:36 Speaker 01 Well, I don't think so. I think it, again, it's someone who just clearly has a point of view.
1:47:45 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:47:45 Speaker 01 Knows what they like, and it's thought out. Like, you know, Jess used to only wear, um, gym shorts, you know?
1:47:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, mm-hmm.
1:47:53 Speaker 01 And that had to change. And guess what? I changed it.
1:47:57 Dax Shepard? Right, yeah, cuz he's your boyfriend.
1:47:59 Speaker 01 He's my husband.
1:47:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:48:00 Speaker 01 And he, and now.
1:48:02 Dax Shepard? He's addicted?
1:48:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, now he likes shopping, and now everyone always comments on his outfit.
1:48:08 Dax Shepard? Oh, and he loves it.
1:48:09 Speaker 01 And he loves it, and I love it.
1:48:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:48:11 Speaker 01 And like, it feels good, and he feels good. He feels put together. It does something outside him.
1:48:18 Dax Shepard? Okay, I wanna ask a question about style. I had this thought the other day.
1:48:21 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:48:21 Dax Shepard? Cuz I know someone who like, by all accounts, probably has good style.
1:48:26 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:48:26 Dax Shepard? They're definitely always on trend.
1:48:28 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:48:29 Dax Shepard? But I have the thought.
1:48:31 Speaker 01 Man or woman?
1:48:31 Dax Shepard? Man.
1:48:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:48:32 Dax Shepard? The style changes so frequently.
1:48:35 Speaker 01 Uh-huh.
1:48:35 Dax Shepard? That I actually don't know what his style is.
1:48:38 Speaker 01 Right.
1:48:39 Dax Shepard? And so I wondered, like, for me, that's an issue. Is that an issue for you?
1:48:43 Speaker 01 Um, I am not attracted to trends.
1:48:47 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:48:47 Speaker 01 Personally. I like classic style.
1:48:50 Dax Shepard? Timeless.
1:48:51 Speaker 01 Timeless, classic.
1:48:52 Dax Shepard? JFK, RFK.
1:48:53 Speaker 01 Nope. Uh, um, every now and then, I'll get a piece every now and then that's trendy, cuz it's like fun.
1:49:01 Dax Shepard? I mean, you're wearing enormous pants. That's part of the trend.
1:49:04 Speaker 01 No.
1:49:06 Dax Shepard? You have, you have taken on enormous pants in the last two years?
1:49:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I wouldn't say, okay, I don't think that's because it's a trend. I really just like the way that looks.
1:49:17 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:18 Speaker 01 I've, skinny jeans are kinda making a comeback. I'm not going there.
1:49:22 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:22 Speaker 01 I'm not wearing them.
1:49:23 Dax Shepard? You're like me. Also, I'm all, right, I'm much older than you and will. And there is a point where you go, I can't play the game anymore. And so I don't know if you're like me at least. I'm like, no, no, we're sticking with what our style has been.
1:49:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's more that I'm like, I don't like that.
1:49:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:49:42 Speaker 01 So sure, it might come back as a trend, but I'm gonna skip that trend because I don't like it.
1:49:47 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:48 Speaker 01 And plus, oh my God, I'm so old.
1:49:51 Dax Shepard? All right.
1:49:52 Speaker 01 Um, and then, but there are still, there are classic jeans and classic looks, Levi's, all kinds of that. That work forever and will never go away.
1:50:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:02 Speaker 01 So I'll always rely on that. But I, I'm with you. When someone is just dressing for the trend, I don't really think that's stylish.
1:50:11 Dax Shepard? Well, I just go like, I don't know what their real style is.
1:50:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:15 Speaker 01 They don't have a perspective.
1:50:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't know what they want to be in most.
1:50:18 Speaker 01 Like, they might look great, but they don't really have a perspective. But also, okay, here's the thing. I prefer that to looking like a slob.
1:50:27 Dax Shepard? Right, right, right. Yeah.
1:50:28 Speaker 01 Even if they're like, my style is slob. That's not for me.
