All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Dax Shepard: Grief, Fatherhood, and Friendship

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Actor, writer and podcast host Dax Shepard recalls his father's final days, and how they changed Dax's understanding of him. In this emotional conversation recorded live at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, Dax also tells Anderson about the unusual start of his friendship with the late actor Eric Dane. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine Thompson Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to all there is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest on the podcast today is Dax Shepard, host of the podcast Armchair Expert. He's also an actor and a writer. I spoke with Dax a couple weeks ago in New Orleans at Book Fest, which is an annual event at Tulane University where dozens of authors come and speak. I'm still going through boxes of things in my basement that belong to my mom and my dad and my brother. And the other day I came across some grainy pictures of making.

on a trip to Norlands with my dad. There was one taken in a photo store on or near Bourbon Street, one of those places where you dress up in costumes. All the others are from a cheap, instomatic camera I had. That's why the pictures are so grainy. But seeing them brought back the memory of that trip, wandering around the French Quarter in an old cemetery with its above-ground tombs.

I remembered the way my dad made me feel. I remember his love and the way he treated me. as a person worth listening to and worth including in on everything. I hope that's how I can make my boys feel. The photos on the back all have the date that they were processed, July 1977, which means I had just turned 10 on that trip, and in less than six months, my dad would be dead. When Dax and I sat down in front of an audience at Bookfest,

I talked with him about his dad, who died in 2012, and also about his friend Eric Dayne, the actor. who died last month after a 10-month battle with ALS. We'll have that conversation in a moment. Welcome back. As I mentioned, I spoke with Dax Shepherd a couple weeks ago at Tulane University during New Orleans Book Fest. It was a moving and at times funny conversation,

and I wanted you to hear it. We were talking in a large auditorium in front of hundreds of people, so the audio and the video is different than we normally have, but I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you will too. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, Anderson. It wasn't until last night when I was going to bed that I read the program, and it says that our exchange will balance humor and humanity while offering attendees a resonant, compassionate look at one of life's most universal experiences. Easy left. I mean, I think that sets the bar kind of hot. No problem. Yeah. Well, throw in some stock tips, too.

To me, New Orleans is so much a city of memory, and it's very much. I think for me, a city associated with Hurricane Katrina, I spent about six weeks here during the storm and afterward. Every time I come here, I mean, I'm staying near the convention center where Ethel Freeman, who was 91 years old, I don't know if anybody in this room remembers that name. Ethel Freeman was the only person to die at the convention center. Her son, Herbert Freeman Jr., was told to put a blanket over her head

and wield her to the side when she was left there. Her body went unidentified for a long time in the morgue. Jerry Peters was found on the roof of a car in the ninth ward. I went by him on a boat and for years never knew his name and only a few years ago learned who he was. The Bain family who died, drowned in their living room in Waverland, Mississippi, mother and father and their two kids. So for me, this city is very much kind of associated with loss and with memory.

And I love how Norlands honors the memory of things. My dad went to Francis T. Nichols School here, which is now the Booker T. Washington Academy. New Orleans kind of layers memory on top of memory. But I think grief is something that we just don't talk about very much, and yet everybody in this room has lost somebody. Or if you haven't, you sadly will. And yet we as a society are not comfortable talking about it, and we're not encouraged to. Yeah, I remember reading this incredible book on killing, and it talked about how separated we've become. from death. A hundred years ago, you processed animals that you were farming.

Grandma and grandpa died in the home. You probably buried them in the backyard. Everything's been so removed that we have no real connection to it anymore. And in that kind of loss of experience, I think we start abstracting things and getting quite confused by them. You lost your dad, Dave Robert Shepard. Can you talk a little bit about the experience? you were able to spend time with him at the end of his life. He really wasn't there for you much during the beginning of your life.

Yeah, my mom and dad got divorced when I was three. My dad was a very large and gregarious man. He was a car salesman. And he was also an addict. And so we would go see him every other weekend. And that generally meant he would take us directly to my grandparents' house, which was great because they were wonderful. So yeah, I had kind of limited time with him.

