Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Best of Thursdays 2023

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

On this special episode, we revisit some of our favorite moments from Thursday episodes in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Mouw. Are you tired, Shepard? No, I'm not tired. This is the best of Thursdays. So if you listen to Best of Mondays, you know that we have split it into two bests of, which is a great, great, great choice by Monica. She had her thinking cap on.

So these are our favorite experts of the year. You know, it'd be fun if you, I bet you could buy this, a cap, baseball cap that says thinking cap. Write that down. That's a hat on a hat on the nose. Or, okay, then there's another hat called. How about a hat? On a hat. There's a lot of these. Etsy's got a whole bunch. On a hat. There's a lot of these. Etsy's got a whole bunch.

But what about you have a hat, but the hat for no reason has a little support beam that sticks to your nose so that the bill doesn't come down low. Okay. And then you would say that hat's too on the nose. Oh, that's good. You'd probably make you cross-eyed if you wore it long enough. Yeah, that sounds painful. And then there's a hat, baseball cap style, and then a small beret on top of the cap. And that's a hat on a hat. Okay. I would just want to suggest that you do a bowler hat on top of that. I love a beret. I know, but both are round, like you have a pancake on a scoop of ice cream. Oh, you want shape. Well, you just hate circles. I love circles.

I'm so motivated by circles. The world runs on circles. What are we talking about? Okay, please enjoy the best of Thursdays. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on a beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub. Expedia. Made to travel.

From episode 533, Phil Stutz. A big part of my philosophy, especially with performers, is failure and loss. They almost have to be worshipped as if they're gods. They're positives. Obviously, you have to know how to deal with them so you don't get paralyzed completely. Why are they to be worshipped? If you think of it in terms of the shadow, which is the part of you you don't want anybody to see, but you can't get rid of, but you still try to hide it, it has a lot of stored up stuff in it.

Emotions, memories, attitudes, fears, whatever it is. You have to get at that stuff with the human ego. Its nature is to try to avoid that. nature is to try to avoid that. So the definition of the ego is removing anything that you think the world will look askance at, will shame you, embarrass you, whatever it is. So let me tell you how I invented this. Of course I do, yeah. Yeah, you guys are actors. I had first gotten out here was the 80s. I was just learning about acting and show business, all this stuff. So a typical thing would happen would be one of my patients would get a callback. They get so excited about it. And then they say, OK, I have to replicate that reading.

So a callback is the one that happens after your initial audition. Basically, you made it through a round of the process. That's right. And right, your immediate inclination is like, Oh fuck, what did I do? That was so right in that room. I have to figure out how to do the exact same thing in this call back. So in fact, they would say to the shadow, just stay outside because if they see you, we are roundly fucked. There's no chance. Just wait out here. It'll take five minutes. I'll buy you an ice cream. What happens is you tell your shadow, stay out, stay away. So you, the ego is working so hard to make the thing perfect. And what you really get is like a flat reading. It's not terrible,

but it doesn't catch your attention. It's dead. And the reason it's dead is because the shadow has been excluded. And by the way, when you tell the shadow to stay outside, what he says is, I'll wait for you out here, but don't expect any help from me. You are fucked. I resent being rejected. I mean, it's not that on the nose, but it's close to it. And when the shadow rebels, it's kind of a withdrawn state and the soul force doesn't come out because the soul force or flow, whatever you want to call it, it's unpredictable. It's sloppy. It's messy because it doesn't care about the things that we care about. It doesn't want to win. It's not playing for that.

It doesn't believe in words that much. It believes in feelings much, much more than in words. The ego thinks the shadow is insane. That's the best way to say it because his value system is so different. So I started to bring the shadow with me. I would talk to him and i say you can come in here you can say and do whatever you want i'll tell you between the two of you you have an excellent vibe to give that permission oh thank you that's the goal of this entire thing oh it is

it is first i want to ask before i proclaim the agenda of this show, is it fair to say that what we're most attracted to, even though we avoid it in real life, what we're most attracted to in life is complexity and multidimensionality. And when you leave your shadow outside, you're literally leaving one of your most fundamental dimensions so when i now am just my ego or my superego or my perfect self we can feel that this is two-dimensional there's not that other bit of geometry that makes you complex and intriguing this is a little bit broader of an issue but it's important which is most people live pursuing that which is magical. So if I just draw like a rectangle on a piece of paper, but it's outlined with dashes, it's not a solid line. And I call that the pursuit of perfection. This is the snapshot?

Yeah, this is the snapshot. But that idea, it seems to make sense. But what it really does is if you think about it, it has the quality of a snapshot. Now, a snapshot has no movement in it and no depth. So the more you hunt for the perfect, the flatter the thing gets. From episode 573, Rick Rubin. We make it less cold? Yes. Or at least, it's just blowing right on me.

Something is blowing cold right on me. It snowed in Los Angeles yesterday. Wow. I know. And I'm just coming from Costa Rica, so I'm particularly. I applaud your lack of codependency, because I would find myself freezing somewhere, and then I would just deal with it. I know, I'm glad you said it.

Because I'd be too afraid you wouldn't like me. I'm impressed by what I just witnessed. Why do I care if you like me? Yeah, you can advocate for yourself. I'm here to be myself. Yeah. I hope you like me, but I'm not going to change me so that you like me. Right, you're not going to pretend you're warm and you're cold.

No. But I'll like you. That wouldn't exist. Admirable. You realize a lot of people struggle with that. Most people. No. That I'll like you. That's admirable.

You realize a lot of people struggle with that. Most people. Therein lies what my job is and what the job of creativity is, is knowing yourself, being okay with yourself, and being able to say, feels cold in here. That's all my job is. Yeah. It really is.

Wow, it just happened. That's fascinating. It was like when Jonah started actually participating in Let's Stutz. Yeah. It really is. Wow, it just happened. It was like when Stutz, it was like when Jonah started actually participating and let Stutz therapize him. You know, you can talk about therapy for a long time. You can talk about it as tools, but until there's a click in the doc where we start seeing them being used

and then you can understand them in a way that's profound. So yes, we could have talked about your book all day long. Also, I've been asked about how do you have confidence in your taste? And it's like, I'm either cold or I'm not cold. It's so clear. It's like, I'm getting chilly. I feel like there's cold wind blowing on me.

