David Sedaris #6

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Episode: David Sedaris #6

Date: August 17, 2026
Podcast Hosts: Dax Shepard & Monica Padman
Guest: David Sedaris (author, humorist, essayist)

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Overview

In his sixth appearance on Armchair Expert, beloved author and humorist David Sedaris joins Dax Shepard and Monica Padman for a sprawling, candid, and delightfully odd conversation. As always, Sedaris’s unique take on human behavior, his willingness to share embarrassing and intimate moments, and his wry wit are front and center. This episode covers a panoramic range of subjects: the nuances of parasocial relationships, the psychology of feeding wild animals, family dynamics, writing evolution, addiction to small rituals, and famously, the story about feeding a tumor to a snapping turtle. Along the way, Sedaris reads a new essay, "Punching Down," delivers characteristically self-deprecating humor, and dives deep into the messy beauty of being human.

Note: Commercial breaks, podcast intros/outros, and non-content segments are omitted from this summary.

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Main Themes & Episode Structure

• The oddities and comforts of modern fame and parasocial friendships
• Sedaris’s everyday obsessions, from haircuts to Duolingo and pedicures
• What makes for compelling personal essays (vs. boring problems)
• The ethics and hilarity of feeding wild animals
• Rules and taboos about family, writing, and boundaries
• How David’s writing and persona have changed with age
• Candid personal anecdotes from all three hosts about travel, odd encounters, and vulnerability

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Welcome Back, David Sedaris (03:22–05:00)

• Sedaris’s Outfit Choices: Begins with Dax and Monica admiring David’s eccentric fashion, including a ‘ladies house coat for men’ and unusual shorts by Dutch designer Walter Van Beirendonck — “I don’t mind being sweaty on the bottom. But I don’t want to go into the bookstore and then be, like, wet with sweat.” (04:32)
• Photos at Book Signings: Sedaris doesn’t take selfies at signings, preferring to engage in conversation or a traditional photo. He reflects on public selfie culture with bemusement. (05:37)

2. Parasocial (and Real) Friendships (06:42–11:00)

• Dax’s Sedaris Obsession: Dax describes becoming deeply attached to Sedaris's writing and audiobooks, experiencing a longing to be part of David’s European life.
  • “I listen to you every single night.” – Dax (07:00)
• David’s Own Parasocial Crush: Sedaris reciprocates the feeling: “I feel that toward certain people… Alan Bennett… I can listen to him anytime.” (08:13)
• Explores how autobiographical work can blur boundaries for both audience and creator.

3. The Art of Daily Observation (11:00–13:30)

• Keeping a Diary: Sedaris describes how he records small, specific moments from his travels. A memorable recent diary entry involves a heartfelt connection with an airport agent named Ms. Young: “I shared such a nice moment with Ms. Young. More memorable than the people I met at the book signing.” (12:56)
• Names and Professional Distance: Discusses the oddity of professionals dressing better than customers and the eroded formalities between strangers.

4. Sedaris as a Curious Traveler (14:20–18:30)

• Haircuts as Social Experiences: David will get his hair cut by anyone, prioritizing conversation over aesthetics. He recalls once having his hair cut in Tokyo by a barber with visible feces on his hands — “Every time he raised the scissors to my face, I could smell it.” (16:36)
• Barbershop Culture: Reminisces on the “real men’s spaces” old barbershops once were, full of adult magazines and inappropriate jokes, and how things (and men’s conversations) have changed.

5. The Perils and Promise of Writing from Life (20:55–23:32)

• Running Out of Material: Sedaris worries about “reusing” experiences (like being bitten by a dog) and the ever-present need for novel, notable, or amusing stories.
  • “If I got bitten by a dog again, I’d be like, fuck, I already wrote about it. I can't use it anymore.” (21:14)
• Boring vs. Interesting Problems: Laments how most daily annoyances (e.g., flight delays) aren’t compelling enough for essays.

6. Feeding Animals and Feeding Stories (29:05–41:03)

• Snapping Turtle Saga: The now-famous story: Sedaris develops a connection with a snapping turtle sporting a tumor, attempts to feed local wildlife better than gas station chips, and contemplates feeding it his surgically-removed lipoma.
  • “To me, it was just about waste.” (41:11)
• The Ethics (and Law) of Feeding Wildlife: Discusses the joy and social taboo around feeding wild creatures, as well as the bureaucracy preventing patients from keeping body parts (like a lipoma) after surgery.
  • “I never go to Central Park without food, and I feed squirrels. And then… I started feeding crows.” (31:48)
• Interpersonal Connection through Animal Encounters: Sedaris muses how feeding animals in parks and his own evolving animal relationships (now donkeys, not rams, in his English pasture) offer new angles for stories.

7. Changing Boundaries: Writing About Family (58:30–62:42)

• Real People, Real Feelings: Sedaris explains how his writing about family members has sometimes led to tension, especially with his brother Paul, but also highlights how family can enjoy the shared laughter and recognition in his stories.
  • “I give it to them first and say, is there anything you want me to change or get rid of?” (60:55)
• Drawing the Line: Sedaris refuses to write about the details of romantic or sexual relationships, respecting some boundaries while exposing others.

8. The Evolution of Sedaris’s Writing (44:11–47:19)

• From Big to Small Moments: Recognizes the progression from writing about major life events to turning “small moments, really about nothing” into essays.
  • “Now I write really about nothing… and it’s so much better.” (45:29)
• The Hybrid Writer-Performer: Dax observes that, thanks to his tours, Sedaris’s essays have become as laugh-packed as top-tier standup, blending literary form with live comedic timing.

9. Addictive Rituals & Daily Obsessions (65:12–73:26)

• Duolingo & Fitbit Addiction: Sedaris details his once obsessive commitment to topping the Duolingo leaderboard, paralleling his former step-counting obsession, and discusses the moment he felt free when he finally disabled the app’s ranking system.
  • “I cannot right now tell you. I haven’t been introduced to [the next obsession] yet, but it’s gonna be awful.” (70:50)
• Discussion on Addictive Personalities: Dax and Sedaris bond over their ability to fixate on harmless habits as a substitute for more dangerous addictions.

10. Social Change and Shifting Taboos (28:00–29:50; 58:30–60:48)

• Changing Boundaries: The group discusses how generational attitudes about costumes, race, and propriety (from blackface to nudist magazines) change over time and the discomfort in being unable to foresee what will one day be considered unacceptable.
  • “We’re doing something now that is going to be incomprehensible in the future, but we can’t guess what it is.” – Sedaris (28:33)

11. Audience Questions, Punching Down, and Generational Parenting (84:12–95:00)

• Sedaris Reads "Punching Down" (84:12–95:00):
  • Sedaris reads his essay, reflecting on changing attitudes toward comedy, “punching down,” and modern sensitivities.
  • “The only rule in comedy is that you should always be as tasteless as possible.” – Frida Garmeis (David’s writing teacher, quoted at 84:32)
  • Explores how large families, sibling cruelty, and the chaos of less-attentive parenting may build resilience vs. today’s incredibly attentive parents privileging their “amazing” only children.

12. The Realities of Mental Illness Within Families (82:07–83:46)

• Handling a Sibling’s Suicide: Sedaris addresses the painful subject of his sister Tiffany’s death, the complexities of mental illness, and the misconception that family can always intervene.
  • “You’d have to think pretty highly of yourself that you could stop it.” (83:00)
  • Dax and Monica agree, reflecting on how systems of addiction and mental struggles can be impervious to outside intervention.

13. Miscellaneous Memorable Moments and Quotes

• On Selectivity of Hotel Luggage Help:
  • “If someone touches your luggage, you gotta tip ‘em, that’s the rule… and then they say, we’ll send it right up to the room, and I say, no, I’ll bring it up to the room myself, because I don’t want to have to wait for—no, it’s already on the way up.” – Sedaris (49:17)
• On Emotional Evolution:
  • “I don’t have anything really to complain about—but I’m angry about a lot of things.” (48:27)
• On Feeding Coyotes:
  • “If I lived in a place and there were coyotes, I’d probably think, hmm, I wonder what they want to eat.” (42:15)
  • [Monica: cautioning that feeding wild coyotes in LA is currently causing problems] (150:02)

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Notable Quotes & Time Stamps

• “I listen to you every single night.” – Dax (07:00)
• “I feel that towards people, certain people.” – David (08:13)
• “To me, getting a haircut is simply about the conversation. My hair is unimportant.” – David (15:04)
• “If I got bitten by a dog again, I’d be like, fuck, I already wrote about it.” – David (21:14)
• “I never go to Central park without food and I feed squirrels… then I started feeding crows.” – David (31:48)
• “Now I write really about nothing.” – David (45:29)
• “We're doing something now that is going to be incomprehensible in the future, but we can't even guess what it is.” (28:33)
• “I cannot right now tell you. I haven’t been introduced to [the next obsession] yet, but it’s gonna be awful.” – David (70:50)
• On “Punching Down” essay: “The only rule in comedy is that you should always be as tasteless as possible.” (84:32)

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Highlighted Segment Timestamps

• Parasocial friend discussion: 06:42–11:00
• Diaries & “Ms. Young” story: 11:00–13:30
• Feeding the snapping turtle: 29:05–41:03
• Sedaris reads “Punching Down”: 84:12–95:00
• On mental illness and family boundaries: 82:07–83:46
• Evolution of writing style: 44:11–47:19
• Barbershop and gender culture: 16:08–20:03
• On audience boundaries and writing about family: 58:30–61:40
• Duolingo obsession, letting go: 65:12–73:26

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Memorable/Lighthearted Moments

• “Every time he raised the scissors to my face, I could smell it.” (haircut story) (16:36)
• Dax recounting his “parasocial ache” and sharing fantasies of being in Normandy with David.
• Sedaris’s genuine delight feeding wild animals and his intense curiosity about people and their habits.
• Dax describes his own struggle with a vacation-ruining hemorrhoid in explicit, hilarious detail (129:09–134:34).
• Sedaris’s lawyerly analysis of everyday annoyances, like tipping hotel porters.
• Monica and Dax’s spontaneous fact checks on such matters as the legality of keeping body parts, squirrels’ intelligence, and the presence of Penthouse magazines in old-school barbershops.
• Sedaris pondering why people "put things up their ass" and Dax’s fascination with ER stories about foreign bodies (95:05–101:53).

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Final Thoughts

Sedaris’s sixth visit continues the tradition of warm, irreverent, boundary-tickling storytelling that makes him an Armchair Expert favorite. This episode artfully combines personal confession, cultural critique, and philosophical asides—leavened with laughter and genuine affection among all participants. Listeners are treated not only to another classic Sedaris reading but also a wide-ranging conversation about the joys and perils of being a human and a writer in a rapidly evolving world.

Recommended for:
Fans of honest memoir and humor, those intrigued by the quirks of modern life, and anyone seeking stories that are both deeply personal and universally relatable.

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Related Reading

• David Sedaris’s new book: The Land and Its People
• Previously mentioned works: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Calypso, Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky

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Armchair Expert Notes

Sedaris is the show’s most-frequent—and most beloved—guest, with Dax and Monica attributing much of their own friendship and podcast ethos to the honesty, vulnerability, and humor he brings to each appearance.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm here with Monica Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[David Sedaris]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

It's ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sixth time.

[Monica Padman]

It's our most. That's our most, right?

[Dax Shepard]

He's our most.

[Monica Padman]

He's our most.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's our most favorite. We love David Sedaris, my parasocial friend.

[Monica Padman]

That's right, your parasocial and kind of real friend.

[Dax Shepard]

David is an author, a comedian and a humorist.

[David Sedaris]

His.

[Dax Shepard]

His books are Me Talk Pretty One Day, Santaland Diaries, Calypso, Naked, Happy Go Lucky. And he has a new book that is out now called the Land and its People. I have read it. I love it. We love David.

[Monica Padman]

We just love him. He does a reading for us.

[Dax Shepard]

He does some reading for us. Please enjoy David Sedaris. We get support from Quint.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[David Sedaris]

He's an upchurch.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, hello. How are you?

[David Sedaris]

Hello.

[Dax Shepard]

Good to see you.

[David Sedaris]

So nice to see you. Oh, yeah, of course. There's a downstairs. I was here last time. Do I sit right here?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's your spot. Oh, we knew you were gonna come in the best outfit.

[Dax Shepard]

I tried to do something fun back.

[Monica Padman]

That's as fun. It's really fun.

[Dax Shepard]

That's as fun as it gets. Are those board shorts?

[David Sedaris]

What is that?

[Dax Shepard]

That's a term for, like, swimwear. That's like, for surfers. Board shorts.

[David Sedaris]

No, no, no. They're these. Walter Von Berenbank. I have a problem with his last name, but he's this Dutch guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[David Sedaris]

But I was in San Francisco the other day, and he made. It was like a ladies house coat for men with this fabric, but the fabric is linen mixed with polyester. And I wore the jacket thing, and I was so sweaty. And then I thought it wouldn't work for my book tour because you're in a store and then there are a lot of people in there, and then it gets hot. So anyway.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, but that's so cute, though. But you got the shorts and stuff.

[David Sedaris]

But the ladies house coat was.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Pretty good.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that is good.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm confused, though. Did you buy the ladies house coat and then have those shorts made?

[David Sedaris]

No, no shorts, too. I don't mind being sweaty on the. On the bottom.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You know, sure. Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

But I don't want to go into the bookstore and then be, like, wet with sweat.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, totally.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you pose for photos with people in the signings?

[David Sedaris]

Never with a sign. Otherwise, that's all you do.

[Dax Shepard]

For the listener.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Otherwise it's all you do.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right.

[David Sedaris]

So I could either sign somebody's book and talk to them or have my picture taken. Sometimes I'm in the airport and someone says, can we get a selfie? I say, no. I say, but this person here can take our picture. I say, oh, I Ran into my cousin in the airport. Can you take a picture of us? And they're always happy to do it. But the selfie thing, I don't know that there's anything about contemporary life that is more puzzling to me, that when you see somebody, you know the way you are, let's say, in front of a mirror when you're alone, to be that way in public. And when I see people and they're doing the angle of their head and all of that in public, I just feel like it'd be like a nightmare about being on a toilet in public.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But you just get used to. It's like the way of the world. This is how these people are making money.

[David Sedaris]

Yes. Sometimes when I'm on the bus in England, I'll look over people's shoulder and they're on Instagram and all their friends look just like them.

[Monica Padman]

I know everyone is starting to look like one thing.

[Dax Shepard]

So I was one time on a TV show with Ashton Cotrino, who he is. You know what he looks like.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So at one point, we're sitting in a pickup truck, we're about to film a scene and he goes, oh, you know, the fucking network asked us if we could take like a couple, like, selfies while we're working. I was like, yeah, okay, great. And he just so cavalier, like, holds the camera down at his hips and starts shooting up at us. There's only like a 3 degree angle where I look good. It's definitely above, but he has the freedom to shoot any angle he wants. And he shows that. I'm like, yeah, you look incredible in all these photos. Look like a monster. Can you imagine that kind of freedom, though? Yeah, I don't care. Aim the picture anywhere, mount it on my shoes and shoot straight up in my nose. It'll look great.

[David Sedaris]

I think that's how a stick insect would feel Good from any angle.

[Dax Shepard]

Something has happened since you were last here. I can't imagine it has gotten to you, but maybe it has because you're on tour currently and there are often armchairs in the audience, right? You tell me.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is lovely. Has it gotten back to you, this parasocial thing, my obsession with you?

[David Sedaris]

Parasocial? What does that mean?

[Dax Shepard]

That is this, like faux sense of intimacy you can have because you consume like a podcast all the time you're with them, it's about their lives and you feel you're very confused because you know so much about them and you're kind of living with them in your car and in private. And it feels genuinely like a relationship. And so over the last year, I think since you've been here, I have become obsessive about. I listen to you every single night. I've listened to some of the books, like, five times now. Every single night for a half hour before I go to sleep. I'm re listening to all the things. And I've been growing more and more, like, entrenched in these fantasies where I'm going to be with you in Normandy or somewhere. And I think, oh, my. I would get along so well with you and your friends and all these conversations, like, oh, yeah, I could fit in perfectly. And I came and I had to admit to Monica, I'm like, oh, I'm having this thing people have described that was so abstract to me, but now I really have it. I have a deep ache when I'm listening that I'm not with you on tour or in Europe or something.

[Monica Padman]

It's tricky because he does know you. He does, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This was very confusing.

[David Sedaris]

How does this.

[Dax Shepard]

That land with you?

[David Sedaris]

I feel that towards people, certain people.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you?

[David Sedaris]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Alan Bennett.

[Dax Shepard]

Who's that?

[David Sedaris]

He is a national treasure in England. Most people here, if they know him, it's because he wrote the Madness of King George. But he's written lots of plays. He started off with a group called beyond the Fringe, and then he's written novellas and plays and movies. He releases his diaries and he reads them, and it's his voice. I listen to him. He did a series called Talking Heads. I can listen to it anytime.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so happy. You know what feeling I'm describing? And doesn't it kind of hurt that you're not involved? Is there a sadness?

[David Sedaris]

Well, what scares me is there was a antique store around the corner from my house in London, and I know the owners, and I would go in and they'd say, oh, you just missed Alan. Oh, he left two minutes ago. So I've always just missed him. And now he's in his 90s and he sounds very, very frail, and I know people. He's the kind of fellow, if you write to him, he writes you back.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really? So have you written to him?

[David Sedaris]

No, I'm just afraid. I'm just afraid I'll miss him. I don't want to miss him. I don't want to impose myself on him.

[Monica Padman]

But he would love to meet you.

[David Sedaris]

He knows who I am, which was surprising to me. But I'm on the BBC, and so he probably.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, there's a million reasons why

[Dax Shepard]

okay, but what's funny, and this is what I've been kind of trying to work through on the show when it comes up, is like, I have your number, I have your address. It's just this very weird zone where it's like my desire to reach out to you is nightly. Like, I just hear something, and I've heard it 25 times, but this time I like it. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, this would be so annoying. And I just am policing myself.

[David Sedaris]

Really. I've never thought of you as a pest.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, you.

[David Sedaris]

I was in England and you were in New York. And I was like, damn it, I'm going to miss him. Because that would have been really nice, you know, to have you over to go out or do something.

[Dax Shepard]

Does that author, writer that you just mentioned. I guess the diaries are what makes it parasocial, right? Like, I'm not going to have that with Dostoevsky. I know I can't hang out with he and Ralph Skull in the Cop. Like, it's all imaginary. But because your work is so much about your real life, I think that's why this whole parasocial thing happens. Is it his work that's, like, about his own life that you can just see yourself joining?

[David Sedaris]

He's written some personal essays that are about his own life, but it's the diaries mainly. And I listen to them over and over and over. And I can listen any year of his diary, anytime. His latest series of diaries came out, hadn't come out in the United States yet. But I'm going to England in a few weeks and I can get it there. But I really want the audio. But he's very frail now and I'm afraid that it's somebody else reading it. I don't know what I would do. Well, I'll just read it myself. But I've heard him so many times, I can read it in his voice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, right, right, right. Do you have an approach with your diary, or do you even care? Or what are you generally writing down?

[David Sedaris]

Well, today my schedule is kind of crazy, but normally what I would do is get up in the morning and first thing I do is write in my diary. And I'm so often I go down to breakfast and I write in my diary on my tour. But today, because I have to worry about getting my steps in. So I got up at 6 and I walked like 4 miles. And then Hugh's with me, so we had breakfast together. So then my friend Alyssa, my publicist, brought me here and I said, oh, you know what? Can I sit in the backseat? Because I just needed to write in my diary. And it was a lot of just what happened. And then I saw my note about Ms. Young. And Ms. Young, I checked in for my flight yesterday in San Francisco, and I had an agent who checked me in, this black woman, and she was maybe 60 years old, and she was missing two teeth, and her name was Ms. Young, and that was on her tag. And I said, I gotta say, I said, I love that. I love that I don't know your first name and that you're Ms. Young. And so we talked about that, just about how everyone calls each other by their first name now. And I said, one thing I hate is when I board the plane and the gate agent says, welcome, Mr. Taylor. You know, welcome, Ms. Baxter. Welcome, Mr. David. Because they're afraid to pronounce Sedaris. And so they're just being lazy and they're making it look like it's a typo. And I know it's not a typo. And nobody cares if you say, can you help me pronounce your name?

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[David Sedaris]

How do you pronounce. Nobody cares about that. Happy to do it. And it's just laziness on their part, but it's not about me. So I'm not gonna stop the boarding process to say, show me where it says that.

[Dax Shepard]

But you've done that. When they bring your meal, I know you've asked to look at the manifest.

[David Sedaris]

Ms. Young was in complete agreement. I just shared such a nice moment with Ms. Young. So that's what made yesterday memorable, you know, like more memorable than this book signing I did. More memorable than the people I met at the book signing was just because I had a real connection with Ms. Young.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

If you had heard her first name, do you think it would have ruined it? Do you think it would have ruined the illusion?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, I mean, if her name tag said Danielle Danielle, then it wouldn't have been special because everyone else just had their first name on their tag.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, so she was doing something unique. Yeah, I didn't get that part.

[Monica Padman]

Or me either. Oh, interesting.

[David Sedaris]

Because sometimes in a situation like that, it's just a one way street. They call you Mr. Sedaris and then their name tag says Deborah. And then it feels wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

You're being familiar and they're being unfamiliar.

[David Sedaris]

Well, partly too, because in so many professional situations now, the people who work there are 10 times better dressed than the people who are the customers. You know, you get into a car and the driver's Wearing a suit and tie. You know, when you see people, like, getting in the back seat, you know, with swim shorts on, you know, and

[Dax Shepard]

a T shirt over France.

[David Sedaris]

And so they're Mr. Duncan.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

And then the driver is Hal, you know, so it just seems uneven.

[Dax Shepard]

Mr. Duncan In a bathing suit.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And then Chip in a fucking tux.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Another curiosity I had that struck me. Spring and fall, you do about 100 cities in your talking tour, your hair is always really kind of kempt. It's really tight and cut. And I thought you're not traveling with a barber. Are you constantly in a position where you're in a new town trying to find some kind of barber that you could trust? How were you maintaining your short haircut on this tour?

[David Sedaris]

I will go to anyone to get my hair cut. If there was a guy with a blowtorch on the side of the road, I'd go. What I find in New York now is all the barbers are from Azerbaijan.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[David Sedaris]

And so I wrote an essay about it because I'm in the Epstein files.

[Dax Shepard]

You are not.

[David Sedaris]

I'm in the Epstein files.

[Dax Shepard]

You are.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, I am. For some reason, Jeffrey Epstein emailed somebody an article from the New York Times that was, I don't know, 2004 or something. And it was about a bookstore in Paris where I'd done reading. And so it mentioned my name.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[David Sedaris]

And they mentioned Don DeLillo's name and a couple other Toni Morrison's name. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, shit.

[David Sedaris]

And so I'm in there. So I went to get a haircut, and I said to the woman, I said, you know, I just found out today that I'm in the Epstein files. And she said what? Like, she spoke, like, 17 words of English. And I'm like, you know, like, I needed her to have a reaction. Have a reaction. So to me, getting a haircut is simply about the conversation. My hair is unimportant.

[Dax Shepard]

You never regretted one?

[David Sedaris]

Mm, no. No. Because again, it would just be funny. And. Well, I wrote about this. I went to a barber in Tokyo, and he had shit on his hands.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[David Sedaris]

And I could see it, like a little smear of shit on his hands. And every time he raised the scissor, I was like.

[Monica Padman]

And you were like, I'm not getting up. I'm not leaving.

[David Sedaris]

And he didn't speak any English. And I used all my Japanese, you know, But I don't have. There's no way you can shit on your hands.

[Dax Shepard]

There's no way. You practice. Excuse me, sir. I Happen to notice you have defecation on your phalanges.

[David Sedaris]

And he's a lovely guy.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[David Sedaris]

And I just.

[Dax Shepard]

Could you smell it?

[David Sedaris]

Oh, my God. Every time he raised the scissors.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, fuck, David.

[David Sedaris]

Every time he raised the scissors to my face, I could smell it.

[Monica Padman]

I'm shocked you didn't just get up and leave.

[David Sedaris]

I didn't want to embarrass him. I didn't want to.

[Monica Padman]

You're mixed messages.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. I think we're all full of contradictions, but one is like, you tell this guy on a bus in England to turn. Or a train to turn his radio off. You'll do that, but you won't see the man who has shit on his

[Monica Padman]

hand getting dangerously close to.

[Dax Shepard]

You know what? I just realized that I am late for an appointment or. I don't know what you would say,

[David Sedaris]

but, you know, when I go to a barber, they just use a shaver on my head. So I say the number two. And maybe he thought I said the number.

[Dax Shepard]

He goes, oh, that's already done the number two.

[David Sedaris]

Scissor cut.

[Monica Padman]

He's like, okay, if you really want that. Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Would you be open to a barber saying, like. Because I think this happens to women a lot. Like, a woman will go into the beauty salon, she'll be like, oh, I'm so tired of this look. And then that hairstylist gets to go like, well, would you like to try something new? And then they get to get creative. If someone pitched you that one of these barbershops, like, if you ever thought about doing something new, would you let them go wild just to see what?

[David Sedaris]

Depend on the person. Like, I met somebody the other day and I bought something that, gosh, I would not have otherwise bought. And he didn't give me the hard sell. It wasn't like that. I just liked him. And I walked into a store, and he didn't say, welcome in. He didn't say, how's your day going so far. Within a minute, he used the word boyfriend. Within a minute, I knew so much about him, and I just liked him so much that I bought this crazy shirt that I wouldn't. It just felt like part of our relationship for me to get this. So a barber could say, let's shave your head, right? And if it was the right barber, I'd say, yeah, let's.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Do you remember? I'm old enough. So I remember this. When you would go into a barbershop and the barber would have Penthouse magazine and sometimes Hustler magazine on the table, it was like a real men's space, you know. And I remember getting haircuts and I was in Toronto and the guy said, where do you live? And I said, paris. And he said, what's that French pussy like? Like, they would talk like that. Barbers could be filthy.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[David Sedaris]

Filthy. Filthy.

[Dax Shepard]

As if they're anatomically different.

[David Sedaris]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

You should have made something crazy sideways.

[David Sedaris]

After a certain age, you feel like you've taken steps back to say like, oh, you know, like what? You know, that is fine. You know, that is. That is so tight. And whatever the words are. I don't know even. They're just looking at it.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't even know what's really preferred. Right.

[David Sedaris]

But then you feel like, really, I've come this far to go back because this jerk. But then if you'd said, I would have no idea. I've never. I can't tell you anything about it. And I actually can't tell you about French dick either because the only dick that I'm getting right now is my boyfriend's and he's American. Like, oh, I don't know what happens.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that would have opened up an incredible conversation.

[David Sedaris]

It could, depending on your barber.

[Dax Shepard]

So you just said that. And then I would go, yeah, I guess. I'd imagine French penises are not circumcised. Right.

[David Sedaris]

That would be really.

[Dax Shepard]

No, your honor to something.

[David Sedaris]

Right, Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're on terra firma. We can go somewhere.

[David Sedaris]

But that's you interested in everything.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You're hoping that this is a very open minded borrower.

[Monica Padman]

The guy asking about the French pussy is probably not going to continue. I think he's going to stop talking at that point.

[David Sedaris]

But my problem now is everyone's from Azerbaijan and they speak 15. You know, when you speak to them, they're like, oh, don't make me. It's like when I go for a pedicure. I've gone for two. My sister Amy took me and then I took my friend dawn from pedicure and the women were like, oh, don't make me.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[David Sedaris]

And so I felt like it was wasted money because I was just sitting there and I wasn't talking to anybody.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I guess that brings me to another one of my questions. Because your work is mostly about your real life travels. Do you ever panic that you are gonna run out of material? Do you feel that sense of like, I don't know how much longer I'm gonna be bumping into? Interesting assigning? Do you have any anxiety about that

[David Sedaris]

one of the essays in my book is I got bitten by a dog. Right? Now if I got bitten by a dog again, I'd be like, fuck, I already wrote about it. I can't use it anymore.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So that would be a worthless biting.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I think you and I have the same thing. I don't write about it, but I love telling stories and often I'm like mid disaster, like something's going terribly wrong. And then I just get that little moment where I'm like, oh yeah, this is going to be a story. And then I can kind of enjoy the rest of it because I know I'll be telling this and I'm almost just grateful for the situation. Yeah, I think it's a neat way to reframe your life if, you know, you're just out there trying to get amusing stories for everyone.

[David Sedaris]

To me, what's unfortunate, last week I spent 12 hours in the Nashville airport and I heard other people talking when we boarded the plane at 8 o' clock. And they said we were supposed to leave at 8:30. And then at 8:30 they said, well, it's going to be a 10 minute delay. And then they said there was a part missing on the plane and they said they would call mechanics to come and look at it. And then we waited on the plane and they said, we're going back to the gate. And we got off the gate and then they said, oh my God, it's a boring problem.

[Monica Padman]

You know what I mean?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Sedaris]

It's a boring problem that nobody wants to hear. And that makes suffering it that much worse. True, because it's so boring. And there wasn't anything interesting about the day.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's just one complaint. It's just I was at the airport for too long, basically.

[David Sedaris]

Well, then I got to Denver and my luggage had gone to St. Louis.

[Monica Padman]

Oh no.

[David Sedaris]

And I had to talk to the guy at the luggage office and he said, if we open your suitcase, what are we gonna find in it?

[Dax Shepard]

To be cute or he really wanted

[David Sedaris]

to know, how do they know it's my suitcase? I mean, I had a tag on it, but I said, well, if you open it up, I said, you'll find a Burberry Dopp kit. I said, it's plaid, but not their iconic plaid. So gay.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not gonna leap out as Burberry. It won't be super obvious. Oh man.

[David Sedaris]

But that was the only interesting part of the. I mean, that's the only part of the day worth talking, worth noting.

[Dax Shepard]

And you'll scribble that down somewhere. That'll get.

[David Sedaris]

Get screwed. Yeah, I wrote about it. My diary. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Back to the dirty magazines. I haven't had the pleasure of going into a barbershop that had the hustlers and stuff. But one of my first jobs at 15 is I worked for this race shop and I worked with like all 30 to 45 year old mechanics and I was 15 and it was like a dive into the deep end experience with male culture. Like they were immediately joking about me and stuff and I was like, oh my God, this is extreme. And then yeah, in the bathroom at work, in the shop, they had a stack of the nastiest. I mean it made Playboy look like Hallmark. You could really see inside of everyone in these. And I was 15 and so I would go to the bathroom like two, three times a shift because I didn't have access to that kind of material. And I was just constantly in there looking at those things.

[David Sedaris]

See, now you can go in there and take pictures with your phone and then have them for later.

[Monica Padman]

It's definitely more hygienic, those magazines.

[Dax Shepard]

I know what the other men were doing with Covered in grease. They were in there for a reason.

[David Sedaris]

But I wonder though, because I don't know this, but does that male culture, does it alive and well?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm trying to figure that out too because I also moved from Detroit to la. So here when I'm around and I get to be around from friends of ours, 15 to 17 year old boys, I have access to like a group of them where I get to see them interact and they do seem so much nicer than boys were when I was that age and they seem way less perverted and insatiable for all that. But again, I don't know if that's because I'm in LA and I'm looking at kids from west la. Do you have any sense?

[David Sedaris]

No, I don't. But you know when I go to the barber in England and when I go to the barber in France, it's not that way. You don't have those magazines.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you been watching Half Man?

[David Sedaris]

I watched the first episode.

[Dax Shepard]

I love it. And I was trying to tell Monica. What I love is how accurate they got how weird us little boys are. Boys are so fucking weird. There's a period. I just think we're so strange. Everyone's got to get their dicks out all the time. And boys are sword fighting. They have this thing and they're just not sure. They have a sense that it's supposed to be being used but they don't know what for. So just all this weirdness comes out.

[David Sedaris]

I love in the movie Bridesmaids with one of the characters, she has sons and she talks about how disgusting they are.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

And their sheet cracked in half.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you ever find any naked men magazines when you were a kid?

[David Sedaris]

No. I found nudist magazines and it was interesting because nudist magazines, Right. It's families being naked together. Right. So those are naked children.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Right. So I thought, like, if you had old nudist magazines in your house, could that be considered child pornography?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, interesting.

[David Sedaris]

No one in the nudist magazine meets your gaze. Right. So no one's looking at you. They're playing volleyball or they're cooking hot dogs or something. But for pornography to work, there has to be an engagement.

[Dax Shepard]

It's an implication of, like, sexuality. Yeah. As opposed to like, we gotta get these dogs off the grill and into these kids mouths. Everyone's starving. The nudity's just secondary.

[David Sedaris]

But I wondered about that.

[Monica Padman]

I do wonder, because someone's taking those pictures. If it's a magazine you can purchase, how could it be?

[David Sedaris]

How could you ever get nudist magazines? I mean, the only ones I've ever seen were old.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, think about these photograph magazines your father collected. They had people under 18 nude in them. Sometimes he was wanting to take one.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. Like Cache Photography Today or, you know, magazines like that that used to come out in the 1960s and 70s.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. It's really curious if, like, you have something that was of the era, fine, that is now here. I bring this up all the time. Not because I want anyone to go in blackface. I don't think anyone should go in blackface. But when these photos emerge of people in blackface in the 80s, I think it's really important to remember there was a major motion picture that was in 3,000 theaters called Soul man, about this lead character pretending to be black to go to college. And he was in full black body. And that was at the Cineplex in 88. So, yeah. If someone that same year went to Halloween, clearly the culture at that time, it seemed completely fine. It was like a major motion picture. It's so hard to imagine right now, but that really happened in my lifetime and no one cared.

[David Sedaris]

When all those pictures of politicians being in blackface came forward. I wrote something that when I was a kid, like, you would dress as a native American, but it wasn't like you felt like you were getting away with anything.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

It was almost like you had no ideas For a costume that was kind of like, well, fuck, I guess I'll go as a chief.

[David Sedaris]

But I think that's hard for people now to conceive of. But we're doing something now that is going to be incons. I mean, in the future. But we can't even guess what it is. We're sitting here in this room, we can't even guess what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

We're doing something deplorable right now.

[Monica Padman]

It's crazy.

[David Sedaris]

And even trying to imagine, like. Oh, is it drinking water from a can?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[David Sedaris]

Books having a paper table.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So I've been on this kind of tirade of. Or not even a tirade. People will just ask me what I listen to, because everyone knows I listen to something to go to bed. I've been telling everyone, you know, I've been this year of listening to you every single night. And when I'm encouraging people to do this, the way I hook them on you is I tell them the story of the tortoise.

[Monica Padman]

Or.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it wasn't a tortoise. It was a snapper turtle that you developed this relationship with. And I think it's kind of my favorite story of yours in that I think it encapsulates exactly who you are as a human being. So I just want to walk through that a little bit with people. In short, you bought this wonderful place, the C section on the island. What's the island?

[David Sedaris]

Emerald Island.