And my brother, who's five years older than me, he was eight when they got divorced. So he had great memories of Roddy motorcycles with my father and everything. I didn't really have any. So I didn't pine for him. I didn't want them to get back together the way divorced children sometimes do. And I was quite judgmental of him.

We lived very, very modestly, and he drove a corvette. He had two children and would pick us up. That's a two-seater for people don't know about Corvettes. They're not built for a family, as it turns out. Nor was he. No, no. And if you think it's bad transporting them in a two-seater,

drinking doesn't help the situation a ton, nor the snowy roads in Michigan. But alas, yeah, I was pretty judgmental of him, and he got sober. He got sober when I was about 14. Things started changing a bit then. He got in this horrendous car accident when I was 15, and I moved in with him for a couple of years.

and that was probably the core of our relationship going forward. In my judgment of him, I also, I think I kind of prided myself on being the one person who wasn't afraid to confront him. All through my 20s, we had moments of real connection and then moments of us arguing and not talking for periods of time. All this to say that when he got diagnosed with cancer, ironically I was in a position financially and time-wise to be able to go back to Detroit nonstop and be a part of taking him to chemo and doing all the things that need doing.

And it's also relevant that I have been supporting him at that point for probably five or six years. And you and I talked last night about the strain of that when your parents' caregiver. Every time the phone rings, there's this anxiety of like, well, what is it now? What problem do I have to solve? So that's how I went into it. I'm insanely grateful for that three-month experience. I went home almost every weekend, and a lot of things were resolved during that time,

maybe most poignantly, as he is this man who was larger than life, and I was so judgmental of, but he was reduced to wearing diapers, you know, and I changed those diapers. and that was a bit of a blessing to see him and fanalyzed because I was able to go, oh, yeah, he's just a little boy like all of us. You wrote about it in a blog. You said the car rides proved to be shockingly therapeutic. One of the hidden benefits of cancer is that it can erode grudges the way WD40 dissolves rust.

It just finds its way into all the nooks and crannies and starts loosening. Before long, the one's formidable chip on my shoulder had melded into something this of a nicotine patch. Apologies were exchanged, tears were had, hugs were frequent and lingering. I spent the majority of our time together running my hand lightly over the tiny little hairs peeking out from the back of the soft bald head. He let me do that for hours. Became one of the more beautiful experiences in my life. Oh, I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, he had the cutest little hairs on the back of his head. He was bald as a motherfucker. You'll see a picture of him.

But he held out to those back hairs. Yeah, I think the most poignant moment for us was we were, I was photographing this welfare apartments that my brother and my mom and I moved into immediately after the divorce. And we were in the parking lot and I was taking a picture. And he just out of nowhere said, he goes, yeah, I remember I had to bring a couch over to the house. Your mom wanted a couch and I pulled out of this parking lot and I couldn't make it through that light. I was crying so hard I couldn't see and I pulled over. And I just sat there crying thinking, I'm driving away from my life. And I didn't think until that moment he gave a shit.

I thought he, we laughed and he was like, party time, let's get a vet, and go to the bar. And so, again, I hadn't made any room for that, that that had been a painful experience for him. Do you feel grief still? Oh, I've had the, I've had waves of grief. When he initially died, let's say like the first couple months after he had died, I felt relief. I felt unburdened. I didn't have someone to take care of.

I didn't have to go home. And then I felt this real shame of feeling relief that he was dead. I guess I had this fear. It was going to get really, really ugly. And it didn't get ugly. And I had some gratitude about that. He kind of passed peacefully and quickly.

Then I wrote this thing. I really didn't know how to process what was going on. I knew intellectually I should be feeling some sadness or some loss. And it just wasn't coming. And so what I often do when I'm confused is I just write what happened. And then in writing and it really kind of opened up a lot of emotion. I remember I was in my, pulled into my driveway and I was listening.

