Matt Murphy (homicide prosecutor)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Episode: Matt Murphy (Homicide Prosecutor)
Release Date: November 27, 2024

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Introduction

In this riveting episode of Armchair Expert, host Dax Shepard engages in a profound conversation with Matt Murphy, a former homicide prosecutor and current legal analyst for ABC News. Drawing from his two-decade-long career in the Orange County District Attorney's Office, Murphy offers an insider's perspective on some of the most notorious murder cases in the United States, his personal journey through sobriety, and the intricate dynamics of prosecuting heinous crimes.

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Personal Background and Journey to Law

Matt Murphy opens up about his tumultuous upbringing, marked by his parents' struggles with alcoholism. Raised by a dedicated single father in Beverlywood after his parents' divorce and his mother's eventual sobriety at age 75, Murphy describes living in an environment deeply influenced by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

Notable Quote:
"I was an AA kid."
— Matt Murphy [07:13]

This challenging background fueled his determination to pursue a career in law, seeking structure and purpose that contrasted sharply with his early life experiences.

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Career in the Orange County DA's Office

Murphy details his entry into the legal field, initially venturing into the sexual assault unit before transitioning to the more demanding homicide unit. His time in the DA's Office was characterized by rigorous trial philosophy, where he honed his skills as a trial lawyer under the mentorship of seasoned prosecutors.

Notable Quote:
"The longer you stay, the more interesting it gets, the more skill you get as a trial lawyer."
— Matt Murphy [11:15]

Insights on Prosecutorial Ethics:
Murphy emphasizes the paramount importance of ethical conduct in prosecution, asserting that justice should prevail over mere convictions. He discusses the pressures prosecutors face, including accusations of misconduct and the temptation to manipulate evidence, but maintains that integrity is non-negotiable.

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Insights on Serial Killers and Psychological Motivations

A significant portion of the discussion delves into the psychology of serial killers. Murphy challenges prevalent myths, such as the notion that most serial killers were themselves victims of abuse. Instead, he posits that while some perpetrators may have experienced trauma, the majority are driven by deep-seated insecurities, entitlement, and a desire for power.

Notable Quote:
"They get off on the power."
— Matt Murphy [18:24]

Discussion on Modern Serial Killers:
Murphy contrasts traditional serial killers with contemporary patterns, noting an evolution in their methods to evade modern forensic techniques. He highlights cases like Alcala and Rex Heuermann, illustrating how these individuals manipulate systems and exploit vulnerabilities to carry out their crimes.

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Ethics and Relationships: Prosecutors and Detectives

The symbiotic relationship between prosecutors and detectives is another focal point. Murphy explains the "vertical system" within the Orange County DA's Office, where prosecutors work closely with dedicated detectives to build strong, collaborative teams aimed at securing convictions.

Notable Quote:
"When you're in the foxhole like that with somebody and you go through a really hard trial, that detective sitting next to you, you come to love them."
— Matt Murphy [39:45]

Challenges Faced:
Murphy candidly discusses the ethical dilemmas and immense pressures prosecutors face, including the difficulty of handling cases with insufficient evidence and the emotional toll of dealing with victims' families.

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Prosecuting Heinous Crimes: Specific Cases Discussed

Murphy recounts several high-profile cases that underscore the complexities of prosecuting violent offenders:

1. Alcala Case:
   A case inspired by Anna Kendrick's movie "Dirty John," Murphy describes prosecuting Jose Alcala, a charming yet disturbed individual responsible for multiple heinous crimes. The case highlights challenges such as flawed initial prosecutions, parole violations, and Alcala's manipulative tactics.

   Notable Quote:
   "He was a psychopath in love with his own brilliance."
   — Matt Murphy [55:16]

2. Hussein Nayiri Case:
   This case involves the kidnapping, torture, and eventual escape of Nayiri, showcasing the relentless pursuit required to bring such criminals to justice. Murphy emphasizes the procedural intricacies and the personal risks involved in these high-stakes prosecutions.

   Notable Quote:
   "Anybody who represents himself as a fool for a lawyer and a jackass for a client, it was surreal."
   — Matt Murphy [54:43]

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Systemic Issues and Reflections

Murphy reflects on broader systemic issues within the criminal justice system, including wrongful convictions and the challenges of prosecuting sexual assaults. He advocates for reforms such as introducing degrees within sexual assault charges to better capture the nuances of each case and reduce wrongful convictions.

Notable Quote:
"A lot of people keep quiet, and that is not the case at all. In fact, it's the exact opposite."
— Matt Murphy [46:00]

Board Work and Exonerations:
Murphy discusses his role on a post-exoneration board, working to identify and rectify wrongful convictions. He shares poignant stories, including that of Timmy O'Donnell, who spent 21 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

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Personal Coping Mechanisms and Final Thoughts

Balancing the heavy nature of his work, Murphy shares his personal coping strategies, such as surfing and cage-less shark diving, which provide him with a sense of Zen and help mitigate the psychological burdens of his profession.

Notable Quote:
"Nothing quiets your mind more than cage-less shark diving."
— Matt Murphy [35:22]

In concluding the episode, Murphy underscores the necessity of maintaining ethical standards, the importance of collaborative relationships within the justice system, and the ongoing need for societal and systemic reforms to address and prevent violent crimes effectively.

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Conclusion

Matt Murphy's candid and insightful discussion offers listeners an unfiltered look into the world of homicide prosecution, the psychological depths of serial killers, and the ethical quandaries faced by those who seek justice. His personal narratives and professional expertise enrich the conversation, providing a comprehensive understanding of the complexities inherent in prosecuting some of society's most challenging cases.

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Listeners Interested in Matt Murphy's Work:
Be sure to check out Matt Murphy's book, "A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death," which delves deeper into his experiences and the cases he's worked on. Available on Audible, where Matt narrates his own book, offering an immersive experience into his professional and personal life.

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Note: This summary excludes promotional content and focuses solely on the substantive discussions between Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, and Matt Murphy.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. This is a real departure from previous experts in the most exhilarating way. This was riveting.

[Monica Padman]

And it's a ding, ding, ding from Monday's episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, from Anna Kendrick because of her new movie Woman of the Hour. Our guest Matt Murphy was a technical advisor on it, as well as an actual prosecutor on the case. Matt Murphy is a former homicide prosecutor and a current legal analysis for ABC News. Maybe you've seen him there and he spent two decades assigned to the sexual assault and homicide units of the Orange County District Attorney's Office, which you'll learn in this is the third biggest in the country. 3 million people under their purview.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

He has tried some of the most headlining murder cases of all time. A lot of shit was happening in Orange county that I kind of didn't realize.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he was like Golden State Killer.

[Dax Shepard]

Dirty John.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

He has a book out called the Book of A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death, which is fantastic. It's so good. And he profiles all these different cases he's worked on as well as educates you a ton on how the actual mechanics of that job work, which I find fascinating. And then, and then his own personal journey. Which is it? This job took an enormous toll on the rest of his life.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. This was awesome. I loved Matt Murphy. I hope you do too.

[Monica Padman]

Oh oh.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by Audible. Audible's best of 2024 picks are here. Audible's cur curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best in audio entertainment. Like a stunning new full cast production of George Orwell's 1984. This is the one I am most excited to indulge myself with.

[Monica Padman]

I'm so excited to listen to James, which is a new title by Percival Everett that is very, very hot right now.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there's so many good ones on the list.

[Monica Padman]

We love Audible. This is how you go to bed.

[Dax Shepard]

I love Audible. I swear by Audible. I can't wait to listen to the Orwell 1984 off this list. I'm also doing Fleas by Autobiography right now, which I'm obsessed with. I can't get enough Audible in my life every night. Go to audible.comdax and discover all the year's bests waiting for you. That's audible.com. dax. We are supported by Bally Bali Breathe has arrived. A new collection from Bally, the leading national bra brand. It's a breathable and stylish collection. Collection of bras, underwear, and shapewear with products that feel as good as they look. Monica, you got to try out some of the products from Bali Breathe collection. What did you think?

[Monica Padman]

Great. Very breathable, very comfortable. You know, these are really important things when you're dealing with undergarments.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, of course.

[Monica Padman]

Comfort is everything. Support is everything. I really liked it because it's very high quality materials. And you can tell.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it attractive? Is it gorgeous?

[Monica Padman]

It is. It's a nice, nice aesthetic.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Ooh.

[Monica Padman]

And what I really like is they've got matching sets. You know, I love a set.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. Of course. You got to have a set.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. It's. Even when nobody knows you're wearing a set, it's underneath, you know? You know, and it really brings a little peptide.

[Dax Shepard]

You're ready if the opportunity arises.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Visit ballybras.com and use code DAX for 20% off your purchase. That's B A L I bras.com with code DAX for 20% off YOUR first order. He's an object. We're pretty willy nilly, man. Don't let this nice set fool you. We're kind of just my speed.

[Monica Padman]

Cattywampus.

[Matt Murphy]

Cattywampus is a good word.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, you're handsome. Let's start with the fact that you're very handsome.

[Matt Murphy]

Devilishly, devilishly so.

[Dax Shepard]

And I mean sincere. It has to be a little bit of an advantage when you're a prosecutor to be handsome. It'd be preferable that the jury likes to look at you. Right.

[Matt Murphy]

You know what's tough is for the women, pretty women prosecutors. It's brutal.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

Because people don't take them seriously.

[Matt Murphy]

The guy you walk in, the bailiff's your buddy. You talk about fantasy football. The court clerk wants to set you up with her divorce friend. And a lot of the women have it tougher because half the women on the jury will want to hate her for her suit. And the court reporter is jealous.

[Dax Shepard]

The men feel emasculated that she's smarter than them. Them. So they hate her on the jury.

[Matt Murphy]

It's a minefield.

[Dax Shepard]

So, Matt, this will be a fun interview for us because we've not had anyone, weirdly, in this realm. We've had a lot of defense attorneys on, as they tend to write books. Yeah. So we've not had a prosecutor on and I can't tell you how immediately how many questions I realized I had.

[Matt Murphy]

Oh, I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. First of all, you're a California native, which is weird.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, I grew up. Actually, we were just talking about it not far from here.

[Monica Padman]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. I grew up in Beverlywood.

[Dax Shepard]

Why don't I know where Beverly Wood is?

[Matt Murphy]

Nobody knows where it is.

[Monica Padman]

It's.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Matt Murphy]

Basically, you know where Rancho park is by Fox Studios.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yes, yes.

[Matt Murphy]

Okay, so literally Cheviot Hills.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

Okay, so it's the second part of Cheviot Hills on the other side of Motor. Okay, so it's basically Cheviot Hills.

[Dax Shepard]

And what did mom and dad do that you were living there?

[Matt Murphy]

My dad was a doctor. Mom was a nurse. Met at LA County General.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that sounds cute.

[Dax Shepard]

They were working together.

[Matt Murphy]

They were working together. Yeah, it sounds cute. I don't think two humans have hated each other more like I should not exist. I kind of nerd out on some of these astronomy things, and somebody tried to calculate the odds of humans existing with, like, Jupiter and absorbing all the asteroids and, like, whatever that list is. I'm the least likely person to actually exist.

[Dax Shepard]

How long did they stay married?

[Matt Murphy]

They're married for 10 years. Probably talked to each other for at least one. Well, my sister is two years younger than me, so at least eight years. They, you know.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

What kind of doctor was he?

[Matt Murphy]

Gi. He started doing rehab centers.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably made a lot of money doing that.

[Matt Murphy]

He did. And he got in, like, in the late 80s, was one of the pioneers. Anthony Kiedis in Scar Tissue. Did you ever read that book?

[Dax Shepard]

I haven't, but I. I know Anthony and I know his story.

[Matt Murphy]

That's a good read. So he actually talked about my dad in that book.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he did. What drove him? Maybe working in the county? No, no, no.

[Matt Murphy]

He's, like, hopeless alcoholic. For a long time. Your dad was both my parents. Yeah, both. I'm a thoroughbred, baby.

[Dax Shepard]

Did your dad get sober?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then he wanted to open a treatment center?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, he was sort of like a passion life. Big AA guy. In 1975, he got a DUI, and it was undignified experience for him, and he was prominent dude, and he got sober.

[Dax Shepard]

My dad got his fourth dui. He was gonna go to prison, and he went to rehab and it stuck.

[Matt Murphy]

It stuck.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He died sober, so it's an interesting experience to grow up in aa, right.

[Matt Murphy]

I was an AA kid.

[Dax Shepard]

Me too. Really? Did you go to, like, Aline? There you go.

[Matt Murphy]

I lived with him in high school because my mom Was still drinking. And he was a legit guy. He was all in. It was like a religion to him.

[Dax Shepard]

Was he in A Course in miracles or ACOA or all the other fringe outgrowths of the 80s? AA?

[Matt Murphy]

ACOA?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

Adult children of Alcoholics. Yeah. Yeah. When I moved in, that was the condition. I had to go to aline meetings.

[Dax Shepard]

Matt, you've heard me say this.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So I never lived with my dad. They got divorced when I was three. And then in ninth grade, he had gotten in a terrible car accident and he needed someone to help him. And I was about to get murdered at the new high school I was gonna go to. So many kids hated me. So I moved in with him, and he said, yeah, come in. There's virtually no rules. You have no curfew, but you have to go to one meeting a week.

[Matt Murphy]

Holy shit, this is so funny.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I started going to, like, Al A Teen or whatever it was. He encouraged me to go to, like, the Al Anon portion. I was like, these aren't my folks. I'd rather be in an actual A. So I was going to AAA meetings before I ever had a problem. I ultimately did have a big problem.

[Matt Murphy]

So I moved in in ninth grade. That was the rule. No curfew, no nothing. I had to go to an L Teen meeting a week. And the rules basically were, I mean, this is kind of bad, but don't get caught with whatever I was doing. Cause I heard a thousand times knocking a Bailey out of jail. And I mean, we used to go to punk shows down the street from where we are right now, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers back then.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Matt Murphy]

But I mean, they were more funk back then.

[Dax Shepard]

We are both tall, lanky gentlemen that were in the punk scene, living with dad, having to go, hey, this is pretty fucking nut private school. No, I went to public school.

[Matt Murphy]

Okay. So I went to public school up to ninth grade, and then I went up going to Loyola with actually a bunch of Los Vitos kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no kidding?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Do you live here still?

[Matt Murphy]

Manhattan Beach.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. And then I'm splitting time between here and New York.

[Dax Shepard]

Now you are the correspondent for ABC News.

[Matt Murphy]

ABC for true crime, all things murder and mayhem.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, boy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so let's find out. So this is incredible that you had that experience, because the group of friends is so unique. The kids I met in there were a. A blast because they already fucked up and got sober.

[Matt Murphy]

Totally. And a bunch of kids that you could really relate to. I had friends, came from really nice families, and my family Was so fucked up that when I got in there with those kids, they were sort of my people.

[Dax Shepard]

Did mom ever get sober?

[Matt Murphy]

She got sober at 75.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Matt Murphy]

No way. Yeah. Right when I thought I was completely done. She was a nurse, so she retired. And like a lot of retired people, she went off the rails completely. Of course, a friend of hers called in a welfare check and they went in and she was a.4:2 blood alcohol level, and that's what finally kicked.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't believe she wasn't in a coma.

[Matt Murphy]

Oh, and they found her passed out.

[Dax Shepard]

75 of her.

[Matt Murphy]

75. 4 2.

[Dax Shepard]

She would have lived to be 160 if she had been. Yeah, I know.

[Matt Murphy]

Scotch Irish jeans, you know. And she had to be a 50 at least at her peak.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Matt Murphy]

That event.

[Monica Padman]

Was she in your life?

[Matt Murphy]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

I love my mom forever. She died a couple years ago.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you have to, because dad leaves and now he's the bad guy, and she's.

[Monica Padman]

But he lived with his dad.

[Matt Murphy]

I lived with her, and then I moved in with him in ninth grade because she was a mess. And my brother and sister, too.

[Dax Shepard]

How do you get college bound from this childhood?

[Matt Murphy]

I wanted to get the hell out.

[Dax Shepard]

Where'd you go to college?

[Matt Murphy]

UCSB. So I'm 15 years old. I grew up surfing here. I took a surf trip with a bunch of buddies. Like when your first friend gets his driver's license, you know, and then you're packing, like, eight kids in the car because now you have freedom.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

We went up there, and there's a place called Campus Point at ucsb. You lived in Santa Barbara for a spell?

[Dax Shepard]

For one year, yeah. Yeah. Ok. And I was lured there by visiting Ivy right out of high school. And I was like, get real.

[Matt Murphy]

Disneyland has nothing. Unhappiest place on earth, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. It's impossible.