[Dax Shepard]

Emerald Isle. And you thought this would be a great place for my family to gather. And then you started doing that. But once you were there gathering with your family, you're like, I don't want to be in this house with all these people. And you take a walk, and then what happens? You discover this turtle under a bridge.

[David Sedaris]

There's this canal there, and it's just filled with. With snapping turtles and with water turtles, too. But they're massive snapping turtles, like the size of your suitcase.

[Dax Shepard]

And their face is intense. Right. The actual beef.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. There was one in particular that had a tumor on its head. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And that was the one you really felt affections, right?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. Because the other ones, you know. You know, the one with the tumor on it, it's like he's wearing a hat.

[Monica Padman]

A hat.

[Dax Shepard]

But at the steps, you started noticing people were feeding them garbage, like ruffles, potato chips. And you were like, they gotta eat something better than this. They can't designed for that.

[David Sedaris]

Well, I was feeding them raw hot dogs, which I don't know how much better that is than. But they'll eat anything. You know, the snapping turtle is just going to eat it and then think later, was that a piece of human shit? And I don't think anything can be too disgusting.

[Monica Padman]

Low brow.

[Dax Shepard]

They'll eat whatever. They don't care. But you started feeding it like, I don't know, did you do some chicken livers too, maybe?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, Chicken legs, chicken backs.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I know. You were on tour and then you discovered you had this lipoma tumor. Tell people what a lipoma is.

[David Sedaris]

I was in Paris one day and I noticed it seemed to pop up overnight. It was like half a deviled egg under my skin, right above my hip. And I went to a doctor and he said, oh, it's a lipoma. And I said, is it gonna get any bigger? And he said, probably not. And I said, why? And he said, I don't know. Why don't trees touch the sky? Which I thought was such a good answer.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[David Sedaris]

And he said, there's no need to get it removed. He made me feel vain for wanting to get it removed. And then I went to a doctor in North Carolina and I said, can we cut this out? And he said, yeah, definitely. And I said, because I want to feed it to a snapping turtle.

[Dax Shepard]

There we go. But do you remember where that idea came? Or just felt very natural?

[David Sedaris]

I just finished this essay about why some people want to feed wildlife and why it's not important to other people at all. I know people who never occurs to them, right?

[Monica Padman]

Me, I don't never think about it.

[David Sedaris]

I never go to Central park without food and I feed squirrels. And then I started feeding birds. And then not long ago, I started feeding crows. It's fascinating to have a new creature to feed, right? And they love hard boiled eggs.

[Dax Shepard]

The crows do.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. We're feeding crows too.

[David Sedaris]

Oh, you do? What do you feed yours?

[Dax Shepard]

We've tried every single thing. I was putting out, like, really nice lunch meats for them and stuff. Kristen was trying different berries and stuff. They love dog treats. That's a big one. I think they're real smelly, those dog treats.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, they love peanuts in their shell.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what I heard.

[David Sedaris]

But ours don't care about that raw chicken breast. Love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Raw chicken breast.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking what the warning light means before pulling out of your driveway. You absolutely convince yourself it was probably just a sensor thing. Right up until you were standing on the side of the road waiting for a tow. Yeah, checking first is the right move. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need a it, Add an Allstate Roadside Plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club Incorporated and Allstate Affiliate this episode is brought to you by SoFi, the all in one finance app where you can bank, borrow and invest all in one place.

[Monica Padman]

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[Monica Padman]

We get support from Skims oh man do I love skims. I've been living in the Skims lightweight cotton collection all all summer and I have to tell you, getting dressed has become so easy. I just throw it on. It just feels right immediately whether I'm grabbing coffee or I'm on the couch all day or I'm out even going to dinner. The cotton is so lightweight and breathable, which in this heat is a non negotiable. The cotton Jersey T shirt. I just need everyone to know about this one. This one hugs in all the right places. It's very soft and it still looks and fits the same after months of washing, which is very hard to do I feel with T shirts. I've been wearing the black cotton jersey T shirt with basically everything all summer long. It goes great with any pattern skirt or shorts or pants. I mean anything truly. I believe that's probably my favorite piece from the cotton collection, but they also have great lightweight cotton thongs that are so comfortable and they're cute. That is a very, very hard mix to achieve, especially with Undergarments. I feel if you can find some that are cute but also comfortable and do the job, that is a win. And Skims has really, really figured that out with the lightweight cotton collection Shop, Skims Cotton and all of my favorite [e-mail] after you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you Select Podcast in the survey and be sure to select Armchair Expert in the dropdown menu that follows.

[Dax Shepard]

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do with. Well, Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot, you've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private, it's been yours. But at some point you're ready to put it out there and that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates built in. SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from, from I've been working on this to here it is, come find me all in one place, no code, no stitching together, a bunch of different tools. So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Head to squarespace.comdax for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Yeah, so what's great about the two camps is there's people who want to feed animals. And it's not just that the people who don't want to feed animals don't want to feed animals. They feel vehemently that you should not feed animals. To not want to is to put you immediately in the camp of like, you shouldn't feed animals. Right. It's very vitriolic.

[David Sedaris]

But it's also like, it's easy for you to say you're not doing anything. Do you know what I mean? Like, you don't have to hard boiled eggs, you don't have to get them.

[Monica Padman]

It's lazy.

[David Sedaris]

Fill a Ziploc bag with damp paper towels to wash your hands when you go to Hyde Park. It's just a few blocks from my house in London. And crows recognize 100 human faces. Yeah. And the second day you go, they're there and you look like a warlock, you know? All of a sudden you got 30 crows dancing in front of you on the street.

[Dax Shepard]

What power.

[David Sedaris]

And it's just fun.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

And it opens a whole new world. But another world just got open because we have a pasture behind our house. And this shepherd was keeping his rams.

[Dax Shepard]

This is in England, right?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. And rams are just assholes. Anyway, he's not having sheep anymore. So our pasture was empty. Someone in the village looking for a place to keep their donkeys. We have donkeys now in our pasture. So it's a whole new. Whole new things to feed and get to know. I'm really excited.

[Dax Shepard]

And he was a don't feed the animals person. Right.

[David Sedaris]

I went to the park with him. He didn't feed a single squirrel. And I thought, oh, he's embarrassed. If I go through a trash can because I'm looking for something shiny or just something I can use for one reason or another, he'll walk ahead. And if I'm picking up trash, he'll walk ahead. So I was surprised. I thought, oh, he cares what people think more than I do. But I had this lipoma and then I thought, you know people who get their legs amputated, right? Alligators would love to eat a leg.

[Dax Shepard]

It's wasted. Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. And instead. And this doctor said, I cannot give you anything I cut out of your body.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you know why? I don't know why.

[David Sedaris]

I don't quite understand it either.

[Dax Shepard]

I know, like, I think they're under the guise of. It would be a liability issue, but what's the liability?

[David Sedaris]

But a lot of dentists won't even give you teeth anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

That's mine.

[David Sedaris]

Right? Someone told me it had to do with flesh eating. Bacteria.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, bacteria.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[David Sedaris]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

I could see that.

[David Sedaris]

But I bitched about it one night on stage. And this woman came up afterwards in El Paso, Texas, and said, I'll cut that out of you and I'll give it to you to keep. No. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

She's like, meet me in the bathroom.

[David Sedaris]

She was a doctor, not a surgeon. And she said, I'll cut you open if it's above my. I don't usually. I like this word. Pay grade.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

I'll stitch you back up and send you on your way, but it shouldn't be a problem. And so after my show, it was like 2 o' clock in the morning or 1 o' clock in the morning. After the book signing, she drove me across state lines into New Mexico.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a great place.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[David Sedaris]

To a clinic? And there were a Couple other people that came with us. And really simple. And she cut it out of me. And then I went to her house, hung out. Later, I didn't sleep at all and went back to my hotel. She shipped it on ice to one of my sisters and she brought it to the beach.

[Dax Shepard]

But months have gone by. Right. You're kind of anticipating this for months. You know, you have this delicious lipoma sitting on ice and you're so excited to get home and feed it to this.

[David Sedaris]

And it didn't amount to much.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you were gonna feed it to the snapper. Hopefully that had his own tumor.

[David Sedaris]

Right, Right. And then I was told that that one died. Oh, my brother and my niece are down there a lot. And they said Godzilla. Turned out lots of people had different names for this snapping turtle. So I fed it to a different one. But it appreciated it.

[Dax Shepard]

I hate to give away my family and I. Because I told you. I also listened to it with my daughters a lot. We often lay down. That's part of our routine, is to listen to one of your stories. But the story ends with you saying, you know, that's the great thing about turtles is they'll eat it and barely think that. Whereas a dog, if you feed it a human turtle, it'll eat it. But then it'll give you a look that says, is that a tumor? I mean, what.

[David Sedaris]

But a turtle doesn't even give it a second thought. But to me, it was just about waste.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

So many of our waste related rules are just lawsuit stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Trying to avoid lawsuits.

[David Sedaris]

Right. You can't give somebody. If all these hamburgers are left at the end of the night. You can't give it away to people because they might. Blah, blah, blah. But you can give it to an alligator.

[Dax Shepard]

They're not litigious alligators.

[David Sedaris]

Or they're. There's all kinds of creatures you give it to. Dogs or cats or. I don't understand why. And dumb rules in place.

[Dax Shepard]

Do we agree, though, there are a couple of good policies against feeding animals when it comes to, like extremely dangerous animals. Right. Like you wouldn't encourage anyone to feed a polar bear and get them more comfortable with your backyard. Right.

[David Sedaris]

No. Or bears, lions, coyotes, coyotes.

[Monica Padman]

I was about to say there was a scenario down the street where a woman was feeding these coyotes. And then. Yeah. More and more and more came. The one got run over. And it's like a whole to do.

[Dax Shepard]

That's also my sister theory. Right. Is that her? Yeah. Her investigative work.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't have total confirmation how much she Was feeding them. But my sister has figured this all out.

[David Sedaris]

I gotta say. I'm afraid to say. If I lived in a place and there were coyotes, you'd feed them. I'd probably think, hmm, I wonder what they want to eat.

[Dax Shepard]

You feed the foxes?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which everyone does in England. Right. In your area, they just throw scraps?

[David Sedaris]

Not necessarily. There are a lot of people who. Right. I know people who throw scraps in their yard and then maybe they'll be gone. But there was this fox. She was eating out of my hand.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[David Sedaris]

In England, eating out of my hand.

[Monica Padman]

And you're not worried about it?

[David Sedaris]

No one had seen anything like it. Yeah, Nobody. People were shocked at this fox. Right. And then our neighbor, they have chickens. They paid someone to shoot her while Hugh and I were in the United States.

[Monica Padman]

Right, the fox.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. And then I thought, naively, well, maybe there'll be another one. No, but Hugh just saw a fox in our pasture that has babies. So I'm thinking maybe. Because if you can get those babies. If you can get them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Domestic.

[David Sedaris]

Eat those maybe.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, gosh.

[David Sedaris]

Whenever you see, like, people who have foxes for pets, they are gleeful almost. And they're affectionate and they lay on their backs and they seem to be smiling, but at the same time they're like, I gotta get outta here. You know, like all wild animals.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they're animals.

[David Sedaris]

I gotta get out of here. A woman came last night to get a book signed. She has a squirrel. And I said, does it get in your linen? Does it hide nuts in your food in your linen? Come. She says, yeah, but now it has the second floor of their house, but it comes down every morning and jumps in their bed at six o' clock to wake them up.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[David Sedaris]

And they let it out and it comes back. It'll just go out for like two hours and then like. Like a cat ready to come back.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Yeah, they're real smart. We found out. We constantly do these lists of the smartest animals and they're always on there. Shockingly, they can live to be 20.

[David Sedaris]

Squirrel.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Monica Padman]

Did you grow up with pets? I forget this.

[David Sedaris]

Dogs and cats, hamsters, regular variety.

[Dax Shepard]

We've had you on enough times, and now I've read every single thing you've written. Do you think about how you've changed as a writer? Cause I kind of of was going backwards, so I got really conscious of how much the earlier stuff is different than the modern stuff. I'm wondering if you're like, even think about that or you've noticed how your writing's changed.

[David Sedaris]

I'm very aware of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So how would you explain the evolution, how it's changed?

[David Sedaris]

To me, a difference would be like, my second book was called Naked, and I was under a deadline to write it. It was before I started going on tour.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

So none of those essays was read before a live audience until the book came out. And everything in it is twice as long as it should be. Everything in it is. You see somebody straining for a laugh and, like, elbowing you in the ribs. Get it? Get it. And it's just awful when people can't see the difference between that and then the last book. I'm like, what am I here for if you can't see the difference? Also, it's a difference that that second book. If you were meeting somebody for the first time and they didn't know anything about you, you would say these were big moments in your life. So I wrote about big moments in my life, but now I write really about nothing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Small moments.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you're one of the only weird hybrids we have. That you're somewhere between a standup and a writer, I think. And I wonder if you agree with that, which is standups write a thing in the morning or even they have a kernel of an idea. They go out, they try it a little bit on stage, they take the feedback from that. They work it a little more. Right. There's this really back and forth process of having the audience help guide them, which is unique to standup. But because you have been doing these lecture tours for years and years and years, wouldn't you say you're working in a kind of a similar format? There's a couple of your live readings, like on Calypso, that I said, if you put it into AI and you have at AI analyze, are there more laughs per second in this than there is this Chappelle standup piece? You are blowing some standups off the stage. Just laughs per second. You're really this weird hybrid. And do you think about that part at all?

[David Sedaris]

Reading things out loud and then going back to the room and rewriting them? That piece that I wrote about feeding animals, my biggest laugh in it came from during Q and A. No one asked about that piece. But sometimes before the questions come, I've just run in my mind Mouth. And I was talking about the relationship between blue jays and squirrels. Whenever you see a squirrel, you're likely to see a blue jay.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, oh.

[David Sedaris]

And blue jays get up in the tree and they watch squirrels bury their Food, and then they go steal it.

[Dax Shepard]

Wonderful, right?

[David Sedaris]

And blue jays eat baby squirrels, and squirrels eat blue jay eggs. And baby blue jays, they're a two

[Dax Shepard]

person circle of life.

[David Sedaris]

And so I found myself saying on stage that I love that. That given how now we'll cancel somebody over an Instagram post, it's nice to know that amongst certain animals, eating each other's babies is not a deal breaker. You know, like, you'll still hang out with each other.

[Dax Shepard]

It's still symbiotic relationship.

[David Sedaris]

And so I wouldn't have thought that at my desk, but I said it on stage and people laughed really hard. And then I put it in the piece. So that happens. And another thing that happens is that I read something out loud and then people come up and they said, oh, I had a similar experience, or, oh, this thing happened to me. And so I can stitch it. I don't then say it happened to me. You know, I'll give them credit, but that can help it grow as well.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. The other arc I notice is, and this is not unique to you, I think this is the arc of most people, which is like, you're kind of nicer now. You're beautifully agitated a lot, which is a source of a lot of your funniest stories, but you have a different disposition. Would you agree with and. Which makes sense because you were kind of a late starter and you didn't know if this was gonna work out for so long. So you had accumulated a lot of living at the bottom of the barrel issues you would have. But you're less angry. Is that a fair. I don't even know that angry is the right word.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you feel that you've gotten lighter as a person over the last 30 years?

[David Sedaris]

I don't have anything really to complain about. Nobody is telling me that I can't write. Nobody's telling me I can't put a book out. I mean, you know, sometimes you'll submit something to an editor and they'll be like, no, not because it's poorly written, but because you said something that they think is insensitive. But they're not saying you can never write again. They can say, change it. And I say, fuck all y'. All.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[David Sedaris]

Because I read that on stage and I know it gets a huge laugh and you're just coward. You know, But I don't really have that much to complain about, but I'm angry about a lot of things. Like, I'm angry about. Don't you just hate it when. And again, I know how petty this sounds. So you go to the hotel because I'm going to a hotel. I started this tour April 1st.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[David Sedaris]

And you go to a hotel and then they run up to open the trunk of the car so they can get your luggage out. And if someone touches your luggage, you gotta tip em, that's the rule. So fine, here's $10 for taking my suitcase out of the back of the car. And then they say, we'll send it right up to the room. And I say, no, I'll bring it up to the room myself because I don't want to have to wait for no, it's already on the way up. And then it's like, okay, that's $20 more. And that feels like again, if I were going out of town one weekend per year.

[Dax Shepard]

You're checking into a hotel every day?

[David Sedaris]

Day. Yeah. I'm not that person who says, yeah, sorry, I don't have any cash on me because I go and I find the ATM that will let me have $5 bills and then $10 and I pick them and I constantly have my money ready and have it down and you just me over for tomorrow.

[Dax Shepard]

I think a lot of this is just like how frequently you travel. If you only hear, how was your flight, how was your trip? Welcome in. You only hear that. So twice a year, it's not even going to register. But it's the repetition that starts driving you mad, I think. And so my issue with the bag thing, when we pull up to a hotel, I'm fine with tipping. In fact, it's like a thing I get off on. I just, I don't need that. I can handle this bag. I don't want to be separated from it. It has my journal in it. This is all these reasons why I don't want a bunch of different people getting it to the room. And it seems insane because I can manage it. So I have a couple built in ones that work so perfectly if I'm with my children, I go, no, no, they gotta learn to handle their own business. Thank you. Right. So they go, oh, cool. He's trying to teach his kids, not be brats. And the other thing you can say, and this one works so well, David, is they go to grab my thing and I go, oh, I'll take it. My mother would be so disappointed if I didn't carry my own stuff. And then they go, oh, okay, yeah. He's just trying to like live up to what his mom expects of him. So it takes all of us out of the equation. Like if you got beef with somebody, it's my mom. Or if you got beef with something, it's my kids, it's not me.

[David Sedaris]

Okay, you're going to your room and you don't have that much time, but you can't take a shower on a trip like this. Yesterday I got in from the airport and I had 15 minutes before I had to leave for the bookstore.

[Dax Shepard]

Stressful.

[David Sedaris]

And so I had to take a shower. I can't be waiting for you to bring my luggage. I don't have that amount of time. And then I get off on tipping people too. But then it's like I told you, I tipped that guy for open. Opening the trunk of the car. Basically.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

So again. And I know people have to make a living and when you complain about that, people are like, you're a dick. You know, but if it's your life and if you're traveling constantly, that's the thing too. I'm in Vancouver the other day, this car meets me at the airport and he says, how was your flight? I said, you're better than that. I said, you know, that's a nothing question. And I said, you're better than that. And I had had the best conversation with this guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you?

[David Sedaris]

Oh my goodness.

[Monica Padman]

After that, right? Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Because I said, you're not opening a door with that question. And I say, my flight's fine, and you say perfect or whatever and then we're done.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a cul de sac.

[David Sedaris]

And even when I was in the airport 12 hours, how was your flight? I'm not gonna. Because I say I was in the. Oh, poor you.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah. Travel these days, these airlines.

[David Sedaris]

I was in a car last month and the guy said, I think we met once before. I was in Cleveland and I took you to such and such. I had my computer and I said, oh, right, you've got three sisters and you. Like I've written down, if I were him, I would have been a little bit afraid at all the stuff that I had written in my diary about him. But he was completely interesting guy. Yeah, I had this driver a while ago. He, he was divorced and he said, we're driving and it's like a four hour car ride and we're somewhere in the Midwest. And he said, do you want to go to lunch? You know, which just wouldn't happen. He said, I know this drive in. And he said, it's clown themed. Not a drive in a diner. It's clown themed diner. Anyway, so we went because it was just so unheard of for a driver to say, like, do you want to have lunch? My schedule that day. I couldn't think of anything better than to go to a clown themed diner with a stranger, with this guy who wants to do standup. And I didn't have to fake laugh or anything like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Do you ever feel stuck in those situations? Like you're at this diner with this person, you're not worried, like I'm going to want to go and how will I get out of this? Or how will I tell him it's time for us to go? I would get really in my head about that.

[David Sedaris]

Oh, I didn't worry about that again, I think because.

[Dax Shepard]

And this is my hunches, like you're kind of always on the hunt for a story, right. Like this is your business, you write about stuff. So any situations potentially fodder for work, you can always frame it that way.

[David Sedaris]

This guy who I travel with sometimes, lovely guy, but he wouldn't ever think to talk to the guy driving the car to the airport. Never think to do it. We were in the Midwest and the weather was just horrible and there were no flights. All the flights from the airport were canceled. So he said, we gotta get a private plan plane. We got a private plane. And it sat like 10 people. And I said, let's bring eight people with us. That's nice because no one's leaving here. But if you said to people, you know, I can get you to Louisville, Kentucky, I bet some people. And he said, no, they might talk too much. And I'm forever angry at myself for not saying it doesn't matter if they talk too much because it would be such a nice story for those people. Then these guys came up and next thing we knew we were on a private plane. Because most people don't get to ride in a private plane.

[Monica Padman]

No, never.

[David Sedaris]

And it was going to cost the same amount regardless, so why not?

[Monica Padman]

You would have given them a story

[David Sedaris]

for their bring people with you. But anyway, it comes down to waste again. Why are you going to waste that tumor? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

When this. It would make this Godzilla's day.

[David Sedaris]

There's hungry turtles out there.

[Dax Shepard]

I joined Kristen. She had a press junket down in Cancun one time this years and years ago, probably 15 years ago ago. And we went down there and so I have nothing to do all day, but they've given her a driver. And then I have a friend who's just in Cancun. He's like, oh, you gotta go to this one restaurant. It's this Old, old restaurant. It's legendary. It's super nice. So I asked the driver in the morning, like, hey, do you think you could take me to this restaurant? He's like, oh, you're gonna love that restaurant. It's the most famous restaurant in town. I go, okay, so I'm gonna meet him at noon. And then the whole ride to the restaurant, the guy's like, I take a lot of people, this restaurant. He's gonna tell me about the restaurant.

[David Sedaris]

Restaurant.

[Dax Shepard]

And then as we pull up, I said, you've eaten here? Yeah. And he goes, oh, no, no, I've never eaten here. And I go, oh, well, come on in, let's eat here. And he's like, no, no, no, absolutely. Come on, dude. If you've never eaten here and you've come here a bunch of time, let's go. So I have lunch with this guy and it's super fun. And then when we get out, he very much wants to, like, reciprocate. So he's like, anything I can do for you that you want? That was just so nice. And I go, yeah, I want to see where everyone that works at these hotels lives. Like, I see the presentation, but I want to see, like, where do y' all live and what's going on? He's like, oh, great, yeah, I'll take you to where I live. And so we're driving around in this little neighborhood, and then he goes, oh, yeah, my girlfriend lives right up here. And I go, oh, cool. And he goes, can we say hi to her? I go, yeah, absolutely. So then we pull into this, you know, it's a little cinder block house about the size of this studio. And we kind of just walk in because it's his girlfriend, and she's like, in a sports bra and, like, whatever. She's not dressed for company, let's just say. So they start speaking in Spanish, and you can tell she's so confused, like, why is this tall white dude in my house? And then he goes, oh, she really would like a photo with you. Can she have a photo? And I go, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I don't know how this happened, David, but somehow the photo was I sat in the chair by the computer and I thought she was going to stand next to me. And then she just kind of sat on my knee. And so now I'm in this photo with a Mexican girl in a sports bra in a small house. And I came back to the hotel, I said to Chris, and I go, hun, potentially a photo may emerge that looks very, very Guilty. I don't know how I ended up in this photo, but I did take a photo with a woman in a sports bra.

[David Sedaris]

I never learned to drive a car, and so I've never been in a car by myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have nightmares that you'll have to drive?

[David Sedaris]

Oh, yeah, yeah. But it's like, with you being in a car, I mean, I can see how somebody listening would be like, fuck all y', all, you know, like, oh, I wish I had a driver. But it's like when you go on tour, so a car is going to meet you at the airport and take you to the hotel.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't do the job without it.

[David Sedaris]

No, it's not a stretch limo.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, right.

[David Sedaris]

But it's a car service. But if you were renting a car and you're just driving it, you're guaranteed, you know, unless you get a flat tire or something, there's not going to be anything to talk about, but. But there's a potential there to have a really nice conversation with a stranger and to learn something. To me, that's what it's all about, is to.

[Monica Padman]

You're just so curious.

[David Sedaris]

Touch somebody to get evidence that they're a person, and then they get evidence of that view as well. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I love it. Tell me about the evolution of. Of everyone in your stories is real life, people in your life. And I think, of course, you're hardest on yourself. You expose all of your own warts the most, but also you just tell it like it is between you and Hugh. You'll tell it like it is with your sisters and your brothers and your dad and your mom. How has that evolved? At the beginning, when people get mad at you, what's the unspoken rules about how you write about people?

[David Sedaris]

Well, my brother, like, for instance, we had an argument about something in 2016, and then he said he didn't want me to write anything about him. Anyway, it took a long time to get beyond our argument. Like it wasn't worth estrangement. I wouldn't say we were ever estranged, but I would say maybe it was strained for a few years.

[Dax Shepard]

He's a lot younger than you.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How much younger?

[David Sedaris]

11 years. And then I had a show in Raleigh and everything I read featured him. And he came, oh, yeah. And he was so happy. But again, the laughs that he got were his laughs. People weren't laughing at him. They laughed at the things he said that he knows are funny, but he's not gonna get up on stage and do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[David Sedaris]

He's not a writer.

[Dax Shepard]

So he's learned to enjoy that, probably through getting to experience the live show.

[David Sedaris]

I think when he said, I don't want you. Right. I knew what he meant. He was afraid I was going to write certain things about him to make

[Dax Shepard]

him look stupid or something.

[David Sedaris]

No, no. Just identify him in a way that, you know, if you have a business, people are just so quick to then write you off.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but he's such a wonderful character in your life because he's 11 years younger than you and he is the prototypical Raleigh dude. Right. He did perfect in that situation. He and your father were best friends. Like he said, that's my best friend. When he was dying.

[David Sedaris]

Paul can speak to men in a way that I can't. You know, he can just speak their language.

[Dax Shepard]

He's very colorful in the way. Unless you're putting words in his mouth. He also has a very unique way of communicating. He's got tons of brilliant little sayings and colloquial things. Right.

[David Sedaris]

Plus, he had a floor sanding business, so he was hanging out with people from the country. You know, if there's grass on the field, I'll play. You know, people who say stuff like that. He's got an ear and he's always known what's funny.

[Dax Shepard]

Has there ever been tension, though, where people really didn't like it and they confronted you about it, or has everyone made peace with it?

[David Sedaris]

I give it to them first and say, is there anything you want me to change or get rid of?

[Dax Shepard]

And how often do they flag something?

[David Sedaris]

I'm trying to think.

[Dax Shepard]

I bet it's the same ratio of our show. We let people cut out anything they want to cut out. And I bet it's 1 in 10 interviews where someone does have something they want cut out.

[David Sedaris]

I mean, most of the people who have said to me, I don't want you writing anything about, I wouldn't have written it anyway. It's just not interesting. It's the same way that quite often if someone comes to get a book signed and they say, I've got a funny story to tell you, it's not funny. But if you're just having a conversation, sometimes they'll say things that are just amazing. Like, you just hit the right.

[Monica Padman]

Because they're just being themselves. They're not trying. So did you. Did you date a lot before Hugh? Because I feel like dates must have been hard.

[David Sedaris]

No, I had a boyfriend before I met Hugh that I was with for six years, and then. Oh, there. I had, like, a little awkward rebound after that. But it was before I had published anything. And then I met Hugh.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Because I was like, people must just constantly. I can just imagine these dates where they're trying to prove to you that they are so funny. And that would be miserable.

[David Sedaris]

I think it would be hard to date somebody, period. It'd be hard to date somebody, period. But like if you all of a sudden went on the dating.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Sedaris]

You know, people knew who you were, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's hard.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you know that everything that happens in bed, they might tell a tabloid at some point. So you're like, wow, I gotta keep that in the back of my mind until you really feel like you could trust a person who's never gonna do that.

[David Sedaris]

And I've never written anything about, you know, even my ex boyfriend. I've never written anything about our sex life. I've never written anything about Hugh. Our sex life?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You know, the line you don't wanna cross.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think the most info you've ever given us about you and Hugh's sex life is Tiffany called you one time and said, there's a man that wants to find her up the ass with a strap on. And do you know if Ambesol reduces anal pain? And you said, you're asking the wrong person. And then she said, well, put Hugh on. He said, it's still the wrong house. Call someone else.

[David Sedaris]

That's one thing. You never want to know that about someone in your. Your sister. You never want to know about your sister's sex life.

[Dax Shepard]

You said in the fact that it was formal, money shouldn't matter, but it did. I got curious about your sleep schedule now that I've read so much of your stuff, because so many of your stories will involve a walk that starts at 1am in New York or you're working on something at the house in England at three in the morning. Do you have a normal thing? Does it evolve a lot?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, I mean, it changes a lot. Like in England, quite often I'll go out, out at midnight and I'll walk to the train station and pick up trash. That's like, I don't know, two hour walk maybe. And then I come home and I'm up for a while. So, you know, I'll go to bed at 3 and wake up at 10 and.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have any guilt? Do you care about what your sleep schedule is? Do you just follow whatever your desire is? Like, I want to go for a walk right now and I'll wake up when I wake up.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, I just became free a couple days ago, because the past almost four years, then let's say I wake up at 10. My Duolingo XP boost would expire at noon. So that would only give me, like, just under two hours. And then I have to cash in that XP boost. And because I needed to be in the top three in the Diamond League, that takes me an hour.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, right.

[David Sedaris]

And then I said to somebody ten days ago at a bookstore, I said, does anybody know how to turn off the leaderboard for Duolingo? And this woman said, I can do that for you, and turned it off. And now I have no idea what league I'm in. I have no idea my ranking. I was competing against people who maybe don't even exist.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[David Sedaris]

So now Duolingo says, I want you to do this, this, and this today. And it might be take 15 minutes, it might take 20 minutes. And I say, you got it, and I'm free. I mean, it was ruling my life.

[Dax Shepard]

This is one of my questions. Is Duolingo. So people that have read your previous books or have even listened to episodes that we've all done together, you were deeply addicted to your Fitbit, which then turned into your Apple Watch. And this commitment to get 10 miles a day, which is how many steps? Like 20,000 or so.

[Monica Padman]

More than that, probably.

[David Sedaris]

Let's see, 30,000.

[Dax Shepard]

What's 10 miles?

[David Sedaris]

10 miles? Well, let's see. I've walked almost five miles today. Step wise, I'm at 10,000. So, like 20,000. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Nice. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So that was your obsession, and that was taking up a huge chunk of your day. And then came Duolingo, and that has its same weird addictive properties. Why is it that that thing has insisted you in the same way as the Fitbit?

[David Sedaris]

Well, I had to be in the top three. Right. A normal person might, and it's complicated, but a normal person might have 300 extra points. the end of the week, I would have 27,000.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[David Sedaris]

And what it meant, too, is that I'd go back to it in the evening. And so after a while, you weren't even learning anymore. But the problem was that I would do it. I'd go to the airport, and I do it at the airport, you know, if I was on tour. And then I do it walking home from the fitness center when I was in New York, or walking. And then I was that person on the street with the device in his hand looking down. And I was so ashamed of myself being that person. And that's what I'm free of.

[Dax Shepard]

You had Become what we call an addiction. Cross addicted. You're now using your duolingo and your fucking steps obsession all at the same time. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

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[David Sedaris]

Sex.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you care or do you explore what's going on? Why you're susceptible to that. Well, let's start with. Do you admit and acknowledge this is peculiar behavior?

[David Sedaris]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[David Sedaris]

Because I know so many people who do duolingo, and they do it like my friend Dave, like, oh, I did what they asked me to, and now I'm.

[Monica Padman]

I don't care about being in the top, whatever.

[David Sedaris]

But again, if I was spending an hour and a half a day and if my German was like, oh, my God, your German's perfect. Yes, it might be different, but the way to get points is to have a conversation. You can have the same conversation over and over and over and over. Right. And then you're getting 180 points a pop. And that's what I was doing.

[Dax Shepard]

That's where the money's at. So you would. You would admit the goal of being fluent in a language is kind of secondary to this weird point structure you've been roped into?

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And do we just think it's the addictive brain or do you have a different explanation?

[David Sedaris]

No, it's addictive brain.

[Dax Shepard]

That's all we're trying to do is plug something in that won't kill us.

[David Sedaris]

But what's interesting to me is that there's something common. Something's coming my way, and I can't begin to guess what it is. But it's like, before someone gave me a Fitbit, it never occurred to me that I would have to walk like that. And before someone turned me on to duolingo, I had no. No idea. So it's not over.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. It'll just move to something else.

[David Sedaris]

But I cannot right now tell you. I haven't been introduced to it yet, but it's gonna be awful.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think it's amusing or annoying for our partners? Because Kristin seems to roll it out in dinner party conversations is. It's kind of amusing, which is she has seen me be addicted to the weirdest stuff. I had a phase where it was toothpicks, right. It was tea tree oil toothpicks. But I wanted the strongest tea tree oil. So I was getting them from Australia, where they had have, like, probably an illegal level of tea tree oil that would be permitted here. And I chewed them so much that I started to get scabs around the corner of my mouth. It was, like, deteriorating my skin. And then I switched to Hall's mentalyptis. I got addicted to those for a while. And I was eating a family pack a day. I'd have to go to CVS once a day and get my family pack. And, you know, she just gets to sit on the sidelines and watch this madness. And it'll just be like four months of this. And then I finally get my arms around that, and then a new one just pops up.

[David Sedaris]

Hugh hated Duolingo. But no, I'll do the same. Like, my brother gave me these little lozenges and stuff. Then I have to have 15 packs of them.

[Monica Padman]

Were they minty?

[David Sedaris]

No, they were very medical tasting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

And then it's all about that. And then it goes away and then something else takes its place.

[Monica Padman]

I wonder what it's gonna be.

[Dax Shepard]

We're both ex smokers. Have you ever considered giving getting readdicted to nicotine because there's so many safe delivery systems now.

[David Sedaris]

No, I feel free.

[Dax Shepard]

You do?

[David Sedaris]

It feels so free not to be dependent on cigarettes and not to be dependent on alcohol. And I feel that free. Like I'm released from duolingo. And again, I'm still. I'm learning more now.

[Dax Shepard]

Turning off the leaderboard led to that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Point system got taken away, but. But that's so funny to me. Cause all it did was take that. All she had to do was remove that. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm good now. Instead of ruminating, oh, do I want to get back on the leaderboard? Like, that's addiction. I feel like, like, oh, I kind of want to go back to it. I want to see if I can. That's crazy to me that she's just like, yeah, I removed it and now you're good.

[David Sedaris]

Well, I asked her to remove it. And then I don't know if it's because I'm on a book tour. And so I don't need to be number one on Duolingo to feel good about myself.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. Self esteem.

[David Sedaris]

You know that I'm getting rewarded for my book. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Have they approached you about being an ambassador to the product or a paid spokesperson? Because you now write about it so much, I feel like they should employ you.

[David Sedaris]

I think not. Because I write about it in a cautionary way. I think.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, another thing, and I know this is all annoying to be be armchair psychologized from afar, but I wondered if the C section and the art collection are subtle fuck yous to your dad. Meaning your dad always promised the family you guys would get a vacation house on Emerald Isle, and he just never delivered on that. And you got to deliver on that while he was alive. And then he also loved paintings and collected a bunch of artwork. And then you got to do that, but you got to Collect kind of real artwork.

[David Sedaris]

When it comes to the artwork, like, I remember I was in Greece with my dad, and we were in this tourist town. And then my dad's like, this guy, I might buy one of his paintings. It'll really escalate in value. And I said, dad, there's that guy in every town this size in the world. Like, his work is never going to escalate in valuable. My father would never give me that. He would never give me that. Like, the artwork that he bought in Raleigh, there was that in every town the size of Raleigh. Do you know what I mean? Like, that doesn't mean that it's not.

[Dax Shepard]

There's nothing special or unique about it.

[David Sedaris]

But because he didn't get out and he didn't go to museums and he didn't read things and look at things, he didn't know that. And also, he didn't want to spend the money. Right? And there are people who will. Gosh, there's this Salman Tour. I bought a Salman Tour painting. Who's this fellow from Pakistan. And, gee, you can't even touch his stuff now. And I just got some early on. And two museums have borrowed it so far, but I don't do that too often. But I don't buy things as an investment. But my father, I would say, you know, like, I went to art school. Like, this has been an interest of mine since I was 14. I think I know more than you do, but just someone not giving you that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Not saying, yeah, you're right, it is frustrating.

[David Sedaris]

And at the beach house, he would go to the beach and he'd say, what do you say we get a house on the beach? And we were so excited. And we get a real estate agent and go look at places. And there was always a reason that we didn't get it. Instead, we was going to put a bar in the basement. And we fell for it again and again and again as adults. We all went to the beach. We hadn't been together at the beach in a long time. And then the third day I was there, Hugh made an appointment with the real estate age, and we bid on a house. And by the fourth day, we had a house. And my father's like, you can't do that. You know, what about the roof? I said, if the roof needs replacing, I'll replace the roof. I'm not gonna let it stop me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you're just, like, closing the loop on the things he likes.

[David Sedaris]

But you didn't ask about the air. How old's the air conditioner? I said, don't care.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You had a reader, a guest that wrote you a letter and said, I wanna come to a live show, but I have Tourette's. A woman.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you said, of course. Come to the show. And then she was sitting in the front row. What ended up happening? I saw you talking about a talk show, but I knew there you had to stop short of what was probably happening.

[David Sedaris]

She said, I have Tourette's and I want to come to your show, but I don't want to be the show. And I was a little bit insulted because I know when there's some with Tourette's in the audience, you know, you figure it out pretty quickly, Right. At first you're like, thrown, and then you think, oh, no, it's somebody with Tourette's. So she came and she was in wheelchair and she sat in the front row. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, fat. You know the guy at the BAFTA awards?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Sedaris]

And I was stunned by the ignorance that came out of that. People. Well, he should have said, why didn't he say strawberry? Because he had Tourette's. And he's got to say the most offensive thing possible. Right?

[Dax Shepard]

That's what the condition is.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. And so when she called me and I wasn't offended in the least bit because you knew the situation, that's what she has to call me.

[Dax Shepard]

So this is fascinating because I had a different take, which is simply there are some things that you have that preclude you from going places. And that's just how life is. And it's like when men become trans women, they accept out of the gates, I'm going to be a woman, but I'll never give birth. That's just off the table.

[David Sedaris]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So my issue is, like, I'm so sorry. The one thing you can't do when you have Tourette's is attend a televised fucking performance where there's going to be black folks on stage. Guess what? You have to recuse yourself from that situation.

[David Sedaris]

But his movie was nominated. I know.

[Monica Padman]

That was so tricky.

[David Sedaris]

So it was like his big night.

[Dax Shepard]

Then. They should have had him backstage so he could experience the night. But we got the exact outcome we were always going to get. So why did we do that?

[David Sedaris]

I don't know. I guess I was more inclined. Like, this is somebody's special needs night. Do you know what I mean?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, a lot of people, but we elevated one person's special night among 10. I don't think we can prioritize one person over 20.

[David Sedaris]

Okay, how about this?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, here we go.

[David Sedaris]

You can come. We're going to put a sock in your mouth like five times. Yeah, okay. We're going to put a sock in your mouth.

[Dax Shepard]

Anytime marginalized people are on stage, you got to put a ball gag on.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah, maybe that's a good idea.

[Dax Shepard]

That could be a happy. Do you. They cut to the audience. There's too many people in bulk. And you start putting together the pieces. Like, wow, every time there's a marginalized person on stage, those persons have their ball gag on.

[David Sedaris]

Because I guess I was thinking of it too. Like, let's say that it was somebody who was quadriplegic. Like, well, now we'd have to put a ramp on, you know, so better you're not calm, but instead, now we would build the ramp, you know, we would never think, well, you have to stay home. Right, right.

[Monica Padman]

I see both because I agree that, like, should Michael B. Jordan, does he have to stand up there and pretend like he's not hearing anything when the N word is being shouted at him?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Is this like his right against him?

[David Sedaris]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's just to me, at some point, you look at it in a utilitarian way. Like how many people were made uncomfortable versus how many got to live out their dream.

[David Sedaris]

I was given an award by the BBC, like a month after that. And then the guy got up there, the host, and he said, a BBC award show. What could go wrong?

[Dax Shepard]

You have agreed shamelessly. Asked you to read something from the new book, a very short one that I love. But before we do that, I just want to kind of publicly fellate you over. I think the story that I am most in love with that I've listened to the most time. And I think I told you my kids like the most, too, which scared me the first time I heard it with my kids in bed is Lady Marmalade. You say marmalade. I've heard you pronounce it Marmalade.

[David Sedaris]

I was taking it from the song. Yeah, from the LaBelle. So song.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But for people who haven't read it and it's in Happy Go Lucky. It's the most incredible story in my opinion, because it has every single thing. It's an exploration of how kind of bizarre your father was and at many times, kind of creepy and perverted. In particular, there was a time where you had a stomach ache and he suggested perhaps you have hemorrhoids. He was suspicious you had hemorrhoids. God knows why. I don't think those are comorbidities. But he implores you to bend over the sink, and he starts studying your anus. And you say he's studying it in the way that could only be described as someone might look at a gem. So, you know, this is a weird activity.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But he's also not a predator, and he's not an abuser. He's just this weird middle ground of, like, we don't know what we file this person under. Right. And that is how people are. They're weird. They're. It's not binary. They're not. Not, like, totally bad or not. It's like. It's even harder. It's like, is dad weird or not? But then, of course, Tiffany, who has her own struggles, she ends up accusing your father of having molested her. And she's uncovered repressed memories, but she's not sure what they are and what you do so beautifully. And I think the reason you can explore all of it in a way that's not terribly offensive. And even you say, I recognize that in an era of me, too. What I'm about to say is hopefully hard. But we didn't believe her. And I just. I don't know why that makes me so happy to hear you be honest about how families are. Families are so unique. You know, they're not your relation with the rest of the world. There's things that are fine within a family, and there's this weird, magical relationship between siblings where it's like, we are the meanest to each other. Your sister walks down with a zit, and you're like, whoa, you have a fucking zit. You know, like, you're just so cruel. And then you also kill for them and defend them. And it's just a very specific and unique experience being in a family. And the honesty that you bring to that. I just left that thing going, man. You tackled everything that was hard. And we come out of it, me going like, yeah, he knows what it's like to be in a family. That's what it's like to be in a family. That's the experience right there. And I just love it so much.

[David Sedaris]

I've gotten so many letters from people who have a Tiffany in their family. And they understand how hard it can be because there were certain people who were like, you're disgusting person, you know, you turned your back on your sister, but they don't quite understand, you know, Tiffany called my dad at one point and enlisted a friend to tape the conversation and said, do you think I'm sexy entrapping them? Yeah. Trying to entrap him.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[David Sedaris]

And then when Tiffany died, he never seemed terribly upset about it. I never saw him cry. He said she had a rotten life and that was it. A lot of people always assume that if someone in your family kills themselves, that you're overcome with guilt. Like someone just asked me that last night, do you feel guilty? And I said, for what? For so many people who are mentally ill who wind up killing themselves. I don't know. You'd have to think pretty highly of yourself that you could stop it.

[Dax Shepard]

I also think you and I, as a gift, have the model of addiction, which is we know what it's like to be in a state of mind where nobody can really interfere. You're on your mission and either you will get sick and tired of being sick and tired or you won't. But no one else is going to interfere with that. And I think once you understand that, it's easier for you to apply it to people and have a little healthier distance from it and not the illusion that you can fix it.

[David Sedaris]

Sometimes be like, I can't be around it, you know, I just can't.

[Monica Padman]

That's the reality of mental illness. That. Yeah. If you don't have anyone in your life who's experienced it, you wouldn't know. Like, yeah, sometimes you have to walk away from that person, which does sound really mean, but. Or you will die. It's a survival mechanism sometimes to walk away.

[David Sedaris]

And I'm sure my father, you know, from Tiffany, calling and accusing him of, you know, again, like, my dad was a creep. Just because you're a creep doesn't mean you're a pedophile. It doesn't help your case any.

[Monica Padman]

Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

There's some inconvenient history here. Okay. So if you're open to it, I would love for you to read Punching Down.

[David Sedaris]

Sure. Let's see. Here we go. Gosh, I haven't read this. Well, I read it on stage when I recorded the audiobook and I think that was the last time. I haven't read it out loud on the book tour. When I first moved to New York in 1990, I knew a total of five people. They all had lives of their own. I couldn't just plop myself down and demand their attention. So I signed up for a once a week class taught at the Westside ymca, hoping I could make a friend or two there writing funny. The course was called, and it was taught by a British woman named Frida Garmeis, who was maybe in her mid-60s at the time and had published several books. What are the rules of comedy writing? She asked at the start of our first session. I put my hand up. Up. You should never make fun of anyone who has less power than you. Frida looked at me with a combination of disgust and pity. Where on earth did you get that idea? She asked. I groped for an answer. The Village Voice, maybe? No, no, no, she said. The only rule in comedy is that you should always be as tasteless as possible. I think about that moment a lot, especially now, when the phrase punching down has become ubiquitous. It's the worst crime a comic or humor writer can commit, at least according to the people who now decide such things, meaning people on X who determine, based, I suppose, on your photo and a wild guess at your net worth, who you can and cannot make jokes about. Words we are now regularly reminded are violence silences as well. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying attention to them. A friend recently called on one of her assistants to deliver a statistic during a business meeting and was later charged with casual violence. Apparently Debra needed to give advance warning. Warning that she was going to ask a question, one that might possibly put her employee, someone who was well paid to know stuff and be able to spew it forth on the spot. Who are these hot house flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded people whose parents never hit them? That's him. People who don't know what real pain is but still want to throw the word around. When I was a child, the slap across the face was too minor to qualify as casual violence. It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up. It never hurt all that much. What stung was the swiftness of it, the surprise. Who knew my mother could move so fast, like someone belted in the martial arts? I don't feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little. Blood was rarely drawn. No limbs were broken. Could my parents have made their point without resorting to violence? Probably, but it would have taken more time, and with six kids to dress and get out the door, that was a precious commodity. I see parents now who worry they're being abusive if they don't spend at least an hour putting their child to bed. An hour. I said to my sister, Amy, do you remember ever once being tucked in in? Can you imagine mom and dad reading to us or singing? Can you imagine them kissing us? Ugh, she said. Stop. Look at us. We're fine. We can handle stuff. We never get offended by anything. Part of this is that there were so many of us. A child needs brothers and sisters. The more the better. Good siblings will press your favorite doll's face onto a red hot barbecue. You then steal the money the tooth fairy left under your pillow. They'll deposit things inside of you when you're four, then sleep with your boyfriend 12 years later. We'll in short, prepare you to live in the real world. Better still, they'll dilute the Eye of Sauron like attention given to an only child. My mother couldn't remember our names half the time, much less care whether we we felt anxious or depressed. One of the worst things that's happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer kids than they did in the past. Sure, it's good for the environment. Fewer people means less demand for resources. The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least 12 times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated, and it gives them an outside sense of their own importance. Our parents thought we were okay at best, and I think that really helped us in the long run. Ask someone now if they have kids and they're pretty much guaranteed to use the word amazing, as in I have an amazing six year old daughter. Amazing because she just discovered a cure for Ms. Or because she speaks three words, words of Spanish. I always want to ask, I mean, just how low have you set that bar? The solution isn't for every couple to start having five kids, but maybe for one chosen couple to have five and the other four couples to go without either have a full litter you can't dote on or nothing at all. If our schools are a mess, it's in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contact, contradict their brilliance if you give them a bad grade, or God forbid, try to take their phones away. Had one of my teachers told my mother that I was acting up in class, she'd have said, thank you so much for letting me know. Then she'd have come to wherever I was in front of the TV or at the side of the TV making my way to the front of it, and slapped my sister, grand Gretchen, so hard her eyes would have crossed. What was that for? Gretchen would have asked. Oops, wrong kid, my mother would have said. Then she'd have slapped me twice as hard to make up for my mistake. I was in Los Angeles not long ago, staying at a hotel in Bel Air. Houses in that neighborhood start at $20 million, so of course there are no sidewalks. You wouldn't want the wrong people wandering. So I was on the far edge of a winding street, Porsches and BMWs racing by, when I saw a van sized private school bus pull up in front of a gated mansion. A mother ushered her child, age 7 or so, through the door as I passed. I walked on for another five minutes before turning back, surprised to see that the school bus hadn't moved and the time had been gone. Rather, it was where I had left it, the engine idling, the mother still at the door, mewing over the sound of her crying child. Well, Atticus honey, where do you want to sit? Said the bus driver. And all these kids had to wait until this one woman's son was happy with his seat. I think that if you don't want to spank or slap your child, that is fine, your decision, but that other people should be completely allowed to not higgledy piggledy. But in this situation, the driver had every right to yank Atticus into whichever seat was empty, saying, shut the fuck up. We're leaving. Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left. Had I arrived at my elementary school with a bleeding head wound, explaining that my father had just thrown me out of his moving car because I was teasing my sister, the teacher would have handed me a band bandaid, saying, well, I hope you learned a lesson now. Even a scratch on the back of your hand could get your parents locked up for abuse. And children know this. In a London park one afternoon, I saw a woman glaring into the distance to where three kids age 7 to 9 were breaking branches off a tree. Hey you boys. She shouted. Stop doing that. You can't talk to us. The ringleader shouted back. And he was right. At least legally. According to the law, the woman was bullying. I was in a crowded restaurant one night and saw this four year old running back and forth across the candlelit dining room. Her parents charmed this as servers were carrying heavy trays of hot food. I kept waiting for the manager to say something, but they're all afraid now of being condemned on social media. Media. She didn't seem innately horrible, this girl, but I think we'd all have been better off had someone said, you sit down right now. In this case, though, it was really the parents who needed to be hit. Ditto the couple I saw the next morning at breakfast. They came with two kids, age maybe 4 and 6, and each of them was watching a different program on an iPad Neither had headphones on and the high pitched voices of the cartoon characters, let's go see what the letter M is up to. Was super disturbing. If this was a sports bar, the sort with billboard sized TVs and loud music playing at the same time, it might have been different. But it was the restaurant of a nice hotel, one that offered room service. Do the parents know that this is not their house? I wondered, thinking finally of a couple I saw on the subway in yokohama once. Their 18 month old son was with with them and when the boy wanted to look out the window, his mother removed his shoes, took a towel out of her bag and spread it upon the seat so that he could stand on it. Just before we reached their station, the woman pulled out a small spray bottle along with a paper napkin and cleaned the kids handprints off the glass. So actually, maybe that's a solution. You have a child or two and then send them off to be raised in Japan until they're 18 or so and have learned proper manners. When they return and you tell them how absolutely awesome and special they are, they will look at you in blank, not understanding and thus not believing a word of it.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, so good, so good and so true.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, you gotta go. I adore you. It's so fun when you come. I just wanted to update you on something. Another one of my very favorite stories of yours is talking about what we call when we do the prompt foreign objects and bodies, which is what nurses and doctors call anyone who sticks something up their ass. And you have the funniest story about the explanation is always I slip and foul. And that your theory is you could be holding what are you holding at the top of the Empire State Building stairs?

[David Sedaris]

Oh gosh, I could be holding. It's not a rolling pin, is it? Is it?

[Dax Shepard]

It's like a candelabra or something.

[David Sedaris]

I could be holding two candles.

[Dax Shepard]

We could get Delta in here. She has this whole thing memorized as well. But the point is you're holding a ton of and stuff. And you're pretty certain that if you fell down all 96 flights of the stairs when you stood up, you would not have a candle stuck in your rectum. But I just wanted you to know that we do a prompt now. So about once every three months people submit stories of foreign objects and body. And we've now just had our third one comes out on Friday. And you would be fast. I do encourage you to listen to these. It's all nurses and doctors telling the stories and we've heard some that would make your head spin.

[Monica Padman]

They're. There are some next week.

[Dax Shepard]

In fact, the one that's coming out is the woman was calling about one story. And then just as a side note, because I always ask them, like, how many have you seen? They've all seen 40 or 50 of these. It's always men. There's almost never been a woman. That's why it was a sidebar. She goes, well, we did have one woman once and she was a furry. She identified as a furry who was a cat. And when she came in, she had different to admit. She had wanted to experience what it's like to have a litter of kittens to birth kittens. And she had put three kittens in her vagina and they scratched her eye.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we don't know what happened in there.

[Dax Shepard]

We don't.

[Monica Padman]

But she did die.