1:50:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's fair. Like, and some people have made an art form out of it, right? Like, like, Sandler's in on the joke, right? He's like, I dress like a fucking slob. I wear sweatpants and hockey jerseys, no matter where I'm at.
1:50:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. He wears basketball shorts. He wears Jess's old outfit.
1:50:49 Dax Shepard? I think a lot of guys are like, thank God Sandler's doing this so I can just wear all this athletic gear all the time.
1:50:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's never been, for whatever reason, never called to me.
1:50:59 Speaker 01 I know. I'm glad.
1:51:00 Dax Shepard? I'll get a jersey every now and then, then I, like, I think it looks cool, but I.
1:51:04 Speaker 01 You never, I've never seen you wear a jersey.
1:51:05 Dax Shepard? I've, minimal.
1:51:07 Speaker 01 Like, would you wear this sweater?
1:51:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, of course.
1:51:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of cardigans.
1:51:12 Speaker 01 I think this would look nice on you.
1:51:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'll buy it off you. How much?
1:51:15 Speaker 01 This is a large.
1:51:16 Dax Shepard? I think it would fit me, based on.
1:51:19 Speaker 01 Got it oversized. It is, it is oversized. It is oversized. That's a look.
1:51:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's popular look.
1:51:26 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. It's a look that I like.
1:51:28 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:51:29 Speaker 01 Although I did wanna take it off when I was talking to Will, cuz I wanted him to.
1:51:32 Dax Shepard? See your boobs.
1:51:33 Speaker 01 Well, don't be crass.
1:51:35 Dax Shepard? Be honest.
1:51:36 Speaker 01 Don't be crass. He's a southern gentleman.
1:51:38 Dax Shepard? Why else would you take your sweatshirt off?
1:51:40 Speaker 01 I just wanted to take it off.
1:51:40 Dax Shepard? See your shoulders?
1:51:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my decolletage.
1:51:44 Dax Shepard? What if I wanted to get in short shorts when we had an attractive guest on? I was like, I almost thought about getting it down into my trunk.
1:51:51 Speaker 01 You're married. I'm not.
1:51:52 Dax Shepard? That's true.
1:51:53 Speaker 01 I get to do whatever I want.
1:51:54 Dax Shepard? That's a big difference.
1:51:55 Speaker 01 It's a big distinction.
1:51:56 Dax Shepard? I also think I'm male, so it's...
1:51:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's also a huge distinction. Here's the thing you're not gonna wanna hear and is the truth. I think you'll understand part of this. Most women, not all.
1:52:07 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:52:07 Speaker 01 I think most men wanna see a pair of boobs. Not all women wanna see a men's bulge, yeah.
1:52:16 Dax Shepard? I would love to know the percentage.
1:52:17 Speaker 01 Me too.
1:52:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:52:18 Speaker 01 I mean...
1:52:18 Dax Shepard? I agree with you on prima facie, my favorite thing to say.
1:52:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:22 Dax Shepard? I do agree with you, but I also, I'm prepared to be shocked by how many women, if in a very safe situation, could view it safely.
1:52:31 Speaker 01 Right.
1:52:32 Dax Shepard? Without feeling threatened.
1:52:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:33 Dax Shepard? How many would like to?
1:52:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:52:35 Dax Shepard? I think it's way lower than the men and the boobs, but I think it's higher than we think.
1:52:38 Speaker 01 I think what's true is that it really depends on the person attached to the bulge. Women might be interested in the bulge.
1:52:49 Dax Shepard? If they like the guy.
1:52:50 Speaker 01 If they already are interested in the guy and like the top.
1:52:53 Dax Shepard? And we could hate a woman and we still wanna see her tits.
1:52:55 Speaker 01 Exactly. You might not care about anything else, but you wanna see the boobs. It's just different.
1:52:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's different.
1:53:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:00 Dax Shepard? And that's okay.
1:53:01 Speaker 01 And that's the way it is.