Bob Dylan's comfort in the storm came on. And I just started bawling. And I thought, oh, he's following comfort, you know. So I'd have these waves. And then I had our, we had our own children. And man is that, I couldn't encourage people to try it more because it's so revealing. The thing that had occurred to me when our oldest daughter

was probably a year and a half old, in my story of my life, I was the victim. He had left me and I was the victim. And now I had this beautiful little girl and the notion of missing even two minutes of her life is so heartbreaking. I can't imagine the grief I would have. feel to not see her do all the things. And I went, oh my God, he was the victim. I wasn't the victim.

The thing he misses a lot harder to miss. And I felt real compassion for him. That was like a wave. I also now that little girl's 12 and she has taken on the same role I had, which is she loves to confront me. She's the one person that's not afraid of the big open the house. And I'm now able to go like, oh yeah, I was a little difficult, you know. You see herself in her. Yes, yes, yes. And I have the capacity and the resources to be patient with that.

You know, I know that I wasn't what I thought I was. He wasn't what I thought he was. And even more, I was very quick with the list of things he hadn't done and the things that he let me down in. But now, 14 years later, I can say my dad was so affectionate with me. Oh, my God. He was such a hugger and a kisser. This is Detroit in the 80s.

Men weren't hugging and kissing and squeezing their boys. My father had a bunch of gay friends, you know. No one's dad had gay friends. He was in AA for he died sober, maybe, I guess, probably 20, eight years sober. He introduced me to that and not just introduced me to it, but he built this incredibly fun life in there. He modeled that sobriety could be really fun. He did that for me. He was flamboyant. He danced. All my emotional confidence to be emotional in public or to be masculine yet vulnerable. Those things, like he really modeled that way more than most dads in the 80s.

did, and that gives probably much better than if he came to my basketball games. It's so interesting me how one of the things that I've learned, I knew nothing about grief. I never grieved. My brother died, my dad died when I was 10. My brother died by suicide when I was 21. He was 23. And then my mom died in 2019 at the age of 95. But I never grieved. I pushed all that stuff down. I propelled myself forward. And it's only in the last couple of years that I've started to kind of turn to it and try to develop a companionship with it in the words of Francis Weller, who's a writer, who I think is very powerful, who writes about grief. But one of the things I've learned from doing interviews about it with people, which is the only way I've really learned about

grief, is that you can still have a relationship with somebody who has died. And that relationship can actually, it can change and it can grow. I have a closer relationship with my dad now than I ever had before. Yeah. I know my dad better. I mean, I was 10 when he died. I saw through the eyes of a child. I see my dad now through the eyes of an adult. I look at my children, and I see what my dad saw through his eyes when he looked at me. So I understand what he was thinking

when he looked at me, and in that way, I know this man, and I'm closer to him, and I feel him, I feel him inside me for the first time. Yeah. And it's extraordinary. Your relationship with your dad has continued. Oh, yeah. It's the best it's ever.

been, which is the most... Which is the most heartbreaking part. You know, I can't help but be bummed. I didn't have all these realizations and life experiences. And thank you. You just reminded me of the most important thing I left out about the affection is like, my dad fucking adored me. He adored me the way like I adore my little girls.

I know that now because I... You didn't know it. I didn't know because I was judging him on the choices. And if he had adored me, how, why was... Is he gone for, you know, 12 years or whatever? But I just, I, not only do I look at them in the same way that he looked at me and I recognize it, I annoy them in the same way. He annoyed me.

He just wanted my attention so bad. And I found it very annoying. And I am like constantly policing myself. I'm like, oh, I'm doing exactly what my dad did. So I know this is how he felt about me. Do you find yourself talking to him? No, but I dream about. I know I asked you last night if you have any dreams about your mom or anything.

And then I'm saddened for you that you don't. But I have this not only do I have dreams about him, but he was really diminished the last decade of his life. He also had, you know, terrible heart disease. My father, when he ate a pizza at night, he would have a frozen pizza, and that was just the base. And then came hot dogs and salsa and chicken fingers and the things that he would create. that he would create. You know, he was indulgent. And so, unfortunately, my memory of him for a long time was clouded by that diminished state

he was in. But now, when I have these dreams with them, I kind of interact with him at my age, well, probably him even younger, when he was like a really gunsling car salesman who was a smooth talker with ladies. Again, the gift he gave me. This man was defined by getting girls way out of his pay grade. Well, by the way, let me just... I must have got that from somewhere.