And it has no more meaning than seems cold in here. There's no greater meaning. There's no insult. It's so face value. This is what's happening. And I'm responding to what's happening. It's so face value. Yeah. This is what's happening. And I'm responding to what's happening. That's all. Within that is a tool because for most people, it is much more cluttered than that.

Every little thing, am I cold or am I not? Because a lot of people go, I'm cold. Huh? They're not. Why am I cold? They're not. Oh, don't you have an iron deficiency? You know, it could lead to a million thoughts.

It's true. Or like this is their space and I know, it could lead to a million thoughts. It's true. Or like this is their space and I can't be the one to call it out. Like Letterman famously, did you ever do Letterman in the day? I never did, but I know we kept it freezing cold. It was like 50 degrees in there, right? And you went in knowing this motherfucker likes it ice cold. And if you'd have said to me, you know, we really like doing the show cold. Right.

We could get you a blanket. It's like, okay. Like I would roll with it, but I'm still telling you. Gonna say it. I'm not you a blanket. It's like, okay. Like, I would roll with it, but I'm still telling you. I'm going to say it. I'm not going to walk out. I think it's okay. Yes, it is.

I talk about these things. I love it. I love it. It should be easier. That's fascinating. Yeah. From episode 578, David Sedaris.

I just got some good postcards. I was just in Australia, and I went to a place I'd always wanted to go to in Tasmania called the Museum of Old and New Art, MONA. And a billionaire, he made his money online gambling, I think. Not gambling himself, but setting it up so that other people could. And then he opened a museum. And one of the things in the museum, and it wasn't there when we went,

was it's like a toilet kind of thing, and there's a camera in it, and it broadcasts your anus. Oh, wow. Huge. And you watch people. I'm okay if I don't know what mine looks like. I don't want to know.

But they built a man-made colon, and they feed it at 11 in the morning, and it defecates at 2 in the afternoon. And you couldn't believe what it smelled like. Oh. It's in this big, beautiful room. And I'd never smelled anything quite like it. Oh, my God. And they said, no, it's just breaking the food down.

That causes the smell. But then there's Picasso pottery. Oh, my God. Wow. And in the gift shop, I bought some great postcards and I bought four bars of soap that were cast from four different women's vaginas. Oh. Wonderful. Yeah. Did the shape surprise you? Yeah, this is a good question. Yeah. In what way? Was it like deeper and longer than you were expecting? Was it because of the vulva or was it like they had filled the vagina with wax and it hardened? No, it was like the outside of the vulva. Yeah, the vulva.

The outward shape. The rose. Yeah, it was just what a guy, you know, does that make sense? It's making sense. Sure, sure, sure. Dax is worried that someone shoved wax up a woman's vagina. Like had a woman do a handstand and then filled her full of wax and then took that out. Because that to me probably would be shockingly large.

But they sell it online at the gift shop, Mona, M-O-N-A. And it's $40 for a bar of soap. But such a good gift for people. You didn't use the soap, did you? No, I don't think anybody would. I think it's so nice and it comes in a pretty box and then you kind of save it and put it out. Does it have a photo of the woman whose vagina it is? No.

Okay. It smells like there are four different scents, like one sandalwood, one rose. Okay. It's not like the goop vagina candle that Bernice Paltrow made. No. Back to the toilet exhibit, because I want to make sure I understand it correctly. They've built a mechanical digestion system. Yes, yes.

Okay, and they didn't try to make it look like a man on top of it. They're just packing a box full of food and letting it rot. It's three massive jars, and the food goes into one, and it goes into another, and then it defecates. The whole room smells because it's constantly breaking down the food. Sure, sure, sure. And it made me think, too, I spent two weeks at the medical examiner's office in Phoenix. They would do autopsies, and the most disturbing part of it wasn't the sight of it, but it was the smell of it. And I can't say the stink exactly, but it's a smell that says to your brain, run.

Yes. Yes. Death. It's evolutionary. Get as far away from here as possible. Yeah. From episode 643, Gabor Mate. Okay. You and I have both are addictive behaviors, Monica, have you?

Yeah, again, not drugs. Oh, so let me give you a definition of addiction, then you tell me. Okay. By the way, the word addiction comes from a Latin word for slavery. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Well, isn't that accurate? Yeah.

Addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences. So pleasure, craving, relief in the short term, harm in the long term, refusal or inability to give it up. That's what an addiction is. I didn't say anything about drugs.

It could include drugs, obviously. Nicotine, caffeine, crystal meth, heroin, fentanyl, alcohol. Could also be sex, gambling, shopping, pornography. Fantasy. Eating, fantasy, bulimia, internet gaming, work, power. I could go on and on and on. So yes. So the issue is not.

I don't get it. Absolutely. So here's what I'm going to ask both of you guys now. Not what was wrong with the addiction, not even what the addiction was, but what did you get from it in the short term that you craved? So, Monica, what did you get? Validation. Can you say more about that?

Feelings of being worthy. Okay, thank you. Dax, what did your addictions give you? Relief. From? Pain. Yeah. Hence my mantra.

Don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. In my case, it's also validation, for example, and also a real sense of being alive. Yeah. Hence my mantra. Don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. In my case, it's also validation, for example, and also a real sense of being alive. Yes. Temporary dopamine. An arousal junkie. Yeah, yeah. Sense of being alive, sense of being worthy, pain relief,

are the good things or bad things in themselves? Right things. Good things. Essential. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your addiction was an attempt to solve a problem. It's an adaptation.

The real problem was your lack of worthiness or your belief in your lack of worthiness, which is a result of trauma. The pain that you experienced, you've already talked about it. DAX is sourced in very painful experiences. Mine as well. And I'm not telling on Monica out of school, because we've talked about this a bunch on here. What is really salient is, yeah, so mine involves like criminal activity. Hers is not, but the result is just as strong. In fact, definitely as strong. Yeah, yeah.

