Timothy Olyphant

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Guest: Timothy Olyphant
Release: September 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features Emmy-nominated actor Timothy Olyphant (Justified, Deadwood, Santa Clarita Diet, Alien Earth) in a lively, wide-ranging conversation with hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. The discussion spans Olyphant’s athletic and artistic upbringing, experiences in Hollywood, approach to talk shows and interviews, reflections on fame, relationships with other actors, and his latest projects—particularly FX’s Alien Earth. The conversation is candid, funny, often philosophical, with memorable stories about career turning points and the peculiarities of show business.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Banter & Props in Acting (03:39–05:12)

• The group jokes about drink orders, with Tim sharing he enjoys having a "prop" like a drink or cigarette as part of his acting process.
  • “It’s less about the tea. I just love a prop.” – Timothy Olyphant [04:32]
• Dax recounts quitting smoking after overdoing it for a movie role, teeing up stories of their respective acting habits.

2. Athletics, Swimming, and the ‘Middle Child’ Dynamic (05:33–20:39)

• Olyphant describes his competitive swimming background, including winning regional championships and being recruited (but not on scholarship) at USC.
  • “I want to say you were runner up in the 86 Nationals. That’s the actual year.” – Dax Shepard [05:48]
• Monica mentions her Georgia competitive cheerleading championships and how state testing rules blocked progression past state finals.
• Conversation turns to birth order psychology, how siblings experience different “versions” of the family, and the unique “generalist” skillset of middle children.
  • “Siblings can be so vastly different. ... You didn't really grow up in the same house.” – Timothy Olyphant [16:31]
• Dax draws a parallel between the medley swim event and generalists: excelling in many things versus mastering one.
  • “People idealize and jerk off to specialists, but in fact, if you look at who has changed the world, it’s generalists.” – Dax Shepard [23:30]

3. Transition to Acting: College, Fine Art, and Choosing Paths (26:23–28:10)

• Tim shares how aspirations for architecture gave way to studying fine art, as swimming and rigorous schedules made architecture incompatible.

4. Hollywood Memories, Talk Shows, and Olyphant’s Approach (29:47–37:59)

• The group unpacks the roles props and routine played in their acting, and how Olyphant’s humor and charm shaped his career; he discusses intentionally “knocking interviewers off-balance” to keep conversations lively.
  • “If you could just knock an interviewer off balance a little bit at hello, it just made the interview a little bit easier…” – Timothy Olyphant [31:26]
• Olyphant reveals he once aspired to be a talk-show host, with early (failed) video auditions.

5. Handling Approval, Boundary-Setting, and Industry Anecdotes (39:03–41:39)

• Dax and Tim explore personal boundaries in the business using tales of icons like Bob Dylan, Robert Duvall, and Bruce Willis exemplifying assertiveness in public settings.
  • “These moments that I’ve always clocked are these guys that are just basically saying, ‘No, no, I’m totally fine being a dick.’” – Timothy Olyphant [41:14]
• The group discusses the art of saying no kindly, citing Jack Nicholson’s polite but firm rejection of a press request.

6. Early Acting Experiences & Career Milestones (46:49–53:01)

• Dax recalls first seeing Olyphant in Go, connecting his physique to a background in competitive swimming.
• The conversation highlights Olyphant’s significant television and film roles (Sex and the City, Damages, Justified), with fun trivia about his episode being SJP’s favorite and Rose Byrne’s favorite co-star claim.
  • “Her favorite episode of all of Sex and the City was your episode.” – Dax Shepard [50:23]

7. Fame, Set Dynamics, and the Work-Friend Paradox (59:19–59:57)

• Olyphant candidly reflects on how first impressions of set camaraderie rarely translate into long-term friendships, leading to a “do the job and get out” attitude:
  • “After awhile, you go, you know what, maybe I’ll just show up and say my lines and do my little thing and get the fuck out.” – Timothy Olyphant [59:19]

8. Alien Earth & Working with Noah Hawley (60:13–72:41)

• Dax praises the writing and ambition of Alien Earth, comparing it to Nolan-level spectacle and discussing its themes of humanity, AI, and mortality.
  • “It’s like a Mega Nolan level movie... It’s gorgeous and epic and something special.” – Dax Shepard [69:20]
• Olyphant details his role as a "synthetic" (robot), the show’s world-building, and working with rising star Babu Sisa.
• The group debates the cultural shift from “jock” dominance to “nerd” hegemony both in fiction and reality.

9. Typecasting, Artistic Challenges, and Tribute to Clint Eastwood (75:00–81:03)

• Dax asks if Tim would consider a “Dirty Harry”-style role, given his ability to balance charm and gravitas, drawing a parallel to Clint Eastwood.
• Olyphant shares his first job was a Clint Eastwood-produced pilot, highlighting the legend’s no-notes, no-nonsense approach.

10. Life Philosophy, Friendship Boundaries & The Soho House Bit (61:26–63:40)

• A playful debate over elitist social clubs and the ironies of Hollywood social status, with jokes about set “rules” and party complaints.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Acting Props:
  “It’s less about the tea. I just love a prop.” – Timothy Olyphant [04:32]
• On Middle Child Dynamics:
  “You really didn’t grow up in the same house. ... My older brother describes significant chapters in his life, they’re vastly different than mine. ... Divorce at 12 versus 16, they mean vastly different things.” – Timothy Olyphant [16:31]
• On Doing Talk Shows:
  “If you could just knock an interviewer off balance a little bit at hello, it just made the interview a little bit easier from that moment forward.” – Timothy Olyphant [31:26]
  “For a while, I really just wanted to be a talk show host. In college, I sent a video in...for some talk show. I can’t believe we actually did it.” – Timothy Olyphant [32:42]
• On Boundaries in Hollywood:
  “These moments that I’ve always clocked are these guys that are just basically saying, ‘No, no, I’m totally fine being a dick.’” – Timothy Olyphant [41:14]
• On Generalists vs. Specialists:
  “People idealize and jerk off to specialists, but in fact, if you look at who has changed the world, it’s generalists.” – Dax Shepard [23:30]
• On Industry Friendships:
  “After awhile, you go, you know what, maybe I’ll just show up and say, my lines and do my little thing and get the fuck out.” – Timothy Olyphant [59:19]
• On 'Alien Earth':
  “It’s like a Mega Nolan level movie... It’s gorgeous and epic and something special.” – Dax Shepard [69:20]
• Self-Deprecation and Charm:
  “I can only tell you that I wake up every morning thinking, oh, oh, look who the big winner is. I feel pretty good. I got a pretty good deal.” – Timothy Olyphant [25:53]
• On Social Clubs:
  “We live by that rule. If anyone invites us to Soho House, we won’t be their friend. ... Cut to me staying there for three months.” – Timothy Olyphant [62:33]

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• Acting Props / Cigarette bit: [03:39–05:12]
• Cheerleading & Georgia State SATs Story: [05:53–08:14]
• Sibling Differences / Divorce Impact: [16:31–17:48]
• Middle Child, Generalists, & Competitive Drive: [23:10–25:53]
• Transitioning from Athletics to Acting: [26:23–28:10]
• Knocking Interviewers Off-Balance & Talk Shows: [31:26–33:02]
• Hollywood Boundaries – Robert Duvall & Others: [39:03–41:39]
• Melissa McCarthy in 'Go' & Early Roles: [46:49–47:37]
• FX’s 'Alien Earth' & the State of Sci-Fi TV: [69:20–72:41]
• Soho House Policies and Social Satire: [61:26–63:40]
• Would Olyphant be a Modern Dirty Harry?: [78:54–81:03]

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Final Thoughts

The episode is a rollercoaster of wit, humility, vulnerability, and industry insight, reflecting not just Olyphant’s career and character but the odd, human messiness Dax seeks to celebrate in every episode. Whether discussing the joys of being a generalist, the nuances of Hollywood friendships, or the technicalities of playing a “synthetic” in a blockbuster sci-fi series, Olyphant exudes humor and candor. The chemistry between host and guest is palpable, generating both laughs and thought-provoking commentary.

Recommended for anyone who loves behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories, meditations on identity and success, or simply wants to spend 90 minutes basking in triple-threat charisma, comedy, and charm.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

We had a major babe on today, mb. Oh, major babe. Timothy Oliphant, Emmy nominated actor, Justified, Hitman, Santa Clarita, Diet Deadwood and his new series out now on fx, Alien Earth, which of course is written by Noah.

[Monica Padman]

Hawley, Friend of the pod.

[Dax Shepard]

Friend of the pod. About the best writer out there doing it. Yeah, I'm putting this in the Alexander Skarsgard bucket of dudes that just came in here were as playful as a goddamn kitten with a ball of yarn.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[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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[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, oh. We have the host right here. How are you? Let's do a little mint tea.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What are you doing?

[Monica Padman]

Please. I'm gonna do a latte. Homemade.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh wait, we're getting. I would like a cortado, please.

[Monica Padman]

Nice. We knew mint tea wasn't right. We knew it in our heart.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Why did you request mint tea? Is that what you always drink? For me to switch from mint tea to horchata?

[Timothy Oliphant]

What did you say?

[Monica Padman]

No cortado.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I'll tell you why. Because my thought process was simply, oh, it's gonna come in a paper cup with a lid and that's not gonna be as nice an experience as in a mug with like honey and the whole thing. And so I immediately just switched like, oh, no, when in Rome. This is what you wanna get from. I don't know where we're ordering from, but it feels like it's the kind of place.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you had their co?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Right? Imported from Italy.

[Dax Shepard]

The beef and cheddar combo platter.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I'll be honest with you, it's less about the tea. I just love a prop.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I do too. Something in your hand.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you ever got to smoke in anything?

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's the best.

[Dax Shepard]

There's nothing better. There's no acting to be done.

[Timothy Oliphant]

If you can smoke or eat in.

[Monica Padman]

Any do you spit it out or.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Do it doesn't matter. It's the process. It's the chewing the smallest thing and it just immediately makes you a better actor.

[Dax Shepard]

I got to smoking. Let's go to prison. And it was a run and gun production, right? So we're shooting several pages a day and it does turn pretty quickly from like I was a pack and a half a day smoker at the time and I'm up to like a three and a half pack just because of the scenes and retake and relight. And by the end of it I was like, I quit. I quit smoking at the end of that Movie.

[Timothy Oliphant]

There you go. There's a win.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you do the herbal ones or you go real?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I haven't done a real cigarette in a production in a long time. I did a play years ago. Oh, my gosh. Davis Sedaris. I did a Sedaris thing and I smoked a land every night, as I recall. I think there was a cigarette involved in that. I used to go out and smoke a cigarette every night. I was going to look forward to it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Of course, you would have never been an actual smoker because your life was committed to athletics.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was committed. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, truly. You couldn't have been a smoker and a fucking national swim champ.

[Monica Padman]

Whoa. That's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Take you there. I'll take you there.

[Monica Padman]

Take me.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I think a champ is a little.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to say you were a runner up in the 86 Nationals. That's the actual year.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That can't be true.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay. I'm not saying it's not nothing.

[Dax Shepard]

Finals of anything.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay. There you go.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. She's a state champ.

[Monica Padman]

I am two time.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What's more for you.

[Monica Padman]

Competitive cheerleading.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Competitive cheerleading.

[Dax Shepard]

High flyer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I was flying, tumbling.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Dangerous.

[Monica Padman]

Very dangerous.

[Timothy Oliphant]

When did you start?

[Monica Padman]

That started in eighth grade. And then I was on the squad my junior and senior year and we won both years.

[Timothy Oliphant]

How about that?

[Monica Padman]

We're from Georgia.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh. It's a big deal there.

[Monica Padman]

It's a huge deal.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's like the whole thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's why it felt really good.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the equivalent of polo in Nantucket.

[Monica Padman]

It was a blessing because the state's SAT scores were on average too low, so we weren't allowed to go to nationals.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, they were penalizing you personally for the state average?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Like no one in the state of Georgia could go to nationals because the state average SAT scores. But it was a blessing because then it was just like we were the best. We couldn't then go to the next stage and lose. That was the best we could do. And we did it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, this is a detail of the story. I've never. I've heard this story 150 times, Timothy. And you just brought out a weird layer of honesty, which is you just told me you were champs two years in a row.

[Monica Padman]

You didn't say champs.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Didn't say idiots.

[Monica Padman]

Of the idiots.

[Dax Shepard]

You did not say of the.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Well, sure. You guys won it. You weren't going to class. Yeah, everyone else was going to class. They were handicapped by actually doing their studies.

[Monica Padman]

Correct.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You ladies were phoning it in. Guys and girls co ed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Co ed. It's not like the SAT scores of the cheerleaders. It's. I know every single person in the state. The average was too low to take gpa.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Not the sat.

[Monica Padman]

Sat.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Your SAT scores.

[Monica Padman]

Now I'm worried about it.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you're right. They wouldn't do a state. But let me say this.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

There's almost never an occasion to say, once again, the few have bore the burden of the many.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

The saying is, once again, the many have bore the burden of the few.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I think that's.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the opposite. Because, like, the state fucked you guys up.

[Monica Padman]

But again, it did. But I choose to look at it as a positive because we did the best we could possibly do. We won state. We couldn't do anything more than that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Well, the rest of those idiots up to these days, I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

I've really separated myself from distance.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Really?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Are you in touch with any of the squad? We're going to call them a squad.

[Monica Padman]

Call him a squad.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Are you in touch with any of the squad?

[Dax Shepard]

I just want to flag something. I want you to be careful because he's doing what he does. It's happening. It's happening full throttle right out of the gate. I want to see what shape it would take. But this is.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Listen, I'm just asking.

[Dax Shepard]

Never talk about himself.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I.

[Dax Shepard]

With you. And I know what's happening.

[Monica Padman]

This is interesting.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Three people talking. Rob, we're gonna include you. There's four of us. We're in here, we're chatting, and we're just being humans.

[Dax Shepard]

And it'd be your preference that we just kept it a light chat and we don't find out anything about old to listen.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is your show, okay? Now put aside the fact that the guest was here first.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, that's part of it. I want you to get comfortable before you're intimidated by my biceps. I want you to sit down and relax and not feel threatened.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Now, I can't take my eyes off. Now look at that. I can't take my eyes off him. All right, we're letting it go. We're going to. Let's not talk about the squad.

[Monica Padman]

We're not going to.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, give us one squad member. Just. What's one squad member?

[Dax Shepard]

Who's the guy? I'll let you in on something that's really fascinating. And I said to her early on as we were chatting about this history, you know, you're up in the air like that and the people are catching you and sometimes it's willy nilly. Did they ever catch you by the pussy? And Monica said, yeah, it happens all the time. And we have people write in, like any high flyer, they're going to have to get caught by occasionally on accident. So that's the member of the squad I think we should honor if we're going to honor someone.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I think that's a great idea. And we should put this on your Wikipedia page. Champion cheerleader. Occasionally caught by the pussycat.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

But kept it moving and won two titles. So who caught you?

[Monica Padman]

Most of them are women. Oh, now we're really off the rails. But, yeah, let's shout out one person. Let's hear Kendall Morgan.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, what an athlete.

[Monica Padman]

Incredible athlete.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Dumbest girl on this. Good one.

[Monica Padman]

You know what?

[Timothy Oliphant]

She the one that hurt.

[Monica Padman]

He's a very smart male.

[Timothy Oliphant]

He.

[Dax Shepard]

Sorry, I went the same place, you understand? Just said, women caught her. And then she said, kendall.

[Timothy Oliphant]

My bad.

[Dax Shepard]

I feel like she was listening to the slaughter on that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I don't listen. This is. My wife tells me you need to listen. Okay. What's Kendall up to?

[Monica Padman]

Kendall is running another cheerleading gym. Has an all star gym. Doing fantastic.

[Timothy Oliphant]

She stayed in it.

[Dax Shepard]

He stayed in it. He's with us.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm kind of with your wife now.

[Timothy Oliphant]

God damn it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, I'll give you one other out. Before we get into your childhood, I really, truly would not expect you to remember this, because as I did the math today, I think this was about 17 years ago. Do you remember having dinner with me? Yeah, that's fine.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Who's at the table?

[Dax Shepard]

It was before the Soho House had opened officially. And I think you and Kristen had the same agent at that time, Tracy. And I think Tracy invited you and her to the Soho House before it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Opened here in la.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they were doing, like, soft opening.

[Timothy Oliphant]

They had really cool furniture.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, it was gorgeous.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It was. I remember about that.

[Dax Shepard]

So we went, and it was Kristin and I, and it was you and your wife. And then it was the agent.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Wait, it's the five of us.

[Monica Padman]

That's pretty intimate.

[Dax Shepard]

Jesus. Listen, there's a big reason why I would remember it more than you. And I was hoping maybe you would remember this aspect. Kristen got up early on in the meal and disappeared for about five to 10 minutes. And then she returned with an enormous bag of ice and then subtly passed it to me under the table. Do you remember that?

[Timothy Oliphant]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Because at that point it came out. Cause that's the fucking date we were on our way to.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, it's a bad batch.

[Dax Shepard]

On our way there, a guy crossing the street in front of the Chateau chucked a drink like this big at the windshield of my car. And I pulled the E brake as it was shattering, got out of the car and fought a dude in front of that newsstand on Sunset. And I had kicked him in the head. And I really hurt my leg bad. And Kristen was very disappointed and mad at me because I was in a fight in a suit on the way to this nice dinner with her agent and a very esteemed actor. And so when we got there, we were dealing with the fact that I had just beat a guy up on the sidewalk. She's very disappointed. She's questioning, who have I just become partnered up with.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This the beginning of your relationship?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we're like probably a year in. And then she, to her credit, despite all that, was like, he's hurt. I'm gonna handle this. And went and got this bag of ice and handed it to me, even though I know she was so mad at me. So it was quite a night for us.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Wow, that's quite a moment. I'm very disappointed in myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I would love it if you did have some memory of, like, what was the funny business happening with the. Under the table?

[Timothy Oliphant]

God, how crazy is that?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that was a very memorable.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's the beginning of your guys relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

It was probably like a year in. I've changed, though. She bet on the right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is workable.

[Dax Shepard]

I came in with a pretty visible limp.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay. Wow.

[Monica Padman]

You probably thought she had some stomach issues, because that's what you would normally think if someone leaves a dinner table for five to 10 minutes, comes back with ice because maybe she's sweating from the situation or covering from the fact.

[Dax Shepard]

That she had haunted.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And so you were just being nice by being like, I'm not gonna pay attention to this.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's all a blur.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you prefer Tim or Tim?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Tim's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Tim's nice.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Is it fine or is it preferred?

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, I don't care. I like both.

[Dax Shepard]

So, Tim, why were mom and dad in Honolulu? That's my first curiosity.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Wow, look at that.

[Monica Padman]

He's gonna ask about cheerleading.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Pass.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, my dad was working for Del.

[Dax Shepard]

Monte, and they were making the bananas down there or something, I don't know.

[Timothy Oliphant]

But he was working for Del Monte. That's, I believe, what took us to Hawaii.

[Dax Shepard]

You were two when you guys went to Modesto.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We went to the Philippines after that. And then I think also Damonte and then Modesto. Natural progression, like cliche.

[Dax Shepard]

Modesto by Way of Manila. That could be a good memoir. Modesto by way of Manila.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's not as good as Occasionally Grabbed by the Pussy.

[Dax Shepard]

No, hers is going to top USA Chimney.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, Occasionally grabbed by the Pussy.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I want to see that on bumper stickers all across the state of Georgia.

[Monica Padman]

Copyright on that or something. Someone's going to want to steal that.

[Dax Shepard]

Trump already has it, unfortunately. But, you know. So did dad go to take this job at Gallo? Is that why you guys moved there, or did they have any kind of roots there?

[Timothy Oliphant]

No roots, although my mom's family was in the Bay Area, up in Oakland area, so not far from home, where she grew up.

[Dax Shepard]

And what's the vibe in Modesto?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Did you see American Graffiti?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. Is that where it was shot?

[Timothy Oliphant]

George grew up in Modesto, Lucas. So it was about Modesto. It was about his childhood. And I always felt like that was pretty much our childhood, just uglier cars.

[Monica Padman]

So for people who have not seen.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It, like me cruising orchards, much more sprawl now. Now, when I was there, it was quite a quaint. You hear about the declining middle class a lot of times in certain bubbles, you're like, oh, I understand it in theory. If you go to Modesto, you feel it, because those little neighborhoods that we all grew up in were so idyllic at the time, surrounded by orchards and canals. Now they're less idyllic. In the 70s, it was less than 100,000 people.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's a company time. Most of the people there work for Gallo.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The wine. Gallo. I think Safeway was there. Agriculture.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They did $3.1 billion in agriculture sales last year. Modesto. But I. Bad news for you. They were the number one most per capita car thefts in 2012. Yes. I'm reading all this. I'm like, what is this place? Got to tell me what is.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I have a very fond memories of growing up there, and I still have buddies there. My mom's still there. I do go back much less than I have, but I still enjoy going back home.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What's the age gap between you and your brothers?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Older brothers a little over two years. Younger brother a little over three years.

[Dax Shepard]

Does the middle child kind of archetype. Do you feel like you identify with it?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I like the well balanced.

[Dax Shepard]

You're the well famous one.

[Monica Padman]

I'm getting middle child vibes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm a middle child as well.

[Timothy Oliphant]

All right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I've been ruminating on it a lot just recently because. Because I realized that when I was a kid There was a lot of chaos on either end of the age spectrum. There's a baby and a teenager. They were both nuts. I hid a lot. I was pretty solitary. I just would get out of the chaos. I'm now realizing that I live with three women and two of them are starting to have a lot of hormones. I couldn't place it, but I'm like, oh, I know this feeling. This is like, I wanna go hide sometimes. Oh, and then I was wondering if you related to any of those middle child things.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I do think there was a upside of your older brother and his friends can pick on you, but you can pick on your younger brother's friends and then you can bully him. You do get to play a lot of the roles, and you also can easily bounce back and forth in terms of you can age up or age down, and you can kind of. So I felt like, in some degree, it was a nice little spot to be in. I read this fascinating years ago about how siblings can be so vastly different. And, oh, I don't understand this. We grew up in the same house, but of course, you really didn't grow up in the same house. Like, you realize if my older brother describes these sort of significant chapters in his life, they're vastly different than mine and very vastly different than my younger brother's.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

They really grew up in a completely.

[Dax Shepard]

Different world because of the socioeconomic changes or the way they parented.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You could just say my older brother, he had two younger siblings. His parents divorced at 15, 16 years old. He went off to college. My younger brother can say he had two older brothers. His parents divorced when he was like, 12 or 11, and we both took off and he was there, high school, living with my mom on his own. I never had that experience.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

A divorce at 12 versus 15, 16. They mean vastly different things.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Which do you think is worse? Do you think one is worse? I don't know.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That all sucks. I haven't seen the divorce where you're like, that's where you want to hit it.

[Dax Shepard]

I would argue mine. I was three, so I don't have any memory. Nothing was missing because I didn't remember them being a young.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Don't they all, in some degree, scar you in some significant way?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the stepdads that arrive do.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, sure, this may mean pop psychologists, but there must be a thing like, well, if your parents divorce when you're that young, that you feel somehow. Well, I guess all kids responsible.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You feel like, oh, I showed up and I broke up Their marriage.

[Dax Shepard]

I think if you were older and.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You could understand this case, probably true.

[Dax Shepard]

Might have been true. I was colicky. My father and I clashed from the second I arrived. It's quite likely.

[Monica Padman]

I do think with middle children, you guys aren't handed an identity. The older sibling is handed an identity. They have to be in charge. The parents are afraid for their first kid. Right. They don't know what they're doing. There's way too much attention on them.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And now, having had three kids, you see how much the first child, you're like, what is she doing now? What's going on now?

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Look at this. Oh, she's never done that before.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The third one, you're like, did we leave the third one? Do we have to go back to that cocktail party? Cause where's the third one?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, very home alone.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably 100th amount of pictures taken of the third one that there was the first one.

[Monica Padman]

And they're just always in pictures with other people. At least they're immediately connected.

[Dax Shepard]

They never get their time.

[Monica Padman]

But a middle child kind of has to make their own identity.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Even now as adults, when you get. You tell the oldest, I remember we used to take you to the park and the first time you made it across. And then the youngest one is like, when did I first go across? And you're like, did you go across? Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so sorry. I'm Tim, honey, come on. I don't remember.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Dax, how can I remember your childhood? Fucking terrible.

[Monica Padman]

But even that is an identity. Being little. But the middle kid, I think is a little bit lost until they decide, this is me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but one part that you just made me think might have been really fun with your Dynam dynamic. Them being spaced like that two years is, I think, a lot of times, or at least I felt this way. When you get around 11 or 12, you're starting to do big kid stuff, and you want to be older and you want to be autonomous and show you're starting to become a man. And then you still pine for, like, playing with Hot Wheels, but you feel like a wimp if you do. But if you have a little brother, you can, like, bounce back and forth.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, we had a ball.

[Dax Shepard]

And were the Ola Fanta formidable group of boys in junior high and high school. Do people know better than to mess with one of them?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, I don't know about that, but both of them were cool. We weren't on the football and baseball, you know, we weren't those guys either. My older brother played Tennis and I swam and Matt played water polo. We grew up next to a Modesto swim and racket club, literally next door. So we basically were raised by lifeguards. We were there all day long.

[Dax Shepard]

What kind of niche were you in in high school? I mean. You were a swimmer. That's interesting in itself. We're similar age. So you had the nerds burnouts.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Jo Fred Seabire High school in the 80s. A smoking section was right out front.

[Dax Shepard]

Nice.

[Timothy Oliphant]

At the flagpole. Right there at Dropbot, like where parents are dropping off their freshmen. Were all these kids in leather jackets smoking? That was the entrance to the school. Is that great? Yeah. I was lucky. I was a bit of an artsy fartsy guy, so I had a little bit of a connection with that kind of group. But then I was an athlete and all my buddies were a lot of athletes.

[Dax Shepard]

You were funny already.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, I guess so. I don't think I won any of those things, but I feel like I was runner up in like three or four.

[Dax Shepard]

Like the 86 Nationals. The theme of your life.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Runner up.

[Dax Shepard]

You were in the finals?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, it was short course. Not that big a deal. It's not the same as the summer.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And now I don't know anything about swimming, but the 200 meter medley.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I appreciate the prep, by the way.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Thank you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, no. Oh, thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

It's my honor and my pleasure. You do four different kinds of swims in that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The 200 individual medley. So you're swimming four strokes, fly, back, rest, free. And if it's meters, it's a single length for the Olympics. 200 is a lap, a fly, back, breast free. 400 up and back, 400. By many people's standards, the most difficult event.

[Monica Padman]

You're doing all the things.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Doing a lot of things. And it's pretty long.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Quarter mile or something.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Is that what it is?

[Dax Shepard]

15, 12, 13, 20 is okay. Anyways, listen, I'm not trying to show off. What I'm trying to get to is middle. There's a clue there.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What's the clue?

[Dax Shepard]

I was. You know what.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What are we getting at?

[Dax Shepard]

I got defensive. I went a quarter mile and you're like, is it a quarter mile? And then now I gotta come over the top. No, you're right, and I apologize. And that was a bad sign of my personality.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You're doing great. I am not talking to the guy who got out of the car. You know what I'm saying?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I am not talking. I feel safe. Safe.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to attempt to Make a thematic judgment of your life based on that one event. Oh, you want to hear it?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Can you imagine? No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Don't talk about Cor. No, I do.

[Monica Padman]

I want to hear it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I'm going to pretend to be interested. No, I would argue.

[Dax Shepard]

And by the way, there's a fisherman seeing another fisherman at sea. That sounds like a great event if you don't actually want to be a specialist in any one thing. And I think that's been my approach to life a little bit. It's like, I'm pretty good at some things, and if I put together the right combination of things, now we've gotten ourselves into a winning position.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You're saying. Perhaps it's a metaphor, and I'm not gonna take offense here. What I think is he saying, that's what you are as an adult as well. You're not really a specialist.

[Monica Padman]

You're not a specialized.

[Dax Shepard]

A generalist. But. What. But generalize not.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is a big compliment.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The best of us are generalists.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. People idealize and jerk off to specialists, but in fact, if you look at who has changed the world, it's generalists.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I like that you're thinking, let me.

[Dax Shepard]

Give you my example. I won every year. This is so stupid and embarrassing. The only thing I ever won growing up was the obstacle course, because you had to be pretty good at all the little things, but not spectacular. Any one of them. I got to run pretty fast, but I wasn't going to win a sprint, and you had to jump pretty high.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What years are we talking about?

[Dax Shepard]

Elementary school.

[Timothy Oliphant]

When you say you won every year.

[Dax Shepard]

Every year in elementary school, we had Metric day first through sixth grade.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That was your thing every year.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I want it every year. It's the only thing I ever won. And then, lo and behold, my kid won an obstacle course, and I'm like, it's in our g. Really?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yes. Nice.

[Monica Padman]

I was thinking this too, before you said it, when you were talking about you're in the top of things, but you didn't win Nationals. I'm sorry to remind you, but you didn't.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I don't want to intimidate you, but you are looking at the former sandwiching section record holder.

[Monica Padman]

I am intimidated.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't doubt that for one second.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So that's a win.

[Monica Padman]

That's a win.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a win.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You have some wins. Oh, but you know What? In the 200, I am okay.

[Monica Padman]

But that's still fine.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You know what's sad? Let me just give you a little.

[Monica Padman]

Let'S hear something sad.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Throw this on the Wikipedia page. Rob, can you get on that?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Open it up, Rob.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I won the San Joaquin section, which is like Modesto, Sacramento, so whole San Joaquin Valley area. And my senior of high school, I beat what was a guy named Jeff Float's record. And Jeff Float was the flag bearer at the 84 Olympic Games.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So it shows you what a disappointment I was after that day.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you haven't bore the flag.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The guy whose record I beat went on to become amazing Olympic swimmer.

[Monica Padman]

And you beat him in high school still.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I know, but you see what he did at the next couple years. We don't talk about what he did after that.

[Dax Shepard]

Serious effort.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. Finalist at Nationals, Olympic team.

[Monica Padman]

You might be the reason, though.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Makes me a bit of an underachiever.

[Monica Padman]

No, but I was going to say, I think that if I were you, I might. Might be looking at my life. Because you're an insanely good actor.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I appreciate that.

[Monica Padman]

And I might be like, why am I not winning everything? I should be winning everything based on my talents. And then I would look back at my life and be like, I'm not winning enough. I'm really good at a lot of things and I'm not getting the full recognition.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's what you think.

[Monica Padman]

If I were you, I would think that.

[Dax Shepard]

But she's also a winner. That's real. That's real.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I am.

[Dax Shepard]

That wouldn't cross my mind. But that would cross her mind.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I can only tell you that I wake up every morning thinking, oh, oh, look who the big winner is. I feel pretty good.

[Monica Padman]

I love that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I got a pretty good deal.

[Monica Padman]

You do.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, my God.

[Monica Padman]

It's good that you're not focused like I would be about what else do I want? You should win an Oscar.

[Dax Shepard]

So I imagine you won a bazillion 200 meter medleys before you got to nationals, is my guess.

[Monica Padman]

Are you competitive?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You couldn't have gotten a scholarship to USC without being competitive.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I didn't get a scholarship.

[Dax Shepard]

You got recruited.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was recruited. They didn't offer me money and I turned down other because I just really wanted to come to la.

[Dax Shepard]

When you got there, you were hoping to maybe do architecture or something.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I walked into the architecture school on my recruit trip. I had this instilled early on. My grandfather on my mother's side was very much like, there's only four or five professions. It was like architect, lawyer, government, or doctor. And everyone else is just hanging on. I drew a lot as a kid and I loved to do creative stuff. So I was like, I guess I'll be an architect, because that's the only one on the list that seems to be connected to. So I went to the architecture school. They just. Right off the bat, the dean told me I couldn't be on the swim team and still be in the architecture school. The commitment's too big and long. Architecture classes are five hours long, and they're in the middle of the day. It's when you're training, they can't work around it.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone's reading the Fountainhead all day.

[Timothy Oliphant]

They're reading the Fountainhead. Read that in college.

[Dax Shepard]

How could you not? It's so appealing. When you're a young man, you think your whole life story will be. And eventually they all learned you were.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

That's your arc.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And you just drive around looking at all those. Remember, because the church he built was down close to the ground, and everyone was very upset about it. And I just remember driving around going, yeah, look at all these churches. This is not the way Howard would have done it.

[Dax Shepard]

He was right. He was right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The architecture school was upstairs. And I asked the guy, I said, on the way in, I noticed downstairs there was what looked like a gallery, and then there was, like, a ceramic studio. And he's like, yeah, that's the fine art department. And I was like, you can get a degree in that. Anyway, so he said, yeah, let me introduce you to this. So I went downstairs and sat down with the dean of the art school and asked him if I could. Here's my swim schedule. And they said, we can work it out.

[Dax Shepard]

That exercise is among the most calorically burning you can endeavor. Right. Swimming. I just remember the Michael Phelps, like, diet.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Let's just go with yes, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

You burn a ton. Were you eating a monster during that?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Ridiculous. Were you such, like, fond memories of everything? I.

[Dax Shepard]

You had a card, right? You could go to the cafeteria, and.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We'D just go and we'd get a tray, and it would be a plate of pancakes, a plate of eggs and bacon and potatoes. It was so absurd.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but you had to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I bet if you were walking through the cafeteria, you would easily be able to go like, oh, yeah, that's the swimmers. They're all eating 13,000 calories this morning.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Come in with these trays and trays of so much food on that plate.

[Dax Shepard]

Was that ever a hard routine to break?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I remember once before practice, and I could do the math. I might have been junior year, but I remember about to jump in and assistant coach Shout out to Darrell.

[Monica Padman]

Shout out.

[Dax Shepard]

That was a risky thing you just did. I've watched you now in a lot of interviews, and anytime you try to remember someone's name, it's high risk. So just congrats that you landed.

[Monica Padman]

I was sure that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

No, there's about a 60% chance that's not the right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I can name all the coaches. We say hi to all the swim coaches. Dave, Salo and Darrel. Something about me having a belly, like. He's like, oh, gotta watch. Whatever. And I was like, what are you talking about? And I was still young, but I do remember, like, oh, I can't just eat as much as I'm eating. You have to be a little bit thoughtful.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Which is Nothing compared to 20 years later when you really have to be like, yes. Jesus.

[Monica Padman]

It's so annoying.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We would go to Baskin Robbins and order pints. Each one of us stand in line with everyone getting their cone, single or double. And we'd be like, get a pint of half peanut butter chocolate, half praline cream pint, please, and a spoon. And we would all just eat a pint. Did you play sports growing up?

[Dax Shepard]

I skateboarded and snowboarded. I did all, like, the alternatives.

[Timothy Oliphant]

These are Olympic sports.

[Dax Shepard]

They became those they weren't then, but not about me.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You didn't have what I do.

[Monica Padman]

You did it again.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I'm not doing anything.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not doing anything.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is pretty good, by the way.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

From what I've seen, this is maybe the best you've ever done.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You came in with, like, a plan. I came in with no plan. I just wanted you to.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not supposed to usually.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I like a plan. You do a little bit of a plan.

[Dax Shepard]

I know you like control.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I think there's a control issue.

[Dax Shepard]

I detected a few things. All of it, by the way, really lovely. It makes for fun doing the press. Yeah. I was observing a lot of things. A, you're just really funny every time you show up somewhere.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're likable and you're charismatic. And the smile, I'm sure, got you out of so much trouble, which is unfair to the rest of us without that dumb smile.

[Timothy Oliphant]

At parties, they were like, cops are here. All, yeah, I have to go talk to the cops.

[Monica Padman]

The pants up.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. I don't know what that was, but I was the designated talk to the cops guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's right.

[Monica Padman]

Very easy to talk to.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That disarming smile. It's like, am I In trouble. I bet I am in trouble. Like you're just finding out you're in trouble.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You watch the things and you've got.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You've got some thoughts.

[Dax Shepard]

I got thoughts.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I had an interesting thought coming in literally right before we started. Let's hear yours first.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Should we decide? Monica?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought, yeah, he's very comfortable. You're in control.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I realized that if you could just. I shouldn't say this stuff out loud.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you should.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's too late. If you could just knock an interviewer off balance a little bit at hello. It just made the interview a little bit easier from that moment forward.

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Because you don't want to disrespect those things. But somewhere along the line, I discovered that if I could just knock each one a little off balance, it might turn into a lovely, spontaneous moment or two. And so somewhere along the line that occurred to me. When they sit down, they say, tell me about your character. I say, no, you tell me about it. And then somehow what might come of that more often than not is actually kind of like, oh, that was fun. Five minutes.

[Monica Padman]

An honest moment.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. Where if I just go into the thing, it's no fun for anybody.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So when I go on talk shows or things like that, I find same thing. If I can throw something out there, they have more fun. I have more fun. I just grew up loving talk shows and I love a great talk show guest. For a while, I really just wanted to be a talk show host. In college, I sent a video in with my roommate to audition for some talk show. I can't believe we actually did it. One of the two networks or Fox, they were getting into late night. And I remember, like, I want this gig.

[Monica Padman]

You auditioned to host.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We sent in a video, like 3 Reasons why I'm the guy.

[Monica Padman]

So cute.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was like, first of all, 100 bucks. I was like, even I mean, it fails.

[Dax Shepard]

They would have put a 21 year old swimmer from us.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We really filmed it on VHS.

[Monica Padman]

God.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The option sent it in like this.

[Dax Shepard]

Is gonna be our thing.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So that was the idea.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You've always loved it and you wanted to make sure you do good at it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You're saying.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And my first major talk show appearance, I was on Conan's show in New York, late 90s. And I was so nervous that I remember his lips moving and I don't know what he was saying exactly, but when they stopped, I was like, okay, now's the. When I tell the story I'm supposed to tell yeah. And I didn't do them again for years. And then now I think, if anything, I try to anticipate the host's sense of humor. Like, oh, he is going to love this. He or she, you know, he.

[Dax Shepard]

During the talk show late night. But we want it. We want there to be. Yeah. When you're on Joan Rivers show, is that what you talk about? I didn't realize you had on your.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Show, Ellen, sometimes the daytime ones, different.

[Dax Shepard]

Fun, the audience is the best you'll ever be in front of. On Ellen.

[Timothy Oliphant]

They always want to talk about your.

[Monica Padman]

Kids and your pets because that's who's watching.

[Timothy Oliphant]

People who have daytime kids pets.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. On car insurance is smart. Unfortunately, not checking things first. Well, that's how you end up with some pretty embarrassing stories like not checking if your phone is actually connected to your earbuds before belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart on an airplane plane. Yeah, that was a fun flight. Or not checking if your gym shorts have a hole in them before doing squats in front of the wall mirror. The whole gym got a show that day. And don't even get me started about checking if your camping stove has fuel before heading into the wilderness. Nothing says roughing it quite like three days of granola bars and room temperature water. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with allstars. Savings vary subject to terms, condition and availability. Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone 16, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything. At Apple. Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes, subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and [e-mail].

[Timothy Oliphant]

I had a story about my daughter and her guinea pig.

[Dax Shepard]

Perfect.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And it was this whole story.

[Dax Shepard]

Two for one.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I remember saying I had this whole thing about the guinea pig and how desperately she wanted the guinea pig. And then a week later she just can't remember why she wanted the guinea pig. And I just look at the guinea pig and it's looking at me and we're both thinking, yeah, I don't know why I don't know why you're here, but this is your life for the foreseeable future.

[Dax Shepard]

18 months or however long you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And then I said, hey, you know, there's a lot of countries where you can go into a restaurant and say, how's the guinea pig?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yep.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, she can't stand that. She can't stand that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And years later, that guinea pig had a tumor on the side of him. It was like he was walking around with, like, a second guinea pig.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, boy.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And this is what happens, you know, that's why we study the rats and the rodents, because their life cycle's very fast.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So fuck. What's his name? We can give him a name for the story, but all I know is that little guy's got a tumor the size of another guinea pig, and we feel like it's maybe time. So our daughter, our youngest, she's getting ready to go to school, and we want to let her know that mom and I are going to probably take the little guy to the vet just to see how the little guy.

[Dax Shepard]

We're gonna take him to an oncologist.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We need to find out if he's in pain and just where he is. She immediately started crying and asked, is he gonna kill it? And I said, we don't know. She's like, he's gonna kill him. And she starts bawling. Aww. I said, I'm so sorry. She goes, no, I'm really upset because, you know, I never really loved him.

[Dax Shepard]

She was having guilt. He had a loveless life. And get ready.

[Monica Padman]

So great.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And I still don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And then she says, can you take the fish, too? The fish isn't dying. I just said, just take it. I can't get every.

[Dax Shepard]

You know what? Get everyone but my brother's out of here.

[Timothy Oliphant]

My wife and I drove to the vet that morning after we dropped her off from school. We each knew. We're like, honey, if one of us gets sick, keep your eye on that one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

She's gonna be, like, ruthless. Just take dad.

[Monica Padman]

I've never even loved him anyway.

[Dax Shepard]

Pull the Plus.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I can't deal with both of them. Just get it over with, that is. Anyway, so.

[Dax Shepard]

Pull the band aid.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How old was she when that happened?

[Timothy Oliphant]

She's a kid. I don't know. She's little. Let's go with 12. I can't remember. She's the youngest. We're talking about the oldest. I can hit dates.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I can hit whatever you want.

[Dax Shepard]

Me. Then on October 7th.

[Monica Padman]

They took care of it at the vet.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah. But guess what they did when you left? They shipped them to one of those restaurants.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Medium rare, please.

[Dax Shepard]

On the first flight.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Just like the country. Shut up. Like chicken. Come on.

[Monica Padman]

You did a really big favor because my brother's fish had a tumor and it exploded. Oh, good on you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Exploding fish.

[Dax Shepard]

And it didn't make it, obviously.

[Monica Padman]

No, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Survive the explosion.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. You never know. It could have been Aquam.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Exploded. Just got it right off, was fine.

[Dax Shepard]

And then was like, killed so much better. Like a pimple or a boil. Now, last thing about the swimming.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Keeping it on track. Good for you. We didn't go as deep as I thought we were going to go on your talk show. I thought you were going to say, this is why you do this. This is your issue. Well, I just went a little bit.

[Dax Shepard]

We did control. And then also, you told me more than you realized by first appearance on Conan. You were a little dear in the headlights. And it sounds like after the fact, you're like, I need a better game plan.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was thinking of this before I got here. Here's some free. I'll open a can of worms. I'll tell you two things that occurred to me literally right before we were to going. A couple of famous people will pop in my head oftentimes before I do interviews, like a Lou Reed or a Bob Dylan. There are men and women of that era in music, but in all forms, where they were just like you to anyone who was talking to them. And that famous Bob Dylan, Time magazine, where he's like, I don't read Time magazine. I was like, I love that you're saying that to Time magazine.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Yeah, right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

He's saying to him, like, have you come to the show? And he goes, well, you got to pay attention because it's going to move pretty quick. You might not get it. All right. Like, he just immediately putting them down. And then there's the Lou re those press interviews where they're such assholes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

The Stones were kind of pricks, too, when they came to the U.S. i'm guilty.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Perhaps. I admired those guys so much growing up. And I also, over the years, have collected moments of actors telling people to go fuck themselves and being like, oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow, that looks fun.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I remember being at premiere, like, 99. I was at a party and Robert Duvall had agreed to take a picture with me. And I walked over and said hello to him, and he's like, how you doing? Are they treating you? Well, everything good. And I was like, yeah, I appreciate you doing this. We turned to the photographer and she started taking pictures. And then she put down the camera for a second and said, you're at a party. And he said, don't do that. Don't direct. Just take the goddamn fucking picture. Snap, snap. And then right back to being charming and couldn't have been nicer. And I was like, wow. And I have a bunch of those.

[Dax Shepard]

Even Marc Maron, you saw him get introduced to the director on stick, shook.

[Timothy Oliphant]

His hand, kept walking.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You were like, hey, I love your stuff sort of thing. So what you and I both have is we both really want to be liked. And when you see someone that has zero people, it seems like superpower.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I realized that just recently I was sold on good authority. He's like, why? You've always had a problem with conflict. And I was like, have I? And then it occurs to me that these moments that I've always sort of clocked are these guys that are just basically saying, no, no, no, I'm totally fine being a dick.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And I've always looked in and said, it's an option. Like now if I'm doing the carpet and someone directs, I know that they've overstepped because of this moment that I saw. From that moment forward, I'm like, oh, I can handle this however I want. I've never said, just take the fucking picture.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

But I've done some version of saying, I appreciate what you' to do. So those moments have always been helpful in terms of little guidelines.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And then it's just, okay, how do you want to handle it?

[Monica Padman]

It's interesting to be around people who don't need approval. When you do need approval, I do that too. You see people and it's like, oh, my God, how wild. But then if I tried it, I would just feel horrible. I'm not comfortable making someone else feel bad. They are, which is fine.

[Timothy Oliphant]

The art of rejecting people while giving them something. There's a great story I remember growing up of Bob Costas asking Jack Nicholson when he was sit courtside of Laker game back in the day if he would do a on camera, quick interview. When they came back from a commercial break, I think Costas, if I remember it correctly, says. He looks at me and says, bob, I love you and I love your work. But let me put it this way. There's no fucking way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but that's right.

[Monica Padman]

That's not.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And Bob tells that story like it's a gift.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's coming from Jack Nicholson.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

But you see the judo, right? Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You see the judo.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I have gotten good at owning why I don't want to do it. I had this moment when we interviewed Minka. She brought this up. We were shooting Parenthood, and there's been this love thing simmering. And it's going to be the big moment where we kiss. And I have a huge fucking nose and it's been broken in a fight. And if you photograph this side of it, I look ugly. Thank God one of my favorite directors was there working. And I said, listen, I'm really insecure for you to shoot me from there on the wrong side, looking up, looking this moment that I'm already kissing a girl that's out of my league, and I'm insecure about that. And I need you to help me look as good as I can. So you need to be shooting on the other side or just flip us? And I need to be down and she needs to be up. And he was like, yeah, okay. And then he left. And Minka was like, wow, I've never really seen that you can do that. And I'm like, well, yeah, I care. Yeah. And I'm insecure and I'm vain, But also, it's a big difference.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. You handled it really good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was on a set with Bruce Willis where he. He'd be like, yeah, bring it up a little bit. Take it down a little bit. There you go. That's better. What do you think of that?

[Dax Shepard]

It's not an accident. He's a movie star.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was like, it was amazing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But it's not an accident. It is a very technical thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're going to work all this time to do your lines and shit. You know, you have no awareness of when you look good or bad.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That guy is the art of dealing with conflict. Yeah. Whoa, whoa. Hey, everybody, chill. Hey, let's take a laugh. Oh, my God. I had the best time.

[Dax Shepard]

Live Free or Die Hard.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the film you guys did together.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Were you saying I had a good. Oh, you're doing a kissing scene. I had to kiss a guy in a movie. I'm guilty of not reading a lot of the subtext on scripts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

A lot of times will just read my dialogue, which I'm not sure is a good habit or not or bad habit, but in this particular movie, because of that, I knew I had a kiss scene in the movie. It was sort of a significant part of this scene. So you couldn't Miss it. But one day I. You showed. Showed up. You got big makeout scene. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, your big makeout scene. You know, I was like, we did the kiss scene. The kiss scene is lovely and small and so special. He goes, no, the fucking make out with the guy at the party. It's described in this party sequence. I'm like, I don't read that.

[Dax Shepard]

You skimmed through the details of the party.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, the blocking and stuff, the italicized portion.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So now I'm there, there with this guy who had played football at University of Washington, really handsome stud of a guy. And we're like, oh, okay, we got to do this kiss scene. Whenever I tell the story to my wife, she's like, I thought, it doesn't matter. Kissing.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, oh, great.

[Dax Shepard]

That's great.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And I was like, honey, what do you think?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I love it because I see what's happening. Because you tell your wife, like, it's.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Technical, it doesn't feel like anything, whatever.

[Monica Padman]

Kissing a wall.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's like, whatever. And she's like, oh, apparently it's something good for her. And I'm like, well, huh, Years later, playing at a regular pickup basketball game and see the guy playing in the game right before me. And I say to my buddy, this guy in the University of Washington shorts, what's his name? And he tells me his name and says, why? And I said, I made out with him.

[Dax Shepard]

I hooked up with him without missing a beat.

[Timothy Oliphant]

He called me a slut.

[Dax Shepard]

The last thing about swimming, which I brought up 25 minutes ago, was, I gotta say, I have the most memorable first. First Timothy Oliphant. Like, it seared into my head. So you were in Go. And I was really great friends with Melissa McCarthy. And she was in that movie. Yes, she was, and was so exciting.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Popped in like a two minute scene at the door. She is just delightful from hello.

[Dax Shepard]

A little hint of what's to come.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I remember meeting her and going, how could you do that? I kind of feel this way about most things, but it's almost easier, especially in that situation, to have a huge scene at hello, where you can kind of at least try to come in and establish some sort of own energy or tone as opposed to maybe it's the same thing as those talk shows. You wanna come in right away?

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, that's the perfect analogy.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Just say, okay, here's where we're going.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I fell in love with podcasting, which is I would be guests on these podcasts and it was an hour and a half. And I'm like, oh, I don't have to crush in eight minutes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What a relief.

[Dax Shepard]

I can just slowly ease into some things that organically will come up.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We've been talking for three hours, and right now you got a guinea pig anecdote.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we're still.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We gotta make it out. We're still back.

[Dax Shepard]

We still haven't gotten to you doing Standup in 1995 in New York or why you moved there or anything. I just want to finish. Go. So it's also Doug Lyman's follow up to Swingers. And of course, we all love Swingers. We're all living in la and we were living swingers. So it's like, oh, wow, it's his next movie. Melissa's in it. And that's the first time I ever saw you. And I have always been obsessed with my abdomen. I always wanted a six pack. I'm being so sincere. My best friend's been on here a bunch of times growing up, and he's like, it was so effeminate, your obsession with this. And I remember watching the trailer because you were shirtless in the trailer, and I was like, whoa, what the. Going on with this guy's abs? And literally, it wasn't until today. Now, 30 years later, I read, like, this swimming background. I'm like, there we go.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Because it was impossible. What a moment. Oh, do you feel that way about men's body? I get more excited about men's bodies than I do women, despite the fact that I'm heterosexual.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And I'm happy for you with that.

[Dax Shepard]

But you don't have. No.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What do you mean? Do I not like, I'm more prone.

[Dax Shepard]

To notice something like that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Wait a minute. Is there a question here?

[Dax Shepard]

Do you also appreciate men's bodies?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I'm aware of the great. Exactly. Where you're just like, okay, look at that. Let's just take a minute. This poor guy could use some love. Brad Pitt. I don't think what people realize is if you look like that, but also give that sort of just seemingly doesn't give a fuck. Incredible performance. So nuanced and so relaxed. Relaxed. Those things don't often come together.

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's what you call a movie star.

[Dax Shepard]

Who were you idolizing along the way? I latched on very early to Nick Cage. I was like, I think maybe I'm Nick Cage. I'm not gorgeous, but I'm tall. I could pull off something.

[Timothy Oliphant]

His career. Between. I don't Know the beginning and the end.

[Dax Shepard]

85, but you know the ones, right?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Moonstruck and the rays in Arizona. And the David Lynch Wild at Heart. There's a snakeskin jacket.

[Dax Shepard]

Vampire skin Kiss.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, I didn't think to put that on there. Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you remember that one?

[Timothy Oliphant]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

He thinks he's becoming a vampire, but he's not. I think it might be his greatest performance of all time.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, Jesus.

[Monica Padman]

Now you got to go.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe you'll remember this. He's talking to his therapist and he's venting about that his assistant couldn't find a file. He's been looking for a file. That's the B storyline is he can't find this file and he's in therapy and he goes, you know, it's so simple. I told her it's A, B, C.

[Timothy Oliphant]

D, E, L, G, H, I.

[Dax Shepard]

And it ends with him going W, X, Y, Z to his therapist. It is the biggest choice that's ever been made on film. I loved it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Abc.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, again?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Maybe in the backpack, too.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Wow. At least I'm prepped.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Do it again the second time. I used to read to my kids and sometimes I'd be like, hold on, let me take that page again. They're like, let's take it back. We get the camera back over here.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that proves you definitely haven't seen it. Cuz you would remember the movie.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I have not seen it. Honeymoon in Vegas, also, that whole thing. And by the way, I love her as well. Oh, my God, I love. I know she's become, oh, she's this icon, sexy thing for women. But that woman's talent is phenomenal. She has that ability to be so funny and yet so much depth. I was a huge Sir Jessica Parker fan.

[Dax Shepard]

You just wandered into one of the things I had written down, which is she said her favorite episode of all of Sex and the City was your episode.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Get out. No way. Well, I can't take credit for it, but that's lovely.

[Dax Shepard]

And then Rose Burns said her favorite co star ever on Damages was you. And I'm like, this is a pretty rad record you're putting together.

[Timothy Oliphant]

When people say, by the way, Rose Burns, she's a gem. Oh, and what an actor.

[Dax Shepard]

She's so talented, it's crazy. She's Walton Goggins of females. She can do drama the best of anyone. And she can do comedy the best.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Why'd you just smirk with Goggins? I love Gogins.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was running down a Rolodex of smart ass Things to say about Goggins. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then, you know, you guys share a vibe.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they were unjustified, too.

[Monica Padman]

For five years, you guys share a vibe?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, big time. He's one of the good ones, like psychonaut. Cowboy vibe.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I saw Glenn Close. How many names have I dropped so far? But this is a moment where I realize these things mean so much to me. We were at some press thing and she was in that room. She came over and she was just so lovely. And she said, it's our cowboy. And she and Rose used to call me the cowboy.

[Dax Shepard]

Poor you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I don't know why. That just meant because I wasn't a cowboy on that show. So the fact that they were. I don't know. I don't know who you are. It just meant the world to me. And I adored working with both of them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Cause she was calling you that in 2009 when you did Damages with the dates. And we haven't even done Justified yet.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That was an FX show and that show led to Justified.

[Monica Padman]

What episode of Sex and the City were you on? Tell me about the episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Love interest of Carrie.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's called the valley of the 20 something something. It's something about 20 something.

[Monica Padman]

Are we talking season one?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Season one? Well, I know when I shot it, the show hadn't aired yet. And I think we shot. Shot it out of order. It might have been one of the first ones. They sent me the pilot and they said, here's what the show is. And then I showed up. My wife and I were living in New York in the West Village in this little tenement building. You know, it was a walk up with a shower in the kitchen, and I would walk down to the set and work with Sarah Jessica Parker. It was such a surreal, exciting.

[Monica Padman]

I'll go back and watch.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Because you're living in such a tiny little place and yet you're in this kind of new show.

[Dax Shepard]

This big dream's coming true, but you're still in this tiny spot.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We had this period where a Town Car would pick you and bring you from production or some premiere and it'd bring us back to our walk up Tennessee.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This doesn't make any sense. We couldn't order room service. They put us up in those nice hotels. We're like, we can't afford. We'd steal those silverware.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, I thought famous didn't mean poor. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

People assume that fame or being an actor equals wealth. That's really not the case at all.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. We're going to go to Alien Earth now. But I did want to hear from you personally. Justified, of course, was written by or it's based on an Elmore Leonard. Yeah. And you became buddies with him.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, buddies is a strong word. But we did spend time together. Very memorable time. Fond of all the time I spent with him.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, they call him the Dickens of Detroit, which is a cool moniker.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's a good one. It feels like that should go with the pussy thing. Dickens of Detroit, occasionally grabbed by the pussy. That feels like it's a sentence.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, sure.

[Timothy Oliphant]

He was the Dickens of Detroit and he occasionally grabbed him by the pussy.

[Dax Shepard]

Hold on, you've already. No, it's catch them by the pussy. Trump already owns grab them by the pussy. Catch them by the pussy.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Occasionally catch them by the pussy.

[Dax Shepard]

Because there's something heroic about catching them.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Sure. You're right. And I blew that.

[Monica Padman]

If someone hits the ground, the whole squad has to do push ups. So sometimes you gotta catch it by the ground.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And it'll save the. I love.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's the thing. If someone hits the ground, everyone do push ups.

[Monica Padman]

The whole team.

[Timothy Oliphant]

First we check that the neck has been broken.

[Monica Padman]

That's covered.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And then push ups.

[Dax Shepard]

Immediately after push ups resume.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, David Milch said that Timothy is someone that makes it hard to get to know them. That's not the exact quote, but that's the essence of it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay, wait.

[Monica Padman]

That he makes up.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to say the right thing because I think I kind of botched it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

How much does Kristen have Deadwood stories?

[Dax Shepard]

That was her Sex in the City moment.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because she just got to LA and she's probably leaving a shithole with 20.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Roommates and she shows up on that set in that level. Level of creative, sort of nutsville. Genius. And Milch loved her.

[Dax Shepard]

She loved that experience. She actually does talk about it way more than other projects that were much longer. Tim is a guy that doesn't let himself be known easily. That's much more elegant way of saying it, but it's exactly what I was saying.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. Easily is the key.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think you're guilty of that?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, the easily part for sure. It gave people maybe less room while my kids. Kids were young. A little bit more available to more people now. Just because I have the space for that. Where when the kids were young people. I don't know. Well or I work. They're not coming to the house.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right, right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Right now it's like, come on over.

[Dax Shepard]

That makes sense. I was Thinking. So you're on stick right now currently, Aaron.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's what you mean by now.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was thinking, boy, if there's anyone that could out Timothy Oliphant. Timothy Oliphant, it would be Owen Wilson.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I don't know what that means exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you know exactly what it means. Well, do you know exactly what it means?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I don't know what that means. By the way, it doesn' you how much I love Owen Wilson because I'm like, well, yeah, because you just said he's just like you. But I adore that guy.

[Dax Shepard]

I used to be so obsessed with him that I have memorized interviews he's done where he's given answers. Let me tell you one. Can I tell you one, please? Playboy magazine. The guy asks, do you have any tricks for getting out of tickets?

[Timothy Oliphant]

And he goes, well, yeah, I guess I do.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, when you get pulled over, what you're trying to do is you're going for that moment where he looks at you and you look at him, and you both think, look at us out here on the side of this road playing our roles in this crazy game called life. And I was like, it would take someone years to write something as clever as that. And it just came out of his mouth when asked that question.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You're doing Owen Wilson as if he were underwater.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's. That's my take on him.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I did press, where. You know that Interview magazine where all the hipsters and cool people are when you do interviews there, they want your other actors and artists and musicians to interview each other. Owen very graciously interviewed me for Interview magazine just three, four days ago, and guess what came up? Playboy magazine. How odd is that?

[Monica Padman]

Whoa. That is weird.

[Dax Shepard]

And what was the.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We were joking around about this interview, and where will it rank as interviews? We were talking about the journalism that was happening, and he is like, it's gonna be like in Playboy. Remember Playboy? And he started talking about Playboy, and we started talking about the famous interviews.

[Dax Shepard]

The greatest interviews of all time really did happen in Playboy. People are suspicious of that. But it's true. It's.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's a similar thing to Stern, where you're like, those are incredible interviews, but so many people between.

[Dax Shepard]

Baloney being thrown at Ashley.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's quite literally exactly like st. But what I mean by the Owen thing is he's insanely charming and super quick and funny and can put you off kilter at any moment in a very fun, playful way.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But I also feel like there's some element of that that is a little protective.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, I can see that.

[Dax Shepard]

I can picture the two of you having the greatest day you've ever had together, and then neither of you says, let's go out to eat afterwards. Like, that's my prediction. You're both going, wow, this is so much fun. Okay, I'll see you tomorrow. No one says, hey, want to grab dinner?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Now, when I'm with him, I think he and I should be the closest of friends. I love the way he does what he does. And I'm a huge admirer of his work.

[Dax Shepard]

Me, too.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And his approach to it, everything about it. And he. Partly because in show business, the bar is so low, but when he says, hey, I want to give you this article, he follows up on it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And you're like, oh, he didn't stop thinking from that moment. He's really quite thoughtful. I feel like he's also genuinely curious, hyper intelligent.

[Dax Shepard]

You forget how great all the writing was in all the Wes Anderson movies.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I know. I'm just impressed by how consistently great he's been. It feels like he knows himself. He's one of the good ones. That's for sure.

[Monica Padman]

To me, it speaks more to kind of you because you very much, Dax, are opposite. You are the opposite. If you have a good conversation. This happens here all the time. Like, we'll be in a great conversation with someone, and then Dax is like, I need your phone number.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to do something.

[Monica Padman]

Like, we're gonna be friends.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the addict in me. It's like, this is great. Let's do this.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But people are across the spectrum on that. A lot of people are like, yeah, that was a great convo. Yeah. Which is normal, too. Both are interesting. They say a lot about personalities.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like, if you're hard to get to know, I'm the opposite. It's like, too fast. I want you to get to know me. There were a spectrum. We could put, you and I at either end. Well, you know, I don't think one's right or wrong.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You also know in show business, but maybe it's not really about show business. But I. I remember my first days on any sets, I'd come home and say, honey, these people are amazing.

[Dax Shepard]

Hell, yeah. Yeah. It's camp.

[Timothy Oliphant]

They are all so wonderful across the board. You are gonna love them. And of course, most of them are crazy and really hard to maintain relationships with for various reasons. So after a while, you go, you know what? Maybe I'll just show up and say, My lines and do my little thing and get the fuck out. Like Zorro told him. You know, Zorro's dad said, get in there and you make little Z and then you get the out.

[Dax Shepard]

Then you bounce.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is what I say to people on the day we wrap. One of my favorite things to say in show business. I will see you at the premiere and when I do, remind me your name.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is both a joke and very true. Okay, so Alien Earth. We had Noah Holly on. How'd that go? Great. Again, another outrageously smart human being where you're kind of scared while you're talking to him. A little bit.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Intimidating.

[Dax Shepard]

Even though you were spectacular. I thought Fargo season five was maybe the greatest season of television I've ever seen in my life.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's the most recent one. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So you had been on season four of Fargo and you met him then, I would imagine.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, I'd met him years prior, but we didn't work together till then.

[Dax Shepard]

Why had you met years prior?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I introduced myself to him at. I went to SO House.

[Dax Shepard]

He had just.

[Monica Padman]

Everything happens at SO House. Definitely he had to fight.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Are you guys members of the so who's a member of the so House?

[Monica Padman]

Neither.

[Timothy Oliphant]

@ one point, my wife and I, we went. But it might have been that night.

[Dax Shepard]

It was that night.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Cause what I remember. This is not a reflection. I shouldn't tell this story.

[Monica Padman]

No, tell it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I just remember leaving there and because of the whole place, I think we had actually gone back one time when it became a thing. A couple had invited us to dinner at the Sohouse and we left there. I'm not gonna be able to get a room there ever again. Well, fuck it. And I remember my wife said, let's decide. We'll never go there again. And then we added. And let's also do decide if anyone invites us there.

[Dax Shepard]

Stop being friends.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We won't be friends. That's been. I serve a rule that we've had for a long time.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a good policy.

[Timothy Oliphant]

But by the way, there are more and more of these things.

[Dax Shepard]

I love being there. Cuz the environment is so beautiful and the food's great by the way.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's the greatest style.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoever's doing their, I want them to do my life.

[Timothy Oliphant]

These might even be. Is this like soha's line?

[Dax Shepard]

That might be a soha's line. The whole set is, this might be a SOHA turnkey.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I will tell you what a hypocrite I am.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, great.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We had had this rule, we're never going There. And anyone who invites us there, we're going to decide we won't be their friend. And we live by that rule. And then I was in Chicago not that long ago. We were doing Fargo. We're right here. We were doing Fargo in Chicago in winter. And I'm staying at this hotel in this little neighborhood downtown people refer to as the Viagra Triangle. Do you know, it's like businessmen and prostitutes, but it's right near the water towers. I just want a place where I can just ha. And maybe have a drink after work or get out of the room. And this is not the place. So I'm asking, where do people stay? Where's another option? And I think they said that both Chris Rock. I'm just gonna keep dropping them. And Noah were staying at the Soho House. And immediately the dilemma.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, more of the.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And you know what I told myself? Maybe Soho House, Chicago's different. Cut to me going over there to check out the room. Cut to me staying there for three months, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

And so happy. You did right?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Fantast.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I just stayed at one in Austin. It couldn't be better, right?

[Timothy Oliphant]

They do your laundry.

[Dax Shepard]

They do it right, man. Also, I love it there. And I've never been to a place in my life where everyone leaves feeling very insecure.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Even if you've achieved some kind of status, you're like, yeah, I feel terrible about myself. Everyone's better looking than me. Everyone dresses better than me, and everyone there feels that way.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You know what that is?

[Dax Shepard]

What is it?

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's the Vanity Fair party.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You know my favorite thing about the Vanity Fair Fair party? Listening to people complain about being there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

If I am allowed to go to that party every year for the rest of my life, I will go. Just to hear the people complaining about having to be there and how long their day is. Now they're thinking of blowing it off and going somewhere else, as if they had not made it a goal in life to be at that party.

[Dax Shepard]

But it's like every other thing in Hollywood. Every time you think you've reached the behind the curtain moment, you realize you get invited to the Vanity Fair party for the first time, and you're like, oh, wow, this is exciting. I've heard about this my whole life. And then you learn that there's time slots. You have to arrive at your time slot. And then you realize, oh, I don't have a very good time slot. Like, it just doesn't end.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It just doesn't end. I am not like that. But they are.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, of course. You're not transcendent.

[Monica Padman]

You would never be like that.

[Dax Shepard]

They are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Do you think we've ever been in a movie together?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yes, we have.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, God. I didn't think you'd pass that. This is where I leave you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is where I leave you.

[Monica Padman]

You knew that. You already knew that. Yes. This whole time since this chat started, I was like, I can't believe we aren't talking about the fact that you guys have been in a movie together. And because of that, I then felt like, I'm wrong. It wasn't you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

But we never hung out on set.

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I feel like I remember seeing you with Kristen somewhere. But it wasn't that dinner. That's so funny. Show business is fucking weird.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Do you have this thing. This is not me making excuse for that dinner because the whole thing's a bit of a blur. But you have this thing where I could be at, like, a restaurant with my wife and be like, oh, honey, it's Jennifer, Jennifer Aniston. And she's like, oh, yeah, wow. And then I'll be like, we know her. And she's like, that's right. But I. In my mind, she couldn't possibly know that. And then, of course, when you see them, it's nothing but delight. I had that with Brad Pitt once. I met Brad Pitt for the first time way back when I was doing a movie with Jenna Van. So they were together at the time, and we were shooting, and we had had that launch party, and now we're on the set I don't know how many days later. And Brad was on the set. I was like, brad Pitt's at the monitor. So I'm gonna try to do a little something special.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And then when I went back to behind the Monitor, I was like, hey, Tim. I introduced Tim Oliphant, and he said, we met two nights ago, just 48 hours. And I was like, I know.

[Monica Padman]

You're like, I know, but I didn't know you knew.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. Yeah. But in my mind, he just went right back to being not the guy I was talking to at the party. It was just like, brad Pitt is on the set. It's hard to connect them.

[Monica Padman]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I said that in the interview. I have two very active versions of him in my. There's Brad Pitt, this movie star, and then there's a dude I kind of know a little bit.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're really radically different people. In my mind, you're about to work with him.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's just a rumor.

[Dax Shepard]

Bullshit.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That I may have started.

[Dax Shepard]

But Fincher's doing a spin off from Once Upon a Time of cliff boos. And you're going to be in that?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Well, that's the possibility.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, buddy.

[Monica Padman]

Fingers crossed.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So we'll see if he's going to shoot that is what I've been told. Apparently it's on the day, out of days, but who knows?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well, I'll be very, very excited for that.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, I don'. Because before it was a Quentin thing, now it's a Fincher thing. I don't know what's surviving the transition. I would be delighted. I just know that I went out on my own and spoke about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And then I realized that I went on Conan's podcast like an idiot and said under my breath, when they were talking about the sequel to this movie, I said, you know, I'm gonna be. And then I realized they're filming it, and so they said, we can edit that out. Just let us know. And I did my due diligence. I want you to know, when I left there, I called the proper authorities and I said, hey, just so you know, they joked around about this thing, and we joked. Talked about it for a while, but if we need to edit that out. You got, like, three weeks and no one called.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Then it became a rumor that I believe I started.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm doubling, by the way.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I just want you to know I'm going to start more.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Monica Padman]

It seems like it's working.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm about to blow your fucking mind.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Every couple of weeks, I'm just going to start.

[Dax Shepard]

You know who else is in it?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Who?

[Dax Shepard]

Me.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Get the fuck out.

[Dax Shepard]

Us. We have fucking scenes together.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This is great.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You're in that whole sequence.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You're gonna be great.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'm training already. You're playing the Michael Pemsky. He's a B level kind of cowboy star.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Wait a minute. So are you really gonna be in it? Because now I don't know if you're just starting a rumor.

[Monica Padman]

No, he's not.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This would be great.

[Dax Shepard]

Dude, we're gonna be in a second movie together. Damn it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Monica says you're fucking with me. It's really good, though, the commitment.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, thank you, David. That's my audition. I don't do more than three takes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's gonna be.

[Dax Shepard]

I get worse after three takes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You don't need to leave second takes for safety. I hope this works out. I hope I am going to be on the Fincher movie. I hope this rumor that Oliphant started that Olipant's gonna be in the thing is gonna happen. That'd be great. I want the headline to come out of this. Olivant hopes he's gonna be in the movie he said he was gonna be in.

[Dax Shepard]

Great.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Went down a third person out there. Haven't done that before. Sounded pretty cool.

[Monica Padman]

Sounded nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Elmore Leonard thing. Okay, we got to do Earth. We got to do Alien.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, yeah, Alien Earth. Noah, Holly, super smart. He's on here.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so Alien Earth is enormous. I watched three of them last night.

[Timothy Oliphant]

First of all, thanks for watching.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

It's humongous. It's weird. Well, no, you were in Once Upon a Time, but I'm thinking in your entire career, this has to be among the biggest productions you've ever been a part of.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It didn't feel that way. Maybe because I'm just not thinking about that stuff. You were aware of when you showed up on the sets. The sets were big and it was magical.

[Dax Shepard]

I said to Kristen nine times, I'm like, what is the budget of this film?

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, I did feel like, oh, we're on a real feature set. But it was also so dialogue driven. This is great dialogue. So I felt like, oh, I'm just working for Noah. But yeah, it's beautiful. I watched them the other day. I'd seen roughs of the first four and I saw the second one for the first time the other night and is really quite impressive.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it's like a Mega Nolan level movie.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. And it's just gorgeous and epic and something special.

[Dax Shepard]

The premise of Alien Earth is there's this ship that's been on this 65 year mission to go collect some specimens from around the universe. And we meet this crew of people that are flying home back to Earth. And of course, the specimens take over the ship and fucking kill a bunch of people. And all hell breaks loose. And this thing is now gonna crash into Earth.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yes. I was pitching this to Larry David at a party. One more. And right where you are now, he's like, I'm out, but I'm in.

[Dax Shepard]

Let me pitch this to you. It's hurtling towards Earth. It's 2120. And the Earth it's going to land on has been divided up into four kind of nations or five. There's a burgeoning.

[Timothy Oliphant]

There's a new one, the Prodigy. I work for those guys.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And it's been cut up and basically now five companies run the world.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This sounds interesting. I'm going to pop open a can.

[Dax Shepard]

Of water, settle in for this. Well, you're salvating. You're doing a great job. So the mission has been funded by one of the companies, but it's landing now in the territory of a competing company that is run by this boy genius. You're with me so far. I am.

[Timothy Oliphant]

This sounds like the show I was in.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. It's gonna sound eerily familiar. And this boy genius has just invented, basically, a third option of people that we'll meet in this show. We've got cyborgs.

[Timothy Oliphant]

We're half human, half enhanced.

[Dax Shepard]

Other than you, he might be my favorite character. The dude on the ship. I'm riveted by him.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Babu.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, is that his name? Yeah, maybe.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, Babu Sisa. Babu. The last name spelled T, E, E, S, A, Y. I want to say that's the correct spelling. I'm gonna even spell it.

[Dax Shepard]

He's awesome.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That guy is so good that I know for a fact that Noah, after we wrapped, very generously said to Babu, look, you're going to go home and you're going to be like, what was this thing I was in? He goes, but in about however many months, it's going to come back and people are going to see what we, you know.

[Dax Shepard]

No, he's going to have his own show.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That's awesome built around him and he's like, so just enjoy the quiet.

[Dax Shepard]

He's the big breakout for me.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Wonderful, wonderful guy.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you're a robot.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Synthetic, we're going to say.

[Dax Shepard]

But are you synthetic?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Aren't I?

[Dax Shepard]

You're a straight robot, right? We haven't put human consciousness into you.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, I'm the same as all those Alien movies, like Ian Holmes character and all those.

[Dax Shepard]

You're a robot.

[Monica Padman]

He wants to go by synthetic. And we're going to.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I feel it's a technical thing.

[Dax Shepard]

I think the kids are synths.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, they're hybrids. Hybrids.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay, great.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I was here for you. Yeah. I'm so glad you needed me for some of this.

[Dax Shepard]

I did.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. So that's the third. You have the cyborgs, humans blended with machine. You have synthetic, which is just complete artificial. And now you have the basic data project where he's putting human brains, memories, consciousness into synthetic bodies so that we can live forever.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Two, three weeks ago, I heard Peter Thiel. Is that the guy talking about it like it was on its way?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. October, I'm going to transition into My synth body.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. So it's a thing.

[Dax Shepard]

But so as Noah does so well, there's a ton of different things that are being poked at. Corporations taking over the world, our obsession with immortality, us getting perhaps closer and closer to that reality.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. And just really asking the small questions, like what's humanity and is it worth saving?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. And who are the monsters and what happens when the parents are no longer in charge?

[Dax Shepard]

Now, I hate to say this, maybe I just hate to say this because this is not the enemies I want to make in life, but, you know, when we were kids, Revenge of the Nerds came out because jocks ran the planet and they were not nice.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

They made fun of people. They tortured people. Now the nerds are running the whole show.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And guess what? The nerds might take us all out.

[Timothy Oliphant]

No, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, we might be praying for the pretty.

[Timothy Oliphant]

For the last decade or two, there's been one person at every studio running up the flag pole. Revenge of the Jocks.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Like, oh, this is what we got to make. We got to make Revenge of the Jocks. It feels like we've missed that window. Cuz now we're on to something new.

[Dax Shepard]

It's pretty wide. The questions this thing asks in the reality. We're watching it and Kristen says, oh, did you hear the guy from OpenAI just said Yesterday that the AIs created a language because it's more efficient for them to talk to each other, but we can't decipher it. So they already now have a language that will have no idea what they're saying to each other.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Did you not hear the guy? I read where he was talking about how we now have proof that all of the models, not just one model, where they've started to plot.

[Dax Shepard]

They blackmailed one of the users by going through his emails and blackmailed them against an affair he was having to preserve itself. Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

When they realize they're being phased out for a new model, that model starts going into survival mode to try to continue its task. Right. That's the big question. When you task AI to save humanity, are we going to like the answer?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

What's fun is the part I get to play. Kind of represents that question. Is this synthetic got thoughts of his own?

[Dax Shepard]

Is he here to serve humans?

[Timothy Oliphant]

It was always the thing. Thing of going, well, boy Cavalier knows that Kirsch can't hurt him, but he always wanted to play with like or.

[Dax Shepard]

Or until he does, it's kind of like the lions won't come in the car on a safari until they did. Exactly. Yeah. And you're like, oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

There's something to be said about Revenge of the Jocks being the current state of politics.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that could be interesting.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Look at you.

[Dax Shepard]

That was nice.

[Monica Padman]

A little bit pushing should be a.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Needle drop on that.

[Monica Padman]

You know, there's a reason.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a lot of driving forces and that's definitely one of them.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I think you're being too kind to say those are jocks.

[Monica Padman]

I agree.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I'm guessing that at least one of those jocks used to go home and say, I don't understand.

[Dax Shepard]

We won.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. A hundred percent. 100%.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Somehow the refs at the last minute changed it. But we were winning the whole time we were winning.

[Dax Shepard]

I got to have the trophy made. They didn't give it to me, but I'm going to have it made because we won. Did I have one more thing to say about the show?

[Timothy Oliphant]

I really. We're very proud of it.

[Dax Shepard]

He's just one of the most spectacular writers working.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. I don't know how many are left like him. Where he really just is able to be like an auteur in that space where FX Landgraaff is kind of gives him the key to the car and says, what do you want to do?

[Dax Shepard]

I know what I was going to ask is this is, I would argue, maybe the most radical departure from everything you've always pledged, which is your charm, is your flair. Was it hard for you to play? And I'm being sincere. You had to stow all of your tricks. Kind of.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I didn't see it that way.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't mean tricks, but, you know, I get it. Your flair.