Let me just jump in because one of the things you said is that he was in the hospital in his final days and not even really very communicative with you, but there was a moment when a nurse came in and he had to pee, and I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but I'll read what you wrote. She was helping him pee, and you wrote, she was manipulating his penis into the mouth of the jug

when he mustered up the strength and focus to say something pervy into her ear. He had stopped talking for five days. I was like, oh, he's done talking. This is one of the last stages. And I was like, no, he definitely just spoke in her ear. Yeah, he said he had lost the will to eat. And you were able to decipher a few words what he said,

but none of them good. No. Yeah. Toward the end, though, you actually... were able to give him a gift. And you write about it. You say, at one point, and unbeknownst to both of us, my wife walked into the room. She'd flown in from L.A. without any warning. It was a surprise. It was an amazing, incredible, perfectly time surprise. Do you want to talk about what she did? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to. She's done so many incredible things over the 19 years. We've been together,

but she's intuitive, like crazy. So I was there, and I was growing really, really upset with the amount of people visiting my dad, and they were all really well-intentioned. These were people who had been through AA with your dad, and he had really showed up for them. Yes, and so his room was an unending parade of many, many people, and they were all lovely and well-intentioned,

but it put me in the position of them grieving and me, having to comfort them, and I was starting to resent that I couldn't just be in there with my dad and I was starting to get really quite overwhelmed with that. And I went outside to sit in the car to get a breather and I kind of called Kristen to just vent about it. I mean, this is unbelievable this story. Kristen Bell is your wife. Yeah. Princess Anna. I was complaining and she said, it's okay. I'm here. Look to the left.

California and I'm in Detroit and I looked to my left and she's standing there seven months pregnant she had flowed she knew I was struggling and she had flown and not told me and figured out where this hospital was it was standing next to the car yeah what a champ you know and then uh so then we went in and visited my dad and again he wasn't talking of only the nurses at that point And yeah, she came in and he got to feel her belly. Yeah, there's a picture of that I'd like to show. Look how cute she looks with that belly, too. His head and her belly, that's quite a...

What's rounder? I just want to read what you wrote about that moment. You said she lifted her shirt up and he put his hand on her swollen stomach. He left it there for the better part of an hour. He was smiling from ear to ear, sitting contentedly, unable to put together a sentence, but still capable of connecting to the new family member we were creating. He wasn't going to make it to the birth, but that didn't get in the way of him meeting the new baby. It was an emotional and triumphant moment, one I will never forget.

If I live to be a thousand, I will still be in debt to my wife for giving him that one last thrill. She's a gangster, y'all. I have come through my forgiveness and growing love for my dad and my acceptance that I'm so much like him. And watching this little girl who's unfortunate or fortunate enough for her very much like me, I don't see the divisions anymore, the compartments that I thought of is like he's one thing and I'm a thing and she's a thing. I can feel we're this thing that's moving through time. And it's so special, and I'm glad he got to touch the new iteration. Could you talk more about that?

This connection through generations through time. Yeah, I mean, if you think of, like, Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, and how really we think of ourselves as animals evolving, but we're genes evolving. And when you think about evolution on a gene level versus an animal level or a population level, it's just a fascinating way to think about how things are just traveling through time. and of course half of my genetics are him and they happen to be the ones that seem to be most expressed, which is interesting. And then those same ones just zip through me to her. There's not a break in those genes, you know.

They don't know that they were in that body, in this body, and that body. They're those genes. So I just think the unending fluid nature of that is a little beyond comprehension. It's a little spiritual. It's a little spooky. You feel connected to your dad in a way you never did before. I don't know that there's a difference is where I'm approaching.