[Matt Murphy]

And I went up there. I'd never been. I'm 15 years old, and we roll on. It's like one of those classic Southern California days. And the one day of the year that Campus Point is firing. So it's the best wave I've probably ever seen at that point. And there's beautiful girls everywhere on bikes, and it's like, where the hell is this? And that was it. All I wanted to do. It's like I found the next phase.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you got BA at ucsb, and then where'd you go to law school?

[Matt Murphy]

San Diego. Went down there, lived on the beach for another three years.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, you were just chasing beach lifestyle?

[Matt Murphy]

I was. I got the sun damage to prove it. Unfortunately now.

[Dax Shepard]

And when you were going after a law degree, was it your intention to be a prosecutor or a defense attorney?

[Matt Murphy]

I kind of stumbled into it. I started a sexual assault education program as an undergrad because we could make fraternity pledges and sorority pledges go. So like I got your class at Women's center orientation where they were yelling at all for being men. And then I had a friend that got sexually assaulted. It was actually somebody I was dating when I was on Semester at Sea. And I came back and it was a horrific experience. So I thought I could maybe take a different approach. It caught on. So that caught the eye of the FBI and this woman, Kathy Harper, her whole thing was sexual assault. That was her background with the DA's office. I got recruited by the FBI and by her.

[Dax Shepard]

In law school or under?

[Matt Murphy]

In law school.

[Dax Shepard]

In law school. Okay.

[Matt Murphy]

It was kind of cool. And this fancy PI firm offered me a track to make a bunch of money. I decided I'd give the DA's office a whirl.

[Dax Shepard]

Boy, really quick, you asked 23 year old me, I'm probably going to FBI to kick some doors down.

[Matt Murphy]

It looked really, really cool. But the rule back then was that they wouldn't assign you to an area where you went to college, where you grew up, or you went to undergrad. I'm a talentless surfer, trust me, way too lanky. But I loved it and I just wanted to keep doing it. So at age 23, I was like, this means I can't surf anymore. Which is the logic totally of friggin 23 going on 15 year old. So I thought DA's office. My plan was to do it for three years. And then at the end of my first day as a junior law clerk, 1992, I was hooked. I knew it's what I wanted to do. The longer you stay, the more interesting it gets, the more skill you get as a trial lawyer. And that office back then, it was a trial philosophy. So they really wanted you to get as skilled as you could. It's like a craft picking a jury. And I sucked so bad when I first started, but it starts getting more and more fun and stressful and then you start doing felonies and then it gets more interesting. I kind of resisted mentors for a long time. And then I don't know what it was, but I had a couple of these guys take me under their wing and then I really felt like I had an actual teacher. So I'd go in and try things in a courtroom and then you'd start dealing with real victims. I went to sexual assault and I spent four years there. And when you sit down with a crying mom whose kid has been sexually abused, sexual abuse is so ubiquitous. And so many of us have had that happen to us over the years. I've had juries where the judge, they'll ask a question, you know, have you or anybody close to you been a victim or experienced something similar? I've had every hand go up in the box, 12 out of 12 jurors. So then you start dealing with that. And with real pedophiles, the predatory ones especially, you do some good when you get one of those guys on a tough case. When you win those, you are impacting the lives of dozens of people, probably.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

And then you get to homicide, which is varsity, and that's where it gets fascinating. That's what I wrote my book about, was that journey, showing up and knowing nothing about murders and starting at ground zero. And I tried to take the reader through my experience on that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's set the stage. First and foremost, you're here because we just interviewed Anna Kendrick and we just saw her movie, which is great. It is a factual case, of course, it's been artistically interpreted, but it's a real life case from the 70s. And as it turns out, you were on that case in an iteration of it, but you were with the DA's office in Orange county, which I think this shocked me, even knowing about Orange county. But it's the third largest DA's office in the country, and under your purview is 3 million people.

[Matt Murphy]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think people would really know that.

[Matt Murphy]

New York, and then you got LA and then Orange county and advise for third, depending on the population. I think Detroit, I think Atlanta had a really big one for a while, but yeah, it's up to the third largest DA's office in the United States.

[Dax Shepard]

And so you had a 27 year career there, 17 of which was with homicide. And in that 17 years, you prosecuted and or worked on a lot of the cases we know about from pop culture. And right out of the gates, Dirty John I read, I was like, what are the fucking odds that we'll meet? So that's pretty wild. But I think we start at the beginning because it's a wild ride. First and foremost. When you were working the sexual Victims Unit, you were warned by an early mentor. You said, the move is to find a buddy. Hopefully you have one to have someone show you the ropes. And they said to you Your love life is going to be in shambles after this, and you're like, not a chance.

[Monica Padman]

Because of svu.

[Matt Murphy]

The subject matter, I mean, it's for.

[Dax Shepard]

A variety of reasons, but Matt was like. I would have been like, get real. I'm mid-20s. What are you talking about, Superman? No.

[Matt Murphy]

And it was a buddy of mine. He's a couple years older than me in the office, still one of my best friends, and he's like, dude, forget it. And basically, the women tend to do a lot better in that unit, for whatever reason, than the men do. There's a thing called pornography, not that I've ever watched it before.

[Dax Shepard]

However, it's like watching it.

[Matt Murphy]

I know it exists.

[Dax Shepard]

I read about it.

[Matt Murphy]

Anyway, it's like 10 hours a day of anti porn. You're immersed up to your eyeballs in the worst stuff you can imagine. And it doesn't take you long before you realize it's 99.999% men. You know, male sexuality. It really does kind of screw with your head a little bit, that line between normal sexual drive and healthy relationships.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's a continuum. And you're like, huh, I'm here. Where does it get pathological?

[Matt Murphy]

Right. It screws through your head like nothing else. It's hard not to bring home.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd rather see murders for sure.

[Matt Murphy]

Honestly, it's a lot easier. And I mean, a lot of murders, there's a sex element to them.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, Rodney, I want to get into that.

[Matt Murphy]

Golden State Killer was one of mine as well.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Matt Murphy]

A lot of the serial killers start out with sex crime, fundamentally. And I talk about this a little bit in the book. My next book, hopefully if I get another deal, it's going to be about serial killers, specifically, because I feel like there's so much meat on that bone.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're going to build to that because I have a lot of sexual questions around that. It does seem. I mean, truly, it seems like, at least from the stuff I consume, there seems to be a really ubiquitous sexual insecurity driving a lot of this.

[Matt Murphy]

That's an interesting observation. I've never heard anybody say that before.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Matt Murphy]

I think you're exactly right. An insecurity element. I got to think about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, let's just say my penis is so small, I can't be with anyone in the normal way. Yeah. But I can force myself on this, and then I can end their experience.

[Matt Murphy]

I can give you kind of a news flash here that nobody knows. And I don't mind saying it And I hope he's listening. Joseph D'Angelo, Golden State Killer.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

Tiny dick. Like micro penis. Small.

[Monica Padman]

Really?

[Matt Murphy]

I don't think that's ever come out in any of the books.

[Dax Shepard]

But, yeah, I intuitively know that's part of some of these things.

[Matt Murphy]

There's something to that.

[Dax Shepard]

It's gonna work in tandem with my other hunch I have about all them is they're kind of all smart and they're underachievers and they think they're supposed to be someone important because they were intelligent enough to be so. And then they underperform, performed. If they have this entitlement, I should have been this. And I'm fucking angry.

[Matt Murphy]

You have no idea how right you are. It's entitlement. And there's a myth out there with a lot of serial killers that they're a product of abuse. I've had an issue with it. I showed up looking for Buffalo Bill thinking all serial killers. Like, I saw Silence of Lambs. I know what it is, you know, And I got there. And a lot of serial rapists tend to be super arrogant, entitled, just like you were saying, they're very, very smart. A lot of them are spoiled. As kids, they were told they were great, and then they get out there in the real world and women aren't so interested in them. And there's a component of that for sure. And they feel entitled to do it. I owed this and I'm going to take it. And they get off on it. There's kind of this myth out there. One of the most common questions you get when you're actually prosecuting those cases is what made them do it? And the answer is, they fucking want to do it. And a lot of times. Can I swear on this? Oh, yes, they want to do it. It turns them on. And they get off on it. And they feel like they're entitled to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Got off the power.

[Matt Murphy]

That's right. They get off on the power.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're proving to everyone right, the.

[Matt Murphy]

More sadistic fear and pain they can inflict on their victims, the better. Alcala. You know Anna's movie.

[Dax Shepard]

How do you say his last name?

[Matt Murphy]

Alcala? He grew up in east la. Actually Cantwell High School, which is another college prep school.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Matt Murphy]

That was a varsity letterman.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Matt Murphy]

Genius level iq, Mensa certified, the whole deal. Brother went to West Point, hero in Vietnam, totally successful, mother who loved him, never abused or bullied by anybody. And the guy probably murdered 100 people. Anna Kendrick. I gotta tell you, so I get A call in the middle of COVID from her people, and it's, hey, Anna Kendrick wants to talk to you about a movie. Of course. I'll talk to her right away. She was super sensitive about the victims and wanted to make sure that they were making a movie. She was sensitive to that. And the way Orange county works is a little different than most DA's offices. It's called a vertical system. So I was assigned Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach, Newport, and Irvine. And then I became one of the two cold case deputies, which is how I got Alcala. And we start the night of the murder. So we'd go to the crime scenes ourselves, we'd help with warrants, work with the detectives from. From the minute the murder happens all the way up, then the detective that you're with that night is with you at council table when the jury comes back and they're for sentencing. So it's a real team thing. So as a result of that, first thing I would do is meet with the victim's families after I filed charges and whatever kind of murder it was. And you bond with those people. You get really protective of them. So when she said she wanted to make a movie and wanted to make sure she did it right, from the victim's perspective.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, she's telling their story, not his.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Which I think is admirable. But it left me with a ton of questions about him. Which you can answer.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, I can answer him.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I think. I think there's a very cool and respectful approach to it.

[Monica Padman]

The new serial killer, to me is the mass shooter. Cause it's to me, very similar. The type, the insecure boy almost always, who has trouble with women or girls, but feels entitled and is on this power trip. I feel like serial killers have moved into that realm. And it's the same type of person.

[Matt Murphy]

So the FBI would say that's a spree killing and a little bit different. The psychology, and I like your theory on that. For the true blue serial killers, like the Bundys, the Jack the Ripper, there's a sexual component. The school shooter tends to really be that outcast, kind of picked on, bullied kid.

[Dax Shepard]

I was gonna say, the way I've seen those folks is a little different. And I witnessed it so much growing up in the way I did in the time I did, which is the system ruined a lot of kids that didn't fit in. There's a lot of kids that are so hurt by that. I'm not justifying it, but I think it's a different Motivation. It's not I'm entitled. It's that you guys are making me suffer so much. I'm gonna make you suffer back. It's like a revenge, a different animal.

[Matt Murphy]

And I go through kind of the taxonomy of murders. A domestic violence murder is very different than a child abuse murder, which is very different than like a Tweaker Rob, the 711 murder, you know, like the conspiracies to kill for money. So they're all a little bit different. You always wind up with a dead body at the end. But you start seeing some of the same things over and over if you do them long enough. Like, serial killers love to collect trophies. It's almost like they go to school for it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, again, they're proud of themselves. They've proved that they're smarter than everyone else.

[Matt Murphy]

For anybody that's interested, I got into probably the Alcala chapter more than anything else in the book, because the deeper you look in serial killers and the psychological motivations, to me anyway, the more fascinating it gets. And when you get into the history of them, I always thought it was a product of modern American life, sort of the disaffected youth and all that. And then you get into. I read Mindhunter by Douglas, who was the FBI agent who wrote Silence of the Lambs originally. And then from that there's a great FBI paper, and they talk about the first real attempt to get a handle on them. And it was this guy, Dr. Von Kraft Ebbing. And he wrote a book in the 1880s. He was a contemporary of Freud, and he was a German psychiatrist, never been to America. It's a whole section full of serial killers that we've never heard of, going back hundreds of years. European. So it's not an American thing.

[Dax Shepard]

It's timeless.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, it's timeless. It's something in the human community psyche, whatever it is, that there are those guys.

[Dax Shepard]

The only primate that we have that kills for pleasure other than us is chimps. And what do chimps have in common with us? They're incredibly intelligent and they have a very stratified hierarchy. So if they're low status and they feel low status, the outcome of that is often homicidal or chimp ocidal.

[Matt Murphy]

What is it, like 98.9% of our DNA is chirped?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you see? Chimp crazy.

[Matt Murphy]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you must on HBO or Facts now.

[Matt Murphy]

Everybody's face gets ripped off.

[Dax Shepard]

You'll be on track again. Look how chimps kill people. Tigers, they get you around the neck. They kill you. They want to eat you. A chimp unleashes fury. It's a crime of passion. They want to make you suffer.

[Monica Padman]

They don't even really necessarily want you dead.

[Dax Shepard]

They want to mangle you.

[Monica Padman]

They just want to hurt you. Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

So disturbing.

[Monica Padman]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Matt Murphy]

It's in us all.

[Dax Shepard]

It gives you that sense. It's just so close at all times, circling all the way back. What was it about the being in the sexual. Do you think you could articulate specifically one is like you're seeing horrific, graphic things. That's disturbing. And that will not make you. That'll make you anti horny.

[Matt Murphy]

Anti horny, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I think deeper and more interesting is coming in terms with where you're at in this weird thing. You possess this same weird drive, and we all have levels of perversion. Is it almost like seeing a glimpse your own sexuality gets scary to you?

[Matt Murphy]

That is a real effect of that. Your job is taking down the guys that are hurting people with their sexuality. Right away you become so paranoid of your own sexuality. As a man, you have to govern.

[Dax Shepard]

This drive and you maybe get a sense of like, wow, ungoverned. I'm afraid of who I would be or who anyone would be.

[Matt Murphy]

That's a huge part of it. And also for me as a guy, we all have to learn. You have to control those urges. And that's something that I think men, in a sort of traditionally masculine way, we learn that very early on and among other men. A lot of people don't talk about this. The dude who can't control his urges becomes an outcast if he doesn't get his ass kicked very quickly by the other man and whatever little crew he's in, if he's surrounded by any sort of decent group of guys. So you learn to control it. And then in that unit, what happens is you overcompensate. And I think that I became. I mean, this is probably way more information than anybody, but what's great about.

[Dax Shepard]

Your book is it's your personal story interwoven with your professional one.

[Matt Murphy]

I became passive sexually, probably to the point of being a lousy partner. My girlfriend at the time was gorgeous, got her master's in architecture and graduated from ucla. And she was a catch in every way. And then here I am.

[Dax Shepard]

You're retired from sex.

[Monica Padman]

It's scary.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, I retired at age 28. Yeah. And probably didn't do much for our relationship, actually.

[Dax Shepard]

You're in that unit for a while and then you get called up to the big leagues, which is homicide. And everyone's aiming towards that. And you have this kind of, well, stereotype or trope, which is you're nervous the first time you go to a crime scene because you know of these people who've come before you who show up and throw up and we see it in movies.

[Matt Murphy]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Just rewatched seven.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's a great movie.

[Monica Padman]

Such a good movie.

[Matt Murphy]

Masterful.

[Monica Padman]

It's so good.

[Dax Shepard]

So good.

[Matt Murphy]

I mean, Kevin Spacey, who I think is getting uncanceled now, I think is he. He just did a Broadway thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. But, oh my God. I don't pretend to know how any of that stuff works, but amazing actor if nothing else.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, well, that is true. I won't take that from him.

[Matt Murphy]

But Brad Pitt, and that was amazing. Morgan Freeman was amazing.

[Dax Shepard]

Incredible.

[Matt Murphy]

It'd probably be the equivalent of you're an actor and you have just wound up doing your first scene with somebody like a Morgan Freeman. I had the biggest imposter syndrome ever.

[Dax Shepard]

You were inordinately young for the position as well.

[Matt Murphy]

I was on a rocket and I look like I was 12. And I go to the crime scene and come on, everything you see on tv, the new guy always pukes, right? I'm literally walking into that going, don't puke, Murphy, don't puke. Because if anybody's capable of throwing up on a dead body or doing something that dumb, it's me. I'm 33. I was surfing that morning trying to get over a broken heart from the UCLA grad.

[Dax Shepard]

Because she moved on.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, she moved on to a guy who is my buddy.

[Dax Shepard]

She wasn't retired sexually quite yet.