1:53:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we're just built this way.
1:53:06 Speaker 01 I don't know, I guess we can do some, unless we have more to say about will or about cougars or... Actually, I don't know if we're even allowed to say cougars anymore. But I think I can since now I am one.
1:53:18 Dax Shepard? There's a coalition of allies protecting cougars?
1:53:21 Speaker 01 No, maybe cougars don't like, maybe older women like myself now, don't like to be called that. And now, as I'm saying it, I don't, I don't wanna be called that. It has a negative connotation.
1:53:32 Dax Shepard? Well, we're calling men who like younger women perverts. So if you guys gotta have to fucking shoulder, uh, uh, whatever the word is, not coyotes, cougars. Tough, right? That's not even close to as bad.
1:53:45 Speaker 01 Well, there is, as you said, there's a difference. There is a difference. I can't go attack Will.
1:53:51 Dax Shepard? Sure, you can't attack Will, but if we're just saying older people liking younger people and we're calling one class of people perverts, and then the other one's bitching about being called cougars, I think that's a little unfair.
1:54:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, but you say all the time, you're always on flip flopping, like that there's a difference between women and men, and when women do something, it's different than when men do something, and that's the truth.
1:54:11 Dax Shepard? But it doesn't mean that you guys can't shoulder cougar. It's not even that bad. Pervert's like an illegal-
1:54:16 Speaker 01 Then I'm just gonna like die. Like, what's the point?
1:54:18 Dax Shepard? Why don't you own being a cougar?
1:54:20 Speaker 01 No! Rob, can you look up how old, like, you have to be to be qualified as a cougar?
1:54:30 Dax Shepard? I think thirty-eight to twenty-seven.
1:54:33 Speaker 01 Stop. Oh.
1:54:33 Speaker 03 Forty's or older?
1:54:35 Speaker 01 Oh my god, I'm getting so close.
1:54:38 Dax Shepard? You're good then. So you don't even, pick up this campaign against, to end cougars. It's a cute name.
1:54:44 Speaker 01 No, I don't like it. Cause it sounds like, um-
1:54:47 Speaker 03 Might include women starting at age thirty-five.
1:54:49 Dax Shepard? Okay, and depending on how young probably-
1:54:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's the age gap, ten-year age gap or more.
1:54:54 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:54:55 Speaker 01 Ten?
1:54:56 Speaker 03 I think eleven really-
1:54:58 Dax Shepard? Cougars are, cougars are majestic, they're very powerful. They're a beautiful animal. They're the prettiest predator we have in the Americas. In the Americas. Did you hear me?
1:55:11 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:55:11 Dax Shepard? We ain't calling you a vulture. Like, you've been given a very regal-
1:55:15 Speaker 01 Don't say you.
1:55:17 Dax Shepard? The class of cougars.
1:55:20 Speaker 01 Fuck! This is bad. My time is like, I'm like-
1:55:25 Dax Shepard? Uh-oh, is this getting real?
1:55:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel really, I feel like-
1:55:30 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy.
1:55:33 Dax Shepard? What you should be feeling is gratitude, that you are a cougar of the caliber that could ensnare one of these cubs just fine. So you should just be thanking your lucky stars that that's still an option for you. There are some cougars that are hungry, and they're starving, and they can't get any pups. Okay?
1:55:54 Speaker 01 No.
1:55:55 Dax Shepard? And you should feel bad for those cougars.
1:55:57 Speaker 01 How did this happen to me?
1:55:58 Dax Shepard? You're one of the lucky cougars, okay?
1:56:03 Dax Shepard? Well, look, again, I'm just a pervert. So on my side of the street.
1:56:07 Speaker 01 You're not a pervert. You're married with children.
1:56:09 Dax Shepard? I know, I know, I know.
1:56:10 Speaker 01 That's not... How did this happen to me?
1:56:14 Dax Shepard? How did you turn 38?
1:56:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:16 Dax Shepard? One day at a time.
1:56:19 Speaker 01 This is like an actual disaster.
1:56:21 Dax Shepard? We gotta get you. I think once you start indulging your cougar appetite, you'll blow right through this little awkward phase. And like, oh, this is perfect. They're so young and dumb, I don't want to date them. All they want to do is come over and show me their buns.
1:56:36 Speaker 01 No, that's even worse.
1:56:38 Dax Shepard? I'm married, I got my husband I love, who dresses nice.
1:56:41 Speaker 01 Who is he? Where is he?
1:56:43 Dax Shepard? Jazz, jazz.
1:56:43 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:56:44 Dax Shepard? And then you have this stable of young dudes that you don't even have to fucking worry about talking to on their birthday.
1:56:51 Speaker 01 I can't even have sex with them. They're gonna break my bones because of bone density, perimenopause.
1:56:56 Dax Shepard? Osteoporosis.
1:56:57 Speaker 01 Yes. Oh my god. Maybe I'll break his bone.
1:57:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I bet you will. Here you go. There's the cougar. Let her out of the cage.
1:57:07 Speaker 01 I can't even control her.
1:57:08 Dax Shepard? We got a new, I'm gonna announce to the LA Times that although P22 is gone, we do have a new cougar sighting.
1:57:15 Speaker 01 Ah, I feel conflicted. I gotta take a nap.
1:57:17 Dax Shepard? All right, let's say, let's do some facts.
1:57:19 Speaker 01 All right. Okay, I have little to no facts.
1:57:21 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:57:22 Speaker 01 Um, one thing, so if you... Okay, you're gonna be mad at me because you don't like when this happens, but...
1:57:28 Dax Shepard? Oh, Worldwide Box Office versus the best day?
1:57:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, basically. There's one teeny, teeny, tiny difference between the audio version of this one and the video.
1:57:39 Dax Shepard? Why?
1:57:40 Speaker 01 Because there's something that worked in the video that doesn't work audio, I think, in my opinion. So I said, "Hey, Emma, will you cut this out of the audio?" But I left it in for video.
1:57:51 Dax Shepard? I'm so intrigued.
1:57:52 Speaker 01 It's nothing. I mean, it's a two-second thing that happens. I leave in the middle.
1:57:56 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:57:56 Speaker 01 And I come back.
1:57:57 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:57:58 Speaker 01 Because I had a cough attack.
1:57:59 Dax Shepard? Oh, you sure did, yeah.
1:58:01 Speaker 01 And...
1:58:01 Dax Shepard? Attack?
1:58:02 Speaker 01 Yes!
1:58:03 Dax Shepard? You cough what, twice outside?
1:58:05 Speaker 01 Stop.
1:58:05 Dax Shepard? Be honest. How many times do you cough when you go outside?
1:58:07 Speaker 01 Listen to me. What happens is like... I feel the tickle and the cough, you know, and I like to like, like I do that, you know?
1:58:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:58:15 Speaker 01 And then it's still there, like that did nothing. And I'm trying to drink some water, that's doing nothing. Um, and-
1:58:22 Dax Shepard? Really quick, isn't it great? When you're in that state, you're so preoccupied with this disaster, like you, you, we could have been on fire probably at that moment.
1:58:29 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:58:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:58:30 Speaker 01 I don't know what you guys were talking about.
1:58:32 Dax Shepard? Yes, exactly.
1:58:32 Speaker 01 I was so-
1:58:35 Dax Shepard? Panicked.
1:58:36 Speaker 01 Panicked and like trying to do teeny tiny coughs, but knew, and it was like, you know, it's like building and building and building.
1:58:42 Dax Shepard? You feel like you're gonna suffocate if you don't.
1:58:43 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, and, and it's, and then I would, then I coughed a couple of times.
1:58:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, a couple of coughs.
1:58:48 Speaker 01 It was still in there, it's still there, and at some point, I, I leaned over and said, I gotta, I gotta get a cough drop. And then I walked over and then I, I left actually to get my cough out.
1:59:01 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm. How many coughs do you think you did once you got outside, like six or seven?
1:59:04 Speaker 01 But by then, it's like they like, you sound like you're gonna throw up.
1:59:08 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:59:08 Speaker 01 Because it's so intense, because you've been holding it in and then it looks gross, I'm like-
1:59:13 Dax Shepard? I'm not, I'm not just the king of conveyance, I'm also the king of coughs, so you know I know about coughing.
1:59:18 Speaker 01 I know, but this is a different kind of, you cough so much that like, yours is different. You cough so much, you're not stifling them, you just cough, you feel fine coughing, it's part of who you are. And it is what it is, you know? And it's not an identity, it's in fact, an identity marker for me that I don't cough.
1:59:36 Dax Shepard? Right. Don't fart, don't cough, don't pee.
1:59:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:39 Dax Shepard? A lot of don'ts.
1:59:40 Speaker 01 So I, I went out there and I was like, ah, you know, and I like had this huge cough.
1:59:46 Dax Shepard? How far did you step away from the-
1:59:47 Speaker 01 Far.
1:59:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:59:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I did not want you guys to hear it.
1:59:50 Dax Shepard? I love the idea of you running up the street and the neighbors looking out and you're just out there.
1:59:58 Speaker 01 I just like, my biggest fear throughout that whole thing was you guys stopping and like, are you okay? Or like, do you want some water?
2:00:05 Dax Shepard? Calling attention to it.
2:00:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was getting, but then also I knew you knew, noticed, but like you then you were trying to not notice it. Oh, my God, it was horrible. So anyway, I left and then I came back.
2:00:15 Dax Shepard? It's shocking how much I noticed, by the way. Considering I'm looking at the guests always.
2:00:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:21 Dax Shepard? But I am catching.
2:00:22 Speaker 01 Yes, of course.
2:00:23 Dax Shepard? 100% of what's happening over here.
2:00:24 Speaker 01 I am catching all the time. Everything that's going on and it's like, like I know that sometimes like I know some of your tells I won't say on here, but I'm like, oh, it's like, okay, so he's annoyed because he just did that.
2:00:37 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:00:38 Speaker 01 Um, and so there's a lot going on in the head. Anyway, I, he, I, in the video, come back in.
2:00:47 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
2:00:48 Speaker 01 And then there's a little conversation about, did you go to CVS?
2:00:52 Dax Shepard? Free because you claim you're just getting a cough drop.
2:00:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:55 Dax Shepard? Bitch, I know they're in your bag right there.
2:00:57 Speaker 01 Yes. You're like, why'd you leave? And I was like, to cough. And then there was a little conversation about that. That's not in the audio.
2:01:04 Dax Shepard? Real time disaster.
2:01:05 Speaker 01 So I just wanted, that's like, I left to cough.
2:01:08 Dax Shepard? Oh, great. Okay.
2:01:11 Speaker 01 Um.
2:01:11 Dax Shepard? That's the one fact.
2:01:12 Speaker 01 That's one, I have three facts.
2:01:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
2:01:15 Speaker 01 Um, it was a fact. It was a cough. That is why I left. It wasn't for anything else because I think then you were like, oh, you farted.
2:01:23 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
2:01:24 Speaker 01 I didn't. That it wasn't one of those.
2:01:25 Dax Shepard? You might have done both.
2:01:26 Speaker 01 No, it wasn't.
2:01:27 Dax Shepard? When you're coughing with all your might, you, you're not, you're not clenching your sphincter. Things happen when you cough that hard.
2:01:34 Speaker 01 I understand that I was at high risk.
2:01:37 Dax Shepard? Okay, but it didn't.
2:01:38 Speaker 01 But it did not happen.
2:01:39 Dax Shepard? Situation happened. Okay.
2:01:40 Speaker 01 And then it happened, you know, it happened again when we were at the movie theater, the, me, you and Rob went to a screening.
2:01:46 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
2:01:47 Speaker 01 Rob, did you hear my coughs?
