Rerelease: Monica Lewinsky

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Episode: Rerelease: Monica Lewinsky

Host: Armchair Umbrella
Guest: Monica Lewinsky
Release Date: January 1, 2025

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1. Introduction and Setting the Stage

The episode features Monica Lewinsky, a prominent figure known for her involvement in one of the most talked-about scandals in American political history. Hosted by Dax Shepard, alongside co-hosts Monica Padman and Wobby Wob Hollis, the conversation delves deep into Monica's personal experiences, the impact of public shaming, and her journey toward healing and advocacy.

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2. Monica Lewinsky's Early Life and Family Background

Monica Lewinsky provides a comprehensive overview of her upbringing, highlighting the complexities of her family dynamics and the impact of her parents' divorce when she was 14 years old.

• Monica Lewinsky (04:23):
  “Monica Lewinsky is an American activist. She's a television personality and she is also anti-bullying ambassador to the Diana Award anti-bullying program and on the advisory board of Project Rocket.”

Her parents' separation introduced significant emotional turmoil, contributing to her struggles with self-esteem and mental health.

• Monica Padman (14:10):
  “It wasn't an ideal time for disruption, especially with new hormones and social challenges.”

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3. Personal Struggles and Trauma

Monica candidly discusses her battles with anxiety, body image issues, and the lingering effects of an unwanted sexual experience at 14. These experiences were compounded by public scrutiny, leading to profound psychological impacts.

• Monica Lewinsky (06:01):
  “I've become good at reading people... someone said to me, I saw this shaman in New York who was amazing... people who have survived trauma, they can't be okay unless everyone else is okay in the room.”

She emphasizes the exhausting nature of trauma and the constant effort required to maintain emotional stability.

• Monica Padman (08:03):
  “I keep rediscovering all the time. I'm never assuming that the person's thing is their issue...”

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4. The White House Internship and the Scandal

Monica recounts her internship at the White House, detailing her initial lack of interest in politics and how circumstances led her into the spotlight.

• Monica Lewinsky (45:50):
  “It was supposed to be a pit on the way to graduate school. So I wanted to get a Ph.D. in forensic psychology and work for the FBI.”

Her relationship with President Bill Clinton became the center of a tumultuous scandal, leading to relentless public scrutiny and legal battles.

• Monica Lewinsky (54:32):
  “I've had to heal my field... moving forward and keep trying to get back onto a developmental path.”

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5. Public Shaming and Its Consequences

A significant portion of the conversation addresses the intense public shaming Monica endured, comparing it to a modern-day version of the Scarlet Letter. She reflects on how societal norms and media portrayal exacerbated her trauma.

• Monica Lewinsky (67:44):
  “You were being called a slut, which no one should be called. It's really just horrendously misogynistic.”

• Monica Padman (74:29):
  “You can have an opportunity for such gossip, children play a game...”

She criticizes the double standards in how men and women are treated in scandals, highlighting the disproportionate blame placed on women.

• Monica Padman (96:44):
  “No one should be talking about a man's weight in general. They're not calling men sluts.”

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6. Healing and Moving Forward

Despite the immense challenges, Monica shares her path to healing, emphasizing the importance of integrating her past rather than running away from it. She underscores the role of therapy, self-reflection, and resilience in her journey.

• Monica Lewinsky (71:32):
  “I came out of graduate school and then was actually almost the darkest period, even darker. But... I need to hold both parts of me.”

• Monica Padman (83:07):
  “I think all your character defects are the opposite side of a coin of some virtue you have.”

Monica's approach focuses on embracing both her strengths and vulnerabilities, allowing her to grow from her experiences.

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7. Cyberbullying and Modern Social Media Effects

Transitioning to current societal issues, Monica and her co-hosts discuss the pervasive nature of cyberbullying and its psychological effects. They explore how social media amplifies negative behaviors and the challenges it poses for personal relationships.

• Monica Padman (86:36):
  “Over half of young people do not tell their parents when cyberbullying occurs.”

• Monica Lewinsky (88:14):
  “We have lost sight of the fact we don't have those cues... There's a lot of mental health issues coming in.”

They advocate for positive interventions and the role of upstanders in mitigating online harassment.

• Monica Padman (80:03):
  “Being an upstander means to sort of intervene in a situation...”

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8. Lessons and Advocacy

Monica emphasizes the importance of compassion, understanding, and active intervention in combating bullying and fostering a supportive community. She reflects on her role as an advocate for anti-bullying and mental health awareness.

• Monica Lewinsky (80:01):
  “Educating people on how to be an upstander online... we're starting to shift the balance.”

• Monica Padman (90:43):
  “I think your willingness to do it in your bravery isn't for me, and it's not for any of those people that was arguing, but it's for all these people who have gone through this and are seeing that it didn't break somebody.”

Monica's advocacy work aims to provide solace and hope to others facing similar struggles, demonstrating resilience and the capacity for personal growth despite adversity.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Monica Lewinsky (06:01):
  “I've become good at reading people... people who have survived trauma, they can't be okay unless everyone else is okay in the room.”

• Monica Lewinsky (54:32):
  “I've had to heal my field... moving forward and keep trying to get back onto a developmental path.”

• Monica Lewinsky (67:44):
  “You were being called a slut, which no one should be called. It's really just horrendously misogynistic.”

• Monica Lewinsky (71:32):
  “I came out of graduate school and then was actually almost the darkest period, even darker. But... I need to hold both parts of me.”

• Monica Padman (80:03):
  “Being an upstander means to sort of intervene in a situation...”

• Monica Lewinsky (84:45):
  “There's this vicious cycle that's happened with online behavior around... we're thirsty for more connection, the ways we're finding connection are also trying to tell us, us that we're less than.”

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Conclusion

This episode of Armchair Expert offers an intimate and profound exploration of Monica Lewinsky's life beyond the infamous scandal. Through candid discussions, Monica shares her journey of overcoming public shaming, addressing personal trauma, and advocating against bullying. The conversation underscores the enduring impact of societal judgment and the importance of compassion and resilience in the face of adversity. For listeners seeking to understand the human side of public scandals and the path to personal healing, this episode serves as a compelling and enlightening narrative.

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Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe you should. Maybe you should do. Hello. Hello.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Hello, Hello.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Hi, everyone.

[Monica Padman]

Hello.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I'm here. This is Monica. Monica Padman, and I'm here with Dax Shepard and Wobby Wob Hollis. I had to say our last names because this is about to get quite confusing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

We're doing.

[Dax Shepard]

It wasn't confusing enough this year, so.

[Monica Padman]

We thought let's at the very end, get even.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Let's get really confused.

[Monica Padman]

Let's add another layer of confusion.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes. We wanted to do a little of our favorites this week. You just heard a couple days ago, you heard Laurel LeBeau, Mom. She. Dax's mom that episode. And my pick for the week is Monica Lewinsky. That's why that's confusing.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Because of Monica and Monica.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

That's why I had to say last names.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

That makes sense. And why did you pick Monica?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Well, I was looking through all our old episodes. I Forgot we've done 850. Yeah, we've done a few. And most of them, I was looking. I was like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And when I saw Monica Lewinsky's name come up, thought, oh, my gosh, I totally forgot we got to do that. How amazing of an opportunity. And then she was just so special and so sweet and so strong and wonderful. And the way she looks back on everything, I think is really profound and probably applicable to the way a lot of people are moving through the world right now. And she's just really the best.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you have any anxiety?

[Monica Padman]

So my anxiety was because this just happened. So we had a guest on, and I went and listened to their first episode, and they were. Or he was on right out of the Gates.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so I was like.

[Dax Shepard]

I wanted to listen to it so.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't repeat all the same questions.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Sure.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, oh, boy.

[Dax Shepard]

I was much worse at this.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. I did think, oh, that was really early. I don't know how it's gonna hold up. But she. I just think she carries it. She's worth a listen if you haven't heard it or re. Listen if you have.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But these have.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Go easy on us if it's bad.

[Monica Padman]

These have become a little bit like.

[Dax Shepard]

Past movies I've been in where it's just like, I'm terrified to listen. I'm not sure if I suck, and it brings all that up.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I get it, okay? But she's a special lady, so please enjoy. Monica Lewinsky.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Monica Lewinsky]

He's an archer expert. He's an alchemist man.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

He's anchoring.

[Monica Padman]

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Monica. Don't be threatened. We have another Monica today.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Ooh, monies.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, it's gonna get really complicated. This is now the third. Well, second Monica guess, but third Monica in the ae. I don't even know her call letter sphere.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes, yes.

[Monica Padman]

Monica Lewinsky is an American activist. She's a television personality and she is also anti bullying ambassador to the Diana award anti bullying program and on the advisory board of Project Rocket. And of course, she is here specifically because October is national bullying prevention month. And so she is making the rounds to spread the word on that, which is a wonderful thing to bring attention to. And this is just an incredibly wonderful interview with tons of honesty and vulnerability.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. Emotional openness. And I admire her a ton.

[Monica Padman]

Me too.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

For sharing her experience and her story in hopes that other people can feel good.

[Monica Padman]

It's incredible.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

But this is just really one of the more beautiful conversations we've had and we thank, thank her a ton for coming in. So please enjoy Monica Lewinsky. When you're like, just asked benign questions, I feel like I would at this point if I were you would be just always looking for the little bit of leadingness of it. Like, do you feel generally like, do you have your guard up on some level when you're just conversing like someone's probably going to try to lead you somewhere?

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think it totally depends. So if I feel comfortable in a situation like Right now, I feel comfortable. So I came in, I felt comfortable with Monica. And by the way, am I like, the first Monica? Monica. Monica Potter.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Potter. We've had Monica Potter.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I was thinking I was not in the attic, though.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

We did a live show with her. So attic, first of all.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I've become good at reading people, which I think most people who end up as public people end up having to be.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Also, add, like, trauma survivors get good spidey senses so that they're not wounded again.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Although, you know, this is sort of non sequitur. But someone said to me, I saw this shaman in New York who was amazing a few weeks ago, and she said something to me about how people who have survived trauma, they can't be okay unless everyone else is okay in the room.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And feel safe. Like, that's how they feel safe, is that everyone else feels okay. And I was like, oh, that's 100% me, you know?

[Monica Padman]

Meaning, like, if they're uncomfortable with your trauma, you feel the need to put them at ease about it before you can be at ease at it or just.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, I think it's just a layer. It's just kind of a layer of how people operate in the world. So not even necessarily people being comfortable with my trauma, But I don't feel safe unless everyone else feels comfortable.

[Monica Padman]

I got you.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right, Right. So rather. So some people might come into a situation and. And think, okay, how do I need to feel safe in this? Like, here's what I need. Do, do, do, do, do. For me, it would be, I need everyone else to. To feel okay in order for me to feel safe in a situation.

[Monica Padman]

Because for you, is fear really contagious? Like, let's say there's four of us right now. You know, we're talking, and you notice Rob is over there, like, and he's shaking, and he's like. He's got pizza sweat. Are you going to take that on or are you gonna go, oh, just. He's going through something. God knows what.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I totally take it on. Like, I went on. The person who was interviewing me was more nervous than I was. And so all their nervous tics started coming out. And initially I was reading it as sort of this person kept scowling. And I was like, oh, fuck, I'm saying the wrong thing. I'm never gonna get this job. Do, do, do. And then eventually I realized, oh, these are nervous tics, you know? So I thought, okay, so now I've gotta make this person feel comfortable.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Which is exhausting.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Now Trauma in general is exhausting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I keep rediscovering all the time. I'm never assuming that the person's thing is their issue. Right. It's gotta be all about me because the whole world is about me and I'm at the center of the universe.

[Monica Lewinsky]

But I'm assuming you're in solipsistic club.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So 90 plus percent of us walking around are solely thinking of ourselves, and we're responding to our own thoughts and fears. And the other person isn't really even in the equation other than that they've set off this, you know, dominoes of fear in that person. Right. Like, it takes a very healthy, confident person to feel that way. I just aspire to have that feeling all the time.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. That's.

[Monica Padman]

We can just take people's behavior for what it is, their behavior.

[Monica Lewinsky]

But I think we, you know, I don't know if this'll make sense, but. So I had to do a lot of work over the years around my relationship to material things like hoarding. I'm not real hoarder, capital H, but sort of, I like to joke. I had clutter from my decluttering books. I mean, so it was just, you know, and I worked over the years with somebody who actually has a background in psychology. And it's been an amazing process to sort of see as things have changed for me, things I'm ready to let go of. But I had this one experience where I was helping friends of mine move because they were remodeling. And it was like, why do you have this case of unopened ball jars for jam that you're gonna pay more money storing than you could just buy it again. But it's like, no, no, no, no. We have to keep those and broken things and all those things. And so I. Where I was able to, I could see, because I had no attachment, I had no energy towards these things, how easy it was for me to think about letting go of them or categorizing them in what way?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, for lack of a better word, be objective about the whole thing.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And so. And I think, as opposed to my own shit, which I had a story about everything and had to tell that story. And I think that kind of reflects in a way what you're saying about just those two very different positions.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Your material stuff. Both Monicas could maybe bond on this. Monica has shared with me that when life is feeling particularly, particularly chaotic or out of her control, a very simple act she can take control of is finding something she likes Paying for it, taking it home. Am I explaining it correctly?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. I can in that moment have the thing I want when there are other things in the world that I want that I can't have.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Sure.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

So it's just a quick way to get some control. It lasts for like an hour and then it goes away.

[Monica Lewinsky]

But, you know, then you get. Do you do the return thing? Because then you get a whole different set of chemicals of the return of like. Oh, it's like losing weight. I just lost five pounds. Exactly.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I actually don't do that because I'm late. I'm like too lazy to go back to the store.

[Monica Lewinsky]

So then I'll return them for you.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Great, Great. This is a good solution.

[Monica Padman]

You have to wonder if some brilliant economists could actually put a number on what part of the economy is just servicing this cycle for people.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, it's true.

[Monica Padman]

Dying and returning and all that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah. So an example would be I had every single article that I read for my master's thesis. Like, I kept everything. Even if I didn't cite it in my paper, I still had it. And that was really connected to sort of all the anxiety I had around people thinking I was stupid, you know, and so it was the safety or all these books that I bought when I was in graduate school that I never fucking read, you know, and it was like uncreased on the thing. But look, look, I'm smart. I'm smart. I'm not a dumb bimbo.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And eventually in the last few years, eventually I was sort of in a place where I was like, oh, I actually don't really need these anymore, which is fascinating. So I think I had read in one of those decluttering books about that we keep things because we're afraid we're not going to be provided for in the. And so that was really interesting to me too. But I agree that the shopping high.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Or the, the control aspect of it.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, I don't think I've thought of it that way, but that would 100% be me.

[Monica Padman]

I feel like a twin to you after telling that part of your story. Because I have somewhere in our garage huge milk crates of every single story I wrote in college. Like every essay I wrote and all the research and everything. Similarly. Cause I have a big hang up about I'm not dumb and everyone thinks I'm dumb.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Okay, you're not dumb. I'm just gonna tell you.

[Monica Padman]

The other day though, I said it's not rational so Einstein could come out of the ground, he could ascend and Tap me on the shoulder and go, you're the only person that's ever been as smart as me on planet Earth. I still need everyone's approval. You can't bring logic to bear on a fear of being dumb or any of our fears, really. I mean, I guess there is some cognitive behavioral therapy steps you could take, but just in general, your fears aren't rational to begin with.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think there's an element of healing and shifting that kind of happens. And then maybe you're ready to have somebody help you try to alleviate that fear.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I agree that. I don't think just because you have a fear and somebody sits down and says to you, oh, you really shouldn't have that fear anymore, that that's gonna now. But I also think, too, that, you know, that there are a lot of fears that come from how I describe it. I don't know that, you know, my trauma psychiatrist would agree, but, I mean, I sort of think with trauma, it's like we kind of each create our own file folders. We make our decision on how we store, like, traumas. Right. So you and I could have the same traumatic experiences, but we might file them in different folders in different ways. Right.

[Monica Padman]

And you see this with siblings a ton.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, exactly. And so I think sometimes what happens, too, is that we'll sort of see that top fear. We may not even recognize in ourselves that actually it's connected to all these other fears that have happened. And so it may seem illogical to someone else, but it's really not to us because it's based on these other experiences we've had too.

[Monica Padman]

But it's like geology. It's just another layer on top of another layer on top of. Before you get down to the foul ingredient, there's so many other things in between there. So you grew up here roughly.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Brentwood. Ish.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I was born in San Francisco, and then I was raised here in, actually, Beverly Hills. And then my parents divorced and my dad moved to Brentwood.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay. What age were you when they divorced?

[Monica Lewinsky]

I was 14.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know that there's an ideal time. I would say, though, that I am grateful to have gone through it at three, because I didn't, like, I didn't long for my dad or pine for him. I was like, I don't know. He wasn't here. Still not here. You know, like, it didn't really bother me. But I would imagine at 14, when your life is the most turbulent, you have new hormones, people are dating, people are getting attention for Things maybe not an ideal time for disruption.

[Monica Lewinsky]

It was more painful in some ways for me because I think I lived with an illusion of how I wanted my family to be. I mean, I was. I mean, by all kind of markers, I had a great upbringing and wonderful parents, and I have an amazing younger brother and never worried about a roof over my head or food on the table. So very privileged that way. But I also think that my parents are two wonderful people who were not a great match.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And that was pretty evident.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Pretty hard to be around.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Pretty hard to be around, but I think also pretty self evident. Even now when people meet, they're kind of like, how were your parents married? You know? But they both bring great things to the children.

[Monica Padman]

Well, your mother was an author or is an author, and your father was or is an oncologist.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah. So actually she was an urban planner before she had kids. And then she became kind of lead parent. And my dad is still a practicing radiation oncologist in his story.

[Monica Padman]

There's a lot of talk lately about inheriting trauma, which is starting to get more and more compelling. The first one was here. I was like, what are you talking about? But now. And it's getting more compelling. But I don't think it's irrelevant that your father is first generation of a family that fled Nazi Germany as Jews and then went to where? El Salvador, somewhere in South America.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Well done.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. And then came here.

[Monica Lewinsky]

So he came here at 14.

[Monica Padman]

Right. So he had to have inherited from his parents a very realistic fear, to your point, of not having enough in the future, that you might not have enough in the future. And even worse, you might be having to escape someplace in the future. Once that's a part of your worldview, I don't know how you shake that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think too, probably the way it also really shaped me was the kind of Germanic background and I think the kind of German Jew identity. It's like, you're German before you're Jewish.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, so where other cultures. Your Jewish identity, you may lead with that. There's this. I'm probably gonna botch it up, which you can fact check.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I will.

[Monica Padman]

You're allowed to make mistakes here. Just to let you know.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Thank you. I'll do them. I was like, really authoritatively saying something like, she's wrong.

[Monica Padman]

Mistakes are encouraged.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah. It's a saying of the tallest poppy gets cut off first. Some version of that. And so that was. I was kind of raised with one parent who that was their, you know, don't make waves. You know, sort of blend in. Hi. Don't try to be special. And then I had another parent who came from Russian background, but my grandmother was Russian but raised in China. And then my mom was actually raised in Tokyo and my aunt was born there. So I have this very eclectic family background. And I think from my mom, it was very much about trying to find.

[Monica Padman]

Your specialness, adventure and discovery and.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yes, and so. And she lost her dad at a very early age. So she was 15. So both my parents had these big life changes at 14 and 15. My dad moving from his home country of El Salvador, where he was born, to German parents, and my mom losing her dad when they were living in Tokyo. It was kind of always these conflicting messages which really played into my self worth and self esteem that was low.

[Monica Padman]

Have you from a young age been what we would just label generically as aromantic? Are you good at whipping up fantasies, living in a fantasy?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yes. In the last few years it's just started to become really clear to me around a lot more brokenness that I had from much younger years. Which makes sense as to why I sort of already liked a boy in kindergarten.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right, Yes. That's something I feel like we have in common, is that I was very early on very active in pretend, my imagination, the roles I was playing. And obviously to escape things that I was not enjoying and prematurely very interested in girls. Lost my virginity at 12 in seventh grade. You know, like always very sexual, always into falling in love. Like for a seventh grade, I was listening to Psychedelic Furs over and over again and all the new wave music. And I just wanted to be like run over by a steamroller with love.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, I mean, I think very much for me it's been, especially the last few years has felt a bit like memento where. Well, why would I have made those choices at that point? Like, that makes no sense for a 14 year old to do that. So there must have been something before that. And then it's kind of like, okay, but I was also doing that at this age and this age and this age. And why, when I was 13, did I have a boyfriend that I broke up with because I thought it wasn't real. Cause we didn't fight, you know what I mean? But it's also, I think, I don't know if this is your experience at all. And I don't know if you have trauma in your background. Monica, but.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

No, we have some scheduled.

[Monica Lewinsky]

We'll lend you some of ours.

[Monica Padman]

Monica has trauma. Monica was someone trying to hide her identity desperately in A mostly white community of Duluth, Georgia.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

And yeah, hard. I mean, there was hard stuff. I don't, I guess I don't, I don't know. I've never thought of it in the terms of trauma before, but there's always hard stuff. Everyone has hard stuff, I think, you.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Know, but I think having third dimension.

[Monica Padman]

Actively try to downplay who you are from the get go is very stressful and traumatic. I do personally, but I'll let you decide if you're saying that.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, I'll get back to you.

[Monica Padman]

So this notion like, ugh, this isn't real, we're not even fighting, is that either modeled on your parents relationship, which you were observing, or are you watching movies by which that's the high water mark of being in love? Like, where does the notion even come from?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Good question. Probably both. I think both. There are a lot of behaviors that I engage in which drive me crazy. And even when I think they like, oh, I've therapized this out, I'm not gonna do this again, I'm more mature. And then you catch yourself and you're like, wow, here we are again. I'm doing this thing that I thought I would never fucking do and I'm doing it. Yay me. But I think the other part of it that comes with that, which is interesting and I don't know if you've experienced this, which is there's sort of that side of you which is sort of stays with it or is tenacious or doesn't give up, which can drive you crazy in certain situations. It's also the thing that saves you. It's also the thing that's part of your resilience.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And so that, you know, you keep showing up, you get out of bed, all of those things. And so I think that's where it's one of the things in this last stint with the therapist I've been with for the last five years that she's really gotten me to see of sort of trying to recognize, you know, all these things that I would beat myself up with, that there can be this side which has helped me survive. And so I need to hold both of them. And as much as I may disdain some aspect of one thing, I have to respect the other too.

[Monica Padman]

I totally agree. I think all your character defects are the opposite side of a coin of some virtue you have. And I'm just always trying to minimize the downside of these attributes and kind of, you know, bolster the good sides of it. Fantasizing and creating fantasies I think for me it's a way to regulate your emotions because you're not comfortable in whatever emotion you're having currently. And so when you engage that gear to go into Peter Pan land, it's a way to correct your own chemistry in your brain. And so it's like a very useful survival y thing to do, I think.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think underneath every everything with some sort of fantasy is actually hope. There's this strange alchemic combination of emotions one has when you have to survive something painful, whether that's just a breakup or world public humiliation, which is, you know, sort of. You need a little bit of denial. You've got to have a little bit of resilience. But then there's also the pain that you're feeling. So I do think that sometimes what can happen is that it is a self preservation mode that some part of you recognizes. I actually can't control contain this much pain in this moment. I have to chop it up into.

[Monica Padman]

Little pieces or disassociate or do something.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

And I want to make one statement because often I'll say this way too late. So generally this would have been a great preamble, which is, you and I will talk about things today and we will talk about our shortcomings and our failures and we will attempt to explain how they came about, which is in no way to excuse anything that you and I have done that's regrettable. So I just want to be very clear to anyone that's listening that we're on a path of this is how we got from A to C. This is by no means saying we have no culpability in arriving at sea.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Absolutely.

[Monica Padman]

But I just wanted to say that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, no, no, no. I'm glad you did. I think that's really important. I think what becomes challenging for us in sort of public conversations is that you'll have people using the same language for two different reasons.

[Monica Padman]

100%.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And so I think you could have somebody who might come out and say whatever they're admitting to and they're really trying to help people understand. And it's a part of a process of owning their culpability. But you can also have other people.

[Monica Padman]

Bullshit excuse.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly. Sort of like PR people. And I think we're living in times where, whether they realize it or not, people feel that they sense that. They don't quite know how to identify it. But I do think we see that a lot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And in fact, did you happen to catch this episode of this American Life entitled Spine?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Oh, I have the Name of it right here.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I know the show, but I haven't heard this.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Okay, so the creator, it's called Get a Spine.

[Monica Padman]

Get a Spine.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Oh, I thought you said spy. I love a good spy book.

[Monica Padman]

We thoroughly recommend everyone listen to it. It's called Get a Spine. And the show, creator and runner of community, Dan Harmon. Dan Harmon, who was later fired from his position, not for these allegations, but he was fired. He gives an apology to a woman he sexually harassed for like three years on his podcast. It's like nine minutes long. And it's seven. It's seven minutes long. It's incredible in a myriad of ways. And it is one to be distinguished as the right way to own your stuff, you know? So anyways, when we think about times where it seems like bullshit and sometimes where it's like a true amends and a true inventory of your behavior, I think we can tell. I like to think we can tell.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think so too. I've had this interesting journey and I think, no shit, right? But I think also too, as a woman, it's been very interesting to kind of observe. I think that there have been times where I felt, gosh, I still feel regret. Right? I mean, I will feel regret every day for the rest of my life. I engage in behavior which hurt a lot of. So not only my family, other people's families, like chaos for the country. So there's so much there. And then there's also. There are times where I've also felt, do I have to keep saying I'm sorry because I'm a woman?

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know that it's sort of that men are kind of left to sort of. They say sorry once. They're like, oh, no, I said sorry, I'm done. I don't need to process that. I don't need to think about that more.

[Monica Padman]

So I have made many apologies my day. And by the way, I'm making those amends because. Because you're saying like, you still feel regret. The aim for me has been to not walk around with regret when I'm giving you my amends. I want to offer you an opportunity to tell me what I can do to make it better. And if I can, I will do that. And if I can't, I just couldn't do it. Which is not to say that I'll not continue for the rest of my life to acknowledge that that was bad. But I am putting regret and shame away from my life because I can't live with it. It's too cancerous in Me to walk around always feeling shame and regret. So I think we need a path towards absolption or whatever you, you actually get in church when they, you know, like not just, you know, I admitted it and you're absolved. Like it's over now.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

So part of me thinks you should not be walking around feeling shame and regret over something that you've apologized for, processed, and did all this stuff 20 odd years ago or almost 30 years ago.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, no, 20.

[Dax Shepard]

20.

[Monica Lewinsky]

It was 20 last year.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, 20 last year. I get real confused because I always think that the 80s were 20 years ago and they're not. They're 40 years. Wow. I do. What, you know, what I think is helpful is I think people came to know you at a certain age in a certain situation. And I would imagine people never stop to go, oh, I wonder who the person was before that. So I do want to quickly just say who the person you were before that. So you grew up in Beverly Hills and dad did relocate to Brentwood and you went to a couple different high schools. You went to like a prep school.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, so I bounced around a lot. I went to El Rodeo for kindergarten, then I went to John Thomas Dye in Bel Air for a few years, then to Hawthorne, then to Beverly, then to Bel Air Prep, which, you know, I always laugh as quintessential la because it was in West Hollywood, like only in la. Right.

[Monica Padman]

Bel Air Prep.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Fancy. You know, Pinky up. And then it became some other name and now it's closed. And then I have to admit, when.

[Monica Padman]

I read Bel Air Prep, I thought you were up in Bel air.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly, exactly.

[Monica Padman]

12Th grade.

[Monica Lewinsky]

That's the whole point. It's like, oh, look, I went to Bel Air Prep. Take me fancy college.

[Monica Padman]

But you also went to Beverly Hills High, Right?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

For how many years? Three years.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Three years, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. And this is basically at the time of Beverly Hills 9 021.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly. I mean, it was a very. I always joke that I kind of never fit in in LA because, like, I'm a brunette and my boobs are real. So it's like I had to sort of. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

There was an aesthetic that was prized in this school.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Oh, sure. And I, Yeah, let's not forget I was chubby. So, like, I always struggled with my weight. And so particularly, you know, it's so interesting, I had thought for a really long time that I had gained all this weight. So I struggled with my weight when I was in grade school, but then I sort of got a handle on it. And my freshman year, when My parents separated, I put on £50. And I'd always for years thought it was connected to my parents getting divorced. But one of the things that I sort of came to understand in the last several years, we didn't have language for it, but I had actually had an unwanted sexual experience when I was 14, so which was right this summer, right before my parents had separated.

[Monica Padman]

And were you taking the approach, I've heard this where people who have been sexually assaulted want to never be sexually assaulted again, so they try to make themselves invisible to men. Who would want to do that? Could you even be conscious of that?

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think the psyche is so complex and so fucking clever, right?

[Dax Shepard]

It is so clever.

[Monica Lewinsky]

So I think that there's this element that may have been possible, but on some very deep level, but I was still interested in boys, right? It could be true.

[Monica Padman]

You can have goals, you can have wants, and you can be taking actions that are in complete opposition to that and there's no logic. There are moments in the day you feel strong and there are moments in the day you feel weak and you're making different plans in those different times and it can all add up to making zero sense, but all be happening at once.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I think it was hard to unpack too because it was. The person stopped when I said stop. And you know, it's just like consent wasn't a thing then. And I have liked this person, but there were all sorts of things that were inappropriate about it, including like a really big age difference. And so for many years I sort of, I was like, Well, I was 19 when I lost my virginity and do, do, do. But technically I wasn't, you know, and so I had always chalked up my, you know, a lot of the struggles I had in high school to my parents divorce being contentious. But I think it probably had a lot more to do with this incident that happened that I didn't even know how to classify it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I think I made it all okay because that was the easiest thing.

[Monica Padman]

There's really no benefit to even isolating it. So one thing could have caused it to reach critical mass. Either situation could have caused critical mass.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I had struggled with my weight before.

[Monica Padman]

Can I ask you this because as a parent of two daughters, I question this a lot because parents in LA are hyper aware of not triggering eating disorders right now, now, today, now. And I do ask myself, it's very well intentioned and I think they're in general doing the right thing. But at the same time I'm wondering how, how much of that was self imposed by what you were seeing around you in your social circle, in your peer group and in school. And how much of it do you believe was maybe imprinted on you from mom and dad?

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think it was 50. 50. 50.

[Monica Padman]

50. Okay.

[Monica Lewinsky]

There were a number of different factors. So one was I developed early. So I don't know why we don't have tests now for young girls and boys to sort of know chemically when they're going into puberty. Why we wait because it's like it starts before but we sort of don't consider it until their pH. You could totally fact check this because I have no idea what I'm saying is right or I'm talking out of my ass. This is my own theory. Like that the chemical change must start earlier than necessarily the physical change. But we don't deem it puberty until we see the physical change. I had whatever the predisposition for my weight issues genetically, but then there was also I hit puberty earlier. So I was constantly comparing my body to other girls bodies who had this incredible metabolism or who didn't have boobs yet or whatever that was. And so I think there were kind of those issues. But I also, I read, you know, Teen Seventeen magazine. You know, I was always reading. Exactly. Always, you know, reading. I think I went on my first diet at maybe 11 or 12.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. This is so brutal.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah. It's so hard. It's heartbreaking though.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

It is.

[Monica Lewinsky]

It's heartbreaking because it's like, why can't we just have that message of we're okay? Like we're okay. However we are.

[Monica Padman]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Wobby Wob Hollis]

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[Monica Padman]

Oh, really?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Lewinsky]

I don't know if you guys saw Anderson Cooper did this documentary a few years ago called being 13 and he had to all these 13 year olds phones or social behavior. And the one thing that stuck with me was that kids were taking on average 150 pictures for one that they would post.

[Monica Padman]

Oh wow, oh wow.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And that just broke my fucking heart in terms of like what's the negative self talk in the 149 that they didn't Choose.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, and that's like, you know. So I mean, I think we see this kind of. It's a strange thing now where we've got parents who are so much more aware. Aware of kind of not body shaming their kids, aware of trying to teach them nutrition in ways that are healthier. And at the same time we have all sorts of other social aspects which are creating those problems that are making them even more insecure.

[Monica Padman]

It's multifaceted at the very least. Now you and I share something that's very rare. I don't know that I've interviewed anyone. We both have associate degrees from Santa Monica College, so. But you ended up transferring or after you graduated, you went to Lewis and.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Clark, right, In Portland. What I loved about Portland was, I think that was where I feel like I found myself as a person. So I don't know if it was a combination of kind of now I, you know, not living at home, I'm in another city slash state. And it's a very different environment there. I got a lot from nature in Portland. People are real. There were sort of galleries being open late, so I felt like I found a lot more of myself there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And you majored in psychology, Correct. And can I give you my anecdotal stereotype and you can correct me if I'm wrong?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I found most of the folks in psychology were people who like just desperately needed some therapy. Some therapy. And were like really needed to figure out what was going on in their mind. Yeah, like I think I just observed that. It seemed like many people that were drawn to that major were like, you know, probably. Yeah, I can say in a non pejorative way.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Just very interested in their internal life.

[Monica Lewinsky]

For all my friends, you know, actually it was probably more in graduate school. So my graduate degree was in social psych. And I think I saw, maybe because I was older and now had had all these crazy life experiences, but I saw more experiences in graduate school where I was both learning and self analyzing, you know, of just understanding. It's like, oh, a threatened identity. Oh, okay. I experienced that. Or you know, power differentials and you know, so many different kinds, biases and understanding things. I'm sure there was some part of me that was interested in psychology because I was fucked up.

[Monica Padman]

You needed some healing and hopefully you would figure out some method. It sounds interestingly to me just from what you've told me about your childhood and whatnot, that you are both confident and insecure.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Is that 1000% right? I was always Lucky. I mean, I think I went through some periods when I was much younger that I didn't have friends or I was bullied a little bit. But by and large I've always been good at friendship.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I've had friends, but I think particularly where men were concerned, I was very insecure. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Was there a mental trick you did where it was like you were insecure yet you were somehow outgoing towards men? Or were you afraid to even approach men?

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think it was probably a strange combination of moments where I would feel old, but then my insecurities would regulate how I responded to reactions or to things that happened.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh. Did you, you had boyfriends in college, I assume up in Oregon?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, but yes, but you can also.

[Monica Padman]

Just go, I don't understand why you want to know about my boyfriends and I.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, no, no. It's just complicated. I think part of me, the self conscious part of me is like, wow, I kind of sound like a big loser in this podcast. No, my God, no, not at all. Dating's already hard, but, well, I can.

[Monica Padman]

Just say personally, I had this body dysmorphic view of my whole being and yet I was so outwardly confident and I would talk to any girl and I would get them laughing. You know, I did all these things that are really counterintuitive to how I felt.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But then my trick was like, oh, no, you're not gonna ever get anyone with this. So you gotta lead with this personality. Like if you're gonna snag somebody, you gotta get out there and you gotta have a bullhorn born of charisma or you're not. Now, mind you, I wasn't accurate on either assessment of my personality, how attractive my personality was, or how unattractive my physical was. But it was a weird paradox of feelings versus my behavior.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, that was how I was and kind of goes back to that. You know, don't stand out, be special. So I think there was. That was kind of always the dichotomy of your. Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Kind of exactly.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Always impacting my behavior that way. But I had experiences where the popular boy would like me in high school, but then I also had experiences where somebody basically worse than standing me up kind of left me standing outside a theater because he saw his friend and walked away with his friend and didn't come back. And I was in a heavier phase and his mom had later said, oh, well, he was embarrassed to be seen with you, which is just like this.

[Monica Padman]

And just really just laid it out there.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, I'm like, I'm a teenager. So I mean, it just. So that's, you know, but that's kind of that fertile ground for when several years later, I think when I was in D.C. and getting this kind of attention from somebody who. I'm not that girl. I'm not the homecoming queen. I'm not the girl that the guy likes. I'm the friend of the girl that the guy likes. Like, that's me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. He's the ultimate prom king of the world.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And so I think it was. There were a lot of reactions and behaviors I engaged in because there was a part of me that was like, oh, this is what that girl is supposed to do. Because a lot of times when you're not that person, especially when you're younger and your brain's not fully developed and haven't had life experiences, you wanna be that person, right?

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Sure.

[Monica Padman]

Well, again, you have a broader romantic narrative you're spinning. And then for that narrative to work, the characters within the narrative have to act a certain way to hold up the story.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. If you do have self esteem issues, it's not like people walk around with self esteem issues and think, oh, I'm so happy I have these deficiencies. Right. Like, you basically, on some level, you're kind of always looking for something to plug that feeling, to assuage it.

[Monica Padman]

So when you got this internship, did you have any interest in politics or were you like, oh, this is just an amazing adventure. Who wouldn't go to this, right?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Well, I was a psychology major and it was a combination of a number of things that I ended up in the internship. One was we had family friend whose grandson had done it the year before. I'd never even heard about it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

So he said, oh, I'll be happy to give you a recommendation. I worked a whole bunch when I was in high school and college, and one of the jobs I had was selling men's neckties. And I had a customer who had worked on the Clinton campaign who then was now hired. And so he also was somebody who recommended me. And then I wrote an essay about how as a psychology major, you study the mind of the individual and the White House is the mind of the country. And so I think that that also had an element. So I really wasn't interested in politics aside from the kind of cursory level like, oh, an election is happening, but.

[Monica Padman]

There'S a monkey thing that happens, right? Like a primate thing, which is that we are aware of status at all times and that is the pinnacle of status. Like that Building is the most status laden piece of real estate in America.

[Monica Lewinsky]

It is. I'm very affected by like the aesthetics of my environment. And so one of the things that I didn't expect to happen was to fall in love with the environment there. It's beautiful. There's just this, it's like smells of eucalyptus.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, really?

[Monica Lewinsky]

And there's just a. I'm very woo woo and spiritual and there's. I didn't know how to identify it at the time, but there's a very special energy there. I mean, yes, it makes sense, sure.

[Monica Padman]

That some of the finest people to ever live have passed through there. Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And decisions have been made that have affect millions and millions of people over hundreds of years.

[Monica Padman]

But I'm always looking at it from the outside. Here's what I. The cynical side of my brain is always like this. I all growing up, I looked at Playboy. I love my grandpa's Playboys. I hid them in my luggage. My mom would find them. She never shamed me, thank God. Playboy Mansion. Was it that Shangri La? And I desperately wanted to be there. I got invited at some point and as I was pulling up, I'm like, wow, look at, look at this place. It's amazing. The yard's incredible. And then I was walking up and I was like, I don't think that.

[Dax Shepard]

Doorknob seems to be broken.

[Monica Padman]

And then I went inside and I was like, oh, these phones are from 79 and they don't work and no one's washed them. And oh, half the switches don't work.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, it was this big, like.

[Monica Padman]

Shattering of my illusion. Like the place was just in general disrepair and it was kind of grody in there. And I was like, oh, damn it. And so the cynical part of my brain's like, if I get in the White House, am I gonna start noticing like, oh, they're not really. But I'm relieved to hear that. No, it is a bit of an Eden, right?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, even the fact that it smells like eucalyptus, I can promise you that the mansion did not smell like eucalyptus.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Not gonna ask, but it smelled like that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, no, it smelled like just despair. If I can give a emotional smoke.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I mean, I think there were, you know, there were a lot of dynamics that were going on there that surprised me. It was very interesting for me once. I then shipped off to the Pentagon and one of the things I came to realize was how the commodity of information was so different between these two parts of the government and at the White House. It was if I knew something and you didn't, that was sort of made me more powerful. Exactly. But at the Pentagon, if I know something and you don't, our boss might be up Schitt's creek.

[Monica Padman]

So it's a completely different culture.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, very, very different culture. And information was valued in different ways.

[Monica Padman]

Was it hard to register that you were there at the White House? I mean, you basically, like, teleported into someone else's life. In a weird way, it was.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I mean, and really, it was supposed to be a pit on the way to graduate school. So I wanted to get a Ph.D. in forensic psychology and work for the FBI.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. But I have to imagine there had to be a period that was totally Alice in Wonderland or something.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think what was interesting for me too is that my first trip to D.C. had been with my aunt. And I remember we had passed by the old Executive Office Building. And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, it's so beautiful. Can you imagine going to work every day there?

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Monica Lewinsky]

And then, Shazam.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Ooh.

[Monica Padman]

That's a great logistical course. So I imagine it's a pain in the ass to get in and out of the White House. Is it cumbersome to go to work there? Do you have to, like, allot an extra 45 minutes to get in?

[Monica Lewinsky]

So as an intern, it's a pain because you have a temporary pass. So every time you come in and out, like, you have to show your ID and you get the temporary pink eye intern pass. Once I became an employee and I had a permanent pass, so I had a blue pass, which was covetous. That's like. Exactly. That's the sort of the all access backstage. So I think that's kind of the. Talk about status. That's the ultimate status symbol in D.C.

[Monica Padman]

And if you have that, then you just literally you park somewhere on the grounds of the White House and then you.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Oh, I didn't have a parking spot. Now you either, either. My mom dropped me off. I looked at home.

[Monica Padman]

So your mom relocated to D.C. because you were going there?

[Monica Lewinsky]

No. So my mom's side of the family. My grandma was the matriarch, and we sort of. Everybody has to live in the same place. That's just sort of how it is. And so my aunt and her family moved to the East Coast. So then my mom and my brother moved. And of course then my grandma moved, and then we all had. My grandma lived in the Watergate. My mom lived in the Watergate. My aunt was living in the country, but she had a pied. A terre. There. So it was sort of. And that's happened in New York. It just happens everywhere.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Lewinsky]

That's how it goes.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So you were with Mom.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I guess that's a layer I had not comprehended any of this.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, that's.

[Monica Padman]

So I read a Vast Conspiracy that was called.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Was that Jeffrey Toobin's book?

[Monica Padman]

Yes, it was a book all about the scandal. Right prior to that. I think I just had a very cursory understanding of what all happened, other than having been alive and lived it real time. I'm a big lefty Democrat. I loved Clinton. I was one of those people going like, this is insane. You can impeach someone over sexual stuff. Like what? So I was so entrenched in that camp. I think that's probably where my thinking stopped on all of it. I also very much real time thought that what was happening to you was horrendous.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Thank you.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And so, you know, I was. I was probably predisposed because I was a liberal Democrat to be on the side of you guys. Right. Yet I am. I like to think objective enough. If I put myself in the mindset of being on the right and already hating this guy and think he's done all this other shady shit, so I can recognize why people were mad about it. I can recognize why they feel betrayed by that and that a leader shouldn't do that and all those things. I can totally recognize that. But I guess what I was unaware of and what at least this book suggests is there was a conspiracy. There was a conspiracy to get him guilty of perjury. You have this woman, Linda Tripp. It's almost crazy to me that you actually know her and that all really happened to you. Like, I have heard those tapes, but sitting here with you as a human being, it's hard for me to even comprehend that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. I mean, talk about sort of like being exposed to your home truths. I mean, have your phone calls recorded without your permission, and it's just like, oh, no, I couldn't have said that. See a transcript. It's like, then you hear yourself, wow, I fucking said that about somebody I would get in front of a bus for, and I'm a catty bitch. And it just. It is. Seriously. I mean, yes.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I. At that time, even. I don't know how old were you at the time?

[Monica Lewinsky]

So I was 22 when the relationship started and 24 when the investigation started.

[Monica Padman]

Who among us can identify with having a friend that you confide in?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right?

[Monica Padman]

Everyone needs that. It is essential for our well being. You have your public life and what we'll talk about on this podcast. And then you have your very personal stuff where you need to air out all the embarrassing stuff, the shameful stuff, front stage, backstage. Yes. So we all have had best friends, and anyone can imagine that our best friend, in fact, wasn't a best friend and that our best friend was intending to write a book about us and that our best friend was recording us and leading us in, by all definitions, entrapping us. I like to think everyone could identify that as just a really horrendous act from one person. That again, I bet if I was benevolent enough, I bet she has her own host of things she's overcoming. I mean, it's interesting that in these investigations you will. Basically, it's cool to commit a crime in order to expose another crime. And in fact, there's no crime, really, with what you guys did. But if we can get you to lie about it, now we have an actual crime. So you're taking one thing that starts as not illegal. Having an affair. Sure. Shameful. All those things are true. Maybe there's moral imperatives, but legally, not an issue. No one's going to jail for an affair. Extramarital affair. Now, recording someone in Maryland without their permission is a crime. Entrapment is a crime. There are all these crimes that basically got committed, and I still don't understand legal, why she could commit a crime. And then the Justice Department goes to her and says, well, we're not gonna prosecute you for doing this illegal thing as long as we can now get all those transcripts. And now we can use those transcripts to.

[Monica Lewinsky]

But that's a whole justice system in general. I mean, there's. I think that's a real issue. I have the hypocrisy of the system. So, I mean, stepping outside of whatever happened to me.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

It's just. How can we say this behavior is wrong and should be punished, but that same behavior should not be punished if you're gonna help us get someone else.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

The fact that the interrogator is allowed to blatantly. I just talked to your friend Mike. He said you stabbed her.

[Monica Lewinsky]

How the fuck is that legal? Exactly. Or plea bargains. I mean, it's just a whole.

[Monica Padman]

Now you're like, okay, well, this person's saying, I committed the murder, so now I have to do something to get out of this. I've now got to choose a bad option to get out of this. So, yeah, it's crazy to me that Things can work that way.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I participated in this docu series that came out last year.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I watched an episode of it today, and it was really, really good.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Thanks. It was really hard to do, so I can imagine. I'm just kind of referencing that because they think that there was a very broad scope of people from that timeframe who were interviewed and that the goal of the series was to really map out all of these different perspectives and narratives that were unfolding real time for us there that we didn't have the perspective to see back to see kind of all the places where stories were. People's narratives were being braided together that we didn't realize or, you know, those things. So.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't. I don't know that everyone is aware of the fact, contextually, that there was a Paula Jones case going.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. Right. Starts with a sexual harassment case and.

[Monica Padman]

Paula Jones against Bill Clinton.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And the goal was to get to subpoena people, to get them in there so that they could then ask questions that would potentially put him in a position to lie about other stuff.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I believe so. And I think that there were a number of different motives that were going on for various people, I think, who were operating on that side. Some exactly as you just said, some who were kind of looking at a bigger picture of how do we basically set a perjury trap. And for almost everybody, I mean, many of us think, I would never lie under oath. But we also live in this country where we have these puritanical views about sex and almost, you know, asking someone about their sex life under oath is almost always a perjury trap. You know, I mean, it's like Jerry Seinfeld made this great joke about during that time where he said, you know, everybody lies about sex. If people didn't lie about sex, no one would have sex. Totally.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

100%.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think sometimes people don't remember. I didn't choose to step forward to talk about this. So I, in fact, got into trouble because I signed a false affidavit. So trying to deny that there was a layer where people didn't understand the level of detail that came out, that was also not my choice to share that. I had to share that legally. I was legally asked and in fact, had to give even more detail because of certain ways that other people chose to testify.

[Monica Padman]

Because everyone's trying to nail down what sexual relations means. So they then feel justified in hearing every single detail of every single thing that ever happened is that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

The reality is that there was not truth told. No Matter what the definition of sexual relations was.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

So that whole thing of like, oh, does this count as a, you know, does it or doesn't it? It doesn't matter. Given everything else that happened.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I've said before, I never understood why or how this became about oral sex. Because that wasn't just what happened. I don't want to get into a lot of the details. I think that was a big part of shame that I ended up having to carry for a long time as a young woman being labeled as somebody who was in this servicing relationship, it wasn't mutual.

[Monica Padman]

There's so many things happening to you at once. One of them is like the legal issues, One of them is an impeachment trial. And then one of them, I would imagine on an emotional level is you. To your point, you didn't meet someone in an alley, hook up and bail. You were in a emotional relationship with someone for a while that is now being reduced to this.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. Is now being examined through a lens that nobody. I mean, like, you know, maybe when you're first start dating someone, you're like, oh, we've done it this many times or, you know, it's such a strange way to not only as oneself to try to analyze something or unpack it, but even more bizarre to have other people talking about something which is normally so private.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I just can't even.

[Monica Padman]

As someone who is very vocally out loud about my sexuality and stuff, and I would say kind of hyper sexual, I still don't want someone to account for everything, every move I made or.

[Monica Lewinsky]

To take it from you. That's your agency.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, I mean, and that's part of consent in a very different way is sort of, you know, what we choose to share about ourselves and what we choose to keep private and with whom we share those aspects of ourselves.

[Monica Padman]

Now, the one thing that I'm deeply interested in about the ride you were on, I just can't imagine the highs and lows, just hourly and daily and the stress on your body and the cortisol and the adrenaline and all those things as much as like you were trying to prevent the worst thing from happening. Was there any relief in it finally just being like, fuck it great, it's all over, I'm the devil, it's over. I don't have to. Like when you have a secret and you're trying to keep a secret. Yeah, it's very stressful.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No, this was not a secret that I ever, you know. Yes, I may have confided in some of my friends. But this was not something I ever would have talked about publicly.

[Monica Padman]

Of course not. I don't think anyone in the world thinks the many accusations that have been leveled at you. I don't think I've ever at least heard someone suggest that you were trying to become famous or get attention. Oh, they have.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Trying to get attention, wanting to make money.

[Monica Padman]

I think what's interesting is I think that entire situation triggered something that no one's really gonna talk about, which is, you know, I don't know what the data was that year, but let's say it was probably 50% of all people in marriages are being cheated on one way or another. So you become the face for anyone who has had a spouse stray.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And you now become an embodiment of that hurt and pain and betrayal and all that stuff.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, I mean, I call myself a social canvas. I think the thing is, is that this story triggered so many archetypes for us. I think it was not just one narrative. I think there were a lot. So there was privileged upbringing, my weight. I was, you know, torn apart from my looks. So I mean, the slut shaming. So whether it, you know, the affair, the fallen woman. So I mean, they're just. We were kind of living in times, I think, where objectivity was just not really present. I mean, just I think along the lines it's interesting to. People will point out to me now, well, how could people have thought you were dumb? You had an internship in the White House.

[Monica Padman]

Right, right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Well, they did. I was called a stupid bimbo. I mean, I have serious trauma from when I was in grad school. I couldn't get up and present in front of a class. You know, you were asking me initially about how I judge people when people ask me a question. When I was in grad school, I was so. I had such imposter syndrome that anytime somebody asked me a question, I thought that they were actually trying to trick me or to see did I know that. You know, I was afraid to get help writing an essay because I thought it would expose me that I should have known something.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, 100%. You know, this was also. It was a really challenging situation, which I don't think we'd even be able to have nowadays. First of all, the cycle's so much shorter. Right. So this idea of there kind of being a year long story. But also because of legal reasons, I couldn't speak publicly. So I was very one dimensional for people. I was so young. There was Nothing else to hang. Hang an identity for me on. What had I been before I worked in the White House? A student. B hollered student. You know what I mean? Again, not to excuse my poor choices, but there were also a lot of people who were invested in making sure that the president didn't lose his job. And that meant that there were narratives that had to be spun, you know, that there were stories, and a lot of those people didn't know me. And then there were a lot of people who knew me well, who had no problem engaging in that kind of behavior.

[Monica Padman]

So you lived the Scarlet Letter, you know, a prophetical book about how we need to deal with issues of judgment and shaming and all that stuff. And it was a heightened book to make a point. And then what? Your real life experience was way beyond what that book did. So overnight, obviously, you're on TV all the time. You're. As I've heard you say before, maybe on John Oliver, even if you want to escape and watch Tonight show, you're gonna then see jokes about yourself endlessly. There was really no escape at all from that. I wonder, during that period, is your family the core, the only place you can go and feel remotely like yourself?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, I mean, my family was all I had, so I couldn't talk to most of my friends until after they had testified. So, I mean, I don't think I would have survived without my family. Although we weren't. I wasn't allowed to talk to my brother.

[Monica Padman]

You weren't?

[Monica Lewinsky]

No. For a long time.

[Monica Padman]

So what was the reasoning behind that?

[Monica Lewinsky]

To protect him legally.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So that he wouldn't be called in to.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, yeah. And he was a sophomore in college.

[Monica Padman]

He was, yes. Yeah. And that was rough for him, I assume.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, we talked earlier when you just got in here, it was like, there's your own guilt, and then there's the guilt of having affected the other people in your life who you love so much and kind of gotten them sucked into the whole thing.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I mean, it's one of the reasons I'm so unbelievably grateful for all the changes that have happened the last few years is that it's people stop my doctor, stop my dad in the hall and say something positive, or someone will have said something positive to Mike at work. And, you know, that alongside kind of whatever history might be told in a class teacher, show my TED Talk. So, I mean, it's pretty. You know, it's just unbelievably meaningful for me, 100%. And, you know, And I. And I've got a niece and nephew whom I adore. And they also have my last name.

[Monica Padman]

Right. One of the most profound things I heard you say was, I think it was on John Oliver. He said, you know, at any point did you decide to change your name? And your response was, did Bill Clinton have to change his name? Cause when he asked that question, I was like, yeah, go by whatever. Fucking Schlong. Schlanger.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, that's exactly the name I would have chosen.

[Monica Padman]

Monica Schlongslanger.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Monica Schlonger. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I was on that train of thought.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Your answer exposed to me how my first line of thinking will be one that was pretty much raised in a patriarchy. That. That's what I. I don't even consider that. Like, of course Bill Clinton didn't have to change his name.

[Monica Lewinsky]

But also, too, I think there's, you know, there were other layers of it, like, more logistical complications. Like, particularly at the time, if I had gone to the courthouse and tried to sign legal papers changing my name, that would have ended up in the press. So then I would have been like Prince, you know, Sally Smith, formerly known as Monica Lewinsky. So then what? Where would I go? And people would. I didn't even understand how that works. So I run into somebody I went to grade school with and I say, well, I don't go by that name.

[Monica Padman]

Anymore, but it shows a ton of resolve. I really think the easier way out would have been to attempt that.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I think the story was so big and it was such a huge change in my life, and my new normal was there was such a massive chasm between what my old normal and my new normal were that I think that there just wasn't room for that. I just had to kind of keep trying to move forward and keep trying to get back onto a developmental path. That my therapist at the time, that was always her goal was to sort of, how do we get you back on a developmental path of a 25 year old?

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, so what does that look like? And, you know, how am I gonna support myself and, you know, and find purpose and meaning in the world and try to find a relationship? Which I think was, you know, also something that I tried at the time. And I now look back on that period and I'm like, of course I couldn't have been in a serious relationship. Like, I dated people, I was involved, I fell in love, I cared about people. But. And I. And I actually think it was hard for some people who, who got to know me and cared about me to sort of reconcile the person they got to know with how the rest of the world saw me, you know. So that was also hard. And at younger ages and maybe careers not fully developed to step into all that. It's just I wouldn't have Stay tuned.

[Monica Padman]

For more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by Skims. We love Skims here on the pod. Monica, you just got some goodies from Skims, right?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I did. And in fact I was just talking about this last night at a girls dinner. We were talking about bras and I was really pushing Skims bras. Everyone who has them loves them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're always raving about them. They're comfy, they couldn't be more comfortable.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I'm told Skims has incredible bras, pretty much wearing one every day. Specifically the Fits Everybody T Shirt bra is my absolute favorite. So if you are in need for a new bra, go for the Fits.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

It'S not as if what you were being shamed for in public was having had an extramarital affair. You were being called a slut.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Which you were not.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No. Well, sometimes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And by the way, what is a slut?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right?

[Monica Padman]

Totally agree. It's fine to have tons of sex with people. No one should be called a slut.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Correct.

[Monica Padman]

But you were being called a slut, which no one should be called.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Well, because I mean, it was pejorative. So whenever you know, slut and tart and bimbo and horror and stupid, you're.

[Monica Padman]

Being called stupid and you're being body shamed. They deployed all of the weaponry that is against women. It's really just horrendously misogynistic.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Dehumanized. Yes.

[Monica Padman]

No one is talking about a man's weight in general. They're not doing that. They're not calling men sluts.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, I think. Correct. All of the women in the story experience that in different ways. I think that we as a society, we look at women in the public eye in a very different way than we do men.

[Monica Padman]

Now when you go through all of that, I think the odds of you coming through on the other side and being someone who could be in an interview or someone that has continued to pursue business, get a graduate Dea. Almost impossible to really imagine. I can't imagine. The fact that you have survived all this is just incredibly admirable. I think it's so rare. I doubt many of us have the strength to go through what you did.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I know it sounds kind of cliched, but I really do think none of us knows how strong we are until we're tested. I do think that. I mean, I'm great. I've been able to survive. There have been many, many moments where I didn't think I could make it through. And it could be the strangest. You know, I think of it, is that it's a small moment of grace that, you know, makes you go right instead of left. The phone rings. Somebody who doesn't even know you're in pain and you don't. Not even. Wouldn't even necessarily say. But that connection.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. What were you doing at that time to comfort yourself?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Oh, during the investigation? Eating, for sure.

[Monica Padman]

And then all the. All the, like, press that followed. Cause it was. It didn't go away in two seconds either.

[Monica Lewinsky]

No.

[Monica Padman]

Right. It was. It stayed for years. Right. It was years of justice.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Well, I think the. You know, it wasn't officially over. So it started January of 98. It wasn't kind of quote, unquote, officially over until he was acquitted. He was impeached by the House, but then acquitted by the Senate. And that was, I think, February of 1999. So it was little over a year there. But was something that stayed in kind of part of the. I don't. Would you say, political zeitgeist?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Kind of the. Well, kind of the zeitgeist in general.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Broad zeitgeist. The cultural zeitgeist. Yeah. And so, you know, and then when I went to graduate school, I had really mistakenly and naively thought, oh, I'm gonna move to England and I'm going to LSE and I'm now gonna be a graduate student and I'm leaving, you know, political Monica Lewinsky back in the States. And I actually was having to take on another. I wasn't getting rid of an identity. And ultimately, I think for me, it was like, I came out of graduate school and then was actually almost the darkest period, even darker. There was an adrenaline that coursed through the entire year of 98. But it was when I came out of graduate school and I couldn't get a job and I couldn't and purpose and support myself. That's really when it was a darker time for me.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Like, you're gonna have no future.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. And that was. And that was when I came into my anger. But at the same time, you know, I see now. I'm not sure I would choose it again, but I see now what that period did benefit me was I ended up having the time to do the deep self healing, you know, the kind of involution. And, you know, there was a lot of spiritual work.

[Monica Padman]

You could have maybe just kept on running if had you found employment immediately.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. I think ultimately. Ultimately, the really big lesson for me, many lessons, but one of them was around not running away from my past, that it was about integrating my past. I'm very fond of saying I don't believe in moving on. I believe in moving forward. And that to me, there's a real distinction between those two. That there's an element of moving on. Feels like, oh, you're supposed to put whatever happened to you in the past and almost with a layer of shame cut off kind of from whatever that behavior was, you know. And it's one of the things I really admire about you and how you've talked about your life experiences, Dax, is that you are so comfortable or seemingly so comfortable with all of the decisions you made based on the pain you were in. And your ability to transcend that shame, I think, has helped a lot of people.

[Monica Padman]

Well, thank you so much. And I only got that from the 12 step program. I work without that, I don't know what I would do because. Cause, yeah, it's living with shame. And this is ultimately what I want to talk to you about. This is what I wanna finish with. You've worked a bunch with cyberbullying. There couldn't be someone who. I don't know how you quantify it, but if you're not at number one, you're tied for number one for the biggest public shaming of all time. I mean, it's just really.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I think on the Internet too, like in the nascent days of the Internet, just that experience of, you know, a lot of people have experienced that now. I think there's, you know, the statistics are like 1 in 10 or something.

[Monica Padman]

I think as a culture, a soc. A country, we've got to evolve past the way we voraciously devour other people, that we get so much pleasure out of exposing people's, quote, unacceptable behavior, of course, by their own definition of what's acceptable and not acceptable. But this feeding frenzy that we all enjoy, the pretending as if. I mean, I suppose there's some. And you have a master's in psychology, maybe you could help me I assume there's some kind of catharsis in watching someone else go up in flames for something that, you know you yourself have done.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think there's so many different things that are at play in our online world. There's the online disinhibition effect, so where people, because they're hiding behind a screen or behind anonymity, find it easier to take on different Personas. We saw the beginning of that with, Remember Second Life?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

So, I mean, that was kind of the beginning, I think, of this idea of an avatar of sort of, okay, let me both be this person, but also be someone else. Be some different curated version of who I want to be.

[Monica Padman]

For sure.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Some projected version, the advertisement for me.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right, exactly. Which in and of itself has a layer of shame connected to it. Right. Cause there's that idea of whoever I am, really am is not good enough.

[Monica Padman]

For sure.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah. So I think that's at play. I think we have people constantly. I mean, just the chasm between our real lives and curated selves online is very challenging. And I think that's where there's so much mental health issues coming in. I had this young boy say to me last week, which was he'd written in an essay, and I've just been turning it over in my mind ever since I read it, where he was talking about, actually with physical violence, that when you don't have an adult to say to you, everything's gonna be okay, you're alone in your pain and your experience, and you may lash out at someone doing the exact same thing for the very reason so that you're not alone.

[Monica Padman]

Sure, sure.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Which was amazing to me. Like, I had never really thought about it from that way. I mean, I believed, okay, hurt people, hurt people. You know, all those things.

[Monica Padman]

And misery loves company. It truly does.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I certainly don't want to excuse any kind of online harassment or bullying behavior, but that in some ways it's a coping mechanism for some people.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, and that's where we kind of have to step back. There is no three prong easy solution. This is like the human condition.

[Monica Padman]

But what has really happened in your and my time is that what happened to you? There were only four news outlets that people watched. There was X amount of newspapers in the country. So you took up so much space that the person who made a weird comment on their trip to Africa, they would have never been put in the paper to get shamed. So for a long period, most people weren't getting the kind of firsthand public Shaming. Right. There wasn't really an outlet for it.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Correct.

[Monica Padman]

But now there is an outlet for almost anyone to get publicly shamed. Because there's infinite number of web addresses, basically, and there's social media and there's a trillion news networks. So now many, many people can be publicly shamed.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I think the business model is different with so many more outlets. There are more people in this industry who are looking to make an income.

[Monica Padman]

Sure, sure. They can't ignore data.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. So I mean, that's the whole thing is, you know, is around the idea, the model of money that gets made from these things and that shame and public humiliation are these currencies in our society.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. They're very tasty for people.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, yeah. And it's. And I do think there's. I have a friend who has this really interesting theory around because we now don't stay in the same village, you know, from where we were born, and know the same people for our entire lives. That well known people have kind of become the local. That was sort of the local gossip that we would. So these are the familiar people that we now, instead of staying in our village, we take them.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. The purpose gossip provided was when we lived in hundred member groups, they were very egalitarian because one man getting power, if he started abusing that power as the chief, three other men could overthrow him at any time. In our early days, that chief didn't have a police force, he didn't have a military. So at all times that person could be overthrown pretty easily. And the mechanism by which everyone would evaluate whether that person should be overthrown was gossip. That's exactly how you build an alliance to make sure someone's not being tyrannical. But then you get apparatuses like military, state police. And now we're not gonna just gossip our way into a new president. It doesn't really work that way anymore. But it is hardwired into us. No one should feel guilty that they enjoy gossip. We are designed to gossip so we can regulate these little groups. I think it's helpful to first recognize, like, oh yeah, I'm inclined to gossip the same way I'm inclined to eat 44 Snickers bars. I'm hardwired to load up on sugar when that fruit's in season. And I just have to know that about my body so that I can take some actions.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I understand what you're saying. I just do think that we can evolve away from gossip.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, me too. I think the goal should be 100% to evolve away from it, because I think we can see in many, many ways that it's ultimately destructive and it's no longer servic the purpose that it was.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And if you step back and you take a completely different view and think about it energetically, it's like words have a consequence. They have a consequence, whether you are hearing them or not. That sense of. I mean, we have energy fields where we're affected by what people think about us, what they say about us. I mean, that for me, I think a big part of my healing was I spent many years having to heal my field. So to sort of having gone overnight from being known by a very small group of people relative to the rest of the world, and then all of a sudden have all this negative intention and energy coming at me, you know, that's an effect.

[Monica Padman]

But, yes, someone who has a deep desire to eat cake should not feel like a failure and shame themselves. They were designed to eat cake.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

That's the point I'm making. I'm not even judgmental of someone. The desire to gossip, I think it's ingrained in us, but I think we should have as an objective and a goal to transcend that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

There's probably a technical term for this, which I can't remember or don't know, but I think that probably one of the most important ways forward is around trying to. Rather than trying to penalize a lot of the negative behavior, which I think can be helpful, is also at the same time trying to bring in more of the positive. Right. So trying to drown that out in some ways. So educating people on how to be an upstander online, like how important that is.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So talk about upstanders, because they do this at my daughter's school, and I.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Think it's like, oh, yeah, no, it's amazing. To be an upstander means to sort of intervene in a situation. And you can intervene while you're seeing something like while you're seeing a bullying situation unfold or an online harassment unfurl, you can intervene that way, but you can also intervene after the fact, too. That's a really important part of being an upstander, which is just recognizing reaching out to the person who's been the target of that behavior. Basically allowing somebody to know that someone witnessed what happened.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

To whether that is a supportive emoji or it's saying to someone, I saw what happened, or saying, do you want to come sit with me? Or want to go to the movies? Some way of if it's somebody you know, if It's a stranger. Just a positive comment. You know, that there are all these ways that we can actually interrupt the cycles that are happening in the bullying cycle that are important for people to remember. Also reporting. So with online situations, reporting any bullying or online harassment that you see is also. These are all ways of kind of being a good digital citizen, and they have a huge impact. Particularly, I think, you know, from the work that I do, the worst kinds of things that happen are when people are suffering in silence alone, and the faster somebody knows that they're not invisible. There's this irony of this kind of behavior that you are a target of something, and yet you actually feel really invisible. So the more I think that you can encourage people to sort of step up and engage in these sorts of behaviors, we're starting to shift the balance of the other kind of behavior that's happening, which we should address in how we're dealing with these issues, too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I also wish, like, when I was younger, it had been explained to me that the power of this group is much, much greater than the power of the bully. Cause when I was a kid, now, mind you, I have been a bully. I would never have thought that about myself. But as I've gotten older and I playback the frequency with which I was in fights and stuff, there has to be several kids that think I'm a bully. And I'm very regretful of that and sorry for that. Also recognize I was in a household where someone was kicking my mom's ass, and my brother was five years older than me, and he was kicking my ass. And then I went to this playground where I could have power, and I enjoyed that. I liked that.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And there are some who talk about people who engage, especially younger people who engage in bullying behavior. Some people look at models that are saying it actually is their kids trying different power structures on. Basically, there's so many different things. I think one of the things that we have trouble with around this topic is that, like usual, we're always trying to simplify things.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes. Good and evil.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right? Exactly. And people engage in bullying behavior for myriad reasons, and people become targets for myriad reasons. And there are myriad ways to handle different situations. There's no one correct way for every single person who's either a bully or a target. I have witnessed and I have experienced the enormous shifts that can happen when people step into compassion.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And it's most hard when it's with someone whose behavior you just personally hate to begin with. But when I was a kid, and there were certainly Many times I was bullied. And more than that, I observed lust of bullying. And for us in the herd watching it, it was like if I said something, I'd be the next target of that bully. I'm assuming I feel alone in the fact that I don't like what's happening to this kid. I'm assuming the rest of the people in this crowd are enjoying this and they like this. So if I stand up, I'm now going to be the victim of the bully. I'll be the next victim if I feel like if I had been educated that, no, no, 99% of you don't want this. You don't want a tyrannical leader on the playground and collect collectively. The power of a group is so powerful to all of us humans. If we get excluded from our group, we change our behavior in general. I think.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I agree. I think it's really important to point out that intervening directly is not always right for every person in every situation. Just like it's not always right, maybe right in some circumstances, but to say to somebody, you have to stand up to a bully, like, it's just, again, it's sort of that nuanced scenario because there are people who are equipped to do that socially and emotionally, and there are people who aren't. And some people can be endangered by doing those sorts of things. Which is why I think with upstanding behavior, it's really important for people to recognize you don't have to be the person who stands up to the bully. You can still be effective. I mean, that's for me. For me, my focus is the target's experience. You know, how do we get that person from feeling shame and alone and sadness to feeling more, okay, fastest? And that doesn't matter if you're 5, 15, 50. You know, social media, I mean, it's really come to kind of map our underlying cultural beliefs, you know, So, I mean, it's a lot of people, I think there was like this thing I read recently, 60 or 70% of people think the Internet is an online harassment is kind of responsible for this corrosion of civility. It's hard because the truth is, we have to look. I mean, I look at social media a lot, and a lot of behavior just kind of like road rage, which I have. So, I mean, it's just sort of that I behave in the car in ways that I would not behave outside the car. Right. But I think that that happens online. We see that sort of not regulated behavior, you know, and so much of it is because we have lost sight of the fact we don't have those. You know, I'm sitting in a room with both of you. I can't read your facial expressions, I can feel your emotions. You know, and there, there are always, I believe there are always so many different languages going on, many which we don't even know we're using, you know, and communicating ways that we're communicating. And so when it's online, you don't have those same cues.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right. You can't see the hurt that you've just caused.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. And so people tend to devolve into the worst versions of themselves. But there are ways to not do that.

[Monica Padman]

You know, I'm always most interested in tackling problems where the river starts, not, not, not as it feeds into the ocean. So, you know, I think there is a, a much bigger global question is which. Why are there so many people sitting in their rooms on a computer that have no control in their life and feel like they need to overpower someone else to get a sense of control? Like, you know, what is the, the societal bigger problem that we're not addressing in children that they would even, you know, land them there?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And that's a pretty hard one to tackle.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I mean, I think it, I think a big thread of that is connection. There's kind of this vicious cycle that's happened with online behavior around. You know, we sort of do that thing of we compare our insides to other people's outsides. I'm on Instagram, privately, Twitter, publicly, and constantly, constantly feeling like everyone else is happier, thinner, wealthier, more in love, all of those things.

[Monica Padman]

Eating better meals.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right, exactly. Doing better Instagram. Let's not forget that. Right. Like, you know, the meta. We also find connection there. Young people, I think it's over 40% find connection, more connection from social media. But then they also feel disconnected in ways too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Lonelier than ever.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. I think what happens is it's kind of this, it's this weird thing where at the same time that we're thirsty for more connection, the ways we're finding connection are also trying to tell us, us that we're less than. So it becomes, it's a very complicated back and forth struggle.

[Monica Padman]

Well, and we've had experts on here that have explained that oxytocin is not released unless you're looking at the person's face. Like all these chemical things that are associated with connection actually can't exist on a virtual connection. They're just, they're not happening. And so they're ultimately Feeling lonely, even though they're distracted enough to not be.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

But they're also getting dopamine hits when the, like, tanks come in and things. Likes come in and stuff. So it is a weird balance of.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's great that we're seeing some of the social media companies start, finally start to address some of these issues. I have a big fear that social media is gonna end up like the cable networks, that if we don't find a way to actually coexist in these social spaces with very different polarized viewpoints, we will splinter off and then we'll end up siloed in the same way of Fox News and all the other stations. And so, you know, I think we're being given an opportunity. I'm not saying it is great, and I know how challenging it is for people who are targets of these things, but we are being given an opportunity online to try to find ways to bridge the divide of perspective.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The thing I most admire about you, and I'm so impressed by, is that you have taken one of, again, the most horrific scarlet letterings of all time. And I have to imagine part of you has felt very fearful of ever even talking about it, in fear of breathing oxygen into something that you just want to be over with in your life. But I think your willingness to do it in your bravery isn't for me, and it's not for any of those people that was arguing, but it's for all these people who have gone through this and are seeing that it didn't break somebody. I can't imagine a stronger example of someone persevering than you. It's incredible, the fact that you still pursued your education and that you started a business and that you started a philanthropic endeavor. I mean, all these things, it's rare to see someone not be broken by that. And I think it's just, oh, I'm broken.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Let's be really clear. I'm still very broken.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, functionally broken, right?

[Monica Lewinsky]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Not shattered to pieces.

[Monica Padman]

Not shattered to pieces. And I just think the power of you being honest about your story is so valuable. I hope you can take on some of the credit you deserve. I hope you're proud of yourself.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I think I feel gratitude more than pride. Maybe that's down the road, but I was talking to my mom this morning just about, I think every once in a while, I kind of shocked into remembering what my life was like before things started to change a few years ago. And I never could have imagined giving A purpose to my past in the way that I have. Or using that pain in service of hoping that other people feel less alone.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

You know, I think that's really what it's about. You probably know this. It's a privilege. It's a privilege to have a life where you're able to help other people feel less alone because of the experiences you're sharing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You must have people reach out to you all the time and share with how you've helped them. I hope.

[Monica Lewinsky]

I mean, that's kind of, you know, that's. Look, we like to shit all over social media, but that's also kind of one of the beauties of social media too, is that we do get to hear from people. We do get to connect in ways that we wouldn't otherwise.

[Monica Padman]

You can find your tribe in a way you can ever could. Absolutely.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Sure. I mean, there's so. I mean, and think about. There are a lot of political movements. The Women's March wouldn't have been able to happen that fast. You know, hashtag MeToo 2.0. You know, I mean, Tarana Burke's started it 10 years ago, but social media changed that into something different. It became a louder voice and coalesced faster because of it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, like all things, it's not binary. It's not good or bad, everything.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right. But of course, that's the world we live in.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Lacks nuance and context and the inclination.

[Monica Padman]

Is to get rid of something or embrace it and shut the fuck up about it. But really, no, there's like a whole process where we can refine things.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And I also think that there are, you know, hopefully the platforms will come to places where they'll be instituting mechanisms to help sort of alleviate those kinds of scenarios too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's really hard to imagine. But all of this, as you pointed out earlier, is driven by economic models. So everyone feels insignificant. We live in a country of three. You feel like you're insignificant, but if you click on the shitty article and.

[Monica Lewinsky]

If you watch the video, we use the algorithm. We do charge of that algorithm.

[Monica Padman]

It's hard to imagine, but we will steer the ship.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah. Did you see Jaron? I always get his last name wrong. Jaron. Lanier. Lanier. Lanier. He gave a really interesting TED Talk last year and he's been involved in the Internet and he made this argument. We sort of went right when we should have gone left at the point of should the Internet have been subscription based or ad based? And so, you know, I mean, you can also see that There, of course, then there are the financial hierarchy issues, if it were to have been subscription based. But I think that, you know, a lot of where we are is because we have, without realizing it, made these agreements of our clicking our data, that these are the new commanders commodities. He argues that it's not too late to turn back, and I think we should really be looking and exercising all options.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, there's a lot of different people right now in the different political races that are suggesting or pointing out that, no, no, this is kind of a public utility and we probably should be treating it as such and it should be available to everyone. It should be democratized, and we shouldn't rely on Nabisco to bring it to us. We should just pony up as a society, probably, and have the version we want.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

I kind of see the validity of that argument. So what's next for you?

[Monica Lewinsky]

So it's October is Bullying Prevention Month. So every year for the last two years, and we will be doing this year, BBDO New York and I have done a campaign for Bullying Prevention Month, which we launch usually in the first few days of October. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm really delighted that we became Twitter friends. I think is for how it started. And again, I've been a long time admirer of you and happy to see you still thriving in the way you are, and it's incredibly impressive and I'm in awe of it, so. And I'm glad I got to talk to you.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

All right, cool. And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman. Monica. Monica, I think I want your number. Monica. La la da de do da da Monica.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Oh, my God. You had a lot of energy for that one.

[Monica Padman]

I exploded because we're coming hot off of some taco order.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

You know what I'm realizing?

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

That song was not about me, was it?

[Monica Padman]

No, it was about you guys.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because this is the Monica's episode.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, it is. This was a great episode.

[Monica Padman]

You loved it.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. Me too. I feel very grateful that she trusted us to share her story.

[Monica Padman]

Me too. Me too. I've always, always liked her.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. And we got to know her.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

We got to know her through this process. And she's so lovely.

[Monica Padman]

She really is a sweet, sweet human being.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I like her a lot.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Me too. Me too. And strong.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. Yeah. Resilient. Never in my wildest dreams as a child, watching that whole thing unfold, did I think, oh, maybe one day she'll sit on a couch across from me and we can really connect about, talk about it.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

Know.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, I know.

[Monica Padman]

It's a wild, wild world.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I wonder what the percentage is of people who then felt a lot of judgment, if they still do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

So much has changed since then.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, I think so much of the reaction was embroiled in whatever people's fears are, of course. So, like, if you were a partner and you had a big fear that your husband would run around on you.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's so interesting too, about cheating. Right. People always get mad at the other person. I mean, they probably get mad at both people.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it's interesting. Like, I've never understood get. You know. Well, no, I do understand. In high school, my girlfriend cheated on me and I went to the guy's house and tried to fight him.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

You did?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I lost my vision as I was trying to punch him through the car window and I missed completely. And his dad intervened. It was a whole. Whole circus.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Anywho, I do. I do remember blaming the person, but it is ironic because, you know, you're not in a relationship with the other person.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I know it's so complicated.

[Monica Padman]

But anyways, I do think that she may have, for some percentage of the population, represented their biggest fear. Some young attractive woman would.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Lead their husband astray.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Is true.

[Monica Lewinsky]

It's.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

It's often. Not always, of course, but it's often the man who cheats on his wife and. Yeah, the woman. The woman who had an affair with him is the one that generally gets the blame.

[Monica Padman]

The other woman.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

The other woman. I try not to say that, but.

[Monica Padman]

Even that has connotations.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Exactly. And like that person gets ostracized and that person and. And often the husband and wife end up reconciling. So the husb. Ends up really not feeling the weight of anything and that other person ends up feeling everything. And that to me is extremely.

[Monica Padman]

Well, yeah, the husband or. Or the wife, in whatever case, everyone cheats. I think it's.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Well, that's true.

[Monica Padman]

I think it's pretty. I think the numbers are even. You think Esther Perel suggests that.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes, that they're even.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because who the fuck. Who are they?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Single people?

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, you've got a stagnant pop. Same percentage of women are married. Married as men. Because they're marrying each other. The statistics are the same.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Well, no. Men are cheating more than women, I would say. Probably.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think so.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Monica Padman]

I think just as many married women are having affairs as married men.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Rob. Add it to the list.

[Monica Padman]

Add it to the list. I think that's true. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by Happy Egg. Happy Egg believes in spreading happiness through the simple pleasure of high quality and delicious eggs. Happy Egg hens are raised on over 8 acres of land by family farmers. Their free range farming model coupled with the humane treatment of their hens leads to absolutely delicious eggs. Happy hens.

[Monica Padman]

Happy eggs.

[Dax Shepard]

It just makes sense, doesn't it? You can see the difference with Happy Egg because the egg yolks have an incredible orange color that's not only beautiful but also packed with flavor. I live for the orange egg yolk.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, it's really nice.

[Dax Shepard]

I've become an orange egg yolk connoisseur.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

You know, Esther says it's something that's been universally reviled and universally practiced.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Totally.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think, I don't think it's a male female thing. I think historically there's men were, in the vast majority of positions of power were men. So you're aware of all of the men's famous indiscretions. But maybe if there were way more famous powerful women, you'd be aware of those indiscretions. Questions.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Maybe.

[Monica Padman]

I, I, maybe you're right though, because there are, I'm sure there are like what is cheating? So sure. I bet men are going to massage parlors a lot more than women to get relieved. I don't think women maybe are shopping for orgasms as readily as married men.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, I mean I, I mean I'm just look at stereotypical married couples. I would say stereotypical typically. Don't get mad at me, everyone. Yeah. The man wants more sex than the woman. Often.

[Monica Padman]

Not always, but I think but often. Well, here's what I think it is. I think both people. Well, I think the woman wants the same amount of sex but with a different person. We all want novelty. That's what it is.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Sure.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone's desiring novelty. And I don't think it's male or female. Like we want novelty. Now are men acting on it more conventionally traditionally? Were they out in the world where they could, they had unobserved time that they could probably cheat? Like this was the system. Did it cater more to that? Probably. If you're a woman at home raising kids.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Of course, yes.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know who you're meeting but, but I do Think. I just think. I think people have affairs.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, they do.

[Monica Padman]

I think men and women both have affairs.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, they do.

[Monica Padman]

But anyway, you're right. The. The whoever cheated can be forgiven and reincorporated in their life. And the other person, the other woman, the other man always occupies that. There's no redemption for them.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

Doesn't feel equal.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

It doesn't feel fair. No.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was. It was. It was enormously unfair. That's obvious. Like, he was, you know, kept his job, kept exactly his position in the world. But by the way, I want to be clear. I don't think that he should have. Now he's done. He's alleged to have done other things that I have no defense of, but let's just say this was an extramarital affair. I don't think the solution would be. He should have been shamed the way she was. No, I think.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I don't.

[Monica Padman]

I think she should have gotten the treatment heated. Like, I don't think either party needs to be sent to Siberia.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I agree.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

But what. I think the part of this conversation that doesn't get talked about very much, which she touched on a little bit, which is, you know, she was like, part of what was so awful is this public presentation that it was a servicing relationship. And she was like. It was a mutual relationship.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

And I don't think that part gets talked about where it's like, she's in a relationship with the person. She. On top of this public thing, there's, I'm sure, a private.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Heartbreak.

[Monica Padman]

Of course. Yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

She's not allowed to. To feel.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

That is not fair.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Yeah, I agree. Anyway, whole thing is a bummer.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, it is.

[Monica Padman]

And a lot of people go like, oh, you. You guys feel so bad for two people who cheated. But I do. I feel bad when people make mistakes.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

And I've made a ton of mistakes. I continue to make mistakes. I'll make more.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I. I don't think I met anyone that's not making mistakes. I've just met people who are better at hiding their mistakes.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So she was trying to find the verbiage for this quote. She said, the tallest Poppy gets cut off first, but it's called Tall Poppy Syndrome.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, Tall Poppy syndrome.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

I'm a Tall Poppy.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

You are a Tall Poppy describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, strung up, or criticized because they've been classified as superior to. To their peers.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. We have the weirdest. I Think about it all the time. You know, I saw someone's Twitter handle was like, abolish billionaires or something, and I was like, it is the weirdest thing that we all want this thing we want in this country. We want to become wealthy and successful, and yet we. And I did resent people who have done that, and for many justified reasons and many unjustified reasons. It's just this very weird thing. It's like we defend this system so, you know, passionately, and yet we're resentful of the people that have done that. It's all complicated.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes. I think we love. I mean, a lot of people have said this, but, like, yeah, we'd love to see people rising. We like the rise fall too. Yeah, I think, because again, like you just said, everyone makes mistakes, and so it feels relatable. But also I think if you're not at that level, you feel like, oh, it's actually not that good up there. Like, there's something about it that feels comforting to you that you're not there. Because maybe when you get to that level, it's like all shady and requires.

[Monica Padman]

Some kind of amoralness. Yeah, I think it's more, why is that person there, not me? I deserve that. They don't. So when they are found guilty of some indiscretion, it confirms that they didn't deserve it.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I know. I think that's a negative outlook on it, which it could very well be true, but I think it's a deeper psychological thing happening.

[Monica Padman]

Just very interesting. We have an entire system, and then no one really likes the outcome of the system. Yeah, but I went down, of course, because now I'm on the other side of it. And I got really defensive when I saw this person. I'm not a billionaire on Twitter, attacking that here. I'm someone who has given millions of dollars to the government, millions of dollars to education, to all these services, to building bridges. So my contribution to the whole system that we're fighting for, be it Medicare or any other thing, requires people to generate a bunch of money so that they can give a bunch of it to the government. So it's a weird proposition to be resentful at the people who are giving a tremendous amount of money to this system that you want to see more services of. So when I see, like, abolished billionaires, it's like, well, how about abolish the. Some things you don't like about billionaires. But if someone is. Is some human being figures out how to make a mousetrap apple and it Generates a trillion dollars, and half of that goes to this system. That's. Why is that antithetical to what you want?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Currently, our system, some of the richest people pay no taxes.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's a big issue. Right? So let's just. I'm just saying. Let's be specific about it. But I'm saying when someone creates the iPhone and it sells several hundred million, and then that puts a half, you know, trillion dollars into the fund that builds roads and educates kids. You know, be careful that that's what you want to get rid of is some source of profound wealth that does get redistributed. Now, you could say I want to see the distribution of billionaires be at. That's fine. But just the very notion of abolish billionaires is just a little weird when what we need is money for all these services.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Right. But I wonder if this is like. Is this like lunch four times a week with your boss? Like, have you seen just abolish billionaires, period, and then nothing more.

[Monica Padman]

This is one woman who was mad at me that I said, preach to Ellen for saying be kind to everyone.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Okay. Right again. So one person is saying that.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I'm only talking to that person. But I think there's a good amount of people.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I mean, the. The argument side of the argument I have heard has not been abolish billionaires. It's been, they need to pay for.

[Monica Padman]

They need to pay a high percentage.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because they don't need that much money.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. Okay. Well, you said you don't know what the number is, but probably 50 of people were getting cheated on that year, that year being 1998. But there's no staff for that.

[Monica Padman]

There's not. No.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I mean, there can't be.

[Monica Padman]

It's a wild guess.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Exactly. Exactly. They're just campy.

[Monica Padman]

They're camping.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

No cyberbullying. She said one in 10. According to cyberbullying statistics from the ISAFE foundation, over half of adolescents and teens have been blade online, and about the same number have engaged in cyberbullying. More than one in three young people have experienced cyber threats online. Over 25% of adolescents and teens have been bullied repeatedly through cell phones or the Internet. Well over half of young people do not tell their parents when cyberbullying occurs.

[Monica Padman]

Boy, I had a weird feeling watching Joker. I really want you to watch it so we can really unpack it. Yeah, but one weird. I always have these weird thoughts that are, like, super contrary to what I traditionally think. And one of them was so this, it's set in the seventies in New York. And he is, you know, he's like any one of these shooters or any number of people we now know we have a ton of in this society.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I was looking at life in the 70s on that. But you know, he's riding a bus around and stuff and he's just, there's nothing to distract him from his kind of mania. And I was thinking like conventionally, I think I hate video games. What a waste of time. Yeah, let's just get rid of video games, right? But I was like, oh, there are a bunch of people who are angst ridden about this system that excludes them. And, and I was like, are these things maybe make our world safer? Like if you can give some angst ridden somebody a joystick and blow people away for four hours on a video game, does that keep them from acting or does that satiate or is that an outlet for their frustration? Is this device that constantly keeps you engaged, which I think of as negative sometimes, is this positive? Is the most terrible things stem from.

[Dax Shepard]

From boredom?

[Monica Padman]

Is maybe.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

No, no, I, I totally don't think so. Okay, well one, because there's been only a rise in these types of behaviors and especially these mass shootings and stuff since.

[Monica Padman]

Well, definitely mass shootings. Yeah, but the murder rate is precipitously down. It's been falling since 70s.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, but I'm not talking like gang related. That's what that stuff is.

[Monica Padman]

And it's guy, A guy finds out his girlfriend, another dude, and he drives over and shoots him and her. I mean just murder overall is down.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, all these types of unconventional shootings and depression rates are up. I mean all these things are. Everything's gotten worse since the invention of phones and video games and all those things. So no, I don't think it destroyed.

[Monica Padman]

An outlet for people because there was a very conventional argument against pornography that it would lead to more rape and stuff. And then there were many people who had studies that said no porn is an outlet and they actually will jerk off watching the porn. And then it kind of their likelihood of going out and being a predator goes down because they have an outlet for it. So I'm not, I'm not planning to flag in either side of that debate, but I guess what occurred to me is you, you could make an argument that this stuff satiates people's angst, but.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I don't think you can make the argument because. Because all this stuff has gotten worse angst wise. If you're talking about people who feel entitled and act out because of it all. That stuff's gotten way worse.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

And depression just has gotten way worse.

[Monica Padman]

And isolation.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. So, okay, so we talk about gossip a little bit. There's an interesting NPR article about gossip. So gossip can help solidify personal relationships and encourage cooperation. Children engage in this form of gossip by by age 5. One provocative view comes from anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argues that gossip is the human analog of social grooming, which is widely practiced by our primate cousins. Through gossip, we can create and maintain social bonds more efficiently, allowing us to form groups of larger sizes. These suggestions about the benefits of gossip for cooperation correspond to a special subset of gossip, what's recently been called pro social gossip. Pro social gossip involves sharing negative judgments about a third party, but where the shared information could protect the recipient from antisocial behavior or exploitation. Thus, gossiping about who cheats at cards or who's likely to shirk at a responsibility would qualify as pro social gossip. Researchers Jan Engelman, Esther Herman and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Plank. The max.

[Monica Padman]

That word requires a different voice.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Plank. I can't. Is it plank? It wouldn't be plank. P, L, A, N, C, K. Plank.

[Monica Padman]

Plank.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Plank.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. That's in the wrong guy, but yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

That sounds plaque.

[Monica Lewinsky]

For.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Evolutionary anthropology studied pro social gossip in both three and five year olds. To create an opportunity for such gossip, they had the children play a game. Children who participated in the study first played with two puppets, one of which was more general than the other. A second child then came in to play the game with just one of the two puppets. And the researchers observed whether the first child gossiped about the puppets, offering a social evaluation that could help the second child decide which puppet to choose. For example, if a child said, you should play with the green puppet because the yellow puppet is stingy and doesn't share enough tokens, that would be classified as pro social gossip. The researchers found that most children in both age groups offered some sort of guidance about which puppet to choose. But the three year olds very rarely offered an evaluation to go along with it. For instance, they might recommend one puppet over the other, but they wouldn't go on to explain that it was because that puppet was generous or because the other puppet cheated. The five year olds, by contrast, offered such evaluations about half the time. They went beyond a mere recommendation to a social judgment, the kind of claim that might make or break an individual's reputation. So that's why they got the three to five number. But yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And the One I think I brought up. Right. Was the explanation I heard was like, keep it a meritocracy.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Which seems beneficial too.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. There's some positives.

[Monica Padman]

Look, I think for me it's very easy to answer. There's some gossip I feel hungover from and there's some I don't.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Monica Padman]

It's really that, like, yeah, if I'm warning somebody, like, don't tell so and so a secret. They're not good at keeping secrets. I feel totally fine about that. I'm saying something negative about the person. Person, but whatever. But if I'm just like, pointing out someone's shirt was stupid. Yeah, I feel shitty.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Why? Yeah, I think for me it's about purpose. Like, what is the purpose of talking about? This is the purpose of talking about it. To dissect it, to understand more, to.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it is to connect a lot too. Right. Because if you and I meet a. Whatever, some stranger and we're interacting and then afterwards I go, did you realize that guy said her herpes a lot? And you go, yes, I notice that there's like some bonding between us that we both observe this thing. We're not crazy in our thoughts or isolated in our thoughts. We're like confirmed that we're on the right path.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I think that's what a lot of gossip is. But generally that kind of gossip is the kind I don't love. I mean, that example is so benign. But like, the shirt is bad. Is that.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, it's the same. Totally. To make some. Someone lower.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

It is. Or it's the connection thing. Like, did you notice, like, his shirt was all wrinkled up? Like, why is his shirt so wrinkly?

[Monica Padman]

Is he not on an iron?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

God, do you think he doesn't have any money? Because guys, I even iron his club.

[Monica Padman]

He's a dirt bag.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

He smells bad too. They are seeking connection, but I don't.

[Monica Padman]

Want to connect on that level. But by the way, a lot of times when people initiate some gossip with me about what? One of those things. I think for the most part, I generally don't think about those things. I don't care about those things.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Right, that's true.

[Monica Padman]

So when they try to connect with me, they don't get a connection out of it.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I agree with that now in my adult life, but I think I probably spent many, many, many conversations just pretending like I noticed that so I could feel inside.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah. And so.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I do it to you all the time.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

No, you don't.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we're watching TV and I'm like, God, have you noticed how big this guy's tongue is?

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

I know, but I don't think you do that. I mean, you do do that about tongues. I don't think you talk poorly about people for, like, no reason.

[Monica Padman]

For sport.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

For entertainment.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

No.

[Monica Padman]

No. Well, I love you.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

That's all I love.

[Monica Padman]

That's all I. I'll gossip with you about things that could save you. Okay. And if we notice someone says herpes.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Indiscriminately, we can talk about it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You know, so many times he said.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Herpes, but then we'd be like, sure, he said herpes a lot.

[Monica Lewinsky]

And then there's.

[Monica Padman]

Should we offer him a screening, follow up conversation.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Conversation of like, oh, my God, he's so confident to be doing that. And why is he so, like, wondering why is that to me is fine. That's just exploring. But like, just being like, ew, he.

[Monica Padman]

Had flakes in his eyebrows.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Yeah.

[Monica Lewinsky]

Ew.

[Monica Padman]

That's what people say.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

That's what you're worried about. No one says that. No one says that. All right.

[Monica Padman]

I love you. And I loved Monica Lewinsky.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Me too.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know that I met a Monica I didn't. I didn't like a lot.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Wobby Wob Hollis]

Even though we found out you hate this, but the name. The name means alone and also advice giver, which both of those things I think apply to myself. You disagree? We'll talk about it on the next back.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

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