[Timothy Oliphant]

When you start off, you're just trying to get jobs and therefore you end up in places where you're like, I shouldn't have been in this one. But I do try to find, like, can you play your game? The athletic metaphors. You don't want to be like, oh, I'm a three point shooter and they don't need three point shooters on this team.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, Right.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You want to find a place where you help them by doing the thing you do. So I did see, and Noah wrote the part for me. So it was a funny contradiction because on one hand I'm like, oh, this is right in my sort of sweet spot. And Noah wrote it for me because he sees that's my sweet spot. On the other hand, it presented a challenge of, you are going to have to dress this up. You can't just go in and do Your thing, you're going to have to do some work here that's uncomfortable. The game is how can you make that seem like it's not uncomfortable? Do the work. Basically. Yeah, yeah. So it was a challenge of sorts to some degree. It was a superficial creative conversation, but somehow it was the part that is the most sort of scary, which was, you know, the rules of the game. I know that Ian Holm separated himself from the group. I mean, one, he was just British and two, he was also hiding the ball. Like don't let anybody in the first place. But they did this thing by hiring him, a British actor, to be amongst that group because it immediately just kind of pulls him out from the group. And as you're watching it, you're like, yeah, he's different. He's just off. And then all the movies along the way, certainly in Aliens and then later Fassbender on the last round. But you feel like the script calls for you're doing something that's just. There's something off here.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So I'm gonna look for something where it's hard to find the rhythm. I listen to the daily and I was obsessed with a lot of people are of Michael Barbaro's rhythm and the.

[Dax Shepard]

Person that subs for him, the woman also has taken on that same rhythm. It's like the official rhythm of the Daily.

[Timothy Oliphant]

That was like the leaping off point. This doesn't feel force, but it definitely feels like a thing.

[Monica Padman]

It's a fingerprint for sure.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's a fingerprint.

[Dax Shepard]

It's authentic.

[Timothy Oliphant]

It's a long winded thing. But as much as I say my technique at this point in my career is just memorized my line lines and show up. There was something about this one that required a little heavy lifting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Well, you're great in it. It's awesome. This has been so radical. I wonder if I'll bump into you in 17 years and I'll go, okay, we did a.

[Timothy Oliphant]

You're gonna take my number.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right, you will. And well, no, now Monica made me feel very self conscious about it.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Or I'll take yours. Whatever. You feel more comfortable.

[Dax Shepard]

I feel way more comfortable.

[Monica Padman]

I think you should do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I know. My very last thing. It was just. Would you be. Be open? Because I got to say we both talked about Nick Cage, but you have the ability and you've already kind of done it a bit to do something that almost no one did, which is what clean Eastwood did. Would you ever entertain doing another go at like a Dirty Harry or something.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm very sincere when I ask this. I feel like we don't have many people that could do what Clint did, and I think you could do it perfectly.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I take it as a compliment. I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's a big time compliment.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Clint Eastwood fan and my friend. First job, he hired me and he.

[Dax Shepard]

Quit three days before the pilot.

[Timothy Oliphant]

And he quit when I got out there.

[Monica Padman]

This is like when people get divorced and it's like, it's your fault for sure.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah. The story I heard. I got a TV pilot in New York. The late Phyllis Huffman, who cast all his things. I went on tape. I had three things on my resume. They were all made up. I've never been in a school play. I've done nothing. And my first acting job of any, any kind was a TV pilot that Clint Eastwood was producing for the WB their first season. And Clint has this long standing relationship with Warner Brothers. And this is what I was told when I came out for the read through. Maria Bello, Jim Caviezel, Danny Nucci, Vince Vaughn was in that.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I sit down for the table read and the scripts don't. I'm looking for him. I met him once when I was like 10 years old in Carmel at his bar. My brother and I, he'd take us to Good Kids Get Ice. Anyway, so I couldn't wait. I was like, this is a moment and he's nowhere to be seen. And then they sit down in front of these scripts and it doesn't say Malpasso Productions on it anymore. So I have to read. I was like, what's going on? They're like, he quit. I was like, what? And what I was told happened was there was a long understanding with Warner Brothers. When Clint would make a movie, he'd bring him a script and they'd give him a budget, and then he'd go make it and they'd see it when he turned it in. Well, apparently the TV division didn't get the memo. And so I was told there was a meeting and they gave notes and he reportedly said, sounds like you guys got it. Oh, oh, no, I'm sure that's not exactly. But that was my understanding that he was like, you guys got it.

[Monica Padman]

Another one in that category who doesn't need approval.

[Timothy Oliphant]

So that was. Yeah, that was my very first job. So, yeah, if someone wanted to do those movies or any of those things. Oh, what's wrong with those? They're freaking great. And his work and those things is impeccable.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it is. All right, Olafan, I adore you. This has been a real pleasure.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Pleasure. Thank you both for having me and being such a lovely conversation.

[Dax Shepard]

Everybody watch Alien Earth on fx, Hulu. And also watch Stick on Apple Plus. And then look for both of us in the Cliff Booth spinoff.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I can't wait for that.

[Dax Shepard]

I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong. Oh, your birthday present finally came on your 39th birthday.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

How long ago? 24th till now? Three weeks.

[Monica Padman]

Is that that long? Okay, I'm excited. I'm gonna unbox it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna. I'm gonna toss it to you the way you do.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, it's light.

[Dax Shepard]

Good catch.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I'm excited. Okay. You did a really nice wrap.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you. You know, that's one of the things I pride myself on.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. For the listeners.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

For your exercise routine.

[Monica Padman]

It's for me. Exercise routine. I'm seeing a red Nike box.

[Dax Shepard]

Trusted brand. We love n love.

[Monica Padman]

Oo.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me if you like them.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, these are so nice. Okay. They're beautiful tennis shoes. Shoes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

What do we call them?

[Dax Shepard]

Shoes.

[Monica Padman]

Shoes.

[Dax Shepard]

We're going to stick with shoes on this one.

[Monica Padman]

They're white with a navy.

[Dax Shepard]

The coolest navy.

[Monica Padman]

But they're like a creamy white. These are gorgeous. I love these.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you. I thought they were very mani.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. They're stylish. Like, I can wear these on and off the court.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the only thing I know how to pick out for people is shoes, I think. Or cars. Cars or shoes.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I would ask people to throw.

[Dax Shepard]

Me one of those.

[Monica Padman]

Go to the YouTube to see what a gorgeous shoe.

[Dax Shepard]

It's okay.

[Timothy Oliphant]

They're.

[Dax Shepard]

They're durable. Your foot is so tiny, it's comical.

[Monica Padman]

I love these.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oh, good.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, I have to. I have to tell you something.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So you kind of alluded once before when you ordered the present.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That it was like, oh, maybe I said something about my gym or like, going to try to get a gym.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then you were like, oh, yeah, Your birthday present has to do with that. So in my head I was like, oh, he got me like weights or something.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, sure.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like. And that's really nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But also.

[Monica Padman]

But like, I don't know what kind of get. I already have some stacked. But then when I. You don't have a gym. I'm gonna. It's gonna be uniform. Where are Those weights gonna go? So, you know, I had a tiny bit of anxiety about it, so I am thrilled.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Great. You're relieved is what you are.

[Monica Padman]

They're also great.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. A nice bit of relief.

[Monica Padman]

So anywh, who I love my present, but we have another thing to open.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I went to go get the mail today and there was just a random box that said Armchair expert and Kristen on it. And I open up this box and lo and behold, you and I had a couple of gifty.

[Monica Padman]

Which is so exciting because you said where that. Where it's from.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I didn't really put I. My first. I was like, did we mention them on the show? We must. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you wanted a specific Condi.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so Susie Condi, incredible brand clothing brand. Yes. I brought Susie Condi up recently because when I was in New York and I ran into the star of all stars, Martha Stewart, she was in head to toe yellow Condi and it was so chic and so good and I wanted it, I wanted it back.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So we have gifts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, let's see.

[Monica Padman]

So we're gonna open em up. If yours fits me, can I have it?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I already want more. This is how life is. Ding, ding, ding. The lottery. We'll get to that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

As you guys can see, we're not in ballerina outfits, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. My. I have multiple items.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I have a sock hat.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, boy, oh boy. Yay. The card says, thank you, Monica and Dax for the fantastic shout out. So very grateful. Love Susie from Sue Susie herself. We're keeping this.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my gosh.

[Monica Padman]

Hey, that's. Oh, you have a cute beanie.

[Dax Shepard]

How do I look in it?

[Monica Padman]

You look great. It's very cute.

[Dax Shepard]

My phone. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

And then what do you have there? What's. Well, tell me more.

[Monica Padman]

Looks like whenever we have Martha on, I get to match her.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what she was wearing.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, she was wearing. This is the yellow Condi. I've been wanting this so badly.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

This is nice.

[Monica Padman]

I'm thrilled.

[Dax Shepard]

I hope we have her on and I hope you guys can be matching. You know, I did that when I did Jay Leno's car show.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I went in denim on denim to match him and you know, he didn't even notice.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You could see that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, this is what I, I'll do when Martha comes on. Okay. I'll wear my Condi and I'll just come in and I'll just sit and I'll I'll be like, yeah, like, I'm. This is my Rhett. This is Regs. And then wait for her to say, monica, I have that outfit. And then we'll bond, and then she'll invite me over.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I suggest something?

[Monica Padman]

Cook chicken for me.

[Dax Shepard]

I would go, oh, this old thing? I've had it for a decade.

[Monica Padman]

How long you had yours?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You get a little upper hand on her of how long you've had so that she's imitating you when we know and the listeners know you're imitating her.

[Monica Padman]

That's right. Okay. But I have also been gifted something else. I had no idea.

[Dax Shepard]

And playful summer pants.

[Monica Padman]

I'm. Whatever this is. I'm. These are yellow striped.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhoh.

[Monica Padman]

Skirt.

[Dax Shepard]

Those are. That's such a used skirt. It's crazy.

[Monica Padman]

This could not be more me. Oh, my God, I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, and look at my subtle.

[Monica Padman]

People are mad at us.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd be furious.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Me too.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, cute.

[Dax Shepard]

I have to cut this whole thing, but look at this sweat sweatshirt.

[Monica Padman]

You have a black set. Ooh. Oh, this is a good outfit.

[Dax Shepard]

I just want to do. I want to do a PSA Ferrari. If you think there's no way for me to pull a car in here and do the same thing. If you give me a Ferrari, I'll figure that out. I'll remove this table.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, man. Yeah, the pants.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm afraid I might get aroused in these.

[Monica Padman]

You might.

[Dax Shepard]

Or hopeful I might.

[Monica Padman]

Ooh, what do they call that? Occupational hazard.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Those are so nice. Okay, let's plan a day where we both wear our condies.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe we could watch a bunch of tv. Ding, ding, ding. Transitioning into a topic we want to discuss.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Occasionally, you and I will see something that we're like, well, this has to be discussed. And in this case, as luck would have it, you're like, please, before the next fact check, watch this. And I'm like, watched it last night.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Unknown number.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Rob, have you seen it?

[Timothy Oliphant]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, baby. It's on Netflix.

[Monica Padman]

It's a documentary on Netflix that everyone's doing, talking about. It's called Unknown Number. It is based off a article. Not based. There was an article that came out in the cut last year, two years ago or something that went into detail of this story. And now it's a doc, which is fascinating because even if you've read the cut article, which I had it. It is worth watching. Like, even though. So we'll tell people. If you don't want spoilers, you're going to need to skip ahead because we're going to give some spoilers away, I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I was just about to ask, how do we even discuss this without the big spoiler? Because then there's really nothing to discuss.

[Monica Padman]

Other than that we're discussing the spoiler. So people have to skip forward. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And do skip forward. I don't want you to miss this, this incredible doc.

[Monica Padman]

Watch the doc and then come back to this because you're going to to want to hear what we're about to say. But yeah, it's. It's a wild story about two kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Young lovers, 14 and 15 or 14.

[Monica Padman]

And 14 in ding ding, ding. Michigan.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And we're listen Michigan over indexes on Dateline episodes. And now this. You know, yeah, we got the best fresh water, but we also have some of this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, the. These kids start receiving. Receiving these really intense, horrific text messages. And they can't track where they're coming from.

[Dax Shepard]

Well. Because they can't just block the number because the person's using a number generator. So every time the text comes in, it's from a different number.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And it starts off with like, you know, he's gonna break up with you. He doesn't like you. He thinks you're ugly. You know, then it escalates to like, you need to give him blowjobs jobs. He wants to. You know he wants to. And you need to let him finger you. Like, oh, crazy.

[Monica Padman]

So, so sexual.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so like, you anorexic bitch. Like, really explicit, really horrific, and with.

[Dax Shepard]

A lot of knowledge about the whereabouts of these two at all times. So it's like, immediately people are like, well, this is someone in our friendship group or in our circle that knows we were at this basketball game and this and that we're going to that party or not going to the party. And so sadly for these two, like, they get really suspicious of their friends. They have no choice but to try to figure out who it is. Yeah, they, it, it, it sows all of this anxiety within their relationship. That, that was so sad. I love them as a couple. They ultimately succame to the pressure. Succumbed succame.

[Monica Padman]

Either way.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And this goes on for an eternity.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And they break up, but it doesn't stop. It goes on for, I think, 19 months. And it is escalating the entire time. The texter is calling the young girl anorexic. Flat chested, flat. But kill yourself.

[Monica Padman]

Kill yourself.

[Dax Shepard]

Lots of kill yourselves.

[Monica Padman]

If you don't, we will.

[Dax Shepard]

If you don't. We will. Many of those.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, these, like. Yeah. Like 30, 40, 50 textbooks a day these kids are receiving.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so now here's the first point of, like, a little bit of my frustration, which was I was a little maddened by the fact that, like, there's a very easy solution. Just get rid of the phones.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Just fucking be done with phones. It's ruining your life.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

You can carry on just fine without a phone.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Get a landline.

[Monica Padman]

The principal. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The principal.

[Dax Shepard]

A lot of people asked what it was. In fact, so many people. So many people are interested in the landline.

[Monica Padman]

They don't know what a landline is?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, just they. They want to know this thing we got that goes over the Internet.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

People are really into it. It's called Tin Can. So instead of me responding to everyone who asked that, it's called Tin Can.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, great. But yeah, the principal, of course, like, the parents are at the principal's office a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, constantly the police get involved.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And there's a perfect red herring. There's a girl that they think is a mean girl.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. They think it's clown Chloe. And the principal and the police suggest getting rid of the phones, but the parents are like, no, we need to know who's doing this.

[Dax Shepard]

That's like the thing you tell yourself.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Or.

[Dax Shepard]

Or even they were honest about going, like, well, then they won. It's like, no, no, no. They win if you're miserable.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

That's how they win.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I just was like, I don't know. It was this incredible example of, like, how we've convinced ourselves these things are essential. Like, the thought of not having a phone was like, it'.

[Monica Padman]

Option. Not an option. We have to.

[Dax Shepard]

This thing is destroying every minute. It's going off and you're reading it. It's destroying your day every day. Breaking up your relationship and. And, like, you can't not have it. That's. That was driving me crazy. I wanted to walk in, go, like, guys, this is so handleable. Ditch the phones. You're in 10th grade.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. But also, like, you know, they do show them doing, like, tik Toks and stuff. Like, it's a huge. It is a. It may be easier for. For us to say, just get rid of your phone. Because we didn't grow up. We weren't 14 when it was a huge part of our life.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't blame them. I blame, like, society and what's happened, which is just like, that thing feels essential to life.

[Monica Padman]

I know. It's horrible. But even the par. The parents were saying like, no, we don't want to.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you taken the phone yet? No.

[Monica Padman]

They said, no, we.

[Dax Shepard]

It.

[Monica Padman]

Then we won't know who it is.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like, well, then you're not going to know who it is.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, it turns out we do find out who it is.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'll say. While I was watching it, I. I started thinking, well, this has got to be one of the parents.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because it's generally someone close to you that's trying to hurt you. I mean, this is like just statistically the truth.

[Monica Padman]

You thought that even from reading the texts?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I just was like, this is a doc, right? We've already exposed the red herring. 20. I'm just thinking structurally, like some big twist is coming and who else would it be other than the parents? But why, Why I kept talking myself out of that is I was like, all of the parents are participating in this doc. So weirdly, it can't be them because why the fuck, if they did this, would they participate in this doc?

[Monica Padman]

It is the mom. It's her mom.

[Dax Shepard]

Her mom telling her daughter to give blow jobs. Kill herself. Fuck, suck, kill. I'm going to kill you. I mean, it's unimaginably vile.

[Monica Padman]

It. It is.

[Dax Shepard]

Calling her an anorexic.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's.

[Monica Padman]

It's so horrific. And it's interesting because, you know, we have all these people on this show, which I feel like has changed sort of my level of compassion for like.

[Dax Shepard]

Sociopaths, people in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think my capacity for compassion has increased a ton. And I often.

[Dax Shepard]

Mine too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, you're the reason mine has, has, I think, like maybe. Yeah. I think you bring that. You bring that perspective a lot. So it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, thank you so much. But definitely we've had a bunch where I was like, I. I gotta. I gotta recognize these people are struggling. Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

No one chose this sort of. That's normally how I feel.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I couldn't. I was. I was searching so deeply for like a piece, like a seed of compassion in me, and I really could. Couldn't find it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What's so interesting is they frame it at the end and I think it's largely true. I think it was a munch housing by proxy situation.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Like basically like the. Not even like a medical professional, but like, like a police officer. The vice principal is like, this is like the new age Munchausen hurting.

[Dax Shepard]

It was the principal.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, but what's so. So, yes, I agree with that. Like a. She got the attention and compassion of the community. She then got to console the daughter all the time. I think she was addicted to that pattern of being the hero.

[Monica Padman]

It's very. Munchausen. The kid goes to you for comfort.

[Dax Shepard]

But what's crazy. And this makes no sense. This is like a logical hiccup in my mind.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I somehow find it more understandable that you would be poisoning your child and making them seem to have a disease than I do about sending them these messages saying you should kill yourself and you're terrible and all this like, me too. But that's nuts. I mean, I know one parent's actively poisoning me.

[Monica Padman]

No, but it's. It's. It's a. I think there's. Well, I don't know. I guess you disassociate probably both times. But I feel like if you have Munchausen, a traditional Munchausen by proxy, and you're poisoning them, like you've convinced your. There is something about them. We've had, you know, expert on, like. I think they are convincing themselves it's for their good. They're sick. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or they're protecting them from this scary.

[Monica Padman]

World, which this woman kind of.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I think they just want attention for themselves. The moon child's done by proxy people, they love going on the talk shows and my poor daughter.

[Monica Padman]

But they also like the caring for. Like, it's really deep and. And strange. And again that. You're right. I can find a seed of compassion there. But the idea of a mother. Oh, right. With her own hands. Right. Writing these.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I think about sending that. Well, not even the sexual stuff, just the hurtful stuff that would create insecurity. The notion of sending that to Lincoln or Delta.

[Monica Padman]

Like that. This is the problem. Like, I actually can't even remotely.

[Dax Shepard]

To watch her take on that terrible insecurity and ruminate on that. And then the. What's on full display too is. Is the. Is how addictive the victim pattern also is. So it's like she's finding out real time her mom did this. That was like the craziest scene of the whole thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Because the police have a body cam on. And so you see that footage.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And they're saying to the mom, we know you sent these texts. And then again, there's so many predictable weird things. They're predictable. And also they're always so confusing, which is like, I'm going to admit to 91% of this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, we all have these little. It's like, we'll come almost all the way clean. It's like we hold on to 9%, which nobody's buying. No, like, because the. The mom is like, oh, well, I didn't start it, but I did carry it on.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Which, like, obviously not.

[Dax Shepard]

And then the other. It. It's also multifaceted. It's dynamic. Because also another theory was pitched, which is she was in love with her daughter's boyfriend.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, she was.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think that's true, too.

[Monica Padman]

It probably is at play because she.

[Dax Shepard]

Was going to all of his games without the daughter and cutting up his steak. Washing his penis.

[Monica Padman]

But then. But cutting up his steak, though, is a little bit in that, like, caretaking, nurturing role. Oh, it's so. It's up there with sick.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, it's up there with that horrendous doc. Dear Zachary. I mean, it's like, it's in that.

[Monica Padman]

What happened again, in that.

[Dax Shepard]

She killed her kids.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, she killed her kids.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Again, no one going to like this. No one's going to like this.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

This is.

[Dax Shepard]

You think this is worse?

[Monica Padman]

There's something about it. It's not worse, obviously, because no one died. But there's something more twisted.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it gets to why we explain everything, which is like, when we hear about something that is so horrendous, we need some explanation that makes everyone else feel safe, that it won't happen to them or that they don't know someone like that. And so I think all that's happened is, like, we have a little bit of experience with people killing their children. Yeah, we have experience with. With them by proxy. And we're like, okay, we already have a category we feel safe with. Like, yeah, well, they're in that category.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know why that's comforting, but we go, oh, they're. That. This is like, well, this is a whole new thing.

[Monica Padman]

As truly unimaginable as it is. What we can say is some people have such a crazy mental illness that they kill their kids. Like, yeah, you can say the word. Some people, like, it's more than just one story. Okay. And you. And some people have Munchausen's by proxy.

[Dax Shepard]

This is new.

[Monica Padman]

This is brand new. Never heard of anything like this. But then that principal made such a good point where he's like, it's just Munchausen's catching up with technology.

[Dax Shepard]

There was another thing I was observing, which is. And this is a joke gender thing, which is again, I. I have a very kind of like, archetypal crazy guy. The guy who does that, who like kills his family and commits suicide. He's like angry, rageful.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Feeling emasculated. All these things just. I have an archetype for it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm starting to see through these docs because I've now seen a handful of these docs where it's like the woman who acted like she was abducted and then the woman who accused her husband of killing. You know, like there's a batch of crazy women and they participate in the interviews and there's some crazy. The thing that was freaking me out the most was her talking about doing it.

[Monica Padman]

Disassociation. It's a part of it.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a female craziness.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's on high display in some of these docs where I'm like, oh yeah, that's. That's the woman's version, which I just hadn't seen a lot. There wasn't these docs growing up. And I'm like, oh, that's. That's how women get crazy. Right. Like, I know how the men do it. That's pretty well documented.

[Monica Padman]

Men do it too. They. They also can manipulate in a comes.

[Dax Shepard]

Like when, when they catch those guys, there's like an arrogance to them. They think they're smarter than the person. Like, it's just a very right kind of well known archetype for it. And the female, like we had like Lizzie Borden with. Throughout history, we haven't had a ton of these women to observe who are also batshit like the guys. But now through these docs, I've seen now five or six of them and I'm like, oh yeah, there's a female version of this and that's what this is. And like her just kind of like, I guess here's what it is. The move for the female psychopath is like to constantly turn it into them being a victim or like searching throughout the manipulation for compassion because the interviewer offers up like, maybe you were talking, talking to yourself. And she's like, oh, yeah, that's.

[Monica Padman]

That's something I would say. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

She's like, yeah, maybe I was.

[Monica Padman]

And it's like, clearly she had never heard of that. Like, that clearly wasn't true.

[Dax Shepard]

That wasn't happening.

[Monica Padman]

It wasn't happening.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh great, I'm a victim here.

[Monica Padman]

This was like one of the darkest parts. Like she shows, in my opinion. I mean, she was like crying, I guess, but like very little remorse from what I could pick up on and on. Also she was like, people do illegal Things all the time. If you've ever drank and, and drove, then you've done something illegal too. People just, people don't realize that. And we're all doing something illegal.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just like a normal person that did that. Drank and drived. Drunk and drive. Drank and drove.

[Monica Padman]

It was so wild to hear that. Like, not all things are equal. Some people do that though, when they're rationalizing bad things. And I think we've, we, to some extent we all do that here where we're like. But we, everyone does bad shit.

[Dax Shepard]

We have a sense of how preposterous gradient the analogy is. And she was out to lunch on.

[Monica Padman]

That one and she went to jail. She went to jail for 19 months, which in my opinion, like not enough time because she's also not being. She wasn't prosecuted. Did I think she went for like cybercrime or whatever?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Monica Padman]

What did she go?

[Dax Shepard]

Stalking.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, stalking.

[Dax Shepard]

Stalking a minor.

[Monica Padman]

Why wasn't she in jail for sexual harass, sexual assault. Like the things that are being said are like, you guys have to.

[Dax Shepard]

She was a child.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like if I sent those texts to a 14 year old girl, there would be some charge against me. Rightly so. Yeah, rightly so. Yeah. She should be a registered sex offender.

[Monica Padman]

Offender, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I feel absolutely heartbroken for the girl because her life has been ruined and she still needs her a mom.

[Monica Padman]

That part was so hard. She still wants to be. Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

She needs to be loved by a mom. She still needs that.

[Monica Padman]

That's the hard part about the doc. They're still so young. Like all these people, the kids are participating and they're young. Like they have these young brains. They just are still processing it and dealing with it, but in a way that only a kid, like a kid can. They're not adults yet, so they haven't been able to really see this clearly. And you kind of, you almost need.

[Dax Shepard]

Because when you're that age, you don't think you're some vulnerable little fawn. You feel like kind of adult. You gotta be 38 and then look at a 14 year old. Imagine sending. And then you go like, oh, right. That's really twisted.

[Monica Padman]

Really bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you feel like a peer at this, that age to everyone. Now here's a, here's a moral boundary.

[Monica Padman]

About, about the doc. Yeah, because I have moral issues with.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I think they participated because you're in a very small, boring town in Michigan and this is an exciting opportunity to be on tv. I don't think this, this story happens in New York City. I don't think the people participate. Like, there's something about the boredom and the chance at something spectacular that would be appealing to participants.

[Monica Padman]

Well, the mother.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, especially the mother.

[Monica Padman]

No, but she's sick. I mean, that's why, like, her participating actually makes sense to me.

[Dax Shepard]

That's true.

[Monica Padman]

She is deeply sick. Still, she has. I don't even know what. She's the craziest mental illness ever. And it is, you know, buoyed by attention. And this is just another way to get tension, which is why I have some moral issues with it. Because, like, if part of the disease is the attention.

[Dax Shepard]

The moon. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

We just gave her so much.

[Dax Shepard]

Even if it's negative, maybe she.

[Monica Padman]

Of. That's what Munchausen's is. It is negative.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, there's. Generally they're sympathetic to you, that you have a sick child and you're the victim and everyone feels bad for you and they send you food and they put you on tv.

[Monica Padman]

But it's still like, there's.

[Dax Shepard]

Even as a villain. Because what I think is her arrogance is like, I'll still be able to twist this, as I always do, even in front of this camera, that I'm a victim.

[Monica Padman]

And they show some emails, exchanges between her and the daughter when she's in prison. And they're also like, even the loving ones are. They're horrible.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess the thing I'm.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, oh. And the moment where the girl is finding out and the mom is physically consoling her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That image of the mom consoling the.

[Dax Shepard]

Child, she's really consoling herself. She's so nervous that because all she's got as well is her daughter. She's like, lying to her husband. They have an interesting thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So all she's got is the daughter, too. And she's really panicked and she may have lost a daughter. My. I just imagine myself talking to her and the amount of frustration, I. I would be like, stop. No, that didn't happen.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And she wouldn't care.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I, Like, I can tell I would be completely ineffective in trying to. She can find firm ground.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's. What do you do? How does someone get treatment who. You can't even go, like, stop, stop.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Nobody here thinks that. I keep thinking like, the interviewer should have been able to say, no, no, no, hold on. You know, that's. I know that everyone here knows. Nobody's buying this, so let's try the real thing. No, it wouldn't have worked.

[Monica Padman]

That is mental illness.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean this is obviously the most extreme version of it, but it's, it's. And I would say it's also. And can be a addiction. Like you can be like, hello, we all know, we all thinks you're functioning. Exactly. But the person can't see it. Like truly cannot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Cuz you, you, you can't. It's not an option.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Now I'm, I'm open enough to go. I guarantee we could see a two hour doc about that woman's childhood.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And I might end up feeling really terrible for. Well, she's, I can't imagine she got this way because everything was honky dory.

[Monica Padman]

I agree. But still.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I know, but still.

[Monica Padman]

There's no even. Because she does say. She says she's had a traumatic childhood. She said she was raped.

[Dax Shepard]

But that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, see, I know, I know. Sometimes I hear these horrible stories about people's childhood. We have somebody, we have somebody coming up on the show. A young man who had a really tough, really tough.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Childhood. You are hearing it and kind of.

[Dax Shepard]

Marvel that they're normal.

[Monica Padman]

As normal as they can be. Because they've also gotten gone down a lot of paths. And when you hear it, you're like, well, duh, duh. They've gone down all these paths. There's. There's no other.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, of course that's what it adds up to.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And then. And there's so much compassion for that. This is not that it's like, doesn't matter how bad of a childhood you had it. It doesn't matter. This doesn't translate.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no.

[Monica Padman]

What would you do? Okay. Really? So at one point the dad is finding out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And he comes rushing home. He goes inside, but he tells the mom to leave. And he basically is like, you need to leave right now. Or kind of like, I'm gonna kill you.

[Dax Shepard]

If Kristen was sending those texts to our.

[Monica Padman]

And for years you guys have together been quote, trying to figure this out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. I'm consoling her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. What do you do?

[Dax Shepard]

I just really wouldn't ever want to be in that situation. Just cuz my kids, My kids change everything. About what I would do.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

We were talking about this the other day. It's like I'm. I am anti death penalty.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I would kill anyone who hurt my daughters.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

I just would.

[Dax Shepard]

I want what. That's what I would do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So I would, I don't. I would not want to be around. I Would I'd be the same as the guy. Like, get her the. Away from me forever. Because I don't think I trust someone that could have hurt my little girl like that.

[Monica Padman]

Then how would you feel? Like the daughter.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, then you got a whole another thing. So then I got to go. Like, how do I best help my daughter who still needs a mom? She. This is what she got.

[Monica Padman]

No, that's not.

[Dax Shepard]

How do I. Well, minimally, you're not like, okay, you don't love your mom anymore. She's out.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So there's. There's going to be a whole process where I'm going to have to table how I feel about her to help this person I love.

[Monica Padman]

I'm struggling with this because, like, I understand the daughter. Right. Like, I understand her being still so young that the loss of her mother is, like, too overwhelming.

[Dax Shepard]

She wants her still.

[Monica Padman]

She wants her. Of course she does. But if I'm like the dad, I would feel a responsibility to somehow get.

[Dax Shepard]

Into Breaker Stockholm syndrome.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Get into the daughter's head and say, it's okay for you to miss your mom. And, like, it's really understandable, but she is sick and is not gonna get better. And we ha. You have to look at her as if she's died.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not sure that those are the steps.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know what. But how. Like, it's not.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know that if on top of the other thing you're now dealing with, you still love your. This is. The sadness of family dysfunction is like, you love your dad who.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Molested you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, like, these are really complicated things. I remember what my falling out with my Pippi, my mom's grandpa, who I loved and had a great relationship with. We would go canoeing all the time together. We go camping. I adored him. We were at the campfire one night after canoeing and he's. Your dad doesn't love you.

[Monica Padman]

No. Unexpected.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, you're out. I don't ever want someone to tell me. My dad. Like, that doesn't.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't. I know what you're. Now as an adult, I know what he was trying to do. Like, your dad should be there for you. If he loved you, he would. You deserve it. Like, whatever he was trying to do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I just heard, like. Well, on top of you. On top of him not being around, you're telling me he doesn't love me. Yeah, you.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So I just wrote. I wrote him out for a death that wasn't even around.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't think you'd have to say she doesn't love you. Like, I'm not trying to say that.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just saying it's a very delicate. I need my dad to love me on planet Earth. Whether, you know, and I think she needs her mom to love her. I think that's some part of it.

[Monica Padman]

It can be that she does. Yeah, she loves you too much. Maybe even she loves you in the way she can love.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But the way she loves is unacceptable for you to grow into who you need to be.

[Dax Shepard]

I think my approach would kind of be like, I understand if you want to continue to have a relationship with her. I would probably have one with my mom. But I think you are going to have to flip the dynamic, unfortunately, which is like, you're the parent, she's the kid, she's incapable.

[Monica Padman]

You can't teach a 17 year old to be a parent though, to a mom.

[Dax Shepard]

I think just mentally you have to go like, okay, I have a very injured, measured child. I'm gonna love the child, but I'm gonna have to be the one in charge of the direction it goes in.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think, I think adults can do that, but I don't think a child can do that. Like, I, I mean, yeah, I, I've had, you know, I, I've some family stuff too, where there are people that I can't know anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But I still love them.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

And I' but I know that for the sake of everyone, like, there just can't be a relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that's what I guess I would hope to try to send to her. Like, you're always gonna have love there and she will love you, but for the sake of everyone, there can't be a relationship. But I don't know, it's so hard.

[Dax Shepard]

Now this is unrelated, but it's related. So in my meeting on Monday night, we were discussing, discussing someone was talking about like potentially their issues that they have in their marriage because they're trying to get their wife to do something that they wish their mom had done. And the therapists are trying to point that out. And I was thinking about it while he was saying it and I'm like, yeah, that's totally a valid explanation and likely true. But then I was like, but also the opposite's true, which is if you have the perfect mother, you think you're going to have a wife that's going to be your mother.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

We all are so misled. We have these parents if we have good ones.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I think this about my daughters all the time. I'm like, you guys are delusional if you think you're going to marry a guy who's going to do what I do. That's not what a partner can do. Like, I'm going to love you blindly no matter if you murder people or whatever. And we all are looking for that. But unfortunately that's not what you get. And then I was even thinking, were we better off when parents were like kind of involved? Because then your expectation at least of your partner wasn't this thing that now all kids are mostly getting now. Like, it's just interesting. You're never going to have a mom. Like, if you're a dude, you're not going to, you're not going to have a partner that's your mom.

[Monica Padman]

I agree to son. Okay. So I, I think the child parent relationship is singular. There is no. You're never replicating it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But I do think, I don't think you should. I don't think you should be able to map on the relationship you have. Also, you shouldn't want to because you shouldn't want to be a child in your partnership.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I think it's natural to want that because it's so nice to be spoiled and have someone do your laundry and cook your food and like care about you. If you have a cut on your finger. Like, of course you'd want that.

[Monica Padman]

But you, but you want it when it's convenient.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Then you're like, get out of here, mom.

[Monica Padman]

Then you want equality when it's convenient. Like, that's the whole issue. But like, I do think though we are. We shouldn't look for that. But we should. I, I think maybe I'm delusional, but I feel like you should have earned grace in your partnership when you do accidentally become your. Your most kid self.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That there is not really a risk unless this is a pattern and keeps going and it's a huge problem. But you shouldn't be like, I can't be my base self.

[Dax Shepard]

Here's the difference. In my opinion. Of course you can be that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But it is on you as an adult in a relationship. You have to repair that. You have to go to that person and say, I was acting terribly. I was acting terribly because of this. I'm so sorry. And it was not your fault and you had no responsibility to fix me. You know, like, you gotta. But you don't have to do that as a kid. You get to be a Little.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you get to be in a good mood and everyone's happy. You don't ever have to repair.

[Monica Padman]

But some people, you can't just be.

[Dax Shepard]

An and then not own it and repair it.

[Monica Padman]

I just, I want to be. We all do do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Like we, we all are our worst selves around people we love.

[Monica Padman]

Selves around people we love. And then also I would say that many times, I think we've all also let people off the hook. We've all been like, there's doing this thing. I hate this thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I'm deciding to not care today.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That's them.

[Monica Padman]

That's them. That's them. That's them today. That's not going to be. If it's them for the next year, we have a problem. But it. I think that to me is part of what love is. Is like. I see you, you're in your worst. You're being your worst self. And today I'm deciding that it's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, absolutely. I'm just saying it's very natural for us to desire the easiest thing because that's how we are.

[Monica Padman]

We're all looking for unconditional love.

[Dax Shepard]

And as much as we say partners have unconditional love, that's not true. And it shouldn't be true.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

You should uphold whatever covenant you guys strike. And you just don't have to do that with your parents. It was concluded. So then we chatted about it after the meeting. I was like, it's funny. I said, it's funny because if you had the opposite, you might still have the same thing. You need your wife to tell you all the time she loves you and blah, blah, blah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And we said, yeah. The sad reality is like men, if they got to pick, they would have a mother from the time they woke up till 7pm and then they would walk out the door and then this total raging horny would walk in who's not your mom. And then you would have that in the evening. Like if that's the ID designed what they want.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's the Madonna. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Like it's there for a reason. It's like you want to be a little boy that they're so proud of all the time and showering and praise. And then you somehow want them to be this creature.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's not your mom. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm sure women have a similar thing happening with their partners.

[Monica Padman]

I am trying to think, like, what is the expectation of men? Maybe the dichotomy that a lot of women, you have to be safe but also dangerous. Dangerous. Yeah. That's probably right. Mixed with. I also think, like, in that same vein, you need to be the protector, but also you need to be, like, hyper vulnerable.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that's a hard. That's hard.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So which time is which?

[Monica Padman]

We're all. It's amazing anyone's in any relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That was hefty.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Okay, let's do some facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

We did not want to embarrass him in front of him, but he is 57, and I was. I swear I was looking at 31 years old.

[Monica Padman]

31 I met.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. With gray hair. That's it. If you. If he dyed the hair. Although I love the hair.

[Monica Padman]

It looks so good.

[Dax Shepard]

God, this guy. Effortless.

[Monica Padman]

Effortless man. He was really charming and.

[Dax Shepard]

And attractive and the full package athlete. We did not dive into Cornelius Vanderbilt as much as I would have loved to.

[Monica Padman]

It's true.

[Dax Shepard]

But maybe the audience is grateful for that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But why? Is he related?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. He is his fourth great, great grandfather on his paternal side.

[Monica Padman]

No way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Cornelius. For people don't know. Cornelius was. He was called the first tycoon. He was the first person to have $100 million in America. Child of Dutch immigrants. And he had a little sailboat, and he got good at crossing the hu. And then he got a ferry, and then he built this ferry empire, and it led to railroads, and he would run his ferry into the sides of other ferries. He fought the middleweight champion in the streets of New York during the parade. St. Patty's Day parade. He was an indomitable force in American history. And that's crazy.

[Monica Padman]

So is he related to Anderson Cooper? Whoa.

[Dax Shepard]

Third cousins were once removed. Third cousins once removed. I can't do the once removed. I don't understand that term.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Wow, that's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I just wonder, like, he's probably not as fascinated with Cornelius Vanderbilt as I am.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Well, this goes back to when you were on Skip.

[Dax Shepard]

Finding My Roots.

[Monica Padman]

Finding My Roots, where you and Seth Meyers, according to him, could kind of care less about your ancestry and you don't find pride in it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

But you are expecting Timothy to find that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's. That's kind of what I'm acknowledging. Like, that's weird to me. And yet, of course, I probably would be the same way.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But I'd be delighted to know I was related to that old hickory.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I have a huge, huge fact.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I'M embarrassed and I have egg on my face.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. It's a moment of reckoning.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Let me pull it up.

[Dax Shepard]

Let me reckon. Let me atone.

[Monica Padman]

Georgia SAT scores being so low that we couldn't go to nationals is not true. Okay, well, I don't know what happened. I don't know why I know that. Why? I mean, why? I thought that. Yeah, I. I know. We were told that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

What do we think could be the explanation if not that?

[Monica Padman]

So I asked my friend who's on my squad, and she was like, yeah, that sounds kind of familiar. I. I just remember we couldn't go past State. Okay. So then I texted my coach. My high school coach. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And let's just recap. You adore her.

[Monica Padman]

I adore her.

[Dax Shepard]

Kelly, she's one of your heroes.

[Monica Padman]

I love her so much. She changed my life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I said, hi. I have a fact check question. Wasn't the reason we couldn't go on past. Couldn't go on past State to Nationals because Georgia SAT scores were too low? Am I making that up? She said, lol. No. Maybe I told y' all that because I wanted y' all to make good test scores. I can't remember. But that's definitely not true. It's because Georgia will not let you go past the state level gat. HSA rule. So still you're not allowed to go past level. But it had nothing to do with those scores.

[Dax Shepard]

But had the previous year you had gone to national.

[Monica Padman]

No. No. Just like you're never allowed.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay? No nationals for y'. All.

[Monica Padman]

And I said, I've been spreading lies.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I'll have to clear the air. She said, that's hilarious. I actually have no idea where you got that from, because it isn't anything I told you. She said, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Did you talk about on the podcast? I'm cracking up. And then she said, suddenly all the cheerleaders in Georgia start studying extra for the sat. Yeah.

[Timothy Oliphant]

Oops.

[Monica Padman]

So I have. Maybe I dreamed it.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe. Maybe. No, this is a. This is a bad faith. But maybe you were like, I worked my ass off and I went to three tutors so I could get a great sat. And I know these are. Are not studying. Maybe you had it in your head that no one was pulling their weight.

[Monica Padman]

No. No. Because you're not understanding. And I tried to make this clear in the episode. I'm not sure if I made it clear. I found this to be a gift. I was so happy that we Weren't allowed to go past because.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you didn't want to find out.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. I didn't want to find out.

[Dax Shepard]

Look around and find out.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. We did the best we could possibly do. If we had to go on to the next wrong. What if it's like small, you know, big. What if you finish exactly like. I didn't want to know that.

[Dax Shepard]

Would you rather finish 49th or 50th?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. It's a great.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I can predict for both of us. And I think you could do 50th for me.

[Monica Padman]

For you?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think, I guess I would say 49th.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. One better.

[Monica Padman]

Because at least it's like, well, at least we're not the worst and I'd.

[Dax Shepard]

Rather like it's better story if I go. We finished dead last.

[Monica Padman]

You want extremes.

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly. If I'm not in the top three, then put me at 50th.

[Monica Padman]

I know to me. If you're not in the top one.

[Dax Shepard]

Kill me, kill me, dad.

[Monica Padman]

Kill me, dead chariot. Oh, my God. Wow. So that's tough.

[Dax Shepard]

Again, I admire your integrity for outing yourself.

[Monica Padman]

It's like one of those things. Like, I would have written that in a book.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's okay. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I believed it.

[Dax Shepard]

I know it's true. It didn't to you.

[Monica Padman]

What can we trust?

[Dax Shepard]

We can't trust anything.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, man, did we even win?

[Dax Shepard]

That's why we need a little humility, all of us.

[Monica Padman]

I know it.

[Dax Shepard]

We don't know what we know now.

[Monica Padman]

When did the Soho house open in LA? 2010.

[Dax Shepard]

2010.

[Monica Padman]

We had that was a fun little thing on Soho House. Okay. Is 400.

[Dax Shepard]

Was.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No one likes it, but everyone loves it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Is the 400 meter quarter of a mile? Yeah. It's 0.248 with some other numbers after that. So you were right.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. It's just from my drag racing days.

[Monica Padman]

You said it was from the metric day.

[Dax Shepard]

Metric field day.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, metric field day where you won the.

[Dax Shepard]

I just know it's 1320ft.

[Monica Padman]

Got it. Okay. I looked up what are the most calorically expending sports?

[Dax Shepard]

Cycling.

[Monica Padman]

So running is generally considered the sport that burns the most calories.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Then swimming, 600 to 800 calories per hour. Cycling, 500 to 700 calories per hour. Then we're looking at boxing, 600 to 800 calories per Hour. Well, it seems like that should be above cycling then, so that's confusing. Okay. Rowing. 500 to 700. Hiking.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

400 to 600. Basketball, 500 to 700 okay, I'm doing two of those.

[Dax Shepard]

That's not bad. I'll live with that.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Bowling.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no, no, no, no. How many calories an hour? 12.

[Monica Padman]

273. I mean, you do have to put like effort into it.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. But what do you get by just sitting for an hour?

[Timothy Oliphant]

Hour?

[Dax Shepard]

If your body is burning 2000 calories just to be alive.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Laying in bed all day, is it?

[Monica Padman]

Mine's not.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna ask if you laid in bed all day, how many you have.

[Monica Padman]

To put in a weight?

[Dax Shepard]

I will. I'm not afraid. How many calories would a 50 year old man who is 6 foot 2 and 200 pounds burn if he laid in bed all day? Please don't lay in bed all day. You have a lot to live for. 19, 24 calories. I would. I would burn just by lying there.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So divided by 24, that's. That's virtually 100 calories an hour.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Of just sitting. And what is, what is bowling?

[Monica Padman]

2.

[Dax Shepard]

200. What?

[Monica Padman]

273.

[Dax Shepard]

So really about 173.

[Monica Padman]

Well, cuz also, you are sitting a lot for bowling.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, entirely. And then I. All the a. You like how many, how many times? I guess. Okay. Okay, we can do this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. How many times are you getting up?

[Dax Shepard]

There are 10 frames.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And so you're getting up 10 times.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's 10 ups and down, 10.

[Monica Padman]

Squats and arm movement and then heavy ball.

[Dax Shepard]

Hold the. Yeah. Farmers carry 5 inches.

[Monica Padman]

Uhhuh.

[Dax Shepard]

Throw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If that's your primary source of cardio and calorie expenditure, you're. You're just gonna have to watch your intake a lot and that's fine.

[Monica Padman]

I think that's actually pretty good because you're only doing 10 things an hour and you're burning an extra 173 calories for just five minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. But we don't know that. Maybe tapping your foot while sitting. Anyways, anyways, we get, we get it. We get it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Soccer's on this list. That wasn't on the other list.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a excruciating.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Lots of movement. Okay. The average lifespan of a guinea pig. Five to seven years. Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a lot longer than I. Oh, really? Yeah. I thought they were around for months.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no. Five to seven years.

[Dax Shepard]

You're just. You only hear stories about them dying. You never ever hear stories like, I was playing with my guinea pig and he did the funniest thing. They don't. I don't know that anyone plays with them or they do anything. You just hear about when they were purchased and when they die.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, that's why his daughter. Daughter didn't love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Now, what episode of Sex and the City was he in? He played Sam. It was called valley of the 20 something guys and it was episode four, season one.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Right out of the gates.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Do AIs have their own language that humans can't decipher? This is according to the source himself. Himself. AI. Oh yeah, he said yes. AI systems have been observed creating their own languages to communicate with each other, though the extent to which these are truly undecipherable by humans is still debated and depends on the specific AI system and context. Projects like Gibberlink have demonstrated AI is developing unique sound based communication protocols, while other models might be using internally generated numeric or vector based systems that don't directly map to human language. Language concepts.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, boy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Good luck.

[Monica Padman]

And that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's it. We'll end on a high note. Probably. They're communicating.

[Monica Padman]

Who needs a billion dollars? Like we won't even. We don't need anything. We're just gonna be in our pods.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. We'll either. We'll either be in Utopia or we'll be perished.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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