I don't know that there's a dad and a me and a her. I think there's this like river. And through so much luck and good fortune, the river keeps getting better, you know. He had an incredibly challenging life of his own. He had addiction. He had a lot of things to overcome. I did too, but I did that. a little better and a little quicker.

And then this little girl of ours is, you know, she's a much superior version of me. I'm so optimistic when I see the trajectory of this fluid line of genes. We're going to take a short break. We'll have more with Dax Shepard in a moment. Welcome back to my conversation with Dax Shepard at Tulane University during the New Orleans Book Festival.

You lost a friend also recently, Eric Dan. Yeah. Yes. So Eric Dane, I can now say I met in recovery, and we hated each other. I hated him. This guy's so fucking arrogant. You hated him from the beginning? Oh, I hated him. What, based on things he was saying in AA? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. All right.

Yeah. It's not all hugs and flowers, Anderson. We're just like any other group of people, we're prone to dislike each other. like each other. I mean, he exhibited so many things that I hate about myself. Was he hogging time? Or what was he doing? He, I thought he was arrogant. I thought he lacked humility.

I thought that he, he was having a very hard time. He had had a big chunk of sobriety then came back and was having a really hard time putting more time together. And I thought he was a bit of a bully. And we were in a meeting at a friend's house. Again, this was told on the podcast,

so I'm not speaking out of school. but he threatened a younger member of the group, and this had been simmering for a long time, and I said, let's go outside right now. It was on. And we walked outside to FISFight in the driveway of an AA meeting. There's not the general outcome of an AA meeting, thank goodness. And people intervened, and it was broken up,

and then God bless both of us, we kept coming back to the same meeting, like neither was going to not show up. And over the course of the next two years, I found myself starting to kind of relate to him. I also think he was getting maybe more honest, or I was open to it, but I heard his story for the first time. His father shot himself in his house.

I didn't know that. When he was a little boy, and his mom came upstairs and said, I'll tell you what happened if you promised that you won't cry. And so that little boy held on to that, and then that little boy grew up without a dad, like I grew up without a dad, and he was so in search of masculine validation,

and it took all these shapes that I hated that I'm sure he hated and me. And I remember he had a share one time, and then when it got around to me to share, and you're not allowed to cross-talk, it's a great rule of at least the group I'm in. You can't respond directly to the way. No, you're not to, like, advise,

or give your two cents. We call it cross-talk. It's no good. But I kind of broke that rule, and I said, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but that's one of my favorite shares I've ever heard. I said out loud in reference to Eric.

And then maybe a week or two later, one of his shares, he said, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I think I've come to follow up with Dax. And everyone in the group had seen us go out into the driveway a year or two before. And then we became friends. and I heard his story and I would go to his house all the time and we would chat and connect on this like the vacuum left when you don't have a dad around about how does one know if they're meeting these markers of becoming a man and in place of that force you rely on your peers which aren't the greatest evaluators of masculinity when you're 12 and I came to fall in love with a very very. scared man trying and hoping he had become a man and I related and yeah I had

I had enough loving him so much and then on that episode of the show this was only two years ago maybe he said on the on in the episode he said yeah my arm's been like atrophied on the right they think I have a virus I'm like oh that's so weird a virus that atrophies your arm. And then maybe eight months after that, he discovered, that's not what it was, it was ALS. And then it was just an insanely rapid decline. They asked me to say some things

and a tribute to him for this big ALS benefit right at the end. And for a person who was so hell-bent on being hyper-masculine and incredibly fit and strong and virile, for him to have agreed to become the face of this disease, completely diminished. I found to be the bravest thing he had done in all these pursuits of manliness. I found that to be mind-blowing and highly admirable, knowing what baggage he had with it. My fear would be that you saw any cracks in my strength, because you will pounce and attack and subjugate me. for me to do what he did would be very, very hard,

and I'm pretty blown away by it. Do you show yourself as vulnerable to your kids? Yeah, I'll say that my kids have gifted me this, which is I had not cried from probably eight, nine years old until about eight years ago, my other soulmate, other than my wife is my best friend from childhood, I got a call that he was in intensive care, and it looked very, very, very bad.

