Suleika Jaouad (on creative alchemy)

Summary

Episode Summary: Suleika Jaouad on Creative Alchemy

Podcast Title: Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Host: Dax Shepard
Guest: Suleika Jaouad
Release Date: July 2, 2025
Duration: Approximately 121 minutes

In this heartfelt and insightful episode of Armchair Expert, host Dax Shepard welcomes best-selling author Suleika Jaouad to discuss her transformative journey through illness, creativity, and personal growth. Joined by co-host Monica Padman, the conversation delves deep into Suleika's life experiences, her coping mechanisms, and her philosophies on creativity and resilience.

1. Introduction to Suleika Jaouad

The episode begins with Dax and Monica expressing their admiration for Suleika Jaouad, highlighting her accomplishments as an author of Between Two Kingdoms and The Book of a Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. They share excitement about the upcoming conversation, setting the stage for a meaningful dialogue.

2. Early Life and Struggles with Identity

Suleika opens up about her childhood, marked by frequent relocations across continents due to her father's academic career. She discusses the challenges of assimilation, feeling neither fully American nor entirely Tunisian or Swiss during family trips.

[20:46] Suleika Jaouad: "When you'd go to Switzerland, we'd be a little too American, and when we'd go to Tunisia, we'd be a little too white to be fully Tunisian."

This sense of not belonging fueled her adaptability but also led to struggles with self-identity, manifesting in her desire to change her name during childhood to better fit in.

3. Journaling as a Coping Mechanism

Suleika emphasizes the importance of journaling in her life, describing it as a "chrysalis" where she could explore her thoughts without judgment. She reflects on how journaling helped her navigate her emotions and become an astute observer of the world.

[26:27] Suleika Jaouad: "I became an amateur anthropologist, attuned to the little particularities that make a character come alive on the page."

4. Battling Leukemia and the Power of Creative Alchemy

A pivotal moment in Suleika's life was her diagnosis with a rare form of leukemia at 22. During her hospitalization, she reconnected with musician John Batiste, whose impromptu performance brought joy and unity to the cancer ward. This experience was a catalyst for her exploration of "creative alchemy"—the transformative power of creativity in the face of adversity.

[51:53] Suleika Jaouad: "Witnessing this profoundly depressing, musicless place alchemized into a joyous second line was one of the best days of my life."

Suleika describes how journaling became her anchor during treatment, allowing her to document daily experiences and emotions, which later evolved into her memoir.

5. Relationship with John Batiste

Suleika shares anecdotes about her friendship with John Batiste, highlighting his unwavering support and the deep bond they share as fellow "aliens" navigating their creative pursuits. Their mutual respect and understanding played a significant role in Suleika's healing process.

[37:50] Suleika Jaouad: "John and I, we call each other aliens. There's a wonderful thing when you meet a fellow alien."

6. The Role of Vulnerability and Honesty in Growth

Throughout the conversation, Suleika advocates for embracing vulnerability and honesty as paths to personal growth. She discusses how confronting her fears and openly expressing her struggles allowed her to transform pain into creative energy.

[44:12] Suleika Jaouad: "I'm entirely made of questions with zero answers. And to me, living the questions means living authentically."

7. Discussion on Taylor Swift's Masters Dispute

Monica and Dax engage in a fact-check segment regarding Taylor Swift's battle over the ownership of her music masters. Monica consults Nathan Hubbard for an objective breakdown, clarifying that while Taylor felt betrayed by Scooter Braun's acquisition of her catalog, it stemmed from a standard business deal rather than being a victimization scenario.

[104:17] Dax Shepard: "She was offered a deal. She didn't like the terms, so she passed on it. Another buyer came in, and now she wants the catalog back."

The hosts debate the narrative of victimhood versus business negotiation, emphasizing the importance of objective scrutiny over Swift's situation.

8. Journaling Practices and Encouraging Authenticity

Returning to the theme of journaling, Suleika and Dax discuss the challenges and benefits of maintaining a consistent writing practice. Suleika shares her strategies for overcoming writer's block and the therapeutic benefits of documenting one's life without the fear of judgment.

[68:32] Suleika Jaouad: "For me, journaling yields the most rewards when I'm doing it consistently. It's like exercise."

Dax relates by sharing his own journaling habits and the struggles of maintaining consistency, highlighting the universal challenges faced by writers and creatives.

9. Final Thoughts and Encouragement

As the episode concludes, Suleika reflects on the collective human experience, encouraging listeners to embrace their vulnerabilities and use creativity as a means of personal transformation.

[66:09] Suleika Jaouad: "Creativity is about making something where there was nothing before. It's that alchemy."

Dax and Monica express their gratitude for Suleika's openness and the profound impact of her insights, wrapping up the episode on a note of inspiration and mutual respect.

10. Closing Remarks

The hosts briefly acknowledge upcoming episodes, promotional segments, and extend their appreciation to Suleika for sharing her powerful story. The episode ends with light-hearted banter, maintaining the show's signature blend of depth and relatability.

---

This episode of Armchair Expert offers a compelling exploration of Suleika Jaouad's journey through illness and creativity, providing listeners with profound insights into resilience, the healing power of art, and the importance of authentic self-expression.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondri in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Monsoon.

[Monica Padman]

Hi there.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi. Today we have Suleika Juad.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Who we've been dying to meet since, I mean, we met her in real life a couple times, but ever since watching that incredible documentary about her and John Batiste, she's such a special, incredible person. She's a best selling author. She's an artist, an advocate. Her books include Between Two Kingdoms and Now the Book of a Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. She's insanely inspiring as a person.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. This was a beautiful conversation and even though Dax and I get into it at the beginning, we will revisit it in the fact check and you can stick around for that.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't wait. This is also news to me.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Suleika Jaouad]

Are you curious about how they brought Gilded Age New York to life? I don't understand. Which bit is not clear? None of it is clear.

[Dax Shepard]

Want to know where the writers branched off from history? Well, when you set your mind on a thing, no one can stop you.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I take that as a compliment. Watch or listen to the official Gilded Age podcast. Wherever you find podcasts. He's an armchair.

[Dax Shepard]

He's an archer expert. I did a movie that shot New Zealand and they would go, you want your Trekkies? And I'm like, my what? Your Trekkies, which were my track pants.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I see your tricks.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is what they call sweatpants. But it was Trekkies and everything is ease.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they're very playful. It's very cute.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's very cute.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It is very cute. I go by Suleiki sometimes.

[Dax Shepard]

You do?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Do you add I's or Y's to your names?

[Monica Padman]

Yes, they call me Moni.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Moni.

[Monica Padman]

You.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't get Daxy too much.

[Suleika Jaouad]

She's a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's like Daxy Waxy.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Daxy waxy.

[Dax Shepard]

Daxy waxy, Twiddle, Dumb little boy.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah. How to emasculate a man? Just add a Y to the end of their day. That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Maxi. Maxi pad.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Maxi pad.

[Monica Padman]

It all circles back to period.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

We can't get off the topic, you.

[Monica Padman]

And I. I know. We really can't.

[Dax Shepard]

It's my favorite topic.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of women, did everyone see Taylor Swift got the rights to her music back today. Did not do that today.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Bought them back.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you celebrating?

[Monica Padman]

I am. I almost wore a Taylor shirt, but I forgot.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Are you a swifty? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I love her. I love her for those re. I mean, I love her lyrics and stuff, but she's a boss. She just will not quit until she gets what she wants. It's so cool. And I was talking to a friend about it this morning cuz I was getting so many texts like, oh my.

[Dax Shepard]

God, that's such a phenomena.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but because it's a female thing. And I do think so many women, regardless of who they are, they see themselves in her. It's such a gift that she has that you can just place yourself on her. So when she has these wins, even though she's a legitimate billionaire, you take them almost as personal wins.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's true. And she's been so open about the struggles.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, I love her. I love the impact she has visibly on my daughters, mostly my oldest. And I've gone to the concert with her. What a gift to give this little girl. But I have tiny criticisms and they're not permitted.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Anytime that happens, I get very flared up about responsible critique.

[Monica Padman]

What are your criticisms?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, would you acknowledge that swifties in general, there's no room for any kind of possible. She's incredible. Also, I don't love the endless victim narrative in the breakup song, but I'm not allowed to say that.

[Suleika Jaouad]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

And then the rights to her music thing is a little one what everyone perpetuates. Go ahead, because you're already. Do you see that physical reaction?

[Monica Padman]

But I don't know if you know all the stuff I do.

[Dax Shepard]

I've watched two documentaries about it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so what is the one sided factor?

[Dax Shepard]

She could have gotten them back.

[Monica Padman]

She tried to get them back from Scooter.

[Dax Shepard]

She didn't want to pay what Scooter paid to buy the recording company that owned the recordings. She wanted to be let out of that deal and have the music. And they said, well, it costs this much money. And she said, I'm not paying that. And Scooter Braun paid that. It wasn't Scooter who owned the movie. He bought the recording studio of which her father owned a percentage of.

[Monica Padman]

We're gonna have to do a big fact check on this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So are you someone who when there's a topic that is too hot to touch, it makes you want to talk about it?

[Dax Shepard]

It's not specifically that because actually I can dodge a ton of the hot button topics. It's when you're not allowed to question it.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Like a sense of censorship.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that healthy debate's not invited. And I think as topics have to land in a political side now, I mean, you can almost not find a topic that one side hasn't claimed ownership over.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

So if I want to pressure test our side of it, I'm anti our side and I'm anti my party. I don't like that. That's a real trigger for me. How do you feel about that?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I am very put off by binary thinking. Anytime there is an all or nothing paradigm, I get activated and I'm drawn to the messy middle. That to me is where the richness is like. I like to fumble through my ideas. I like to not even necessarily know if I am 100% sure of what I'm arguing. But I want the freedom to figure it out. That's when I get most excited conversationally.

[Dax Shepard]

Me too. So I guess just the Scooter Taylor, things like Scooter's the villain, he's an evil man and she's an ang. And already the archetypes, those are too extreme for both people.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally. Even in books, I don't like a clean villain or a clean angel.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Those aren't interesting stories.

[Dax Shepard]

And a villain who does a few.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Nice things and that feels more believable to me. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So I'm with you. And this isn't specific to Taylor Swift.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're not voting on that.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I'm not even waiting in there because, honestly, I don't know enough to wait in there. But I do feel a kind of knee jerk skepticism anytime there are clear narrative roles that don't allow for messiness.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that makes total sense. But I do think there's sometimes some hypocrisy that can happen. Like when you live a life that's. I don't believe in two sides. Yeah, you do. In your life. We have had our own business situation where you definitely feel like there's a right and wrong thing happening here and it's still messy. I understand points of view on both sides, like the politics thing. Of course, no one's perfect. No one's an angel. Villain is a little bit trickier in that position. But, yes, it doesn't mean that one person isn't better.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally.

[Monica Padman]

For a position. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm happy to assign gradients to each person, but in the canon of Taylor, it's like, Jake Gyllenhaal's a terrible man. All the exes are like, terrible people. And I'm just afraid of that. I'll end my Taylor thoughts at that.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I'll say, as someone who has written memoir, I feel like it is your responsibility when you write in the first person, be it in a song or in book form, to save the sharpest knives for yourself. And I also believe that that makes for the most interesting stories.

[Monica Padman]

Absolutely.

[Dax Shepard]

We just interviewed Jarad Carmichael, and he has a new special. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Don't be gay. And I've never seen a person go harder on themselves in public. And it's not even hard because obviously he's at peace with who he is, which is the beauty of willingness to go like, yeah, and this is what I like sexually. And I want to dominate. It's like, oh, my God, this is wonderful. People don't say this. They think it, but they don't say it.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I think that's the thing that made me fall in love with stories from the time I was really young. Is that moment when you read something and it can be fiction or nonfiction, and you're like, holy shit. I didn't know you were allowed to say that out loud. I didn't know you were allowed to feel that out loud. And that glimpse of recognition when someone holds up a mirror to the ugliest parts of you or to the parts that we're told we need to conceal. That really excites me.

[Dax Shepard]

That's in your book right at the beginning, the dissolving of loneliness. Because you recognize, oh, I'm not alone in this feeling, this thought, this experience, because I've just read it here from this person. And that's very comforting because really, loneliness is maybe the saddest place to occupy.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I think it's the epidemic of our time.

[Dax Shepard]

For sure. Yeah. What was the first thing you read that really ignited that same thing where it's like, oh, I'm not alone in my weirdness.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So my dad was a professor, French, French Literature, Skidmore College. They were strict in some ways, like typical immigrant parents. But when it came to reading, I could read anything I wanted, which is why I read lolita at age 12. There was nothing off limits, quickly.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't let you move on from that. I certainly know what the perspective of an older person reading Lolita is. What is a 12 year old? Cause Lolita is roughly. I don't know, what is she in that book?

[Suleika Jaouad]

She's about 12, 13.

[Dax Shepard]

She's just pubescent.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I did not understand it through a problematic lens. Like, I saw the COVID and it was the old vintage cover with the heart shaped sunglasses. And I was like, that's cool. I want some heart shaped sunglasses. So that was my first draw into the book. So I will say I devoured Lolita. I was fascinated by it, especially at an age where for me, I was having my first inklings of intrigue about romance and not sex necessarily, but sexual bodies.

[Dax Shepard]

What's appropriate, what's not this mysterious energy that you're feeling sometimes in your body without explanation.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally. So I credit that book with inspiring me to write. And also the end result of that inspiration was a semi traumatic experience that made it such that I didn't share my writing again for a decade.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Someone read your private musings.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So I was in seventh, eighth grade. As an extra credit project, my English teacher invited the class to write a fictional short story. And so I was reading Nabokov. I was reading Paul Bowles, who wrote these incredible novels set in North Africa with all sort of seedy subterranean characters. I was having like a real explosion of exposure. And so I went so hard on this extra credit project. I filled up an entire yellow legal pad, maybe 50 pages, with a novella, handed it in, was so proud of this story. And a week later, everyone got their assignments back except me and I was like, cool, cool, cool. My teacher's waiting to have a private meeting with me.

[Monica Padman]

She wants to get it to talk.

[Suleika Jaouad]

To you and tell me how brilliant I am.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Suleika Jaouad]

All the things. And then I got called into the school psychologist's office and she was holding my yellow legal pad. And so my story was heavily inspired by my recent reading. Inspiration? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Were they nervous? There was some sexual impropriety happening in the household.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It featured a 12 year old Arab American protagonist who was working as a prostitute in a brothel in Tangiers.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. So you were just combining all the pieces that you had reading.

[Suleika Jaouad]

A little smoking, 12 year old prostitute.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

I can imagine being your teenager and within a page going like, oh my God. Okay. Oh, fuck. What are we gonna. The panic that would set in if you were reading that.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Well, and the most horrifying thing about it, I was so humiliated. But she never said a word to me about it.

[Dax Shepard]

She didn't?

[Suleika Jaouad]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

She left it to the psychologist.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I felt really deeply shamed. Like I felt like I had done something bad and wrong, that I had exposed some part of my psychology that was bad and like, needed professional intervention.

[Monica Padman]

Ye.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So I kept writing in the privacy of a journal, but it really made me scared to give my imagination free rein and to share whatever emerged from my imagination to anybody.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm surprised you rebounded from that.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It took me a long time. I was so interested by those formative moments. Either those moments of creative injury or those moments of validation. It's that kind of sliding doors esque exercise and that question of if we end up where we're going to end up, irregardless of those moments or if they really set you on a path.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. If you had a different teacher that was like, I think there's really something brilliant here. Let's push her in this direction. Who would you have been?

[Suleika Jaouad]

And maybe it would have yielded the opposite effect. Maybe I'd be an accountant in Cleveland right now.

[Dax Shepard]

You can imagine a scenario where they were like, oh my God. Like the scene in Christmas Story where it's like, ralphie, your paper. A right. You have that experience and now you're like, oh, I'm supposed to be a great writer. That could also be arresting in some way.

[Suleika Jaouad]

But it was that ignition of that pilot light of self consciousness for me that maybe is happening irregardless at that age because you're entering puberty, where I suddenly felt very porous to the opinions of those around me and especially people in authority and not necessarily in a good way. I Was a little bit of a hellraiser as a kid, but I was overcorrecting in either direction by either rebuilding, rebelling against it, or really yearning for it as a marker of what I should do next.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, what city was this happening in?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I went to, like, 10 different schools on three different continents by the time I was 12. Oh, wow. And this was in upstate New York, in Saratoga Springs, where my dad was a professor. Okay, Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I have a lot of intrigue about Saratoga Springs, having read all these 19th century patrician class where they vacation there.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

So I have this really vivid image of it without ever seeing anything. Is it lovely?

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's lovely. But I was a townie, and so when you're a townie, the second. The kind of big hat wearers, the people who come in the summer for the horse races arrive, everybody gets out of there. My family always would, like, rent their house because that would fund the whole year, so a lot of people do that.

[Dax Shepard]

And your dad was on a college schedule.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And would you guys go traips around the world, or was it generally with intention?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Beyond my immediate family? All of my dad's family still lives in Tunisia. All of my mom's family lives in Switzerland. So we would spend summers there. But occasionally, what we would do is rent our house. And with the funds from the rental, we would travel for two months, and not in a fancy way. We'd get a ticket, say, to Mexico or Nicaragua. And we had one rule as a family. We were only allowed to bring a backpack for the whole summer.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. This is.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And my parents are not planners. We'd arrive, there would be no hotel around. We'd stay in youth hostels and ride chicken buses. And I found this supremely embarrassing. At the age of 12, all I wanted was to go on, like, a Royal Caribbean cruise. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

With a schedule.

[Suleika Jaouad]

With a schedule. Like all of my classmates were doing when their families took vacation.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, I want to know how your mom and dad met, because, yeah, he's from Tunisia, she's from Switzerland. This is quite a pairing. And it was in the 80s, I presume.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Both my parents immigrated to the Lower east side in the 80s. And my mom is a visual artist. Came here on an artist grant. My dad came here for his PhD, and my dad, at the time was working at the United Nations International School. And my mom was trying to be an artist and had a number of side hustles. I don't even know if I should share this, but her sister was a substitute teacher. When her sister couldn't make it. My mom would go in as her.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, nice. I love that. A hustler.

[Suleika Jaouad]

A hustler. And. And so that's how they met my mom pretending to be my sister. And there was, like, a little bit of sisterly tension because my aunt was like, I saw him first.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. How exciting.

[Suleika Jaouad]

That's very exciting.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, both of these Swiss Mrs. Both liked him.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Both of them liked him.

[Monica Padman]

That's a meet cute.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's real meet cute.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's something in the genetic stew of this all, too.

[Suleika Jaouad]

There's a real Francophone connection.

[Dax Shepard]

They're both adventurers. They both have left their native land. They're both attracted to what they don't know. Novelty. Like, there's some clues in here about the recipe that becomes you.

[Suleika Jaouad]

They're both misfits. They're both the only ones from their family also to have left and stayed.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, and how did the religion play out? Was that an issue?

[Suleika Jaouad]

My dad was raised Muslim. My mom was raised Catholic. I would say they're agnostics, bordering on atheism, but they're very much culturally what they were raised as. So my mom had no interest in getting married. Most of her. Her friends in Switzerland have been partnered and have families but have not gotten married. So the idea of marriage is very bourgeois.

[Dax Shepard]

They've transcended marriage in a few countries.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And my dad, you know, my grandmother had 13 kids, never learned to read or write, never left her village, got married at 14, 15, as was very common.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, if you have 13 kids, you gotta start right away.

[Suleika Jaouad]

You gotta start early. So he really wanted to get married. So she eventually relented because she needed a green card. And they were very much planning on being together, but had their little city hall wedding.

[Dax Shepard]

And do they speak French in Tunisia?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yes. Tunisia was colonized by the French, so that's their common language and what I grew up speaking. Oh, no kidding.

[Dax Shepard]

You have siblings?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I have a brother.

[Dax Shepard]

Older or younger?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Younger.

[Dax Shepard]

How did he like this lifestyle?

[Suleika Jaouad]

It was tough for us as kids. I think as a kid, you want to be normal. You want to assimilate. When we'd go to Switzerland, our cousins would call us their American cousins. We'd go to Tunisia, and we were, like, a little too white to be fully Tunisian. I'd go back to the US and especially post 9, 11. It was always because of my name. Where are you from? Where you're really from, that whole thing. I think we both really struggled to locate some sense of belonging, and we dealt with that in very different Ways. My brother was very shy and kind of went inward. And I remember, you know, he was in ESL in elementary school, and he came home and said to my mom, I'm the dumbest kid in my class. So heartbreaking. And my mom was like, you're not dumb. You just haven't learned the language yet. And I think I dealt with it by becoming the professional new kid. Like, I could, like, walk into a cafeteria and just clock every segment of the social fabric of a school and be like, these are the cool kids. This is the bully. It was like a game of chess for me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like you were able to diagnose. In order to be friends with this group, I need to be this type of person. You get very committed. Chameleon esque when you're in that position.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Which is a real skill set in terms of adaptability. But there's also a danger to it in that when you're constantly assimilating, it's hard to locate that through line.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Who are you?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Who are you? I remember begging my parents tearfully to let me legally change my name to Ashley because the coolest girl in fourth grade was named Ashley. They always were Ashtray as her nickname, which was even more sophisticated. So in my dream, I would be Ashley Ashtray Jawad.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. And Ashtray was not a pejorative. It was celebrated. Yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Very cool.

[Dax Shepard]

It was cool.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. That goes to show how cool is so subjective.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So subjective. And like Ashtray, we could be interviewing.

[Dax Shepard]

Someone else and be like. And I was so bullied, they'd call me Ashtray. They caught me, and you're like, yeah, that does suck.

[Suleika Jaouad]

What about you, Monica?

[Monica Padman]

Exact same story, but there was more. Maybe not more, but shame. My parents didn't make us, Trav. Mom would make dinner for her and my dad, and then dinner for me. Eggs, you know, like American food. I was fighting being Indian, but it was all so extreme and unfair in retrospect. Now when I look back on it, they weren't making us speak any language. Nothing. I hated the way other people saw them, or I was worried about how other people were seeing them, especially my dad, because he had an accent and it was in Georgia. I could just be at the restaurant and feel like he's ordering and he's saying this wrong, and it's still there.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I was with my mom last weekend, and I have apologized to her so many times because there is nothing more brutal than your child correcting you in general. But when you have an accent, like, she would Say TJ Maxx's. There's always an extra S or a.

[Dax Shepard]

Missing S. She just moved to Michigan. That's the Detroit thing. We put S's on everything.

[Suleika Jaouad]

We were with her, and she ordered a salad with protein. And I knew from the way that she pronounced it that probably the waiter hadn't understood. And I was like, let me be mature and not regress and just like, let this be.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And sure enough, the waitress brought out salad with a side of poutine fries.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you in Canada? It was poutine.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Providence, Rhode Island. So my parents did double down on the culture. We were not allowed to speak English at home because my family members didn't speak English outside.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And so my mom would make a high pitched beeping sound whenever we spoke in English until we switched to French.

[Dax Shepard]

So can I hear that sound?

[Suleika Jaouad]

It was like, beep. It was so annoying.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that is so funny. What about bringing friends home?

[Suleika Jaouad]

So the food thing, I used to lust after just the odorless beauty of a Pop Tart.

[Dax Shepard]

Anything Stouffer's, Anything you put in the oven.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The things we now know are horrible.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally. And I remember being in the second grade and my mom making a cheese plate for my friends. And it was not just any cheese, like, really smelly. And I was just so horrified.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Mom put some craft singles out.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It was like, the Swiss thing was embarrassing. The Tunisian thing certainly was smelly, spicy food.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The smelliness. And I am kind of obsessed with smells, and I think maybe that is part of it. Walking into the house and having to check before a friend came over, like, opening windows.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Absolutely.

[Monica Padman]

For no reason whatsoever. It is crazy.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I remember saying to my mom the next time, I was like, please just make macaroni and cheese. And I had an idea of what that was going to be. My friends come over, and she had made not what I was hoping for, which was toxically orange. Kraft Mac and Cheese.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Powder.

[Suleika Jaouad]

She was, like, grating nutmeg. And I was just like, isn't it so sad? The thing that makes me feel the worst is I used to throw away my lunches when I got to school, and I ate another butter every single day for lunch. Then the vending machine is done. And my mom was a wonderful mom who took such care. She's doing everything in making these healthy foods.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, the Kraft Mac and Cheese. It's so specific. It's so specific. And I would go to friends houses and they would obviously always have Kraft Mac and Cheese. It was so Good. To this day, I don't know what they were doing to make it different. Because then I was also like, we need to buy this and I need to eat it. And so she did. And I was like, this isn't right.

[Dax Shepard]

She couldn't do it.

[Monica Padman]

You're doing something wrong. I feel the same way. It doesn't feel like my white friend's house.

[Dax Shepard]

There's only two ingredients, milk and butter.

[Monica Padman]

There's no way she was doing anything wrong. But I was like, no, it tastes Indian. Something's wrong with it.

[Dax Shepard]

There's turmeric in this.

[Monica Padman]

I can taste a curry to this. It's so weird how it stays and how it still lives, but now it has so much guilt with it.

[Dax Shepard]

I would imagine if you're feeling all these feelings, it'd be all that much more rewarding to be connecting with people via their writing.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I would say that this whole experience made me an astute observer of the world around me because. Cause that was part of the survival skill, was observing behaviors. I kept a journal of American colloquialisms and idioms that I would try to just like, fold into conversation until they sounded natural. Earthling words that I wanted to roll off my tongue. And so I became really attuned to dialogue. I felt like a little amateur anthropologist all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Spy.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It really sharpened my powers of observation, but made me interested in those little particularities that make a character come alive on the page, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. And I do think that desire for connection, that sense of belonging, I never found that despite my best efforts. But I would find it in books.

[Dax Shepard]

What social rung did you end up in? I know you were at Juilliard at 12 playing the double bass that doesn't scream homecoming queen.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So I spent seventh and eighth grade trying to become as popular as possible. And that felt like safety to me. It was like a kind of armor, you know? I went to public school. Did you go to public school?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I had a real epiphany thanks to a movie. What is the movie? It's Julia Roberts. She teaches at an all women's college. Mona Lisa Smile. Oh, yeah. Okay, So I watched that movie, and I'll never forget the scene on the first day of class. Julia Roberts is the professor. She shows me. And all of the girls have already read the textbook. And they are so smart. And they were cool in a way that I had never been exposed to. They were cool because they were ambitious and they were talented and they were leading with that. And I Came home from watching that movie at the Wilton Mall and was like, oh. However, I'm trying to be cool right now is not actually going to lead to what I want, which is, is to get out of here and to live an interesting life. And the very next day, I walked past the lunch table with these cool. In an upstate sort of way, friends and went straight to the library and was like, I need to get my shit together. And I've always been prone to dramatic shifts like that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I imagine you have an active romantic imagination of life. You don't want this one, so we must go get the one we want.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah, it's like writing a little character sketch for yourself and then trying it on for fit. I have only a few times in my life where I've had, like, a stark epiphany like that, where it really set me on a different course. But from that moment onward, I remember finding the best student in my class. His name was Patrick. And going up to him and being like, will you teach me how to study?

[Dax Shepard]

And he was like, um, yes.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, God, you're the reason kids are like.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I started practicing.

[Dax Shepard]

You're beautiful. And she was like, in the popular group. This is, like, out of fry Night Lights. He's like, oh, this is Landry being asked to help Tyra.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, look how Landry is the coolest character.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we learned that maybe Patrick is too.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I became very focused practicing the bass on getting my act together. I'd been a terrible student and kind of getting into trouble smoking cigarettes. Oh, yeah, all those really great.

[Dax Shepard]

Good stuff.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I had my first cigarette in the sixth grade.

[Dax Shepard]

Same. How are you going to be on from the iga? Full carton. When I interviewed John, because you famously met at this Juilliard band camp, I said I would have immediately been so attracted to any young girl who chose the standup bass as her instrument. There's a lot there that's a real statement to pick that, don't you think? Just generally speaking, in all the school bands.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I started on piano when I was 5, and my mom was super strict about it. I had to practice every day. Hated it. And I remember what graded where you get invited to pick an instrument. I think fourth grade. And I remember all the girls clamoring for the violins.

[Dax Shepard]

Violin. The flute.

[Suleika Jaouad]

The flute. The basic bitches of the orchestra, basically. And nobody wanted to play the bass. There were, like, a couple of tall, hulking guys. And I remember thinking of it as, like, its own kind of misfit or outlier in the orchestra. And that for me was another kind of turning point where I was like, oh, no matter how hard I try, this whole assimilation thing is not working for me. Let me own this.

[Dax Shepard]

It also reads his confidence.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Absolutely. And I really, from the moment I picked up the bass, fell in love with it. Part of it was a way to inconvenience my parents, especially my mom, who'd forced me to practice this instrument. And it was wildly inconvenient. I couldn't get my cloth totally. They had to get a station wagon to be able to fit it in there.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't think about your kid picks an instrument and you're like, fuck, we gotta get a different car.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yes, absolutely. It was a nightmare. And I loved it.

[Monica Padman]

What about it? Other than that, it was a little different than the norm. It was not basic bitch instrument.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's the only instrument you have to kind of hug with your whole body when you play and you feel every vibration in your chest. And there is something so primal to me about it. I love being the only girl in the bass section.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're kind of wrestling that instrument.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's a full body experience. And I also liked it because I remember my teacher saying, like, your hand isn't big enough to play the bass. And I was like, watch.

[Dax Shepard]

Also you get calluses. Like you're walking around your whole life aware of this dedication you have. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

There's some incredible TV coming out of the UK right now. Brits just do it differently. The accents, the wit, the scenery, the devastating one liners disguised as compliments. It's all streaming on Britbox. They have the best mysteries, dramas, comedies and seriously addicting originals like Outrageous, based on the true story of the Mitford sisters. They were kind of like the Kardashians of the 1930s. Wealthy, audacious, chaotic, wildly opinionated and always making headlines. And chances are you've never heard their story. Story. It's stunning. It's jaw dropping, it's very British. So check out Outrageous. It could be your next favorite. Don't miss Outrageous streaming now only on Britbox. This new year, why not let Audible expand your life by listening? Explore over 1 million audiobooks, podcasts and exclusive Audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you. Tap into your well being with advice and insight from leading professionals and experts. Experts on better health, relationships, career, finance, investing and more. Maybe you want to kick a bad habit or start a good one. If you're interested in learning how to master your emotions and hearing scientifically backed advice for using your emotions as a tool, may I suggest Shift by psychologist and bestseller author Dr. Ethan Kross. Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com wondery that's audible.com this is Nick.

[Dax Shepard]

And this is Jack. We're best friends, ex finance guys and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, the Best Idea yet, we're bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Or which cartoon turned four turtles into.

[Dax Shepard]

A global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke. Last one which cold beverage was so hated by Star Starbucks they actually ended up acquiring it? Spoiler the Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the Orange Mocha Frappuccino, Join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. And if this podcast likes to longer than 45 minutes, call your doctor.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Today is the worst day of Abby's life. The 17 year old cradles her newborn son in her arms. They all saw how much I loved him. They didn't have to take him from me. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, families shipped their pregnant teenage daughters to maternity homes and forced them to secretly place their their babies for adoption in hidden corners across America. It's still happening. My parents had me locked up in the godparent home against my will. They worked with them to manipulate me and to steal my son away from me. The godparent home is the brainchild of controversial preacher Jerry Falwell, the father of the modern evangelical right and the founder of Liberty University, where patients, powerful men emboldened by their faith, determine who gets to be a parent and who must give their child away. Follow Liberty Lost on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. So band camp is not a cool place to be, but a badge of honor at band camp is if you play so hard that you not only get a blister, but then you bleed. If you bleed on your strings, you're like super cool.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you probably don't want to wash it off, but then you're like, I'm supposed to?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, this is getting Indulgent, but I want everyone to see. So that band camp, was it in a pastoral, beautiful. Was it in Saratoga?

[Suleika Jaouad]

It was in Saratoga Springs.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it was okay, perfect.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It was an orchestra camp, which I was in. Jazz camp, which John was in. In a ballet camp.

[Dax Shepard]

So you weren't in the same discipline within the camp. You remember obviously meeting him?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I did because he was in a band with my first ever boyfriend. So I hung out with him quite a bit. But John was so shy that he barely spoke to me. Like he couldn't make eye contact. He had a mouthful of braces.

[Dax Shepard]

Skinny.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Skinny as can be. In like oversized clothing. And just awkward and delightful and already so brilliant.

[Dax Shepard]

That's my curiosity. Did you get inklings of like, oh, this is a special.

[Suleika Jaouad]

At the end of the summer there was a kind of recital. And I remember he played this piano solo. And mind you, he'd been playing for two years at that point. And everyone gave him a standing ovation. And you're not really supposed to do that at kids concert, like. Cause everyone's kid is special and brilliant.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And it was just an involuntary reaction. And I remember thinking to myself, I've never met someone quite like him.

[Monica Padman]

I have chills.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And then just totally forgetting about it. Cause it's summer camp, he's from New Orleans, never going to see each other again. And fast forward four years later, and it was my first weekend at Juilliard and I was on the one train with my friend Michelle. And we see this guy who's like attracting stares because he had headphones on and he was like humming to himself and rocking around and playing the air piano. And everyone was like, who is this crazy dude?

[Dax Shepard]

What age was everyone at that point?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I was 16 and John was 17. I was a freshman at Juilliard. I was in the pre college program.

[Dax Shepard]

And he was just vibing in his own.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah, you can picture it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Making sounds.

[Dax Shepard]

When I'm explaining John to people who don't know who he is, I'm like, you'll never meet anyone that feels more from another planet.

[Suleika Jaouad]

John and I, we call each other aliens. There's like a wonderful thing when you meet a fellow alien.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Even if you're not from the same.

[Dax Shepard]

Planet, planet or planetary system, there's like.

[Suleika Jaouad]

A game, recognized game thing that has. And so in that moment I was like, oh, I know that guy. I remembered him because he was so awkward and weird back then too, in the most delightful way. And I was like, that's Jon Batiste from New Orleans. And then I said. Just blurted this out. I said, that's the man I'm going to marry someday. And my friend Michelle was like, say hi to him. And I was like, no, no, no. And she went, john, right as the subway door is open, and I, like, ducked and ran, and I totally forgot about. And she was at our little living room wedding and told this story.

[Monica Padman]

God, life is.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Isn't that bizarre. We have no interest in each other romantically.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have an explanation for why you started journaling so early? Because you have journaled your entire life, which is pretty rare.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I was a really angry kid with a lot of big feelings, in part from all this moving around and upheaval. And so. So I think I needed a receptacle for that to kind of get it out of my body. And so I think that was the first impulse. And I always felt so much better after I journaled. And then I think in the course of just trying to transcribe whatever swirl of feelings or thoughts was happening inside of me, I also started to kind of delight in it. Like, I started to have fun in my journal. I would read back, and my journal are full of lies.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Things that definitely did not happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Like boys you were dating or.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah, boys I said I kissed. That I certainly never did lie.

[Monica Padman]

Like fantasy.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah. There was a fantasy element and a sense of possibility, and there was a lot of trying things on for fit and writing my way into it and seeing how it felt. And so I think from an early age, I realized that the journal is this rare space where you're not doing it for a grade. You're not doing it for anybody other than yourself. It's kind of like a chrysalis. Like, you get to be your goopiest, messiest, most unformed self, and there are no stakes.

[Monica Padman]

You're not turning it in to get critiqued.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's not good writing. It's not even grammatical writing. It can just be whatever you want. I could experiment on myself, with myself, and just see what emerged. And I think I'm someone who. I don't actually understand what I'm feeling or what I'm thinking until I write my way through it. I often. And I notice this in my writing, and I don't know what it's like for you. When I went to work on my memoir, all of the first drafts of that book were full of lies. Like, the story. I wanted it to be interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, of course.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I would write it and be like, that does not actually feel true to what I'm actually thinking or feeling, and then I have to go back and revise. And I think so many of us, in the way that we think back on the stories of our lives and on the stories of who we are, they live in the aspirational as opposed to what's actually happening. Honesty. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But then you weirdly manifest. This whole life that you've been practicing in a secret way, you do kind of end up becoming the thing you're fantasizing about a lot.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And the act of keeping a journal, it keeps me honest so that I can then manifest. I know you journal a lot, but something will come up enough times that I'm like, so bored by whatever petty grievance or whatever thing it is that I'm finally like, I have to do something about this. This is intolerable. Like, I cannot spend another minute of my one precious life rehashing this stupid thing that happened with my ex boyfriend or whatever it is. And in the act of noticing those patterns or noticing something, the undesirable things that are coming up, it liberates me enough to actually move towards what I want.

[Monica Padman]

That's what therapy serves as well. Same sort of thing where it's like, oh, my God, I'm talking about this again.

[Dax Shepard]

It's embarrassing.

[Monica Padman]

Like, I guess, yeah, you can kind.

[Dax Shepard]

Of get shamed into changing. You're like, this is embarrassing.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally, yeah. When did you start keeping a journal?

[Dax Shepard]

I sporadically journaled through high school, and then I took this really long road trip when I graduated, and I journaled pretty good during that. I had this very romantic sense of the life I wanted to live. And it was inspired by people I had read. And so the worst version would be to call it, like, there's some egomaniacal nature to it, to journaling, just to the whole thing.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Were you writing for your future biographer?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, writing with the notion I'd be reading it when I'm older, which is like this weird trap. And I think you gotta learn to break that. Self conscious, but no audience. It was gonna be me. And I knew every time I looked back in life, I was always kind of embarrassed by. I thought was so cool. And then it was gone for a while. And then when I got sober, I started journaling and I noticed this crazy pattern where it was like, I would be religious about journaling every morning and then I wouldn't journal for eight days, and then I'd relapse. And once I figured out that pattern, I think just superstitiously, I decided, if you can't commit to journaling every day, you're not going to commit to sobriety. So I've been journaling for 21 years straight, but I stopped and I noticed you have periods where you stop. Yeah, and I want to talk about stopping because I stopped for a period because the journal was always where I was, dead honest. And I started to have some things I couldn't even be honest about with my journal. I didn't realize that till later, but I was like, oh, I stopped writing because I couldn't bear to write in it and not be honest when the.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Truth is too hot to touch. Did the way that you journal change when you were in that midst of the kind of dark night of the soul and early recovery, were you still writing with that self consciousness or were you kind of writing to save your life?

[Dax Shepard]

Writing to save my life and writing with great humility. And you can almost track when I'm feeling good and bullish in my recovery. But no, it's the punctuated starts. Right. It's like returning to journaling after a two month bender, basically. And the level of humility and lack of self consciousness, just like I'm gonna die. That's really the pure, pure zones of it.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I think that for me is always what journaling has felt like is writing to save my life. Like I'm not actually doing it with the idea of rereading it.

[Dax Shepard]

Any vanity.

[Suleika Jaouad]

No, it is when I'm my most laid bare, stripped down self and when I have only questions. Like, I feel like I am entirely made of questions with zero answers. And to me, the epigraph that I included in the Book of Alchemy is that Rilke line of the questions now and eventually someday you'll live your way into the answers. The idea of living the questions.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, living the questions. The book is called the Book of a Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. And I thought, well, first we should talk about what alchemy is, and then I want to talk about the first time you were in the hospital, because I think that might be the most tangible sense of alchemy I've ever heard. So alchemy is. People used to try to turn random objects into gold.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And it's always been one of my favorite words in the English language. I've always been drawn exactly to that traditional popular definition of alchemy, this idea of transmuting something base, something considered worthless, like lead, into something precious and noble, like gold. So I think as a kid I was just interested in it. As someone who was interested in magic.

[Dax Shepard]

I Don't want to be too corny, but I think you were a piece of gold that everyone thought was lead and you were waiting for everyone to recognize that you were gold. Yeah, I think that's what's going on.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's kind of like the ugly duckling.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. So you're amongst all these people that you're being told they're gold and you're like, but I'm not like them. But I think I have something to offer.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm valuable too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I think I have value, but no one's seeing it.

[Dax Shepard]

You have this incredibly literal experience with alchemy. I'm sure when I say hospital, you could probably think of many times where this happened, but I'm thinking you and John weren't romantically involved. I don't know how you come to know each other from the subway to your first diagnosis with leukemia, but you're in the hospital at 22. How have you and John reconnected at that point?

[Suleika Jaouad]

So we had stayed in touch. It's so funny. We both got honorary doctorates at Brown last weekend.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, congrats.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Thank you. I know we felt very fancy.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sorry I didn't address you correctly.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah, exactly. You can refer to me as Dr. J for the remainder of this conversation. But I was having so much, so much deja vu to that age. I was like, when was the last time I was in a cap and gown with my parents present? Yeah. So we reconnected the summer I graduated from college and he crashed my going away party. I was a total mess. I nearly missed my graduation because I was so hungover that I slept through my alarm. Like I was so shame faced, I couldn't meet my parents eyes. That was a disaster.

[Dax Shepard]

And you just graduated from Princeton.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I just graduated from Princeton and I. I was such a creative kid, but I graduated from Princeton and whatever sense of freedom and imagination that I'd had, I went into Princeton. I was on a full financial aid scholarship and was like, I need to honor the sacrifices my parents made for me and I need to honor this opportunity. My interpretation of that was I needed to have a practical plan. And so I had no idea who I was, what I was doing. And I had this sense of anxiety. Bezos gave our commencement speech.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I remember him saying something about how at the age of 80, you'll survey your life and the choices that you make now are extremely important.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Too much pressure.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I was like, I already felt like I had failed. When I graduated, I was like, I had no plan, no job.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, if you go there in a full ride and you have double minor in French and in Gender studies, what's your major?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I did Near Eastern studies in French and gender studies.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

I would argue too, you're a bit of a wunderkind. And there's easy ways to achieve the wunderkind things, and now it's up to you.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Well, but there are easy ways to continue achieving the wunderkind thing when you graduate, and they're not always the things you actually want. So I was like, maybe I should go to law school. That sounds impressive. All of my plans were about what sounded good, of course, and how to sound impressive. When someone asked me, like, what I was planning to do after graduation and none of them actually felt appealing to me.

[Monica Padman]

Were you still playing music throughout this time?

[Suleika Jaouad]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I really was so lost. And I reconnected with John and moved to Paris and was working as a paralegal. I was sick at the time and didn't know it. So I had this real sense that something was deeply wrong with me.

[Dax Shepard]

When you have leukemia at the beginning, what are the symptoms? Symptoms? Feeling like.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So I have a strange kind of leukemia that starts with a disease called myelodysplastic syndrome, pre leukemia. So it moves very slowly until it grows into full blown leukemia. So I had been sick my whole senior year.

[Dax Shepard]

In leukemia, you end up with way too many white blood cells.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It depends what kind. But not enough white blood cells, not enough red blood cells. So I was constantly getting sick and went to see a doctor who told me it was probably because of my period and, like, sent me home with iron supplement.

[Dax Shepard]

Your test results are back. You're a woman.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Exactly. I was exhausted all the time and saw someone and they were like, maybe you're partying too hard. Burning the candle at both ends. All of it was attributed to me and my failings as a person. I was so exhausted, I would drink eight cups of coffee to get through the day and could not function. My most dangerous era of self medication was that year and that summer because I just could not function. And I thought it was me. I didn't think it was a health thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you get any cocaine?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Wonderful.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Started with Adderall and then Big.

[Dax Shepard]

That was my drug of choice.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would do cocaine and it felt like a cup of coffee. Like, that's how exhausted I was. Like, I was like, oh, okay, I can keep my eyes open.

[Dax Shepard]

I've done an eight ball and I could take a nap. Wow. I wish I would have bumped into you in Paris in this phase.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Well, so I went to Paris because cocaine is not cool in Paris. And specifically to get away from the whole crew of people I was hanging out with. Because I knew by the end of that summer that I was in trouble and that I was someone I did not want to be and that I needed to make a change. And the only way, you know, my whole childhood changed was changing your zip code.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And so I took this paralegal job and was like, I need to get out of here. Need to start over. And I did clean up my act. And it was without all those substances in my system that I really realized something was deeply wrong. And I kept getting misdiagnosed because as a woman, and especially as a North African woman, in Paris, nobody took me seriously. I got hospitalized for a week, and they diagnosed me with burnout syndrome and released me from the hospital. Like, I really thought I was going crazy.

[Monica Padman]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

That's maddening. The weird thing is it was a relief. I was about to say, I bet.

[Monica Padman]

So good.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It really was. I was so relieved. At least it wasn't in my head, that I wasn't a hypochondriac, that I wasn't making all of this up that.

[Monica Padman]

You are causing or that, like, you couldn't handle life.

[Suleika Jaouad]

That's how it felt. I felt like. I remember writing in my journal, I can't cut it in the real world. So a year to the day after graduation, I got admitted to the hospital in New York and spent the whole summer inpatient. And that to go back to alchemy is when I feel like I really, really started to think about the applications of a particular kind of creative alchemy in my life. And it really was John who, I feel, like, modeled that for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So you're in the hospital room. You're absolutely miserable. Everyone on the hospital floor is miserable. It is a cancer wing of the hospital, and John shows up with a few musicians.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah. So I'd been in there six weeks. Whatever I think thought that whole experience was gonna be like, was not it. I had brought a suitcase full of books. I was like, I'm gonna read through the rest of the Western canon. I was like, I'm gonna make this productive. And I did none of those things. And at the end of the summer, I was the sickest I've ever been. None of chemo's working, and I was going into bone marrow failure. And that same day that I got that news, John showed up with his Whole band. Cause he just learned I was in the hospital. And again, we were just friends. This is who John is. He shows up for people and in the most difficult moments and he always shows up. He's the guy who will fly to New Orleans for three hours to see his eight year old nephew's soccer game. And so right there in my hospital room, they started to play for me. And as the sound of the music floated out into the hallway, these patients and doctors and nurses were like poking their heads out like, what is happening here? And everyone started to sing and clap their hands and started to dance. And it was, was such a profound experience of witnessing this profoundly depressing, musicless place where the only sounds that you hear are the beeping of IV poles and the wheezing of monitors alchemized into this joyous second line. And everybody was so happy. And it was one of the best days of my life. And it had started as this terrifying day that unlocked something for me and that I felt, felt such a sense of powerlessness. Whatever plans I'd had for how my life was going to go were obviously out the window. But when you're stuck in a hospital bed, in a room with no end date of being released in sight, you have every excuse in the world to do absolutely nothing. And it's so easy to feel like you have no agency and you're seeding control to doctors and to caregivers and to whatever mysterious happenings are taking place in your body. And it was this moment where I started to think about how survival necessitates its own kind of creative act. Like when the chemosaurs make it too painful to speak, you have to find different ways to communicate with your friends and family. And when you're bored out of your skull because you're 22 and you're stuck in bed and all your friends are like out starting their lives, you have to use your imagination to not go crazy. And so I returned to the journal in the most serious way I'd ever returned to it in a really daily way.

[Dax Shepard]

You took this Hundred day challenge basically. Yeah, yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I started using it as a kind of reporter's pad. I would write little details about what was happening in this cancer ward. Like my neighbor down the hallway, Dennis, who declared a hunger strike because all of the meal trays kept arriving with the food still frozen. And he was like going around trying to rally all of us to join us in this hunger strike. I would write about the nurses and their gossip. I was watching a lot of grey's Anatomy at the time because that, weirdly, was the one thing that made me feel a little less isolated within this experience. I was like, oh, yeah, I get this. And I remember asking one of the residents if her life bore any resemblance to the cast of Grays. And she was like, we have just as much sex, but everyone's significantly less attractive. And so I, like, write down these little lines of dialogue. And I was like, actually, I don't want to be here, obviously, but this place is really interesting and there's a lot of stuff happening here.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't mind being on record saying this, and I've said it before, but people in the medical industry are perverts in the best way possible. They are perverts. That's a good group.

[Monica Padman]

Seems like you were at that time with the writing and then even with John bringing music back into your life, you were kind of getting tethered back to your old self.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally. And it was because I had leukemia, so there were no expectations of me for the first time since childhood. And I think all kids are creative. You're not. Not thinking about being a good artist or a bad artist. You're just playing make believe. And you're able to do that because there are expectations of you to monetize it or turn it into your passion or into your major, whatever pressures we put on ourselves. And so I was just doing it for myself because it was fun and there was no goal, no outcome in mind. Scarier than even the possibility of death was the idea of being some tragic story of unmet potential. And more unbearable even than that was the idea of continuing along the path that I was on, where I was really living for what the journalist David Brooks describes as the resume virtues, the traits that make you attractive in a modern marketplace, as opposed to the eulogy virtues, which are the traits that were remembered for long after we're gone. Were you kind? Were you brave? Did you take interesting creative risks? It's not about your gpa. It's not about how cool your job title sounds. And so it was profoundly humbling to me. And I started to research our long lineage of bedridden artists and writers throughout history, like Frida Kahlo, who was in a bus accident at around the same age and was stuck in, and her mom gave her a lap desk and an easel and she started making the self portraits that obviously turned her into one of the most famous artists of all time. Or Virginia Woolf, where there's so many examples of people who used that confinement as a springboard for something totally unexpected and as a space that was useful. And that, to me was exciting. It's always been. What's exciting to me about writing is even when some tragedy befalls you, the second you write about it, it becomes grist. It becomes something that you can excavate on the page. It becomes material.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You even talk about becoming excited for your nightmares. What a reframing.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I was keeping this journal for myself, writing about a lot of the things I couldn't talk about out loud. I was writing about infertility. And also, there's nothing quite like being sick to humble you. There are so many indignities. You lose your dign every single day. When you are in cancer treatment, you have no privacy. No privacy.

[Dax Shepard]

People are in and out of your space touching you.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I think they designed the backless hospital gown.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a further fuck you.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Exactly. I'm like, surely there is a better design out here that we can come up with that does not make you feel so literally exposed.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. Why do they need to access your back so much?

[Suleika Jaouad]

They don't. Never once has there been an immediate urgent need for access to the backside.

[Dax Shepard]

Why can't it just rope in the front line?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Like a roll? Absolutely.

[Dax Shepard]

I put one on backwards one time because I was like, oh, this makes sense. And then I came out and then I was quite embarrassed. They're like, you have that on wrong.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Someone, not me, should design something.

[Monica Padman]

I feel like what you feel you're owed in life dissolves immediately when you're in there. Because what you're owed is not having your ass exposed. Really. It becomes so real and human about what we deserve and don't deserve.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Absolutely. And in the process, I had such limited energy. I'd have two hours maybe where I felt ok. I had to get really specific about what I wanted to do in those two to three hours and who I wanted to spend those two to three hours with. And that was a really useful exercise. I still think about that. I'm like, if I only have two hours today, what makes me feel most alive? Who makes me feel most alive? What do I really want to do?

[Monica Padman]

How are your parents during all this? And also just cause knowing with immigrant parents being like, I have to maybe interfere with the server and say how to pronounce this? You're always kind of looking out for them in a different way. Did you feel sort of burdened by that during your time there?

[Suleika Jaouad]

I had worked so hard to be independent. I'm a very proud person. We are a very Proud family. Like, I really struggled with the accepting of help and the needing of help.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's my number one.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And especially at 21, 22, where, like, the last thing you want to feel is infantilized. You're like, I've got this. Even though you definitely don't got it.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Whether you're in the hospital or not, you don't got it.

[Dax Shepard]

You're clearly in a new nosedive. No one has it.

[Suleika Jaouad]

In fact, no one has it. You know that same guy, Dennis, who started the hunger strike? He never had any visitors the whole summer. And like, I remember being really struck by that. Cause I was having all kinds of feelings about my friends, some of whom were really there and many of whom were not. Which in retrospect, of course, the people I was playing beer pong with or doing cocaine with were not, like, by my bedside, holding my hand as my hair was falling out. So he ended up dying and nobody came to collect his body. And I remember. I remember being so humbled by that and shocked by it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's independence.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It really makes you think twice. And I started to really realize how lucky I was to have parents who were there every single day. My mom, who was like, cooking me the very things as a kid that I was tossing in the trash can because the meal trays kept showing up frozen. Right. And it really changed my relationship. Relationship to my parents. When I was writing my first book, Between Two Kingdoms, my mom actually gave me her journals from that time because I wanted to understand her perspective. And that was so sobering. They say there's a word for someone who loses their parents. Orphan. There's a word for someone who loses their spouse. Widow. And there's no word in the English language for a parent who loses their child because it is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. And so I think for me too, it was this moment of seeing the humanity in my parents. And worse than that, seeing them trying so hard to be brave and strong and knowing that it was devastating, that really humbled me in such a big way. And it also, I think, really made me think about the kind of relationships I wanted and the strength and quality of those relationships. Relationships to my family or to my friends or romantic relationships.

[Dax Shepard]

So in that time, you also start writing this column in the New York Times, life Interrupted. And then post treatment, which takes three years. You're not cancer free for three years. At that point, you go around the country, you drive thousands of miles, and you meet people who have written you letters based on that column. And then that becomes the basis for the memoir Between Two Kingdoms.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

And then after that, we do the beautiful documentary American Symphony. John is up for 11 Grammys. You're a successful writer, he's writing a symphony. This should be a wonderful time. And it returns. And then in that return, you know, journaling is a practice, is your superpower. But then your vision gets so fucked up from all the medication, you're only left to paint. But that was the thing when I watched the doc, I was like, look at that. This volcano of creativity. Like take writing away and she just is going to paint endlessly. It was very inspiring to watch your output during that time.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I feel like the most powerful acts of creativity sometimes are born from a place of desperation, from like a savage place of urgency. Again, it's like that writing or painting or whatever it is to kind of save your life. And that's what it was for me. You know, I went into, into that hospitalization was getting a second bone marrow transplant, being like, oh, I know how I'm going to navigate this. I had 10 journals with me. I had my shared journal with John, my medical journal, my personal journal. And I was seeing triple and quadruple and having these really intense medication induced hallucinations where I was having nightmares about 10 foot tall giraffes that doubled as IV poles. And like, I knew from having been through this once before that instead of resisting what I was most afraid of, instead of numbing myself against it or like turning away from it, the only way for this to not be a miserable or a solely miserable traumatic experience was to engage with my fear and to collaborate with it. And so I started transcribing these weird hallucinations and nightmares in watercolor. I'm not a painter, haven't painted from the time I was a kid. And again, it was doing this thing purely for myself, without any expectation of it needing to be a thing. And I would do one every day. It was like a visual journal, essentially, because watercolor in some ways is like a perfect medium because you can't control it. Yeah, you're not the sole agent of it. It's like an aquatic dance or something. Yeah, it moves, it moves. And that's the beauty of it. It's like all about the happy accidents on the. And I became obsessed with it. My nurses every day would come in and they were like, let's look at the new painting. It was like a surrealist art gallery. And this young woman who would come to clean the floors said to me, like, I always clean the floors in here for longer than I need to because I like the way I feel in here. Ultimately, I really believe that that same creativity we have as kids that we have natural access to is something. Something that if we cultivate as adults, you don't have to be a screenwriter as your day job or a Grammy winning musician or whatever. It is just an energetic shift. Like there's a miracle to it. You make something where there was nothing before and it becomes something new. It's that alchemy. And that for me is how I've navigated all the peaks and valleys and tried to look at my life, life as a sort of creative project that I get to constantly reimagine.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. Well, I left one part out. So during COVID given your experience, you started a newsletter, a substack the Isolated. And that accumulated hundreds of thousands of readers and participants. And it's still alive and it remains like one of the biggest artist communities in the world, this thing you started. So did that experience with kind of prompting others to get engaged in it encourage you to write the book of alchemy?

[Suleika Jaouad]

It did. And I really resisted writing this book because I worried that journaling sounds unserious. And it also seems so self evident. You need a pen, you need a notebook, and off you go. And yet to your point about stopping and starting, how many times have you bought a journal, filled out the first few pages, and then just left the whole rest of it blank and then bought another one because that journal is ruined and you have to look, it symbolizes your failure totally. I think especially in the moments where I've fallen off, Even as someone who has loved keeping a journal, it's actually a really hard thing to do, to be in conversation with the self. And often when you need it most is when you resist it most. And so that idea of being prompted, and I'm someone who, if you had told me at 20, like, write to a prompt, I would have been like, absolutely not. That sounds like homework. I'm not interested in that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there's a section you quote another writer, a poet who says, like, soon as you tell me, tell us about a favorite memory in the wilderness or some shit, I've forget what it was. And he's like, that's like putting your finger in a goldfish pond. And all the goldfish immediately run to the shadows. And I'm like, that's how I feel about prompts. All of a sudden I can't remember one thing.

[Suleika Jaouad]

So to me, it's not the prompt, it's the reading that accompanies the prompt. And so my whole life, especially when I'm feeling stuck, I start by reading something and the prompt I think of as, it's not homework, you don't have to follow it. Sometimes I read a prompt and I'm like, I hate that prompt. That prompt irritates me and I write into that irritation and that yields something. Interest. It's that kind of kaleidoscopic effect where you just shift the barrel just so and the light falls differently. And so for me, journaling when it yields the most rewards is when I'm doing it consistently. It's like exercise.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's like going to therapy once a year.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah. So in order to get myself there, I need some structure, some container, and something to prod me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I loved your explanation of trying to write the memoir and going to Vermont and get in the cabin and get. And you're all set up to do it. And then just the agony of trying to write a book and how the way you broke out of that is just reading other people's work. And I relate to that enormously. In fact, anytime I have had writer's block, my break the glass is Catcher in the Rye. For whatever reason, if I read like three pages of Catcher in the Rye, I remember what I love about writing. I want to do the thing I just saw.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Totally. And I love reading the journals of the writers I admire most. Like, I like reading about their struggles with the writing life or whatever it was that they were dealing with. My very favorite thing to do is to try to sync up the journals of my very favorite writers with the books they were writing at the time and to try to like understand the movement of what was happening. Oh, yeah, that's cool. I also think writing is very intimidating to a lot of people. And I think in some ways the journal is the most democratic of writing forms because you don't have to be a good writer. And it's actually specifically about not doing precious writing, self conscious writing, where you're like, how is future me going to think about this?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think a journal is bad if we end up getting copies and it's like, oh, they're just doing a thing. They weren't being honest or they weren't rambling even. You need some of that to know it's real.

[Dax Shepard]

But I think what's required to overcome that is repetition involved. I don't think you get there by starting and stopping and starting stopping. I think it's like the act of it consistently will erode that self consciousness.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I also find that it sharpens my memory. Like the second I write something down, I remember it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And so it's so easy to just like tumble head first into your life and to have moments that feel significant that you think you're going to remember and then obviously, inevitably you don't. But even in the writing of a memoir, people are like, how do you remember all of this shit? And I'm like, because I recorded it. And this is the second you write it down. It kind of traps it in Amber, do you have fear of people reading your journals or are you someone who localize them around, hoping someone will be interested enough to read?

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want anyone to and I don't care.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I feel the same way.

[Dax Shepard]

I was going to ask you. I don't ever read any of them.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I don't either. The only one I do like to go back and reread is my joint journal with John. When we first started dating, we were for years so full of angst and about relationships and marriage in a way that wasn't even necessarily about each other, but just our own baggage that we were bringing into it. And both of us were spending a lot of time on the road and we would do the thing that couples do when you're apart where you have a call and you're like, how are you? How was your day? And it's like you never really get to the there, there. And it's so easy to feel disconnected. So John was like, instead of. Because we were doing morning pages at the time, instead of doing our three pages a day, what if we direct about each other and snap a photo and text them to each other?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So that was my curiosity mechanically, how.

[Suleika Jaouad]

They get shared works. So we started doing that and like things would come up in these entries or in these letters essentially to each other that I didn't even know I was feeling. And same with him or certainly would not have come up in a phone call. And all these kind of questions and doubts and anxieties we were having about our relationship. And it's fun to go back and reread those.

[Monica Padman]

So intimate.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's so intimate. The most intimate.

[Dax Shepard]

How long has that been going on? Does it get interrupted?

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah. When I was in the hospital, there was like a period of time where we couldn't see each other because he'd been exposed to Covid at work. He was writing letters, but I would do like a voice dictation. And that's the Other thing I like about journaling, it doesn't have to be pen and paper like John does piano. Journal entries. Oh, I'll sometimes do voice notes when I'm walking.

[Monica Padman]

The painting you said was a version.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Of that from the isolation journal. We did a kind of hundred day journaling project during the pandemic. And this woman, never forget who had lost her 13 year old daughter, decided that her version of journaling was going to be using her daughter's art supplies to create a visual journal entry every day. It became like a grief journal for her and it was a memory of her daughter every day. And she loved it so much that she kept doing it because she was like, this is the first time I've been able to feel the journey, joy of remembering my daughter and not just the pain of it. And I was like, yeah, what a creative and deeply powerful way to engage with your grief. And also to reinterpret journaling.

[Monica Padman]

I have the opposite. I started a journal at the beginning of the year and I stopped pretty quickly. But also I was very hung up on someone. I live by myself. There is no reason for me to be worried that anyone's gonna like find it, read it. And I was like, should I tear the pages out and shred them every day? Like, I don't want anyone ever seeing this.

[Suleika Jaouad]

We need to get you a lockbox.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, probably, yeah. It's not that I'm writing some major secret or anything. It's just I don't want anyone to see it and I don't want to see it again. I want it gone.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Is there a feeling of shame?

[Monica Padman]

I wouldn't have said so, but the strength at which I was like, it has the home. Yeah, it definitely does. It's strong enough that there is obviously something else happening.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I think that's very common.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I think it might be why people steer away from it. Like, what if someone reads it?

[Suleika Jaouad]

And more interesting than that is what you just said. It's like, what if I read it?

[Monica Padman]

I don't want to scroll through and see something from last week that is going to remind. I want it gone.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah, I think that'd be interesting to write into.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, true, probably.

[Suleika Jaouad]

We just went un tour for the book. We wanted to recreate our living room set on stage. So in Brooklyn, we actually hired a man with a van to take our entire living room furniture to the Bam Opera house. Like our couch, our coffee table, everything. The one thing that did travel with us city to city were all of my childhood journals. Maybe 50 or 100 of them. And so I had a suitcase with a combo lock code. Because I'm like, what could go wrong? An audience full of people who are curious.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Suleika Jaouad]

All of my most shameful. And at one point, we left the suitcase by accident.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Suleika Jaouad]

At a venue. And only realized when we got to the airport. And I had a moment where I was like, you know what? Actually, I'm okay with this.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Whatever things I'm embarrassed by, whatever particularities feel like so unique to me. It's all good. It's the same shit we've all been struggling with since the beginning of mankind.

[Dax Shepard]

I also think it's a little bit telling of your own. Own list of virtues. So for me, I think bravery is high on that list. And I think the bravest thing I could do in my lifetime is have no fear that someone would know all of me. That would be the ultimate kind of self actualized. Yeah. There's all my journals. I trust that I'm still lovable after, you know, this. I try to head towards that direction, but I was curious, so I didn't even have a sense of my journals until the fires happened. And then it was like, what are we taking? And I was like, all I want is my journals. I had never put them in bags. I couldn't believe how much room. Room it took up. Yeah, I'm never gonna read mine unless I'm writing. Yet I do have this in the background. Fear that they're gonna get lost, burnt something. The thought of all that disappearing. Do you have any of that?

[Suleika Jaouad]

This is a great prompt. Susan Cheever, John Cheever's daughter, has a great essay and prompt in the book called Letter from a Burning Building. I'm trying to think I'd probably grab my paintings before, but I think I would grab my journals. And why is that? I don't know. It's not because I need them or want to reread them, but they do feel. Feel like morsels of myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, they're the record of your existence in a lot of ways.

[Suleika Jaouad]

There's this wonderful Joan Didion line where she says, we're well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be. And that's how I feel about my journals. They're my past selves. And I want to keep on nodding terms with the people I used to be.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay. So the book is broken into 10 chapters, and they are prompts. And then within each chapter, and it's like on. On Love, we go through all these many big segments of life. On earth, really. And within each chapter you have all these contributing authors. There's like a hundred. A hundred people have submitted stories that are kind of prompts and the list is incredible. Gloria Steinem wrote something for it.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Gloria Steinem is our oldest contributor at 91. Our youngest was six at the time, Lou Sullivan, who's a two time pediatric cancer survivor. It's sort of a collection of the people who have most creatively inspired me and who are not necessarily what you think of when you think of as creative. Like there's the George Saunders and the Salman Rushies of the world in it. But there's also Lou, a man on death row, weeks out from his execution, and a young mother who is about to become a widow, who writes one of the most beautiful essays and has this beautiful prompt. And the title of it is I Begin Again. And she's imagining herself beginning again on the other side of this thing that she knows is coming and it's happening. And I structured it in those 10 thematic chapters because I did go back for the first time ever and reread all of my journals. And I tried to distill the themes that kept coming up again and again and again. And it was fear and purpose and love and the body. That that was sort of the initial conceit of it. And it's kind of like a memoir in essays. It has these long chapter essays for me. And it's meant to be designed as a sort of hundred day project, if you want to do it that way.

[Dax Shepard]

That keeps coming up. There's just many people that prescribe this kind of hundred day commitment and then see what happens after that. As you said, on beginning, on memory, on fear, on seeing, on love, on the body, on rebuilding on ego.

[Suleika Jaouad]

My mom is like, why did I kick off the On Ego chapter? Because she's one of the essay contributors. She's like, what are you trying to talk about me?

[Dax Shepard]

On purpose and on Alchemy. Yeah. And there's just an incredible list of people that contributed, as we just said, you mentioned many of them, but Ann Patchett.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Love Ann Patchett.

[Monica Padman]

Incredible.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Have you had her on?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I'd love to have her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Selman Rushdie, Elizabeth Gilbert, we've had her on Lena Dunham, We've had her on Gloria Steinem. John Green.

[Suleika Jaouad]

John Green was a late addition. So I wrote the On Love chapter, which begins with my relationship to his very famous novel, the Faults in Our Stars, which for me, like taught me so much about love.

[Dax Shepard]

More than Lolita.

[Suleika Jaouad]

More than Lolita, thankfully.

[Dax Shepard]

Good One.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And I read this essay out loud. It was, like, three days before the book was due to a friend of mine. And I was like, I just wish John Green could have been a contributor to this book. And she was like, did you ask him? And I was like, of course not. He's John Green. And I hung up the phone, and I just sent him a cold DM on Instagram, asking him if he might want to contribute to the book, which, by the way, was due in three days, which is super rude. And he sent me an essay and prompt a couple of hours later.

[Monica Padman]

Incredible.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Do you have an allergy to earnestness? It's one of my big allergies. And yet when I'm earnest, I'm proudest of myself.

[Suleika Jaouad]

I said to John the other day, you know, we got to stand at the gates at this graduation, like, last weekend. And I was like, God, it's so exhausting to be cool. I don't think being cool has made anyone happier. And seeing the nerdiest of these kids. Cause you exit these gates right as you graduate. We're, like, cheering and doing dances. And then the cool kids were just like.

[Monica Padman]

They couldn't enjoy it.

[Suleika Jaouad]

They couldn't enjoy it. And so you know what? As someone who has had an allergy to earnestness, I think I'm ready to try to live a lifelong case in defense of earnestness. After a while, I'm just done with the two. Cool for school.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Suleika Jaouad]

What about you?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I mean, I'm moving towards it more and more. I think kids are enormously instrumental in that.

[Monica Padman]

If it's earnest, there's a lot of, like, floofy earnestness that I am saccharine.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a lot of signaling.

[Monica Padman]

Signaling. Hoping to get a reaction. You can feel that. And that's disgusting to me. But someone who just is who they are. Saying what they think or believe that.

[Dax Shepard]

They love and are excited by is so beautiful.

[Monica Padman]

That is cool.

[Suleika Jaouad]

That's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Monica will tell you my kink is I'll watch these videos of really elaborate wedding proposals or the Olympians dancing on the airplane, and I just ball. I cry the whole time. I'm like. In the face of all the negativity, in the face of so many people that can make fun of you when you are willing to stand up and dance and sing and be beautiful and be vulnerable. What a thing.

[Suleika Jaouad]

And make a fool of yourself and.

[Dax Shepard]

Not care in a world that just can't wait to fucking destroy. It's so brave and beautiful.

[Suleika Jaouad]

It's so brave.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Well, I feel so honored to know you and John and what a delight to have watched that documentary and fallen so in love with both of you and then get to know you personally. And I think this is. As a devotee of journaling, I think this is the perfect book to encourage people to try this. I really encourage people to write. You're going to get to read so many wonderful different writers. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't be activated by this.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Thank you both. This is so fun.

[Dax Shepard]

You're prolific. You'll write more books. Looks. We'll do it again. We hope you enjoyed this episode.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

[Dax Shepard]

You complimented my shirt and I thank you for it.

[Monica Padman]

I really like it. I like the collar on.

[Dax Shepard]

I need to order more colors of this.

[Monica Padman]

What brand is it?

[Dax Shepard]

That's. We did this last time and I've already forgotten.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

It's Kmart.

[Monica Padman]

Nope. Weissen made. Yeah, Weissen made. Let's look it up.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, order me a bunch while you're there.

[Monica Padman]

Weiss made. W I E S M A D E. This looks very all American.

[Dax Shepard]

Classic.

[Monica Padman]

Classic Textbook. Not in a like it's a. They're affordable.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You know, I'm not too crazy. Crazy. Well, I can't say that I lost the right to say that I do have three crazy pieces of clothing.

[Monica Padman]

But you also have been giving gifts.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. I have some nice sweaters from my friend Monica that are very pricey and.

[Monica Padman]

From your friend Wad Pit.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's what I was saying. I have a few items of God's true which is, you know, so I.

[Monica Padman]

I wasn't, I didn't know if saying this would make people like mad, but I, I, I feel obligated to say yes.

[Dax Shepard]

We should thank publicly.

[Monica Padman]

Brad sent our boy.

[Dax Shepard]

Our boyfriend.

[Monica Padman]

Our boyfriend Brad sent us some goodies from God's true cashmere. He sent you a gorgeous button down.

[Dax Shepard]

Green which I've already worn in an interview.

[Monica Padman]

It's beaut. It really is so nice. He gave Kristen a top and pants.

[Dax Shepard]

Kristin got more than you and I.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we don't like that.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want to talk about.

[Monica Padman]

I.

[Dax Shepard]

It's okay.

[Monica Padman]

It's okay for you. Okay. Please don't speak for me, but I got the blanket and it is incredible.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you been using it?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't put it on top of you when you're watching your perverted show. Oh no. You got to keep that very far away from your extracurricular activity.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Why?

[Dax Shepard]

Cuz it's It's.

[Monica Padman]

I thought. I would. Think you would want me to be using that.

[Dax Shepard]

I like you using it as chore play. But then getting it out of the whole area when it's time.

[Monica Padman]

Why? Cuz.

[Dax Shepard]

Cuz you want to preserve its like.

[Monica Padman]

Freshness, you know, I think he would like it.

[Dax Shepard]

He would love it. Yes. If he found out you were incorporating it, he would love it. In fact, let me do that and then I'll send him a text.

[Monica Padman]

So things have already turned.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Monica's been enjoying sexually the blanket that you gave her.

[Monica Padman]

It's such a beautiful blanket. Um, and. And it was such a kind gesture. It really was so sweet that he sent us those things.

[Dax Shepard]

God, now do I tell Now? Now it's. Now we've opened up a can of worms.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I was watching on Father's Day, Godfather, right? And Marlon Brando has this very, very long scene. People remember. It's when he dies. He's in the. He's in this cute spoiler. No, it's okay. It's a 50 year old movie. He's in this garden in his backyard playing with his grandson. And then he dies. But he's wearing this incredible, incredible. Looks like cashmere button down. Oh. But it's so, you know, it's set in the 40s or 50s and so it's time specific. But it's got the most beautiful, like hints of. I guess it'd be plaid, but very subtle. It's such a gorgeous shirt. It was so, so distracting that I said to the boys. I was like, I'm like, look at this shirt. This shit's. So then I took a. No, but that's interesting because that's also a scene. I have the. I can. I took a screen grab that did not look good. You know, Here, I'll send it to Rob.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So this is a gorgeous shirt. I'm so into the hintiness of the lines. Like it's like the silhouette of lines.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah, it's a green. It's kind of greenish, but like with yellow. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Checkered. It's incredible. And I, I was just. I. I was obsessed with the shirt, just imagining being in the shirt. And what did I do? I took a picture of it. I sent it to Brad.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I said, was this pushing God's true? 70 years ahead of schedule.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Secondly, you, you can manufacture. Can you make us this shirt?

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

He immediately wrote back and said, oh, yeah, he's the original OG and yes, I'm on it.

[Monica Padman]

What the.

[Dax Shepard]

So I might Be getting a matching shirt that maybe only Brad and I.

[Monica Padman]

No, this is great.

[Dax Shepard]

That was made famous by Marlon Brando. This is. This is a hat on a hat on a hat on cherry. On icing. On cherry.

[Monica Padman]

This is way too much.

[Dax Shepard]

If I can be using him, I'm not.

[Monica Padman]

Kind of don't use people.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of. I'm contradicting what I said about if I knew the president, I wouldn't call to complain about prescription problems. Prices.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I, I am abusing my access to him by asking him to make me a shirt I liked from a movie. But he seemed to like it as well, so we'll tbd.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's exciting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, it was so nice of him. And the price point is a little different than this tea you're wearing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Dramatically so.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of what, you just said something and it reminded me of something.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

You said, said we.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Now, sometimes if you do somebody else's podcast or you get interviewed, they'll ask you, what is your favorite episode or what have you learned.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

From the show? And I always forget this, but I need to remember to say it because this is the thing that I think has stuck with me most out of 900 plus episodes. We had an expert on. I don't remember on what, but basically he was like, you can tell if people are using you or I or we in the way they talk.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I have never. For I. I am so attuned.

[Dax Shepard]

I am too.

[Monica Padman]

To when people are. Are doing it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That affected me as well.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Where I notice it all the time. And in fact, we were watching Rocky with the kids and Rocky comes home and he finally admits to Adrian and they're newly dating. I can't fight him. I'm gonna. He's gonna beat me. I can't do it. You know, and this is gonna happen in that. And he wants to quit. And she goes, oh, it's okay. What are we gonna do about it? And they're brand new dating. And I paused and I said, you hear that girl? She said, what are we gonna do about it? What could be more loving than this is our problem.

[Monica Padman]

It's so sweet.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I remember this too, though.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And how you can include people.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

How you can include and exclude people. Like there, there's a lot said in the way you identify.

[Dax Shepard]

We, I, you and I make effort. Do you make an effort?

[Monica Padman]

I do make an effort. I. But I'm also like, I'm really sensitive.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So I Think I do a good job about always saying our show and we blank. But when I say when I'll say it on accident is I'll say I interviewed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you. You do say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then I hear myself saying that, and then I'm like, well, that's hurtful. And I don't mean it. But also, I can in some way, I conduct the interview. I don't mean we're not doing it. I just mean, like, I. I don't know. I have the research.

[Monica Padman]

To me, saying and I asked is one thing, or like I said or I, or whatever.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it does, like, jolt me out.

[Dax Shepard]

When you say I interviewed, and I know it immediately.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I go, oh, that's weird, because I'm. I'm really good at saying our show. And we did this, and we have 900 episodes, and we blank, blank, blank. We had so and so. I'll always say we had. I'll never say I had so and so.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll always say we had so and so on. But then I do often say I. It was interviewing so and so.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think that's the thing that I, like, have real. I mean, I've taken a lot of things, obviously, from the shows, but that one has really, really stuck.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

And I. I hear it all the time in the world around me. The way people talk about themselves or their partners or their friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's. It's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

There's all kinds of opportunities for you to do it right or wrong. Like I'll often say my daughters.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I probably should say our daughters all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, it depends on if. If she's there. Yeah, yeah. Our daughter.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But if you are not with Kristen. I think my daughter's is fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But I still think I should always just say our. And I'll say to people sometimes, why don't you come to my house at 8?

[Monica Padman]

Uhhuh.

[Dax Shepard]

And then even that I'll go, like.

[Monica Padman]

I should have said our interesting we. I, you.

[Dax Shepard]

These are important pronouns ripe for triggers.

[Monica Padman]

Right? For triggers. Right. For opportunity.

[Dax Shepard]

Speaking of we, I had a very, very fun morning date yesterday.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, what?

[Dax Shepard]

My friend Ethan Supplie, who, you know, I just. He's one of my handful of people I would describe as magic.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. There's a category in my life of people I've met that I think are magic. And he's. He's really, really up there. But he was in town, and he famously has lost 300 pounds. Wow. Through diet and exercise.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

His Instagram is so fun to follow because he's really embedded now in that space.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

It was really interesting because I was like, are you taking GOP ones?

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

He's like, no. I'm like, why? Like, what. What's the reservation? And he's like, he's kind of like circling this thing and he's not really articulating it, but all of a sudden it just. Emotionally it occurs to me, I go, hold on. Is it like. Is it like if they created a pill or a pill or a shot that would allow you to. To drink? Is it like that? Cuz like, if they invented a pill that allowed you to drink three drinks, I wouldn't take it. And I'm sure a lot of people be like, well, why there's a pill or a shot that makes you not an addict.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But I have so much baggage in history and trauma with this struggle.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's like a. I don't know if I could ever trust it, even if I was watching it work for everybody. The stakes are just so high.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Plus, like, all the benefits I got out of of it through not having a shot available, that I had to work these steps and learn all these tools. And he's like, that's exact. That's it. And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. That's so complex.

[Monica Padman]

Very complex. And I'm sure he takes a ton of pride.

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely. As he should.

[Monica Padman]

As he should in. In, you know, on. On his journey to be a healthier person. And I'm sure when you've done that and you take pride in it, that that feels like some. A weird shortcut.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That doesn't give you the feeling.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. And the identity and all the other stuff.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so. So him and then Jonathan Tucker, friend of the pod.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God, Jonathan Tucker. That is a deep cut. We had him so long ago. I think Covid, he was in his.

[Dax Shepard]

Car, red Cadillac, red interior, his 80s Cadillac.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Most colorful, interesting, energetic boy.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, gosh.

[Dax Shepard]

So the three of us, whoa. I guess they had done a movie. They'd had done a Nick Cassavetes movie back in the day. And so they remained friends. And. Oh, and then something really kind of sweet was Ethan was. I don't know if it's sweet. I don't know what it is. Now Ethan had his own batch of friends. He grew up in la. His childhood friends have become the most successful actors all time.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

So maybe that's part of the story. But he did Say, do you know, of all the movies and. And Ethan's been doing movies for 30 years and big ones. He's like, yeah, you. You two are the only two guys I've ever maintained a friendship that I made on a movie after the fact.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And I guess I felt grateful and flattered and then also like, oh, that's so interesting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because I've made. I've kept in touch with a lot of the folks, but we had a pump.

[Monica Padman]

That's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

We debated politics. We lifted.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. It was really. It was fascinating.

[Monica Padman]

I think that actually, him growing up here and being around the most famous.

[Dax Shepard]

Kid in the world.

[Monica Padman]

The most famous kid in the world and famous people. I bet he has. He is not. There is zero sense of enamoration with anyone. So he's just like, if I like you, certainly.

[Dax Shepard]

But I've never maintained any of those friendships because I was blown away with their celebrity. Like, even. In fact, like, on Without a Paddle, Ethan and I became great friends. He wasn't the star without a Paddle. He was like, maybe seventh on the call sheet or something.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't think you're only being friends with those people because of that. But. But don't. But you are attracted. You can be.

[Dax Shepard]

Or you were.

[Monica Padman]

You were maybe more so.

[Dax Shepard]

Certain people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, certain people you're attracted to because of their.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I could name them. It's like the people that I worked with where it was like, I couldn't believe I was working with them. Is like Burt Reynolds out of the Gates. Tina and Amy. When I did Baby Mama, I was like, wow, I can't believe I get to work with Tina and Amy. So cool. Yeah. Now, mind you, there were Academy Award winners in Baby Mama, but, like, Greg Kinnear was in Baby Mama. I think he won for as Good as It Gets.

[Monica Padman]

He did great movie.

[Dax Shepard]

So I wasn't, like, necessarily attracted to the acclaim or I want to work with an author. Oscar winner, but, yeah, people who I deeply admired from a distance. When I got to work with them, I was pretty blown away. Or when I got to do the Judge, I was like, pretty. Couldn't believe I'm in a scene with Robert Downey after all this time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Really cool.

[Dax Shepard]

By the way, I do need to. I need to tie up one loose end on Godfather.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

We're midway through the movie, and all of a sudden I realized I'm like, well, of course. No women like this movie. Movie. There's no women in this movie.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, there's zero. There's Diane Keaton's in it once in a while, the sisters there getting beat up to justify Sonny beating up the. The husband. But it's like, oh, yeah, this is a, this is a movie about all guys. Yeah, in duh. No wonder girls aren't like clamoring to see Godfather.

[Monica Padman]

Although, oh, wait, I guess there's an exception. But like, Ocean's Eleven is a lot of men, but Julia Roberts is in it and she's so good in it. I love that movie.

[Dax Shepard]

And we went to Mission Impossible last night as a family. The kids had never seen a Mission Impossible movie.

[Monica Padman]

How did that go?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it was good. I loved it. It's not the right starter, Mission Impossible, cuz it's like reckoning it might be the last one.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. It's supposed to be the last one.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't buy it. Yeah, I hope it's not the last one. But this one was definitely a darker version. Lincoln loved it. Delta was like, that was the longest, worst movie experience of my life.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Lincoln now loves it. And I was now in a catch 22. I'm like, well, my impulse now is like, Lincoln, there's eight of these. Like, summer's here. This is what we're doing. We're gonna watch the fucking Mission Impossibles this summer.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, this is tricky.

[Dax Shepard]

And then Delta was like. And then I go, oh, but actually that's a terrible game plan for you, Delta. You hated it. And she goes, well, I'm open to giving it another try if I'm at home and I can leave. And I'm like, okay, so, but we're going to give the more some of the more up, uplifting, funner versions of it. Okay. One thing I wanted to share. Okay, let's indulge it. I have long heard the word rapture.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I've always heard rapture. It's almost always been in reference to Jesus. Like the rapture of Jesus is love. I never hear rapture outside of that.

[Monica Padman]

You know, you're enraptured, I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

Rarely. Just I think every time I hear it, it's like the rapture of his love or something. Anywho, I was. It weirdly happened two times in one night. So maybe it was just me. Probably was just me. But we were laying on the couch watching tv and Lincoln loves to get in and extract whatever's left in my ear. Piercing hole from 35 years ago. She likes to get in there and root around and try to get the little ball Out. And I love that so much when she's digging in my ear. And then I just happened to say, I just. I love when you dig in my ear. So then long after the extraction was done, she was playing with my ear while we watched Friday Night Lights. And I was laying on the couch and this little girl was playing with my ear. And I was like, like just radiating warmth. I felt so at peace and so happy. And then that same night, I'm tucking Delta in, just her and I in bed, and we're talking about how I always. I drive them crazy because I pet them and they hate it. So I'm not allowed to pet anyone. If I put my hand on their leg, I can't, like, rub their leg. I just got to keep it still.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I always forget the. The thing I do, it's a bad habit, is when I'm holding their hand, I circle their thumb with my finger. So I'm doing that and then I circle, say to her, sorry, I do that. I go, I think it's genetic. I go, my Papa Bob used to do it to me, and my dad used to do it to me. And I kind of loved it. Once I realized they both did. And then I found myself that I just do it genetically. It's like a tick. I do. And then I just said that. And then we're laying in bed in a way that she's snuggling me in my nook and I'm holding both of her hands.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And she starts rubbing her thumb around my thumb because she knows that I like it from my dad. And we were laying there and she was doing that. And I just started, like, just kind of weeping. Like I was just kind of leaking tears. And I could feel her whole body as if it was just like in mine. And she was this act of generosity and caring about me.

[Monica Padman]

So kind.

[Dax Shepard]

And I really was thinking like, oh, this is rapture. And it's funny, we're so like, obsessed with. Did we get enough love from our parents or did they do it right? But the feeling of your child loving you is rapture. It's like so. It's so filling. There's something about it that's just really special.

[Monica Padman]

That's lovely.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It was really one of the most wonderful moments I've had. Planet Earth. This little sweet girl who's thinking about her wants to express to her dad that she loves, loves them. Oh, he. Like, it's a mega. It's a 10 ton mega bomb.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm happy for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It was very sweet.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Good.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't think we're going to top that, so we should do some facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Facts for Suleika.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yes.

[Monica Padman]

What a fun conversation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Now we're about to get into it, me and you a little bit. Not really. I don't want to. I don't want to fight. I'm not in the mood to fight.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So this is a very mixed signal. So you go. We're about to get into it. I don't want to fight.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't. I don't want to fight, so I want us to be nice to each other.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Because at the beginning of the episode, we have a mini argument about Taylor Swift and the. And the masters and stuff. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And we say we're gonna. We're gonna discuss this on.

[Suleika Jaouad]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I asked Nathan Hubbard for some help. Nathan is a big, big music guy. He's the CEO of Firebird Music. He was the CEO of Ticketmaster. He's. He's very, very deeply entrenched in the music world. And he has a podcast that I love on the Ringer Network. Great network. Bill Simmons. He has a podcast called Every Single Album he does with Nora Princioti. And they. Yes, they go into deep, deep, deep stuff about Taylor. So I asked him, I'm going to read it. I said, hi, I have a question for you, and no worries if you don't have time to answer it. Dax and I are in a debate over what happened with Taylor's music. And so there will be be an upcoming fact check where we discuss it. Dax feels like the zeitgeist narrative about Scooter and her isn't exactly accurate. I need the facts. Any chance you can give me an objective rundown of what happened?

[Dax Shepard]

First of all, I applaud how neutral that question was.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I am here to learn.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Ready?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

He said. Scott Boretta, who heads Big Machine, Taylor's original label, started shopping the entire Big machine catalog around 2014. Lots of people got a look at it, including weird places like Twitter and Facebook. Taylor's camp knew about this, but the terms at which Scott was willing to give Taylor back her masters were erroneous. They required she extend her deal with Big Machine, and the payback felt arduous. Taylor still feels that before actually selling the catalog, that Scott had an obligation to bring the deal to her, in which case she might have chosen to seek financing to buy the catalog. Catalog instead. It was Sold to Scooter.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Taylor had a lot of issues with Scooter that had already.

[Dax Shepard]

Really quick. We just. So the points I've made. This is all very consistent with what I was saying, which is she was offered a deal. It had an extension. She didn't want to do that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, she wanted.

[Suleika Jaouad]

She.

[Monica Padman]

She's saying she didn't have the opportunity to even get financing to do it, that it was then sold to Scooter.

[Dax Shepard]

But hold on. You. You just hold on. Or this is good faith and we're keeping it good. It's important. She did have access to it, but it included an extension with her deal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It included things that they felt were crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep. So I just wanted to be clear because this is one of my main points is that it was brought to her. She didn't like the terms.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Because the.

[Dax Shepard]

Which I mean because the common narratives is like all this happened. She had no idea and she didn't have a chance. And that. That's part of my issue is right there is she was offered it and she didn't like the deal.

[Monica Padman]

She didn't like the deal. Which by. By. As. As people who have been involved in business deals, sometimes they are crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

That's fine. That is. I. I don't mind that she didn't like the deal or that it was a bad deal. I just want it to be crystal clear. The guy was shopping the entire catalog of the label. She was offered this. It would have involved an extension of her services. She didn't want to do it. Okay. Now it's goes. Go ahead.

[Monica Padman]

Instead it was sold to Scooter. Taylor had a lot of issues with Scooter that had been aired that were clearly exacerbated by his company making the acquisition out from under her. The press around Scooter owning the catalog became painful. Right At a time when a lot of money began pouring into acquire music catalogs. Spotify and Apple made it possible to model out the cash flows for music. Shamrock came in and made that acquisition and immediately reached out to try to involve Taylor. Deals get done based on people and relationships as much as price. They stayed persistent. And as exemplified by her note today, Taylor's note clearly earned her trust. For them, they get a stamp of approval as they look to invest billions in these assets. Taylor Swift just called them hugely trustworthy. That matters in these transactions. I think there is some debate around whether she was realistic in her negotiation with Big Machine the first go around and whether she just couldn't cobble together the funding to make it happen or thought nobody would buy it without her approval. But there's no debate that she felt betrayed, that she felt she'd been attacked previously by Scooter, and that she became hell bent for a decade on writing the perceived wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. Yeah. So that we're not going to fight because that's. I feel like that's exactly what I was saying about this story.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And again, I don't like Scooter Braun.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's irrelevant.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it's super relevant because the reason it didn't go well is she had previous issues with Scooter Braun. Like she already didn't like Scooter Brown.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But like take. You take Scooter Scooter Brown out of it. They brought her the catalog. She didn't like the deal terms. She passed on it. Another buyer came in, Mike Herbowitz. He bought the catalog and now she wants the catalog back and she wants to buy it off Mark Herbowitz.

[Monica Padman]

That's a very like non emotional way of looking at it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And these things that are your IP and your creations and your heart and your soul, emotions are real. They're. They're a real factor.

[Dax Shepard]

I just think if you remove Scooter Brown, which is a. The perfect antagonist in this story, he's so unlikable. If you remove him from this story, I don't think people would feel the same way. If it's a different human being that saw an opportunity and bought the catalog. I don't think it's this crazy story of her being a victim.

[Monica Padman]

You don't know what's gone on between her and Scooter. There's all kinds of stuff beforehand. That's what was already aired. And part of why this was so, so bad for her is that it was sold to someone that had already, she had already had all kinds of issues with, who's had issues with a billion other artists. They've all left his label. So clearly he is doing something to them that's making that happen. You can't say just because someone is rich, they're not a victim. We don't know what happens.

[Dax Shepard]

I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. I would say the first deal, she wasn't a victim. It was a standard deal.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I'd say the second go around where she attempted to buy her masters, which very few people have done and there's no well worn path to that. She didn't like the terms and she chose not to buy it. So I don't think she's a victim there. Like no one forced her to do anything. And then the worst person imaginable ended up getting paying the price. And that was infuriating to her emotionally and to all the fans. Into you. Everyone's furious about who ended up with the rights to it. I don't think that's a healthy narrative to say this. Endlessly successful, accomplished everything on her own. Self made billionaire. Unfortunately, I don't think in the music space she's been a victim. She's not one of these people.

[Monica Padman]

Self made billionaire is because she has been so dead set on this and re recording the music. And she even says. She said the ERAs tour paid for this. It paid for her to be able to do this. That was. That was explicitly stated at the beginning of the tour. Like this is the.

[Dax Shepard]

She wanted to own her masters which is a rare thing.

[Monica Padman]

She wanted the rights to her music instead of her enemy having the rights to her music.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And when she had an opportunity.

[Monica Padman]

Fine.

[Dax Shepard]

To buy a. She didn't.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because she didn't like the deal.

[Monica Padman]

That's also didn't have the opportunity. She. She didn't have the money at that time.

[Dax Shepard]

And that. That's fine. No artists do.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

There's nothing unique happening to her. She wanted to own all her music which is just really rare.

[Monica Padman]

Well whatever. Who cares? She wanted it and she did.

[Dax Shepard]

She couldn't afford it at the time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And Scooter could. So he got it because the company was just selling this catalog which happens. And she just wasn't singled out or bullied or victimized.

[Monica Padman]

No one's saying she's bullied. Well, I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

I think everyone thinks.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I don't know what happened between her and Scooter before. So I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I don't. I don't either.

[Monica Padman]

And I have a sense it's probably something really shitty.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm being very clear. I don't think Scooter is a great guy. I don't like Scooter Braun.

[Monica Padman]

I think if someone who we hate is holding the rights to our. It's not like it's. It's you. They're holding the rights to you. I think it makes.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's just be clear. He's holding the rights these recordings.

[Monica Padman]

But Dax, you're making. That's so like weird black and white. That's not create as a creative.

[Dax Shepard]

He has. He has no say over what she performs, what she writes, what she does. Like she. He has zero control over her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. By owning these masters, saying these, her work is her. It's her words. It's her experiences. It's her. It's her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

If someone is holding the rights to that who you. You hate, it makes tons of sense to me to do everything in your power to take that from them. And that's what she did. That's what the recording.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think I'm not supportive of her getting her masters back?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

I am.

[Monica Padman]

You know, you haven't said that once.

[Dax Shepard]

I am. I. I'm delighted she owns her masters, but she owns her masters because she's a shrewd badass. Not cuz she's a victim.

[Monica Padman]

That's fine. You're so hung up on that.

[Dax Shepard]

I am. I think, I think it's a very terrible narrative for people to have. Yeah. I think it's all a great triumphant story. Here's this woman who created all this music and by George, she ended up owning all of it, on top of it in the same way that the Beatles did. Which was also radical.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

But it does avoid the bigger thing that we were actually debating. That was one symptom of the larger debate of just when people are beyond criticism, when that's not allowed. I think that's a very dangerous scenario. Scenario. I think AA should be totally open to criticism and I think there's valid criticisms of a. Like I don't think anyone. I don't think anyone should be a. Above criticism.

[Monica Padman]

I guess I'm like, I don't know. I listened to all these pop culture podcasts. I listened to all these things and, and there's a part. I'm like, why, why does everyone need to have a criticism of someone? Why does everyone need to have an opinion of other people? I'm kind of bored of it. It's like just. I don't know. I don't know. Especially ironically, knowing people, you and Kristen, who are in the public eye.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Who people have criticisms of who people. Why it's so unnecessary.

[Dax Shepard]

If Kristen and I made a public enemy out of somebody and we had 50 million fans who are actively angry at a human being. It has to be a one to one comp. So Kristen and I have some public enemy that we're talking about all the time. Is the bad guy in our story.

[Monica Padman]

Well, her fans are. I'm sorry, her fans are not her. She has music about it, but she, she doesn't talk about him. They talk about him and they've made it. The fans, the Swifties have made it also their identity. Identity to take this on for her. She sings there are songs about him. I mean, they're not his name, but there are clear songs about him. But she's not out there on talk shows talking about him.

[Dax Shepard]

I think if one individual mobilizes 50 million people to hate one individual, I think we need some fair criticism there. I think that's a dangerous situation and it is. I do think it's important for people to go, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. What do you think really happened? How evil is this person? Are they plotting against her? Like, we need to pressure test this ire. And I think, yes, I think definitely when some one human being has mobilized 50 million people to hate one person, that definitely is a time where some scrutinizing is in, is in order. And if 50 million people hate Jake Gyllenhaal, who doesn't deserve it?

[Monica Padman]

Well, they don't, they don't, they don't all hate. That's the other thing I think you've made, you've made it such a big deal. Like, like everyone hates. Obviously everyone doesn't hate Jake Gyllenhaal. He has a incredible career. He's doing well.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, I'm saying Swifties.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you can't be doing his level of career and have 50 million people hate you. You wouldn't be casting anything. You would if all the switch.

[Dax Shepard]

You still have 300 million people to entertain.

[Monica Padman]

That's not. No, I, I, I, not everyone who likes Taylor Swift hates all the boyfriends. In fact, most people don't. They find it very entertaining. They find the song all, like, fun and reading between the lines and who she's writing about and X, Y and Z. But are they like, that person needs to die or we can't support that person. I'm not going to their movies. Maybe a chunk. I personally don't know anyone who's like, I'm never going to go support a Jake Gyllenhaal movie because of her. Yeah, I've never heard of that again. I'm sure there are extreme people, but that's not the norm. So I don't, I also think that's unfair to make like, though maybe some radical extreme people. Extreme Swifties. The face of all the Swifties. I mean, I don't, I love Jake and I love her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So why can't I be the example of that?

[Dax Shepard]

I, I think many of her fans have deified her and I think it's very dangerous to make a deity out of A human being. That's what I think. And I think when someone has become a deity in public, whether they're a cult leader or they're. Anytime there is a deity in public, that is the time for a lot of scrutiny. I think that is what the fourth estate does. I think that's what people's obligation is, and I think it's what a social primate does when one deity has arose, arisen. I think it's really important for people to go, well, hold on a second. And I think the fact that that's not even permitted is scary. And I think anytime that's not permitted, it's scary.

[Monica Padman]

Sure, yeah, that's fine. Anyway, okay, well, thank you, Nathan Hubbard, for weighing in. That was very helpful.

[Dax Shepard]

That was a great answer.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. How old is Lolita? In, in the book, Lolita is 12.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

At the beginning of the novel, she's 17. When she. Oh, spoiler. Dies. Dies in childbirth.

[Dax Shepard]

Boo.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

So I've never read it.

[Dax Shepard]

I read the first third. It was when I got scared that I could never enjoy a novel again. I was like a third of the way through it and I was like, oh, this didn't happen. This is someone's weird imagination about falling in love with a 12 year old. I think I'm out.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, it says the novel details a protagonist. Humbert Humbert.

[Dax Shepard]

Red flag number one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Obsession with and sexual abuse of the 12 year old. Okay, well, Russian.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, Nabokov is Russian. I thought he was Vladimir Nabakov.

[Monica Padman]

I, I, maybe he's not, but that's.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought maybe he's Czech or something. Maybe you look up what he is. He's Russian. He's Russian. Yeah. St. Petersburg, Russia. Oh.

[Monica Padman]

It would kind of be like Raj Patel not being Indian. Yeah, we can make some assumptions.

[Dax Shepard]

Vladimir is a pretty good clue.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Okay, now, well, we talk about loneliness and you know Vivek Murthy. Yes, he taught us about loneliness.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I, that's more dangerous than smoking.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it's so sin because he was in my dream last night.

[Dax Shepard]

Vivek.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Vivek Murthy.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

And then I was listening to this episode this morning. Morning. And loneliness. He would, he had fixed my friend's car. He had like taken off a piece and made it a Honda or something. He was like a car guy. And I thought I went to prom with him, but I didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a weird dream. Vivek Murthy as a peer who's a mechanic.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But it was still him. But he had like this. He was able to do this car.

[Dax Shepard]

Stuff too and be your age.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I went to prom with them. And then it didn't look like him.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It didn't look like the real Vivek Murthy, but that was the name that was being use.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you think spurred this dream?

[Monica Padman]

I think the magnesium's making my dreams crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

They've been wild.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking. Dakota Johnson.

[Dax Shepard]

She's in the dreams.

[Monica Padman]

No, but on Amy Poehler's podcast.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

She tells a story about a dream which, you know, you're not really ever.

[Dax Shepard]

Supposed to do that you shouldn't do that. That's a PSA to everyone. Even though I did just ever tell anyone about your dreams.

[Monica Padman]

Right. But I did just. Yeah, and then she did it on that show. And that has gone viral.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it has.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, ding, ding, ding. Cuz it's about Maddie Healey. He has some history with Taylor. Anyway, she had a dream about him and he kept turning into asparagus.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. And that went viral. Well, you never know it's going to go viral, do you?

[Monica Padman]

You don't. Why does a hospital gown open in the back? Hospital gowns open in the back primarily to facilitate medical procedures and patient care. This design allows easy access to the patient's body for examinations, treatments, and and monitoring without requiring them to fully undress, which is particularly helpful for those who are bedridden or have limited mobility. The open back also simplifies gown changes, especially when a patient is soiled or requires frequent changes.

[Dax Shepard]

So.

[Monica Padman]

So it's more for soiling. Yeah. Extreme situation. Oh, bed pans.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that. Now bed pans make sense.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But the rest of it doesn't because I feel like they're looking at the front of you way more than they're looking at the back you. So if easy access is the point, they're definitely upfron front way more than they are in back. They'll listen to your lungs in back, but in general they're tapping all over your abdomen.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's just not where the bulk of the business is done. So it makes more sense to open up the front. But the bedpan totally explains it. I think.

[Monica Padman]

I think it's more for people with not a lot of mobility.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. Still, though, if they want to get at the front, it's hard to get at the front with the back opening down. You have to take the whole thing off.

[Monica Padman]

Right. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

So I think they've prioritized bedpan, which is the right decision.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Okay. She talked about commencement speeches, so. No, I think I might need to revisit.

[Dax Shepard]

No, we already did. If the front half wasn't Taylor, then.

[Monica Padman]

Let me just say, welcome to New York. It's been waiting for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That's her opening line.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Because it was brand by you. Because it was what I think it was at nyu.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And that's a lyric.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it is. Okay, let me keep going on the speech. Yeah, only if you need to.

[Monica Padman]

Fine, I won't. All right, well, why don't people in the comments go ahead and write their favorite commencement speech line?

[Dax Shepard]

Great.

[Monica Padman]

And we can read some of those.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'll know not to look at the comments of this episode cuz I dared push back. Sure, I'll know better.

[Monica Padman]

All right, well, that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Foreignchair 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.