[Matt Murphy]

She was not. She was not. And my buddy Greg, as he put it, the guy she wound up marrying, he's just like you, dude, just a little better in every way. Walking to that crime scene, we had a dead guy on his back in a kitchen. And the majority of the crime scenes are inside and a lot of them are domestics, which is what this wound up being. But I walk in and it's like, don't puke, don't puke, don't puke. And I look down and he had a folding knife in his left hand and a wallet chain into his right back pocket and immediately jumped out at me like, why would a right handed guy have a knife in his left hand? Or a left handed guy have his wallet in his right back pocket? And here's another thing that isn't in the book. First thing, the Detective Byington who wound up being one of my best friends and he wound up being the lead in so many stories I talk about in so many of the cases. But he lifts up the shoulder because what happened was the killer, who was his mistress, I guess we could call.

[Dax Shepard]

Her, he was married, having an affair with her. She had just gotten broken up with by her boyfriend who she still lived with.

[Matt Murphy]

Right. And so she starts seeing our guy and I don't know if he's still living with his wife or if they were separated. And this is super weird and this is also not in the book. His brother had a dream. His brother is a really deeply religious guy to the point of being kind of out there a little bit. Has a dream where his brother is killed. Again, my whole thing with the family something he told me this. He has a dream that he sees his brother's death. And so he talked to him and said, God came to me in a dream and showed me your death. And he's going to strike you down if you don't end this sinful relationship and go back to your wife and kids. That's true story. And if that isn't the weirdest friggin thing. And I'm not religious, but we always kind of thought he had this talk with his brother and he went over to end it and she couldn't handle two breakups, so she shot him. He was hauling ass for the stairs and there was one Grey's wound to his arm. And we see all these bullet holes on the wall upstairs. Broken glass as he's going down the stairs. She got him once in the. Then he goes down and he's on his back and she shot him twice in the heart, once in the temple, once in the mouth. So the detective, I'm 30, this is my first murder scene. I'm just thinking, don't throw up, don't throw up. He lifts up his shoulder to show me the two bullet holes in the wood underneath. Which is significant because it indicates degree between a first and second. Also it was a six shot revolver and there were eight holes so she had to reload. Which legally is all very significant. He lifts up the shoulder, shoulder. And I'm in the don't puke mode. And the guy groans because yeah, a lot of people.

[Dax Shepard]

The air came out of his hair.

[Matt Murphy]

Came out of his mouth. And it's like, I mean it's like.

[Dax Shepard]

You'Re just trying to act like you've been in this situation.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, I've seen this a million times. It's like, are we sure this guy's dead?

[Dax Shepard]

Dead men don't talk sometimes they do sometimes. They do. Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

So that was my first one. And then what happened? She bails out. This is my first week in the unit.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to add. She is financial manager, financial planner, 41.

[Matt Murphy]

Years old, never been in trouble a day in her life. Ties to the community. Grew up in Newport beach area. So she's got a right to bail. And back then it was $250,000, and she can make it. And I've got no arguments to keep her in. And this is statutory bail. She gets out and tracks down the ex boyfriend who had just broken up with her and they were still living together. He's in a hotel and he falls asleep. Unbeknownst to him, she brought in a tire iron from the car. Bludgeons him to death in his sleep next night.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Matt Murphy]

Right after he bailed. And then goes to the place called the firing line at Huntington beach, rents a gun and kills her soldiers. Suicides. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

In a firing range.

[Matt Murphy]

This is my first week, and I think I've got the shortest career in the homicide unit because I must have screwed something up. My boss, who was wonderful, he's like, how's this your fault? You know? He's like, she had a right to bail.

[Dax Shepard]

I hate to tell you this. I'm so relieved that was the first story because I'm so sick of us men killing everyone and hurting everyone. Anytime a woman's a piece of shit, I'm like, well, thank God there's a couple of them.

[Matt Murphy]

Somebody on their team is doing something wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it is weird because normally women kill. Normally, she would have killed herself first before killing everyone else.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's the tire iron where I go, oh, bitches can get down too. Boy, we can all be. If you can go in and bludgeon someone to death with a tire iron, I mean, that is a dude movie.

[Matt Murphy]

And not only, like, you shouldn't hit him once or twice until he was shaking. She bashed his face into the point that we needed fingerprints to identify him. We had a pretty good idea who it was because he rented the room.

[Monica Padman]

She went, tonka.

[Dax Shepard]

Full Tonka. That's one of the chimps from the dock. You'll learn.

[Matt Murphy]

Okay, Full Tonka. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Well, there's so many good ones on the list.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

I love Audible. I swear by Audible. I can't wait to listen to the Orwell 1984 off this list. I'm also doing Fleas B autobiography right now, which I'm obsessed with. I can't get enough Audible in my life every night. Go to audible.comdax and discover all the year's bests waiting for you. That's audible.com Dax we are supported by Amazon Prime. You might think of prime as your gateway to incredibly fast free shipping on all your Amazon orders, which it definitely is. But prime is so much more than that. Being a Prime member gives you access to prime video, Amazon music, prime gaming, ultra fast grocery delivery, and tons of other benefits.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Sounds like a great night. Another way prime saves the holidays let's say a coworker got you a holiday present and you somehow forgot to get them something, seamlessly shop for their gift on Amazon.com and then use prime to get free one day or same day delivery. So it's like they were on your gift list all along. So what are you waiting for? Become a Prime member today and get more out of whatever passions you're pursuing. Whatever you're into, it's on Prime. We are supported by Quint Tis the season of holiday gifting, but finding the perfect gift can be pretty overwhelming. For timeless gifts made from premium materials at an affordable price. Quint has your back. Quince lets you treat your loved ones and yourself to quality essentials like their Mongolian cashmere sweaters, which start at just $50. That's an elevated gift at a price that won't break the bank. Or for more winter coziness, try their super soft soft fleece sweatpants or their packable puffer jackets. Both perfect for anyone who's traveling for the holidays.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

They're very cozy gift luxury this holiday season without the luxury price tag. Go to quince.comdax for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's qu inc.comdax to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comdax what is the experience working with detectives? And maybe delineate that you guys have different roles, what the detective has to do versus you have to build a case. These are kind of separate things. So what are the pros and cons of those relationships?

[Matt Murphy]

First of all, beginning with the FBI, I got to work in some of those task forces over the years. And the FBI agents in my experience are some of the best people I've ever met.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they're so cool.

[Matt Murphy]

They're so cool. A lot of people don't know this. A lot of them are lawyers. They tried to get me out of law school. The FBI as an administration, like when they want to tell you no and there's no logical reason for it, you hear the word protocol and you deal with some of the most ridiculous. Dealing with the FBI.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

And the agents were wonderful. So they made up for some of the negative experiences you deal with with.

[Dax Shepard]

The admin, with the bureaucracy.

[Matt Murphy]

So the philosophy of the vertical unit was a guy named Francisco Berseno, who just passed away. He was Superior Court judge, but he used to be head of the homicide unit. Vietnam War, war hero came back with a guy named Ed Freeman, who back in the early 80s was a World War II war hero. So you get these two guys and they built the homicide unit and they came up with this vertical concept. And what they wanted was for their young women and men in the homicide unit to be able to bond with their detectives to eliminate a lot of those problems. So especially Southern California is a patchwork of small cities. My cities of Newport, Costa Mesa, Laguna and Irvine are all small police department. And when you go in, it's like that day. I think in a way Byington was trying to freak Me out a little bit. It was a little bit of a hazing. The new guy. And can this guy hang?

[Dax Shepard]

Sort of rite of passage.

[Matt Murphy]

It's a rite of passage. And right when I walked in the door and I left this out of the book, they were literally. It's like seeing straight out of tv. They'd forensically processed the living room part of this townhome. And they were eating a pizza, and.

[Dax Shepard]

The guy said to Matt, and he goes, she killed the shit out of him.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. Basically stapled him to the floor. And this guy is. A lot of detectives are funny as shit.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah, you gotta.

[Dax Shepard]

You have no choice.

[Matt Murphy]

The gallows humor. Another interesting thing about the best detectives and the best prosecutors, too. I think it's the guys that are one bad decision away from being the same people. They're investigating a thousand percent. Those are the ones.

[Dax Shepard]

Well. Cause you can understand, I have this, too. I'm a scumbag. I'm a recovering addict. I can drop into a mindset pretty easily of feeling like I'm owed something. I'm justified for this.

[Matt Murphy]

As far as detectives go, there are detectives who literally are Boy scouts that live this very Joe Friday life. You know, just the facts, ma'am. And you encounter those, and they're great at the documents, the police reports. There's no spelling errors in them. And they have their advantages. When it comes to the really bad, the serial killers, you gotta catch the cases that are impossible, that nobody else wants to take a run on. Give me the mutant that almost got fired a couple times. And that's the one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You gotta get in their head, well.

[Matt Murphy]

That'S the person that's gonna win it for you. And that's the one that you can also. When they're sitting next to you during jury selection, that's the person you can lean over to. I keep saying, guys, a lot of these are women. Some of the best investigators I worked with were women.

[Dax Shepard]

But I'm sure increasingly so over the course of your career, in 92 or.

[Matt Murphy]

93, even then, they're the women that have been divorced a couple times. It's the same thing.

[Dax Shepard]

They're paying the same price everyone else pays for that job, 100%.

[Matt Murphy]

And they're the ones that. The more twisted they are. That's the one you can lean over to and go, juror number 10, what do you think? And you need that kind of guidance, especially when you've been doing it for a while. I needed as much help as I could get. But you know what's interesting? We would do these juror questionnaires on the really heavy stuff, like the serial killers and the death penalty cases.

[Dax Shepard]

This sounds crazy, but I do think we should just mention for people who are 25 years out of jury jurisprudence, when the case begins, you're starting with an ample amount of juries, and you're going to get to kick some off as the prosecutor, and the defense is going to get to kick some off. So you're trying to figure out who's going to be helpful. Right.

[Matt Murphy]

You get 20 challenges on a life case for no reason. They're called peremptory. So I can boot a jury for any reason other than race, but if they come in and they're wearing a shirt you don't like, you're allowed to kick them if you get a bad feeling in your gut. And so when you come up through the ranks, like I did 37 misdemeanor jury trials before I touched my first felony. And you don't get to do questionnaires in any of those. And questionnaires, you get to ask them all kinds of things. And I learned over the years that you gotta trust the gut, not the paper version, because they can look really good on paper. It's kind of like dating, in a way.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, also, people answer questions in a way they think they're supposed to answer versus there's a quadrillion bits of information coming at you that are nonverbal, which.

[Matt Murphy]

Is the most important thing, from chimpanzees on up.

[Dax Shepard]

But back to, oh, so the police, they're very helpful, right?

[Matt Murphy]

So those detectives. Yes. Sorry, I took us on a tangent. The thing about a vertical unit is you get a relationship with them, you win a couple tough ones and pretty. And those cops are listening to everything you have to say because they want to win. I would meet with the families, but these cops would do the death notifications and imagine that. I think the most extreme emotion I've ever experienced is, of course, for the dads, too. But for the moms who have had a child that's been murdered and imagine you're a cop who has to break the news to them.

[Dax Shepard]

No, thanks.

[Matt Murphy]

And that cop, when they go through that, you talk about tolls on relationships and alcoholism and all that. When they got the right guy and they know they got the right guy, they want to win that case. And when you bring it home for them and then you win a tough one.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's this beautifully symbiotic relationship, which is you gotta gather everything perfectly. And then I'm gonna Slam dunk this.

[Matt Murphy]

And when you're in the foxhole like that with somebody and you go through a really hard trial, that detective sitting next to you, you come to love them, and they love you back, and they wind up being some of your closest friends.

[Dax Shepard]

I would imagine that Yalls integrity gets tried probably more than almost any other job. I'd imagine it's quite tempting. I bet it's presented all the time that you could massage something and you would know I'm kind of vi violating this person's right. But I know they're guilty, and it's worth it. I bet that comes up a lot.

[Matt Murphy]

It definitely happens. And as a defense lawyer, I've seen more of that. I defend a lot police officers, and I'm dealing with the case right now where they pulled some stuff that I've been shocked. As a former prosecutor, I can't believe.

[Dax Shepard]

That the prosecution's doing.

[Matt Murphy]

However, when you do it long enough and they let you actually be a pro as a prosecutor, you learn pretty early in your career that the only thing worse than a family losing a loved one is losing a loved one getting a conviction and then having to do it all over again because somebody doesn't turn something over.

[Dax Shepard]

Because here's a hypothetical I could imagine happening. I could imagine finding a bit of evidence. And now if I take that on, I'm legally obligated to turn that over to the defense. Right. And I might go, I'm just going to skip that altogether. I didn't see that. I don't have to incorporate that because I don't really want to turn that over. Those little question marks, probably when I.

[Matt Murphy]

Came through, there's a guy named Chris Evans who's now a superior court judge. Real world guy. He was a fireman who went to law school at night. And so he was a citizen of the actual world. Unique, gifted as an actual trial lawyer. And I used to go watch when I was a law clerk. What he told us was, make sure the defense has everything and then beat him with it. That was what we got taught. And so for anybody that's holding evidence back, number one, it's totally illegal. State of California. It's actually a felony. But the people that do the dirty tricks as defense lawyers or prosecutors, they're trying to compensate for a lack of game. And if you've really learned the craft and you've studied it as a prosecutor, if you can't convince a jury, you shouldn't win the case, even if you were convinced the guy did it, you can't cheat to win, you have to.

[Dax Shepard]

Have a level of respect for the system.

[Matt Murphy]

You really do. And your reputation is all you have in that business. The best prosecutors really are kind of like my buddy Jim Mendelsohn was an actual fighter pilot before he went to law school. And they're gunslingers. They want to fight.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't want to cheat and win.

[Matt Murphy]

No, there's a spectrum of talent in anything. But like the guys I was in the unit with and you know, guys, including women, they were some of the most twisted, diabolically genius people. They were superheroes in my eyes. And they would turn everything over the ones I would worked with because they would never admit they sweated any defense lawyer they ever came up against. They wanted to beat them. And the tougher the case, the better, as weird as that sounds.

[Dax Shepard]

Now if they were prone to be problematic, where was it generally going to surface?

[Matt Murphy]

Unicort and doing misdemeanors, the ones who suck are never going to get to homicide. And so you wind up with kind of the exact opposite. You wind up with a bunch of people who were kind of brazen, sharp elbowed, who relished the challenge. As a prosecutor though, one of the toughest parts is there are three things alleged on every appeal. The appellate defense counsel will always accuse the trial lawyer, defense attorney of being incompetent. So they get accused of incompetence. The judge gets accused of some sort of malfeasance in forgetting to instruct on something, some sort of incompetence. And the prosecutor always gets accused of misconduct. Right now the police have had a hard time and some of that goes over into prosecutors. And there's people that are open to that idea.

[Dax Shepard]

And also what gets made, what do I watch? I'm very heartbroken and interested when I see on Frontline the confessions. And they got seven confessions from seven guys who are all below a third grade reading level that were scared that sting of injustice on that level. And innocence is so strong that obviously you could probably mis evaluate how prevalent, who knows?

[Matt Murphy]

I sit on a board with Purdue University. It's a post exoneration board where our whole task is trying to find people in Indiana that have been falsely convicted. And I work with a guy named Timmy O'Donnell on that who's an exoneree. I freaking love this guy. Of all the people on the board and there's a bunch of rich, fancy famous people, Timmy's the guy. So he did 21 years for a murder that he actually did not commit. And it's Coming from a career prosecutor, actually innocent. There's a bunch of mistakes that were made. And they kept offering him deals and refused to take it because he really didn't do it.

[Dax Shepard]

What a proposition to present to somebody.

[Matt Murphy]

Oh, yeah, talk about a devil's bargain. And he's like, no, I'll stay in prison before I'll admit something I didn't do. And talks to a man of integrity. Yeah, absolutely. It happens. And if you got a heart, which you clearly do, it's the worst injustice imaginable.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why our system's set up the way it is. To let many guilty people go is preferred to a single innocent.

[Matt Murphy]

That's right. And that's the way it should work. It gets problematic when we get into the serial killers that are going to victimize other people.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it gets into problem there. And I think where jurisprudence is most problematic is in sexual assault. It's still almost impossible to prosecute 100%, in my opinion. Let me hit you with this. I was reading Missoula, the John Krakauer book on the kind of rape epidemic at Missoula. The problem processing, prosecuting these kids and then the problems with the juries, even if they get the stuff they need, it needs degrees like murder. I think that's one of the problems is you have these jurors looking at these young people and there's no degree. So it's all in or all out. And they have a hard time finishing a young person.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Not that they shouldn't be finished. That's not what I'm saying. But I think if there were degrees within it, it could move the needle.

[Matt Murphy]

It's a really interesting. Because you're absolutely right. Like a 288. That's sexual abuse of a minor. There's one charge. I mean, there's different subsections of rape, but that word is a heavy thing. And a lot of jurors. You're right, I prosecuted. My niche was date rapes. And you don't want to tag a kid as a rapist for life for a misunderstanding or a drunken miscommunication.