2:01:49 Speaker 03 I did.
2:01:50 Speaker 01 See, and I knew you did. Did you say you did or didn't?
2:01:53 Speaker 03 I did and I chuckled. I chuckled a little bit.
2:01:56 Speaker 01 I knew, I knew it was, you were getting nervous for me and then you were getting nervous for me and I was getting so nervous.
2:02:02 Dax Shepard? Water. I was excited. Anytime I can help a friend, I like it. So.
2:02:06 Speaker 01 But it was that same thing and I just kept throwing mints in my mouth. I thought that would help. It didn't really help.
2:02:11 Dax Shepard? It, it takes on a life of its own. Once you're panicked about it.
2:02:14 Speaker 01 It does.
2:02:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it amplifies all your sensations down there and now you're convinced.
2:02:18 Speaker 01 I know.
2:02:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:02:19 Speaker 01 Okay, um, now the P bodies.
2:02:23 Speaker 01 The awards, okay?
2:02:25 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
2:02:25 Speaker 01 Winners were chosen.
2:02:27 Dax Shepard? What, like, since we interviewed him?
2:02:29 Speaker 01 Well, remember, I, no, I said like something about the Peabody's and I was like, there was nominations or winners, I don't know what's what, but it was winners.
2:02:35 Dax Shepard? It was the winners, and we didn't, we didn't get one?
2:02:37 Speaker 01 Nope.
2:02:37 Dax Shepard? Still didn't get one. What is it gonna take, Peabody?
2:02:40 Speaker 01 Okay, I'm gonna tell you who, well, won, okay, for entertainment. Adolescence.
2:02:46 Dax Shepard? Great, worthy of a Peabody.
2:02:47 Speaker 01 Very, and or.
2:02:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, I love the show, I, I don't know why it's worthy of a Peabody, but I loved the show.
2:02:53 Speaker 01 Never seen it. Common Side Effects, that's on Adult Swim.
2:02:58 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:02:59 Speaker 01 So, I don't know.
2:03:00 Dax Shepard? So, they, here's what I can no longer tell myself. They are digging deep, I mean, they're, they're, they're taking in all media if they found a winner on Cartoon Network.
2:03:09 Speaker 01 Adult Swim.
2:03:10 Dax Shepard? Adult Swim.
2:03:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:11 Dax Shepard? Is that on Cartoon Network?
2:03:13 Speaker 01 I don't know, actually.
2:03:13 Dax Shepard? I think it is.
2:03:14 Speaker 01 It might be. Dying for Sex.
2:03:16 Dax Shepard? Okay, yeah, Liz Meriwether and.
2:03:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, and Michelle Williams.
2:03:20 Dax Shepard? Michelle Williams.
2:03:20 Speaker 01 Episode of ours go back in the archives. Um, Forever, that's a Netflix show.
2:03:26 Dax Shepard? Okay, so a lot of people.
2:03:27 Speaker 01 Heated Rivalry.
2:03:29 Dax Shepard? Sure.
2:03:29 Speaker 01 Jimmy Kimmel Live.
2:03:31 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:03:32 Speaker 01 Mussolini's Son of the Century.
2:03:34 Dax Shepard? Okay, so almost everyone in show business got nominated, it sounds like.
2:03:37 Speaker 01 And the Pit. Oh, and Pluribus, and The Rehearsal.
2:03:41 Dax Shepard? Holy smokes.
2:03:43 Speaker 01 I know.
2:03:43 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:03:44 Speaker 01 And that's only in entertainment.
2:03:45 Dax Shepard? Well, I guess I'm relieved that there's no podcast.
2:03:48 Speaker 01 There's documentaries. Oh, you're right, they should make a podcast. Oh, oh god, here it is, fuck.
2:03:56 Dax Shepard? There is a podcast? Oh my, Peabody's!
2:03:59 Speaker 01 Oh, that's, this actually hurts.
2:04:01 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy, I don't even know if I wanna hear the list.