For me, my tether has been connected to this human Aaron Weekly since I was 11. And he was my refuge from this pursuit of masculinity. He also had a crazy childhood. And the two of us were able to be vulnerable with each other, which I think was very, very rare for boys in Detroit in 87. And the thought of him not being here really, really opened something up. And I was trying to tell Kristen the news I just got in that I was going to fly to Detroit. and I just couldn't really get it out.

And my kids were there. And then that was the proverbial crack in the dam, and it just hasn't stopped. But these little girls bring it out of me so much. And they love it. They laugh at me. They tease me nonstop. Is dad crying?

My weakness, my Achilles is any documentary about a female singer, I watched the Shenato come. Connor, Doc, purposely in my bedroom, middle of the day, knowing I would maybe have an issue. And sure now, I see three little faces peeking around the corner. Are you crying, Daddy? No, no. Yeah, if you're a woman who's been through some shit and you step on a stage and open up your mouth and let it rip in spite of that, I'm on the ground crying. So, yeah, they see me, they see me cry a lot now.

Dad used to cry a lot like at anything. If the song Amazing Grace was playing anywhere, he would, like, we saw a movie called Conrack with John Voight, and it was about a guy in the South who was a teacher, and I just remember him weeping in the theater. You know, you have this great obligation when you have kids to, for me, the way I frame it, maybe it's right or wrong, which is like, I'm the guy in their life.

And so I'm setting the bar of what they think they deserve. And so I think they deserve someone who takes them very seriously and listens to them all the time. And I think they deserve a man who's willing to be emotional and be present and not be afraid of their emotions. And I have to get over my shit to be that man in their lives. That's my job. Yeah. I'm just, God, I've lived this long to be able to do that for my kids and with my kids. There's nothing better.

I think we're out of time. Dex Sheppard, thank you. Oh, so fun. Thank you, everybody. I want to thank Dax Shepherd for that conversation and the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University for letting us share it as an episode of All There Is. And I want to thank Walter Isaacson for inviting me there.

A couple of upcoming things to tell you about Thursday, April 9th. I hope you join me at 9.15 p.m. from my streaming show, All There is Live. It's our live show about loss streaming on our grief community page, cnn.com slash all there is. You can also communicate with others who are watching at the same time. One of my guests will be Julie Devaney Hogan, a wife and mom to three young kids who was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was treated but has now come back as a very aggressive form of brain cancer. My biggest fear truly as mothers that they certainly will be given permission to cry, but will they still find joy and humor and ways to laugh in life? Will they come to family events and will they be treated as the child who lost their mother young? Or will they be scooped up and brought into a joke and brought into a laugh and brought into a song as our family typically does?

So I have found I have to be really direct in sharing with my family and my close friends what I want right now. What I want is for us to continue to laugh. I want the raw, gorgeous grit of our family to continue to exist as it is. To watch All There Is Live, just go to CNN.com slash All There Is on Thursday night, April 9th at 915 p.m. If you missed the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. All the older episodes of that show are available on demand for CNN subscribers. Coming up on the podcast, my interview with Sarah Wildman. She's an editor and writer at the New York Times.

Sarah's daughter, Orley, had a rare form of liver cancer and died in March 2023. She was 14 years old. I came across some of the pieces that Sarah has written in the Times about Orally and was so moved by them, I reached out to her and been wanting to talk with her ever since. And we just sat down together a couple weeks ago. There's something so profoundly off-kilter about having nurtured someone from birth and seeing them leave. And I know I'm not the first person to have done it, but it feels like that. so out of order, you know, I felt like in free fall, you know. What does it mean now? What does anything mean? How do I put one foot in front of the other? How do I relate to anybody? How do I

go out looking like a person? You know, how do I not appear to every single person that I'm completely shattered? What's so strange is what allows us to get up again each morning or do the things that we're supposed to do. I almost wanted to run. That's Sir Wildman on an upcoming episode of all there is. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others we'd like to hear from you, leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. Thanks for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone.