Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Michael Lewis on the Gambling Epidemic

Episode Details:

• Title: Michael Lewis (on the Gambling Epidemic)
• Release Date: May 7, 2025
• Host/Author: Armchair Umbrella (Dax Shepard)

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1. Introduction and Guest Background

Dax Shepard welcomes listeners to the episode, introducing Michael Lewis as a best-selling author known for seminal works such as The Fifth Risk, Flash Boys, The Big Short, Moneyball, and Liar's Poker. Dax highlights Michael's transformative exploration of human behaviors and systemic issues without traditional scientific methods.

2. Michael Lewis's Academic and Early Career Path

Michael shares his unconventional journey from studying art history at Princeton to working as a stock boy at the prestigious Wildenstein Art Gallery in New York. He recounts his fascination with art and the complexities of the art market, including encounters with fraudulent practices.

Notable Quote:

"When I got so immersed in something, I became a different kind of student. I was a mediocre student. When I had to do lots of shallow stuff... I became excellent."
— Michael Lewis [06:04]

3. Transition to Wall Street and Solomon Brothers

Seeking financial stability and intrigued by the burgeoning bond market, Michael transitions to Solomon Brothers on Wall Street. He describes the frenetic and often reckless culture of the firm, characterized by excessive gambling and hyper-competitive behaviors.

Notable Quote:

"It's this compulsive behavior. People were betting money for the firm. And when they weren't betting the firm, they were betting with each other on anything."
— Michael Lewis [23:03]

4. Writing Liar's Poker and Early Literary Success

Michael discusses his decision to write Liar's Poker, a memoir capturing his experiences at Solomon Brothers. Despite the firm's initial disapproval, his insider perspective resonated with readers, catapulting him into literary success.

Notable Quote:

"They cared about my well-being. I'm going to regret saying this because it'll come back to haunt me. I have said it a few times. I don't think I've ever said it publicly."
— Michael Lewis [32:14]

5. The Big Short and Financial Crisis Insights

Michael delves into his influential work, The Big Short, which examines the 2008 financial crisis. He explains the creation and destructive impact of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps, highlighting their role in the collapse of major financial institutions.

Notable Quote:

"So that seemed like a good book in the art market... I'm gonna come and write a book about Wall Street. Why not tell them right?"
— Michael Lewis [21:08]

6. Ethical Reflections and Responsibility as an Author

Addressing criticisms, Michael reflects on the unintended consequences of his writings, acknowledging that while his books aim to demystify complex systems, some readers might interpret them as guides to exploit these systems for personal gain.

Notable Quote:

"And I'm not unsympathetic to the criticism. Maybe I should take more responsibility for the consequences of the books. However, if I do that, the books are gonna suck."
— Michael Lewis [39:31]

7. Current Work and Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

Michael introduces his forthcoming book, Who Is Government?, which explores the intricate and often underappreciated roles of public servants. He emphasizes the critical impact these individuals have on maintaining societal functions and honoring veterans.

Notable Quote:

"There are lots of very gifted writers. Each piece is so different from the next, so it'll be fun."
— Michael Lewis [82:42]

8. Addressing the Gambling Epidemic Among Young Men

The core of the episode focuses on Michael's latest work, which investigates the alarming rise of sports gambling among young men. He outlines how the legalization of sports betting has created an environment ripe for addiction, exacerbating mental health issues and societal challenges.

Key Points:

• Impact of Legalization: Since the Supreme Court ruling in 2018, 38 states have legalized sports betting, leading to increased accessibility and normalization of gambling among youth.
• Addiction and Mental Health: Michael highlights the correlation between increased sports gambling and rising suicide rates, particularly in states like Mississippi.
• Industry Tactics: Companies like DraftKings and FanDuel employ sophisticated algorithms to target vulnerable individuals, creating a predatory business model.
• Personal Intervention: Michael shares his experiment where he provided his son with substantial funds to engage in sports betting, observing unexpected resilience and learning outcomes.

Notable Quotes:

"It was a calculated, coordinated effort to get all these people, they abused, vulnerable people, as they always do."
— Michael Lewis [55:16]

"If you have a chance to have meaningful life experience that isn't writing, have it. It will inform the writing."
— Michael Lewis [06:49]

9. Societal Implications and Future Outlook

Michael cautions that the gambling epidemic among young men is part of a larger pattern of systemic exploitation, likening it to historical financial crises driven by similar predatory practices. He foresees long-term societal repercussions, including increased distrust in institutions and deteriorating mental health among targeted demographics.

Notable Quote:

"We're creating young male anger at a fantastic rate. If you were gonna set out to create as much young male anger as you could, we're doing a great job."
— Michael Lewis [54:39]

10. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dax and Monica engage in a light-hearted discussion towards the end, touching upon art, conspiracy theories, and personal anecdotes. However, the primary focus remains on the serious implications of the gambling epidemic and Michael's efforts to shed light on these pressing issues through his work.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• "When I got so immersed in something, I became a different kind of student." — Michael Lewis [06:04]
• "It's this compulsive behavior. People were betting money for the firm." — Michael Lewis [23:03]
• "They cared about my well-being. I'm going to regret saying this..." — Michael Lewis [32:14]
• "Maybe I should take more responsibility for the consequences of the books." — Michael Lewis [39:31]
• "We're creating young male anger at a fantastic rate." — Michael Lewis [54:39]

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Key Takeaways:

• Michael Lewis's Unique Perspective: Leveraging his diverse background in art history and finance, Michael offers profound insights into systemic issues within both industries.
• Predatory Nature of Sports Gambling: The episode underscores the systematic targeting of young men by sports gambling companies, leading to widespread addiction and societal harm.
• Call for Awareness and Reform: Michael advocates for increased awareness, ethical regulation, and societal intervention to combat the gambling epidemic and its far-reaching consequences.

For Listeners: To gain a comprehensive understanding of the gambling epidemic and its impact on young men, listening to this episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard provides an in-depth exploration backed by Michael Lewis's expertise and firsthand experiences.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. That was kind of cheerleading move you did.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you. I'm Randy Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padme. Oh, it's an honor to announce our guest today. Oh. One of our radical thinkers.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Michael Lewis. Michael is a best selling author and podcaster. His books, the Fifth Risk, Flash Boys, the Big Short, Reddit loved it. Moneyball, the Blind side. He has a awesome podcast out currently. You could listen immediately. Called against the rules in this season is all about this pretty troubling gambling epidemic among young men.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And we talk at great length about that. In addition to, you know, all of.

[Monica Padman]

His other great work, I mean, this person wrote Moneyball and the Big Short, two of my favorite movies of all time.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And we've left one out, which is this great Wall street book that started it all.

[Monica Padman]

Liar Poker.

[Dax Shepard]

Liar's Poker.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Good job.

[Michael Lewis]

You're.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm editing it, but also you're. You've become a real brain trust.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. But I can't take credit for that. I was editing it this morning.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. You're okay. All right. Please enjoy. Michael Lewis. We are supported by Happy Egg.

[Monica Padman]

I love an egg that you can like. The yolk is so bright.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I like a dark orange yolk. When you get that dark orange, you know it's high quality. This restaurant we go to all time for breakfast place. Yes, yes. So good.

[Michael Lewis]

Think there's cheese in the scrambled eggs, but it's just the yolk.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Happy Egg. Hens are raised outside and the hens are treated with care on small family owned farms. Happy Eggs farming standards lead to the hens being, well, happy. Happy hens. Happy eggs. If you're making eggs, do yourself a favor and buy the best. You're going to taste the difference. Crack open Happy with Happy Egg. You'll find them in the yellow carton. Visit happyegg.com dax to find the store near you. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apply for Apple Card today and start earning up to 3% daily cash back on everyday purchases. And that daily cash can even grow automatically when you open a high yield savings account through Apple Card. What are you waiting for? Visit Apple Co CardCalculator today to see how much daily cash you can earn. Subject to credit approval. Savings available to Apple Card owners Subject to eligibility, savings and Apple card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA member FDIC terms and [e-mail] he's an unchanger.

[Michael Lewis]

I just walked around the corner to your local pharmacy, ala Boots Pharmacy. And he said, what are you doing in our neighborhood? I said, I'm doing Dax Shepard's podcast. And he goes, I love that podcast. That guy's funny. And his wife's even funnier.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's true. She's better looking. She's more talented. I'm still having a great life in her shadow. There's still plenty of light over here.

[Michael Lewis]

You get enough attention.

[Dax Shepard]

I do. And the more she gets, the better for me.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

It's lovely. That's right. Get a picture with her. I'll hold the camera.

[Michael Lewis]

But also, you never walk into a dinner party and everybody just wants to talk to you. And that's good.

[Dax Shepard]

That's really good. Because I was on TV and had a girlfriend for nine years, and it drove me mad that we would go places and people would be meeting her for the fifth time and introducing themselves. And I'm like, this fucking sucks for her. I don't know how she does this.

[Michael Lewis]

And for you, no one's really winning.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, well, this is miserable. You've just made this person I love feel very insignificant. And I don't know how she's gonna deal with this. Cause I think it's gonna just get worse for a while. I just read the book. I love it.

[Michael Lewis]

Oh, thanks.

[Dax Shepard]

So you have a circuitous path to writing, which is. You are from New Orleans. Yeah. Yeah. And you go to Princeton and you do art history. And when you started that major, had it not occurred to you there's no employment after. Like, I majored in anthro, but I knew I'll never be employed as an anthropologist.

[Michael Lewis]

But you probably had the same experience I did. You went into a class and you went, oh, my God, this is interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And I had the freedom to do that. A lot of people don't.

[Michael Lewis]

So I did, too. I not only had the freedom, I had a father who said, don't you dare waste your Princeton education trying to figure out what you're going to do.

[Dax Shepard]

For a living, how to make money.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah. He said, don't go study economics because you want to work on Wall street or that kind of stuff. He such a waste.

[Dax Shepard]

And your dad was a lawyer.

[Michael Lewis]

He was.

[Dax Shepard]

Does he fit the form of most lawyers where they absolutely hate their fucking job?

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

He ran a law firm. He's still alive. He's still great.

[Dax Shepard]

Good for you.

[Michael Lewis]

My parents are still living in the house I grew up in. I'm gonna go back in two weeks.

[Dax Shepard]

You know you're gonna live to a hundred. What a freedom you have.

[Monica Padman]

I'll knock on wood for you.

[Michael Lewis]

I still stay in my bedroom from when I was six years old. So I had not only the freedom, but also a dad who had said, don't screw it up. By succumbing to this pressure. I knew that it wasn't a path to fame and fortune, but I didn't know what to do.

[Dax Shepard]

But you were on fire for it.

[Michael Lewis]

I was so excited. I lived for that feeling.

[Dax Shepard]

And you had a bit of focus on archeology as well?

[Michael Lewis]

A little bit. You did some homework? Well, I tried to. To get out of Princeton, you have to write a thesis. And it's not trivial.

[Dax Shepard]

Yours was 160 pages. 190.

[Michael Lewis]

It was like 60,000 words. It's like a book. It was narrow. I really cared about it. It was about the way Donatello used classical sources. And serendipitously, I had access to unpublished research about what Donatello would have seen. We know all kinds of stuff that's been dug up since then that he didn't know. So I could rec the picture he had of what Romans and Greeks were doing and think about what he saw and how he used it in his sculpture. And it had this feeling like I'm doing something no one's done before.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So exciting.

[Michael Lewis]

When I got so immersed in something, I became a different kind of student. I was a mediocre student. When I had to do lots of shallow stuff, when it was just deep dive and get it down on paper, I became excellent. And for the first time, really in my academic career. And I thought, oh, means I want to be an art historian. And that is when the archeologist who supervised the project said, they know jobs.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Is this the most you're going to do right now?

[Michael Lewis]

Pretty much. In the thesis meeting, I must have been thinking, oh, I'm a good writer. Because I said to him, what did you think about the writing? He said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. Like you're not that good a writer. Oh, that's where I was in my head when I got out of college. I like, I don't know what I'm going to do. The professor says, I'm not a very good writer. He thought I was a thinker, which was funny because I never thought I'd had a thought.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, I wasn't aware of that. If you caught me there, age 21, graduating from Princeton. You just said, poor Michael, he has no plan. People have said, oh, he's charming. We like having him around. I have a lot of friends who are going to be successful.

[Dax Shepard]

You might get invited to some fun barbecues.

[Michael Lewis]

Oh, definitely. That was never a problem. It was like I captured some people's imagination, but no one saw use in me. But I got in my head, shit, if I'm not going to be an art historian, I want to write books. I want to do that again.

[Dax Shepard]

So that started that early?

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Because my chronology for you, you do go get a job working for an art appraiser in New York or something, right?

[Michael Lewis]

Wildenstein. You know the Wildenstein Gallery?

[Dax Shepard]

I do not.

[Michael Lewis]

You know it because of. They call it the tiger lady, the lion lady who had all the plastic surgery. She was Jocelyn Wildenstein. She was the wife of the heir to the gallery. And I actually knew her or had met her. I was the stock boy at Wildenstein. It was just like get the pictures from the vaults and bring them out to show the clients in this place. It might still be the world's most valuable private collection of art. When I was there, I mean, they had 64 Fragonards, they had 10 Cezannes, no one had ever seen. They had started as Jewish rag merchants end of the 1800s, and on the streets of Paris would trade rags with impressionist painters. And then they smuggled all this stuff out during World War II. There's a whole story about collaboration with the Germans to get their stuff out. So that stuff was in there and I was the stock boy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So I had a rare experience where I knew a dude through sobriety who was an art dealer, and he drove a Carrera GT. He had like 15 incredible cars. I went to his house, he had a Magritte hanging on the wall. He subsequently was evading the law. What I found out is that that whole world is rife with con artists. There's got so many people that sell art they don't actually own. It's a very willy nilly world, right. I feel like it needs an expose.

[Michael Lewis]

I've thought that for a long time. That's more true of the contemporary art world than it is of the world of old master paintings or even the Impressionists. But still, there was a whole class of person who would come in and look at what might be a Raphael, to say it was a Raphael. And they were paid by the gallery to determine what it was. And all the incentive in the market is to say it is, it is, it is. I mean, you saw with this Leonardo that sold for $400 million two years ago. You must have seen this. This picture. It was found by a New York dealer in a Lou, Louisiana auction house and bought for like $4,000. And it had been in a house six blocks from where I grew up for like 50 years. A new Orleans family had bought it at auction in England.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it real?

[Michael Lewis]

It ended up being bought by the bad dude in Saudi Arabia for I think, $450 million and instantly discredited. And it's sort of like maybe Leonardo might have seen this at some point.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Did they get their money back?

[Michael Lewis]

No, because it hasn't been so totally discredited.

[Dax Shepard]

There's enough to be in a forgery.

[Michael Lewis]

There's a difference between a fake and a forgery, right? A forgery is something that is consciously pretending to be something like you. And I went and painted a Leonardo and tried to pass it off.

[Dax Shepard]

That's an actual fraud.

[Michael Lewis]

That's fraud.

[Dax Shepard]

There's intention.

[Michael Lewis]

This is misattribution. It's probably like school of. But the Louvre had a Leonardo show. The guy at the Louvre is sort of like the man declined to include it in it. And it's just vanished. Nobody knows where it is.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my.

[Michael Lewis]

So that kind of thing happens quite a bit. And of course, when the buyers are Russian oligarchs and they're sticking in shipping containers and nobody's gonna see em again, they're just marks. Because, yes, you may get shot if they find out, but nobody's gonna know what you did.

[Dax Shepard]

I had in a movie, I wrote a plot line about a guy who, he wants to travel with $30 million undetected. So he has a Mondrian that he just folds up into a backpack. You know, like, it's a very cool transfer of wealth, these things. It's like, how else does one hold $400 million and travel with it? But you can.

[Michael Lewis]

But if you have a stolen work of art, you've got something that really is inventable. You're not going to be able to sell that.

[Dax Shepard]

Right?

[Michael Lewis]

You get the pleasure out of it, but that's all you're going to get out of it.

[Dax Shepard]

You get to tell your mobster buddies, come over and look at this, that you have that.

[Michael Lewis]

Can I tell one Wildenstein story? Because this was an amazing story. The question at the time, when I was there, I was only there six months, but I had free run of the Whole place because I was a stock boy. So I spent all my time looking at paintings no one knew existed and sculptures. There was a time when Daniel Wildenstein, since deceased, the grandson of the guy who founded it, comes rolling in from Paris and he says, bring me the Houdon. Now, Houdin was a very famous Enlightenment sculptor. He did the busts, you know, of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. He managed to get all the leaders of the day. They're these magnificent, realistic things. And everybody thought they were all known. You'd open a book on Houdin, you'd see all of them. And to our knowledge, we did not own a Houdin. And so nobody knows what he's talking about. And finally he gets really upset and he marches into the elevator and motions everyone to come with him. Goes down to the basement, pulls out this massive shitty plaster bust of his father, of George Wildenstein, I think his name was, takes a hammer and a chisel goes boom. It opens up and inside is a Houdin of Mirabeau, who was the triple agent in the French Revolution and who had smallpox. His face was all scarred and this thing was unknown to anybody. They had smuggled it out of Paris and gotten it to New York.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Michael Lewis]

Now it's known, it's sold. I don't know who bought it, but it was like he put up 10 minutes dollar price tag on it and eventually it sold. Yeah, there was that kind of stuff going on.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're kind of watching as they pull the jade mask out of the burial site. Like you're getting to see the artifact when it's first discovered, in a way, watching it come out of the plaster.

[Monica Padman]

That must have been so cool as an art person to be in it like that.

[Michael Lewis]

There was nothing to do all day because the only people who came through, every now and then a billionaire would come through. And every now and then the other people who would come through were the museum directors. And there was a guy named Tom Hoving, who was a very famous director of the Metropolitan Museum, and another guy named Everett Fahey, who ran the Frick Museum. They were just world class observers of paintings. And they would come through and I'd be left alone with them. I was told, show them whatever they want to see. Fahey, I loved him. Both of them have died since, but Fahey came through. And I got to kind of know him because he came through a few times. And one time he looks at me, he goes, you have any friends who are interested in Renaissance painting? I said, yeah, actually my dad is, he's obsessed with it. He says this isn't very expensive. They have a couple of pictures here. I don't think they know what they have. Really? My father owns them. No way.

[Dax Shepard]

No way.

[Michael Lewis]

My father bought them cuz you were.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, hey dad, pick these up.

[Monica Padman]

Some insider trading.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh wow. Insider trading.

[Michael Lewis]

Well, I mean, they sold it knowingly. Yeah, yeah. He said these are gems. These are interesting pictures. They're not very expensive. One was $40,000. I mean, they cost something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What do you think they're valued at? Today?

[Michael Lewis]

He has a St. Jerome in the wilderness bashing himself in the chest with a rock. The idea is to ward off sexual thoughts.

[Dax Shepard]

Age, old struggles.

[Michael Lewis]

Not an obvious thing to go and take a rock to yourself when you're right. But it's by Fiorenzo Di Lorenzo, who is the master of Perugino, master of Raphael. And it's an amazing picture. He bought it for, I don't know, $100,000 or something. And it's a million dollar painting anyway.

[Dax Shepard]

That's great.

[Monica Padman]

That's so fun.

[Dax Shepard]

That's so fun.

[Monica Padman]

Now I want to get into art.

[Dax Shepard]

Meanwhile, be careful.

[Michael Lewis]

Here's the problem, the original point. This seems like this should be a good book in the art market. And I'm sure for someone else there is. I have so much trouble caring about the people. The people who are the victims are billionaire collector. And it's just so hard to get worked up about the characters.

[Dax Shepard]

This Saudi dude got ripped off for 450 million. I'm kind of like cool. I'm glad the money's here now.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, you're kind of rooting for the guy who ripped him off.

[Monica Padman]

Did you ever want to steal one?

[Dax Shepard]

That's all I would be thinking about. I'm like, I gotta get a replica of this.

[Michael Lewis]

You know, that's very funny you say that because I swear to you that thought never crossed my mind.

[Monica Padman]

No, that's the first thing I thought.

[Michael Lewis]

I mean, it's so funny. They must smell that and keep people like that out.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

But that thought never crossed my mind. What did cross my mind? This is a strange story. For whatever reason, my father told me two things growing up about careers. He wasn't unhappy with being a lawyer. Exactly. It just wasn't a passion project. What he was, was a very gifted administrator. And so he ran the law firm. He would also end up running businesses that the law firm were entangled with. He did a lot of different kind administrative things. He ran a big hospital for a stretch. But he said, the problem with the law, unless you're a litigator. Litigators love their jobs. They're performers, they're actors in the courtroom. He said, you're dealing with other people's problems, and other people's problems are just not that interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

You're also dealing with people in the worst version of themselves. They are in trouble. They are desperate. They're scared. You're not catching any of these people on their best day.

[Michael Lewis]

You're catching families that are fighting over money, and it's nasty. So he kind of scared me off. The law and things like the law. But for some reason, he said, never take a job where you have to wear a blue suit. I think what he was thinking was banking. I don't know what he was thinking, but he had something in his head about if you have to wear a blue suit. And I thought, well, that's never gonna happen. But when I got to the Wildenstein Art Gallery, the rule was the stock boy had to wear a blue suit.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Lewis]

And all I had was like, seersucker from New Orleans. And I just wore it. And they started yelling at me, go get a blue suit. And I said, I don't own a blue suit. It was a knockdown, drag out, fight. And finally they took me by the hand over to the Bloomingdale's young men's department and bought me a blue suit. And so the one thing I did do that was kind of squirrely was when I quit. I went in the morning before they opened and I left the blue suit on the sidewalk in front of the place.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Michael Lewis]

As an act of, like, I don't know what, upper middle class protest.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Very brave, Very brave. Very brave.

[Michael Lewis]

Very brave.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so after a bit of this, you do realize I'm going to need to make a living. And you decide to go to the London School of Economics.

[Michael Lewis]

That was a bank shot because I had a girlfriend at the time who was getting out of college and she really wanted to go to the language.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. And you wanted to be with her.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah. So I followed her. And I also had the thought, the world is a conspiracy of people who understand the language of economics. All these classmates of mine in college seemed to throw away their college lives studying something they didn't care about. But in exchange, they got a pass. They got a pass to wander the halls of Goldman Sachs. They could talk that language. And I thought, I'm gonna go learn that language just to go learn that language. I was suspicious and I had One class in microeconomics when I was a senior that I took pass fail, so I didn't have to do very much work so I could focus on my thesis. And I remember thinking, why didn't I realize this was interesting? I stayed away from it because all these people I disapproved of were studying it rather than going and seeing what it was. And actually, some of this is really an interesting way to see the world.

[Dax Shepard]

When I learned of, in combination with your Vanity Fair article and this great frontline about the meltdown, when I learned about the complexities of the credit default swap and about the instruments that no one at the firm understands except for three people, that is fascinating.

[Michael Lewis]

That's finance. So that wasn't even this. This was like, what's the difference between a compliment and a substitute in the marketplace? Or when prices go up, what happens to demand and supply?

[Dax Shepard]

Like Adam Smith.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, it was Adam Smith 101.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought, wow, markets are fascinating. They're like a living organism. They're cool.

[Michael Lewis]

They are cool. And London School of Economics gave me a chance to play catch up. They had a program where they put you through their whole undergraduate program in a year and you got a master's in year two. My father, in his wisdom, he called it the Lewis family deal. And this is the joy of being raised with privilege. He said, as long as you're doing something, I will cover your expenses for the first three years out of college.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah, law school. Love that.

[Michael Lewis]

So I was working as the art dealer, but I didn't get paid very much. I actually became a woodworker as an apprentice for six months. And then I went to the one School of Economics for two years. And that was in a lot of ways, transformative. That's where I started publishing stuff. I started submitting things willy nilly to magazines. And the British are much more receptive than Americans to amateurs. It's not, who are you? They just read it and go, wow, I like this.

[Dax Shepard]

That's almost counterintuitive to me. I think of Britain as being much more steeped in social hierarchies and prestige.

[Michael Lewis]

That's true. But there are many fields that we treat as professions that they treat as crafts or guilds. You don't have to go to journalism school. You're just writing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I have a great friend in Britain who's a journalist. And yeah, he didn't go to. And he's incredible.

[Michael Lewis]

No one cares if you wrote for the school newspaper. All they care about does the piece work.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so the writing Started then.

[Michael Lewis]

That's where it started.

[Dax Shepard]

So then you go and you trade bonds or you sell bonds. I mean, there's a wild story. You have a cousin in London who's kind of aristocracy.

[Michael Lewis]

She married into it. New Orleanians understand this language more than anybody on Earth. She's my first cousin once removed. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No one knows.

[Monica Padman]

I never understood this.

[Michael Lewis]

Which means she's my mother's first cousin. She married Baron Patrick von Stauffenberg.

[Dax Shepard]

Fucking A. Let's go.

[Michael Lewis]

He is the nephew. You know, the von Stauffenberg who put the bomb onto Hitler's table?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes. His uncle was the one who tried to assassinate Hitler.

[Monica Padman]

Whoa.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a cool lineage.

[Michael Lewis]

And he's great. They were great. I got to London and they had dinner parties, and I would be the young person they would invite over to amuse the older people. One day she says, I got an extra seat at a dinner, and it's in St. James's Palace. It was hundreds of people, but the Queen Mother was coming, and she said, you can meet the Queen Mother. And I thought, why not? You know?

[Dax Shepard]

Is the Queen Mother just the Queen?

[Michael Lewis]

The Queen's mother.

[Monica Padman]

The Queen's mother.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, very literal.

[Michael Lewis]

She was Queen Elizabeth's mother.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Michael Lewis]

And I was sat between two women, both of whose husbands ran Solomon Brothers London office. And at the end of it, one of them said, whatever you're doing, you stop doing. You ought to come work for my husband. Come work at Solomon Brothers.

[Dax Shepard]

Which I can read between the lines, and you can't charm the fuck out of these.

[Michael Lewis]

The fix was in at that point. I went over and had interviews, but it was kind of like, whatever. Everybody seemed to like me right when I walked in the door. And then I got offered this job.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait. Talk about learning the secret language of what's really going on. It's like, yeah, that's how it happened.

[Monica Padman]

If your wife says higher, then they will.

[Michael Lewis]

So this is really true. It masquerades as a pure meritocracy. The first break is not pure meritocracy.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Michael Lewis]

I had that point in my head. I was getting out of school, and at this point, the Lewis plan was over. I had to make a living. I was publishing stuff, but I was being paid so poorly, you couldn't live on it. And I thought this. When I got out of college, when I started to write stuff that didn't get published, have lots of experiences. Writers have this problem. They just become writers, and then they don't know anything about writing. And that gets very boring. And you write books about being a.

[Dax Shepard]

Writing that's acting as well. You've been pretending to be other people since you're 18.

[Monica Padman]

You didn't gain any real experience to play.

[Dax Shepard]

You're playing a factory worker. You never even.

[Michael Lewis]

How do you enter into that space? Yeah, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just gonna have to rely heavily on imagination and a bag of tricks probably. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

So I thought. And still think, whenever you have a chance to have meaningful life experience that isn't writing, have it. It will inform the writing. And it gets harder and harder to do that. You're typed as the writer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The more successful you are, it almost hinders you in that way.

[Michael Lewis]

True. Because you don't have to do it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

A lot of interesting stuff happens because you have to do it. But I thought of Wall Street. Not only is it going to pay me a whole bunch of money, but this could be interesting to write about.

[Dax Shepard]

No. To peak behind the curtain of this culture, which is elusive. How could you not be intrigued to see what's happening?

[Michael Lewis]

Wall street in the 80s. Yes. Nobody quite understood what had just happened. Why were young people who had just come out of college being paid the equivalent of $100,000 or something to start when they clearly didn't know anything? Like what was that all about? It was also true that serious quantitative ability. So this was the moment where they're starting to grab people out of like the Physics department at mit. And it was just happening in our place. We were at the bleeding edge of that. And as chance had it, it wasn't just that I got a job on Wall Street. At that moment. The firm I joined, Solomon Brothers, was making more money than all the other Wall street firms combined. What had happened? There had been an explosion in indebtedness in the society. The government was borrowing lots of money. There was the invention of mortgage bonds.

[Dax Shepard]

When did those get invented?

[Michael Lewis]

Late 70s, early 80s. But the market was exploding. And Solomon Brothers, historically been this place was kind of a sleepy backwater. But they were really shrewd traders of bonds. And bonds were always thought to be like, that's not where the money is. Stocks are where the money is. And all of a sudden bonds were where the money was. And what happened in that place was the best story on Wall Street.

[Dax Shepard]

An atomic bomb of money went off. Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

In a crazy place that although when I got to it had become a public corporation. They had sold stock in themselves. They had pretty recently been just a private partnership. And the behavior in the place was like the behavior you would have in a private men's club where nobody was ever going to see what happened there. And it was literally every third day, some stripper would come in, take off all their clothes on the desk.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Dudes are throwing spitballs at each other. I mean, everyone's acting like they're 13. Yes. Buying too much food just to show.

[Michael Lewis]

Off the material was fantastic. Yes. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

What about coke? How much were you seeing? Coke. I need a little more coke.

[Monica Padman]

In this story, is it coke or Quaaludes?

[Michael Lewis]

I hesitate.

[Dax Shepard]

That's to come off the coke, because.

[Michael Lewis]

I'm pretty naive about drugs.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you are.

[Michael Lewis]

Alcohol's great. I never really needed any more.

[Dax Shepard]

But we would agree it was all fueled by coke.

[Michael Lewis]

It was fueled by almost like a gambling addiction. But that's what you saw. It's this compulsive behavior. People were betting money for the firm. And when they weren't betting the firm, they were betting with each other on anything. They could bet on liars, poker, dice, one thing after another. Horses, sports. It was just constant gambling. And I got my problems, but that's not one of them. I don't care about it. But it was fun to watch and fun to describe. They let in all kinds of characters. It wasn't cookie cutter people. Former Navy fighter pilots and former professional athletes and people who just come off the street and shouted their way into a job. It was hustlers.

[Dax Shepard]

That's an energetic vibe.

[Michael Lewis]

Very energetic in some ways. I love that part of the place.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I bet it would be intoxicating just to be involved in it.

[Michael Lewis]

It was. It was also intoxicating because I was, by their standards, kind of an intellectual. I had gone to Princeton. I had a master's. I thought all the time about things.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you knew about art.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, that kind of stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Triggering stuff.

[Michael Lewis]

And so there was a training class for six months where it was not, like, teachers from out of the place. It was the actual traders paraded through, and you could ask them anything. And I was the guy who always had his hand in the air and was grilling them, trying to understand what they did. I got to master the subject because they let me do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

It's a moment I don't have anymore. I know what goes on Wall Street a little bit, but at the time, I felt like I knew more about what was going on Wall street than anybody.

[Dax Shepard]

And so much of this stuff is brand new. Everything's been digitized.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right. The young person is Lear. Old people don't know. It was absolutely thrilling for About a year and a half. And then I hit some cliff. All of a sudden there wasn't that much to learn. And what I was supposed to be doing is selling people stuff they shouldn't buy.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're surrounded by toxic human beings who are in a nosedive.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes. I remember just like going home at night and staring at the ceiling thinking, I can't believe I just did that. You did a bad, bad thing. And I was rewarded for it. I was successful. I was in the loan office and my clients were people who were managing billions of dollars. It wasn't widows and orphans, but my job was to get them to do stuff they probably should, or sometimes they should do it, but mostly not. And in a funny way, this is a little crude. It was to get them to take the other side of bets that our own traders were making. So these are not good bets.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what's fucking wild. As you learn about how all these banks work, they're playing every single side of it. They used to be some tiny margin.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like in your podcast, the guy who figured out on a New York Knicks vs Lakers game, the odds in New York are going to be different because they're biased by loving the Knicks. And then the Lakers betters are going to be biased. So the spread in those two places, there's something to be. There's like a point off.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, that's right. You bet the Knicks in Los Angeles and the Lakers in New York and you're gonna win or at least you're not gonna lose. Get different point spreads in different places.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

I got to a point where I was faking it. And when I started to fake it, I started to do less work at work and started to write more articles about what was going on at work. And I got in trouble.

[Dax Shepard]

I was wondering the fallout. Cause it's nonfiction. You're using everyone's names.

[Michael Lewis]

This is what happened. I wrote a article for the Wall Street Journal's Op Ed page saying everybody on Wall street was overpaid. Oh, while you were there at the bottom of it, it said my name and I was an associate at Solomon Brothers in London. Oh my. This is how delusional a 24 year old is, though. I remember thinking, it's so cool. Everybody's going to think it's so cool.

[Dax Shepard]

He is an article.

[Michael Lewis]

I was thinking I'd come in, the Boston would go, man, you have an article in the Wall Street Journal. No, that's not what they said.

[Dax Shepard]

You thought everyone had your same Primary desire, which is to be a published writer.

[Michael Lewis]

I get to work. The guy who's the husband of the woman, the guy who hired me, who ran the whole Solomon Brothers, is waiting for me at my desk. I really liked him, and he looked so sad and kind of gray. And he said, michael, what have you done? He said, I've been up all night. And I said, why? And he said, yeah, yeah, you love my article so much. And he said, no. We had an emergency board member meeting because of the article. And I said, oh, very oddly, there were a bunch of reasons they didn't want to fire me.

[Monica Padman]

It would have looked horrible if they fired me.

[Dax Shepard]

You'd be like a whistleblower.

[Michael Lewis]

No, that wasn't it at all.

[Dax Shepard]

What was it?

[Michael Lewis]

I had stumbled into the second or third most profitable client the firm had who I didn't do anything useful for. They were just amused that I was there and I would tell them the things I was gonna write. The guy said, I don't need any advice from people like you. If you just tell me what you're saying, that will be useful enough, and I'll funnel out my business through you. It was Jacob Rothschild.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Michael Lewis]

The Rothschild. The guys who ran his money. And they became so big that I was just a money machine. All I was was not offensive to them. I wasn't trying to sell them things they shouldn't buy. And they were to buy something. They call or sell something, and they let us make money off them. They were really pretty funny. Because I was 24, they refused to talk to anybody else in the firm.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I love this move.

[Michael Lewis]

So extremely important people, including the CEO, would come to London and want to meet them because, my God, they're now the second biggest client of the firm. And they would say, no, thank you. We just want to talk to Michael.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

This is awesome.

[Michael Lewis]

So in a way, they made me possible. They protected me. So the guy wasn't going to fire him. His name is Charlie McVey. Great guy. He says, we got to find a way this doesn't ever happen again. You can't write. I said, it's what I love to do, and I'm going to keep doing it. And he goes, could you find another name? Oh. And I said, that's not a problem. And I don't know why it popped into my head. I said, what if I use my mother's maiden name, Diana Bleeker Monroe? So I wrote some things under the name of Diana Bleeker.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, interesting. Because now we've changed genders. I wonder what that does to the reception.

[Michael Lewis]

That's what he said. He said, this is perfect because none of these people around here are gonna think a girl's a guy.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Michael Lewis]

Exact quote, he said, no one will think about it. It never would say Solomon. It would just say, Diana Bleecker is whatever. Now, the New Republic then was a pretty hot magazine. Michael Kinsley was an editor of Genius. Michael Kinsley, who published some of my first pieces, some of them under the name of Diana Bleeker, to just let it sit at that. So he would put at the bottom of the article, diana Bleeker is a pseudonym. One day I got home and I got a landline call. I pick up the phone and the actor Chevy Chase, his dad was named Ned Chase. And Ned Chase was a prominent nonfiction editor at Simon and Schuster.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Michael Lewis]

He said who he was. I can't remember if he told me that Chevy was his son.

[Dax Shepard]

He did, yeah. Let me help you out. He definitely did.

[Michael Lewis]

He might have. And he said, I just figured out you're Diana Bleaker. He said, and you really need to write a book. And at that point I thought, you'll pay me to write a book. I'm out of here.

[Dax Shepard]

It had to be a paid cut, though.

[Michael Lewis]

Oh, well, a huge pay up. I wasn't even thinking that as long as I could live on it. So I remember this. It would have been like September of 1987, because I realized at that point I got to stay till January because my bonus will hit my bank account in January. So I got to fake this until January. Once a month I would fly back to New York, just bring clients to the Chicago exchange or to go hobnob with the people on the New York trading floor. And I had with me a notepad out when the stock market crash of October 1987 happened. And I was just wandering the Solomon Brothers trading floor, writing what ended up being a chapter in the book. And I was already thinking, I got a book in this. Yeah, funny that nobody is like, michael.

[Dax Shepard]

What are you writing?

[Michael Lewis]

So that happened right before that. And then I told them I was leaving in January of 88, and the book appears in the fall of 89. There's one other funny little footnote. They were charming in their way. They were rude, crude, socially unacceptable, misogynist. But if any one of these guys was sitting here, you would like them. Yeah, of course you would say, michael, you're an asshole for having sold them out. That's a real guy. You shouldn't have done that. They were not phony. Slick investment bankers. They were like street hustlers. And I was very fond of them. Not all of them were that way, but a lot of them were that way. So you've seen this chick has just written a book about Facebook called Careless People. It's just come out and Facebook has sued her and she's not even allowed to go on television to talk about her book.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh no.

[Michael Lewis]

And she signed some sort of non disparagement agreement when she was leaving Facebook so she can never talk about it now. And they have to pull the books in the shelf.

[Dax Shepard]

She feel like you have made everyone else wise.

[Michael Lewis]

Something like that. So I didn't sign anything. And not only had I not signed anything, I told them I'm quitting to go write a book. And I'm gonna write a book about Wall Street. Why not tell em right? I like em. And some big shots brought me into a room and asked me, what are they paying you? And I said, I think it's like $40,000 advance. They'd just given me like $160,000 bonus. And that was like for them, chump changes. Like next year it's going to be $400,000.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Michael Lewis]

They brought me in a room and the tone was they were troubled. They were really worried about my mental health. They thought I was screwing up my life by leaving what they thought was a sure fortune to go write a book. Who was going to read a book?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

They cared about my well being. I'm going to regret saying this because it'll come back to haun. I have said it a few times. I don't think I've ever said it publicly. One of the guys, and he was extremely senior in the firm, said, michael, we think you could run the firm one day.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Michael Lewis]

And I remember thinking, you're out of your fucking mind. I can hardly show up. I can't brag myself to work. Did I run the firm one day. But they thought highly enough of me in that moment. They just cared.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how intriguing you must have been to them too.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Michael Lewis]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

I think so. Because you all seemingly have the same goal, which is like, let's make a bunch of fucking money and let's make it for our clients. And to see someone have gotten to the place they're all desiring to be and to leave is just very intriguing.

[Michael Lewis]

Well, it was weird.

[Dax Shepard]

This is Bradley from your podcast to go be a Rhodes Scholar. That's so intriguing.

[Michael Lewis]

Instead of going to the Knicks right away, David Robinson, instead of going right to the spurs, goes into the Navy.

[Dax Shepard]

Goes to the Navy.

[Michael Lewis]

Roger Staubach does the same thing for the cowboys. Some people go on Mormon missions.

[Dax Shepard]

Fucking Tillman.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, people do that kind of thing. It's far more noble than anything I did. To go and fight for your country.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

But to be wired so that, that you're insisting on living your life instead of the life the world wants you to live. And that sounds like, oh, of course you live your life. But actually there are all these incentives to do stuff that you really don't particularly want to do.

[Dax Shepard]

You just get on an exit and you're on that road and it takes a great deal of effort to exit it. Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by all state. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate first. Like, you know to double check the hamper first before turning your white laundry into a lovely shade of pink. Like, you know to check that your headphones are plugged in first before blasting your guilty pleasure playlist in the quiet section of the library. Like, you know, to check that you're texting the right person first before sending that spicy gossip about your cousin. Checking first is smart, so check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Savings vary subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Brooks Running. If you're a runner, you've definitely heard about Brooks. They're a reliable, high quality brand known in the running community for being the best in the biz. Brooks gifted both of us pairs of the Glycerin 22 sneakers. And man, I love mine.

[Monica Padman]

Really comfortable.

[Dax Shepard]

God, the right pair of shoes can make all the difference when it comes to getting out and working out. I'm doing my sprints in them. Oh, just total comfort on my knees.

[Monica Padman]

Also, great design.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, very stylish. The Glycerin 22 is for anyone whose feet crave a cushioned experience. The wide platform plus the tuned heel and forefoot help your foot land and transition from heel to toe smoothly and steadily. Okay, this is smart engineering. Listen to this. The sole of these shoes has a next gen nitrogen infused foam with larger cells in the heel to provide plush landings. And then there are smaller cells in the forefoot to invite responsive toe offs. That's a fancy way of saying they thought of everything here and these shoes perform great and feel even better. So whether you're running, hitting the gym, or just want to feel maximum comfort and stability as you live your active lifestyle, give Brooks a try. Learn [e-mail] at 24 I lost my narrative.

[Michael Lewis]

Or rather it was stolen from me.

[Monica Padman]

And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics.

[Michael Lewis]

I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen.

[Monica Padman]

And ultimately you triumph in finding it again. So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks both recognizable.

[Michael Lewis]

And unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up, they connected.

[Monica Padman]

With the people that I'm talking to, and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the.

[Michael Lewis]

Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Monica Padman]

You can listen to Reclaiming early and.

[Michael Lewis]

Ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

[Dax Shepard]

Lamont Jones's world is shattered when his.

[Michael Lewis]

Cousin dies in custody just weeks after entering prison. Prison, the official report says natural causes, but bruises and missing teeth tell a different story. From Wondery comes Death County, Penns, a chilling true story of corruption and cover ups that begins as one man's search for answers, but soon reveals a disturbing pattern. Lamont's cousin's death is just one of many and powerful forces are working to keep the truth buried. With never before heard interviews and shocking revelations, Death County, Pennsylvania pulls back the curtain on one of America's darkest, darkest institutional secrets. This isn't just another true crime story. It's happening right now. Follow Death County Pa on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dax Shepard]

You can binge all episodes of Death.

[Michael Lewis]

County PA early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. This is a byproduct of first being raised with incredible privilege. So I don't fear starvation. So that's a necessary condition. There's but it's also a byproduct of being from New Orleans and being raised in a pretty happy, very kind of family oriented environment where you didn't get measured by your success except in sports. But nobody knew what anybody else's dad did for a living or cared.

[Dax Shepard]

That's unique.

[Michael Lewis]

A value system was a little different, but I knew what happiness felt like.

[Dax Shepard]

I also think New Orleans, New Orleanians, whatever you Call them. I think they also value personality more than other places.

[Michael Lewis]

What is really rewarded is openness to other people, openness to casual social interaction. Being entertaining is highly valued, but it isn't highly valued in a very self conscious way. It's just appreciated and encouraged.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. To be a character is cool.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So the book comes out. It's very successful. It is one of the seminal works from that time.

[Michael Lewis]

Goes right to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Michael Lewis]

And I'm nobody and I'm 28. All of a sudden I have a career. People are telling me I'm a born writer. Which comes as news to anybody who ever taught me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you should send that to professor.

[Michael Lewis]

Or the English teachers. Throughout time, it was like I always had problems. And so it is a curious situation to be in.

[Dax Shepard]

So my one follow up question, because now that is 30, however many years ago.

[Michael Lewis]

That was 1989.

[Dax Shepard]

36 years in the rearview mirror. And I imagine you have a similar dissonance that Oliver Stone has where Wall street, although supposed to be a cautionary tale, was very inspiring to a lot of people. To actually get into Wall street, how do you take the fact that. That many people read Liar's Poker as a how to? They want more tips.

[Michael Lewis]

So this was a great lesson to me about how people read books. They read the book they want to read.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

I got a letter after I wrote the Big Short from a very intelligent, very serious, very upset Oxford don of philosophy. I saved it. I don't remember his name saying, you were responsible once for diverting all this young talent to Wall Street. I thought you might have learned your lesson, but you've now done it again with a Big Short and really ought to take responsibility for what your readers do with your books. And I'm not unsympathetic to the criticism. Maybe I should take more responsibility for the consequences of the books. However, if I do that, the books are gonna suck.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, the person who wants to read the Big Short and get that message is in search of that message and will find it somewhere else. And I just talked about this the other day. It's like, JD Sandra cannot take responsibility for two assassins holding his book. I'm sorry that those people. John Lennon's assassin was reading the book at the scene of the crime. There's been a suspicious amount of people that have found the inspiration to assassinate people. Now, I read that book as one of my favorites. I certainly didn't get that message.

[Michael Lewis]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's Bill Gates's favorite book. He started Microsoft, but it's not on J.D. he can't fucking decide how people are gonna.

[Michael Lewis]

And it isn't that every young person who read the book said, no, I wanna go work on Wall Street. Because I've had plenty of people say, I read it and I hear what you thought it might have done and did that for me. It demystified it for me. And I thought, I don't really need to go do that. I'm gonna go do what I'm gonna go do. So I had plenty of people say that, but more people say it's why I went to Wall Street.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Michael Lewis]

But those people would have found some other reason to go to Wall Street.

[Dax Shepard]

I do think there's an appeal to it. I get it. It's like if you're a young dude, it's the closest you can get to have a career that is playing a video game. You chase points, more points. You're in a constant state of dopamine and reward center being triggered and all the addiction things. I get it. People who want to live at 11. That's the spot for you.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah. You get to play a video game with a stripper on your desk. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. While eating too much guacamole that you've ordered.

[Michael Lewis]

No, that's right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Y. There was this other thing. Books have dog whistles. And sometimes you don't realize what the dog whistle is until you see, oh, my God, look at all these dogs running because of the book. And the dog whistle for this book was I persuade the reader. Because it's true that I don't know anything. Art history major. Yeah. I studied economics. But that doesn't teach you how to make money on Wall Street. I get to Wall Street. Yeah. I learn intellectually how these markets work. But I know nothing I say to you is going to cause you to go get rich. And if I knew something, I go to our trader and tell him to do it and make money for the firm. There's almost no way that what I'm saying has actual financial value. And yet the world is paying me a fortune for it. There are lots of young men sitting at American universities who think I don't know anything. And no one's ever gonna pay me to do anything because I don't know anything. But look, he doesn't know anything.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

And they paid him a fortune. This is the place for me that I'm just like him.

[Dax Shepard]

Or Hollywood.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a lot.

[Michael Lewis]

Well, I'm just like him. There was a. I Identify with you. And wow, it pays to be that. And so that happened a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

I do want to talk for a second about Big Short, because I have the enormous pleasure, and I want to thank you to your face to getting an issue of Vanity Fair, where you started writing in 09 and reading the article that led to that book. Or maybe that was an excerpt.

[Michael Lewis]

It's Portfolio magazine.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that what it was?

[Michael Lewis]

It was a Conde Nast magazine. But the Big Short starts when an editor Portfolio calls me and says, you want to revisit? And I said, nobody will talk to me. I am just toxic. If anybody sees me on a trading floor, anybody who brought me in is going to get fired.

[Dax Shepard]

Who's the guy who rattled the automotive industry with the safety glass?

[Michael Lewis]

Ralph Nader. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

You were like the Ralph Nader of imams.

[Michael Lewis]

I just thought, I'm toxic. But however, I sense that the things that had gone wrong in these big Wall street firms had their origins in my experience at Solomon Brothers, and that this was kind of the end of a story that I written, the beginning of.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

And then I started just trying calling some of the guys who had lost all the money for the Wall street firms. They were individual traders who had lost like $10 billion. To me, it was unthinkable because the place I left the Wall street firm had such an informational advantage in the market. They seemed to just win every time. And I thought that was going to happen forever. Somehow the Merrill lynch and Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns had become the dumb money at the table. I thought, that's the story.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, aig, the most aig, too. They were selling the credit default swaps.

[Michael Lewis]

They were selling. All these people were selling insurance.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just want to say to people really quick, credit default swap. It basically is in concept. I own a million shares of General Motors. I want to make sure I have a little insurance in case it ever goes out of business, that I don't get wiped out. So that's a credit default swap, but you actually don't have to own a million dollars of stock. This is the fucking major hiccup in the premise of this problem product. So I can say I want to insure 10 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway and then launch some scandal.

[Michael Lewis]

I could buy fire insurance on your house. Now, what incentive does that create?

[Dax Shepard]

That you want my house to burn down?

[Michael Lewis]

I want your house to burn down.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That's an insane product.

[Michael Lewis]

There is a wonderful New Yorker writer named Casey Sepp who wrote a book about Harper Lee and In this book, she creates the book that Harper Lee was trying to create when she got blocked. And it's about a minister sister in the south who bought life insurance policies on other people and then murdered them.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

We see this on Dateline every week. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

And made a huge living. Yeah, yeah. You should not be able to buy insurance policies, things you don't own. Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Or lives that aren't yours.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right. However, Wall street creates this product where you can buy insurance policies on securities you don't own.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're astronomical. People should know. So it's like the factor of I can insure a million dollars worth of stock I don't own for very little amount of money. The returns were astronomical.

[Michael Lewis]

It's pennies on the dollar. I can buy a billion dollars insurance for a few million dollars on these bonds that are never going to go bad.

[Dax Shepard]

And Lehman Brothers, which people own credit default swaps on Lehman Brothers, started as a rumor that took down the firm.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right. So they create all these incentives to destroy all these companies.

[Dax Shepard]

But it dovetails nicely into the fact that you started when mortgage back back bonds happen because now we have all these mortgage bundles that were being sold all over the place and you buy.

[Michael Lewis]

Shirts on them even if you didn't own the things. And so I wander back into Wall street for Portfolio magazine and I start calling some of these traders and they want to talk to me. That's when I thought, christ, I might be able to do this because I can get that side of the story. And it turned out they wanted to talk to me because Liars Poker was why they were on Wall Street. And it was like after. About inspiration. It was like I created the financial crisis for this book. Stories need structure. And there were two aha moments. One is, oh, they were the dumb money. Who's the smart money?

[Dax Shepard]

Michael Burry.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's among the most interesting stories I've ever read. It's such an amazing personal story encased in this kind of world event. But the notion that you have a man who has a wandering eye or a lazy eye and believes that's why he's a glass eye, even better. And that's why he's not social. And that's why he explains all of his awkwardness with all of his relationships to this glass eye. And then he's a fucking surgeon training to be a neurologist and then starts trading and he's the only person willing to sit down and read the actual loan applications. And then wins and has a son who clearly is autistic, then takes the test. And as he's saying, my son does not have autism and he's getting 100%, I mean, what a fucking story.

[Michael Lewis]

There was this cliche on Wall street when I was there. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. And he was actually the one eyed man who was king in the land of the blind. And there's this other thing about him. It wasn't till the movie came out that I understood it. Christian Bale plays him in the movie. Christian Bale nailed him so unbelievably exactly on the screen. And I had the thought I could not have described to Christian Bale what he needed to do to play that role. How did that happen? So Christian Bale finally confessed to me what he'd done. Michael Barry said, Christian Bale called me up and said he wanted to spend the day with me. And it was the weirdest day I've ever had in my life. But Christy Bale came and studied him for a day.

[Dax Shepard]

He was you on the training floor.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right. And asked for his CL at the end of the day. So Michael Berry shipped him his clothes. So he wore his clothes. But Christian Bale figured out that all the weird mannerisms he said, it all came from him breathing in the wrong places in sentences. If you try this, if you do this, all of a sudden you're herky jerky in all kinds of odd ways. And he's told Adam McKay, the director, as long as I'm breathing in the wrong place, I will reproduce this guy's physical.

[Dax Shepard]

He is the best living actor. I'll be on record saying he's impressed, possibly good.

[Michael Lewis]

There's something about when someone is really good at what they do. There's a simplicity to it. Everything slows down for them. When he said that, I actually thought, first, I'm ashamed that I spent a year with Michael Berry and I did not notice that you wouldn't have been.

[Dax Shepard]

Able to pinpoint that it was his breathing that was.

[Michael Lewis]

I get paid to notice things and I never noticed that. But yes, it's true. And then I thought, when I go write about people, I'm going to try spend a little time pretending I'm Christian Bale and asking myself, if I'm Christian Bale, how do I play him?

[Monica Padman]

If I had to be him.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think would be physicality, even funnier as a protocol, as you call the subject. And you go, I want to do a piece on you. But first I'm going to send actor Christian Bail in for a couple hours, and then I'm going to meet with Christian, then I'm going to come talk to you. It's a very unconventional approach. I have to writing. But you will be sitting with Christian.

[Michael Lewis]

Bale, spend a couple hours with you, just to tell me how to describe you.

[Monica Padman]

The movie's so good. Were you so happy with it?

[Michael Lewis]

Yes. More than happy. I was shocked he pulled it off. I thought it was undoable. I didn't see how you made it. People buy stuff all the time. They're never gonna make. I thought, this is one of those.

[Monica Padman]

It's incredible.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But he had to get really creative.

[Michael Lewis]

And he nailed it. And it's got real relevance now. I think that event, the financial crisis, speaks to this moment in our politics right now. The anger it created, and it was a justifiable anger. All of a sudden, we go from a society where everybody's at least willing to at least pretend to believe that it's capitalism and we're all living by the same rules. It's fair, but it's harsh. Then all of a sudden, no, these rich people are not playing by the same rules. If I fail, I fail. If they fail, the government comes in and not only bails them out, but enables them to keep paying themselves huge sums of money. When what they did caused enormous harm to me, they should at least be out of business.

[Dax Shepard]

Down to. If you were on a line making SUVs for General Motors, that hit you. It just really knew no boundaries. That crisis.

[Michael Lewis]

It radicalized a lot of people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it's funny because you can read about Savings and Loan scandal, Milken, right after you wrote Liars Poker, and you kind of think, okay, we identified this thing we must be aware of. But then it resurfaces in 2008, and you go, okay. And what you really have to admit is this impulse is never going anywhere. It'll be whack a mole for eternity. This is the nature of people.

[Michael Lewis]

I think that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

And it'll have different shapes over your lifetime, but you're going to witness these things every 15, 20 years. And that's kind of the reality on this planet. That's my cynical takeaway.

[Michael Lewis]

But if you think about what came out of that event, the Tea Party.

[Dax Shepard]

Which morphs into Trump Tea Party, even into Qanon.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Bitcoin, which is a reaction to the mistrust of the institutions and the governments. I remember when I was reporting the book, one of the Obstacles I faced was that the smart people who'd been on the right side and had often tried to do the right thing, they didn't just make the bet or one case before they made the bet. They went to the Wall Street Journal, they went to the FBI, they went to the sec, and nobody wanted to hear about it. They made the bet sort of more in sorrow than in greed, but they were terrified that the society's gonna wake up and it's gonna have to turn on someone and they're gonna turn on me because I made all this money out of it. And getting the subjects comfortable, me coming in and talking to them, to write about them in a way that was gonna make them very prominent, made them very nervous.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're shining a line at, wait, somehow this guy made a billion dollars during this.

[Monica Padman]

Like the two guys.

[Michael Lewis]

Those two guys were the most sensitive.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I bet. They seemed like such sweethearts.

[Michael Lewis]

Two young guys in the garage in Berkeley.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

Now, what wasn't in the book. It was the one time in my career I regret allowing a subject to tell me. We'll tell you everything, but there's one thing you have to keep out. Nobody's ever done it to me before, but I thought, in this case, I should do it. It was worth it. His father was the vice chairman of Lehman Brothers. He and his father had this argument while they were making the bed because the father had funded the firm. Like the father would say, lehman Brothers would never do such things, and Lehman Brothers would never be in this position. And the son's saying, no, your firm's actually corrupt. It got very heated. If you were ever gonna turn this into a different kind of drama, that father son thing, it killed me. I couldn't use it. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That would be very frustrating to be telling this whole story and to be leaving out such a compelling part of it.

[Michael Lewis]

I hate the feeling that I haven't told the reader everything I think is important.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Or, I mean, I think it was.

[Michael Lewis]

The one time I felt this is kind of important. Important. The reader should know this. But that was the only time I have moments like that in my life. I remember I stopped blurbing books, like, 20 years ago because someone I had a social connection with asked me to blur the book. I didn't like the book. I could not do it. So I was lying on the back of the book. I said, I'm just never doing this again. So I'm never going to do this again either. If I can't include all of it, it was worth it. But Uncomfortable.

[Dax Shepard]

We cut stuff in here that any guest wants cut. And our feeling is generally more just like, oh, what a bummer. That's a really good spot. And they're too nervous about this.

[Michael Lewis]

How often does that happen?

[Monica Padman]

One in five? There are very few times, but there have been times that I've pushed back. There's a reason why this is important to keep in.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Most often it's heartbreaking because they're worried about the reaction. And it's so clear that the reaction would be very positive and supportive. And it's just like, you don't see that this is actually great. It's never like, oh, damn, we don't have a juicy thing. It's just, oh, man. You don't know that. This is actually quite endearing about you.

[Michael Lewis]

So this is very funny. You say this because universally, when I write a book, the main characters are a little upset with me because I don't give anybody any editorial control. And they read it when it comes out and they call, we have a conversation. They don't feel betrayed. Exactly. That's not right. They feel like I have exposed them.

[Dax Shepard]

They feel very vulnerable.

[Michael Lewis]

They feel naked, and they're upset that they're naked. And then what happens is, is people appreciate them.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

And their best friend calls and says, that's you. And they realize, my best friend knows that's me and still loves me, and so everything's okay. And then they forget that they were ever naked.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

And then they forget they were ever upset. I don't write books about people I don't feel some sympathy for. This is not a hostile act.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

I know exactly what you're saying. People don't know how other people see them, and they think they're managing the situation and they. I know that you are seeing me right now in some way slightly different than I would see myself if I was sitting there describing myself. And it would make me uncomfortable to know what you were saying.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Michael Lewis]

But it's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

As we say in aa, it's none of your business. Like, what he thinks of me is actually none of your business. Okay. Would you agree that. I guess it's five seasons, not four, but this season of your podcast, against the Rules.

[Michael Lewis]

So we took on sports gambling as a way to talk about the society, really. But it's a really interesting situation, and it's an awkward thing to take on because everybody who might take it on is being paid by the sports gambling companies. There's not a lot of honest stuff about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Michael Lewis]

And I'VE had friends who gamble on sports or who are friends with the people who own DraftKings and FanDuel or whatever, whose opinion about the industry has changed because of the podcast. So that I've noticed. And I was just at this past weekend, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It's like the Moneyball conference, and it's 3,000 nerds in a room and a lot of GMs of sports teams. And it's been overrun already by DraftKings and FanDuel. And so there are all these people from DraftKings and FanDuel, and it felt like I was the stink bomb in the room. They didn't have any panels on the subject, but it's clear that this is an uncomfortable.

[Dax Shepard]

It's kind of like exposing CTE or smoking and cancer.

[Michael Lewis]

People get pissed off because there's a lot of money at stake already.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Those two companies are 30, $40 billion companies. It is sinister what we're doing to young men right now. It's not just with sports gambling. We're creating young male anger at a fantastic rate. If you were gonna set out to create as much young male anger as you could, we're doing a great job.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's take away manual labor jobs, let's take away the trades. Let's stop sending them to college. Let's get that suicide rate up.

[Michael Lewis]

Let's tell them they're evil from the minute they walk in the classroom when they're in first grade. And then let's create an industry that preys on young male overconfidence in testosterone.

[Dax Shepard]

In rites of passage and acts of bravery.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes. And that has, with unbelievable precision, the ability to identify people who don't know what they're doing and get them to do as much of it as possible. Yes. At the same time, they can, with great precision, identify the very, very, very few people who actually know what they're doing when they're betting on sports and kick them out of the casino.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. It's diabolical, those algorithms. They can go, oh, this guy's too good of a gambler.

[Michael Lewis]

He actually is making edge bets, the beds that have positive expected value. He knows something about golfers that we don't know. We can't take the bet.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's gone.

[Monica Padman]

Can you just say you can't do this?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

We pro gambler who knew what he was doing to give us his bets to place, and we participated a little bit, so it was legal. And we got booted out everywhere in a matter of four or five bets. Even where we'd lost money because they could identify that the bet, even though the bet lost, it was a smart bet.

[Dax Shepard]

That's like a bar that's only letting alcoholics in. You got to prove you're an alcoholic first and then anyone who can manage their drinking, you get the out of here. That's exactly that.

[Michael Lewis]

If you're just going to drink water, we don't want you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we want addicts.

[Monica Padman]

Can this be legal?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's go through it. Can we start? I was really fascinated with Dan Juan. He's a great character. So Dan Juan started studying fans, which no one had really ever studied. And I think the reigning opinion of people who attended sporting events was a certain type of person. And through his studies he found out, well, you know, you'd be surprised to find out that fans, they donate more money, they're more politically active, they have higher GPAs. They're not the group you think they are.

[Michael Lewis]

No, they're socially engaged, but they are, are not rational.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So now we get into the kind of Danny Kahneman take on these guys, which is what happens to someone's thinking when they're a fan.

[Michael Lewis]

I mean, it's motivated reasoning. You will systematically think your team is going to do better than you should think or your favorite players. You got one half your brain in a really irrational space already because you are a fan.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I like it when he puts it so simply. Like just the original proposition is, come spend two hours with us. There's a 50% chance that you're going to be very upset at the end of this. And it costs a lot of money. You see the bias right there. Any rational person would be like, no, those are terrible odds if I'm going to spend a bunch of money.

[Michael Lewis]

When you introduce gambling into this mind, it's already a mind that thinks, it knows things it doesn't know.

[Dax Shepard]

He gets into the superstitions.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I myself just did this. I went to a Detroit Lions game, the one they lost in the playoffs, and I hadn't been to a game all year. And I went and it was like a big deal. And they lost. And I'm like, it's cuz I hugged the coach. He didn't want to hug me. Like why did I have to hug that fucking guy? Cuz he's on tv. I had this whole story. I'm like, oh, Detroit hates my guts. I'm kind of biased.

[Michael Lewis]

It's funny what gets studied by academics and what doesn't. And as he points out, the fan was Just sitting there, waiting to be studied. It's such an important character in American life. But pinheads like me generally don't like sports. People were just turning a blind eye to it because they thought it was not worthy of attention. And for our podcast, it's worthy of attention just to establish the brain space in which this gambling industry is going.

[Dax Shepard]

To enter, because they are targeting fans. That's why it's very important to understand right out of the gates that a fan is doing some irrational thinking.

[Monica Padman]

So most people who bet are a fan of the thing that's surprising to me already. I would assume most people who get into sports betting aren't fans, so they could be sort of objective.

[Michael Lewis]

There are some who do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Then they're kicked off.

[Michael Lewis]

Overwhelmingly, they are fans. Wow. Yes. So what happened in this country is that back in 1992, Senator Bill Bradley, former New York Nick, had passed a federal law that forbid states from legalizing sports gambling that didn't have it all already and that grandfathered in Nevada, for.

[Dax Shepard]

Example, maybe Atlantic City.

[Michael Lewis]

No, they didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they didn't have a sports book there.

[Michael Lewis]

Then what happens is, because Atlantic City is not grandfathered, they don't have it. New Jersey gets upset. They can't do it. And Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, launches what seems to be a quixotic and feudal lawsuit to try to overturn Bradley's Law. It succeeds in 2018. In 2018, the Supreme Court says this law is unconstitutional. It's up to the states. Any state that wants to legalize sports betting can. Since then, 38 states have legalized it, which created all kinds of weird natural experiments, like Alabama doesn't, Mississippi does. And suicide rates go up in Mississippi and savings rates go down in Mississippi. You can see you have bankruptcy, all that stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

My own personal story. I got to have dinner one time with Ted Olson.

[Michael Lewis]

So did I.

[Dax Shepard]

And I find Tim to be one of the most impressive people I've ever had a dinner with. And what's so interesting to me about Ted Olson is he was the lawyer that argued in front of Supreme Court that Citizens United. Is that what was called? So he has this one thing on his record that us on the left would fucking hate, which he made corporations humans. And at the restaurant, the busboy comes over, starts crying and says, thank you so much. I got to marry the love of my life because of you. And then he's on the other side and gets rid of Doma. You're like, here's complicated life for you. And so brilliant.

[Michael Lewis]

And he's the lawyer Chris Christie hires to argue the Supreme Court case.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Michael Lewis]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, this is the reality of life.

[Monica Padman]

Well, he's just a good lawyer, but.

[Dax Shepard]

He'S cared deeply about doma. He felt like that was a huge violation.

[Monica Padman]

Did he care about DOMA or did he care about winning a hard case?

[Dax Shepard]

No, he truly said this is an injustice and believed that. And it was a liberty issue. And he believes in liberty. And sometimes liberty falls on your side and liberty falls on the other side.

[Michael Lewis]

You make a very good point in asking that question because I had dinner with him too, when we interviewed him. I really, really liked him.

[Dax Shepard]

He's damn likable. He's from the South.

[Michael Lewis]

He died.

[Dax Shepard]

He died.

[Michael Lewis]

He died three months ago.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I didn't know.

[Michael Lewis]

He died right after I had dinner with him, like two weeks after I had died. But I asked him. I was just curious. You're the most famous Constitution, most successful, argued the most cases before the Supreme Court. What's the strategy here? You're not just taking anything that comes in the door. And he would say that one is, I don't want to argue something I don't myself believe. But also if I think this is a non starter, it's a waste of time. So he's also picking cases. He's looking at the Supreme Court. He has the Supreme Court wired. He knows what they think about things and he's picking the things that he thinks are going to succeed. And he had an odd premonition that sports gambling would work.

[Dax Shepard]

One element of this that I heard in the podcast, which is fascinating, is someone comparing some definition as is this a game of luck or a game of skill? Because tournaments are not illegal.

[Michael Lewis]

The reason we have two huge corporations in the middle of this business that are not Las Vegas casinos, DraftKings and FanDuel. Preceding the legalization of sports gambling, there was a fight to legalize fantasy sports. And they were two fantasy sports companies. And fantasy sports sports looks a lot like gambling. You're entering competitions and you buy in and you win money. And they went state to state, these two companies with very shrewd lobbyists and persuaded a lot of states that this was not gambling because it was a game of skill.

[Monica Padman]

But poker's a game of skill and it's gambling.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes. So is blackjack. It's a slippery slope. And where they had success was especially where there weren't Native American tribes to oppose them.

[Dax Shepard]

We'll get to California, but that has a lot to do with California.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Michael Lewis]

California and Florida are both places where the tribes are very powerful, and they had the right to have gambling on the reservation. They didn't want anybody doing it. Anything like gambling authorized.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. And anyone who lives in California, every time these props come up, you see these are very heavily funded because you have casinos on one side and you have the tribes on the other. You see more of those commercials than anything else.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So the Supreme Court says states can't.

[Michael Lewis]

And the states are starved of revenue, and they're looking for new sources of revenue. They want to believe. And FanDuel and DraftKings lead the charge and legalize sports gambling in lots of places with state regulation. But if you interview the state regulators, they basically say they're running circles around us. The state regulator in Ohio was very funny. We interviewed him. He said, my teenage son is getting pizza boxes with free sports bets attached to it from these companies, and I'm the regulator. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And now I gotta go, okay, no more on pizza boxes.

[Michael Lewis]

They're whack a mole with your Uber ride. You get a free sports bet. And so they're enticing young people. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I bet it's not a lot on the salads. The quinoa bowl probably doesn't have. Probably.

[Michael Lewis]

Right. So I live in the state California. California, where sports betting has not been legalized. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the boys in my son's high school class are betting on sports. So they are both underage and in a state where it's illegal. He was like, yeah, I can do this. Here's the app. You find ways to get around the restrictions, and you just do it. So we actually did an episode where I gave him $5,000 and put a GoPro on his head, basically. Or a wire on him and said, let's go see how smart you are, and we're gonna learn why you shouldn't be doing this. I inoculated him, just like handing him a box of cigarettes and saying, you gotta smoke the whole box or fifth of whiskey. You don't get to get up until you finish it. Yeah. And it was really interesting to see him figure out what was going on for me. It's obvious. Right. I was on Wall Street. I know a lot of people in that world. I know that if DraftKings or FanDuel trying to get me to do something, I shouldn't do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. You enter life as I do, which is you're in Las Vegas, and you see they've built a glass pyramid in the desert, and you must go. I guess the people gambling don't win. Right. You just have that knowledge. The reality of there's systems at play that are much more complicated than I could ever be as an individual. And I have to acknowledge that enormous asymmetric.

[Michael Lewis]

It's true in all markets. If you're going to teach a trader, someone who's going to trade anything, one thing. You teach them the idea of adverse selection, that if someone is finding you to trade with you, it's quite likely that person knows something you don't know. Or to expand on this, if there's a market price for something, there's all this information in that market price. And a bet like a money line or a point spread is a market price on a spot sporting event. Unless you know something that the market doesn't know. And you better know why you know something the market doesn't know, because the market knows a lot. You are a disadvantage that the market knows stuff you don't know. So the person on the other side of the bet likely knows something you don't know. That's your baseline. So there are, I know them professional sports gamblers who know that golfer A is better on this kind of course than the market knows and is going to overperform at this tournament because this kind of course suits him or fraternity brother knows that his fraternity brother who's on the basketball team has just agreed to miss the first free throw in the basketball game this weekend. There is inside information.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

That is useful. If you have that, go for it. I mean, it's not advice if you have to gamble. If you have to gamble, try to know something.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you should know something.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Once this happens and the Supreme Court allows this, you go to Vegas and you talk to some like veteran bookmakers. What has the impact of this been on Vegas and what are the people in Vegas saying?

[Michael Lewis]

Vegas was not ready for the change. FanDuel and DraftKings has this huge advantage over the Las Vegas casinos who have sportsbooks. Their business model was more like a tech company, the FanDuel and DraftKings more like a social media company. They knew everything about the behavior of their fantasy players. They knew what their weaknesses were, what vices they could be encouraged to indulge in, who would make what kind of bet. And the fantasy sports companies knew everything that was their business model. Knowing about their customers. That's a new idea for Las Vegas. I mean, they know the high rollers, they know it in a very general way, but they don't Know how to take someone who is engaged in two legged parlays and turn them into someone who will make even worse three legged parlay bets.

[Dax Shepard]

It is nefarious. Yeah, it's just straight nefarious. It's like payday loan type shit.

[Michael Lewis]

Imagine prohibition ends in the 1930s and there's a liquor company that actually has incredibly detailed information on how to get addicts to drink.

[Dax Shepard]

They have your whole history pre prohibition.

[Michael Lewis]

They have every drink you ever had.

[Dax Shepard]

This guy can't say no to rye.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right. And they show up on your doorstep.

[Monica Padman]

And give it to you for free.

[Michael Lewis]

And start to get you going again.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Jesus.

[Dax Shepard]

Get you off that wagon.

[Michael Lewis]

That liquor company has this huge advantage, and that's the advantage that FanDuel and DraftKings have.

[Dax Shepard]

What about the mules and the runners?

[Michael Lewis]

Once I found my character, the professional sports gambler. Rufus Peabody is his name. He's among the smartest sports gamblers on the planet and he's been making a very good living out of it for 15 years.

[Dax Shepard]

What is a very good living?

[Michael Lewis]

Millions of dollars a year.

[Dax Shepard]

Millions of dollars.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I thought you said billions.

[Michael Lewis]

And he works his ass off. He really does have edges in and it's not easy. But part of his problem is that in the old world, the Vegas casinos would take his bets. In the new world, FanDuel and DraftKings won't. They figure out he knows what he's doing and they don't want the bets. So to get his bets down, he has to hire networks of people like his mother. They're professional people.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he's got to trust them.

[Michael Lewis]

He has to trust them. And they have to be smart at disguising the bets so that if you're actually a professional mule, you're actually placing these bets for Rufus. You do things, things like make stupid bets occasionally so that they don't detect.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta trick the algorithm.

[Michael Lewis]

That's wild. You live in New York, you bet on the Knicks. You do that for a little bit so that they classify you as dumb better. And then you come in a bunch of smart bets. So our producer in the podcast, Lydia Jean Cott, who 1, doesn't know the difference between a basketball and football and two is such a nervous Nelly around. Money and risk would never go into a casino. That's too scary kind of thing. Rufus gave Lydia Jean 100, 150,000. I can't remember. Lots of dollars to place bets with and she was running.

[Monica Padman]

This is hilarious.

[Michael Lewis]

The bank shut off her credit cards because they thought someone had stolen them because there was all this money coming through the bank account. She has been banned from, I think every sports book in the country and has been told, you're never welcome here again. The funny moment was there was one sports book, mgm. So one of the Vegas sportsbooks took her first bets, the smart bets. The bets actually lost. So she lost a bunch of money right away on golf, like tens of thousands of dollars. They thought, oh, dumb high roller. They misidentified her. They weren't good at figuring out those bets were smart. They wanted to make her vip. They got in touch with her and they gave her pre tickets to Charlie xcx. And she calls and she says, this has been the most miserable experience of my life. I don't want to be doing this. When can I stop?

[Dax Shepard]

Cortisol levels are through the roof.

[Michael Lewis]

Now I can go see Charlie at Madison Square Garden. And she was so excited, but she made the mistake of continuing to place bets. And the day of the concert they called and said, we're taking away the bets. They took away those bastards.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Michael Lewis]

Those bastards broke her heart. I should have bought her tickets.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I was just going to say you should wealthy, you should have bought her.

[Michael Lewis]

It's so funny. I should have bought her tickets. But I was thinking, this is such a great end to the story. I just want to leave it at that.

[Dax Shepard]

Crazy.

[Monica Padman]

They can do that.

[Michael Lewis]

I want to hear her tears.

[Dax Shepard]

You have your priorities straight. How does the VIP status work on these online things? And how is that turbocharging, the addiction?

[Michael Lewis]

If you get to be a vip, you have a problem. I was talking to a bunch of people who manage large sums of money for like university endowments and pension funds and all the rest. People who are giving money to Wall street people to invest for them. And they asked me, if you were interviewing a Wall street investor to decide whether to trust them with your money, what question would you ask? And I said I'd ask, have you ever been a VIP at a sports book? Because if you're a VIP at a sportsbook, you're exactly the kind of person who should not be investing money they have identified. You are bad with money. You are going to be a long term cash cow for them. Make a lot of stupid bets and yeah, we'll all frame it as I can afford to lose this. It's just fun for me. It's recreational for me to lose a million bucks. In this pool of VIPs are lots of people who can't afford to lose the money. And they don't make the distinction. One of our sports gambles. Want to see how badly the big sports books would behave. He started to behave like an addict and would say things like, I just need another line of credit that my wife doesn't see. Let me in in the game. And they would say things like, you can't put this in writing. Just tell me over the phone and we'll get you the line of credit. I would say that if you manage to get yourself designated a vip, it's an embarrassment. It's not a compliment.

[Dax Shepard]

O oh, boy. I want to thank California publicly and I want to acknowledge my own stupidity as a fan. So I see this Jake Paul fight with Mike Tyson. I grew up watching Mike Tyson knock guys out. I know the one thing that doesn't decline as you get older as a boxer is your knockout punch. We watch George Foreman drop Michael Moore very late age. I'm like, this kid's never fought. So I see that Mike Tyson knocking him out plays three to one. I'm like, I have to make this bet. I sign on to one of these sites, I can't even remember which go to place this. You can't. And I'm like, I can't. It's because I'm in California. But I didn't even know that. Oh, so I'm pissed. Then I go away to Hawaii that weekend. I can't make a bet in Hawaii. I don't know what to do.

[Michael Lewis]

They have a real problem with gambling in Hawaii. It's one of the couple states that have moral objections.

[Dax Shepard]

Good for them. So I go down there and I've got to take some side bets with human beings. I end up getting $300 on the table. And of course he loses and he doesn't knock out Jake Paul. And I was like, thank God Gilbert didn't take my bat.

[Michael Lewis]

I was like, I think I was.

[Dax Shepard]

Willing to go like 10 grand on it. And he goes, joe, I'm a fan of Mike Tyson. I don't even think about the fact that, okay, Jake Paul's the one with the career that's building. He knows something I don't know about this fight. I just get rid of all my rational thinking and now I just want to thank California for not taking my bet.

[Michael Lewis]

Do you think the fight was rigged?

[Dax Shepard]

What I think is that there are a couple of slow motion exchanges that are impossible for me to believe because Tyson does his bob. He's done this a thousand times. This is muscle memory. Soon as he ducks and misses that, you're getting the right uppercut and you see him start to throw it and then he doesn't throw it.

[Michael Lewis]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, I'm not going to say publicly I don't want to get sued, but I'm saying that doesn't make any sense to me. This is a guy that's thrown that exact move hundreds of times with crazy outcome and he just stops. And he's in the middle of the movement and he stops. And I'm like, that doesn't look right.

[Michael Lewis]

Do you think if you said what you were maybe about to say that you would get sued?

[Monica Padman]

It's just your opinion. I don't think you could get sued.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder if I say Jake Paul fixed that fight in your opinion. Yeah. What's the difference when you say your opinion? Still slander, isn't it? No, I have no information.

[Monica Padman]

Try it. Let's give it a whirl.

[Michael Lewis]

I don't know if that's the way to get your legal advice.

[Monica Padman]

I think if you say allegedly, would you say allegedly after everything?

[Dax Shepard]

All I'm saying is I witnessed some of the fight.

[Monica Padman]

Allegedly.

[Dax Shepard]

That does not make sense to me. Do you have an opinion on it?

[Michael Lewis]

I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

You watch it.

[Michael Lewis]

No, I'm not a huge boxing guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Michael Lewis]

I don't like seeing people get hit. I remember when I was a kid, I went to a camp where you were forced to box. And I remember the first fight I got in and I wailed on some kid. I hated it. Like, I just stop. I don't want to beat him up. And then in the second fight, someone got in and wailed on me and I thought, I like this even less. So where is the fun?

[Monica Padman]

Like there's a lose, lose.

[Michael Lewis]

Where is the fun here?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so how is California? I guess we're six, seven years into this experiment. You already mentioned Alabama and Mississippi, but is California experiencing less of some of the fallout from this as other, other places?

[Michael Lewis]

I don't know. The tribes have succeeded in preventing gambling from being legalized. But as I say, my son, 17 years old and he's on the apps and he's gambling.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, just paint me a little bit of a picture of how bad it is. And then I want to go into what you taught your son and what we can maybe advise other people that are listening to adhere to young men.

[Michael Lewis]

Who take the sports gambling become addicts at a rate of about 8%. Charlie Baker, former governor of Massachusetts, new head of the ncw. When he became head of the ncaa, he went and did a kind of listening tour of Colleges because he wanted to see what was going on in sports on campuses. And he thought he was going to find one thing and he found another. He found an epidemic of athletes being harassed by their fellow students, gamblers. And the harassment was like death threats. You missed this free throw or you're dead. Or just tell me now something that I know that I can bet on. It was so bad that he did a survey and found that 60% of the boys on college campuses were sports gambling. I think that that is probably missing what is an even bigger story, which is I don't think there's a high school in America where there isn't basically a sports gambling ring. It's part of being a boy. It's just becoming what you do. Of course for most people it's not going to have much effect and it'll be 92%. Yeah. But it's a machine for creating lots.

[Dax Shepard]

And lots of addicts and it's a particularly cruel addiction. We interviewed someone with a gambling addiction. Yeah, the famous. A chef. And what was illuminating to me as an addict was I've never done an eight ball of coke. Felt like and thought, oh, I could do another eight ball of coke and that would get me out of this. It has the most unique trap, this addiction which is like there's the illusion of getting even and then exiting. So everyone has a fairy tale. Just want to get even and then I'll stop. There's no getting even. Thank God, because maybe I'd still be trapped there.

[Michael Lewis]

It leads you to oblivion. It leads you to the end. It leads you to ruin. And I kind of thought one way that reform is going to happen. It's going to be some high profile person's child.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We're going to wait till that.

[Michael Lewis]

Because that's happened in England. I don't want to tell you who it is, but I do know a person who's very prominent there, whose son has just not commits suicide but close, who's bankrupted himself. And the dad realizing this is outrageous and is going to work politically to constrain the gambling industry in the UK and Australia.

[Dax Shepard]

There are things to learn from.

[Michael Lewis]

They're way ahead of us. And they're much less prone to making stupid bets. It's interesting. We are uniquely stupid. We're not inoculated. It's like smallpox just hit us. Yeah. And I might be wrong about this. Maybe this is all just going to go away and this new vice will be assimilated into the culture and we'll all be fine. But I Do think it's more likely that we're going to be living with an epidemic? It's silent. You don't see it with drug addicts. You see them. This just someone on his phone doing stuff. You've got a casino in your pocket. So I think we're going to wake up and go, what have we done? To a half generation of young men, the question is like, what do you do then?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

You have a child, what do you do? It's a question I think a lot of parents ask themselves about a lot of things. How do I protect my child from this thing? He's out there in a predatory environment. It's essentially a predatory business.

[Dax Shepard]

As was the mortgage thing.

[Michael Lewis]

As was the mortgage thing. But my child was not gonna buy credit to false swaps.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember my initial reaction to the 08 meltdown was like, all these people that couldn't afford these houses went and bought these fucking houses. Cause they believed it was gonna go up 20% a year. And I, I blamed them. And then I learned how they were approached to refinance, how they were encouraged to buy a house outside of their thing. And I go, oh, no, no. This was a calculated, coordinated effort to get all these people, they abused, vulnerable people, as they always do.

[Michael Lewis]

That's right. I actually do think that if you have a boy that you need to have, not just the sex talk, you have to have the gambling talk.

[Dax Shepard]

So, yeah. What did you do with your son.

[Michael Lewis]

Walker, who is a senior in high.

[Dax Shepard]

School and a Texas Ranger? Famously a Texas Ranger or an Oakland A.

[Michael Lewis]

But I said, first year of this thing, sports, gaming. He goes, yeah, we're all doing it. He was not yet, but all of his friends were.

[Dax Shepard]

He was circling.

[Michael Lewis]

I went and taught his English class and there were like 30 kids there. And he asked during the class, can you raise your hand if you're gambling on sports? All but one of the boys did. None of the girls.

[Dax Shepard]

So.

[Michael Lewis]

But he said, like, yeah, I'm tempted. I think I know some things here, especially with hoops. He's a hoops player. He knows about the Golden State Warriors. So I said, here, I'm gonna give you $5,000 and you're gonna wear. And we're going to just follow you. I'm going to stay out of it. I'm not going to parent you. The producers may a little bit, but you're going to just explain why you're doing what you're doing and you can keep the winnings. What I thought was going to happen is he was going to vaporize the $5,000 and it was going to be humiliating. And the humiliation would be the antidote. He would learn how little he knew and that the things he thought he knew, he didn't know and how complicated this market was and how this market was trying to get him to do stuff he shouldn't do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

That's not what happened.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

He drank the fifth of whiskey. He was like, that's great. Let's do this again tomorrow.

[Monica Padman]

He made million dollars.

[Dax Shepard]

He didn't throw up. He didn't get hung over.

[Michael Lewis]

I don't want to ruin the episode for the listener. The episode, it turned out so beautifully. What actually did happen. He got the lesson and he got the money. And how that happened, I would rather people just listen to that.

[Monica Padman]

Makes sense. I am.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm really delighted you took this on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But now you do have a book coming out.

[Michael Lewis]

I do.

[Dax Shepard]

Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. What is this about?

[Michael Lewis]

I got really interested in the federal government during Trump 1. I thought it was just comic material. Trumpet fired his whole transition team the day after the election. Five hundred and something people. There were a thousand people inside the Obama administration who had spent six months preparing sort of a course on how the federal government works for whoever won. And Trump said, the course is irrelevant. He literally said, I can learn everything I need to know in two hours.

[Dax Shepard]

That's quite a feat.

[Michael Lewis]

Very smart man. Beautiful mind. He's a beautiful mind. But I thought, this is comic material. I'll go get the briefings, starting with how the nuclear weapons are run. The people who were going to get that briefing, they couldn't give me all the classified stuff, but they were kind of grateful. It's like we worked so hard.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We wanted someone to read this. Could someone just hear this?

[Michael Lewis]

But the reception, it was called the Fifth Risk to that book was so positive that I thought I might want to do more of this if it proves useful. Another thing happened was at the very end of the book, I did one deep dive into the life of a single civil servant. And the story was literature. The material was so good, I thought I should have done more of that. So year a bit ago, I was on a hiking trail with the then opinion editor of the Washington Post, David Shipley, and I said, you know what we should do? I can't do it. It's too complicated institution. The government is huge. It's massive. There are 2.3 million employees. I said, let me go hire six writers. I love people who Just. I know. Make everything fun on the page. I, along with the six of them, will parachute into the government. Everybody can find their story and you can run it as a series running into the election just to remind everybody what these people do. And the series was called who is Government? The pieces were so good and things you just wouldn't expect. I'll give you one that's not mine. Casey Sepp, New Yorker writer. Found a character in the Veterans Administration named Ron Walters. No one's ever heard of him. No one would have ever heard of him. Who took over the national cemeteries 20 years ago. And the national cemeteries are where we bury our veterans. And when he took it over, they had kind of mediocre customer satisfaction. The families of the people who were burying their dead had mixed feelings about how the operation was run. There's now at the University of Michigan that measures consumer satisfaction across our society. Like it's not just private companies, but also government agencies.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

And so you can find out how the Department of Agriculture is doing, but you can also find out how Amazon and FedEx is doing. Ron Walters turned this enterprise into the enterprise with the highest customer satisfaction in the entire country. And you think about, why do we have a country? What are the things a country? Mostly it's, we're better off in a country because it helps keep us safe, but it preserves certain values. And if we don't honor our war dead, it's ugly. And that this man has come in and honored the war dead. Quite moving. And not asked for a dollar more than like his civil service pay. And not ask for anybody to write an article about him. He was very wary. It's story after story like this and the idea of some know nothing rolling in with a chainsaw and saying, you're all waste, fraud and abuse. When some of these people are the.

[Dax Shepard]

Best among us and have dedicated 20 years of their life to making this thing, it's obscene.

[Michael Lewis]

So it turns out that the book is very timely. I wrote the last piece of it after the election, but all of it mostly was written last June. And it's Dave Eggers and Kamau Bell and John Lanchester and Casey Sepp. Seen the Incredibles? She was the voice of Violet in the Incredibles. She's a wonderful historian, too. And Geraldine Brooks, the Australian novelist. Really gifted writers. Each piece is so different from the next, so it'll be fun. It's a way to have a conversation about this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay, great. So listen to against the Rules. But then also get who is Government? The Untold Story of public service. Michael Lewis, you're very, very charming and interesting. I love being with you guys. I really enjoy having you as a Dennis.

[Michael Lewis]

I really enjoyed it.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi, there. This is hermium. Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check, Ms. Monica. I am launching a competing religion to Quakerism.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, to Quakerism.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm using spices, too.

[Monica Padman]

Dax, why don't you at least do herbs?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to use spices, too, to confuse people.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. And what. What is. What are your spices? Places.

[Dax Shepard]

Shining. Prancing.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Intriguing.

[Monica Padman]

That's bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Captivating.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Energizing.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Sprinkling. Could also be sparkling.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

This is like an extroverts religion.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. This isn't. This is about. This is so outward.

[Dax Shepard]

This is great.

[Monica Padman]

And it's so performative.

[Dax Shepard]

Shining, prancing. Intriguing. Captivating. This is a way of life.

[Monica Padman]

Intriguing is not. Not good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, if you're using it specifically in the SLA way.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

No, things that are intriguing aren't inherently that. It's just been used in that.

[Monica Padman]

Things that are intriguing. But you're saying these as verbs.

[Dax Shepard]

But you can be intriguing in many ways other than romantic or sessual.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Mine's also easier to memorize. Right? Because you probably already have mine memorized. And you probably don't, off the top of your dome, have. Have the original spices memorized.

[Monica Padman]

I think I do. Stewardship Service.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you're okay. You're just kind of making a mess of it now. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

What? That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

But you got to go spice.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, I. No, I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

God, you and your rules.

[Dax Shepard]

Service. Stewardship.

[Monica Padman]

Stewardship. Community. Peace.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good job. What's eni?

[Monica Padman]

Integrity. Integrity. Was I there?

[Dax Shepard]

Was.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. How many have I done?

[Dax Shepard]

You need one more.

[Monica Padman]

You need an E. Equity. Equality. I did it.

[Dax Shepard]

Good job.

[Monica Padman]

Now yours. Shining, prancing. Spit Takes.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, that was Pete. Or what?

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Shining, prancing. Intriguing. Celebration.

[Dax Shepard]

Captivating.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, captivating. Shading egg on your face.

[Dax Shepard]

Energizing.

[Monica Padman]

Energizing. And sparkles.

[Dax Shepard]

Sprinkling.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, sprinkling.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so mine's not easier to remember. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Well, that's cool. At your cult, you're gonna have that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, do you want to talk about. Because you were waiting patiently for me to listen to the Malcolm Gladwell episode called Rogan Intervention.

[Monica Padman]

Joe Rogan Intervention. It's on. It's revisionist history. And the new series season's great so far. There's also a couple really good episodes About George Floyd.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, and RFK or whatever.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. There's an episode before the Joe Rogan intervention about that called the RFK Jr. Problem that leads sort of into the Joe Rogan intervention. And God, that Malcolm Gladwell, what a gift he has. He's so good.

[Dax Shepard]

What an incredible episode, I thought.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Okay. So the episode is. Starts off kind of calling out Joe Rogan a little bit about his interview with RFK Jr. And not really. And like, the difference between an interview and a conversation, it really just deep dives into what is a good interview.

[Dax Shepard]

Versus a conversation between friends. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Interviewing is a real skill. It is different from conversation. And it is like. Yeah, they play a clip where Malcolm is being interviewed by Michael Gervais, and Malcolm starts crying, talking about his dad.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But what led. There was so nothing like. It was. It was very simple. It was. And I was like, yeah, it's. It's complicated. And it's that simple. Getting, like, real emotion out of someone.

[Dax Shepard]

So there's this string of back and forth where RFK, RFK Jr. He claims that the Spanish flu. He's got three whammies in a row. Spanish flu. That people didn't die from the virus, that in fact they died from this bacterial infection. And that Fauci signs off on that. Fauci agrees with him that this conclusion. And then that what the Spanish flu really was was a backfiring of a vaccine. And so, yeah, Joe's like. He is skeptical at first. He's like, you know, according to what and what's the documentation? And he finds the article from Fauci. Then there's some, like, you know, at least Malcolm's conclusion is that neither of them really understood the difference between a primary and a secondary cause of death. So, you know, what's he to do if he doesn't know. Know that?

[Monica Padman]

Right, right.

[Dax Shepard]

Like an average person could misread that conclusion. And then when he gets into the vaccine thing, now he's just, you know, now you're in this weird position where this guy's saying there are articles, but you don't have them. And I just wonder. I was trying to just. I was trying to delineate how ours is different. I. I guess really the only difference is the people we have on are. Are truly experts in the field. They're talking. Talking about. But likewise, we. We can only push back so much because it's not our field.

[Monica Padman]

Well, right. But I guess if we're gonna have someone controversial on. Which we don't do that often actually, but if we do like before we had Andrew on, there was a conversation we had that was like, if we're gonna have him on, we're going to have to have all the conversations and push back. So to me, it's that, that it's like you can't have someone like that on who's extremely controversial and says all kinds of stuff and not be prepared to really push back.

[Dax Shepard]

Challenge.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

The statement that that was a vaccine that killed 100 million people.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course I'm in bed. Like, that's a. That's one of the few issues I'm pretty vocal about. You know, very pro vaccine. Although I have a little bit I've had. I understood people who didn't want the COVID vaccine more than maybe someone who's so pro vaccine that I am was. I understand it's your body and you ultimately get to decide what you put in your body. That part, that piece of it I totally get. But I was, I got more. I want to hear your conclusions because I, and maybe this is a bad habit of mine. I keep trying to zoom out and figure out what's really going on on, you know, like, that's my great curiosity. You've got like two intelligent people who Joe and rfk. They're not dumb. Dumbs. Either of them. They're both intelligent people. And then you wonder why is it. Does that story appeal to them that there's like, there's been a conspiracy. It's vaccines. That's. The Spanish flu is really vaccines. Why are two intelligent people drawn by to that conclusion?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't know if Joe is. I don't know if that's.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I don't know either. He seems skeptical in his defense while he was hearing it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I don't know what he thinks, but RFK Jr. But must believe it. I mean, I, I, Yeah, he.

[Dax Shepard]

He's sincere about it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So.

[Dax Shepard]

So then I just, I, I try to figure out what's going on under it. And even broader, why is it so appealing to people? A very large amount of people are drawn to that. And my conclusion is, I think if you feel very left out and excluded that there's this group of people in the country that are living this great life and you feel excluded by that. It's almost like you feel like they have some secret shit. Like they have some secret. Why are they succeeding at this level and enjoying all of this prosperity and opportunity? And I'm not. They're not more valuable than me. They're not smarter than me. There must Be some kind of conspiracy just in general, you know what I'm saying? Like there's some, there, there must be something dirty going on that all these people have all this shit and then all these other people don't.

[Monica Padman]

But it's not, those aren't the, the, it's not poor people who are anti vaccine. In fact, it's mostly very, very privileged people who are.

[Dax Shepard]

But, well, there's two, I think there's two really big buckets. There's the Whole Foods, that's super liberal, probably elite group. And then there was the fuck no, that's got trackers in it. That's, you know, Biden trying to control me. That, that's the, that like the anti Bill Gates faction. So I think there is two really big factions.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But I, I, I tend to think the people who, I mean it just, in my experience, the people who are the most vocal and leading the charge are not poor people. When you have so much privilege and access to the Brazil nut that might have, that's, you know, $14 per nut that might have this special benefit, like they want to go that route and then that's natural and all of these things. But I, I think most people believe doctors, they like believe the system. Right. That doctors pretty much know what they're doing, that when the baby is born it needs these things and they're just going to go do these things and they don't have to question every single thing that comes in also because, because they don't have time or energy to question it. They're living their lives well.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think the last time I looked like 83% of the country had gotten at least the first round of the vaccine for Covid. So despite whatever you were hearing and the pushback, the vast, vast majority of the people did. So. Yeah, I agree. Most people just do. Most people are vaccinated, thank God. But I'm, I get just curious why that thing that sounds pretty far fetched to me doesn't sound far fetched to an intelligent person. And I guess my conclusion is if you already think the system's rigged, like if you're already suspicious that there's some kind of weird unfairness happening, I have to imagine you're more open to that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If your kind of baseline assumption is like something crooked's going on.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but I, I don't, I don't think that's the majority of those people. I really don't. I mean, definitely not rfk.

[Dax Shepard]

He's a Kennedy, but he's the black Sheep Kennedy. Like, that's how I set him in that category. It's like the other Kennedys had a much different trajectory than him.

[Monica Padman]

Trajectory. But not.

[Dax Shepard]

He was privileged fully.

[Monica Padman]

And like.

[Dax Shepard]

But even, like, a privileged person could feel like the least privileged among the girl. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But that, to me is like, so kind of part of, I guess, sort of this bigger thing. Right. Like, you're. It's so. You're so privileged and insular that you think you have it bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Like, look, and then it's also. Look, if he's just a random person on earth, I don't care. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But he's in charge.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, now. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Not at the time of that conversation.

[Monica Padman]

I think when he had RFK Jr on, I think was during the election.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Do we know? Rob, can you check June 2024? June 2024.

[Dax Shepard]

He was running for president at that time, right?

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Michael Lewis]

Oh, God, yes.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Was a nominee.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So he's saying, like, this is my platform.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. And then there's a bigger. Then there's a really fun. And I wonder where we both land on it. There's the bigger issue of, like, this spectrum between journalists and comedians with podcasts and then their obligations as such. Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, a journalist has a whole code of ethics and.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Vetting sources and all this kind of stuff.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And there's tons of conspiracy theory podcasts. You know, there's nuts. No one gives a shit. What people are really worried about is that he has a huge audience.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So it's just. Interesting scene. It's like, that's a very relevant variable. And how upset someone is that there's just a comedian talking about conspiracy theories.

[Monica Padman]

But he's not a. He's. His podcast isn't a comedy podcast. He's a comedian.

[Dax Shepard]

No, yeah. I'm just saying he's a comedian. He's not a journalist.

[Monica Padman]

Correct.

[Dax Shepard]

Not a politician or a doctor.

[Monica Padman]

But his show is a show where ideas are explored. It's not, you know, a laugh riot. I mean, I'm sure other funny episodes or whatever, but it is there to explore ideas. Maybe he thinks he is being responsible with it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I assume he does, because I think he's a principled guy with integrity, and he just happens those. So I believe the experts we have on. And he believes the experts he has on.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't know, though.

[Dax Shepard]

And then. You don't know.

[Monica Padman]

We wouldn't have him on to come Talk about anti germ theory.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because I don't believe exactly.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't think, I don't know that Joe Rogan does. I think he is like come talk about your thing. Let's, let's talk about it. But then he himself isn't equipped to really have that conversation with this person who's powerful. You know, in the episode before when they're talking about rfk, you know, he, he doesn't believe in Louis Pasteur's germ theory. He doesn't believe that. He believes. Believes in the opposite thing. And so does Woody Harrelson like there. And, and so yes. It's not to me it's, it's like.

[Dax Shepard]

See I think it'd be easy and convenient if you could write the people off as dumb, but I don't think you can do that. So then the question is how do smart people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Have the courage to go against 99.9% of.

[Monica Padman]

I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Biologists who think a certain.

[Monica Padman]

Think it's courage. I think it is is a, a long time of not having your feet on the ground that you're able to explore all these different options for life and the world and the way it works and who's in charge and who's not in charge. I do think it's like checking yourself on how quote normal your life is in comparison. I think most of these people's aren't.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I just think there's a baseline distrust of, of systems. The government, health care, doctors, universities, like all these institutions.

[Monica Padman]

It's just, it's becoming more and more.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's hard to know chicken or the egg where there that many people and now there's just an outlet. I, I don't know. You know, I'm, I, I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Well we do know because measles is back now. It wasn't. You know, people are, now these things are coming back that were gone.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

There's that whole episode about the rotavirus and the, the vaccine for that which they've like, you know RFK and them have said is bad and it is like single handedly saved millions of children.

[Dax Shepard]

Infants from diarrhea, dying of diarrhea than any other vaccine. It's so reckless.

[Monica Padman]

It is, it's just reckless.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But anyways I remain really curious like what is why.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

As a smart person, how do they look at that and look at like the tens of millions of kids just in India that have been saved from the rotovax.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to like understand how that gets shoved aside in your 13 cases of maybe not even verifiable.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, side effects. Takes charge over tens of millions of people.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And I mean, I. There's gotta be something interesting there.

[Monica Padman]

There also might be a part of a lot of humans that want that. That want to be the. Except, you know, it's almost like the opposite side of the coin to, like, exceptionalism. Like, I'm different, right, from everyone else.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's what I'm saying. It is. It is a kind of a display of courage, you know. It is. I am not afraid to go against the grain and to march to the beat of my own drum. And all these other, you know, individual tropes that we love. Great episode. Most importantly, no matter how you fall on it, I think, like my. My headline of that episode to you. My original feedback was Malcolm's genius for the way he unravels his story. Story is so proprietary and unique and stimulating.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's just so.

[Monica Padman]

He's such a good storyteller.

[Dax Shepard]

The way he flips. It's like he flips channels back and forth to different stories. And then the way he weaves them ultimately together is so impressive.

[Monica Padman]

Great show. Revision. Revisionist history.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you did there.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, let's see here. We talk art. Art with Michael.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's talk about some art we're going.

[Monica Padman]

To do from Wikipedia.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's talk about art, baby.

[Monica Padman]

The list of most expensive paintings. Okay, according to Wikipedia, the Salvador Moon dead is the. Is the most expensive. 450 million adjusted. 577. But this is the one that he talks about that a lot of people say, a lot of people discredit.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a very unimpressive painting to me.

[Monica Padman]

It's da Vinci.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, we love da Vinci, but I'm not impressed. That doesn't say 570 million million to me. 1500, though. That's when it was painted. Yeah, 1500.

[Monica Padman]

The. Yeah. Attribution is pretty disputed. Then we have Interchange, the Mona Lisa, obviously.

[Dax Shepard]

We just need to say it's never been sold.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. These are paintings sold.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That would be billions of dollars, probably.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I assume. Yes. Interchange is a cooning.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I like. That's more my speed, Monica.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's nice. It's nice. It was 300 million adjusted.398. Oh, that was sold by the David Geffen Foundation.

[Dax Shepard]

It still blows my mind. There's objects that are worth a half a billion dollars.

[Monica Padman]

I know. Well, there are cars I think the.

[Dax Shepard]

Most expensive car is about 75 million for a Ferrari GTO.

[Monica Padman]

The third is a Ceson. The card players. That was 250. Adjusted 349.

[Dax Shepard]

I like it. It's like two cowboys.

[Monica Padman]

I like that one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They're about to shoot each other. That's my story.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think so. I think they're playing cards.

[Dax Shepard]

One of them's always cheating. There's always a cheat in these cowboy card games.

[Monica Padman]

Why are they cowboys that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the guy's got a cowboy hat on.

[Monica Padman]

He's wearing, like, an Abe Lincoln hat.

[Dax Shepard]

It's kind of a mix between a stove pop stove pipe and a cowboy hat.

[Monica Padman]

Stuffing. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Then we have Stouffer stovestop stuffing.

[Monica Padman]

Paul Gougen Goggin called Gauguin. Is it Gauguin?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Gauguin. Nafe. Fat Ipiopo translates to when will you marry?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I like that one. I like her dress.

[Monica Padman]

210. Adjusted 270.

[Dax Shepard]

Her feet are a little mangled like mine.

[Monica Padman]

Right. She has a lot of toe.

[Dax Shepard]

If I told you this, that I'm now describing my foot as a comb over. Because the long toe has now moved over to fill the gap of the baby toe.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So it looks like Trump's hair now. Yeah. A fucking comb over on my feet.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

That may come up on Kimmel tonight, but it happened here first. We tend to talk about my feet a lot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. You're doing Kimmel tonight. And I'm going to Beyonce tonight.

[Dax Shepard]

Star studded night.

[Monica Padman]

Jackson Pollock is next. Number 17A.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that's Jackson Pollock.

[Monica Padman]

Incorrect. Number 17A. 200 million adjusted 265.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. 200 mil. Okay. I'm allowed to say Pollock. Did you know that? Because I'm 12.5% Pollock.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because my kids are 25% Pollock. It's like the Natalie then.

[Monica Padman]

No, Then we have a Gustav Klimt Wascher Schlangen. Two. That's a hundred.

[Dax Shepard]

What a name. Wasserschlagen.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. This is like.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a fever dream.

[Monica Padman]

Women. Naked women. Two naked women.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I see a breast. I see butt cheeks.

[Monica Padman]

But they have long hair.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

This is cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Flowers in between them. They're like maybe on a. There's like four women in that photo or in that painting.

[Monica Padman]

Where's the other two?

[Dax Shepard]

You can see if you look at the faces, top, middle, then to the right, we've got two broads. And then on the bottom, we've got A broad.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This guy was having a hell of an afternoon.

[Monica Padman]

This was fun. Well, I want this one because I like art of women.

[Dax Shepard]

You do? That's your niche.

[Monica Padman]

So I wonder if I can buy it. It was sold for 1 83.8 million, adjusted 248. So I just gotta save up.

[Dax Shepard]

Quarter bill.

[Monica Padman]

Mark Rothko is next. Number six. Violet, green and red. Now, this is pretty much just squares.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Good for him for being so successful with the squares. I do like it, though. It's pleasing.

[Monica Padman]

I do too. I did too.

[Dax Shepard]

Beats the hell out of that Da Vinci Salador moon dump.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. Dump of a painting.

[Dax Shepard]

It isn't worth 500 bucks.

[Monica Padman]

You're me today.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't even trust the providence of that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we don't.

[Dax Shepard]

People don't count me in that group.

[Monica Padman]

Next is a Rembrandt pendant. Portraits of Merton, Suleiman and Upjin Koop.

[Dax Shepard]

All the people in these Rembrandt photos look like they have syphilis. Like their faces are red and weird. Like, look at her nose. As red as hell.

[Monica Padman]

What do you mean?

[Dax Shepard]

You're the least observant person I know. I love this. You can't see her red.

[Monica Padman]

It's not about not. I'm staring at it. I don't see it as bright red like a clown nose.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I do. It's like it's gonna fall off. And then the guy on the left, he's like. He's suspiciously. Rosy cheek, too.

[Monica Padman]

He's pink. But that's very, like. That's very close to real life skin.

[Dax Shepard]

I think all these people were like, they had all kinds of parasites. And I bet people looked terrible back then, don't you think?

[Monica Padman]

Facts.

[Dax Shepard]

You can wash your face or brush your teeth.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but white people's skin is disgusting. No, is pink. Your skin is pink.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't have blotches of blood on my face like this.

[Monica Padman]

She does. What are you talking about?

[Dax Shepard]

Look at her nose.

[Monica Padman]

Her nose is just shaded.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no. She's got, like, a huge sore on her nose. All these people look like they have scabies or.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my. You're like. So is this because you're nervous about Kimmel? You're being.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm lashing out at these people from the past.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, you're right.

[Michael Lewis]

Oh, jeez.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank. I'm impressed you admitted that.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

She has a she. This woman will be dead within the month. No, no.

[Monica Padman]

You're.

[Dax Shepard]

You're dying of something.

[Monica Padman]

First off, you're overreacting.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it that she was blowing her nose so much, she just.

[Monica Padman]

See, this is why you shouldn't blow your nose. She's not. She does have a red. This area of her nose, this nostril is diseased. Is red. Yeah. She blew her nose. She had a cold.

[Dax Shepard]

No, she has a real. Like a bubonic plague. Black death is on her nose.

[Monica Padman]

You know what?

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me. And this chap on the left, he's like 18. He's going to die within the month as well.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. Oh, my. You need to stop.

[Dax Shepard]

These people are long gone.

[Monica Padman]

Monica, you are not being respectful of the dead or the living now. Or the painted.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, don't sheep, if you're in the audience.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

What? That's how humans got syphilis. Sheep.

[Monica Padman]

This sounds like rfk.

[Dax Shepard]

No, look that up.

[Monica Padman]

Are you sure that. Yeah, Rob, can you look it up? I can't type that into my browser. I think the reason I couldn't see it at first. At first, we're looking for people who are listening. We are looking on the big TV screen at these pictures, and I'm not wearing my glasses.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And I think that makes me a better person.

[Dax Shepard]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

I really do.

[Dax Shepard]

Because now, look, we have a history of this.

[Monica Padman]

Then I. Zoom.

[Dax Shepard]

We were watching an interview with somebody one time and tongue was so big. And you thought I was a bad person for observing that their tongue didn't fit in their mouth.

[Monica Padman]

I thought it was a little. I didn't say, like, we're being mean.

[Dax Shepard]

Listen. I didn't say, like, this person was a jerk or anything. It was just like, wow, they really have to wrestle their tongue.

[Monica Padman]

And you made some jokes.

[Dax Shepard]

What were the jokes? I don't remember any jokes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, about. About this person's tongue being very big.

[Dax Shepard]

I was just observing.

[Monica Padman]

You made the whale of it. You think you could ever observe something and not make a joke about it?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not sure.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

There's no scientific evidence to support the claim that syphilis originated from sheep.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you so much for laughing.

[Dax Shepard]

Likely was brought to Europe by Columbus's crew. Columbus. They were sheep fuckers. They don't say that. Yeah, that part's true.

[Monica Padman]

This is how conspiracies start.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, but you're kind of like, this could all seem like pageantry so that we could demonstrate were above that because you just pushed back. Then we looked it up. Then turns out I'm wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not from fucking sheep. Continue on.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Anyway, I just think it's best if none of us wore glasses. Okay. I think that's all for the paintings.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. There's a lot of money out there.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. First cousin once removed. Someone who's related to you as a first cousin but is in a different generation. Specifically, they are the child of your first cousin or your parents first cousin. Think of it as a first cousin who was a generation removed from you.

[Dax Shepard]

So that's a tricky one for me because I have Mandy and Kelly. Who would be. They'd fall under this category.

[Monica Padman]

I thought they were your cousins.

[Dax Shepard]

They are, but they're my dad's cousin's children. But.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Here's what makes it tricky. I'm going to tell you why it's complicated. There's only two bloodlines because my grandpa's brother married my grandma's sister and had Mandy and Kelly.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

So they're like double first cousins, I think is what they called themselves. And so because of that proximity, I'm actually not. I'm like, it's same blood level as would be if it were my brother, you know?

[Monica Padman]

Huh. They were your dad's cousin's kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Your first cousin once removed is supposed to be your dad's cousins.

[Dax Shepard]

But that's interesting, the two bloodlines thing, isn't it?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Who is Jacob Rothschild? Big business guy? Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, was a British hereditary peer, investment banker and member of the Rothschild banking family. Roth. Rothschild is a hard one. I can see you trying to not bring it up over there.

[Dax Shepard]

Rothschild, Rothschild.

[Monica Padman]

Rothschild.

[Dax Shepard]

I was thinking. I wasn't trying to not bring it up. I was just thinking about that They're. The Rothschilds are the center of me. Many, many age old conspiracies. And then I was thinking, oh, this is related to what I was saying earlier because I think when people acquire great wealth, they amass great wealth, all of a sudden they're somehow running the world and they're cheating. So, like, the Rothschilds are the center of all this. That book I read, the Behold the Pal Horse, they're kind of like they're crucial players in the Illuminati, the theory.

[Monica Padman]

Huh. Like they themselves believe it or people believe it about them.

[Dax Shepard]

People think the Rothschilds have run the world order. Roth's child's.

[Monica Padman]

Roth's child.

[Dax Shepard]

See, Johns Hopkins.

[Monica Padman]

It is a Johns Hopkins.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a regular old Johns Hopkins right here.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. The book Careless People is by Sarah Wynn. William, are people from New Orleans called New Orleans? Yes. Assassin assassinations due to J.D. salinger's book.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, here we go.

[Monica Padman]

Many murder cases throughout Its time Mark David Chapman, who had an obsession with the book Murder, John Lennon, also John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Gut Shot was thought to be obsessed with the books as well. There are many other people whose murders or attempted murders are thought to be connected to the Catcher in the Rye, such as Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of jfk and Robert John Bardo, the man who killed Rebecca Schaeffer. It says Holden Caulfield might have some criminal potential as well, having similar traits of killers.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's my favorite book.

[Monica Padman]

Because you're a killer?

[Dax Shepard]

Because I like to kill people. And I do think it captures very well a feeling of not fitting in or feeling different. Different in a way that's gonna prevent you from inter integrating the way everyone else seems to be integrating.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think that that's on the ladder to that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's a slippery slope.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. To incel, like a soft landing is punk rock music. But you could, you could further. You could follow it further.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think a lot of these people in basements who are. What are they called?

[Dax Shepard]

Like incels?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I said incels, but something else.

[Dax Shepard]

Basement dwellers?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Rat people.

[Monica Padman]

Chosen chodes? No, it's Jesus God. Just go on Kimmel already. Get this over with. It's causing thing. Like abstinent. Like not chosen abstinence, but something like that.

[Dax Shepard]

Celibate.

[Monica Padman]

No. What if I became an incel because I started doing research?

[Dax Shepard]

Involuntary celibates.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's it. I think involuntary celibacy.

[Dax Shepard]

To think is just where the term incel comes from.

[Monica Padman]

Just like the long. Oh, that's what it comes from. I never knew that.

[Dax Shepard]

It's an acronym. Ish.

[Monica Padman]

It's actually a portmanteau.

[Dax Shepard]

It's what?

[Monica Padman]

A portmanteau. That's what it means when you take two parts of two words and put them together.

[Dax Shepard]

A Portman two.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You never heard.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Monica Padman]

A Portman too.

[Dax Shepard]

Natalie Portman too. That's like if Natalie Portman had a Fu Manchu, you would call the Natalie Portman too.

[Monica Padman]

Heterosexual men who blame women in society for their lack of romantic success.

[Dax Shepard]

That's not going to get it done, boys.

[Monica Padman]

I wouldn't say it's the best route. No.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Yeah. I mean, could you make yourself any less appealing?

[Monica Padman]

I know. That's the irony of the whole thing.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it's the double edged sword that people can come together on the Internet and find each other in a great way and then they can find each other in a terrible way. Because these dudes there were Always dudes that couldn't get laid in their basement.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

In their mom's basement.

[Monica Padman]

But they were mainly watching tv.

[Michael Lewis]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But they couldn't, like, commiserate and feel bad for themselves and become victims.

[Monica Padman]

Those other guys who were in the basement just watching TV now they see seem hot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Just the lazy guys.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think sex robots will cure this?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if all these incels get a really good sex robot.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

They'd be. Not be so hostile anymore because they.

[Monica Padman]

Still want the power over women. Like, they don't want women to be more powerful than them. And so the sex robot isn't going to fix that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the sex robot won't be more powerful than them. They'll be in charge.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but they'll still be real women in the world.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I just wonder if it's like, if you video game it, they'll be. They'll be distracted.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, they can masturbate these.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like they want to move their hips and hump.

[Monica Padman]

That's.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a primal desire.

[Monica Padman]

They do on the couch.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

They just hump their couch.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm watching a show where the woman just masturbated by humping a big pillow.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just got kind of envious of female and anatomy.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I. I couldn't hump a pillow to completion.

[Monica Padman]

I bet there is something you could put it in and.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, a pillow's everywhere. Like, you check into a hotel room, and if you can just hump a pillow, that's great.

[Monica Padman]

But why do you think that's better than jacking yourself up? Because it's somebody else.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not exactly. You're not providing the friction.

[Monica Padman]

I see.

[Dax Shepard]

There's no, like, dual signals going on. Like, you're trying to ignore your hand.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I'm surprised they haven't invented, like, a mechanical hand.

[Dax Shepard]

They have.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's called a fleshlight.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, a flashlight. Yeah, that's a. I've thought about. Oh, yeah, that's.

[Dax Shepard]

I've thought about it. And you know what has prevented me from ever trying one? The cleanup.

[Monica Padman]

Ew.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want to deal with a machine that I'm humping, you know?

[Monica Padman]

Also, don't you have to hold the flashlight presumably?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think the hand.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, just a mannequin hand.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You. You can, like, connect it to the wall.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, well, I got a suction cup.

[Monica Padman]

No, like, it's plug in, but it's a long cord. So if you're in bed, you don't have to touch it.

[Dax Shepard]

I tried to hump numerous times the toilet paper roll, which was always a. It never worked. But it always called to me because it was a circle.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think I want to know anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. You've got a boundary.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Casey, Sepp's book on Harper Lee, Furious Hours, murder, fraud and the last trial of Harper Lee. Okay, the tiger lady. He mentioned this tiger lady. He said tiger lady or lion lady who got all that plastic surgery. Do you remember her?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it was tiger lady. Jocelyn Wildenstein.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder how much money that costs.

[Monica Padman]

Well, she had a high profile divorce from billionaire artist dealer. Ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Monica Padman]

And businessman Alec Wildenstein. Cat like facial appearance. She. Oh, she passed away in December.

[Dax Shepard]

She went through all nine lives. Wow.

[Monica Padman]

She has two children.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay. Now I'm sorry.

[Monica Padman]

That was a pretty good one. Okay, let's see if it says here. Here. Oh my God. Her yearly telephone bill was $60,000 and food and wine cost 547,000.

[Dax Shepard]

This was in the like settlement. Divorce settlement.

[Monica Padman]

I guess she received 2.5 billion in the divorce settlement.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my Lord.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's outrageous. Yeah, she could own almost all those.

[Monica Padman]

But then she went bankrupt.

[Dax Shepard]

She went bankrupt? How the did she lose 2.5 bill?

[Monica Padman]

She had a lot of.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's not in surgery.

[Monica Padman]

Well, some of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe a mill.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Oh, three apartments in Trump Tower were repossessed in 2020.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God. She ran through two and a half billion. I don't know why I'm surprised. A woman who turned herself into a cat also wasn't great with money. But it still shocks me to lose that much money.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. She was Swiss.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm glad she's Swiss. They need something. You never hear anything bad about the Swiss. They're always been neutral. They've got great chocolate and skiing, great banking. Yeah, we need something on them. And this is a start.

[Monica Padman]

It's true. Oh, okay. Did Ted Olsen argue the most cases in front of the Supreme Court? So there's like a list of. From lone descent of U.S. supreme Court top adjustment advocates. Number one is Lawrence G. Wallace. 157 arguments.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Then there's. Number two is an unknown advocate.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Wants to go by unknown.

[Dax Shepard]

What a match.

[Monica Padman]

Three is Edwin Needler 143. Four. Michael Dreben 106. Five. Paul Clement. I've heard that name. 92. Six. Carter Phillips, 86. Seven. Irwin Griswold 83. I'll just. Ted is 13 on this list.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I. My claim wasn't that he had argued the most, but I thought he was maybe the most victorious. But I bet these. Some of those names are from, like, people in the 1800s that were there every other day back when it was in the basement and it was kind of a joke kangaroo court.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. That's mean. Again.

[Dax Shepard]

I. I was.

[Monica Padman]

Do you ever read like this?

[Dax Shepard]

My. Like you're Stevie Wonder playing the piano? No, he said he passed.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

That really bummed me out. I feel very lucky that I had a passion.

[Monica Padman]

I felt really kind of weird in that moment. You did, Because I knew that was new, like, you were finding out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I always had this fantasy we would interview him someday because he. I really, really enjoyed the dinner I had with him.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So I felt, felt, felt like.

[Dax Shepard]

What'd you feel? Like I should feel stupid. Okay. We've been at this for a while.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't know how you felt.

[Monica Padman]

I will. No, I just felt like, what if you cried? Like, what if you, like, got really needed to take a break when that would have been fine, of course. But.

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Not if I need to take a break. We have a guest. We can't invite guests on. And then I go, I need to take a break.

[Monica Padman]

Well, if you find out that I die in the middle of an interview. I have.

[Michael Lewis]

That'll.

[Dax Shepard]

That'll mean I. I have witnessed you get killed in the middle of the interview. You're never not in or have a heart attack. Okay. Or I will have to take a break. Yeah. To start chest compressions.

[Monica Padman]

Or. What if I. What if my. An email comes in with my AIDS test?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, boy. We're in. You're going to get in hot hot water this episode. Unairable. Cut it.

[Michael Lewis]

Dump it.

[Monica Padman]

All right, that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

Love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

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 the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.