[Dax Shepard]

You have two people in a blackout. We're reconstructing two people's blackouts.

[Matt Murphy]

And it's a really tough thing. Words are important. Maybe if there were degrees, but who's.

[Monica Padman]

Going to come up with the degree? That's very tricky too. To me, there's some things that are worse. I'm gonna get in trouble for just saying that. Worse than others.

[Matt Murphy]

But there are.

[Dax Shepard]

Look, I was molested. There's worse versions of the way I was molested. I can tell you if someone was molested. If that was my parent, that's fucking worse. If it were reoccurring for years, yes. If there was violence for me, there's degrees of what I experienced, for sure.

[Matt Murphy]

But you know what's interesting about that? A lot of people, you encounter that. Not to spin off on a tangent, a lot of people think that that's like a zombie bite. So many people have been molested. I still don't think the public understands that.

[Dax Shepard]

I admit it. I say it out loud. I didn't know of an actor when I was a kid that said he had been molested. I thought I was the only person. Now people are talking about him.

[Matt Murphy]

I will bet a majority of men in Hollywood were the victims of sexual abuse at one point or another. Because I'm ready to come to terms with the idea that a majority of men in general in America at one point or another were sexually abused as a kid.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. The conservative estimates are like 25% of us that grew up in the 80s.

[Matt Murphy]

Work, and our parents, they were smoking and drinking. And we were wildlings in our generation, for sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Completely unprotected.

[Matt Murphy]

But one of the things. Things about it is there's a weird stigma that needs to be relaxed, especially when it comes to men. A lot of people think it's like a zombie bite. We know it happens when you get bit by a zombie. Right. Or bitten by a vampire.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, you will then become a predator.

[Matt Murphy]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I grew up with that paradigm.

[Matt Murphy]

Right. So a lot of people keep quiet, and that is not the case at all. In fact, it's the exact opposite. A lot of people that have been sexually abused know how awful it is, so they would never do it. And I understand that there's some psychology behind it, and some people that are horrifically abused, it affects them. But the vast majority of time, and this is four years in sex and 17 in homicide, which half are sex cases anyway, the majority of the offenders were never victims themselves. And I'm here to tell you that is a pervasive myth. I think that's another part of the stigma that people are gonna be like, oh, I don't wanna leave them around with my kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I wanna hear about a few. You do a dozen or so cases throughout your long career in the book, I guess since it was prompted by Anna's movie. Let's talk about him for a minute. The notion that this motherfucker was on the dating Game blows my mind, right? So tell us about him a little bit.

[Matt Murphy]

So he grew up loving home, never abused or bullied by anybody. And this is the best investigators. He went through three different Capitol trials, which means you have A through K factors is what is known in a bifurcated jury system in California. So those are the factors the jury gets to consider in weighing whether there's any mitigation. So A, factors like circumstance of the offense, how brutal it was, B, factors other crimes of violence. And you go down the list and essentially a serial killer is motivated in a life or death sort of way to come up with any sort of abuse possible as a mitigating factor to present to their jury. So he had three great defense teams. They were unable to uncover a single instance. So he grows up in a loving home, successful siblings, mother who loved him, aunt very much in the picture. Father died when he was, but went to prep school. Varsity letterman on the yearbook committee, graduated from UCLA film school, genius level iq and handsome for the day and charming for the day.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean currently he was.

[Monica Padman]

He needs a haircut.

[Matt Murphy]

2024, but yeah, he's a good looking dude.

[Dax Shepard]

Back then is the part in the movie where he worked at the LA Times as a photographer, he was a.

[Matt Murphy]

Typesetter and he worked for the LA Times, gainfully employed. So this guy actually not far from where we are, 1968, he kidnaps, rapes and almost murders year old girl named Tali Shapiro. So anybody that wants the background. Anna's movie was wonderful. The detectives were involved in it. I give it an A. And the final scene, the only way it could have been more true to real life is if she'd made it longer. Phenomenal job. So anyway, so he kidnaps this 8 year old good Samaritan, sees it, follows him to this little Hollywood bungalow. And all of this is in the book. I think people would be interested in it, I hope. But this cop, his name is Camacho, LAPD officer here, shot in Vietnam, comes back from the war, shot in the Watts riots. It's his first day back at work.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Matt Murphy]

And he gets a welfare call. And nothing about it seemed any more right in 1968 than it would today. So he knocks on the door and he hears one second, kicks the door in. And Alcala is going out the back naked. And he finds this little girl, 8 years old, she's been raped. She's in a coma for 32 days.

[Monica Padman]

Stop.

[Matt Murphy]

She's got a barbell across her throat, second away from death. So this cop saves her life.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Matt Murphy]

Alcala gets away, gets to the east coast, enrolls in NYU Film school. He'd already graduated from ucla.

[Dax Shepard]

After that event, he decided to get out of town.

[Matt Murphy]

He fled. And inside his apartment, they find hundreds and hundreds of photographs of young women and boys in positions of vulnerability out in the woods, in rooms with him. Some of them are sexual, some of them are pornographic, some of them are remodeling. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things.

[Dax Shepard]

What age is he that they lost?

[Matt Murphy]

So this is 1968, mid-20s, I think, at this point.

[Dax Shepard]

So he's like prolific.

[Matt Murphy]

This guy is the real deal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay.

[Matt Murphy]

So goes to New York. They catch him. He's working in an all girls sleepaway camp in Vermont. And there's a rainstorm. And two of the little campers go running into the post office to get out of the rain. FBI 10 most wanted list. They look up and they're like, that's weird. That's Mr. Berger, because he's a counselor at the camp. They catch him, they extradite him back to California. Winds up kidnapping and near death of an eight year old. And he raped her. There's a photo in that. This is one of the scenes that sticks with me, even though I wasn't physically there because I was 12 when it happened. Little white Mary Jane's in more blood than should ever be able to come out of. An 8 year old at the scene. So she survives. Miraculously, they extradite him. The prosecutor decides to give him a straight child molest case. And he goes in, he gets a life sentence. They paroled that guy after 34 months. And that is a cautionary tale. So he gets out and they violate his parole. They catch him with a 13 year old girl that he was certainly on his way to killing, but they had marijuana. They wind up prosecuting her for possession of marijuana. Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

13 years old, fucking guy.

[Matt Murphy]

So he gets about a year and a half, they release him again. It's like Forrest Gump again. Gets out and then he kidnaps Monique Hoyt. She's 15 year old, Ronald away, rapes her, sodomizes her. She wakes up, he probably thought she was dead. She comes to and says, we can't let anybody know what we did. He then had a moment of emotion, broke down crying, and then transported her wherever they were going. And she jumped out and called the police. And then the court has an obligation legally to presume the rape and kidnap is true and assess danger to the community. And knowing all the background, the judge lowered his Bail, he got out and he kidnapped and murdered a 12 year old girl out of Huntington beach named Robin Samsoe. So he gets convicted, goes up, case gets reversed once by the California Supreme Court, convicted again in 1986, goes back up. Now it's the 9th Circuit that reverses it. So the case has been twice gutted. Then it winds up on my desk. So we don't know anything at this point. This is late 2002, 2003. I get it assigned to me because I'm one of the cold case deputies and this poor family has had to go through this twice. Now every time a case gets reversed, they reinterview everybody. Well, we gotta figure out what kind of evidence we have. The police in 1979 got into his storage locker and again, different batch. Found hundreds and hundreds of photos.

[Monica Padman]

How can you.

[Matt Murphy]

More young women and girls. He killed 100 people after he was released from California State Prison. So he killed a 21 year old computer programmer in Burbank, very close to where we are right now, named Jill Parenteau. We didn't know that. So once upon my desk and I talked to my old man and I'm like, what do we do with these? Because the case got gutted twice and there was a photo found, this is kind of cool. Of a girl named Lori Wirtz. She was on roller skates in a place called Sunset beach, that's right next to Huntington beach, that was in a storage locker. And it turns out that was from the same day that Rob and Samsoe went missing. So we can put him in the area and then we're kicking it around like how do we frickin prove this thing? And there were signs in the background that were still in the cement. And we found some guy in the Navy of all places that was able to give us an exact time that that photo was taken based on the shadows. So I'm locked and loaded, I'm ready to go again. No sooner do we make the decision that we're gonna retry this fucker, that we start getting DNA hits out of LA county for unsolved murders. Because California just entered the CODIS system. So we get three DNA hits in LA county, plus a fourth. He was a suspect in one, Jill Parenteau, the computer programmer. So now we got five. So we constructed a whole thing. And then like a lot of good serial killers, because he's a psychopath, they can't resist the control. So he wound up representing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, this is a big move, isn't it? Oh yeah, they over index in representing themselves.

[Matt Murphy]

100%. 100%. Which is awesome because they all suck at trial. Whatever disconnects them that makes them want.

[Dax Shepard]

To talk about a definition of their arrogance.

[Matt Murphy]

Oh my God. And it's the greatest.

[Dax Shepard]

If I were you, I'd just go like, so this guy's representing himself. I think that tells you everything you need to know. We rest our kids.

[Matt Murphy]

There's a great adage, I threw this in the book that you learn in law school. Anybody who represents himself as a fool for a lawyer and a jackass for a client, it was surreal. But I had to deal with him every day. I had to go and talk to him.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Cuz you gotta talk to the council, right? Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

And for me, being kind of twisted, it was fascinating.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I would have enjoyed.

[Monica Padman]

Tell us, what was he like? Tell us.

[Matt Murphy]

Well, first of all, so there's this moment, like they don't give us any training on how death row actually works in California. And I just thought it was one big prison yard, like a prison within a prison. It's all in San Quentin. And I didn't know yet that they sub classify them. They have a yard they call themselves and they divide it up into yards called the weenie yard, which are the guys that aren't dangerous to staff or other inmates. And so we just sentenced this guy, big white supremacist, gang leader, super gnarly dude. He'd just gotten the death sentence out of Orange County. So he goes up, I'm sitting there, we're waiting for the judge one day. And I literally had to talk to this guy several hours every day for six months, you know, Cause he's representing himself. So you develop a rapport.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I ask you one hard question? Because we interviewed the defense attorney that was representing the victims for Epstein, and he had several lunches with Epstein while he was representing those people. And he. He said, he's so fucking charming. I'm there experiencing what they experience. And leaving, going, boy, that was fucked up. Did you have any of that?

[Matt Murphy]

100%. That's why the actor who played Rodney Al Kalina's movie was friggin brilliant.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he. Yeah, he's so good.

[Matt Murphy]

Brilliant. He won the Dating game of the Three Bachelors by being charming and funny. And the actor nails it because it's like, who would get in a car with that guy? And the answer is almost everybody, because they're so freaking charming. But that's the thing with Alcala. So I'm like, hey, Rod, just out of curiosity, what do you do When a guy like Billy Joe talk about a cartoon character and this guy frickin swastika tats everywhere, the whole deal. Aren't you worried that a guy like that is going to get to you? He goes, matt, buddy, you know me, I'm on the weeniard. I'm not violent. I'm never going to see that guy. He was offended that I would think that he was a violent guy. This guy murdered 100 women and smashed their faces in with rocks.

[Dax Shepard]

And that other guy's a philistine.

[Matt Murphy]

Right? Right.

[Dax Shepard]

That guy's a racist prolodite.

[Matt Murphy]

What are you talking about, swastika? What do you mean?

[Monica Padman]

Do you think that he believes that in the moment, right?

[Matt Murphy]

Oh yeah. Totally in the moment. And that's the charm. Watch the Bundy tapes where he's getting interviewed. It is fascinating. Bundy has a moment where the reporter says, hey, what's it like to know you're going to get executed tomorrow? And Bundy's response, I'll never forget this. He's like, my odds of getting executed tomorrow are about the same as yours getting killed in a car accident on the way home. He goes, God forbid that should happen.

[Dax Shepard]

There's so much concern for him. So much concern.

[Matt Murphy]

God forbid. What a horrible analogy to use. Like I am concerned with you. And they did. They fricking juiced Bundy the next day. To the betterment of all mankind. The really smart psychopaths, they understand intuitively where that good heart opening is and they take advantage of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no one likes this. But sociopaths over index in empathy. They're very, very good at knowing exactly how you feel and what you want to hear.

[Matt Murphy]

That's exactly right. That hypersensitivity to it is connected to their love of inflicting pain. Even for the sociopaths that haven't killed anybody, like the ones that are running businesses, there's that little element of cruelty that so many of them have. They get off on it.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to go through a couple more because the book is just full of so many riveting cases that you covered. I didn't realize Orange county was such a hotbed of activity.

[Monica Padman]

Seriously.

[Dax Shepard]

But Skyler deleon.

[Matt Murphy]

Skyler deleon, yeah. So he was a Power Ranger. He had a speaking role. He's a child actor.

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. You know, he was. Of all of the guys I dealt with, all the fraudsters, Ed Shinn was one of mine that I talk about in the book. Skyler was the best liar of anybody I'd ever seen.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Matt Murphy]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Because his name rhymed with it.

[Matt Murphy]

Or Skyler the liar.

[Dax Shepard]

Good job, Michael.

[Monica Padman]

Couldn't help myself.

[Matt Murphy]

I like it.

[Dax Shepard]

I like that she's got a pneumasone sweater on. She's feeling pretty good today.

[Matt Murphy]

This guy was in the Marine Corps for about a second and went awol. A lot of them also joined the military and go awol. Alcala did my Nyiri guy did my last one. That's another common thing that you see on the psychopaths. So he winds up putting together this scheme to basically murder people to get their money. And there's this beautiful couple, retirees, Tom and Jackie Hawks. Jackie was in a motorcycle accident. She was in her 20s, couldn't have kids of her own. Marries Tom. He had two young kids at the time, so she got to be mom. And then one of them had a baby. So they'd retired onto the ocean and sailed around on a yacht. Now they got a grandchild, and Jackie just wants to experience that. So they decided to sell the boat and they go out for a sea trial, which is basically a test drive for a yacht. Never seen, heard from again.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Matt Murphy]

And so Skyler is there with all the bill of sale paperwork, fingerprints that we sent to the FBI. It was Tom and Jackie's fingerprints. They actually signed all the stuff. And there was one problem. The S on her signature didn't match, but everything else did. That became important. They show up with these documents indicating they bought the boat. There was a notary that notarized the documents. They'd filed it with Prescott, Arizona. Everything legally they could do indicating they'd purchased the boat they had done. And so we had to untangle that. I do an annual surf trip with a bunch of buddies to Indonesia. And you sit on a charter surfboat for 12 days or whatever. I was going to skip that year. And anyway, I catch my girlfriend making out with the groomsmen at a wedding. So that's bad. So I decided at the last second, I'm going to take this surf trip. And I went up on this boat. This guy, Gary Burns, who was a part of the boating world, and he's a totally legit guy, but he had seen sort of the underbelly of it and met some small smugglers and actual pirates along the way. There's Tom and Jackie. Like three months later, they're missing. It's a Newport case. I'm working with Byngton again, that same detective who moved the body and made the guy groan. And we were at a dead end and we suspected something Bad had happened. But we did two forensic workups of the boat.

[Dax Shepard]

So the boat was found. Boat was found, they're not on it.

[Matt Murphy]

Tom and Jackie are missing. And you got Skyler and Jennifer saying, hey, we bought the boat. And here's all the documents indicating we bought it. By the way, when you find these people, they promised to teach us how to operate it properly. We would hate to have to sue them.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, this is a pretty good. That's a cool angle.

[Matt Murphy]

So I watched his interview. Credit to the detectives, I believed everything he was saying. Yeah, he was on probation for a burglary at the time. And he goes, look, this is cartel money. My dad was involved in the cartels. You can look it up. I can't tell you where I got it or they'll kill my family. It was so convincing. And it's like I was buying this in a money laundering scheme. That's why I was buying the boat. It's all cash. It came up. This could almost work. Like this almost makes sense. And the thing is there's a difference between what you suspect and what you can prove. And we had friggin nothing. And we had a weird story, but it was convincing as hell. So I called Gary in Australia, the charter boat captain. And I'm like, dude, what are we missing? And without skipping a beat, it's almost scary how fast he said it. I don't even think I finished the sentence. He's like, missing anchors. Look for missing anchors. There's murder on a boat. There's going to be a missing anchor. Everybody thinks an invented the wheel. Everybody gets tied to an anchor. That's how they do it. And we go back to the boat for like the 20th time. Sure enough, been staring us in the face whole time. There should have been two anchors on the bow. There was one. And so we hook him the next day and the whole house of cars fell down.

[Dax Shepard]

So what have they done? How have they.