[Dax Shepard]

She passed from it before she could

[David Sedaris]

hear the pussy jokes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a lot of pussy to be had there. Yeah. It's like, where do we want. We know we're using. Are we going to use it for the cats, for the vagina?

[Monica Padman]

Just so much right there.

[Dax Shepard]

And then one that'll make your husband too is another one told. Another woman came in, she had put three razor blades in her vagina and then super glued her labia shut.

[David Sedaris]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

So she arrives, she announces this. They send her up to surgery. In the meantime, nurse reads her chart and discovers she has Munchausen. And when you have moonshousings, there's a very specific protocol for the doctors because they don't want to give you the payoff you're looking for. So you have to be kind of disinterested. Not a lot of follow up questions. Don't offer more services if they'll try to get you to like feed them and do all this stuff and you have to resist. So the woman comes out of surgery. So they don't want her to stay because they know she wants to be there forever. So they're going to discharge her in an hour. She calls the family, come get them in an hour. So she got basically an hour in there. The woman who had been admitted said, can I work on my homework while I'm waiting to get picked up? And the nurse thought, well, how bad could this be? She goes to her book bag that was in a closet. She gets out the one folder she needs. She said she shook it upside down, she got a pen that she felt safe about, gave it to her. She left, got back to her nurse station and in five minutes the bell rang. She went in there and she said, what's going on? She said, I swallowed a razor blood blade. And she goes, where did you get the razor blade? And she held up her binder and she had put a hole at the top of it and hid razor blades in the binder.

[Monica Padman]

Isn't that crazy?

[David Sedaris]

Wow. I was kittens signing books. I met a woman, a dentist, a couple weeks ago. I said, do you see a lot of thrush? It's a bacterial disease that turns your tongue white. And she said, occasionally. She said, but what I notice more often, often is bruising in the backs of women's throats, particularly on February 15th. Yes. No. And I said, I didn't know that the back of the throat could bruise. She said, oh, quite clearly. And there are like spots on the back of the throat when it bruises. And she said, other times I'll notice it. And I'll say, what'd you do last night? And a woman will say, celebrated my husband's birthday or my boyfriend's birthday. Birthday. But why don't we know this? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

Because if you were going to go to the dentist tomorrow, wouldn't you be like, not today, Dick.

[Dax Shepard]

Bruises in the back.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Oh, my God.

[David Sedaris]

Can you imagine? Can you imagine, like, somebody doing that? I mean, there must be people who

[Dax Shepard]

have done that before, these nurses and doctors, pretty regularly now. They're seeing every single imaginable thing. Like, if you can think about it, they've seen it.

[Monica Padman]

People like to shock. I mean, that's also a big majority of us just really like shock value.

[David Sedaris]

But I feel like so many of the things people put up their ass and they do it again and again. I feel like if you're a doctor, you could say, you know what? I got people who were in car accidents. You're just gonna have to wait until what time? If it's today. If it's not today, because you put a horseshoe up your ass like something that isn't even conducive.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, David. We've now heard people put, like, whole propane tanks up their ass where now they can't operate on it because there's a hazardous explosive. Like, they gotta get the bomb unit in there. But the thing that makes me sympathetic, the reason I'm so compassionate, is more than half of the stories start with what?

[Monica Padman]

Monica, the wife was out of town.

[Dax Shepard]

More than half are. The wife was out of town's the first bit of information you get. And you think, these poor men have been waiting. They're almost always old.

[David Sedaris]

I spent 10 days at the medical examiner's office in Phoenix. And they take a picture of everyone who comes in. And the wife's out of town. The husband dresses in her clothes. Autoerotic asphyxiation. Accidentally dies. So the wife has no idea, comes back, husband's dead in the closet. Hung himself. Dressed like not dressed like. Not fooling anybody.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Sedaris]

With pantyhose on and a bra and a wig and then hanging dead in the closet. But to find. But nobody. I wrote about that on a radio story once and they cut it out. Nobody talks about. It's an epidemic. Like it never occurred to me. I had to read about it because it never occurred to me. Oh, I know. I'll hang myself while masturbating. That should be fun. And it wouldn't occur to me.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not obvious. Obvious to me.

[David Sedaris]

And maybe they don't talk about it because they don't want people doing it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[David Sedaris]

But so many people do it and they just do it a little bit too long. So when I'm reading the newspaper and it's an obituary for like a 17, 18, 19, 20, or even an older and there's no cause of death, that's

[Monica Padman]

where your mind goes pretty much auto. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They were in pantyhose of brazier.

[Monica Padman]

But it's because they have kinks that they feel embarrassed. They can't tell their partner or do

[Dax Shepard]

it makes me sad.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So then they wait till they're out of town and they die.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. That the moral is a wife should never go out.

[Dax Shepard]

I literally.

[Monica Padman]

That's what we were like.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, if you're over 50, you cannot leave your over 50 year old husband at home. God knows what you'll come home to. David, I adore you. I just want to join your life. I want to retire and then just go on the road with you and be dawn and just help with the book signings or something. So just that offers on the table if you ever. If she wants to sit out sometime and you just need a right hand man for free.

[David Sedaris]

Well, you know what? I'm coming back. I have a show in Pasadena in the fall.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you do? Okay. I would love to be your assistant.

[David Sedaris]

I'm gonna need somebody to go down that line.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I would love that.

[Monica Padman]

That would be fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, I would love that. Okay. I adore you.

[Monica Padman]

I know you're so excited.

[Dax Shepard]

Your first parasaurus relationship and real life relationship. It's confusing and exhilarating. So I can't wait for you to come back. Okay. Oh, everybody get the land and Its people. It's fucking brilliant. Brilliant as are all of them. Fifteen in a row that are brilliant. Is incredible. The land and its people. It's out now. Get it? He is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. Thank God Monica's here.

[David Sedaris]

She's gotta let him have the facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Hello, Monica. Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hello, Dax Shepard. We're back, baby.

[Dax Shepard]

We're back. Did you have any, any anxiety about coming back?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I wouldn't say I had anxiety. Like I didn't have nerves.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But I did have, I did have, you know, an existential crisis.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow, this is great.

[Monica Padman]

Let's get.

[Dax Shepard]

We're starting right away with a crisis. What was it?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I just. We didn't do fact checks, obviously.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

This summer. It's been two months. I haven't seen you in two months. Months.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Darn's nears almost exactly two months.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that's. We don't normally do that. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

We haven't had two months quote off in eight. Over eight years.

[Monica Padman]

No. And even when we do summers, we still do fact checks.

[Dax Shepard]

Remote.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So already rookie mistake. Out of practice. I left my spray inside. Can I quickly grab it?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I won't make it. I won't make it.

[David Sedaris]

I'll back.

[Dax Shepard]

Be right, right back.

[Monica Padman]

That's okay. We're gonna have some stutter. We're gonna have some stutter starts.

[Dax Shepard]

Clumsy moments.

[Monica Padman]

I hope the audience is okay with that. I will say for people who I ran into so many armchairs this summer, it was so lovely.

[Dax Shepard]

All over the world.

[Monica Padman]

Literally all over the world.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And often they would say we're really. We want the fact checks back.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's nice.

[Monica Padman]

And it was very nice. And so I, I thank you. Anywho. Okay. My existential crisis.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, please.

[Monica Padman]

I have still been editing, which maybe this is why I'm still. I've still been connected. I'm still seeing us. I'm still doing some things. Yeah. But normally I'm antsy. I'm ready to be back. I am like feeling nervous that maybe you don't want to be back and you know, all of that.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I gotta tell ya, it flipped on you. I don't know what happened this summer, but I really enjoyed the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, lovely.

[Monica Padman]

Like really too much.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. This is really fun and unexpected because I think we had reverse. Reverse experiences.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah. We need to talk about it. I mean, not that of course I'm happy to be back and I love this channel job. It's so lucky. I honestly, I thought that throughout the whole summer I just kept thinking, ma', am, I. This life, like, what is going on? That I have this job that's allowing me to have months off and enjoy that time.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And like I, yeah, I was just filled with gratitude. But I, you know when you wake up and you're like, just five more minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. You had a five more minutes feeling. Yeah, yeah. So first and foremost, I had an awesome summer. There's no two ways about it. I had an awesome summer. So many wonderful memories. Got to see so many different people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Truly great. Also, yeah, we didn't. And I didn't even edit right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, so I literally could pretend I don't have a job.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And we didn't talk really. Like, we didn't have much face to face interaction at all.

[Dax Shepard]

We just text. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it was peculiar for me. It really was. Because I have this whole fantasy about being retired and unemployed.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And I will say after about four or five weeks, the first thing I thought is like, something would happen and I would be like, oh, I want to talk about it on the fact chat.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

So that's lovely. That's a great feeling to have. Like, oh, I very, very much miss getting to hash stuff out with Monica.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

And then there was more existential stuff happening which was like, oh, wow, okay, so this is what it really looks like. And I guess my best comparison. And by the way, I know I'll change my mind 40 more times, but just currently, today what I felt like is I have quit caffeine in the past and I think maybe the longest would be like three months. And for sure I felt the benefits of it in that I was just way calmer. I was not in a rush to get everywhere. I have far less dust ups with other motorists.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, oh, wow, this is what it's like to be, you know, content, moving through the world. But after about three months of it, I was like, I don't enjoy being on planet Earth as much. Being content. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I'm a little, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Like I just need a ton of stimulation.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I don't know. I have no conclusion. Just I knew. I was like, huh, Could I sit at this house indefinitely just because it's pretty and there's nature? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Which then that makes me really scared.

[Monica Padman]

Well, why it's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because it's such a promising finish line and it's so aspirational. And in my mind, it, like, is one thing.

[David Sedaris]

Thing.

[Dax Shepard]

And then to relearn the lesson you learn in life all the time, which is just like, no, no. Inactivity is not the road, and stagnation's not the route to happiness.

[Monica Padman]

And expectations are not good.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

They are. You just. They're all. You're always going to fall short of an expectation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I was just a little bit like, huh. Now, there was a lot of compounding factors that also added into that.

[Monica Padman]

Do you feel okay to talk about it?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. I will just say in a nutshell. Last year was, of course, so exciting to be in Nashville. No one had ever spent a summer on the lake. I had.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So everyone was just like at a 10 last year. But now kids are older, they're a teenager, and everyone had a good time, but people wanted to come home, you know, like, in fact, Kristen and. And Lincoln came home for a few days.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which then, of course, I mean, that's so complicated for me because I have this big fantasy that everyone's going to love this place and I want everyone to love it as much as me. And I'm like, hold on. Why are people going back?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. That's hard. That's very hard.

[Dax Shepard]

And then reckoning when like, okay, wow. So just forget retirement and let's forget eight years from now. Just next summer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think next summer we'll have the shape that this summer had, which is fine. And yeah. I probably won't be posted up there for that long in a row. Erupted period. For some foreseeable time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And that's okay. But also, it's a year away. We don't know what it's gonna look like.

[Dax Shepard]

We don't. Because last year, of course, I'm like, yeah, we're gonna live there. Yeah. We're gonna sit there in that Eden. We're moving and just be so delighted.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Which might come around again. Who knows? Maybe next summer everyone will be like, we really wanna. Who knows? You know?

[Dax Shepard]

And only one of us in the group is 51 years old. So it's like one of us is also at a different life stage.

[Monica Padman]

That's right. But even. You're saying even for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, again, I can't. I can't really parse out which part is which.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

I just know that I have more questions.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Than I had last year at the end of summer. Which I'm kind of fine with. And then. So then I got back Monday night.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

At like 11 o' clock at night. And I didn't want to leave, you know, I didn't want. In fact, they all came back. Back six days before me.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

We'd always been planning on staying to the date I stayed, but then the girls were like, I don't want to get back and start school the next day. Which is totally fair.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And. And I had scheduled two different friendship hangs during that time. Really insanely special. Both of them were, were so wonderful. But I wasn't dying to get back. And then I, I woke up here yesterday and I was like, pretty good. Can't beat the weather here, man.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean the weather in summer for it to be 82 and it's like, there's no humidity. And I was just.

[Monica Padman]

I have a grievance. Everyone in LA I'm seeing, you know, they're posting and they're like, it's so hot. Like everyone's. I'm like, guys, you do not understand.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't know shit.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because I was in the heat bubble of Europe. You were in some of it too, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I was in Paris when everyone was dying.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was, I was in Hungary, hungry. Yeah. And it was insane. It was a hundred degrees every day in very high humidity. So it was like, it felt life threatening.

[Monica Padman]

And in the south, it's just a different kind of heat. It just is. I was just there and I was like, ah. Like, and I love the heat and it was oppressive and I. And not even close to the same like temperature as it is here. It is technically cooler there, but it is not. And it. You are swimming through the air. So la. You guys, we need to relax. Like, we have it so good here. It's crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it pretty much never gets, it gets ugly at the. In September.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But that's.

[Monica Padman]

Even then.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

So. Yeah. And then I went hiking this morning and I was like, yeah, this place is, it's, it's beautiful.

[Monica Padman]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just immune to it because I've been here for 30 years.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But if you're gone for two months, I'm like, man, it's objectively beautiful here.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

The weather's objectively really nice.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

And my little corner of this city is incredible.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I had my hard shell tacos last night. I was like, oh, that's right. I love it here. I love it here. This is really funny that we had a reversal kind of.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it is funny. Sometimes you have to get Away to have the gratitude for what you know,

[Dax Shepard]

sometimes you gotta lose it to know what you have.

[Monica Padman]

What did they say? Distance makes the heart grow fond.

[Dax Shepard]

It does. It does.

[Monica Padman]

And it does. I mean, even like, being in Europe, which was so fun. Oh, my God. Such. I had such a good time. Paris and London. But then, you know, you do. You. You realize things that you take for granted at home, home being the United States, like starting there. Do realize, like. Oh, yeah. Like. Like, man, they have no urgency. Like, I. I'm like, gonna miss my flight. That's never happened. And it has nothing to do with me. It's because they're just standing there.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Monica Padman]

So, you know, you. You go. Yes. With a lot of fantasy about leaving your life and like, this beautiful other experience and.

[Dax Shepard]

And you can ride it for a long time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, like the same no matter where. Yeah. There you are.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

But that is actually, I think, true, but delayed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You get reprieves from it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, there are four weeks if you get. If you're lucky enough to go to Europe where you're like, oh, yeah, man, I'm European. I'm like. I drink cappuccino all day long. Like, you really can.

[Monica Padman]

So fun.

[Dax Shepard]

You can snap into thinking you're someone different, but then ultimately it creep. Creeps back in.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's really funny because. So Elizabeth and Andy are in Bordeaux. I think I told you they moved

[Dax Shepard]

and they moved there.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, they moved their. For a year. Who knows, and maybe more. Yeah. And I mean, I would definitely urge people to listen to their podcasts because it's, like, funny to hear they're of course, having a great time and it's beautiful and they love it, but moving somewhere is so different from having a vacation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And hearing the kind of struggles is. Is interesting and does make you feel grateful for, like, home. Home is meaningful to me. I've always said that. And I think sometimes I get, like, prickly when other people want to leave you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, sure.

[Monica Padman]

And, yeah, but, man, it was a good summer.

[Dax Shepard]

It was a good summer.

[Monica Padman]

I went a lot of places, but I also had a lot of good time at home.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's attempt to go chronologically, I think.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Oh, wait. Can I say one really, really? The most important thing that happened this summ. Summer.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

My brother had a baby.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Just weeks ago.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

His name is Memphis.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it is. I only heard the nickname, which is so, see, why is his nickname Fizzy? It's so cute.

[Monica Padman]

Because it was Memphis To Fizz from Memphis.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Fizz.

[Monica Padman]

And then Fizz turned to Fizzy. And.

[Dax Shepard]

And your dad's only calling them Fizzy already, right?

[Monica Padman]

Fizzy. He want to start a podcast called Fizzy and Me where he just walks around and talks. And I was like, okay, well, just

[Dax Shepard]

seems like I'm in. I'm in.

[Monica Padman]

I said. He said, It's a 5050 split. I said, that's a pretty good deal considering he's not going to do anything

[Dax Shepard]

other than a visual.

[Monica Padman]

My dad made a good point, though. He said, well, they're. They to see him. And I was like, that actually is true.

[Dax Shepard]

That's solid.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But he's so, so sweet. I got to meet him last week and he's so small.

[Dax Shepard]

How much did he weigh when he was born?

[Monica Padman]

Seven something.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So good size.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And then he's back up in weight. He's doing great. He has great Padman hair. Also. Emily, his wife, also has great hair. Memphis has a lot of good stuff going on.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm jealous. He already has much more hair than I do.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

From the photo I saw, he has

[Monica Padman]

a lot of hair. Yeah, he's really nice. Anyway, that was. That's like, that's a big deal for the family. Everyone's very happy and healthy and good.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it so fun to watch your parents be grandparents?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my gosh. It's so. It's so heartwarming. It's like very.

[Dax Shepard]

I love that there's a buck coming. I can feel it. Your parents, they're going to get no break.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I don't even want to say. Say it because I feel bad.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so cute and endearing.

[Monica Padman]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Of course it is.

[Monica Padman]

I feel bad saying this. Like, I feel like I probably shouldn't say it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Because my, my.

[Dax Shepard]

Let me guess. So just you. You get annoyed sometimes. It was it.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, actually, it's just the baby voice is hard for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, sure. Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

That's all I want to say.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. And that's. That's a standard. That's a well worn grievance for people.

[Monica Padman]

Like we all have baby. We all do a little voice around little babies.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But like, it maybe it's also just. I didn't know that was coming and

[Dax Shepard]

it doesn't feel familiar, like in some deep recess of your brain. It's not how she spoke to you.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's what I mean. Yeah. I said I don't remember this.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you brought it up.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah. I don't know. If it was gentle. Um, but when I first heard it, I, like, snapped my head over at Neil, and I was like, oh, my God. And he was like.

[Dax Shepard]

And did he roll his eye? Like, did you guys share a knowing look?

[Monica Padman]

Well, my mom, because she is the already the best grandma. She lived with them for the first two and a half weeks to help. And she bonded so quickly with Memphis and. Yeah. Fizzy, and he. Yeah. When my mom holds him, he just immediately, like, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Nothing better than being held by grandma.

[Monica Padman]

I know he loves his grandma. Really cute. And so I'm so happy for her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And my dad and all of us. But, like, the voice is just wild and.

[David Sedaris]

Do you. Can you.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think you couldn't do it?

[Monica Padman]

Yes, I can do it, but I won't do it.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not gonna do it for me, obviously. Oh, you won't do it for me off of the air?

[Monica Padman]

I won't. Because I actually. Actually feel guilty.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I know she feels sweet and connected.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And so it feels, like, so mean that I care about that I actually don't care about it, but I. I do bristle every time.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, she's calling attention to herself.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And she should be able to, of course, but your. Your kind of primary wound is. Is the calling attention to yourself, and

[Monica Padman]

she doesn't call attention to herself in life, so.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I would say. That would be one of my criticisms of her. I'd like to see her shining, reserved.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So maybe that's part of it.

[Dax Shepard]

It, like, she's breaking.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. She's uninhibited because this little sweet baby,

[Dax Shepard]

she's filled with the confidence of love.

[Monica Padman]

I know. It's so nice.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

But I just really don't remember.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, she's like. Okay, all right.

[Monica Padman]

It's not that. It's not that. It's. It is specific.

[Dax Shepard]

Could you ask Neil to do a little sly recording just so I can hear?

[Monica Padman]

No, I have a recording of it. I'm not going to play it for me, though.

[Dax Shepard]

You will after the show.

[Monica Padman]

I just feel like it's public. I feel like it's humiliating dating.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm not asking you to do it on here.

[Monica Padman]

No, I mean, between you and.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to know what this is. I'm. Now I'm dying to hear.

[Monica Padman]

I know, I know, I know. I know. It's so bad.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it's so nice and, like, I feel conflicted and bad about it, and she's a great grandma, but I don't even remember it with My brother. I was there.

[Dax Shepard]

You were eight. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So I. That's why it's like, oh, this feels brand new. And I don't get. Get it.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, she said maybe it's reflective of a time, of her life now, maybe.

[Monica Padman]

But she said she did that with us.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, she did.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But you're calling.

[Monica Padman]

I. I. My body does not recognize it, and it's rejecting it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, understood. Anyway, the immune system's deployed.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, everyone's very happy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Great, great, great, great.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, back to. So, okay, beginning of summer. Summer. Let's time travel.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So I think the first. Well, first of all, Idaho was so spectacular. Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You went with the Kimmels.

[Dax Shepard]

Went with the Camels. Ike was a new guest this year, Baron Holtz. We love Ike, who was so much fun. He's ever. And what a perfect fit for that scene. So, yeah, tons of fun with Ike. Just a really perfect time there. Flew to Budapest, and I think my first morning at the hotel. So the Richardson were there a day before us at the hotel. And I come down for breakfast the first morning we're there. We had gotten in really late the night before. My family's not up yet. And I go downstairs. Well, Molly's already there with one of the girls. I can't remember which. And as soon as I sit down, she goes, your friend's here. And I go, what? She goes, your friend is at the Hotel Schwarzenegger. And so I look out the window of the restaurant in the hotel, and there's a little sliver of sidewalk where there's tables. And sure enough, Schwarzenegger's out there playing chess.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

With what appears to be some kind of security.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

A person I've never seen. And just to refresh people's memory.

[Monica Padman]

You love him.

[Dax Shepard]

Twenty years ago, I got invited on a motorcycle ride with him. We got along really well. I started going and bringing him out on stage as he was fundraising. This escalated to me, me literally watching a movie with him at his home, next to him while he was in a bathrobe.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, that's the level of knowing him I knew. Yeah. You know, you spent some time 20 years ago. Okay. So I see him, and I'm so excited. I haven't seen him in, I don't know, 15, 20 years. And so I go out to the little sidewalk where he's sitting, and I noticed pretty quickly as I'm approaching the back of him, there is a dude pushing himself through the little FICA plants because he's seen him from the sidewalk.

[David Sedaris]

Walk.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's actively trying to get his attention, and he's about 2ft away with his head through bushes, this bogey. So he's already kind of ignoring that energy.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And now I come up on the left side of him from behind, and I go, arnold, how's it going? And he doesn't look up at me at all. He just keeps staring at the chessboard. And, like, the bodyguard kind of looks at me. And now I go like, oh, yeah. He's kind of in protection mode. He's, like, blocking out that guy. Me. Whatever.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I put my hand on his shoulder.

[Monica Padman]

It's a real big swing, but it's

[Dax Shepard]

not because I know him.

[Monica Padman]

Did you say it's Dax?

[Dax Shepard]

So I put my hand on my shoulder, on his shoulder.

[Monica Padman]

I go.

[Dax Shepard]

I go, arnold, it's Dax. And I keep thinking he's going to go like, oh. Oh, my God. I didn't know that it was you. How are you doing? What are you doing in Budapest? You know, like, that's coming.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Now I have my hand on his shoulder, and I'm saying, it's Dax. He still does not. Not move his eyes from the chessboard at all. And now the bodyguard is starting to wonder, Right. Is this a problem?

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Arnold clearly doesn't know this guy.

[Monica Padman]

Arnold.

[Dax Shepard]

He's big. I'm a big gentleman, and I'm manhandling now Schwarzenegger, and he gives me this kind of crazy look. And now I kind of assess of. Now we're getting into some tricky situation. Like, the bodyguard's getting nervous. He will not look at me. And then I just go, all right.

[David Sedaris]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Take care. And I. I walk inside, and I. I sit down, and I. I think Molly watched the whole thing. And I go, yeah, dude. He. He either is in. In such a protective mode that he literally blocked me out, or he doesn't have. He doesn't remember me at all.

[Monica Padman]

Or option three, hit me. He's really into the chess game, and that takes so much cont.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I grabbed his shoulder. I. I don't think that one was like that. I think got to be one of the first two.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm not ruling it out.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, now, so I'm having a huge laugh at this. Like, kind of. How embarrassing. So I eat breakfast, whatever. I think it's kind of funny. Then slowly, my family starts trickling. And now Eric's here. Now the whole gang is at breakfast.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And an hour goes by or something. And now he's. Now he's walking. He's entered the restaurant. He's now walking through, and he walks right by our table. And now I think, okay, now he's not playing chess. The other guy's not there. He's looking forward. And I'm with Kristen.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe he has forgotten me, but I bet he knows who Kristen Bell is. Oh, that's my assumption. And so as he's walking by the table, I give it another.

[David Sedaris]

No. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I give it another shot because it's a little. Monica's a little nuts to me that he doesn't remember me.

[Monica Padman]

Put your hands.

[Dax Shepard]

I couldn't. I was sitting. I was seated and he was walking by. Okay, now as he's walking by, go. I go, arnold, I embarrassed you.

[Monica Padman]

So scared.

[Dax Shepard]

I go, arnold, it's Dax and Kristen. I throw Kristen's name in the mix, you know?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And now he just goes, oh, yeah, how you doing? And then he just cruises out.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so he. At least.

[Dax Shepard]

But he didn't. There was nothing. I think he is like, now we're inside the. This hotel. So now I think he's being a little more civil to the riff raff that's trying to get his attention. And so he just. Again, he just cruises out. I see him like two or three more times in the week that we are there, and I don't even fucking try. Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but you said your name.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I don't. Monica. I don't know. I don't know what was going on.

[Monica Padman]

How's your ego?

[Dax Shepard]

It's totally fine.

[Monica Padman]

That's good.

[Dax Shepard]

If anything, it helps answer the question why he's not come on the show when we've invited him and he's gone to other places. I'm like, what's. I don't think he remembers that he knows me, which is fine because I still have all my memories of knowing him.

[Monica Padman]

Can maybe you should send him an email and be like, hey, here's what's going on. This is what's going on. It kind of hurts my feelings a little. And you could make it up to me by coming on my podcast. You know, set some. Do some guilt trips.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, the man has had a life of being being famous.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And Schwarzenegger. I mean, he's so Schwarzenegger.

[Monica Padman]

Who are we?

[Dax Shepard]

Just like the biggest star ever, you know, talking.

[Monica Padman]

Who do we just have on that was in a movie with him and was talking about.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, oh, Scott. No, it was. It was Alan Richson. They have. They have the Christmas movie coming out.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, he said that. Like, he. It's just Another level of fame. And he's pretty.

[Dax Shepard]

He's great. And his description of how he was was not the description I was met with, but who cares? I have. No.

[David Sedaris]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, no. I have zero.

[Monica Padman]

No. I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Frustration with them or judgment or any of this stuff. I'm like, yeah, dude. Dude. This dude's life. It's like he's trying to play chess, and a guy's crawling through bushes, and it's been that way for the last 50 years of his life or whatever.

[Monica Padman]

More than just being famous, he was also a politician. I mean, it's just literally everyone knows him.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. I don't know. It's just interesting that, like, again, back to me evaluating how long I want to do any one thing. I'm like, man, he's been doing this for a long time. There's a lot. A lot of his life is been at hotels in other countries, trying to stay busy until he goes to work and probably not wanting to be at work, but then getting home and be like, I. I don't want to be here either. You know? I don't know. It's just an interesting life that I got to observe. So that was one funny thing that happened right out of the gate.

[Monica Padman]

That is funny.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

There's a ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

What is it?

[Monica Padman]

Okay, because this is for Sedaris.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful.

[Monica Padman]

Our friend. And there's a fact that is a ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Which is. Can you get a stomachache from hemorrhoids?

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Because the father thought the source of his stomachache might be hemorrhoids, even though the boy didn't express there was any hemorrhoids.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And the answer is no. A stomachache is not a direct symptom of hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are swollen veins localized strictly in the rectum and anus. However, they often share a common root cause, such as severe constipation or straining that can trigger both anal discomfort and abdominal cramping at the same time. Now, this is a ding, ding, ding. So why don't you share why this is a ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so I did not have constipation. I had a harness. The first few days I was traveling after Idaho, and, yeah, I had my first hemorrhoid, and let me tell you, I did not enjoy it whatsoever. I see. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor about the things that go on with my body, be it my dead toenails or whatever this. I was like, no, thank You.

[Monica Padman]

And is that because you got worried it had to do with age?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, sure. I'm like, oh, my God, is this my future?

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Have we reached the age where this. Like, I'm gonna battle this now? Yeah. In rapid succession, it's that. Then it's like, I really got to curb my toilet use. I cannot sit there and watch Instagram videos for 45 minutes.

[Monica Padman]

They warn about this.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. And I had just been like, yeah, that's not happening to me. But I'm like, okay, I gotta. I need all new hygiene around this.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then just the feeling is hor. I hate it. I hate it. What did it feel when I touch it? I didn't even like touching it.

[Monica Padman]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

No. And, you know, I like to touch everything.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah. Did it.

[Monica Padman]

I just, like, feel like a bubble? What did it feel like? Yeah, like a bubble, but, like soft or.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, and the initial. I don't know, man. It just. I don't really want to go up.

[Monica Padman]

Is it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's. It's around the edge of. It's a. Yeah. It's a swollen vein that is now coming out.

[Monica Padman]

It's coming out and you can't tell

[Dax Shepard]

if it's part of your. You can't tell if it's part of your anus or if it's coming from inside.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But it was different. And I was like, oh, Lord, Lord. This vacation is all about walking.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

For 10 hours a day.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And walking doesn't feel great.

[Monica Padman]

I have a question. So did. So let's say you're just on the toilet.

[David Sedaris]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's just say this. I took a picture of it when it first happened. I'm like, oh, my God, what is going on down there? I gotta take a picture. Do you want me to put on the tv?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. Throw it up there.

[Dax Shepard]

And I looked at it and it made me. Me immediately depressed.

[David Sedaris]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

I hated how it looked. And I was like, oh, my God, I want to take a flamethrower to my whole butt cheek area. I'm like, I'm disgusting. And I. And. And I'm disgusting. And I looked at the picture and then I erased it.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't even want to. I don't want to see that ever again.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Now, when. When did you notice you had it? You were on the toilet and you were like, ow.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I wiped.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And it was. And it was sensitive and I felt something. Oh, yeah. So. And then ultimately, as you know, then. Then Kristen went into a local pharmacy and bought hemorrhoid cream. For me, Preparation H in a different language. But you can't mistake the labeling and the packaging. Thank God.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, you can see what Preparation H looks like in your head.

[Monica Padman]

I think it has a plus on it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it's like yellow with blue square in the middle. It's very memorable.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You'd see in grandma and grandpa's medicine cabinet.

[Monica Padman]

You know, I didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't? No. The Padmans have never had. Had any hemorrhoid action.

[Monica Padman]

I've never.

[Dax Shepard]

Look at that. Right. Isn't that classic? We're looking at the picture of the preparation age. Yeah. Big yellow box with a nice blue rectangle. An ointment in. In yellow as well. So she got that for me and I was like, God bless you. I would be. I would be so embarrassed buying that.

[Monica Padman]

Really.

[Dax Shepard]

In public. Because everyone looking at me would know I have a hemorrhoid.

[Monica Padman]

Right, right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I was like, you know, hun, there's gonna be a story now that you have hemorrhoids.

[Monica Padman]

Right. But there wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

There wasn't. But then I made one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Then you. Yeah, there is gonna be a story because you made just one.

[Dax Shepard]

I made one, yeah. Yeah. So I made a tabloidy article on AI and it did such a good job. Like, I don't know if you spent any time looking at that post.

[Monica Padman]

I did, because at first I thought I was like, what?

[Dax Shepard]

What? The things it did in the corner, like, it did it just like those tabloids where a little box. It's like Kristen's five tips for whatever. You know, like.

[Monica Padman]

That is pretty. Yeah. This is the one they made. It's up here.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't tell the difference between that and. In fact. Oh, it's on the lower bottom. What's in Kristen's basket?

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

See, on the very bottom next to the picture of the bridge, it says, what's in Kristen's basket?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I see. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because that's what they do in those things. Like, what's in Kristen's basket.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Anyways, I thought it was so funny. I made it just for us.

[Monica Padman]

I know. Well, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I saw how funny it was. And then I was like, no, I'm gonna Definite. Yeah. Because we got such a laugh out of it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, did it work, the ointment,

[Dax Shepard]

insofar as it reduced the symptoms of it, it didn't make it go away right away. It eventually, by the way, it's gone.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, cool.

[Dax Shepard]

It's very gone. There was a. There was a longer period Maybe the last few weeks where there was like, I'm going to say, like a marble feeling on my. Somewhere between a marble and a bean.

[David Sedaris]

Bb.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And now that's completely gone. And I'm so delighted. And I. And I spent too long on the toilet again today. I was like, here we go. As soon as. As soon as it's gone.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I spent, you know, back in LA reading, reading Instagram.

[Monica Padman]

I think you should reduce your time on the toilet.

[Dax Shepard]

I have to. I have to. Yep. That's a must.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So that was my first one and I don't recommend them.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, don't recommend that.

[Monica Padman]

But that was a crazy ding, ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. It was for Sedaris.

[Monica Padman]

So that is cool. That was sim. The one thing that was nice is that David did give me some wrecks. Some Paris and London wrecks.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

He emailed me. So we had a little bit of email exchange about recommendations. David Sedaris.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

And it was nice. He has great recommendations for shopping. Mostly for shopping. He gave me some restaurant recipes recommendations too. So his favorite store is Egg in London.

[David Sedaris]

Huh?

[Dax Shepard]

Is this where he's getting taxidermy and stuff?

[Monica Padman]

No, it's a clothing store.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So when I was in London, I kept thinking, I gotta go to Egg. I gotta go to Egg. This is a store. That is a must from David. And then I kept pushing and pushing and pushing him. And so the last day, the day we're leaving, I was like, I'm going to Egg. So I wake up, I walk over the air there. It's. It's not close and it's closed.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no.

[Monica Padman]

It was closed that day. So I peeked inside that day. It was clothes that day. I peeked inside and it did have cute looking things.

[Dax Shepard]

It did. Your style. I mean, he is really out there. You'd acknowledge he's one deviation beyond you with the daringness of this.

[Monica Padman]

He has a lot of daring.

[Dax Shepard]

He wears priest robes and, you know, and dresses and.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, he does. It just looked like flowy, pretty clothes. Okay, so I have to go back. I was on the cutest little street and I. That was a sad part of the trip that I didn't get to go to Egg. But speaking of his fashion.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, David's.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. One of the facts is who made his shorts that he's wearing in the episode?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. Huh.

[Monica Padman]

And it's Walter Von on Berendonk. Very hard. Last name? B E I R E N D O N C K. No, I wouldn't even try it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'd Say pass. It's too hard on that name.

[Monica Padman]

I just was touching my hair and it reminded me of something very important I gotta talk about. Okay. Right, Right. So we had Taron Eggerton.

[Dax Shepard]

Incredible episode.

[Monica Padman]

Such a good episode. And he is. Is obviously extremely attractive.

[Dax Shepard]

Exquisite.

[Monica Padman]

Truly exquisite. When he left, all of us, the three of us were like, oh, boy. Yeah, oh, boy.

[Dax Shepard]

Powerful.

[Monica Padman]

And, you know,

[Dax Shepard]

no wonder he has always booked auditions.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Like in Percy. So magnetic. And. Yeah, you fall in love with him.

[Monica Padman]

Casting couch. If I were. If I were a casting director, I would.

[Dax Shepard]

Casting couch. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Um, and, you know, we did this interview a while ago, and it was so good and memorable, and we've been talking about it, and I go to edit it, and my hair looks.

[Dax Shepard]

You said this so bad through your eyes.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, it is horrible.

[Dax Shepard]

What's going on? Because you told me this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I text you. I said.

[Dax Shepard]

And when I was flying back two nights ago, I was like, I got to get back into the headspace of the. I'm gonna watch. So I downloaded from YouTube that episode and I watched it on the plane ride back. And it was midway through the episode before I remembered you said there was something wrong with your hair. Because I didn't see anything wrong with your hair. And then even after you said, it looks so terrible, I'm looking at it. I'm like, what part is she talking about? Walk me through exactly what was.

[Monica Padman]

I think interview, though. I think I did redo. Do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So it looks a little better in the second half than it does the beginning. But it.

[David Sedaris]

I just.

[Monica Padman]

I guess I just threw it up.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And in the mirror, it must have looked.

[Dax Shepard]

See, your hair looks.

[Monica Padman]

So

[Dax Shepard]

let me find first, because that looks. I guess maybe that's when it occurred to me. You said it was wrong. And I'm like, I don't. I don't.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't see what she's saying. It's volumous. 24 minutes.

[Monica Padman]

24 minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

Minutes in only.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I want, like, let's look at, like, six minutes in. Six now. First of all, this still isn't great.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it looks great.

[Monica Padman]

Look at my stupid face. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You look so cute. What's going on?

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I just am so embarrassed.

[Dax Shepard]

It would be really fun to be able to, like, astro travel into other people's eyes. I am dying to see what you're seeing. Are you at all curious to see what I'm seeing? Yeah. Because I'm assured that they're dramatically different things we're seeing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Jess. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. Can you do like six minutes in?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm trying to find.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I guess I felt very disappointed when I turned this on. And I see this very handsome man and charming man, by the way. Very nice per. Like, he was looking at me a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

A ton. And it made me like him so much.

[Monica Padman]

Me, too.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

He was very engaged with looking at me. And then. So then I'm like, ew. Like, stop looking at what he's seeing. And he's seeing gross bad hair.

[Dax Shepard]

So really quick, Rob. Okay, I. I found. It is a little messy, this photo, before we. We move on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think Monica looks less good there? No, I think her hair looks great there. I don't think that. And do you think she looks cute?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

E. Okay, thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, now. Well, hold on now. Now he is.

[Monica Padman]

This is correct. And look at my face.

[Dax Shepard]

He. Well, he paused it in a. That was the best.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the. That was the. Of that section that I can find.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so this is the issue.

[Dax Shepard]

The best you look.

[Monica Padman]

No, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. The best. The clearest image of a closeup of

[Monica Padman]

the best I look.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Monica. I'm not.

[David Sedaris]

I look at it.

[Monica Padman]

It's crazy looking that it's. It's not up. It like something.

[Dax Shepard]

Her ponytail fell a bit in back.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, now real quick question.

[Monica Padman]

Take that down.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you.

[Monica Padman]

This is like looking at the hemorrhoid.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I just couldn't erase that fast enough.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, I would. I would suggest that this is a very healthy side of you. It didn't cross your mind, like, oh, we're interviewing this guy today. He's a babe. I want to look great.

[Monica Padman]

Well, this is all wrapped into what I want to talk about.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Great one is, I'm sure I looked in the mirror.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, it's hard to get ready.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. I must. Looked in the mirror and thought, like, oh, like, fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe on the walk over, my hair

[Dax Shepard]

fell down a little downhill, maybe like, boom, boom, boom, boom.

[Monica Padman]

But I also. I did know we were interviewing. Okay. Not good either. Take these down. What are we doing? Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Turned on Rob. Rob's just back there trying to find a good image.

[Monica Padman]

I've been happy the last two months. I haven't had to deal with.

[Dax Shepard]

To look at yourself.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I. Yeah, so I did know we were interviewing him, obviously. And I do know he's attractive.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so I. When I was editing this and he's there and he's looking at me and he's being so charming. And all I could think is, what is, what is wrong with me? Like, exactly what you just said. What is wrong with me that I didn't like, get. Do a little extra?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think that might be what's right with you.

[Monica Padman]

It isn't because.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, because you didn't like the result.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I think like, let's say you never saw your.

[Monica Padman]

Yourself, great life for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but then that would be ideal. You didn't like overthink it. You weren't stressed about how you looked. You came and did your job and then that was over. Had you not seen it. Yeah, that would be a very healthy way to go through life.

[Monica Padman]

That is generally how I go. That is how I go through.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the dream.

[Monica Padman]

But it's not because like, okay, it wouldn't have hurt for me to just like, the problem is.

[Dax Shepard]

Let me get macro for once.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you ever have this thought? I. I have this thought often which is like, you think you look so different day to day. You don't. You look like yourself and everyone knows what you look like. And all this huge chasm between how you looked on Monday and Friday is in your head. You can't look that different. Well, no, but I experience that all the time. I'm like, good Christ. Also see comments like, woo, he's 18. You know, was like, sometimes I'm like, oh, it looks like I got hit by a truck. I don't know what happened between Monday and Tuesday, but clearly I couldn't look that different. And you can't really look that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you don't look different to me because I see you every day. This is the first time he's ever seeing me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So he thinks that's what I look like. And you're saying that is what I.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm saying that you see some big difference in how you look on that day. And I do not as I'm assuming you probably don't see a big difference in how I look day to day.

[Monica Padman]

But I, but I, I do if I'm trying. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

I'm a single person out in the universe and I don't actually think he's a single person. I don't know. But if he is, that's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

You think he's not single? I do think because of research you've done independently post meeting him.

[Monica Padman]

I did look something up, but it was hard to tell.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, you did a little digging. Dig, dig, dig, dig.

[Monica Padman]

For not. Because how could he possibly have any interest.

[Dax Shepard]

You have no idea what. Let's start there. You don't even know what his aesthetic is.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I know humans eyes, and if they're looking at that girl's hair. Okay. You're like, she doesn't give a. Well, and then maybe that's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the only.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. That's the only hope.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Is that this girl's chill as. Yeah, that's a good look.

[Monica Padman]

The problem is at Orna. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, her hair looks rad, but she. It's not because she fashioned it that way. She's just tossing it here and there, and it keeps landing in very sexy shapes. And I go, yeah, look at this. Wild. She's like a wild animal.

[Monica Padman]

She's confident.

[Dax Shepard]

She's like. She's in the forest.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. And I was also in the forest, but not in an orno way.

[Dax Shepard]

I love that you did some research. I want to let them know a little bit more about this. Yeah. Come on.

[Monica Padman]

No, I just looked him up.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Where do you go? What do you Google? You went to Google and you just typed in his name? Or do you write is single?

[Monica Padman]

No, I didn't write his single.

[Dax Shepard]

You just write his name.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So I had a friend in town, and I said, oh, we just interviewed Taryn Edgerton. And I said, he is shockingly attractive.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Blow your groin apart. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, it's why, child. Like, you need to listen to this one or watch it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And she was like, oh, yeah. Isn't he dating Alex Cooper? And I was like, wait, perfect.

[Dax Shepard]

No, she's married, is having a baby.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I was like, no, she's married. And he was like, oh, yeah, no, Alex. And I said, earl, he can't be dating her either, because she's dating Tom Brady.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Really?

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

And then she was like, oh, wait, no, no, it's this person. I'm not gonna say who it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I was. Then I looked that person up, and I was like, oh, is she Indian? No.

[David Sedaris]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Not even close.

[Dax Shepard]

She's a honky.

[Monica Padman]

I. I wouldn't say that.

[Dax Shepard]

A cracker.

[Monica Padman]

She's not Lebanese.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, all right, I can feel you.

[Monica Padman]

So, anywho.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I was like, whoa. Okay. Yeah. So he's understandably in a relationship. And that made me feel better because I was like, well, then I wasn't available anyway. Like, I mean, he wasn't available anyway, so not putting my best foot forward is actually fine.

[Dax Shepard]

It was very respectful of his new relationship.

[Monica Padman]

But I did think, like, why Am I so opposed to closed? To, like getting ready? And even today I was like, okay, we're back. Like, I should, like, do my hair. Then I thought, yeah, this is just too much. Like, it's too much effort.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, look, it could be one of two things. One is you have a very healthy relationship with it all.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is like, I look how I look. Let's go. That would be great.

[Monica Padman]

That's. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But if it's. If it's. If it's vestigial from you not putting yourself out out there.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, it would be some kind of declaration that you're trying.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Like is.

[Dax Shepard]

And then that's the old stuff.

[Monica Padman]

That's like, is it a self protective mechanism? I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder.

[Monica Padman]

I wonder too.

[Dax Shepard]

What's wonder?

[Monica Padman]

This is the first time I've wondered, you know, what's so funny? I'm definitely more likely to get like, ready for a female guest. That I think is fashionable. Yes, definitely.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes. So which goes to kind of.

[Monica Padman]

Which one does it prove?

[Dax Shepard]

That point. I'm always making that, like, we're all doing it for our job.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly. I also, I have to. I mean, I knew that he was hot, but I did not know the level.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't know. No, you got to be in person.

[Monica Padman]

Did not know until. In person. And seeing his, like, twinkly eyes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Even just the way he moves and thinks about things. The way reposition.

[Monica Padman]

So smart.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Very, very, very smart.

[Monica Padman]

And. And thoughtful.

[Dax Shepard]

We're in love.

[Monica Padman]

Talking about his child. I mean, talking about his vulnerability. I mean, come on.

[Dax Shepard]

I know, I know.

[Monica Padman]

It was.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's not very masculine. You must have been flooding the basements on that.

[Monica Padman]

I don't like that. That's something you're putting out there. He is masculine. He is masculine.

[Dax Shepard]

No, but the fact that he was saying and. And I'm quoting, he said, when it gets into the tropey masculine things, I just don't have them. And for you, that would be like,

[Monica Padman]

ooh, swing to me. That is masculine. That's very confident.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, obviously I ruined that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, life's long. Hold on.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

But he'll be back. I text him this morning.

[Monica Padman]

You did?

[Dax Shepard]

I did. And I said. I just. Because I watched the episode on the plane.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

As I said. And I just said, hey, man, I'm really grateful that you rescheduled. I think it's such a great episode. Episode.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Also, by the way, that was something that was incredibly kind. He had.

[Dax Shepard]

He Was movie was like long out.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That was just like. Let me make good on this.

[Monica Padman]

It was.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He has integrity. Oh, I know. He's so hot.

[Monica Padman]

What are we going to do about my hair?

[Dax Shepard]

Let's do some facts.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because we have so much more.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Oh, this is a fact. Because it's. Well, it's a ding, ding, ding fact. We talk about feeding animals in this episode with Sedaris.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because he loves to feed animals.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I brought it up like 10 times in this two month vacation. I found myself telling lots of people that he feeds. Well, because we have so many deer in our yard and other animals and.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I just found myself going, oh, one of my favorite things about Sedaris is he's like, yeah, I feed animals. I know everyone says you're not supposed to, but I don't care. I want to feed him. And I love that about him.

[Monica Padman]

He needs to be careful because guess what?

[Dax Shepard]

What?

[Monica Padman]

There's a coyote in Atwater. His name's Wiley.

[Dax Shepard]

Perfect.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. And he chases everyone. He's chasing people and kids and it's because someone's feeding him. So don't do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[David Sedaris]

All right.

[Dax Shepard]

Keep doing it.

[Monica Padman]

And no. And it's also a ding, ding, ding for you guys. Acting like these coyotes aren't scared of little girls like me. Okay. Wiley is not, not scared.

[Dax Shepard]

No. But he might be months away from moving into someone's house and fully domesticated. Get that rabies vax on him.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. What are board shorts? Board shorts are long, quick drying swim shorts built for surfing and board sports. They feature a flat non elastic fixed waistband with the lace up tie, no inner mesh lining, and a strong four way stretch fabric to prevent rash and stay secure in head heavy waves.

[Dax Shepard]

No mesh.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, no mesh is interesting. Well, I guess they're differentiating that from the swim trunk.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I grew up on board shorts and when I switched to a shorter swim short with a mesh a liner, I've grown to love that. And I really can't imagine now going back to a board short with no line.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Why do they do that?

[Dax Shepard]

I don't.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. You know, sometimes these answers just lead to more questions.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. The turtle snapper turtle story is in calypso. Oh. The doctor said to him that he couldn't give the patients anything they've cut out of the body.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Now is that a law or. That was just his personal.

[Monica Padman]

So I looked that up. A doctor or hospital often refuses to give the patient or remove body part heart due to Due to a standard biohazard disposal policy they need for pathology testing and liability concerns, though patients legally own their tissue in many places and can sometimes request it back. So it says in most regions, such as the U.S. no federal law bans keeping your own surgically removed body parts, though a few states have specific restrictions.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So it says patients routinely sign consent, seating, tissue rights to the hospital for research or disposal. Okay. You can refuse to sign those specific release waivers and formally request the tissue, though you may need to jump through administrative hurdles or sign liability releases.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I mean, I wish. I guess. I don't know why. I guess I wish I had my wisdom teeth.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

I had a doodad pulled out of my lip, as you recall. Ryan had the same one. He did Let me take a picture of him holding it with tweezers, which is great because it looked identical to a maraschino cherry. So did Ryan's.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's as close as I've gotten.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But you wouldn't want your hemorrhoid.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't ever want to see anything associated with that again. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I actually don't understand. Understand.

[Dax Shepard]

I did a lot of research on hemorrhoids while I had one, and it did talk about. And again, I don't know if this is medically sound. This is something I came across about certain times. They put a rubber band around it the way they castrate cows and dogs, and then it just falls off.

[Monica Padman]

No. Did you try it?

[Dax Shepard]

No, but it crossed my mind. Like, I gotta get some braces. Rubber bands.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, those teeny ones. Oh. Ow. Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Imagine doing that. That yourself there, laying on your back in bed trying to fucking do a ponytail holder around your hemorrhoid.

[Monica Padman]

Imagine. I mean, it doesn't even make sense. It just.

[Dax Shepard]

But yes, I would have tried it off. If it went on long enough, I probably would have tried it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it can't fall off then. You just have a huge open wound.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, no, because when you put the rubber band around it, like when they castrate cows and stuff it just from where the circulation stopped, it then seals itself off and closes it. For real? That part's real.

[David Sedaris]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I'm not recommending that anyone do it, but that is what happens.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. You said squirrels are always on smartest

[Dax Shepard]

animal lists, which was an exaggeration. It was on two of our lists that we read back in the day.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

With dolphins, Sentient. Org, or whatever.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm back on sentient media dot org.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

30 most intelligent animals in the world might surprise you. Okay, now we got. I'm going fast. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. In first to 30 or 30.

[David Sedaris]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Humans. Yeah, interesting. Dolphins, ravens, pigs. Chimpanzees, elephants.

[Dax Shepard]

Again. All right. I mean, I'm reminded how much I disagree with the pig and chimpanzees.

[Monica Padman]

Pigs are.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, fucking chimps. Can do. I mean, gorillas can do sign language. What are we talking about? Pig? No.

[David Sedaris]

All right.

[Dax Shepard]

Anyways.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. African gray parrots, octopuses, bonobos, rats. Pigeons. Pigeons, Crows.

[Dax Shepard]

Pigeons.

[Monica Padman]

Listen. Oh, you. Now you're making me read. Frequently regarded as the rats of the sky, pigeons are often thought of as a nuisance. The reality, however, is that pigeons are extremely intelligent. In an experiment, pigeons were trained to differentiate between Picasso and Monet paintings, something they had no problem learning. That is wild. They were then able to apply what they learned to distinguish between works they had not previously been shown. Stone telling the. The difference between the expressionist and cubist artist. That's wild.

[Dax Shepard]

That's cool.

[Monica Padman]

Dogs, number 13. Cats, horses. Squirrels, number 16 says they display their intelligence through deception. When they think they're being watched, they'll pretend to bury nuts and seeds while hiding the actual food under their arms.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, cool.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, playful. Yeah, that was good.

[David Sedaris]

Beast.

[Monica Padman]

Ants, orcas, wolves, deer, llamas, koalas, orangutans, gorillas, hyenas.

[Dax Shepard]

I you up for life on orangutan? Because you're like, what am I gonna do? Am I gonna do that?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you did. You did mess me up. 27. Raccoons, honey badgers, giraffes, Porsche spiders.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa. I didn't know there were any smart insects.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it says they have to do serious problem solving.

[Dax Shepard]

Solving.

[Monica Padman]

They need to plan ahead and recall information based on the best escape and trap routes. Okay, well, anyhow, squirrels was on there, so. You're right. What is Sedaris holding at the top of the Empire State Building in that story? He says, I'm pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building naked with a greased up rolling pin or pepper grinder in each hand and a box of candles around my neck and still end up in the last lobby with an empty rectum.

[Dax Shepard]

With an empty rectum.

[David Sedaris]

So good.

[Dax Shepard]

Listen to him last night.

[Monica Padman]

That's it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I love him. I love him so much.

[Monica Padman]

Great episode. We're so lucky. We are so lucky that we get to have him come through this attic

[Dax Shepard]

almost every time he's in la.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, man, and I can't wait for

[Dax Shepard]

him to come back in September. Remember? I committed to being his helper.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[David Sedaris]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't wait.

[Monica Padman]

Great.

[Dax Shepard]

So get tickets to that show if you want me to show you to your seat.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. All right.

[Dax Shepard]

Love you.