And maybe even more strong. That's the whole point. Yeah, being brown in the South and liking a boy and having the boy say, I can't like you back because you're brown is like, well, that's a wrap on that. And some passed down abandonment stuff.

This is my issue. I know that about myself, but it's like what we said earlier. It happens in here all the time and it continues to happen where I don't feel like I should be here and I don't know how to stop it. The therapist on me wants to jump on this like a dog on a bone. I want you to. Attack, attack, sicker. Okay.

But let's just conclude the point. Your addictions, my addictions were adaptations. Adaptations to what? To emotional pain. Where is that pain sourced? In trauma. So addictions are not diseases that you inherit. They're not bad habits that you choose.

They're desperate attempts to relieve suffering. That's all they are. And the fact that your addictions were criminal, it's only because this society criminalizes certain addictions. I meant the inciting trauma to me. Yeah. You could try to evaluate as being more traumatic than that. I don't compare traumas. That was the point I was making is I would debunk that. Yeah. Even though yours is criminal, hers is just as devastating. Yes, exactly. So the result's the same. So, Monica, can I ask you a couple of questions?

Yeah. First of all, you said that you don't feel like you belong. Is that the phrase you used? I think I did say that, yeah. Freudian slip. So let me give you a bit of coaching, if I may. Yeah, please. I don't belong is not a feeling.

Feelings are I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm sad, I'm angry. Those are feelings or emotions. What is I don't belong? Opinion? A fact? Fear? It's an opinion. It's a point of view. Yeah. What do you feel when you believe that you don't belong?

Ah, unnecessary? Unnecessary is not a feeling. You're right. Okay. I guess sad, but that seems basic. What do you mean that seems basic? It seems so obvious, but it feels deeper than the word sad. No, no, wait a minute. No.

If you're willing to work with this, just stay with this belief that I don't belong here. Did you experience it here today? Yes. Okay. Now just check in with your body. What do you feel when you have that belief, when that belief seizes hold of you? Physically, I feel hot. Okay.

If this was on camera, when you said that, what would the audience have seen on your face? Just now when I said it? Yeah. You probably don't know. Did I smile or laugh? You smiled. What's funny about it? I want to smile again. What's funny about it? Nothing. Okay. So what you're already doing is you're distancing yourself from your feeling. That's not a criticism, just an observation. For for a good reason you learned that i better not be with my feelings i better kind of minimize them but let's go back to the question again what do you feel when you believe that there's three of us here engaged in this to me very deep and honest conversation yes and you don't belong what do you actually feel in your body when you believe that I would say

hopeless that's not a feeling oh god hopeless is a belief that there's no hope what do you feel when you believe things are hopeless

sad sadness yeah now how does sadness show up in your body everything feels retreated and deflated kind of constriction

yes in your chest and your belly and so on can you be with that emotion right now just for a moment is it okay that things are constricted can you just chest and your belly and so on can you be with that emotion right now just for a moment is it okay that things are constricted can you just accept them and be with them what's it like when you're with them when you're not deflecting the minimizing

it's uncomfortable and painful like it hurts there's pain there can you be with that pain i don't want to who the heck wants to yeah of course you don't pain there. Can you be with that pain? I don't want to. Who the heck wants to? Yeah. Of course you don't want to. But can you be? Yeah. Okay.

That's the way through. Is you actually have to allow yourself to have those emotions and to be with them. Because it's got nothing to do with being worthy or not worthy. It's got to do with these emotions that we don't know how to be with. Because as a child, you weren't given the support to experience all your emotions. So you can actually work your way through it. But your way through is through the body, not just by talking about it. You have to actually be with this stuff.

I'm not a Buddhist teacher by any means, but I'm talking basic, you know, but the Buddha said, you just got to be with all this stuff and notice. And then, by the way, who's the person that's noticing the pain and staying with it? Who's the person that's being honest about it? Me. Yeah. Is that person really not worthy? No.

Okay. I love you, buddy. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated.

Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan. And they both spent the week in the water. You were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub and, of course, a great shower. Expedia. Made to travel. From episode 661, Barbara Kingsolver.

Growing up in a working class culture and a working class place, you don't say you want to be an artist when you grow up. Well, at least in Kentucky, you don't say that because it seems... It feels hoity-toity. It feels hoity-toity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it feels. It feels upper class.

It feels rich. We hate rich people. Exactly. It's self-indulgence. What a luxury. And it's putting yourself above it. Like, I'm not one of you. It's like saying, I'm going to be Meryl Streep when I grow up.

Yes, which happened on accident. Yes, I just kept this to myself. Can I say as a boy, as a young boy growing up in very blue-collar Detroit area, it was gay. That was my fear. I was writing. I was being creative. And so my little paradigm I was stuck in was that was gay. Because it was feminine, which also is probably part of your feeling too.

You want to be a powerful woman, which means more masculine. Right. I need to do what the boys are doing. They're not writing poems. Right. That's for sure. It's all wild. That either of us would have had any thought like this thing needs to be private.

It's so crazy. Yeah. And God forbid if you'd wanted to be a dancer. Oh, no. It wasn't on the table. People ask me that in interviews, like, when'd you know you were going to be an actor? Did you act all through high school? I'm like, you didn't go to my high school. I would have acted in high school. I had to get my ass kicked in the parking lot every day. Not an option. That's how I felt for a long time after I left Carlisle, Kentucky. Being a writer

was not an option. Saying I am a writer, I couldn't imagine it. I needed to be something real and practical. So I just wrote. And all that time I was traveling around, I was still writing and I wrote poems in French. God, they're probably terrible. But I was writing and processing. And I think what hit me in Tucson is I didn't have a voice. I wasn't from anywhere. Interesting. I didn't have any authority. I was writing short stories set in Tucson, and they just felt fake, just as fake as those French stories that I wrote.

There was no authenticity. And also, honestly, I had internalized the shame of being hillbilly. I mean, we haven't even started on that. Oh, no, we're getting there. But just as I didn't understand I was white until I went to the Congo, I didn't understand I was a hillbilly until I went to college in a state where people stopped me in the cafeteria and made me say words so that they could laugh at me. W-A-S-H. Warsh. Yeah.