[Matt Murphy]

So what they did is they lured him out to sea, they brought in this guy who's a Long beach insane crip. But yeah, they got muscle, they went out, they lured him out to sea, they tasered them both. They threatened to beat her if he didn't sign. They threatened to taser him again if she, she didn't sign. And they tied them to the anchor, begging for their lives and threw them overboard.

[Dax Shepard]

Was the intention just the capital gain? Did they just want the boat?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, they wanted the boat. And they also had a power of attorney indicating that they should have had access to their bank Accounts, too.

[Dax Shepard]

All money motivated.

[Matt Murphy]

All money motivated. And then when we got the search warrant, we found an LAPD Interpol liaison card to a totally separate murder the year before in Mexico. A guy from Southern California named John Jarvey, who got into drugs. He was a pilot, had back issues. A lot of people have experienced that where he was sober. Goes back on painkillers, fucks him up, and he gives him $50,000 in cash. Skyler cut his throat.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Did you watch this newest Zodiac doc?

[Matt Murphy]

I haven't. And, you know, here's my problem with Zodiac.

[Dax Shepard]

Please.

[Matt Murphy]

They never catch him. It is maddening to me.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the Zodiac doc is really, really well done. And I think it's exploring a different aspect, which really hit home as the guy, the Zodiac. Zodiac was a schoolteacher in Atascadero.

[Matt Murphy]

Wait, did they finally figure out who did it?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they know. Oh, I didn't know a thousand percent who it is.

[Matt Murphy]

He just got away with it. Died before he got.

[Dax Shepard]

He died. He was on dialysis. He died at, like, 58.

[Matt Murphy]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And why does he call that again?

[Dax Shepard]

He named himself that. Very smart guy. He was a champion diver. He was a scuba guy. He was enormous, man. He's a teacher and a task. He meets these kids. There's seven kids. The mom of the seven kids, husband, is in Atascadero State Mental Prison because the dad had molested the kids or one daughter in particular.

[Matt Murphy]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

She's in Silver Head. She's got seven kids. This teacher shows up, and he starts taking them to the movies some nights. He's their teacher. She trusts him. He develops this relationship with the whole family. What's neat about this doc, is it's not focusing as much on him like the other ones have. Is this crazy thing where you can know somebody who's been so generous and benevolent. This duality that can exist between what you think is a serial killer and then the absolute torture of getting presented evidence after evidence. But you know this man, and he was kind to you, and it's riveting. People want everyone to be a cartoon character of a serial killer. They don't want to be the teacher that was kind to you. And, you know, that's the thing. And to see what they had to deal with. There's the victims, but then there's this whole family that it tore them apart. And one brother finally admitted, no, it's him. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's heartbreaking for this family.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. Well, Rex Heuermann, that's the latest. That's The Gilgo beach one. Another huge guy. That's more east coast news. But he's kind of the modern. I think he represents the next wave because he figured out a way to defeat modern forensic science.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Matt Murphy]

They made a DNA hit on a hair, and it's mitochondrial DNA, so the numbers are like 1 in 50 as opposed to 1 in 18. Octillion. He killed probably 19, they think. And he was an architect in wife, kids, the whole deal. Yeah. And he would wrap them in burlap, which probably had something to do with fingerprints. And yeah, he got away with it for years and years, but so did my Golden State Killer case. That guy got away with it for years.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by Sonos. Sonos is the world's leading sound experience company. They invented the smart sound system that makes it easy to play anything and any room, which we love. Sonos was the star of our Halloween party. I had it playing outside by the guest house. I had it playing in the garden. I had it playing in the kitchen. Kept the party rocking no matter where you moved.

[Monica Padman]

It makes a big difference.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the sound is so good. You really got to take your favorite holiday movies and holiday songs to the next level and experience them with Sonos. And with holiday gift season upon us, Sonos products are a perfect solution for that. Hard to buy for person on your gift list.

[Monica Padman]

They've got amazing Ace head. And since you know we are podcasters, if you know any armchairs in your life, really smart, it's a great gift for them so that they can really get us in their ears properly.

[Dax Shepard]

Whether you gift a sleek soundbar, a sturdy portable speaker, or our favorite headphones, your lucky gift recipient is sure to be impressed. Sonos has great gifts for everyone on your list. Visit sonos.comdax to save 20% on select products. That's sonos.com hashtags. We are supported by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. We, of course have a gorgeous website that we designed. And by we, I mean Rob. That's right, Squarespace. Using their great templates. And it looks so beautiful and it functions so official. Yeah. So whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place. All on your terms. If it's your first time creating a website, no worries. Squarespace Blueprint is a new guided system that helps you build a unique online presence from the ground up. Your site will be perfectly tailored to your needs and with the help of engaging email marketing tools, you can share your brand story with your community and even grow your audience and reach through targeted email campaigns. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.comdax to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace airspace.com DAX to get started today, Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping. When you use Apple Card on your iPhone, you'll earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, including products at Apple like a new iPhone 16 or Apple Watch Ultra. Apply now in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs bank usa Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at Apple Car and Zodiac so he would teach the kids ciphers, right? He'd teach them how to do ciphers. Like you draw a grid, A, B, C, D, E, F. You drew a symbol and taught them how to write code letters. And he was submitting these to the San Francisco Chronicle and they were running them on the front page and there was these ciphers they couldn't break. One of the ciphers got broken last year, 50 years long. His cipher didn't get cracked. He was writing nonstop. I'm the Zodiac. What figure out this cipher. It'll tell you what I'm going to do next. I mean, it was so twisted.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's a very smart dude and very competent and a pedophile, as we come to find out. And this whole sexual kids. He killed teenagers who would be making out at makeup points.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah, they were equal, equal opportunity. These guys, boys, girls, women.

[Dax Shepard]

He was into self aggrandizement. He killed a cab driver for no reason because he wanted to kill the guy in front of a movie poster of a movie he loved. And he used to teach the kids. I mean, it is so dense with craziness.

[Matt Murphy]

I gotta watch it.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta watch it. And my heart to this family, I can't help but try to think of it in terms of addiction. And I think about like, are they like, me buying coke? Like, okay, we're buying coke this time, but we're not gonna buy coke anymore after tomorrow. Are those deals being made in their head? Are they trying, trying to quit?

[Matt Murphy]

Here's the difference in my mind. And I mean, look, everybody in my family is an addict. For the addict, we can have sympathy. It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You know, Stevenson, right? The duality of man. The vehicle he had to use was spontaneous transformation. Like Dr. Jekyll was a noble man working for science. Mr. Hyde was the monster that would kill. And when you know, it turns you into something and you know that you're hurting other people. Addicts only hurt themselves.

[Dax Shepard]

Typically there's collateral damage, but in general.

[Matt Murphy]

Sure, there's collateral damage, but it's not predatory.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Matt Murphy]

It's secondary.

[Dax Shepard]

I just wonder, are they trying to quit? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Is it like a compulsion and then they feel guilty or they're like, I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

Doing this till the day I get caught. I'm just so curious.

[Matt Murphy]

There's an arrogance that goes along with it, I don't think you see in addicts. And also sadism is an inherent part. It's a thing called the hair psychopathy checklist. It's like the most common traits of actual psychopaths. And grandiosity is on that list. The very first serial killer case I did was a serial rapist in Dante hunting speech. Finally killed one of his victims named Victor Morocco Miranda Guerrero. And he was living in a tiny little place and he had a notebook. He would write Victor King self portraits with a crown on his head. And it's like textbook type stuff. Addicts, it's a little different, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Dax Shepard]

I only meant the element of trying to quit.

[Matt Murphy]

For a lot of those guys, they get off on it so much. It's more the opposite. They can't wait to go out and do it again. And I don't think they feel guilty about it at all.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I had some questions that have just kind of always been on my mind about someone. With your job, how do you deal with the frustration of knowing you have someone and you don't have the evidence and you're not going to have it? What does that do to you? How do you compartmentalize that or how do you process that?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. The answer is not very well. I lost a lot of sleep over those.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm almost shocked there's not more vigilante justice. I bet back in the day there was.

[Matt Murphy]

It's funny you raised that. People forget there's a social compact. And one of it is somebody murders your family member, somebody you love. The deal is we don't exact revenge because the state is supposed to do it for us. And that's what a lot of people forget as we tack back to like early release. And I'm as pro reform as anybody, but for the sexual predators and the really bad guys are the ones that unnecessarily hurt a family or a victim.

[Dax Shepard]

Is the biggest predictor. I have to imagine rapists are just en route to that.

[Matt Murphy]

And all rapists don't wind up being serial killers. But virtually all serial killers were rapists. They start out with like, peeping or flashing, and they work their way up. They'll steal some underwear. The beef I have with the FBI definition on serial killer is it's too broad. It's two or more victims by the same perpetrator at different events. That encompasses gang members and mafia hitmen and drug dealers. They get in beefs. The real predatory guys are the sexual offenders.

[Dax Shepard]

I watched this great documentary about chess masters, and there's this very common pattern for chess masters. This happened to Bobby Fischer. It's happened to a lot of them. They spend their whole life anticipating doom, and they exercise their brain in that way. And when they are not concentrating on chess, a huge percentage of these chess masters become paranoid. It's a liability if all your focus. So are you aware that you have had a unique view of. Of life and do you attempt to.

[Monica Padman]

Correct for that a lot of bad guys?

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You have a little bit of a misleading worldview, I might argue in the same way. Let me add one other one. So my wife's mom was a nurse, and she came to me on the first time we met, and she said, oh, great, I'm glad I'm meeting you. You have to help me get Kristen off of birth control. And I said, well, I don't think that's my position. Do you know how many strokes I see at the hospital from birth control? And I said, I bet you see more than anybody. That's who they come to. Yeah, but if we look up right now, car accident deaths per 100,000 in strokes from birth control, I would be more apt to get her to quit driving a car. It's not a realistic, but I understand why to you it is.

[Matt Murphy]

No, I think you're exactly right. Of course, there's this nice old man that we were on the same schedule, and he would ride his bike past this elementary school, Manhattan beaches. I'd be on my way to work. And for years, I'd pass by this guy a couple times a week. And after about a couple months in sexual assault, it was like, there's that freaking pervert. I know what he's up to, you know, like, you definitely get jaded for sure. And you're right, I would have a.

[Dax Shepard]

Very skewed Worldview and I don't think anyone couldn't.

[Monica Padman]

So I have zero judgment if you didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm skewed by my weird experience in life. Right. I travel around and meet a bunch of artists all the time. I think the world's full of creative, wonderful people. I'm delusional.

[Matt Murphy]

I mean, I've stepped over 100 dead bodies over the course of my job. That definitely gives you a viewpoint.

[Dax Shepard]

Now here's a great question. So I have a tolerance and an appetite and a capacity to understand gnarly stuff still needs to go on in life. People gotta do gnarly jobs. Some cop answers a call to domestic disturbance and they walk through a door to a house they've never been in, they know violence is happening. That is a very intense gnarly situation and we need people to go do that. I think some people have lost their appetite for the reality of what has to go on. They have. And so to those people I'd argue like, hey, you have to have some understanding that gnarly shit's got to get done. And guess what? Gnarly shit getting done goes wrong often. You have to some tolerance for how ugly and gnarly all this is and.

[Matt Murphy]

Split second decisions too, that police are put in all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

And that is not to excuse any of the clearly racially motivated horrific things that have happened. Just everything's happening and you have to have some tolerance for this. And you also have to have some self correcting if you're you. And I'm wondering how one even does that.

[Matt Murphy]

You know, I scuba dive a ton. I still surf every morning I can, even though I'm getting rickety in my old age. But this is going to sound weird to say I started shark diving a few years ago. Nothing quiets your mind more than cageless shark diving and it's a lot safer than anybody would think. And sharks get a bad rap.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll take your word from it.

[Matt Murphy]

I'm going to Cuba in two weeks to go shark diving there and it is a frigging blast. That's been really Zen for me. And like you, I got to be very careful about using anything chemical to balance that out because that's a very slippery in that job.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, well, okay, great. That was one of my questions. Funny enough, the rate of domestic violence is really rough. It's overindexed. The rate of alcoholism is really fucking high among police officers. Do all those same things plague das?

[Matt Murphy]

Yes. I don't think to the same degree though as cops. And I Think that we still have it a lot better than they do. And it's rough to be a police officer right now. You're putting your life on the line for $80,000 a year in a community where you're hated, where the community is being hot to hate you. That's, I think, what really gets them.

[Dax Shepard]

As you even pointed out in the book, most of your colleagues aren't in thriving long term relationships.

[Matt Murphy]

No, not in homicide, they're not. And my mentors, and I don't really mention this because I kept them out, the rule is you're either a genius and there are a few that came through the unit that are able to balance out and be great husbands, wives and fathers and mothers. But generally you go into that unit if you're single when you go in, you're single when you come out, and if you're married, you're probably getting divorced.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

You know, Cause you can't do the job. At least me, I wasn't smart enough to have good bandwidth on both, and I decided that I had to go all in.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how can you be at dinner not thinking about this thing that has to get done in order to get this person off the street? Like, to be able to leave that at the valet is a tall order.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. When you have the responsibility to the moms. That's what it always came back to me, is when you meet the mom and they want you to bring it home for him. And for me, I'd wake up in the middle of the night. What's hard about the dinners is when you get the call outs. You know, I talk about this in the book. I had a notorious case out of Costa Mesa and I got the call in the middle of the woman I was dating at the time. It was her birthday. And for me, being awesome boyfriend that I was, it was just like, all right, we're out. That's tough on relationships. But in retrospect, I was a lousy romantic partner for a lot of that time.

[Monica Padman]

Obviously, it's hard to watch people you know are guilty and you don't have the evidence. But what about the opposite? Is there ever a time where you're like, God, I hope it's the right one.

[Matt Murphy]

So that's a great question, and thank you for asking me that. The answer is no. Because your ethical obligation, your sacrosanct duty, is to do justice. It's not to get convictions. And when you entertain a doubt, especially if you're working for a good office like I was back then, it is understood as soon as you say I have a doubt. But a lot of times it's not just whether the person did it or not. A lot of times it's on an enhancement. Like, I had a case where we go, and it was a very wealthy couple, Newport beach, about to get divorced, and I filed murder for financial gain. Because you only need any part of the motive being financial, that satisfies the element. The guy was so rich, we were afraid he was going to run anyway. And UK citizenship and all that. And then we get into the computers and as soon as the forensic analysis comes back, like six weeks later, FBI. So maybe eight weeks if we were asking for it in four. The real problem is he was going out visiting the services of sex workers, I believe is the politically correct. And he was bringing home STDs. That's what they were fighting about. So now I knew what they were fighting about, and it wasn't money. And we also learned in the course investigation, each side of the family had tons of cash. So I had to dismiss that right away. Ethically, even though concerned that he might run. And what did he do? He frickin ran. But yeah. So ethically, whenever you entertain a doubt, you gotta dump it. And I had another one. A guy actually charged with murder, he, he was a choker. He had a whole history of domestic violence where he would choke his ex girlfriends and ex wives. So it was his third fiance and they get in a big argument and she's found dead. He calls 911. The rigor's already set in. She's been dead for hours. She had bruising to her strap muscles, which happens in strangulation. Petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, which is when the blood vessels burst. There's always telltale signs for when somebody's been strangled. So he fought with her, choked her, caused death with asphyxia. Easy. Charged him with murder. We get the tox back, toxicological results of her blood. Turns out she took about 500 sleeping pills. And you die of asphyxia from sleep.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right, yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

So that's one had to dump it. You don't pass go. You immediately call the court, you go in and you dismiss it. We prosecuted him for the domestic violence. He went to prison for that. But yeah. So that's part of the job.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Is murder reflective of the time and culture, the way everything is. Is there a trend in murder? Is there a style in murder? Has it changed since the 80s?

[Matt Murphy]

That's a really interesting question. So murder itself, I think the motives have been the same for 100,000 years. Jealousy, greed, anger, lust. It's like the Four Horsemen that you keep seeing over and over. Throw a little booze in there, fourth of July barbecue, dispute with the neighbor. Next thing you know, the gun comes out and somebody gets killed. So it's the same thing over and over again. What we're seeing now, and I think that this is kind of a weird byproduct of the fascination with true crime, is you're getting guys like Rex Heuermann who are figuring out they. They don't want to get caught. So they're getting smarter about it. Almost like a Dexter type thing. And that's the new thing. Most of them aren't smart enough. The vast majority of murders are one offs. It's situational, never to be repeated again. But for the real predators, they are getting smarter. So that part is a yes. There's also social media impact on the way some of the psychopaths are able to manipulate the public. And we've just seen a big example of that. I don't want to necessarily go down this rabbit hole, but the Menendez brothers, you know, that's a fascinating thing. We got Netflix and we've got this outpouring of people that feel very, very strongly because they think they were sexually abused. Therefore, we gotta let them go. And it's a dicey area in keeping.

