Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Episode Summary: Rebecca Lemov on Brainwashing

Podcast Information:

• Title: Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
• Host: Armchair Umbrella (Dax Shepard)
• Episode: Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
• Release Date: April 9, 2025

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard engages in a profound discussion with Rebecca Lemov, a historian of science at Harvard University. Together with co-host Monica Padman, they delve deep into the intricate and often unsettling topic of brainwashing, exploring its historical roots, methodologies, and modern implications.

Historical Context of Brainwashing

Rebecca Lemov introduces her extensive research on the history of brainwashing, particularly focusing on its emergence during the Korean War. She explains how the term "brainwashing" entered the English lexicon and its initial application in high-profile cases like the Patty Hearst trial.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (00:49): “Brainwashing has existed probably since humans have been humans. But we get kind of aware of it from the Korean War.”

The Korean War and Brainwashing

The conversation highlights the harrowing experiences of American soldiers during the Korean War, specifically detailing the "Tiger Death March." Lemov recounts how thousands of U.S. soldiers were subjected to brutal treatment, leading to severe psychological trauma and instances of coerced confessions.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (25:18): “It was one of the most grueling and demoralizing. A missionary who had passed by them on a train said he couldn't recognize them as American soldiers.”

Mechanisms and Methodologies

Lemov discusses the methodologies used in brainwashing, distinguishing between "hard brainwashing" (intense coercive techniques) and "soft brainwashing" (subtle, pervasive influences). She introduces the concepts of "actor" and "analyst" methodologies in studying brainwashing.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (14:36): “With a topic that's as complex as brainwashing, you do have many definitions and philosophical questions and many directions you could go.”

MKUltra and CIA Involvement

The discussion shifts to the CIA's MKUltra program, which sought to refine and weaponize brainwashing techniques learned from POW experiences. MKUltra's extensive sub-projects explored various methods, including the use of LSD, hypnosis, and other coercive practices aimed at mass behavioral change.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (44:31): “MKUltra was secretly funded in 1953 by the CIA to be a comprehensive program investigating various routes for massive behavioral change.”

Cult Phenomena and Modern Parallels

Lemov connects historical brainwashing techniques to modern-day cult behaviors, examining how charismatic leaders manipulate intelligent individuals. She cites examples like the Manson Family and NXIVM to illustrate how brainwashing tactics have evolved and adapted over time.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (48:13): “He used their intelligence against them. They were very good at convincing themselves and others.”

Case Study: Patty Hearst

The episode revisits the Patty Hearst case, where her kidnapping and subsequent involvement with a terrorist group were framed as brainwashing. Lemov details the psychological manipulation she endured, emphasizing the complexity and ethical dilemmas surrounding such cases.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (15:44): “When Louis Jolyon West takes the stand... the case that Hearst was trying to advance was lost minutes into his testimony.”

Emotional Contagion and Social Media

Transitioning to contemporary issues, Lemov explores the concept of "soft brainwashing" through emotional contagion on social media platforms. She critiques Facebook's 2012 experiment on emotional manipulation, highlighting the ethical concerns of mass emotional influence without user consent.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (61:25): “Facebook published it in a prominent journal, pnas, and that is sort of a self-congratulatory move which they never really repeated because it caused so much controversy.”

Implications for Modern Society

The conversation underscores the pervasive nature of brainwashing techniques in today's digital age. Lemov warns of the subtle yet profound ways in which social media can influence individual emotions and behaviors, drawing parallels to historical brainwashing methods.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (65:06): “Cults are perfect examples of that as well, because you forget that everyone except the leader at the top is both victimized but also victimizing.”

Conclusion and Takeaways

Rebecca Lemov emphasizes the importance of understanding brainwashing to safeguard against its modern manifestations. She advocates for increased awareness and critical thinking to recognize and resist coercive influences in various forms.

• Notable Quote:
  Rebecca Lamov (68:16): “But after a time, the Korean War is known as the forgotten war, but it became synonymous with these brainwashed men.”

Dax Shepard wraps up the episode by praising Lemov's comprehensive research and encouraging listeners to explore her book, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion, for a deeper understanding of the subject.

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Final Thoughts: This episode offers a compelling exploration of brainwashing, blending historical analysis with contemporary insights. Rebecca Lemov's expertise provides a nuanced perspective on how brainwashing has shaped both individual lives and broader societal dynamics. Whether you're unfamiliar with the topic or seeking to expand your knowledge, this episode serves as a valuable resource for understanding the complexities of coercive persuasion and mind control.

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Recommended Listening:

• The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion by Rebecca Lemov
• Couples Therapy (Referenced Discussion on Therapeutic Interventions)

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Connect with Armchair Expert:

• Follow on Wondery: Available on the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
• Support Wondery+: Access early and ad-free episodes by joining Wondery+.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondri 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. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Leslie Stahl.

[Monica Padman]

And we're all brainwashed.

[Dax Shepard]

And we've been brainwashed. Our guest today is Rebecca Lamov. She's a historian of science at Harvard University, and her recent research explores data. I'm trying to change my. The way I say data.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Because now it's wrong. Are you sure?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Every scientist we have says data because it's D, A, T, A. If it was data, it'd be two T's or even D A, D, D, A. Data.

[Monica Padman]

Data.

[Dax Shepard]

Data. Okay. Explores data technology and the history of human and behavioral sciences. She's written a bunch about a database of dreams.

[Monica Padman]

Wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

What part did I do wrong?

[Monica Padman]

Database.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, database.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Sound Right. Database of dreams. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind. World as Laboratory. Her new book, that's what we're here to talk about. It's very tasty. The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion.

[Monica Padman]

This is wild. It's scary and it's good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's very, very scary and very good. And I love the history of where all this stuff was kind of discovered and workshopped.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. It's not. No one's. I mean, obviously some people stumbled in, but it's calc. A lot of this is very calculated.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They learned how to do this at a certain point.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

As you'll hear.

[Dax Shepard]

So please enjoy. Rebecca Lamov. We are supported by Discover. If there's one thing people have learned from the entertainment industry, it's just how easy it is to earn a reputation, even if it doesn't reflect who you are. For example, everybody thinks that Discover is a card that isn't widely accepted, but in reality, it's accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. Yes, 99%. So maybe now you'll think twice before judging a book by its cover. Unless it's a cookbook. In that case, judge away. Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report. Learn more at discover.com credit card we are supported by Mint Mobile. Do you say data or data? Well, at my house, say data. But I'm trying to say data. I know it's correct. That's normal, right?

[Monica Padman]

I say data.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

We had a guest this morning and Dax is wearing that shirt. But it was inside out on accident.

[Dax Shepard]

Which Monica pointed out to me once we left.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I didn't notice it till it was way too far in anyway.

[Dax Shepard]

Really passed the point.

[Monica Padman]

I never thought. Actually, what was really funny is I kept looking at your shirt. One, I was like, I've never seen it. It's new.

[Dax Shepard]

Great novel.

[Monica Padman]

And two, I have a shirt very similar. So I was like, oh, it looks like my Elizabeth. And Jake. I think he's stretching it out.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Took a while.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't recognize it? Yeah. You're back in California?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How often do you come?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Pretty often, partly. My husband's family lives here.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you guys meet in college?

[Rebecca Lamov]

We met afterwards, but in Oakland. I was struggling to write my dissertation and he was working at the cafe where I was struggling meet.

[Monica Padman]

Cut.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It really was. There was a mixtape involved?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And he was heavily tipped during the dotcom bubble, but then it collapsed and then the tips dried up.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Very true. It was a version of Cheers but with coffee where people would just come to gather around and chat with him because he had that kind of air about him. But I was so involved in trying to write that I would sneak by and hide behind the jukebox.

[Monica Padman]

You were playing hard to get.

[Dax Shepard]

You just had to wait for him to approach you.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It was unlikely we would ever meet, actually.

[Dax Shepard]

How did you.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think I made a comment that I liked the music he was playing on the jukebox. Maybe it was through the jukebox. Yeah. Desmond Decker. And then he offered to make me a mixtape.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa, hold on. That's a huge first swing.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Or a tape of this, but it was a handmade tape. And then inside he wrote his number, but then he erased it and hoped that I would call him, although it was non existent.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that. You'd have to look.

[Dax Shepard]

Or take charcoal and tissue paper.

[Monica Padman]

He's playing a game here.

[Dax Shepard]

This is masterful.

[Rebecca Lamov]

He's detective methods. But instead, somehow we ended up meeting. He was gonna give me a photography lesson.

[Dax Shepard]

Another great.

[Monica Padman]

He's trying to throw it, all of it, at you.

[Dax Shepard]

If he. He's like great at foot massage.

[Rebecca Lamov]

You're like, okay, that's actually true.

[Monica Padman]

That's lovely.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I hadn't really thought about how cliche ridden that story is, but.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but that's the nature of love. It is all cliche. And then it feels very special and unique to you. And that's what's so sweet.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, it's really true.

[Dax Shepard]

So that means you guys have been together for 25 years.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So embarrassingly, you were graduating from graduate school the same year I graduated from undergrad. But I imagine I'm older than you, so I think you must have boogied.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Maybe not.

[Dax Shepard]

I was born in 75.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I was born 66.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God, you look incredible.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Oh, thank you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do. Look.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know if you're supposed to comment on professors looks, but I don't either.

[Monica Padman]

But I always like a compliment.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I accept a compliment under any conditions.

[Monica Padman]

There you go. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Where are you from originally?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I was born in New York City, but grew up in Washington D.C. or the outskirts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, and then now you're in Boston. So you've really done the tri state.

[Rebecca Lamov]

And we lived in Seattle. My daughter was born in Seattle. That's where I started teaching. That's where I actually taught my first class on brainwashing.

[Dax Shepard]

And then why Berkeley? Did you fancy yourself an antisocial misfit or just they had the best program?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Well, after I graduated from college at Yale, everyone I knew seemed to be heading across the country. I saw people I knew on i80.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you did?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Other graduates like midway through the country, others fleeing the east coast. But when I tell students today, I make a joke about going to California to find myself. They don't know what I'm talking about.

[Monica Padman]

Oh really?

[Dax Shepard]

Like that reference doesn't mean anything.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It doesn't mean anything.

[Monica Padman]

Oh no, that's probably sad for us.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why our population's declining and everyone else's is on the rise.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Maybe you go to California to take a job in tech.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, not to go surfing and drop acid and get to learn cultural.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Learn yoga. Yeah. So I was already living there, and then I applied to several graduate schools. Well, I got interested in anthropology.

[Dax Shepard]

How could you do that?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Oh, right, we shared. I thought, why not just think of the most interesting thing you could study and the most interesting questions you could ask. Surely it's anthropology. I originally went to study ethnobotany, which I thought of in a kind of Carlos Castaneda way.

[Dax Shepard]

Meaning expand your mind kind of way. Yes.

[Rebecca Lamov]

But then ethnobotany. It turns out the way they were studying at UC Berkeley was highly technical and it involved cognitive networks and taxonomies.

[Dax Shepard]

What's your story of why you were so drawn to brainwashing?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Well, it did happen during graduate school. So I finally ended up studying something like the history of the social sciences because I got interested in questions about why people do the things they do or how free are we really or to what extent people can be controlled. And that's kind of a cultural question. One of the reasons I got drawn to brainwashing is that we became enamored of this kind of French post structural theory. And not that there was anything necessarily wrong with these writers, but just the way it was treated was a bit cultish. People weaving the book and trying to find this ultimate meaning. And I found it transformed the way I was writing. And I became very proud of writing highly complicated things just at the very edge of being understood.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably more often not understood.

[Rebecca Lamov]

And then I would be kind of proud. That must mean it's a very smart.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm not even sure if I.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Get it exactly the thing you're not supposed to say. I proudly showed this to a friend who is a journalist and he said, this doesn't sound like you. And I just remember that moment later I thought, was there an element of something like brainwashing, even though it's very.

[Dax Shepard]

Mild, or you fell under a romantic spell almost.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, it was kind of a spell.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that's the journey of finding your identity in some way is you fall under the spell of these different things and then they stick or they don't.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Filed under youthful enthusiasm or just enthusiasm, which is kind of a good thing. And then the other part of it was I also fell into a kind of bad spell. Addiction and an abusive relationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. You guys share anthropology and addiction. That's a lot of crossover.

[Dax Shepard]

We would have had so much fun.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Indeed.

[Dax Shepard]

If you don. Was your flavor of addiction.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It was hard drugs, opioids. So I kind of fell into this because I found myself in just a impossible emotional situation. And a friend had shown me how to use this. I felt that it alleviated my emotional burden. It was such a relief. And I thought this is just a great invention.

[Dax Shepard]

Especially opiates. They have the illusion of manageability because you can function. It's not like you're inebriated, drunk and you can't do anything.

[Rebecca Lamov]

And then I found someone who was a link to that or could purvey these things. So I fell into a relationship with him and that compounded the whole situation. You know, it started off just weekends and kind of seemed manageable. I wouldn't have used the word functional, but I probably thought that I was functional. But after a couple years I lost friends and I lost touch with a lot of my family and has found myself very isolated.

[Dax Shepard]

So a good two years of that opioid hold. How were you able to quit?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I feel daily fortunate that I was able to because it just becomes so much your reality that you don't think you're going to be to get out or you don't even think you deserve to.

[Dax Shepard]

It's its own brainwashing. Right. It alters your brain in a very significant way and you can actually not even see any longer.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I remember a moment where I thought, could I go out today? Do I actually deserve to see the sun?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

The deserving piece is so heartbreaking.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. But I had one friend I continued to see who's really wonderful and we went out for coffee and she said something like, I just wanted to observe that your boyfriend walks around like he's smarter than you, better looking and funnier, but he's not any of those things. And he acts like he has his foot on your neck all the time. And that was very shocking to me.

[Monica Padman]

Did you feel like that in the relationship, like this person's so much better than me?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, I felt he was very accomplished. And also I was kind of scared of him.

[Dax Shepard]

Did he feel familiar?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Probably.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Or he felt aspirational and also kind of scary. I felt like he could tell me truths about myself that I always needed to know. I mean, there are ways that these dark relationships have a cult like element to them. And when I went to travel, the spell would break. This also happened and it would just be like it lift.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so cult like these really, really controlling relationships and even the strategies of separating you from your friends and all your support network. And then, yeah, I was even thinking, did you watch couples therapy by chance.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I've watched a bit of it and I really like it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's incredible. And then this one woman, and I won't use names because I don't want to get sued, but one woman is with a bonafide narcissist, and when she's explaining what they're going through to Orna, you can see that Orna's presence anchors her back into reality in a way that she's hearing what she's saying almost with an entirely and realizing, oh, yeah, this motherfucker's crazy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you can remove yourself from being inside of it for a second when there's someone there who's just a third party. I mean, that's why therapy is so effective.

[Dax Shepard]

You have to consider how this person's hearing this story.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. Just being there to either witness it or give you some sort of feedback can be this miraculous thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Well, first of all, you're a professor of the history of science, which again, that's a discipline made up by Harvard.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, exactly. It first existed at Harvard.

[Dax Shepard]

I wasn't even aware that that was a discip. But as I read the description, I'm like, oh, I love that. I think I would be very interested.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think anyone who studies or is interested in the kind of questions anthropology asks would like history of science, too, because it kind of asks similar questions and it's infinitely interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

And am I right that a lot of the question is like, how do we know what we know and how do we trust what we know, in a sense? Is that a common exploration in that?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. Also, how does science gain its authority? What is the nature of scientific truth? I mean, it really asks big questions. And then, of course, as with any field, people get very specialized. But it's all kinds of interesting sub questions because we have history of medicine, and I do history of behavioral sciences, which is more unusual.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so let's start with. Well, before we start there, I do want to ask two hours a day of meditation.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Well, at least two hours.

[Dax Shepard]

At least two hours.

[Monica Padman]

Were you meditating when we came in?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I was.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I felt disturbing.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It's just like a little moment.

[Monica Padman]

That's great.

[Dax Shepard]

I do that before I have to go on stage or anything like that.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I know. I was thinking I could review my notes a little part of you wants to be like, what is in my book.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It's much better time used to just observe your sensations. So a great gift that came after this whole dark episode was learning to meditate and just having that practice. And I'VE kept it up two hours a day. I've never missed a day since 2000, except the three days my daughter was being born. The three days 2002, Yaluka was busy laboring.

[Dax Shepard]

Will you do an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Generally, yeah. I do the same kind that Yuval Noah Harari does. Just because I saw that he was on your show. I just love him knowing what it was like not having that practice. I just never don't want to. And I get to choose to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And your family knows not to.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Well, when my daughter was little, I mean, I adapted to my life circumstances. So for 10 years, I would hold her hand while she was falling asleep. And I would be meditating or holding her when she was a baby. But that would be the nighttime one. Just to be flexible about it. Cause life doesn't always give you an hour.

[Dax Shepard]

When brainwashing's been studied in the past, I guess you kind of lay out two methodologies, the analyst and the actor. Can you break that down for us?

[Rebecca Lamov]

These are methods from the history of science that I borrowed to apply to brainwashing. So with a topic that's as complex as brainwashing, you do have many definitions and philosophical questions and many directions you could go. You can use the actors category, which really means just look at how people were using the word, how your actors were using it. And if your actors are scientific figures, then also look at how they're using it, even though they're also using it to analyze. So it's kind of combination.

[Monica Padman]

Get an example.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. So one of the main figures in my book is this psychiatrist named Louis Jolyon west, whose papers I've been visiting for 16 years now. So I feel like I kind of know him. He was one of the most prominent brainwashing experts. And he said many different things about brainwashing. One pivotal moment is he was called to the stand at the Patty Hearst trial, which was framed as a brainwashing trial.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the defense, right, Or Stockholm Center. Is that the first time we heard that?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. She never embraced that term and the legal team never used it. But people have applied that brainwashing was a term that her lawyer did try to use in her defense. And they brought forward the most prominent experts in the world to make the case that she had not been responsible for her actions.

[Dax Shepard]

And for people who don't know, she was kidnapped. She lived with this far left wing terrorist group for a while. They ended up robbing a bank. And she participated in the robbery.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It's also relevant that she was kidnapped from her apartment and held in a closet for about 70 days.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Lamov]

And blindfolded and subjected to the reading of malice tracks and raped and horrors beyond what you could. Ungrounded, as you would say she was unground. So these experts from the Korean War who had been military experts were called to examine her and they saw parallels to what had happened. But anyway, so the moment when Louis Jolly and West takes the stand, the prosecutor asks him, what do you mean by brainwashing? And he says, well, actually, it's not a very scientific term, but what I really mean is. And he kind of starts to ramble on a little bit and say it's coercive persuasion. But the judge cuts him off and says, could you get to the point, Dr. West? At that moment, it seems like the case that Hearst was trying to advance was lost minutes into his testimony because he was saying it doesn't have medical or scientific authority. But just methodologically looking at that moment and seeing how the term appeared in public and it was rejected by the public as something that made sense. So it allows me to follow these threads through the book. And it gave me some organizing principles.

[Dax Shepard]

But the actor analysts would be. If I'm getting this right, anyone that's studying something else, they might be confident in just their observations without ever really asking what. What the personal experience and point of view of the person being studied is. And incorporating that aspect.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, that's a good way to put it too. So many people are tempted to stick to an analyst point of view or look at how to analyze a phenomenon that's very complicated, but it's almost giving credence to the actors themselves and how they interacted, even with ideas.

[Dax Shepard]

Even the Jonathan Haidt moral dumbfounding things. They're gonna be as provocative as possible. When you learn cultural relativism in anthropology, the one that they're gonna hit you with every time is infanticide among Inuits. Right. That they had some practice of killing firstborn daughters. And so if you were to only just observe this practice and make a conclusion, you would never have learned from the actor. Well, a boy has to hunt for us to feed us as we get old. So first we have to have that. When that's secured, we can now afford like, you would never have learned even what the rationale behind it all was. I think it's a very generous and respectful thing to assume the person you're studying has a total rhyme and reason for what they're doing, that they're not doing something completely. Completely void of any logic.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Exactly. And that's interesting in itself.

[Dax Shepard]

So this one will be even harder to explain. But you say the other superpower is second order observer.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I borrowed it from this sociologist named Nicholas Luhmann. But what I mean by that is the idea of observing your observer. So after you've gone in and tried to see from the point of view of people involved, even if they're experts, they're also your actors, then you pull back and try to observe the system itself.

[Dax Shepard]

Is this a good example? I always think of the Stanford prison experience. Initially, they think they're studying the students who have gotten too much authority and abuse it quickly and abuse these people. But then if you pull back further, you have to acknowledge that the constructor of the actual experiment is himself, Philip Zimbardo. Nice.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Zimbardo, Nice. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

This has been a.

[Monica Padman]

This has been a runner of us trying to remember.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, getting it wrong most often. And then finally it's cemented.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Actually, I think there might be more than a second order observer. But you can keep pulling back the frame as you're saying that he himself.

[Dax Shepard]

Zimbardo, was a victim of the exact same. He was observing and trying to understand. Cause he himself had elevated his authority and detachment from everything.

[Rebecca Lamov]

This makes my husband very upset, actually, because he feels that Zimbardo should not have taken credit for this brilliant experiment and profited off it when he basically became part of the experiment. But he does say that he acknowledges it. He acknowledges it, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Then everyone becomes part of it. If you are the analyst, you also are entering in, and then where do you break off? Or we're all just a part of everything.

[Dax Shepard]

There's also a law of physics, which is if you observe light, depending on how you observe it, it's either a particle or it's a wave. A wave. Thank you. And that can change depending on the observation of it. So certainly brainwashing has existed probably since humans have been humans. But we get kind of aware of it from the Korean War. Is that where we start really trying to study it and understand it?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, that's when it actually has a moment when it enters the English language. Edward Hunter, who was an operative and journalist who worked for the OSS in China in the 1930s, started collecting a lot of examples of propaganda and observing what he thought was this new weapon that Communists had as they rose to.

[Dax Shepard]

Power at that time. Would we not say it would be propaganda?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Exactly. There is a distinction. He had that background as an expert in Propaganda. But he starts to talk about brainwashing right before the Korean War, around the time that this famous incident was that Cardinal Minzenti, who was a Polish high level priest and religious hero and just national treasurer, he was arrested in 1948. He disappeared for 28 days and nobody knew what happened to him, but he was taken by the secret police of Hungary. And then he came back and he looked like a shadow of himself, like a gray puppet. And he was paraded before the newsreel cameras and he confessed to these outrageous crimes that he couldn't even have possibly committed. Like he had stolen religious artifacts and he said he had taken money from the church. And even though he'd left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say when I come back. Yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he was a trophy for these new communist governments. Like an announcement that we can do this. And he did return to himself within a couple years. And he said, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person.

[Dax Shepard]

And you say, yeah, becoming someone else was alarming enough, but the nightmarish part was that you had no ability to recognize that this had happened. So even scarier than becoming different is you wouldn't have even noticed it.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, that first part. Without knowing. So within 28 days, fairly fast. And then he also revealed what had happened to him, although he didn't have full memory of it.

[Dax Shepard]

And if you think of your stereotype of someone susceptible to this tiny bit of thing, it's not a leader in the church who's got charisma and all these people skills and a great education and all these other tropes we think would inoculate you from this.

[Rebecca Lamov]

A hero to his people. And he knew what was coming. He knew that there was a possible threat to himself. So he could have been prepared, or he probably did try to prepare. But one interesting thing about it, he said he thinks he was drugged and he was pushed around. He was not a young man and he was sleep deprived. But one of the things that struck me was that he recalled that he was stripped of his clerical robes and he was made to wear a clown costume and he kind of had to crawl. And so there are these status based humiliations.

[Dax Shepard]

Also a quite literal stripping of someone's identity.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. Well, it's often the case that removal even of someone's name is very effective. Like in the Stanford prison experiments, one of the first things they do is the guards only refer to the prisoners as numbers. It's very effective.

[Dax Shepard]

How much were people doing brainwashing things that they didn't even know they were doing? So like a long standing tradition is to shave all of the cadets heads. That's part of it. You're actually stealing their identity from them. How calculated was it? Or some of these things just naturally happened.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think it's often not calculated, which is kind of surprising because it follows a seemingly ironclad series of steps. But people seem to invent it spontaneously in some cases, like in the case of Patty Hearst. We were just talking about the guy who was in charge of. Of her abduction and re education. He kept asking her, you're not brainwashed, are you? Cause he wanted to believe that she was truly converted to his cause. That it wasn't that she had been, you know, not allowed to go to the bathroom and she had been raped. For him, it had to be real. He was also, I guess, in it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, right, definitely.

[Rebecca Lamov]

And you can see that with Cardinal Mincenti. I mean there was a Soviet method that was borrowed by the Hungarian police. And there's a long history of what they say in Pulp Fiction. Getting medieval on your like, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are ways to unmake someone that seemed to be part of the human repertoire. But what was different maybe in the middle of the 20th century is that psychiatrists and sociologists and experts would choreograph it sometimes. And then in the US they actually responded to this crisis by out develop their opponent. Yeah, weaponize it.

[Dax Shepard]

So I guess I didn't know a lot of this, which is shameful. But you do a great job of painting a picture of what the Korean War was, which was initially, it was called a police action. These young kids went. One of the main characters in your book is a year old boy who's in 11th grade and he signs up before his senior year and he goes over there thinking he's a part of a police mission. They arrive, they are using all the equipment from World War II. They don't have any new guns, new tanks, new anything. Things are breaking, helicopters are falling apart. The enemy has all new Russian stuff because they're backed by Russia by proxy of China. So they're getting slaughtered and outgunned. And their full sense of what an American is at that point is starting to really fracture. Like we're supposed to be indomitable, we're supposed to have the highest tech, everything. And all these young guys end up as prisoners of war. Tell us about the tiger march. That was particularly grueling.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Almost the definition of Brutal. So the Tiger Death March, thousands of US Soldiers, when they were captured, they were marched north and stayed overnight in these kind of series of impromptu camps, sometimes in old mines and sometimes in ramshackle buildings. It was under the oversight of a commander nicknamed Tiger. And sometimes when they walked along these mountain roads, he would just push. Soldiers is off.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Who are all completely malnourished. They have zero energy. They're already physically quite diminished. They don't have the right gear. It's freezing.

[Rebecca Lamov]

And they were joined by some civilians on this march because there were monks and nuns and missionaries who were being captured in Korea, who had been serving in churches, seen as enemies. So they were being marched too. So during this march, soldiers, even though they were emaciated, sometimes they'd lost half their body weight. They would try to help one of their compatriots or a civilian. There was a nun named Mother Beatrix, I think, and she was in her 80s, and she was struggling, of course. And the North Korean soldiers said, just leave her. We'll take her in the cart. And then they heard gunshots and never saw her again. Other times, soldiers would just drop dead along the road because they couldn't take another step. So it was one of the most grueling and demoralizing. A missionary who had passed by them on a train said he couldn't recognize them as American soldiers.

[Dax Shepard]

And when they made it after these long marches and they got in these camps, then the camps were often even more. More brutal. They would have thought, once the walking was done. Long story short, it's all really, really heartbreaking and worth learning about. But at the end of all this, there are 21 of these guys who go through this process, who choose to stay in China and take on Korean wives, have children. They do get completely converted to some degree. And there's a process by which they do it. And I wonder. We get into now, Ma Dong, he is the leader of China, and he has something called the Method or Re Education or Thought Reform. And it has a very predictable and formatted approach, which is discussion, criticism, and unity. So take us from these guys who are in these camps, as you would say, ungrounding. I think it's worthwhile to explain what ungrounded is.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I like to think of it as a series of six excessive shocks to the point of disorientation or sometimes utter demoralization. So, again, your expectations are not met, to say the least. And the soldiers have been told you'll be home by Thanksgiving, and instead they're being marched North. They're in the camps. Men would die in the camps. Initially, when the North Koreans were running them before the Chinese took over. They would die just by falling in the latrine and not having the strength to get out, which was a pit. And then seeing your compatriots die that way. Sometimes they were also bombed by the us, Sometimes napalm by their own. So it was destabilizing a sense of faith in one's own nation. But sometimes they would also just die overnight. They were living with corpses. So this prepares the way for a more targeted ideological remolding, which is what happened. And then, interestingly enough, I learned this at a conference a few years ago by this scholar named Amanda Smith, who specializes in Chinese history, that people who know about this consistently underestimate the extent to which the PoWs were subjected. It was kind of an experiment that Mao was running. He wanted to see if the method he used on Chinese people would also work on American GIs and officers.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, because the method was designed to treat peasants one way and landowners and landlords another way. It was a very rigid prescription. And his conclusion was, well, these infantrymen are the peasants. Right. They're not the landowners. The generals are the landowners. So they would receive those two different approaches.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

But it's really interesting, the discussion part, this kind of re education or the method would start with urging these people over and over again for a very, very long time to journal their life story. And in some fascinating way, none of these people had experienced therapy prior to this. This wasn't a thing people did. So this is like a very unique experience and comforting versus what they had just experienced. Because when you're journaling, you get to sit next to a stove. So there's these little incentives along the way. And through the telling of your story over and over and over again, you then get into a zone of criticism. And this is where you have to defend your nation's ethics. How they treat black people, that was a big issue they would remind everyone of. And they're now putting you in a position to have to defend your story or your identity or your sense of reality. And then lastly is unity. And now they're going to explain this other way of thinking that is so much more beneficial and so much more collaborative and helpful.

[Rebecca Lamov]

One example, this isn't from the camps themselves, but from a reeducation center that a Western doctor was subject subjected to. So he was seen as more elite. So I think it was more brutal in a way. He was chained and brutally interrogated. But One thing as he slept at night, if he moved around because he was in a small cell with 10 to 12 people, they called it capitalist expansion. He had to justify just sleeping or moving.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Rebecca Lamov]

And they also reinterpret because they would take your own words, your own journal. 91% of the troops, hundreds of U.S. troops, some UN troops, were given these books and they were actually made to answer questions about their family life and their relationship at school.

[Dax Shepard]

What's interesting about that, and I think why, as we see it, come up in modern society in a far more innocuous way, often people haven't ever taken the time to try to explain their worldview. Probably nobody really has taken the time to write out what their worldview is, what the ethics are of the country they are loyal to. So in doing that, it's a very clever way to establish a little anxiety in your own understanding of why and what you do. You know, it's probably the first time you've questioned any of this.

[Rebecca Lamov]

The guy you were just mentioning, Morris Wilts, who enlisted at 17, he said we were never taught a word in high school about our system or about communism. He said it would have been helpful. We should have been taught just so we would know what we were fighting and also how to defend our own system. But he felt really unequipped.

[Dax Shepard]

So now's a good time to also introduce because there's two waves, right? There's the small wave and the big wave of men starting to return. The first wave is like 139 guys and then over time it's 3600 or something massive like that. And people are coming back with varying levels of vacancy and being visibly disturbed. Then you have the people who stayed. And now is where we should learn our understanding of trauma doesn't exist to the point where the word trauma is almost not even a word. In the 50s right. So as they're seeing all this bizarre behavior, everyone stateside is assuming this is brainwashing, not, oh, this is a traumatic response to this horrendously traumatic experience.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. The trauma was invisible, partly because people didn't think the way we do. Of course, today we complain that we've gone too far the other direction, perhaps, that we see it everywhere at every moment. Like, if your latte order didn't turn out right, then I was traumatized.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Lamov]

But a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist, he was trained in the 60s, and he said, you just didn't expect to see it. You might see one or two cases in your lifetime, but you would also think if there were one or two cases, these men would have seemed to be qualified. But I did not find them ever described as traumatized. And I think there are a number of political and social reasons why. Although there's one mentioned by Robert J. Lifton, not diagnosing them as traumatized, but just mentioning their experience was traumatic. But other than that, in the hundreds of pages, there's no mention of this. And I think it's partly one thing I call the volleyball problem, which is that even though the men had been starved to the point of nutritional deficiency and often death, by the time the Chinese took over the camps, which is sometimes a year later, they were eating better and they were able to gain back weight. And the Chinese ran this POW Olympics, which they kind of used as a PR opportunity. And they showed pictures of the men in uniforms having fun. Having fun doing. Doing gymnastics, rope pulling.

[Dax Shepard]

Volleyball.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah. So that's why I call it the volleyball problem, because it looks like it's okay. It was also just propaganda for the international courts. I think this is one of the profound parts of it, is because it didn't have marks, their suffering didn't show. The men themselves despaired that anyone would ever understand.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, maybe the amputees that came back, which there were, they would have maybe been like, oh, they went through some shit, but the rest of the guys played volleyball.

[Monica Padman]

You would have just been like, that's war. Not this psychological element. You can't see that.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Rebecca Lamov]

But after a time, the Korean War is known as the forgotten war, but it became synonymous with these brainwashed men. They were seen as either cowards or.

[Dax Shepard]

Freaks, weak that they had succumbed to this propaganda easily. And also, it's worth pointing out that in the entire Korean War, there was only a single psychologist on the ground at the time. And then when they return, though now dozens of psychiatrists and psychologists are Deployed to now study these guys. And so what do they find? Because now this sets us in motion on our own program.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It does. It very much has waves of effects. The only time they compare them with veterans of other wars or POWs from other wars is initially they think that maybe it's something like what happened in World War II, which was a condition called rice brain, which involved men drinking too much and unable to control their behavior. We probably call it PTSD today. They were said never to recover. There was one article that initially, right after the men came back, compared them to that, but subsequently was more framed as something unique and knew that was happening. And it felt into this narrative that the communists had a weapon that had never before been seen in history. And the level of collaboration or indoctrination among American troops was said to be a national emergency. And the different experts found different things, used different methods. Sometimes they gave them the Rorschach test, they gave them some sort of psychoanalysis sometimes, but mostly not for healing, but more to try to understand what had happened to them and whether this could be distilled into a method that could either be protected against or earned and used.

[Dax Shepard]

Perhaps used, defended against or deployed on your enemies. Yes. So, sir, comes out of this survival, evasion, resistance, escape.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Exactly. So there were survival schools already used to prepare troops for deployment. They would be sent off to the wilderness and had to survive for three days with limited amount of equipment. But they added a resistance component. So it was called seer. Survival, evasion, resistance, Escape. This was developed directly out of the Korean War by Louis Jolly and West and others. And the resistance was really to create a mock POW camp stocked by Eastern European.

[Dax Shepard]

There were stand ins for the Koreans.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Well, stand ins for just who might be capturing you in the future. Men would be interrogated there and brutalized and waterboarded in the training. In the training, yeah. It often involved really being punched until you fell down to the ground. And then when you struggle to stand up, being kicked or punched again over time. And so the person would lose track of the fact that their antagonist torturing them was actually a fellow member of the military. But they would fall under this disorienting condition. They would then maybe be locked in a Syrian box, which meant this tiny box sometimes in the sun, where you couldn't move your limbs, and they would start to lose their minds.

[Monica Padman]

So we were doing this to our own people to get them ready for this. How is that going to do anything if you're just doing the exact same thing?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's my Question. So I wonder how effective it was. The men who went to Vietnam, had they received this training?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, 30,000 men initially, right after, in 1956, went through this training to see if it was working. So it was regularized and routinized and then applied to any service member who was in danger of being captured. They also instilled a uniform code of conduct which mandated that you couldn't say anything more than name, rank and serial number, which was supposed to address the brainwashing problem. So during Vietnam, brainwashing didn't really arise again, but I don't necessarily think it was being attempted either.

[Dax Shepard]

I was gonna say, yeah, how do we know if that was a failed attempt by the Vietnamese or the great training the GIs received?

[Rebecca Lamov]

There was classic torture that John McCain or Admiral Stockdale experienced. It had different purpose. Yeah, they weren't that interested in ideological remolding or converting during Vietnam. But nonetheless, unless the training continued and they were finding that troops themselves were damaged, that it was so brutal.

[Dax Shepard]

Even if it's pretend.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's not pretend if you're actually going real stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Pretend broken ribs.

[Rebecca Lamov]

So they brought in the same experts to modify the training so that it wasn't actually crippling the men. Nonetheless, it was still very brutal. And even today there are legends about it. And if you get in the company of veterans, they'll often tell you their serious stories, although technically they're not really supposed to talk about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's also really easy to underestimate just how young all these people are.

[Monica Padman]

They're frontal lobe.

[Dax Shepard]

Their identity isn't even solidified yet.

[Monica Padman]

I think people who think they could never be brainwashed could definitely be brainwashed. Maybe the most acceptable.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I agree with you that 100% certainty is probably a sign. You could even use the Milgram experiments as another example of that.

[Monica Padman]

You talk about him too. Shocks. We've learned some stuff over the years here.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It probably comes up sometimes in interviews.

[Dax Shepard]

There's like five studies. We give them marshmallow delay, grammar.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Classic touchstones.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they're ubiquitous.

[Rebecca Lamov]

They're so good because they're almost parables of our time.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, they're our bible in a sense.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I teach a whole class on them because the deeper you go in them, historically they're very interesting. But with Milgram, as people watch the film, they often become convinced one way or the other. It's rare for someone to become convinced that they are sure. They would have given shocks. I've heard of one person saying that, which I think is admirably. Honest.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Yeah, I agree.

[Rebecca Lamov]

She's. But most students, I can see them wrestling. And people don't always talk about what they think. But when you see someone who's 100% certain and even mocking those who gave shocks or who succumbed to this kind of intensive situation, it shows a kind of lack of imagination, potentially, of what it might be like. And also who's being tortured in this experiment. It's kind of invisible to us.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

If you told Monica she could get an A if she zapped people, she would have done it.

[Monica Padman]

That's mean. That's not even about brainwashing. That's just like trying to get ahead.

[Dax Shepard]

No, Milgram, with the use of. You get an A if you shock those people.

[Rebecca Lamov]

So mean.

[Dax Shepard]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

No, I have a lot of integrity. I know you do. But I definitely think I could have ended up doing that with the thought that I guess it's fine. I mean, I could just see it. And we had somebody on, I thought was so interesting who talked about this experiment, but also talked about the rookie cops in the George Floyd situation. And her whole take was, everyone watches that and thinks, how come they didn't do anything? This is crazy. And she's like, most people in that position would not do anything. And to walk around with this moral high ground when you've never been in any of these positions is crazy to me. I'm always like, yeah, I think I probably wouldn't have done anything.

[Rebecca Lamov]

You just don't know. And I think living your life so that should that occasion arise, you would know how to act.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think there's something really. I mean, this is a weird way of looking at it, but with you, with addiction and probably with you, and I've some things that I've done that I am shocked I did, my identity would not have lined up with certain actions. And so if you have experienced that, I think it's easier to say, like, you know, we all sometimes do things we do.

[Dax Shepard]

Who knows what I'm capable of?

[Monica Padman]

Who knows what anyone is.

[Rebecca Lamov]

People like Thich Nhat Hanh write about. It's easy to be sympathetic of the victim, but to understand the capacity we all have. I was thinking about the fascination with scams we have, which is somewhat related to how people respond. Respond to brainwashing or cults. It's very reassuring to say, that's so absurd. If anyone details a scam that someone fell for. I even do this too, where you think, at this point, I never would have believed they were an FBI. There's something Wrong with them, you try to identify that moment where you wouldn't have, or it's not you, just not me.

[Dax Shepard]

So that you're not scared.

[Rebecca Lamov]

You can turn it around and make it reassuring. But actually these things are profoundly destabilizing because we're all subject to them.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So how did MK Ultra and the CIA take what they had learned from these Korean POWs and improve them as or perfect them?

[Rebecca Lamov]

So MK Ultra was secretly funded in 1953 by the CIA to be a comprehensive program investigating various routes for massive behavioral change. Or to go back to Cardinal Menzenti. The idea could you make someone into another person and perhaps even like a perfect assassin or just an operative or could it be used for interrogation purposes or things like that? So really they created zones of free investigation clandestinely and they funded them through conduits or cutouts. And there were about 150 sub projects.

[Dax Shepard]

150?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think around 150. Some of them quite small. Some of them involving dolphins, potential dolphin assassins.

[Dax Shepard]

Some fell in love with those dolphins. We talked a lot about them, but.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Then a lot of them involving LSD or hypnosis or the ability to create dissociative states and unground systematically subjects in different ways so that they could be transformed. And so they really took the brainwashing episode and created a scientific and military mandate. A lot of what the social sciences were interested in was creating a better running society in which people would assume their roles without being asked. So they would internalize codes and normalize routines.

[Monica Padman]

Behave.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, kind of behave. Because I guess you could really say that too much democracy was seen as concerning because surely each person couldn't just go about living as they wanted. So there were ways that behaviorism and learning theory that was also flourishing during this time.

[Dax Shepard]

Do we have any smoking gun from the very top with a president's awareness going like, this is the goal. We're going to start subliminally doing this, or we're going to try to start on a huge grand scale doing this.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Dean Acheson, actually the Secretary of State under Truman. Yeah. He said in the United States we were willing to let the rest of the world live as they want to live, as long as they believe as we do. There's a sense that if you could have a kind of inner conformity, people could go about their business. I don't know that he intended it exactly as I'm interpreting it, but I would say that this describes the project that you also see among many behavioral scientists, which was seen in rats Running through mazes in elaborate Skinnerian systems where people are just responding to these kind of conditioning messages in order to take on certain roles, actually, that it was for the common good because people don't actually know what they want, so might as well.

[Dax Shepard]

We have a rise of cults as well. Is it like the heyday, the 70s? When does the cult phenomena start ticking up?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think it picks up in the late 60s.

[Dax Shepard]

Manson's late 60s, and he overlaps or.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Intersects with MK Ultra.

[Dax Shepard]

He was a participant.

[Monica Padman]

That's a theory.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I've been hot on the trail of this, and you may know about the book chaos, by Tom O'Neill, where he investigates this as well. But in the Louis Jolly Ann west papers, where I just was yesterday, I found more evidence that west, who was One of the CIA's main behavioral experts who went back to the Korean War, he had investigated the pilots, the soldiers. He'd done many other things. But he ran a project in Haight Ashbury that was affiliated with the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. And he was calling it the Amphetamine Research Project. And he had several people working under him, some of whom went to do ethnographic fieldwork with the Manson family in Mendocino. And the Amphetamine Research Project was run by Robert, who was Charles Manson's parole officer, in addition to being a psychologist. And Roger Smith got a grant with Louis Joanne West. So you can bring them very close together. This was before the Manson family committed the crimes for which they're known.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess my question is, do these cult leaders stumble upon this stuff intuitively, or was there at some point a guidebook for people?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think mostly intuitively, there's a kind of guidebook that they intuitively play out, is my sense. Often it comes out of these extreme hierarchical power relationships that they cultivate the effects of charisma. Also, just the cycles of blissful release that their followers get in cults creates this kind of dynamic where the cult leader is almost jealous of his followers, and then it leads to a kind.

[Dax Shepard]

Of abuse, some kind of sadism.

[Rebecca Lamov]

There's all sorts of dynamics that emerge in cults. And in the late 60s, before the Manson murders, cults are still kind of seen as intriguing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, what's the difference between an ashram and a cult? People are starting to live communally as the love movements happening.

[Rebecca Lamov]

There are all kinds of love movements. There are many Back to the Land, which I have always found fascinating. Of course, the definition of a group as a cult is not always ironclad. In some cases, it is very damaging for one person, but could be briefly healthy or liberatory for someone else. So it's tricky.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm obsessed with cult docs. I think I've watched every single one.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone is.

[Dax Shepard]

And what's undeniable is there's a huge period of bliss, of improvement, of growth, of community, of connection. You look at the Rajneeshis, if they don't go to war with their neighbors, I don't know that the thing ever goes sideways. It's like they're all pretty happy, but now they need to outvote the town. So they gotta bring in homeless people and then they lose control of that. Now they're poisoning a salad bar in town. You know, before this dispute happened, they're all kind of dancing and moaning and yelling.

[Rebecca Lamov]

If I were gonna write a review of Wild Wild Country, I would say that they selectively framed it because the cavorting wild dances and the realization sexual splendor. My husband grew up in the Bay Area around the. And he's like, they're not showing the automatic weapons they were all carrying that whole time. They were heavily into gun trafficking and drugs. And the documentary also takes the focus off of Osho, as if he was kind of blissfully going along and his second in command was poisoning the salad bars.

[Dax Shepard]

MAN ON Sheila, she's like my biggest crush ever.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

God, what a powerhouse. Sent like a 23 year old girl from India to the US and said, build me a city. And she did. What a woman.

[Monica Padman]

Think about what she could have done if she did, if she were for MK Ultra.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I kind of bought that because of my addiction background. So Osha, as we learned, he's a benzo addict. He's like on a ton of Valium. I did buy into like, Yeah, I bet he was checked out and fucking occasionally. But there's no way he would have bothered himself with any of the.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, I suppose that's true. But he still was heavily involved in the manipulative practices.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, he had all these things.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he did have this special access that no one had without him.

[Rebecca Lamov]

He also had a lot of needs for all the Rolls Royces.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So incongruous, the whole flashy nature of him.

[Monica Padman]

It's always so wild. The big party conversation, people is like, would you be susceptible to a cult? But are we all susceptible to starting cults? Is everyone equally? Like, maybe you give someone enough power and we can all be.

[Dax Shepard]

She's subtweeting me right now.

[Monica Padman]

No, I'm asking a real question.

[Rebecca Lamov]

That's an interesting twist on the question, not would you join a cult, but might you start a cult?

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Rebecca Lamov]

You can see people get carried away by a little bit of power. I used to say that with teaching assistants sometimes in graduate school, give them a little bit of power. Suddenly they're patrolling the classroom, causing they're guards. But not everyone did that in the Stanford prison experiments. A couple people show a real aptitude for it, like the John Wayne character in that one. So it's a complex condition that we're all involved in.

[Dax Shepard]

So can you tell us the steps of how it works in a cult? You enter, hey, my name's Dax. And then I wake up and I'm clearly a devotee of a cult. What things have to happen if you're.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Talking about an abusive cult? Often there has to be a condition where you encounter a recruitment that, that you may not know is a recruitment or you may be misinformed about the nature of the group. Sometimes it's just you were standing on one street corner, not another. You were waiting for one bus where they happen to be sending people out. But you're maybe misinformed. You attend a meeting so you're drawn in to some degree. You are exposed to group activities. You're probably love bombed. It can happen extremely quickly and I think many people are surprised.

[Dax Shepard]

Would it be fair to say they would be already over indexing and being ungrounded? That seems consistent. When I look at the people who joined NXIVM or the people who joined all these groups, they already felt a little untethered or unmoored and they were in search already of something.

[Rebecca Lamov]

I think we underestimate how incredibly socially attuned we all are. When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I, on one of the first days of school, we saw a flyer that said free vegetarian dinner. And we were very excited. We presented ourselves there, there was indeed a free dinner. And then afterwards these members of the group said, could you just sign this piece of paper and just say it's just pro forma, but you would be the vice president of our group. And we were two days into school and we signed it. And then the next day the dean of the college called us and said, did you really mean to do this? And we were like, no, we don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Even know what it means. What does it mean?

[Rebecca Lamov]

I didn't even know what it meant.

[Dax Shepard]

What did it mean?

[Rebecca Lamov]

It meant that they had the right to be on campus. They just wanted a toeholding campus. It was Christian, maybe partners, but they didn't really tell us what they were.

[Monica Padman]

They are very vegetarian so often.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the vegetarian, it feels so friendly.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Be careful of vegetarians.

[Dax Shepard]

You get invited to like a barbecue. You're like, there might be some fights, but you hear free vegetarian food and you just think, yeah, this is going to be some peaceful.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Well, there's many things that work quite well, especially for a seeker. Most people are seekers to some degree. An invitation to an environmental group or something that seems very benign or altruistic, and especially if it's misrepresented, just getting the person there, exposing them to these intense conversations, not letting them be alone, sometimes not letting them even go to the bathroom alone if they'll agree.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I was thinking of the Maoist stuff. The method that seems really present in a lot of these cult documentaries I've watched is like you have food restriction. Quite often you have the narrative part where you're telling your own story. There's kind of a therapy aspect, the discussion where you're implored to talk about your childhood and explore that. It's like you can see that it has the same arc almost as the Maui.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It really does. And that's why the experts who had studied the POWs recognize this. There's a revelation of the self. There's also exposure to texts and lectures and discussions. Oh, there's often sleep deprivation too. A famous cult deprogrammer from the 70s, Ted Patrick, his son at 14, was almost lured onto this school bus that was commandeered by the Children of God, which is one of the most notorious cults. And his son luckily escaped. But he then went the next day to see what was happening and he stayed overnight. And he said even though he was a 45 year old veteran and a lot of experience and a man of God, he said, you're bombarded by so much information and this intense eye contact and never getting to go to the bathroom by yourself. You're very sleep deprived. They're playing scripture over and over because they will mobilize biblical sayings to change the tone. Also being asked about your bank account simultaneously. He said he found himself being unmoored, even though he had explicitly come there to understand and demystify it.

[Dax Shepard]

Have either of you thought to yourself, I am in a cult. I have two personal experiences.

[Monica Padman]

I've had cult like, definitely not for real, but cult like experiences. I mean, part of that is a good business sometimes has that soul cycle had cult like things around it, its own language. I know all of our tech companies have all of that they have rungs in their own language and it's very culty. I wouldn't call it a cult though. And ucb, that was a improv school and theater, but it was culty. You wanted to rise in the ranks, you wanted to be beloved there. But no, not for real.

[Rebecca Lamov]

For real or even Harvard people say it resembles a cult in a certain way just because there's certain language we use.

[Dax Shepard]

You're very in group out group.

[Rebecca Lamov]

It's a powerful experience just to be socialized in that way. And it can have resonances with a cult. But I'm curious.

[Dax Shepard]

For me, AA for sure, in so many ways it is a cult. And then I definitely look at the methodology by which they get you is a. Anyone coming to an AA meeting for their first time is already ungrounded. That's why they're there. Their life is obliterated. They don't know who they are. They've been acting in all these ways that are inconsistent with their morals. So we did the work for you. We show up kind of deconstructed and it's a group and there's language and there's a text and it has a lot of built in, non falsifiable claims like you don't have to believe in God, but you do. There's a lot of clever.

[Monica Padman]

There's a lot of story building and sharing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God. Yeah. It's almost exclusively sharing your story, exploring it, learning a new way to live. So it's interesting. I've been in it and I'm aware of that. And yet I go, well, the alternative for me was death. So this is far preferable. I can handle being in this cult. Now forget cult. What I really think is brainwashing. What is a little bit unique and good about AA is there's no leader. I think that's what saves it from being potentially destructive. Because this is a very powerful mechanism that could destroy people. If there were even a single leader. There's not even a person in charge of the room. So that's. It's kind of maybe built in safety net. But the way I think over 20, 21 years of being there is I find myself recognizing, oh, that's very regimented, that's very myopic, that's very unflexible. That doesn't account for the variety of human beings there are in the world. There's a lot of things I have to confront. I was having a conversation with a great friend of mine who's been in it roughly the same time as me. He's older, he's a genius. And we were talking and we shared a therapist. And the therapist comes from this very unique point of view, which is he was in the program for a long time. He was an addict, he stopped going. And he also treats a lot of people. And he's like, there are some givens. We learned that, I don't know, that I believe are givens. And then hearing someone in authority who is smart and trustworthy, even just that little poke. And then I found myself saying to my friend the other night, like, this part's a little weird and it's fascinating to me. I would probably put it more in the brainwashing category. And I don't even think nefariously. Again, there's no one in charge. But I do recognize I have to weed through a lot of thinking. That's pretty ironclad in my head.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, I've had similar experiences. A lot of former addicts gravitate towards Ashtanga yoga, which I did too. Well, I love yoga anyway, for the last 35 years. But Ashtanga is this particular form that's very intensive. It did have a guru who passed away. I wasn't interested in that personally, but it just felt like such a health giving practice. And even though I could hear the criticisms, it turns out he was making these invasive adjustments of women, pelvic adjustments that he claimed were. It's a little bit like those gymnastics.

[Dax Shepard]

Larry Nassar and like Bikram.

[Monica Padman]

I think he was just having sex with people.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he's doing it all.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, he was mandating massages.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Rebecca Lamov]

But with Ashtanga it was this interesting reckoning over the last five or six years, but I had already, for other reasons, modified my yoga practice. But people who were present when it was happening but said they either didn't see it or didn't think it was what it was, or the person involved seemed fine or they told themselves it was okay, or you know, this whole reckoning in the community. Also the fact that the adjustments can be quite abusive and cause so much damage and so many injuries over the years. But people want an extreme experience and it will deliver that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Lamov]

So it's like a high. I think it's bringing awareness to whatever you do. You may feel like I finally found this. This is, this is the antidote.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare.

[Rebecca Lamov]

At 24, I lost my narrative, or.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Rebecca Lamov]

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.

[Rebecca Lamov]

To be chatting with folks both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that.

[Monica Padman]

People have navigated roads to triumph.

[Rebecca Lamov]

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 with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so all the things we've talked about are what we might call hard brainwashing. Tell us what's soft brainwashing and tell us what's pervasive in our current landscape that we need to be aware of and tell us how it works and what things are out there.

[Rebecca Lamov]

The history is meant to bring us up to the present moment and give us some tools to think about our current destabilizing environment. I looked at the emergence of social media and some key moments that are often not talked about. So if you look at There's a famous experiment Facebook ran in 2012, but it was published in 2014 where 700,000 users they changed the emotional valence of their feed without telling them, although it's part of your user agreement that you could be experimented on, but people didn't know that. So some of the people received, they said a more positive feed as judged by the word count and the emotional valence, and others received a more negative one. And those whose feed was adjusted negatively, they then counted how they reacted. Did they post more negatively or react more negatively?

[Dax Shepard]

Were they counting how much time spent on the ad themselves?

[Rebecca Lamov]

Maybe they've counted engagement in subtle subsequent experiments, but in this one they mostly counted how they responded. And they found that there was a statistically significant shift in the emotional content of the responses when your feed was altered more negatively and sometimes to a greater degree than your posting or reactions would be more negative. And so this was confirmed as a case of proving or operationalizing emotional contagion at a distance. People just could be exposed to this change, and then their internal states would then change. And so the interesting thing I found in examining this experience experiment was first of all, that Facebook published it in a prominent journal, pnas, and that is sort of a self congratulatory move which they never really repeated because it caused so much controversy. But when you look at the actual article, they cite a 1990 definition where they get this idea of mass emotional contagion at scale. And this was from a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii. And if you look at how they defined emotional contagion, they were actually drawing on a memoir of trauma that was written by Vivian Gornick called Fierce Attachment. They said this is how we define emotional contagion as what happened between this woman and her mother, who was an extremely disturbed woman and she had a really complex relationship with her daughter. And Vivian Gornick wrote this wonderful book, Fierce Attachment, which is kind of a masterpiece describing the spread of trauma between a mother and daughter and these intense emotions. And that's the definition that Facebook was using of emotional contagion. So it's kind of built into the experiment. I'm arguing in a second way when they use the word counting software that they drew on, which is called Luke. This software was based on the diaries of people who had been asked to write about the worst experience of their lives. And that was how they came to define the words they used. We focus on messaging, but what I want to show is that there's a level of trauma and intense emotional suffering that's kind of built into the operations of the app. There's also Catherine Liu, this interesting scholar at University of California shows that trauma. I think she's writing a new book about this, but that it's very profitable on the apps. It draws eyes, it draws traffic. So it's kind of like a trafficking. And people who do content moderation are constantly exposed to it, Similar to the brainwashing episodes of classic brainwashing or hard brainwashing. There's a way it's steeped in trauma and yet not necessarily recognized as such.

[Dax Shepard]

And people will now point out people voluntarily complied with that. We started just giving you a full time access to ourselves and filming everything we do. But both sides are working right because people are posting their trauma.

[Rebecca Lamov]

That's why I like the definition of brainwashing as coercive persuasion, because it's not pure coercion. There's an element of participation. There's a kind of a yes, even if it's unknown to yourself or not perfectly understood. There's a collaborative element, which I think is what makes it interesting and why it's uncomfortable to think about.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we're a lot more comfortable with the notes. Someone chose to smoke cigarettes and that's why they have lung cancer. They just loved a perfect life and they got lung cancer. We don't like that. That's very scary. That means we might get lung cancer. But we do love an element of complicity. It helps us not take on so much anguish because you go, oh, they kind of elected to do that.

[Monica Padman]

I think we also like a victim and a villain. Yeah. But to know that everyone's got. Doing both things makes everything very complicated.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Cults are perfect examples of that as well, because you forget that everyone except the leader at the top is both victimized but also victimizing. It's hard to know where to draw the line.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They're on mission. They're converting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I have to say, and this sounds dismissive to other cult members, but NXIVM interested me the most because of all the subjects of these cults I had met in these other documentaries is so many of them were outwardly searching so hard for something. They were just waiting for a guru to walk in front of them. But the NXIVM crew, they were above average intelligence, most of them. They were very critical thinkers. That's what they were bound by. And then I got obsessed with, well, what's this guy's magic spell on these very critically thinking smart adults? And I think what I observed was he weaponized that against them. Every time they ask him some big philosopher philosophical question, his response would be, well, what do you think? And they were so keen to impress him that they would come up with their very best explanation. And in doing that, they gave themselves the answer and he just would sign off on it. He outsourced the actual dogma to them. He used their intelligence against them. And then back to your point of people thinking they wouldn't be susceptible or they would be, it's like, well, here's this group that he figured out how to get them to investigate, indoctrinate themselves.

[Rebecca Lamov]

That's beautifully put. I completely agree. Because if you look at Keith Ranieri, who presented himself as world's smartest man and world's most handsome man, it's hard to believe that he also used to say that the rain didn't fall on him. He could be walking outside and it fell on other people, but not on him. So you'd think that an intelligent person wouldn't necessarily believe that. But he did attract, and they do say this, that cult members are often highly intelligent. Intelligence does not protect you. It actually can make the web tighter and more effective because you're very good at convincing yourself and others. But Ranieri, what he was really good at was turning them against themselves, turning their gifts against them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And in some ways it's love bombing. Like you said. He's allowing them to feel like, oh my God, I impressed him and he's the smartest person in the world. I guess I must be my best version of myself here. I think there's a lot of that. Like, oh my God, he's bringing out the best of me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And when you're watching those guys, they're on the Santa Monica Pier now. They've been deprogrammed and disillusioned and they're just chatting and they're recognizing some of the things they believed. And one of the guys just goes, yeah, he was a judo champ at seven. And they both are like, oh my God, how did we, how do we believe mean a seven year old judo champ?

[Rebecca Lamov]

It's like a spell is broken.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And the absurdity of these things they had heard now come flooding and I imagine just the shame that that induces.

[Rebecca Lamov]

So to continue that to today, it seems like the stakes are much smaller. But I argue that that's not the case. Even though we're dealing with ordinary circumstances, yet they are always connected to the extraordinary. It's very easy now to silo yourself in terms of what you're exposed to and to find news or information that just confirms your predilections. So I think that if you are finding that or if you're not exposing yourself to challenging material or just things that don't agree with, why you, you already think that's something to be concerned about or something to kind of disrupt these dynamics can feed on your altruism and also your repository of unresolved emotions and then just crank them up to the point where you're not really paying attention. So bringing down the temperature and in whatever way, you cannot contribute to polarization.

[Dax Shepard]

I hope everyone checks out. The instability of truth, brainwashing, mind control and hyper persuasion. I'm a slow reader and I was blasting through it. There's so much historical stuff. I love the history. I mean, there's just so many elements of the Korean War that I hadn't known about or properly sympathize with.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Isn't that profound? It's such a forgotten war, no one talks about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the sequel was so much longer heavily protested cultural.

[Rebecca Lamov]

The whole experience of researching it was amazing to me.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, well, Rebecca, this was so fun. Thank you so much.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah, thank you both.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned to hear Ms. Monica correct all the facts that were Wrong. That's okay though. We all make mistakes. I screen grab something.

[Monica Padman]

Tell me.

[Dax Shepard]

I know if I want you to find this interesting, it cannot be about the Cold war.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

So hopefully I didn't screen grab something about the Cold War.

[Monica Padman]

I hope it's about fashion.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Fun to hear. Updates and the subject synthesized so well for Monica Zangzhou. Anxiety about death. You are on the right track with one of the ways to manage that response. I did CBT for anxiety about death and the training is what you say look at probabilities and odds. Focusing on stats and having self compassion when the worries override the stats and likelihoods. Also acceptance that we actually have so little control from an existential standpoint and being truly Zen about that from a place of gratitude for each day helps. It's tough to get to that place though. It took me years. People like Monica Mia are prone to rumination, AKA sticky brain. It sucks so much and is tough to understand if you don't experience it. Similar to obsessional thinking, Monica's brain is micro obsessing about death now and making her anxious. Just a perspective since I know you don't suffer anxiety the same way.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. That was nice.

[Dax Shepard]

That was a nice comment. Someone really took some time to try to help.

[Monica Padman]

They did. Thank you. Sticky Brain. I've never heard that.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what I'm gonna start calling you now. Sticky Brain. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Rather and joined by Sticky Brain.

[Monica Padman]

I hate. I hate the way I could tell.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I had a hunch it was gonna.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't like that. Is it rude for me to talk about this?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's always a good start when.

[Monica Padman]

Somebody is reaching out to you a lot about hanging out but you don't really know them well.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And. And so that's just not going to be your priority. How do you handle?

[Dax Shepard]

Well. And this might tip you into child ownership. I have much better built in excuses than you do. And they're legit. Which is I don't do anything. Every night of the week I'm home with my kids eating dinner and then watching tv. Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So I can just always go like oh yeah, I don't. Which is true. Also we get a babysitter like six times a year.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So I really make it kind of clear. I. I just, I don't. I'm not social. And you really.

[Monica Padman]

It's not true though. Like you go to breakfast with people. You make time for the people that you are prioritizing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So I can Do a breakfast.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Once every month and a half. I'll do a dude's dinner. Maybe two months. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

There are times that you prioritize. Prioritize it.

[Dax Shepard]

But, but that's like top tier best friend maintenance.

[Monica Padman]

That's, that's what I have time for.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And I feel like, I don't know because I'll say, like, oh, sometimes I'll say I can't for the foreseeable future.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Now so that I got to put that on them. If I asked someone to hang out and they said I can't for the foreseeable future, I would go, okay. Yet they don't want to hang out.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But it's not okay. And I don't, it's not personal. It's not like I don't want to hang out with this person specifically. It's I, I, I just only have time for the people that I barely.

[Dax Shepard]

That Right.

[Monica Padman]

That you're closest to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I want to use that time for those people. People and not I like, you know, it sounds mean. It really sounds mean. And I understand that it sounds mean, which is why I find this to be troublesome.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Get a kid.

[Monica Padman]

No, cuz I, I, I thought you.

[Dax Shepard]

Were going to though after excited.

[Monica Padman]

But after Mindy.

[Dax Shepard]

Mindy. You kind of were.

[Monica Padman]

I was thinking about it. I'm still thinking about it. But well, and then this is like part of the overall thing as a parent. You can say that, right? Like, you can say like, oh, I.

[Dax Shepard]

Just like I'm with the kids every night.

[Monica Padman]

I've been with the kids. I don't think I'll really be able to make it happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And, and it's true. Which is great.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But my stuff is true too.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah. I'm just saying. No, I know it's an excuse and it's not an excuse. Like I really am home every night.

[Monica Padman]

And you go to your meetings. You do like, you prioritize the things in your life and so do I. And I guess that's like, it's the same thing. But if a single person says. Sounds more like you're just saying you don't want to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And it seems more rude when really it's the same thing. It's like I'm prioritizing the things in my life that are important to me. I don't think I can add anything new in right now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Same with parent young parents and old parents like me. I wasn't pointing to you.

[Dax Shepard]

Grandparent parents.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. If I am working, that's One category. Right. That's one category of things I have to do during the day. Category 2 is being by myself. I need some time to myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Y.

[Monica Padman]

That leaves a small amount of time for social.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And there's two types of social. There is social with basically family, like friends who are basically family. And you don't have to be or do anything but be yourself. Show up as you.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. Come as you are.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Byob.

[Monica Padman]

That's right. Then there's the other bucket of social, which is you have to be on a little bit because you don't know them as well.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes.

[Monica Padman]

You just have to be like the best version of yourself. Yes. Let alone the category of dates which we haven't even thrown in the mix.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure, sure.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So currently my time is.

[Dax Shepard]

Only your voice got high. Currently my time is apparently counted for.

[Monica Padman]

Because we also have to be on during this job quite a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Many hours a week.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And so I'm a little spent of that mode.

[Dax Shepard]

You want to be a dud. You want to be able to be a dude.

[Monica Padman]

My close friends allow that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They accept the dud version.

[Monica Padman]

My fear is I'm have. I'm telling people, like, I don't have time to do this. I'm sorry. Basically. And then those people are going to see me out.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Monica Padman]

With Jess and Anna. With. Exactly. With my friends. And be like, fuck you. You said you couldn't. And for me, what I want to say is like, that's a different category.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

That I do make time for because I need that restorative.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think any of these people are entitled to all that information. I think you just need to relieve yourself.

[Monica Padman]

Should I write, like, write a note, make 80 copies and then pass it out?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, look, I do have a set thing in my notes that I.

[Monica Padman]

You do?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Because I get asked very often to ask Kristen to do things.

[Monica Padman]

You mean go out?

[Dax Shepard]

No. Hey, I've got this project Kristen would be great for. Hey, this charity event. Can Kristen.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's a very sincere. And it's true. Which is I won't be a conduit of requests to Kristen. She gets it all the time and it's not gonna come from me. It's damaging to the relationship for us to be not wanting to hear what each other has to say. So I took the time at some point to write out a very thoughtful version of that. But I don't want to have to do that every single time. So I have it in my notes. And I just copy and paste.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. Do you want to read it?

[Dax Shepard]

So maybe I wonder. I can find it now that I've said that. Not. And if you've received this, then, you know, that's okay. Cuz it's all. It's legit and I stand by it. No, I can't find it.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think the parents deal with it the most.

[Monica Padman]

What do you mean?

[Dax Shepard]

Like, my mom gets a lot of requests. I think Kristen's mom gets a lot of requests. And I get it. Because you're like, oh, a parent can ask their kid anything.

[Monica Padman]

Right, right, right. Yeah. It's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if I wanted Ace to do something, I'd be like, I just ask Charlie. He'll. He'll ask him.

[Monica Padman]

Probably.

[Dax Shepard]

He's got no autonomy. He's got to listen to this request. I should ask Ace if he'll host a gala.

[Monica Padman]

He'd be great.

[Dax Shepard]

He would. If he danced.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah. He's such a good dancer.

[Dax Shepard]

He and Lincoln were so cute at Disneyland. It's so fun to watch. They really get along. Really? They weren't dancing. That's the problem. That's the annoying and attractive thing about Ace is he's the world's best dancer. But he won' I know.

[Monica Padman]

I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

He won't give it to you.

[Monica Padman]

I get it.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if I were him, all I would do is dance.

[Monica Padman]

I know. And then people would be like, can you stop?

[Dax Shepard]

I know. I would exploit it and ring it out for every bit of attention I could. And he doesn't. He's like. He was. He was right to be trusted with that superpower.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Although he needs to lighten up the reins a little bit. I think, like, on Thanksgiving, he should do a dance performance for us once a year. He should put on. We sit through these other talent shows with the kids and the videos they make. We got an actual bonafide talent in the mix, and he's not showing us, but he is.

[Monica Padman]

It's exactly correct. Because we are like, oh, I just wish he would dance for us. Yeah, that's what you want. You want people to want you bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think it's weird? I think everyone does this, but do you think it's weird to look at a kid and go like, oh, my God, he's gonna do so well with the ladies. Like, every time I'm around Ace, all I can think is like, God, this guy's the every option's gonna be available to him. Great dancer, sweetheart. Gorgeous.

[Monica Padman]

I do think that's Your first instinct.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone's are daxes.

[Monica Padman]

Daxes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's not my first instinct.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not?

[Monica Padman]

No. I think you put a lot of emphasis on romantic love.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, dancing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, dancing's hot. But it's not like you don't think.

[Dax Shepard]

It'S a silver bullet.

[Monica Padman]

I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

I do.

[Monica Padman]

I know you.

[Dax Shepard]

If you look good dancing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not like you can just know the running man if you look stupid doing the running man.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but that's a pass. So few opportunities in this world to dance. It's not like when we were in college and everyone was dancing.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, if you're into dancing, you go out dancing and people see you. They see you.

[Monica Padman]

But when you're an adult, when I.

[Dax Shepard]

See you, your dog, Charlie.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. When I. As an adult, there are so many adults I know that I've never seen their. Them dance. I have no idea what they look like dancing.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you know what? Everybody. Anyone in the pod looks like dancing.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. We've been to weddings. We've been to.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But like, nothing stands out.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

At all.

[Dax Shepard]

Come on. Roller skate parties. You know, Ryan's a great dance party. You could name the great dancers. Erica, great dancer. We know she's a great.

[Monica Padman]

But that's. I know that because she posts videos of her dancing in a dance class.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And you've seen her.

[Monica Padman]

But not like she's not that. Laura's wedding, it doesn't resonate with.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not a priority for you at all. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And in fact, like you say, Matt, I don't know what Laura looks like dancing because you.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe because you never were. That wasn't anything you were into personally. Like, you were never like, I'm a great dancer.

[Monica Padman]

Every. We went out five times a week.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I think a woman that dances well is very sexy.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's a way to look cool.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, that's not for you.

[Monica Padman]

It's not. Not for me. It's not like I'm not attracted to it. But it's not on my.

[Dax Shepard]

But what about Anderson Paak? If she can't dance, then she can't.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Ooh.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I don't think that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think you can have sex if you can't dance.

[Monica Padman]

Right. So that's a lie that he said that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But I do think someone who's very in touch with their body and knows how to move their body, it's a good signal. Let me just ask you this. There's two guys, they're Identical twin brothers. They look the same. They have the same personality.

[Monica Padman]

The exact same personality.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. One of them is dancing like a dad.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And the other one is dancing very well.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, listen, that's not a good.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a perfect one.

[Monica Padman]

No, it's not. Because you made control group. You name them the same.

[Dax Shepard]

The only different. The only variable is their dancing, obviously. So which one do you want to get in bed with?

[Monica Padman]

No, that's not how you play this game. You have to give me different, different sets of. Of good things. And one of them is dancing on one person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

The other has other stuff and I have to pick. If obviously they're the exact same and they're. They're dancing, I'm obviously going to pick that.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. Because you would, you would say it's a tr. It's more attractive than not.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, I. I already said that. I said it is.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought it was like a. Who cares?

[Monica Padman]

No, you're not listening.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, I'm trying.

[Monica Padman]

I said, I said it's not that it's not attractive. It is attractive.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But it's not on my list. It's like top five things. So. Yes, of course, if top five things are met with two people and they're the same person and they look exactly the same and have the exact same personality.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I'm not going to say no to good dancing. Yeah. But if it's like guy A and.

[Dax Shepard]

Really quick when you look at them and you're like, I wonder who's better in bed. Would you not assume that the guy that's coordinated and on rhythm is better in bed if they.

[Monica Padman]

They have the exact same everything? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay, good. Anyways, Aces is a spectacular dancer. Lincoln and he were having so much fun together.

[Monica Padman]

That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

And we were again, we were gay dads, as you know, great at Disneyland.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh.

[Dax Shepard]

But we were not as built this trip. We're not as big.

[Monica Padman]

You are.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's keep it.

[Monica Padman]

This whole episode's of disaster. God. Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm a little bigger than Charlie at the moment. Which is very rare. First time in our total in our whole friendship. I'm a little bigger than him. So I think the what people assume changed. Remember last time he was like, he was an Adonis and they thought I must be an architect. Do you remember this whole thing?

[Monica Padman]

Only vaguely.

[Dax Shepard]

They're like, oh, the one man's much older than his husband. Husband.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But he looks kind of cool. He looks artistic. He's got tattoos. He must be an architect. This is what they thought.

[Monica Padman]

Now you think that when people look at tattoos, they think artsy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think if you're seeing someone who is heavily tattooed and successful. Well, how do they know that? Because we have a guide.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, that's a giveaway.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But maybe being honest.

[Monica Padman]

But maybe your hot husband.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. So, yes. We're just going with like, most people think. So you see an older dude with a younger man. They have a guy.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Got it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. And he has.

[Dax Shepard]

90 plus percent of people are gonna go, oh, the older dude's got some money.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. He's made some money. But he's also heavily tattooed. So he's either owns a restaurant. You go through.

[Monica Padman]

This is very la.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, most likely. Yeah. If you were in the Midwest and I saw a dude heavily tattooed and I knew he was rich, I'd go, oh, he owns a tool and dye shop. Like, this is exactly. What environment could he make a ton of money but also look like a fucking junkie?

[Monica Padman]

Scary guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Okay. So that was last year's scenario that we both thought was most likely. People definitely thought I was an architect and this was my boy toy.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But now is a little bigger this year. So now I'm not sure what they think. I didn't have as clear of a conclusion of what people thought, other than people, again, were very excited and happy that we had a family that seems to be consistent.

[Monica Padman]

That's nice. Yeah. Families are great.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

What do you think about the fact. Did you notice that during this whole time we've been talking, I've picked up my fingernail?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And now I have this piece, and I've been putting it places, different places in homes.

[Dax Shepard]

You'll remember it. I see you grab your phone, which is disheartening. Oh, she's checking her phone in the middle of this story about me being an architect.

[Monica Padman]

I wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

And now you're. Yeah. You should eat it. Just eat it.

[Monica Padman]

No, I've never.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you dropped it between your legs.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I was worried about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. Well, there it is. One of our guests will be sitting there and be like, God, I'm just keep stabbing my butt cheek.

[Monica Padman]

Some people will be, like, so disgusted by what just happened.

[Dax Shepard]

Remember you would put your feet on the couch and people would really lose their feet.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

They wouldn't like it. And I am not that grossed out by nails. And I guess I'm not that grossed out by hair. I guess I might be very chill.

[Dax Shepard]

You are. You're afraid of death, but everything before then, you're kind of fine with.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Pooty nails.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, actually, yeah, I'm proud of myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're cool. You're cool.

[Monica Padman]

You're cool.

[Dax Shepard]

You're cool.

[Monica Padman]

Can't dance, but you're cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Can't dance. Save your life. But if you shave that inside, you'll pull it off.

[Monica Padman]

I was a good dancer.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no one will ever know.

[Monica Padman]

I had a. I. I danced well with this one person. We danced a lot together. Okay. Oh, I pulled this up to show you something and now I have forgotten. I'm all over the. Well, we just did Armchair Anonymous. This is what happens. Our brain gets a little jammy. That's a Easter egg.

[Dax Shepard]

Easter egg for.

[Monica Padman]

No, she don't say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

This is for Rebecca Lauv. And this was interesting because this was brainwashing and is scary.

[Dax Shepard]

You think you've been brainwashed by you.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you tried. You tried to brainwash me into thinking dancing was the best quality.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think it's a very hot, attractive quality.

[Monica Padman]

It's. It's hot and it's.

[Dax Shepard]

It turns things sexual. I guess that's really what I'm saying. Oh, it breaks through. Like, you could meet a dude and you be like, oh, he's good, but I'm in the friend zone. You could see him dance. Be like, you know what? Like, it's definitely an inroute.

[Monica Padman]

I. You're right about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you.

[Monica Padman]

But it's not going. What? It's not a bad dancer if I like them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you'll. That's fine.

[Monica Padman]

Is not a deterrent. But I guess you're right. A good dancer could be an additive.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It could change the dynamic of everything.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if that's been my experience, which is. I think some girls were like, whatever.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

He's loud. And then on the dance floor like, oh, this is interesting. He is loud. Very loud. Louder as a dance.

[Monica Padman]

As a dancer, even louder. Okay. Population decline. You said California's population is declining and everyone else's is on the rise. Now, I'm going to read you the list here.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

This is most decline all the way up to most pro. Most growth.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So the most you can do, like.

[Dax Shepard]

The top 10 and bottom 10.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. I'm not going to count. Okay. I'm going to read them all.

[Dax Shepard]

All 50 states.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. Okay. So the most. The most decline. New York.

[Dax Shepard]

They're hemorrhaging people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. 0.91% population change downward point 1991091.

[Dax Shepard]

Almost 10% of the state left. Or 9.1 out of 100,000 people.

[Monica Padman]

91%. Oh.91 change in population.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So almost fell a percent.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. New York. So that's the worst. Then Illinois. Yikes.

[Dax Shepard]

Sorry.

[Monica Padman]

Because Rob left.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's true. It makes it look good.

[Monica Padman]

You're a part of it. New York, Illinois, Louisiana, West Virginia, Hawaii, Oregon, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, California. So already there's a lot worse off than us. I'm just going to say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Then Maryland, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Alaska, New Jersey, Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, Vermont. Want Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota.

[Dax Shepard]

All losing people.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, fuck. Oh. Michigan is the last loser.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Last of the losers.

[Monica Padman]

Last of the losers is Michigan.

[Dax Shepard]

First place in losers.

[Monica Padman]

That's right. 0.03%.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's nothing.

[Monica Padman]

Population.

[Dax Shepard]

That could be a miscount now.

[Monica Padman]

It wasn't they. This is on World Population Review.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Very trusted brand.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm always on there.

[Monica Padman]

Now we're gonna go neutral. Up, up. Okay. So Vermont has 0.1% growth.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

In population.

[Dax Shepard]

Could be a statistical error. Go ahead.

[Monica Padman]

Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Indiana, Virginia, Wyoming, Alabama, Colorado, New Hampshire, Washington, Maine, Oklahoma, Nevada, Georgia. Ding, ding, ding. Tennessee. Ding, ding, ding. Utah, North Carolina, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana, South Dakota, Texas, South Carolina, Idaho, Florida.

[Dax Shepard]

Man, I would have definitely thought Tennessee and Texas were higher on that list.

[Monica Padman]

Pretty high.

[Dax Shepard]

What's the percentage change?

[Monica Padman]

It's the 12th.

[Dax Shepard]

But what percentage?

[Monica Padman]

1.19%.

[Dax Shepard]

1.1. So that's more. That's higher than the Biggest Loser.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Florida is one point. 91% population growth.

[Dax Shepard]

2% a year. Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So I just, as a Californian, people are worse off than us.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I just want that to be known.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. You want more people to come or you want to stay the same or you want people to leave?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I don't have an opinion on that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Infanticide among Inuits. Until recently, certain Eskimo groups were reported to practice female infanticide in the belief that the time spent suckling a girl would delay the mother's next opportunity to bear a son. Males being preferred to females because of their future role as providers in a hunting economy. From sex ratios and census data, rates of female infanticide of up to 66% for some groups have been inferred, leading some 66%, leading some ethnographers to conclude that these groups were headed for extinction. Eskimo beliefs regarding the effects of infanticide on fertility, however, are in accord with the results of research on the relation of fertility and lactation. The cessation of lactation following infanticide would significantly shorten the expected interval until the next birth. Given this fact and available field data regarding the parameters of Eskimo population growth, the present computer simulation indicates that Eskimo populations could sustain a rate of 30% female infanticide and still survive.

[Dax Shepard]

You reading that just reminded me I have something much better. That is what I screen grabbed to tell you.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, tell me.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I interrupt this portion?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that was like that.

[Dax Shepard]

That was it.

[Monica Padman]

I mean it's sad.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, this is. This is really something. And I probably need to send these to Rob right now so he can get them up on the tv.

[Monica Padman]

Oh great.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so for the listener who can't see this, it's a picture of a very white woman on the left and a very, very black woman on the right. 36 year old German model who now identifies as black, plans to move to Africa after taking melatonin injections.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

She and her partner are now prepar for the move with the influencer stating. My husband and I had already planned to emigrate a few years ago, but then the pandemic hit. It hasn't been easy choosing where in Africa, but we currently have Kenya and Namibia on our short list. Now scroll through the other pictures there. Rob.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

This is.

[Monica Padman]

This is.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait till you see the one in her and her tribe outfit.

[Monica Padman]

Is her.

[Dax Shepard]

It is her. And she's dressed like she's a Maasai or something. This is nuts. Do you think this will be like. Well, people sign on to this. Yeah. So that's. There's a peptide you can take. No, bodybuilders use it to be darker so they don't have to use as much self tanner. And apparently she's just on an elephant dose of it. And she is black and identifies as black. You can't identify as black.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think it. Is there any conceivable way in the future this will be a very protected group?

[Monica Padman]

No, because this isn't fair to black in a marginalized. A very marginalized group.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

I mean unless.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Unless.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, look, here's how it. This is only way it could happen, okay. If the black community was like great, we love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Send us your whites, then send us your previous wife.

[Monica Padman]

I guess we can't have a problem with it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm actually, I'm more okay with her just dying herself black.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Over saying I identify as. My issue is the identify as black.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Not. I don't really care if you take too many.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, what did. Exactly what did she say? Hold on. Let's go back real quick.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

She said, who now identifies as black. Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Has announced plans to move to Africa after injecting melatonin, a synthetic or. Melatonin. Yeah. A synthetic hormone to darken her skin. But yeah. I guess people probably. There's no way people who can't see this are imagining her skin is as dark as it is and she is as white as it gets on the left.

[Monica Padman]

This is nuts, right? This is.

[Dax Shepard]

This is like something you used to see in the old days in the Inquirer. This happened, remember, with the woman that was somehow became president of the naacp and she said she identified as black.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Exactly. It is called melanitin. It is peptide hormone stimulating. Like.

[Dax Shepard]

Go ahead.

[Monica Padman]

I mean. No. Then is it okay to make me white? I mean, I don't want to anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But, like, I don't care. Then gets into that where to me, that's way worse. What she's doing is way worse than.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

The other way around.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Because I would. I would say imply. Yes. She also has ginormous augmented breasts, which is interesting. If you've not experienced racism your entire life.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

To say you identify as black.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Is.

[Monica Padman]

How could you. It's unacceptable. Yeah, it's unacceptable.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think it's white entitlement to the nth degree. It is like, as Joy would say. The caucasity. Yeah, the caucasity. To say you identify as black. Oh, I can't believe I haven't sent this to.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you have to send.

[Dax Shepard]

I got to send all this right now.

[Monica Padman]

You. You know what's kind of. Obviously, I think this is atrocious. This is a. No, no. This is bad, bad, bad. But what you just said, like, if you are a white person, you can't say you identify as black because you've never experienced what it's like to be a black person in this country. I will say she's not going to be a black person in this country. She's going to be a black person in Africa, where racism is going to be. Not. Look close.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. That's fair. And that's kind of. That was. That was Kirby's kind of. What she illuminated for us was like, it's different in England because people chose to come there.

[Monica Padman]

That just.

[Dax Shepard]

The whole dynamic is completely different.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And. Yeah. I don't know. I guess if you are. I mean, now we're trying to pick maybe what's the best place to do this in.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, this is insane.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Like, it's insane to do. It's entitled. It's wild.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess also, who cares a little bit of who cares? Like, she wants it. She's on some weird journey.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

She's not hurting anyone. I guess I shouldn't care.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I care on behalf of a marginalized group that has experienced a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

Of COIN in Africa. They're not marginalized, so.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And she's from Germany. Complicates everything. Okay, you can resume.

[Monica Padman]

So I don't. As someone with brown skin. God. I mean, this is like, what are we doing?

[Dax Shepard]

What if someone.

[Monica Padman]

Are we doing what? Peptides.

[Dax Shepard]

What if a white person. Me.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I said, I'm Indian.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to identify as Indian. And I took this peptide. Like, what would you.

[Monica Padman]

I would just say, but you're not.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, but I identify as.

[Monica Padman]

Stop.

[Dax Shepard]

Ever since I went to India, I realize I'm Indian.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I guess I'd say, what. What about Indie? What makes you feel Indian?

[Dax Shepard]

I like the food.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so you like Indian food.

[Dax Shepard]

And it feels like you. I was designed to eat that food. It made me think, huh, that's weird. Why does this food sit so right? It's like I've evolved to eat this food.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I realized, oh, my God. I know what's going on. I'm from Bombay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. It's actually Mumbai, but not.

[Dax Shepard]

When I left, it was still Bombay.

[Monica Padman]

Because you didn't leave. Because you are never.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I was there. Clearly, I was there.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah. Okay. So you think. What. What do you think happened? Do you think that you were born there?

[Dax Shepard]

I was assigned the wrong ethnicity at birth. I was assigned Caucasoid. But I'm Indian.

[Monica Padman]

And were you born there?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm reincarnated. I'm a Buddhist too. I have a lot.

[Monica Padman]

You can be Buddha.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm Siddhartha.

[Monica Padman]

You can be Buddhist. Yeah, I'm fine with that.

[Dax Shepard]

But I was an Indian Buddhist and I was reincarnated in this stupid Caucasoid body. I'm Indian. And the food. Food tastes so good to me.

[Monica Padman]

So you might.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm of a high cast. I found out from. Because it. Of course I am.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so you might have been re. You might have been an Indian Buddhist, and you are. Have been reincarnated. I can't deny that. But you have been reincarnated as a American white person.

[Dax Shepard]

The oppressor. No. Maybe you want to be the oppressor, but I don't.

[Monica Padman]

I am the Oppressor. That dropped my nail again.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't believe you found it.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

It was lost to the.

[Monica Padman]

I feel complicated about melanin or melanitin. Okay. And I feel we were talking about this yesterday. Like peptides are a lot of the rage right now. Now in la.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And there it like there is the real chance that you can just change your whole being with them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I, I'm very skeptical of, of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Interesting.

[Monica Padman]

And now with this. This makes me like even more.

[Dax Shepard]

But this a. This is the most extreme case imaginable.

[Monica Padman]

But it's a real peptide.

[Dax Shepard]

I love peptides.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I feel like this is a little reminiscent of your initial Ozempic. Ozempic issue, which is like, why not? Like, I don't. Who cares?

[Monica Padman]

Like, no. Like no, you. I don't think it's fair for you to decide tomorrow to take melanin, Melanitin and then become my color. Like, I don't think that's.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's a very extreme version of Pepe's. But do I deserve to take a peptide that elevates my HGH levels naturally? Well, it's not naturally. I'm taking a peptide. Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Nothing's going to happen.

[Dax Shepard]

My thyroid, my pituitary gland's making the hgh. It's not exogenous hgh. What's the problem?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I just think all of this is a really, really, really intense obsession with anti aging and optimization that I find over overall. Just like not you. This, this overall conversation about it. Obsessive and very. The substance.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But let's take me as an example.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Like I have a crazy workout regimen and a diet regimen and I'm going to take anything that doesn't have bad side effects that's going to help me in that pursuit.

[Monica Padman]

In the pursuit of what?

[Dax Shepard]

Being as physically fit as I possibly can.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And. And I can afford to.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Right now is it fair or not that I can and other people. That's a, I think a side conversation. But just assume everyone has access to everything.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm 50. I just was at Cota and I rode a motorcycle all day long on the racetrack.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I felt great and I was able to do that. And primarily because of my fitness, a lot of the 50 year old dudes are not doing the sessions like I can do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So I am. My life is really good because I, I can still pursue my hobbies with vigor and it makes my life better. And that is solely an outcome of how I've taken Care of my body. And this is yet another tool. Like eating well is or like that protein is or vitamins are. It's just another thing. It's a very arbitrary line between should I take vitamin D or take a peptide?

[Monica Padman]

Well, there is a difference in that. A lot of these peptides aren't like, approved. I looked on the website yesterday of one and they all say not for human use.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So that I go through a doctor.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So, yes, without a prescription, you're gonna get on a website and it's gonna say for animal use or something. I have no claim on that, but I'm talking about going to a doctor and having, having a real, the human version of a peptide prescribed to you.

[Monica Padman]

I guess if, if a doctor is prescribing it and I get blood panels.

[Dax Shepard]

Every two and a half, three months, monitors, everything.

[Monica Padman]

Look, I don't, I don't think it's like amoral. I, I think it's, I, I think society is, has become really obsessed with, with anti aging.

[Dax Shepard]

You think more than.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. This is ext. I mean, to me, injecting yourself with a massive concoction of things that you're, you're, you're tweaking to opt, like make you look 30 for the rest of your life to me, is literally the substance. Like that movie.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Well. But the substance was robbing your.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Future. Your current self. So there was a heavy price to pay.

[Monica Padman]

There was a price to pay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I just, I'm not seeing the price to pay. Other than the finance.

[Monica Padman]

We don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no. Anything I'm on has been in the market and being. Has been used on HIV patients for 35, 40 years.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but you don't have HIV.

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Monica Padman]

So you don't know. Technically, I mean, there's a reason these things aren't FDA approved. They have not been tested for long enough.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no. All of these are FDA approved if you get a prescription. And they're also a category that can be used. Used in lab testing, which is what you're seeing on the website. But no, all of any peptide I'm on from a doctor has been FDA approved and used in medical trials. One in this case I'm referencing as HIV patients.

[Monica Padman]

Got it.

[Rebecca Lamov]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. I don't know. I, I think it's fine. Obviously I have no say in what other people do, but it is, it does. It sprouts all this interesting. All these interesting questions. Because I don't want to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But then I think. But if literally Everyone else is doing this.

[Dax Shepard]

You feel pressured to do it.

[Monica Padman]

It's not even that I feel pressured. It's like I'm gonna look so old or I'm gonna look so even though I'm actually aging naturally, I'm gonna be left behind.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you're aging naturally. Naturally, but with Botox and injections.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's an identical argument for someone who's like looking at you and going like, well, fuck, do I have to get Botox? Because everyone's doing it and I don't want to get Botox, but Monica's getting it and now I have to. So it's like that's the same argument as this peptide thing. To me it is.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, that's why I did that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because over time it's like, oh my God, everyone is doing this. And I guess if everyone has a face that looks wrinkle free and I'm the only one walking around with wrinkles, that's gonna look insane now when it used to look normal.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, this is an interesting side thing. That will take too long. But I more think about. Yes. I've talked about this with Eric and stuff. It's like, well, everyone's gonna be on tirzepatite or some GLP1 at some point. It's gonna be over the counter.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's just say everyone's gonna be on it's 4 cents. Everyone's skinny. Let's just say everyone's skinny. I know, but what I think is like, well, in a world where everyone's skinny, people that aren't skinny will be very interesting and exciting. So if every. No one has wrinkles. It's interesting to think of just if everything's neutralized.

[Rebecca Lamov]

But it, it.

[Monica Padman]

I guess that's my whole. I'm like, we're becoming one person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that is boring.

[Dax Shepard]

But.

[Monica Padman]

And I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

We're not.

[Monica Padman]

But we kind of are. If, like, if everyone can get the exact same coloring.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

If you can change your features, if you can make yourself not age, if you can be all one body weight. Like, that is so boring. Really. I think for me anyway.

[Dax Shepard]

Or you might. Silver lining. It might actually be. Well, then all you'd be deciding on is personality. Everything else has been neutralized.

[Monica Padman]

I guess. I mean, I mean that.

[Dax Shepard]

Doesn't that sound like utopia? A little bit.

[Monica Padman]

No. Yeah, sure, sure. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

It's just, it's. It's interesting. It's fascinating. If mine was. I don't think I look any hotter. I don't think my face looks better. I don't. There's like nothing I'm taking to look. To look better.

[Monica Padman]

But there are peptides like that. There are. I know.

[Dax Shepard]

What are they. Let me ask my doctor if I can be on those. But yeah, I'm. I'm up for everything that. That makes me feel better and doesn't have a big cost associated with it.

[Monica Padman]

You know what's wild is the other day a old video popped up on Instagram of do you remember from the Hills. Heidi. Heidi and Spencer.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And do you remember she got so much surgery, plastic surgery.

[Rebecca Lamov]

She did.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't know that, but it was a huge thing. She, like got a ton of plastic surgery. They did this epic episode where she was basically like talking to her mom and her sister.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Her mom and her sister were bawling and she was explaining everything she did and she was like talking kind of weird and like, it was sad. Like it was. It was presented as, oh, my God, cautionary tale.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And this popped up and I was like, that is not how I remember it. She looks kind of like so many people now.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

Nowadays like her, her in quotes, like crazy things.

[Dax Shepard]

She did this kind of standard.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Well, I will say when I'm in Beverly Hills, I will pass like six or seven women in a row that have identical shape faces because the filler ends up making every face and they.

[Monica Padman]

Get nose jobs that their nose is the same and lip injections that make their lips all the same. Yeah, yeah. I just am going to get chin filler again.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I just don't care about what that people do that stuff. It doesn't bother me.

[Monica Padman]

I don't care individually, like, I don't care that that person in Beverly Hills is doing it. But societally, I start to, like, pull back and I think, oh, my God, we really are shifting into this other realm. And that is where I start.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think people have always been doing everything they could. So they wore perfume when that was invented and they got hairbrushes to keep their hair pretty and they got combs and they got hairstyles and everything that was at your disposal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

People have been pursuing looking the best they can.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And we're just. There's more and more products in the mix.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I do think people have been trying to look their very best for. I don't think that's.

[Monica Padman]

I haven't brushed my hair in like four days, so.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we pick what things. I know, Me too. I like my jeans are dirty, but.

[Monica Padman]

I need to work out anyway. That's all very interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. That's it.

[Dax Shepard]

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