Yeah, and syrup. What's this syrup? Smells like a polecat. What? Yeah, just mocking my accent and saying, oh, you're wearing shoes. How cute. So I just kind of erased that. The accent you're hearing now, I code shift.

When I'm in Kentucky or when I'm at home, when I'm talking to my neighbors, I talk the way I spoke growing up. But little by little and not really intentionally, I just neutralized my affect. For sure. So that people will listen to what you're saying instead of stopping at the words. Really quick, you're arriving at a place that artists have to arrive at, which is you first start by trying to emulate things that you yourself find captivating or romantic, and you can't succeed at it. And then hopefully the road leads you to believing,

actually, my version is worthy of telling, and my voice is worthy of listening to. And that's such a crazy road. I agree with you completely, and I'd take it a step further. You have to get to, I do have something to say. My voice is worthy. Furthermore, it's the only thing I've got. Yeah, exactly. It's your only true asset. And if all you have out there are antennae for what you think people want from you, you got nothing. Other prerequisite knowledge you must know is that I fucking hated the hillbilly elegy.

Thank you. I fucking hated it. Monica and I had a bunch of arguments. I was screaming from the rooftop. This is a fraudulent account of all of this. The person wasn't there. They didn't experience any of this. This is bullshit.

And the one good thing about him running and winning the position he has now is it's proof that he's not one of us. Well, that's the only thing that ultimately Monica had to— I had to really eat my shorts or whatever that phrase is. Because we had a lot of arguments around that. Because he was like, I don't buy it. I know that world. And I'm also from the South.

I'm from Georgia. So I was like, well, you can't assume just because it wasn't your experience. Like, we had so many debates. We had a lot of debates about it, right? Okay. And then I had to be like, God, you were right. This fraud. It's his worldview.

Okay, here's my complaint about that book. We don't even have to say the name of it. He's entitled to write his memoir. The fact that that got pitched and bought wholesale as my memoir too and your memoir too. and bought wholesale as my memoir, too, and your memoir, too. The explanation of a people makes me so mad because he had no context. He didn't talk about structural poverty. He didn't talk about the history of this region. It was a self-aggrandizement of his enormous accomplishment.

Well, it was bootstraps. Yes. I went to the Ivy League. If you only work hard enough, you can be. Right. And the thing is, what's heartbreaking about it is that it really validated the stereotype. It was so widely, sorry. No.

You've already eaten your shorty. Yeah. It was so embraced by the rest of America because they want to hate on hillbillies. They want to look down on us. We are the last class of people that progressive people get to make fun of. There's also a poll. Humans love a, quote, underdog. People love an underdog story.

And that's what it felt like a little bit, which is very problematic because it's, again, this model minority issue where it's like, oh, everyone— Also, he's pretending he's Basquiat, and he's not. Exactly. Right, right. It makes people believe, oh, well, if he can do it, what's wrong with everybody else? Yeah. And that's wholly wrong. A lot of us recognize structural racism, institutional racism, but structural classism is just not talked about.

From episode 591, Michael Waldman. They call it the counter-majoritarian. In other words, sometimes when the crowd wants something, you want someone to say, slow down everybody. But not too much. Sooner or later, you want the country as it is and as it's growing and changing to be reflected in the government that is supposedly elected by the people. There were only three times in the country's history where the Supreme Court left this kind of invisible, unmarked spot in a really big way, where it was extreme or partisan or unduly activist.

And each time there was a massive backlash. There was a massive political and social backlash. There was even a political realignment. You know, one of the questions is, are we in a beginning of a moment like that now? So one of them, for example, which I talk about in the book, is the Dred Scott case.

So that was the first time Supreme Court really, really got in the middle of things. And only the second time in the country's history, they struck down a law of Congress. There'd been all this growing agitation over slavery and efforts to push slavery out of the South so that it would be more nationwide. Every time there was new territories, every time there was a war,

we had to decide. And the country was getting more and more worked up about it. And the Supreme Court said, we're going to intervene and, quote, solve the problem, meaning the problem of agitation over slavery, not the problem of slavery. They did this case Dred Scott, which was an enslaved man who'd gone to a northern free territory and became free and then went back home to Missouri. And they said, oh, you're a slave again. And he fought this 11-year battle. First of all, everyone knew it was going to be a really big deal. You might remember that the Dobbs case, the abortion case leaked last year. That was a really dramatic thing. The Dred Scott case leaked. Really? It leaked to the incoming president-elect Buchanan. He was actually

privately lobbying them, hey, go big, overturn the limits on slavery. And so then he knew exactly what they were going to do. So he had his inaugural. And first of all, he was on the stage and he was like whispering to the chief justice and everybody said, well, we know what that means. And then he got up in his inaugural address and he said, well, the Supreme Court's going to make this big ruling in a few days. None of us know what it will be, but let's just all agree we're going to abide by it, whatever it says. And the newspapers the next day said, well, we know what that means. So it said Congress could not limit slavery in the Northern territories. Wow. Not only that, Black people are so inferior they can never be citizens and have no rights.

This was explosive. It led to an incredible eruption, led to the rise of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln's whole political career was to take on this opinion. From episode 599, Megan Phelps Roper. You were very involved. You're, I guess, from the outside, from my perspective, you're kind of an heir apparent. Your mother was the matriarch of this organization, right? And she was a lawyer herself and had originally picked all the picketing spots and whatnot.

Ultimately turned over to you at some point. That became your role. About a year and a half before I left, there was kind of this big shift within the church where these elders took over. It was all of the essentially older married men. And so a lot of the things that my mom did fell to me. My mom, a lot of her influence within the church came from the fact that she would do anything. So again, I'm the third of 11. I felt like she had like seven or eight full-time jobs. Like she was doing the media for the church and all the logistical operations, which it's all of the external facing stuff,

like the protests, but also all the internal stuff, like lawn mowing and daycare operations and like piano lessons. And it's an incredibly well orchestrated operation. And did she ever say to you guys behind closed doors, did she ever have to preface that? Like, I know this is extreme, but never. No, no. It's really funny because my husband had these questions too, before he was

my husband. He would ask these questions like, we had to know how crazy this was, right? This had to be something that we like, wink, wink, nod, nod. And I was like, no, because we believed that the Bible was the infallible word of God. In other words, it wasn't us. We weren't wrong. It was other people were wrong. Like they were the ones who had left the truth of God. And it's so clearly set out here. Can't you just memorize this verse?

Yeah. And it wasn't intentionally inflammatory as much as it's intentionally the truth. So it wasn't until after I left, and actually the process of writing my book, as I was kind of following the way things had fallen out. Because, you know, again, I was five when all this started. You start doing interviews very, very young and you two start participating in a lot of the forward facing media stuff.

So you're pretty fucking savvy by the time you're 17 years old. I was just right there with my mom. It was one of the things, you know, she required me. I'm the oldest girl. I think she was trying to protect me and keep me close. And so there were moments where I started to go out into the world to get an outside job, and those ended very quickly. So I accepted that this was my role. As I was going back through my memories and the newspaper articles and talking to the older people in my mom's generation who

had left when I was very young. So people who I didn't really know and I was asking them all these questions. I think one of the things that I didn't realize at first was my grandfather was absolutely using the power of the 24-hour news cycle. And it's very funny because you can see this happening on social media today. Outrage, provocative things, like this is what gets attention. And so we optimize for those things. My mom would say, this is the soundbite generation. This is why we have three to five words on a picket sign, the most inflammatory version of our message. It's real and it's true. And we believed every word of it, but it's also clearly something that is designed to get attention. And it's funny,

I remember sitting in on an interview that my grandfather gave and the reporter said, some people say that you're just doing this for attention. And my grandfather looked at her like she was an idiot. And he was like, well, of course, I'm doing this for attention. How am I going to preach to these people if I don't have their attention? Your transition out of it starts in, I guess, 09 when you joined Twitter. Yes. Your TED Talk, which I urge everyone to see, it's tremendous. You really detail this whole experience. And you're urging people who would like to challenge other people's beliefs to use four steps.

So maybe we could talk about the four steps because I think they're wonderful and they're the ones that ultimately broke through to you. Yeah, I got on Twitter to spread the church's message. Initially, the responses that I got there were very much like what I experienced on the picket line, a lot of anger and reflecting the same kind of hostility and provocation that people felt from me. And then there were these individuals who just used these, to me, the very basic tactics. I'm essentially in that TED talk, I'm just describing what people did for me. So the four steps.

The first one is don't assume bad intent. Because it immediately cuts you off from being able to understand, you know, like we were saying earlier, seeing people in their own context. Because if you believe that they are doing this on purpose, if they are purposefully doing what they know is wrong. They're nefarious. They're forces of evil. Exactly. Like, what hope do you have of changing their mind? They have to be defeated, right? That's the sense. Second point was ask questions for a number of reasons. Like first, that's the

thing that helps you understand where they're coming from so that you can address what they actually believe. But there's also this other point, which is that when you ask people questions and you give them an opportunity to be heard, that sense of feeling heard, I think, also makes us more likely to listen. These people are asking me all these questions. So I'm like going on and on about, you know, I have a lot of things to tell you because I memorized all these Bible verses. And then I get to the end of it. And then what?

And it's like, well, what do you think? Yeah. What do you make of this? Like, how could you possibly disagree with this? Yeah, right. Asking questions is actually a really powerful tool. I feel like they seem very obvious, but they're not easy. From my perspective, we are all the product of our biology and our upbringing, our environment.

So it's really funny. The epigraph of my book is this line from The Great Gatsby that says, reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. Oh, I like that. I love it so much. That was one of the things that I read, you know, because it was Chad's profile picture when he was anonymous on Twitter back in the day was Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. Oh, you're kidding. I'm surprised you guys don't live on West Egg instead of South Dakota. I went back to reread that because I'd read it in high school and that was near the beginning

of the book. Even for people who seem to be doing really bad things. The recognition that who they are in this moment isn't who they have to be forever. From episode 652, Robert Sapolsky. So then you look at some interesting things about stress. Suppose you're two years old, you're stressed at home because you're growing up in poverty and your food's lousy and your parent or parents are never around, they're stressed as hell. By age five, you take kids in kindergarten and the socioeconomic status of their families is a predictor of how high their cortisol levels are going to be when they're just sitting there quietly. how high their cortisol levels are going to be when they're just sitting there quietly

and you put them in a brain scanner. And by age five, if you make this stupid decision to be born into a poor family, your frontal cortex is already maturing more slowly than average. You're already starting to pay the price for it. It is so screwed.

Okay, a study last year, brain imaging techniques, first couple of studies where you could now do imaging on a fetus's brain. Whoa. You look at fetal brains and you look at mom's socioeconomic status. No. And what her cortisol levels are like in her bloodstream, which gets across the placenta and into the kid's brain. And during fetal life, your mother's SES is already impacting the grade at which your brain is growing. And presumably the amygdala is growing as well at an asymmetrical rate.

Yep. Get exposed to a lot of your mom's stress hormones while you're a fetus. And as an adult, you'll have a bigger amygdala. Oh my God. Be more reactive. And here's the real horror of it. As an adult, you had a bigger amygdala that's

more reactive and secretes more stress hormones. And thus, when you get pregnant, your fetus is going to be exposed to more of your stress hormones and get born with an enlarged amygdala, and it goes multi-generationally. The cycle. And when they say trauma is passed down, that's a biological reason why. Yeah. In addition to maybe also epigenome as well, right? Mom's passing down her epigenome. Am I right about that? Yep.

Experience doesn't change your genes, but it changes the regulation of them. And have a whole lot of those stress hormones coming all over your fetal brain. You do epigenetic things. You futz with it so that certain on and off switches are stuck in the off position forever after and others are in the on position. And you got that now. That's part of the instructions

of what kind of brain are you constructing so that you either go out and succeed or don't in the world. Of, let's just say, a man, he's holding a gun, he's in a riot, and someone's approaching, and they pull something out. It looks like it could be a gun. The man shoots, and we say, what happened one second before he shot? What most courtrooms will ask at that point is, what happened one second before? And once we know the answers to that, we're set. Did the guy intend to shoot? Did he realize what the consequences would be?

Did he realize there were alternatives? He could have done something else. And the answer to all of those is yes. And you say, okay, that's it. There was intent. He should be held responsible. The problem with looking at one second before, one minute before is you're not asking, where did that intent come from in the first place? Not if he had that intent at the time. Where did that intent come from? It had something to do with if the guy was hungry or stressed or sleepy or afraid or happy that minute. It's got something to do with what the guy's hormone levels were this morning. If he was secreting a lot of cortisol, his frontal cortex wouldn't be very good at saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. That's not a handgun. That's a cell phone. Don't

do it. Don't do it. Did the guy go through a trauma in the previous couple of years because the structure of his brain would have changed? And then you're back to adolescence and you're building the last year prefrontal cortex and childhood and culture and prenatal environment. Again, your mom's poor and already that's having an effect on your brain and your genes. Right. And then if you have this one gene, right, MAO alpha, what happens then? It comes in a couple of different flavors and studies from rats and monkeys and stuff suggested that if you had one of those flavors, you were more likely to be violent. In a courtroom, somebody even once had somebody's sentence lessened, citing that they had the quote warrior gene. And then really beautiful, thorough studies looking at people where you know what

their genetic makeup is. And you look at them from birth, and you're saying, which of them have had antisocial violence by age 25 or so? And the answer is, if you had the bad version of that gene, were you likely to be more violent than average by the time you were an adult? And the answer was, yes, if and only if you were abused as a child. It like turns that gene on almost. Yes. If you weren't abused, it didn't matter if you had that scary variant. It's not genetic inevitability.

It was genetic vulnerability, gene environment interaction stuff. And there's genes where in principle, if you've got the bad version, you should be more likely to get clinically depressed as an adult if and only if you went through major stress as a child. Other genes in this culture, if you have this gene variant, you're more likely to become

alcoholic than chance. But in this other culture, it doesn't have any effect. Why did that person pull the trigger? And you got to understand what was happening a second ago and what was happening a million years ago and everything in between, because all of that went into who that person was going to be at that instant. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. or armchair expert, if you dare.

From episode 567, Alison Roman. So you were in an interview and you were launching some partnership, some capsule product with Material. Is that the name of the company? Oh, I love Material. They're great. It's a great company. And in that you made,

so here's where I'll be critical of you. Yeah. You shouldn't talk shit about anyone. Ever. That is the biggest takeaway. This is my moral judgment of you. Are you kidding me? Don't talk shit about people.

Do your thing. That was like far and away the biggest takeaway and obviously came from such like a place of insecurity and like me being protective of my- Maybe some jealousy. Oh my God, so much jealousy. Are you kidding me? I had this like little parcel of I'm the cook lady

and I do the cooking. And then there's like other people doing it that are like beautiful and famous. And I'm like, how dare they? Who gives a shit? And why did I have to make a comment on that to increase my own value? Right, so that's the only thing for me.

And I read that, I'm like, that's a bummer. I think we'd all aspire to be bigger than that. Totally. Okay, now because the two people you criticize, because they were both Asian, that was painted as a racist point of view. Now, an allegation of racism, it kind of requires the New York Times or whoever to act. But again, what percentage of the world thought you were racist when they saw that? I have a hard time believing it was above 0.4%. I mean, my perception was it was 100%. Sure, of course. And that the whole world knew probably, right? Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. That's an

example of being like, oh, you said something super fucking stupid, really born from a place of jealousy, childishness, insecurity, all this other stuff that's obviously not coming from a well person. And you're like, oh, that was dumb. But now you're saying it's also this other thing. So it's not as easy as being like, oh God, that was such a gaffe. It then becomes like a scarlet letter on your personhood for the rest of your life. I can see why that was interpreted that way. And I would never discount somebody saying that that's how they felt for that instance, because it was like, well, you only named two people. And they happen to both be Asian.

And you're like, okay, yes, I see that looks really fucking bad. And then I'm like, I promise you, I'm just jealous, petty, and stupid. I'm not racist or whatever, you know? You should have thrown a Caucasian in there. I know, but you know what? You're just talking. Well, because Marie Kondo was on the cover of Forbes magazine that was on my kitchen table. And I had just read this article about her literally like the night before.

And I literally was cleaning out my pantry when I was giving this interview. Don't ever do that. And just like looked over and I was like, like this person and like this person. I was naming like the two most famous people I can imagine in that space. I didn't give it a fucking second thought, which was such like a frankly ignorant move on my part. And rookie mistake. Such a rookie mistake. What I interpreted in the moment as, oh, that was shitty, then almost ruined my life. Right.

You know, because of the rapid fire sort of spreading of social media. And this was also at a time where pandemic had just happened. I was very popular at the time because people were cooking a lot. And so it was like a perfect storm of I was top of mind. I was not really a celebrity. And so I was this regular person that this thing was happening to that I think encouraged more people to talk about it. It's kind of like when Julia Fox became famous. So like, I know her, I see her, Lucien. Now she's dating Kanye. Like people want to talk about it. I was like in this quote unquote

feud. Did you have defenders at that period? I'm sure, but it was too dark for me to even look to see. Anyone I had worked with, any one of my friends, like no one publicly wanted to stick their neck out because it was such an intense climate for anyone at that time. I don't begrudge anybody for it. It's like McCarthyism. It's like, oh, I don't know if he was at that meeting.

Yeah, and I think that when people say like, oh, you weren't canceled, I sort of am like, well, I was. Unless you literally die, how else do we define cancellation? Right. Because I was canceled insofar as much as that nobody would hire me for anything. I made my own work. Phone did not ring. The email box was at zero.

It was dark. It was bleak. And I was like, oh, nobody's going to ever want to work with me. No one's going to hire me. So I have to then create my own ecosystem. This is a weird new phenomenon of the last 15 years. I think there needs to be examples of what is the post-cancel landscape. And there's going to be advisable paths and ones that like,

yeah, if you're just sitting around going, when's the such and such paper going to hire me again? It's like, yeah, you are canceled. For me, I was like, well, I have to continue to do the work, make this about the work because I really believe in that. But also I hope to have a very long and storied career. Yeah. And that's going to be a shitty part of it. That's going to be like a divot. I can't just have a meteoric rise and ascend forever and ever because I'm a human person. I think what would be really helpful to people, because people experience much smaller versions of this,

but very relatable where it's like, oh my God, my life's over. My friendship circle hates me. Whatever that core community they have, they lose. People do that. Can you think of some turning points where there was breakthroughs? You must've just wallowed in it for a while. It was so dark. I lost a few friends in the process that the friendships were probably a little precarious to begin with. They were mostly white women, you know? So you're like, okay. But one really important person to me was like in her wedding, I made her wedding dessert. Like I was like, we were very close and that was really painful. But everybody else in my life was like, I know you, I love you, I stick by you, you'll get through this. Had I not had that, I would have been a nightmare. I mean, it still was a nightmare, but it took a really, really long time to be able to

leave the house with confidence. And I was really fortunate that we were wearing masks at the time because I felt like it was the only thing that protected me from this deep pit of shame every time I left the house. Because I would make eye contact with someone on the street and I'd be like, they know who I am and they fucking hate me and they think I'm a racist. Well, I was just going to say, it's not just that you were called a racist on its own. You're called a racist at the beginning of the BLM movement. I mean, the time, like there's literally going to be marches down the street where it's like high alert for races. I know really bad timing across the board. I know. I wasn't like, that's not who I am. My attitude was like, I'm bad. Like I'm sad and bad. Like I went really inward. I made myself very small. I had zero confidence. I was so shrouded in shame.

I feel like I'm going to burst into tears right now, but actually. Please do. It's really good for the show. Let it rip. Monica, honestly, when people first started telling me that you were into my recipes, I was like, does she know what I did? Oh. Because like, you're not a white lady.

You know, I'm like, oh, she's a smart, informed person. She must not know. Oh my gosh. Because if she did. Of course I knew. You're like, I am very online. Anytime I received any sort of praise or like feedback from somebody that wasn't a white person, I was like, oh my God, I'm not the fucking worst. Oh my God.

I knew I was going to cry. Monica, I'm so proud of you. No, but seriously. I'm so happy for you. And now I'm well done. I know, we're all crying. Should we take our clothes off? That's tough.

Everyone's vulnerable. We're spent out there. This will be really connective. From episode 611, Neil Theis. A lot of people have heard of something called chaos theory and or the geometry that goes with that fractals. And this comes to the scaling thing, which we may come back to. So you might look at a tree in its totality. Oh, it's a tree. And then you might find if you carve a piece off of it and you look at it under a microscope, you might be shocked to find that

the little piece of the tree actually looks almost identical to the big tree you're seeing. And that's fractals? Yeah. You don't even have to cut a piece off. Just look at the trunk and then see where it branches. Those each look like a trunk. Those branch into smaller branches. Each of those looks like a trunk. On and on until you get to the twigs.

And so the thing about fractals is that they're scale invariant. No matter how close you look or you look at it microscopically, the way the bark is forming looks like the way the bark is forming big. Clouds from a distance look puffy, but if you go closer, you feel like, why aren't I getting closer? Because you see smaller puffs and smaller puffs. In an airplane, you can't always judge how far you are away. And so it just looks like the same thing, regardless of how close or far you are. And these geometries occur all over the place. So if you look at a satellite view of a riverbed and the way a river branches into a delta, but I can show you pictures. If I don't tell you that it's a riverbed, I could tell you, oh, this is a picture

of blood vessels. Well, can I tell you? And it looks the same. Do you use Apple TV? Yes, I do. So Apple TV has these great screensavers that come on. Maybe four days ago, I'm watching one that is a satellite view of a river system. And at first, I thought, that's so weird. They're showing us some kind of cardiovascular system. Right. You had seen it one way and suddenly see it another way. People have asked me on occasion after I've given talks on all this stuff,

what's enlightenment like? Like I would know. But what I say to them is it's that moment where you thought it looked this way and then you see it that way. That's an awakening moment. Right, right. Exactly. So it's all a matter of you come in with sort of assumptions about what things are and this gets into complexity theory. You hear a sound in the sky and you look up and you see a dark, funny shape. Is it a balloon? Is it a ship? And then you realize, no, it's a murmuration of starlings. It's a flock of birds. I love the starlings. Yeah. So when you look up, if you're at the right vantage point, you might look at the group of starlings and see it as one object. And now we zoom in and what do we see? It's interacting birds. It looks like

a thing, but it's not a thing. It's interacting smaller things. You go in deep enough to the microscopic level and there's no starling. It's just cells interacting. We need to spend one second there. The notion that we're not one item is really abstract because our only interaction with it is as one cohesive unit. It's only abstract because we're trained to not see it. Yes. And my professional training, because I'm a pathologist, what that means is I look at biopsies from people's tissues under the microscope all the time. So I'm seeing people at the cellular level hours every day. Yeah.

Right. And so I live at that level of scale. I've had dreams. I never have flying dreams. Did you have flying dreams? Never had one. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, of course he does. I know. I'm jealous. I figured. Oh, God. Everyone's resentful, I think. Yeah. I had all the flying dreams.

You're the chosen person. I'm only three. I'm the new Messiah. Oh, my God. Sell your businesses. I always fly just three feet off the ground, though. So I don't want you guys to think I was up in the sky like doing somersaults. But you flew. I flew a scientist. Oh, my God. Sell your businesses. I always fly just three feet off the ground, though. So I don't want you guys to think I was up in the sky, like, doing somersaults.

But you flew. I flew, yeah. So the only time I've ever had a flying dream, I was flying over a liver slide. And I was flying in the tissue, in the valleys, up over the peaks. And part of me lives at that level of scale. My training allowed me to open up complexity theory the way I do. At the level of the cell, the bird ceases to exist. The way at the level of the bird, the flock cease to exist.

Our bodies are nothing but cells interacting with each other. Flocks of cells. Kabillions of cells. That organize themselves from the bottom up. And there's no cell in the body that's figuring out, do I need to eat? Am I hungry? Do I need to sleep? Am I tired? Am I horny? Am I excited? Am I depressed? They're all just doing their thing, interacting with each other at the local level. Someone told me that starlings pay attention to seven other starlings around them. If that's the

correct number, how they got to it is you can computer model all these things. And that's what led to chaos theory and complexity is once you had computers, you could model how things interact over time. Any one cell changes how it's going to behave. The whole system is going to change. So in Buddhist terms, that's interdependence, right? That the way the world exists depends on every single tiny piece of it, and they're all connected to each other. And the slightest change down here can yield vast changes. A significant difference between complex systems and chaos is that complex systems always have a

little bit of randomness in their system. This is really key. And that makes them predictably unpredictable. Chaos was predictably predictable. Complexity, you can't ever tell where it's going. And the importance of this low-level randomness, I often use ant colonies. So I was sitting in a zen garden in Kyoto once, and there was a wisteria branch in front of me. And there were ants going up the wisteria branch in front of me and there were ants going up the wisteria branch two columns of ants going up and one column of ants coming down and after that trip i came home and i went into the subway at delancey and essex in new york city lower east side and there's a stairwell there that's particularly wide compared to most subway systems and it was rush hour and there were two

columns of people going up the outside and one column of people coming down. And none of them knew what they were doing any more than the ants knew what they were doing. They were all just, I've got to go home and get dinner together. Oh, I've got a meeting I have to go to. Oh, I can't wait to go home and sleep. Yeah, there's no rule to walk this way.

And yet it was arising. And this is what complex systems do. We call that emergent self-organization. If you remember from Star Trek, matter and antimatter, let's say an electron and a positron. A positron is an electron, but with a positive charge. If they hit each other, they annihilate and become energy again. So you have these particles popping up and self-annihilating and sinking back down into the energy field. So that's called the quantum foam. I love that. This idea that the smallest levels of scale,

it's just this bubbling, seething foam of particles coming in and out of existence. Sometimes those particles don't self-annihilate. Sometimes they survive long enough to interact with each other. When they do that, what are they doing? They're interacting. And they fulfill all the principles of a complex system, all four rules. So they interact with each other to become larger subatomic particles. Those interact to become atoms, to become molecules, to become cells, and everything else in the entire universe. So the entire universe is one complex system, and there is no thing identifiable anywhere that is in fact a thing. Because at the

lowest level of scale, it's just the quantum foam. Foam. Quantum foam. I gotta get some of that. I'd like to order some off Amazon. I'd like to do a shot of quantum foam every morning and kick things into high gear. But we are quantum foam.

Sure, sure. There's no piece of us that isn't quantum foam. You already have it. Can I take more? I want more of everything I have, though. This is very consistent with my personality type. I want more quantum foam. So this is where we go next.

This is how you get all the quantum foam. Oh, I got it. I see the segue coming. Right. You look at an ant colony from a distance and it looks like a thing. You go in closer and it's just ants. Then you go into the ants closer and it's just cells. At different levels of scale, you have a different appearance.

What else changes as you go across scales? So at this level of scale, there are four people in this room. We are separate and our edges are our skin. And that's the way we grow up thinking of ourselves. Yeah. We have like boundaries. Right. But when you go down to the cellular level, where are your boundaries? So the first thing is that you're sloughing dead skin cells off the top of your skin all the time. And that's a lot of the dust in our rooms, which is really a little disgusting when you think about it. We just had the grossest episode of our life with someone that rented an Airbnb and their psoriasis over the course of two months. The person thought

that someone had taken a bag of flour and thrown it all over the room. And we were like, whoa. Perfect. So where is the boundary of that person with psoriasis? Where are our boundaries? It's at least the space that you sit in, your homes, your offices, et cetera. But that's dead stuff. Now we know about the microbiome. And we each have signature microbiomes that are our own microbiome. The ultimate fingerprint. Except that if you have people you live with and pets like cats and dogs, for example,

within a short time, your microbiomes merge into a single microbiome. Like a household microbiome. Like a household microbiome. Like a household microbiome. Oh, here we go. And everything you touch, you're leaving microbiome behind, and you pick it up from other people. So you kiss someone, microbiome exchange. You touch a doorknob, then someone else touches that doorknob,

microbiome exchange, keyboards, pencils, forks, knives, couches. And so where are your boundaries at the cellular level? Your boundaries are at least as wide as the spaces you inhabit. So at the lower level of scale, our boundaries got out further. That's a spatial version, but how about in time? If you take your body and all your cells, your human cells, and go back to yesterday, all your current cells derived from cells yesterday. If you go back 10 years, they derive from those cells. If you go back to your teenage years, from those. All in continuity, no separation. Go back to your childhood years, your toddler years, your infant years.

And then you re-enter your mother's womb. And you go back to being an embryo and you go back to that sperm and that egg. And that egg in your mom was present in her body at the time she was born. There's no separation between you, your mom, your grandmother. Keep going back. Go back 300,000 years to when we weren't even Homo sapiens, we're Homo erectus. Back to Homo habilis.

Yeah, thank you. I'll start over the sceneine afarensis. That's farther than I can go. But then all the way back to early animals. Down to, as best as we can tell, there was a single cell progenitor. I know. We even like to compartmentalize evolution. We like to think of it as having

all this punctuation. Right. There's no separation. There are no boundaries. So at the cellular level in time, we're part of the whole biomass of the planet. Everything alive. Right. Well, there's no atom in our body that we didn't breathe, eat, or drink from the planet. So we can think of ourselves as these beings that are separate walking around on top of this rock we call planet earth, or we are the earth that has at the atomic level self-organized its atoms over three and a half billion years to people who have the misconception that they're separate. But in fact, our boundary is the entire planet.

And what science tells us we are isn't the materialist view that says, oh, we're independent individuals and politically, oh, we should all have certain freedoms, etc. All of that's true at this level of scale. But it's also true that we are simply expressions of the universe in every moment, and we are seamless and not separate from each other.