[Dax Shepard]

With my normal trying to always find the middle ground. What's interesting is there's two options on the table in this debate. They either were not molested and they belong there, or they were molested and they don't belong there. Here's my position.

[Matt Murphy]

They're molested and they still belong there.

[Dax Shepard]

I know where you're going, right? Yes.

[Matt Murphy]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I watched the trial. And what is undeniable is their testimony would be seen so much differently today than it was then. And I'm grateful it would be seen the way it should be today, for sure. I think that was a fucked up family and I think really bad shit happened to him. I don't think either of them are that good of actors. And I know that world and I believe them. Does that mean you can cut down mom with a shotgun?

[Matt Murphy]

Therein lies the rub, remember? And this is one of those things that forensically, it's Mossberg 12 gauge. That is a six cartridge weapon. And there were 13 shots.

[Dax Shepard]

And it takes a while to load a shotgun.

[Matt Murphy]

It sure does. It takes a while.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a pain in the ass. You cut your thumb sticking them in there.

[Matt Murphy]

It's A pain in the ass. And they'd practice with them. They bought him with fake ideas. But Lyle Menendez went out to that car, got ammo, reloaded the shotgun and literally put the gun to his mom's face and blew her face off. We can say everything we want about whatever Jose did or didn't do. Yeah, great. Unless you're after the money. Why do you kill Mom? In that debate, nobody will come up with a good answer.

[Dax Shepard]

How about this? I can't even make that argument. You were supposed to protect me. You turned your eye. You could have saved both of us from all this. Still. Fine.

[Matt Murphy]

But then we're talking about a revenge killing, not self defense. Yeah, yeah, right.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's just interesting again, to me, what's frustrating is it lines up the way every fucking thing lines up. Which is. It's binary. You're on this side or you're on this side.

[Matt Murphy]

Exactly. Right?

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, because your middle ground also has a flip. Right. Your middle is they're abused. They should serve time and maybe it's time to let them out.

[Matt Murphy]

That's not in a legitimate position at all.

[Monica Padman]

That's how I felt. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They've been in there for 30 years.

[Matt Murphy]

They're not strangers. They killed their parents, they raised them. I've got no issue with that. My problem is the zeal that everybody's gone into it with. They've all forgotten the first trial. And they've all forgotten how Lyle was bragging about how he lied on the stand in the first one. There's so many nuanced pieces, like reloading and shooting mom in the face.

[Dax Shepard]

Buying two Porsches and Rolexes.

[Matt Murphy]

Spending spree that started four days after the murder.

[Monica Padman]

All that.

[Dax Shepard]

Right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's all rough. They didn't.

[Monica Padman]

No one's. I mean, I guess some people maybe are.

[Dax Shepard]

Some people love them.

[Matt Murphy]

Bill Maher has a great thing. I'm going to butcher the quote, but it's brilliant. It's basically America never reacts. It just overreacts.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. We don't have act, we have overreact.

[Matt Murphy]

Which is exactly what you were just saying. There's a middle ground that everybody ignores.

[Dax Shepard]

It's because everything has to line up politically. So it's like all of a sudden, once you find out what your identity is, what's our team doing? Well, I don't want to lose my team. God. It's not a coincidence. You're presented with two options because there's two fucking parties and there's two identities.

[Matt Murphy]

In this, which is madness.

[Dax Shepard]

It is madness. Covid you gotta act like there's not a disease to be a member of your group, that's nuts. You gotta act like we gotta be separated forever. To be a member of your group, you can't let it go.

[Matt Murphy]

What happened to the great rational middle that I still think exists?

[Monica Padman]

It does, it does.

[Matt Murphy]

And see, with juries, that's a job as a da, you have to get a disparate group of people who are across the spectrum and get them to agree on something basic. Especially for murder. This stuff predates Democrats and Republicans. It predates empires and kings. This goes back to Hammurabi cuneiform. Like what happens when you kill somebody. Well, there's degrees of badness in it.

[Dax Shepard]

One of the first laws they wrote.

[Matt Murphy]

Down, literally the first laws dealt with killing people. And the Ten Commandments. That's a sequel to a lot of the first writings. How do we deal with each other as human beings? And I can tell you from my experience, the grief of a mom or a dad losing a kid to murder is the same now as it has ever been. And together as a society, like, if we can't all agree on that were lost. I think that that might have something to do with the fascination in true crime because it. It's kind of a refuge where people can get away from the screaming heads. It's one of the last areas where people, regardless of their political affiliation, can agree.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Have you been involved in any penis chopping zofs?

[Matt Murphy]

I've been involved in penis choppings offs.

[Monica Padman]

You have? No.

[Dax Shepard]

You haven't? Oh, yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought you were being funny.

[Monica Padman]

I was kind of being funny, but also I wondered.

[Matt Murphy]

I know I've had a couple.

[Dax Shepard]

Why?

[Matt Murphy]

I've been involved in a couple. But my last trial was my Hussein Nayiri case. This is actually a great story. It's a great story.

[Dax Shepard]

Good one to go on. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

It was a marijuana dispensary. Owner gets kidnapped. And the marijuana world in California is still like the wild west. So the way it works is you can't bank from marijuana proceeds. So it's all cash really quick.

[Dax Shepard]

So people understand the federal government hasn't legalized it. So any proceeds that were in a federally FDIC insured bank, you could go in and get all the money that.

[Matt Murphy]

F in the FDIC stands for federal, which is a federal crime. So they can't use Visa, MasterCard. So we legalize marijuana in the state of California without a plan in effect to deal with that. So the result is it's all cash.

[Dax Shepard]

You immediately open up the door to an actual narco trafficker saying, I own a dispensary. Here's how I explain this million dollars of cash. I put it in the bank.

[Matt Murphy]

The cartels are involved in so many dispensaries in California. It's a problem.

[Dax Shepard]

It's just sitting there is a great laundering situation, but you got legit business.

[Matt Murphy]

Guys that are coming in and they're squeezing out, and they're lowering the margins for the criminal element that's been responsible for that business. It's like the old bootleggers for years and years. Like, those guys weren't Seagram's whiskey makers. They were criminals that were willing to fill the need of bootlegging back in the 30s. As a result, the bad guys in the marijuana world know who's selling a lot of product, and they know who's got a big pile of cash at the end of every day. So this guy, he owns a dispensary in Santa Ana, totally legit, super licensed, and in fact, the guy didn't even use weed himself. So he's like a legit business guy. They put trackers on his car, and they surveilled him, and they took him. He was out in the desert on a meaningless trip with a friend. And they got it in their little brains that that must be where he's burying Alibaba's treasure. So they kidnap him out of Newport, they drive him out, they torture him the whole way out. They get him to the GPS coordinates where they'd stopped. They're like, give us the money. And he's like, I've told you for the last time, the money's in the safe, because why wouldn't it be in the freaking safe?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, I don't need to use the desert.

[Matt Murphy]

But again, psychopath in love with his own brilliance. They've tortured him. And he's like, for the last time, it's in the office. It's not out here. So he's like, you. And he cut off his penis, and he took it with him. So they also kidnapped his roommate's girlfriend. So imagine this. She's along for the ride, basically. They didn't torture her. So in the middle of the Mojave Desert, they dump her out. They're still bound. They throw a knife down, and they're like, if you can cut your way out, you might be able to get out. If you can't, you can just fucking die. So the van drives off. So she manages to get this blindfold off and sees lights off. In the distance, and she's in her pajamas and goes running through the California desert. First car she sees is an off duty sheriff's deputy going to work.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my gosh.

[Matt Murphy]

And so they're able to get to him before he dies. And now the search is on. And so, long story short, our mastermind fled back to Iran, where he was originally from. And he grew up in California. California kid. But he still had citizenship and still had family back there.

[Dax Shepard]

We don't have a great extradition policy with Iran.

[Matt Murphy]

They're not real big on that, which is a huge problem. So we've got the mastermind of this thing we wound up. And this is kind of cool. They do a canvas of the scene. So a canvas is just when the cops go and knock on doors, right? So they knock on a door. You're old enough to remember Bewitched. You're too young to remember Bewitched.

[Monica Padman]

Do you remember Mrs. Kravitz?

[Matt Murphy]

Always looking out.

[Dax Shepard]

Knows her, 59 years old. Can you believe? Look, look how good she looks.

[Matt Murphy]

They've got a neighbor. And you never get anything on a canvas when you're out of Lee's. It's a due diligence thing. But she's like. As a matter of fact, I did see something. I saw these boys, it looked like two went up on a ladder into the house where the kidnapping happened. But I didn't see them come out. They were wearing hard hats that looked too clean to be real. And the cops are like, please tell us you can describe the truck. And she's like, well, with the license plate due, she wrote down plate number. And of all the brilliance and all the planning that went into this, we had a really smart psychopath guy and he had helpers. And one of the helpers was a stone.

[Dax Shepard]

You got to do everything yourself, right?

[Matt Murphy]

That's why.

[Dax Shepard]

Cuz someone's penis off, you better be doing the whole thing. Yeah.

[Matt Murphy]

So anyway, he used his own truck for that event. So we catch one of them, the other guy flees to Iran, and we get pretty much everybody else, including the wife of the mastermind. So we've got her. She was in law school at the time.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Matt Murphy]

And now the game became, can we lure the guy out of Iran? It was one of the coolest things I ever got to do as a da so we flipped her to help us lure him into the Czech Republic. And I still can't believe it worked. But we threw a net on him. The Czech border police. And that was a case where the FBI were Heroes. So the former Soviet countries absolutely will extradite to the US because they actually trust our legal system. The UK is terrible, France is even worse. Spain, not so good surprisingly. But yep, pain in the ass. To get him beat out of those countries. So we could pick any country in the world. The Czechs. We get him here, extradition is successful. We put handcuffs on him in New York, transport him back, we're preparing for trial and he friggin escapes from the Orange County Jail with two guys that were in there for murder and they were on the loose. You read headlines about this back in the day, you don't remember, but for a week they're out.

[Dax Shepard]

You got this guy out of Iran, now you've lost him. I don't know how present you were at whatever girlfriend's birthday it was happening that week, but I'm sure you are not fucking thinking about.

[Matt Murphy]

I was not popular either. He's out. And he left my photo on his bunk along with my trial partner Heather Brown, who I love to death. And it was Escape from Alcatraz. They tunneled out through these plumbing tunnels behind Repelled, off the roof, literally. Something out of a movie leaves my photo on his bunk. And Iran. A lot of people don't know this. Have pretty warm diplomatic relations with Mexico because they're both OPEC countries and they have a full blown embassy in tijuana like about 15 minutes from the border.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh geez.

[Matt Murphy]

So all he has to do is head south. So I'm convinced the guy we spent a year outsmarting, oh my God. That we got outsmarted by. And instead for whatever reason he went north. And so we got him in San Francisco, a week later they recaptured him. That was my last trial as a prosecutor and he took the stand. And that was my final question to him, was dude, tell us, why couldn't you just leave it there and give the poor guy a chance? That it was. Would be reattached.

[Dax Shepard]

And you asked that stenographer had to ask that question.

[Matt Murphy]

And he was enraged by that question. I mean he was so pissed, which is the goal. You want the violent guys to flash in front of the jury. Which allowed me to argue in the end, ladies and gentlemen, I asked him something he didn't like. And his answer was, you're done. Personally, you're done. You're done.

[Dax Shepard]

You got a movie moment out of it.

[Matt Murphy]

I had a movie moment out of it.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't handle the truth.

[Matt Murphy]

You got it. And then the beauty is you connect that to closing where it's like, ladies and gentlemen, think about this. In between you, a group of people who are deciding his fate. A superior court judge. And in a courtroom full of armed guards and bailiffs.

[Dax Shepard]

He couldn't handle it.

[Matt Murphy]

He threatens to kill me or whatever you're done means. Imagine what he's like in the back of a van when he's not getting the million bucks that he thought was buried out there.

[Monica Padman]

Nuts.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah. So Hussein Nayiri. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did he ever say what he did with the penis? Did he Lorraine Bobbitt it and chuck it out the window of the van?

[Matt Murphy]

Flipped one of the three guys in the van and he said they threw it out the window down the road. Now, I never called him to testify, but it was one of the co conspirators.

[Monica Padman]

Weird.

[Dax Shepard]

What does one do if they're walking down the side of the road and they see a penis there? I mean, immediately. You should call the authorities. Right. No one misplaces them intentionally.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Matt Murphy, this was awesome. The book of a Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death. There are a dozen of those stories in there as well as your own. What else I want to add about it is it's a great education on a district attorney's job. You learn a lot about jurisprudence while you're hearing about all these crazy cases.

[Matt Murphy]

Hopefully an interesting way for the reader. The Audible's doing really well. I narrated it myself. Learned. I write in tongue Twisters. But thank you for saying that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So everyone, check out the book of Murder, and I look forward to your next book. This has been incredible. Thank you so much.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, good. I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode. But we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong. Just real quick, what if I was. People do this. Some people wear sunglasses inside Anna Wintour. Yeah. So you might like it. What if I wore sunglasses?

[Monica Padman]

I don't like not being able to see your eyes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's a bad look for me. But just what if. Try to wrap your head around the fact that I'm the type of guy that, like, I'm always wearing my shades. You know, I'll catch up. I'll be the dude in my shade. I'm always. My shades. I should have worn my leather.

[Monica Padman]

This is tricky. Okay. This is a deep.

[Dax Shepard]

This can change exactly how you feel about somebody. Right?

[Monica Padman]

This little accoutrement, you putting that on is going to change your whole personality. Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

So what do I do if I hate your new personality? But I love you.

[Dax Shepard]

What, what happens?

[Monica Padman]

What happens? Yeah, I mean really, like people do change over time.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, also remember my uncle, he had had that procedure for his epilepsy where they told, they warned he and his wife, like he may have a radical shift in his personality that was on the table.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's an interesting question.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have a friend though, that had a, like, do you think a radical shift in their personality? Cuz I could be that friend to some degree from where I grew up.

[Monica Padman]

Huh. To those people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. This guy's like, he's sober and he, he's liberal.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think your personality's changed? Because those are just, just those aren't to me personality things. They are. We might confuse them as personality things, but those are like some beliefs and some just ways of walking through the world.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I imagine you have a b. I have a bias where it's like, I think I'm aware of the things I've gotten better at and I'm not necessarily sure which ones I've gotten worse at. So I think a lot of people that were friends with me in my early 20s, like, they got me, but I would alienate certain people or I was too provocative or I'd get drunk. And then I think a lot of my friends were often having to apologize for my, who I was to their friends that didn't know me. I think it was a little too much for some people. So of course I would chalk that up as like, well, now I'm, I'm, I'm better.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

But maybe some people would be like, he's boring now. I, I like the guy that was a little too, A little crazy, right? This guy's a yawn. Yawn fest. Now. I just thought of an idea for a furniture line called. What word did I just say?

[Monica Padman]

Yawn fest. You want to do yarn fest?

[Dax Shepard]

I want to do yawn furniture. Like lawn furniture. Oh, but it's comfy furniture for taking a nap in.

[Monica Padman]

I like that yawn furniture. Is it still for outside? I think it should be.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. I feel like you must be in a really good mood today because you have your hair up and you have a bow in and that to me usually a cue. Like, you got up this morning and you're like, I feel pretty good. I'm going to do a thing. And now here it is.

[Monica Padman]

That's a great guess. That's not what happened.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I put my hair. I just grabbed the first clip I saw and put my hair up to do My makeup?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And then when I was done with my makeup, I was about to take it down and I thought, oh, I'll just leave my clip in.

[Dax Shepard]

It landed right.

[Monica Padman]

It landed right. It's hard to.

[Dax Shepard]

Sometimes you just get lucky. Right.

[Monica Padman]

It's hit or miss.

[Dax Shepard]

Throw it up, and then you pull off an orna.

[Matt Murphy]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I should have taken accidental perfection. That's right. Okay, so I guess you don't really want to talk too much about personalities.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I love talking about personalities. Do you think you've changed a lot?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I did a pod. I did a awesome podcast yesterday called she Pivots.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

It was really fun. Awesome host Emily Sussman. And she asked me what my personality was like as a kid. Like, was I. I must have been very wanting a lot of attention. Yes. Because I went into entertainment.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And could not be further from that. I was so shy.

[Dax Shepard]

You were shy.

[Monica Padman]

So shy.

[Dax Shepard]

But you always made a lot of friends, so that's a little.

[Monica Padman]

I did make friends. I did it but quietly and slowly. Right. I did it in the way I still make friends. Like, I'm not at a party out taking huge swings. Taking big swings, making. Yeah. Loud noises and, like, drawing attention. I'm not drawing attention. You know, I hate that. I hate audience participation. And, like, Jess is very like, you. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, here I am.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I love that, like, I. I do joke with him, though, that I. The first time I ever met him, ever, was at one of the Hanson Christmas parties. And he was, like, had his, like, shirt off or something. It was doing a dance.

[Dax Shepard]

I think those. Those heightened events could bring out an even heightened version of himself. So.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, this guy's dangerous. I'm scared of that person. I'm not. But I want distance from that person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep. And I think that's what a lot of people's reaction to me was in my 20s.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, and that's so funny because I obviously have a pattern of thinking like, ah, I'm. I'm scared of that. I don't want that near me. And then I always find my way towards those people.

[Dax Shepard]

Moths of the flame. Germany.

[Monica Padman]

Opposites of trash.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Laws of attraction. Attraction. Remember I read that fascinating article about how they're like, they're so buttoned up and responsible and yet they keep. They get drawn to the chaos mix.

[Monica Padman]

Messies.

[Dax Shepard]

Inexplicable.

[Monica Padman]

One of our old school go to's our tropes. Anyway, so I used to be very shy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm not shy anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, congratulations. But no one would. I can't imagine anyone would miss your shyness.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's a great question. My mom probably misses it because I was probably nicer.

[Dax Shepard]

I know what you're about to say, and I. Nicer? I don't think you've ever been shy to your mom.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, I wasn't, but I was stuck to her hip.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well, that would have been nice. Yeah. Like a little monkey.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But actually, this was probably a lesson for her. She probably didn't like that. She was probably like, can you, like, go away? No, she never said that to me. But she was probably like, I need some space. I've been working all day. And then there's this kid here.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Stuck. Glued to me.

[Monica Padman]

Glued.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's sweet.

[Monica Padman]

You were.

[Dax Shepard]

You were glued to nerdy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Oh, well, mainly in public.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Because I.

[Dax Shepard]

You kind of hide behind her body the way kids do.

[Monica Padman]

I get she. She would describe it as. Yeah, it was, like, always kind of glued to her.

[Dax Shepard]

My cousins Mandy and Kelly, who are the funnest people on planet Earth, you'll remember, they visited not too long ago, and we had the blast. Mandy is the younger sister, and she has same personality I do. Right. Look at me. And then Kelly, who's my exact age, was very, very shy, and she would just move through the world, hiding behind Mandy at all times, but she was much bigger. But I have such a clear image in my head of anytime we would leave our little bubble and be at a Kmart or a thing, Kelly would be behind Mandy. Like, go ahead. You do do all this stuff I don't want to do for us.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting. It's again, maybe a birth order thing?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. You would love this. So the update no one's asking for is, I went the dentist.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, right.

[Dax Shepard]

And my hygienist was five X's into astrology, as you are.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

And she was really mad that you hadn't told me what my rising was.

[Monica Padman]

But I. I've asked you.

[Dax Shepard]

I said. I think she has. I think she made me take a test to find out my rising, but I forgot it. I only remember Capricorn, but she was a Capricorn, but she had, like, five. And this is the thing about. You guys are really into it. All of a sudden you have, like, all the signs. Because she's like, I'm such and such rising, and I'm this waning, and I'm. And I'm like, well, you've got now a fourth of the signs.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, no, it's.

[Dax Shepard]

I loved her, by the way, very fun hygienist. She was swearing and stuff, which I love.

[Monica Padman]

That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

And of course, I asked her because it had been almost to the day seven years since I had been there last time.

[Monica Padman]

Sure, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And she was like, whoa, seven years? I going, no. And I'm going to ask you to do something that's really maybe even impossible to do because you already know the seven years. But I'm going to ask you to pretend you don't know that and objectively assess my mouth to see how long you think it's been, because this is what I asked last time I was here. And this is when she started swearing. She was like, oh, my God. Yeah, you're just genetically lucky. You don't have any tartar. She's like, you have no tartar. And you know what she told me, which I find really fascinating, is remember my calcium heart score, which I brag about all the time?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you do a lot of bragging.

[Dax Shepard]

I do a lot of bragging. It's unbecoming of a gentleman.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think that's a personality change or has that always been there?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no. In fact, when you. What I was going to say, the grody part of myself that I think is diminished is I used to, if not directly, brag. I was really trying to brag all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so that's gone down.

[Dax Shepard]

It's gone down.

[Monica Padman]

That's good.

[Dax Shepard]

And even now, there's a zone of things I'll brag about and there are things that. That I should be in trouble for, but I'm not. So that's the break. So my calcium score, I was terrified to get it because of my diet is meat. And so I was so relieved and delighted that it was zero.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Similarly, I haven't been to the dentist in seven years. I've been one time in 17 years.

[Monica Padman]

That's disgusting.

[Dax Shepard]

Because it was 10 years before the last trip. I know, it's foul. Everyone is throwing up their tuna sandwich in their car right now. I am bragging about it. And then here's my other justification. This is what I told her. She's like, yeah, some people genetically are lucky. They don't build up a lot of tartar. And that's you. And I said, I'm going to take it because I have some other genetic stuff that's like psoriatic arthritis and stuff. So these things that I have that are just blessings from above.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we all have a grab bag.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, I. What a great genetic lottery I hit with My teeth.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Really lucky, because I hate going.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of bragging.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Something that you've bragged about recently that I've been excited to bring up. So the cognitive test.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yes, yes, yes. It's. Now it's your turn in the catbird seat.

[Monica Padman]

But there was a huge revelation that happened. I got my test results back. Hour and a half long with Dr. Richard Isaacson. Been fascinating. Fascinating. All the cholesterol stuff. You know I started my statin. I told you that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

All the cholesterol stuff. All the other stuff turns out minus the cholesterol, which is really, really, really bad. But we're working on it. Everything's tip top.

[Dax Shepard]

Wonderful.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, everything's great. My liver's great. Which I was worried about.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I would be too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But it's fine. So I can keep powering through.

[Dax Shepard]

You're built for it.

[Monica Padman]

Then the cognitive test results. And of course I, I was very anxious about this part of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You thought you'd convince yourself you did bad.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Even during it. I think I said on here, I said this is very, very humbling. And she said I had had people walk out and we got, you know. And I was like, yeah, this is really bad. I did. I'm doing horribly. I'm doing horribly. And then when he. And what? I didn't even realize we were taking an IQ test. I didn't realize that.

[Dax Shepard]

Were we?

[Monica Padman]

Yes. The. The number is an IQ score.

[Dax Shepard]

It is. Cuz there was none of the fun riddles that I love from maybe the.

[Monica Padman]

Kid ones, maybe different.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no. A standard like to get into men's IQ tests has a ton of computation and long form pattern recognition and prediction.

[Monica Padman]

Well, this is pattern we have. There was a lot of pattern or not. Maybe not pattern recognition.

[Dax Shepard]

There was identifying but there was no pre. It's not like they would go A, A, D, H. What's the next letter? I love.

[Monica Padman]

True. Okay, well, whatever. Anyway, it is what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so is an IQ test.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Why didn't he give us an actual number? Did he give you a number?

[Monica Padman]

He.

[Dax Shepard]

Did he give you a number?

[Monica Padman]

That's my whole thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So he said cognitive test. Don't worry, your cholesterol hasn't affected your brain yet.

[Dax Shepard]

Or what if you were even smarter?

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well we'll get to that. So he said has infected your brain yet you did. Fantastic. The guy, you know who evaluates it said words like superior, excellent. Wow. So I was just so relieved at this point.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, of course.

[Monica Padman]

And he said, you did a teeny bit better than your co host. And I said, yes. This is so exciting. He's been bragging so much.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes.

[Monica Padman]

And he said, well, actually, I don't have the numbers. One of you did a little bit better. I was like, ah, okay, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

So one of us did a lot of.

[Monica Padman]

And I said, oh, man. Well, if it was him, I think this is because of the seahorse and racism.

[Dax Shepard]

Uh huh. Sure.

[Monica Padman]

And there was an Indian man also on the call, and I was asking him about seahorses. He also was very hazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he was like, seem.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, that was. You had two people on your call?

[Monica Padman]

I had like eight people on my call.

[Dax Shepard]

Why did I only have one?

[Monica Padman]

I think I'm a very interesting case.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. They brought in the.

[Monica Padman]

At least I have an interesting case.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So anyway, while I was commiserating with the Indian man on seahorse sea monkeys, Dr. Isaacson told Holly to pull up our actual numbers.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And when he was doing it, he goes, oh, my God. Are you serious?

[Dax Shepard]

It took his breath away.

[Monica Padman]

Holly, are you serious? Is this. Is this real? We scored the exact same score.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my. What?

[Monica Padman]

Good to the tenth of a point.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Now nothing could be better.

[Monica Padman]

Nothing.

[Dax Shepard]

No one's hurt feelings.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Matt Murphy]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think my dad did that for us. And obviously we both definitely scored differently in parts, but it all added up to the.

[Dax Shepard]

That's kind of crazy. Same number because again, there's all these columns of intelligence and some of them I know I did terrible on. So the fact that, like, our terrible things evened out to be the same. So they give you an IQ score. We'd cut it out. Out. But I will.

[Monica Padman]

I wrote it down, but now I forget it. But hold on. I. I sent it to Eric.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think it's an IQ test, but I'm going to. Unless it's great. Then I'm going to say it's a really good IQ test. Do you know what I'm saying, though, where you have to get those really good rhythms?

[Monica Padman]

This is an IQ test.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Sorry. Felt like a memory test.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Oh, my God. Okay. The. Our number is first.

[Dax Shepard]

Before you tell me, have you taken a bunch of IQ tests? I've taken a bunch.

[Monica Padman]

So I told my mom the number.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And my dad, I was like, good news is my brain is doing well. This, you know, whatever. I explained the whole thing. And I was like, this is my score. And my dad was like, yay, that's great. And my mom was like, well, when you were five, you got five points higher than that. Or seven when I was seven. So I was like, okay, well, it's keeping me humble, you know?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I reject that. I'm not trying to make you mad. This is my own self preservation.

[Monica Padman]

That was your score.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know what to tell you.

[Dax Shepard]

That's lower than I want.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And actually this is. I wasn't going to say this, but now I'm going to say this based on your reaction.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

To me, it's so telling about men and women.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Cause I'm taking this test and I'm like, I'm fucking this up. I'm doing so badly.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, right.

[Monica Padman]

I. Oh my God, this is so embarrassing. I'm stupid.

[Dax Shepard]

The self doubt.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And then my score is exemplary high. And I think men don't do that as much. Or let's take you. Who ended up with the exact same score as me.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. This is a great comp.

[Monica Padman]

Because after we, you know, we talked after your test and you didn't think that. I mean, you weren't like, I did amazing, but you.

[Dax Shepard]

I wasn't. Remember, there were quite a few that I thought I did bad on. I don't think I was like overly bullish about it. I think I thought I definitely nailed a few things that F thing. You know I bragged about that, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you did some bragging.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I didn't be like you for sure. On the spectrum. I didn't feel like you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So I just think it's an interesting takeaway of doubt and confidence. How men and women walk through the world and when they're put through tests, like, what is happening in their brains.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm teeming with testosterone, which, like, is the chemical that convinces you you can do things you can't.

[Monica Padman]

Right. And it's just funny.

[Matt Murphy]

My brain was more what you were thinking, Monica, after I took the test, Right.

[Monica Padman]

As a comp, we got the same score, which is why I can say that. Like, because I didn't do poorly.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. And yet you thought you did.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I wish I could do these things with more confidence.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Borrow some of that feeling.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder, like if we dug into it, what's under that? You know, is it for you? You that being smart is a very defining characteristic. And so here's this thing that has the potential to destroy your identity. I'm just throwing something out. This isn't what I think, per se, but I'm just like, spitballing now, is it that the stakes were higher for you, Whereas for me it's like, well, I know I'm going to tank a lot of this and I don't.

[Monica Padman]

You don't. In fact, that's what our just fight just now was. You're like, I reject that number. I'm higher than that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, because I've gotten better scores than that. And so of course I'm going to believe the one that made me seem the smartest. That's like my self interest.

[Monica Padman]

You don't have what you're saying you have. You think you're. You think, you believe.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a paradox. Yeah, it's a paradox. Yeah. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

I think also like women, a lot of girls are told like, oh, like girls don't score as high on tests or girls aren't good at math, or girls aren't X, Y and Z.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And still. Yeah. I don't. I am in there thinking like, well, I, I mean, it's all subconscious, but it's like, yeah, I can't be very good at this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it'd be interesting to know what young girls now because. Yeah. When you grew up, the admission rate for men in STEM at universities was still in the 80s probably. Right. But now it's completely flipped. So now like two thirds of girls are getting into college and only one third of boys or whatever. The number is pretty crazy now.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I watched the. I guess it was a holiday concert.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Last night at Lincoln School.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, nice.

[Dax Shepard]

And as you would expect, lots of balling.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm watching all these little girls. It's all girls school.

[Monica Padman]

So cute.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're singing and it's so beautiful.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm crying.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I look at Chris at one point and I go, you know, daughters are really the best thing this planet has to offer. They're the best thing that this planet has to offer is little daughters.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Me, they're all. I was looking at all of them. They're so cute and. Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Gotta protect them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Oh, man, it was so touching. I was also tripping the out that I have a daughter in a Catholic school outfit like I. In a bazillion years.

[Monica Padman]

That is so funny.

[Dax Shepard]

That is not what my fantasy of having kids was.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it was. It was great.

[Monica Padman]

That's sweet. Do you think a lot of men feel that way about daughters?

[Dax Shepard]

I think a lot of men want to have a son. When I could spitball for an hour on why that is just historically, what that has meant until recently. But the second you have a daughter. Every man I know that has daughters, the first thing we say to each other is like, our, aren't we so fucking lucky? Like, we got so lucky that we have these girls. And you know that study that just came out that adds like 1.5 years to your life per daughter you have. And it's cumulative. It does something very good for us.

[Matt Murphy]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, this is great because people may remember a while back, you and I have debated which is better, acetaminophen or ibuprofen.

[Monica Padman]

We sure, sure have.

[Dax Shepard]

So I, for me, particularly headaches. I gotta go. Tylenol.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

But I do like Motrin for muscle pain.

[Monica Padman]

I like Motrin.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you won't even play. What about for headaches, though?

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I'm Motrin.

[Dax Shepard]

Your team Motrin. Listen to this.

[Monica Padman]

Stop trying to make me who I'm not.

[Dax Shepard]

The gods have intervened and we have a perfect solution. Motrin and Tylenol have finally settled the great debate by teaming up and introducing Motrin dual axis action with Tylenol.

[Monica Padman]

They did this for us to save our relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

I think they may have. Why just use one when you can have both? The pain targeting strength of Motrin united with the pain blocking power of Tylenol. Ibuprofen is the active ingredient in Motrin and acetametophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol. Motrin plus Tylenol brands provide over a hundred years of combined pain relief experience in one product. Whatever your needs, Tylenol and Motrin are here to help. Fast acting, long lasting by Tylenol, Motrin and Motrin dual action with Tylenol on Amazon or at a store near you. Use product only as directed. Tell me, makes you love your dad?

[Monica Padman]

No. I mean, I love my dad. Yeah. But no, it's like, it makes me so happy to hear that. And. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you have a disconnect.

[Monica Padman]

I have a disconnect. Why do we stop caring about women after a certain. Like, really? I mean, yeah. Not to be political, but women, I'm gonna say for me, just took a big hit and. From men and women, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So that is so curious to me how we can, like, look at these. Be so proud of our daughters and, you know, want the best for them. And I believe that. I believe that. I believe that most people want the best for their children and half of their children are girls.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

To me, there's just like a hypocrisy. Not you, obviously, but there's a hypocrisy where it's like, I gotta protect my family and I gotta. And then you don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but. And this is where you and I often disagree, which is like, yes, if your conclusion is that it was an opportunity to vote for women and that was the thing that drove your voting, then it's very disheartening.

[Matt Murphy]

But.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, but I mean, more just. Well, that too, but also just rights.

[Dax Shepard]

But I personally think that it wasn't a vote on women as much as maybe it should have been. And I voted that way. But if I just look at the exit polls, that's not what people were saying was their concern.

[Monica Padman]

That's my point. That's actually my point is it was not their concern.

[Dax Shepard]

But let's just be as generous as we can. If you are somebody who is having an impossible time feeding your family and your conclusion, right or wrong, is that it's because the left. Well, feeding everyone and keeping everyone safe would trump other things. It's like first order of businesses like food, shelter and water.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Once we have that, then we move on to these other things. So it could be that they very much want those. Well, we know 70% of the country wants those rights for women. But they may have said to themselves, but I am more scared about my income currently. And that's got to be what. What I'm gonna vote to. And then we can disagree on what the best route for them.