2:04:05 Speaker 01 Podcast and radio. Divine Intervention.
2:04:08 Dax Shepard? Great show.
2:04:09 Speaker 01 Scam Inc.
2:04:10 Dax Shepard? Really good.
2:04:11 Speaker 01 When We All Go to Heaven.
2:04:12 Dax Shepard? Love it. So, just three?
2:04:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:16 Dax Shepard? All right, y'all can throw in, you did fifteen TV shows, you, okay.
2:04:20 Speaker 01 I know.
2:04:20 Dax Shepard? Well.
2:04:20 Speaker 01 I'm pretty upset.
2:04:22 Dax Shepard? I'm sorry.
2:04:22 Speaker 01 Now that I've, now that I knew there was a specific section.
2:04:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:04:25 Speaker 01 Okay. Or next year.
2:04:28 Speaker 03 I think sometimes you have to submit for these things, too.
2:04:31 Dax Shepard? Well, we certainly haven't done that.
2:04:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, so, we've just didn't even try.
2:04:35 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:04:36 Speaker 01 Oh, you're one of those, you guys are those types, like, we didn't even try, so we didn't lose.
2:04:40 Speaker 03 Well, I'm just saying we should do it.
2:04:41 Speaker 01 Can't lose if you didn't try.
2:04:43 Speaker 03 We can do it next year.
2:04:44 Dax Shepard? You don't miss a hundred percent of the shots that you don't take.
2:04:47 Speaker 01 Exactly. Um, oh, was The Long Good Friday Pierce Brosnan's first role? No. He was in a TV movie called Murphy's Stroke. And then The Long Goodbye is listed as number two. Same year, though.
2:05:02 Dax Shepard? I think he was famously a street performer in Ireland, in Dublin, maybe.
2:05:05 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:05:06 Dax Shepard? Maybe even one of these Living in the Cars stitches.
2:05:09 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
2:05:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he, he, he, he paid his dues.
2:05:12 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Also, his wife died. That's really sad. Sorry, it's just in the trivia that I'm looking at. What that, they shouldn't call that trivia.
2:05:20 Dax Shepard? No. What they, well, what they mostly shouldn't call it is trivial.
2:05:24 Speaker 01 They didn't.
2:05:25 Dax Shepard? Okay, good.
2:05:26 Speaker 01 So, don't worry.
2:05:27 Dax Shepard? All right.
2:05:27 Speaker 01 Um, he's a handsome man.
2:05:29 Dax Shepard? Very handsome.
2:05:30 Speaker 01 And that's all I have to say.
2:05:31 Dax Shepard? All right, well, I love Patrick. I really had to resist, I have that inclination. I get, you know, one in 10 guests where it's like, I get his phone number and hang out with him and talk about things.
2:05:43 Speaker 01 You do, you get people's phone numbers all the time.
2:05:45 Dax Shepard? I know, and I, I wanted to get his.
2:05:47 Speaker 01 And you didn't?
2:05:47 Dax Shepard? No, maybe because he was a journalist.
2:05:49 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:05:50 Dax Shepard? I don't know, but I did, I wanted it.
2:05:53 Speaker 01 Oh, that's interesting, okay. That's kind of telling, like, you do this all the time. You did it earlier with our guest that you danced in front of.
2:05:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:06:00 Speaker 01 And maybe you think it's, you're able to do that because they're in entertainment?
2:06:05 Dax Shepard? Right, we're all in entertainment. We also might be at things together.
2:06:08 Speaker 01 Right, but you might be at something with Patrick.
2:06:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, maybe Patrick would, would like to be friends. But I just like, oh, I'm a showbiz guy.
2:06:15 Speaker 01 He doesn't live here, I guess, so that makes sense.
2:06:17 Dax Shepard? No, but I go to where he lives quite often, so it could be a friendship.
2:06:19 Speaker 01 All right, well, I think we could still get his number.
2:06:22 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:06:23 Speaker 01 I love you.
2:06:23 Dax Shepard? Love you.
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