[Monica Padman]

To those people who truly are like. Well, again, yeah, I think there's some misinformation about what would help those people. But they. To those people who really. They're in like, I can't put food on the table. I'm not. I have no judgment of those people. I don't. That's a very specific situation. I am not talking about that group.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's tens of millions of people.

[Monica Padman]

It is. But there's a huge percentage of people that did not vote for women's rights that do not have trouble putting food on the table and chose to still, again, the most generous thing I can say is chose to pick their tax dollars over women's rights. And that is. There is just. To me, there's a. There's a disconnect between the way we think about young girls and then what happens.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Overall, I think people just triage their priorities, you know, I think, yeah, it's. And then. And then. And for you. Which is totally understandable. That's. That's number one for you on all the issues that were being voted on was. That was the number 1 1. And there's some other stuff you totally care about that went to number two. And if.

[Monica Padman]

Well, everything I cared about, not unfortunately, but was belonged to one party. Sure to make big sacrifices.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's put it this way. I do believe if you had virtually two centrist candidates on the right and the left, and on the right they were pro reproductive rights and on the left they were anti. And they wanted to extend. I think you would have flopped.

[Monica Padman]

You would have 100%.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So I do think it was in the same way that for the people that were. Are pro life, that, that that one always trumps all the other ones. I think we often have certain issues that trump a lot of other stuff we care about.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Just bums me out. I can feel. I can really feel it. I don't know if you can sense this too, but I've been around a lot of women lately. Yeah. And like, everyone's in a tough spot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I. I feel it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's, it's. It's like.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I talked to my ex girlfriend, Carrie. I sent you the text.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Then I FaceTimed her. And we haven't had a FaceTime. Like, we just check in with each other once every few months and. Or she'll send me a song she likes or I'll send her song. But we had a full, like, hour and a half facetime to talk about this. All these issues.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. She doesn't need that from me normally. Like, that's not something. She's not reaching out to me to go, like, how are you not freaking out kind of a situation. You know, and so. Yeah, I can see in. I can see. I see it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You know, you brought this up and I think it's right that a lot of men, young boy, young men feel not seen or not spoken to and, And I really. I guess I'm just. To our male listeners who are in a position of influence at all, it's on, it's on you. Not you, but you as a group to help these men. It's. If I don't think it's on women.

[Dax Shepard]

To do it, it's not on women. It's on the party. The party has to have a plan for.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But I'm saying the way to choose, change the seed, the culture. It happens from within. And we had Sharon on and she was like, it's not that. It's not the government that's gonna come in on a White horse and change people's opinions and change. Exactly. It comes from within.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And I was also thinking about this, speaking of daughters and fathers. Kerala, where my parents are from, is a very matriarchal society because originally it was the wealth was passed down through the female.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Matri and local.

[Monica Padman]

So there isn't this, like. Cause I was like, why is it? Like, why doesn't my dad have this? And even my grandfather, who was much, you know, of a old generation, he didn't have that at all. And I was like, what is it? And I was like, oh, it's not that they're like, special. They didn't grow up in a patriarchal environment. And it's for everyone to start moving more away from.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, so much of it too, is just you're kind of a product of your environment. And as you know, Keith Payne said, it's like, yes, we all believe we've thought through all the issues and come to the best conclusion, but it isn't suspicious. I can predict 90% what your conclusion is going to be. I think that's relevant. And so I don't deserve applause because I'm a feminist. I was raised by a force of nature woman. And there was no dad around. I was seeing no lowered status. I just am the lucky beneficiary of having grown up with a gangster mom.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was just on a trip with a dude who's also only dated and is now married to gangster women. And I said to him, well, your mom must be a gangster. Was she? And he's like, oh, yeah. She's like the ultimate gangster. This is like, yeah, that boy is the beneficiary of that. And I was the beneficiary of that. And that's just. We got lucky. You know, he was born into a house.

[Monica Padman]

You got lucky. But also there's societal things that make it harder or easier. Like when there's equal pay, it's easier to grow up in a household where your parents are equal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You know, there's. That's what these systemic things are about, change. You know, that's why we have to change some of these things. Because it. You're absolutely right. It's what you literally are born into.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, some people dispute this data, but let's just say for one second it's true that. That men will date laterally and below them and that women date later financially above them. Yeah. Or even like status wise, educational attainment, these different metrics. Right. But on social dating platforms, that it's really pretty staggering. And I was like, why is that? Right? Why is that? And what occurred to me is like, oh yeah, for a guy who grew up in the 80s, his dad worked and the mom didn't work or make money and probably didn't go to college and have a degree. So like his. The primary love in a boy's life was this woman who probably had less status than the man on the scene. So of course that makes sense. Whereas if you're a girl, dad had more status and money and power than mom and you're trying to marry dad. So like boys are trying to marry mom and girls are trying to marry dad. So of course this pattern exists. That's exactly what you saw growing up.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe for a large swath, but for a woman who has a level of success, a certain level has hit a certain level of success. I don't think that's. They're not looking for someone with more. That's hard. Like, that's really rare and hard to find.

[Dax Shepard]

But like a lot of women would not want to. I'm going to. These are air quotes. A deadbeat boyfriend. But there's so many rich dudes that are happy to have a wife who's never done anything but look gorgeous. That's weird to me. Like, what, why is, how could that be? Why is that like not triggering for a guy and that would be hugely triggering for a woman.

[Monica Padman]

Most of the people in my life are with partners that are 100% on par.

[Dax Shepard]

Comparable.

[Monica Padman]

They're all working. They're all working and make around the same amount of money.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess my conclusion's hopeful for me, which is like, oh, well, as this primary structure evolves, perhaps the baggage of both those things will go away. Like, I think this is very much product of like 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s family structure. But more and more and more people have either a mom who makes the same as dad or more. Or I know a ton of people here, which I didn't exist in Michigan in the 80s. There was no stay at home dads. I never met a single kid whose dad stayed at home. And. But here I don't know what the percentage is, but all the time I'm meeting men at school who. That's what they do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So conceivably their daughters aren't going to think that a guy who, you know, that, that's, that would never be an issue for them. Because the other, the other conclusion is it's just so bleak. Like they're. There's the kind of, you know, Scott Galloway who I love so much of what he says. His is pretty bleak, right. Where this is just going to get exacerbated because less and less men are going to college. So less and less men are even going to achieve something laterally significant or above. So it's just going to continue to self perpetuate, which I can see that's a very defendable position. But I'm hopeful that as people's role models and parents evolve that they'll just, it'll maybe take care of itself.

[Monica Padman]

But why. What's his take on, like, why it would self perpetual. Why can't men get themselves to college anymore?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they're being outperformed by girls, very simply. They're, they're, they're getting, you know, now that the reins are off of girls and the shackles are off of girls, well, lo and behold, they perform better, they test better. You know, they're, they're more mature. There's all these things.

[Monica Padman]

But it's. I don't think it's that, like, I don't think the stat is that boys are getting rejected from college. It's that they're not going.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Well, in these elite schools with hard admissions, way more boys are applying than are getting in.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And. But metrically, girls are doing much better. They're getting in at a much higher rate.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but I mean, we, I guess that's an outlier, right? Like trying to get into an Ivy League school. I mean, just a regular public college institution there. There's no reason other than from within that group that they shouldn't be able to go. Like that's what I, what is happening.

[Dax Shepard]

But what if though they, what if they can't compete?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I think there, there literally would be affirmative action for men. Like if, if I think that if 90% of women. If it was like every school is turning into 95% based on 5 because of marriage. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Malcolm was saying.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That Tulane is becoming a.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

A women's only college.

[Monica Padman]

But. And then that gets into. Is. But then why. Because is it then draw more women and draw less men? You know, that whole thing, whatever. There's so many factors to it, but there would definitely be fixes for that. Currently, I don't, I just don't know why they should.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how much is anecdotally your high school school experience? And I'll say my high school experience. So on average, girls were much better students than the boys. Like, the boys were highly distracted. You know, they were distracting in class. I was one of them.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think the only reason they weren't before blasting boys out of the water is that they didn't apply, or they weren't expected to do that, or they weren't encouraged to do it, or they were discouraged to do it. But, like, once that. I think once that, like, when everyone's aims were the same, I'm not shocked they've blasted by boys just from sitting in classes my whole life.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Boys were kind of. You couldn't get them to fucking settle down for 10 minutes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know what's happening there.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Physiologically. But I'm not shocked that now that the governor's off girls that they're doing better. That doesn't shock me at all.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's not shocking to me that, that they're doing better, but it doesn't explain to me why men are just dropping off the map.

[Dax Shepard]

I think what men are feeling is we made a very specific decision about 30 years ago where we said, okay, our economy is transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a brain economy. And we're gonna invent stuff and we're gonna administrate and we're gonna do all this stuff. And then. So NAFTA is a very appealing policy. Cause we're not gonna be manufacturing anymore. It'd be better to get cheap labor in Mexico. And a lot of, lot of decisions were made to pursue that goal of a brain economy. And we have the results. So I think, at least when I was going to high school, in fact, I can tell you my. I told. I, I a month or two ago, I said, I reconnected with them. Joey Ricardi. Joey Ricardi wasn't a good student. His dad was a bricklayer. He had a work ethic like no one's business. He owns this incredible excavation company now, and he's done incredibly well. He could have never. He was not going to go to college. Yeah, there used to be a lot more avenues like that. The trades. The trades were bigger. The trade, you know, manufacturer. I'm from Detroit. Like, most people went into manufacturing and they had great lives and they had ski boats and, you know, so that is really fallen out. So that's a real issue.

[Monica Padman]

It is a real issue. But in the same way that when we talk about AI here, and if I say, like, well, I think we should put regulations. And you're like, well, we can't, because we have to compete with, with these other countries, they're not gonna stop.

[Dax Shepard]

And I say that not because I don't agree with you. I say that because I think I'm working backwards from a reality. I don't think we should do that.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. So I'm making the same equivalency. Like if we said we're not gonna be a brain economy, how the fuck are we gonna compete with China and India and these other countries that are full brain economy.

[Dax Shepard]

But luckily we have some models. So it's like Germany's doing both things. Germany is leading in tech and in engineering, and yet they also have this huge manufacturing base.

[Monica Padman]

You know, I don't think they're leading in tech. Germany isn't leading in tech.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. They're very, they're a very high tech civilization.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And they have a, their own stock market. That's, you know, they, they have all the things we have. They're kind of winning on both fronts. And they have a, they've made a lot of legislative decisions that the skilled lab a. When you're in school, they drive you, if you're a boy, to a vocational school.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I think that's very smart.

[Dax Shepard]

And you pick up an actual trade there that you will make $45 an hour. Like you'll be a middle class whether they're unionized or not. They just culturally, I think, because we have at least a model of it where it works, where you can have both things. You can have a brain economy and a manufacturing economy. I think we need to do a lot better.

[Monica Padman]

I do too. But so that's sort of. How do we get those people to hear. Because this is the truth. The party that wants to do that, the party that wants to do free community college to offer retraining and vocational skills is not the party they're voting for. So I don't know how to get those people to understand that what is in their best interest and this country's best interest of that, of actual training that group to be middle class or above love. And there is an avenue for that.

[Dax Shepard]

Now look, some of these things are dog whistles. I'll totally agree with you. But it's very simple messaging. It's like 2016, Trump's the only person in America and that's like fighting for coal jobs. We're going, we gotta get into green energy.

[Monica Padman]

But what else did she say? And so we have to retrain. Hillary said retrain. I heard it so many times. Retraining, training, and that's correct.

[Dax Shepard]

But listen, you can totally disagree with it on an environmental stance, but you had one side saying, we're going to get into green energy, which is a very High tech energy. It's all happening in Silicon Valley. It's like the solar panel companies, the wind turbine companies, and then you have oil and gas drilling, which is North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, all these places where dudes are roughnecks and they can go make $60 an hour and nothing they can do solar and wind. Sounds like they're never, that's never going to be for them. But coal mining and gas and oil, which the right is very in favor of gas and oil and the left's very against gas and oil. You just got to acknowledge that that's a whole sector of jobs that a lot of these guys were going to have. And they think that one side wants to get rid of all those jobs. The last of their high paying jobs. Jobs. If you can just table the environmental aspect for a second, I understand the appeal of that. That's not like hard for me to get. Is one side saying I'm going to protect all these jobs that the left says are too dirty for the world and the other side is saying we're going to green, which is high tech in Silicon Valley. That all makes sense to me. And it's a lot simpler to understand than.

[Monica Padman]

Than the reality.

[Dax Shepard]

Something more complicated.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. All right, here we go. So this is for Matt Murphy.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, this was a fun one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The percentage of DNA that we share with chimps, 98.8% almost our temperature.

[Dax Shepard]

That'll be our. My new way of remembering it. Remembering it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, great. Al, blood alcohol levels, his mom was 5 and 08 is the legal limit. So that's really bad. Really, really bad.

[Dax Shepard]

That's insane.

[Monica Padman]

Very bad. On the Wry plus episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

We do a little fact check now for the Wondery plus episode. So for the Matt Murphy Wondery episode, the facts are a little different than they're the same, but they're different because I have. I found a different fact.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. You keep going.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, because in that episode I said that he, Kevin Spacey is currently in a play and he's not.

[Dax Shepard]

He's not?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. He's unemployed currently.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I guess he's set to appear in a movie. Movie Peter 58.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And where he got the standing ovation, he. It was at a theater in Oxford. Which is why I guess I was confused. It says his first stage appearance since being cleared of sexual assault after performing a brief scene by Shakespeare. So he just did a scene.

[Dax Shepard]

Little one off.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. He did a five minute scene and.

[Dax Shepard]

That received a standing ovation.

[Monica Padman]

I guess so. All right, so he's not Currently in a play.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. There was a standing o last night.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you call it a standing O?

[Monica Padman]

I used to, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you know, you're off of it. Am I doing something dorky?

[Monica Padman]

I said it a while. I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Go ahead. It's a little dorky.

[Monica Padman]

No, it's fine. Okay. You said 25% of boys are molested. Ish. And the last time we talked about this, I was like, yes, I found that stat. Now that stat's gone.

[Dax Shepard]

They took it off the Internet.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, it's gone. And what's left is one in six. I guess that's this big number. And then there's a site called 1in6.org. Then all these other places are saying 1 in 6. I looked a lot for the other thing and I couldn't find it. And I kept finding one in six.

[Dax Shepard]

One could be data from today and one could be data from the 80s. Like I'm always referencing Body Keeps a Score. And that stuff was all about the generation in the 80s.

[Monica Padman]

But one is data from today and the other is data from last week.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no, that's. I don't have an explanation for that. But I could see where from my generation to my kids that it has dropped.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, that's nuts. If you're at a football game and you're looking at those many thousands of people and you're saying one of every six people you see.

[Monica Padman]

Awful.

[Dax Shepard]

It's crazy.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

That's more than that. Have been in a traffic accident.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know those stats, but.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So are you more likely to be sexually abusive if you were sexually abused? Again, some conflicting info. There's stopit now.org which we talked about. That basic. Stop it now.org says, no, you're not more likely to be. There is a study by the NIH. Among 747 males, the risk of being a perpetrator was positively correlated with reported sexual abuse. Victim exposed experiences. The overall rate of having been a victim was 35% for perpetrators and 11% for non perpetrators. Of the 96 females, 43% had been victims, but only one was a perpetrator. A high percentage of male subjects abused in childhood by a female relative became perpetrators. Having been a victim was a strong predictor of becoming a perpetrator, as was an index of parental loss in childhood. And that is all.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I love you. This was fun.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You rose to the occasion of your bar at.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I rose to the occasion. It's a rose.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it is.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my Lord. All right. Love you, Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail].

[D]

Hey Armchairries, quick question for you. Have you ever stopped to wonder who came up with that bottle of Sriracha sitting in your fridge? Or why almost every house in America has a game of Monopoly stashed away somewhere? Well, this is Nick and this is Jack and we just launched a brand new podcast called the Best Idea Yet. It's all about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the people who brought them to life. Like Super Mario, the best selling video game character ever. He's only a thing because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye or Jack. How about McDonald's Happy Meal? Believe it or not, the Happy Meal was dreamed up by a mom in Guatemala. Every week on the Best Idea yet, you'll discover the surprising stories behind the most viral products of all time while picking up real business insights along the way. We guarantee you'll be that person at your next dinner party, dropping knowledge bombs at the table. Follow the Best Idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the Best Idea yet early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus.