Best of Wednesday 2024
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. This is our best of Experts on Experts for year 2024. We had an

An incredible amount of great experts this year. It was really hard to pick. An embarrassment of riches. It was. So please enjoy The Best of Experts.

We are supported by Audible. Audible's best of 2024 picks are here. Audible's curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best in audio entertainment. Like a stunning new full cast production of George Orwell's 1984. This is the one I am most excited to indulge myself with. I'm so excited to listen to James, which is...

a new title by Percival Everett that is very, very hot right now. Well, there's so many good ones on the list. We love Audible. This is how you go to bed. I love Audible. I swear by Audible. I can't wait to listen to the Orwell 1984 off this list. I'm also doing Fleas by autobiography right now, which I'm obsessed with. I can't get enough Audible in my life every night. Go to audible.com slash DAX and discover all the year's best waiting for you. That's audible.com slash DAX.

From episode 697, our sweet love, Molly McNierney. A friend of a friend said...

There's a job opening at Jimmy Kimmel Live to be an assistant to the executive producer. I'd never seen Jimmy Kimmel Live. I had no idea what an assistant to an executive producer did, but I knew it was in the industry and could maybe get me closer to comedy. In the meantime, I'm doing improv classes out in L.A. and making great friends who are all really funny people and funny.

I interviewed Jimmy Kimmel Live. This is pre-DVR. I tried to stay up to watch the show the night before and I fell asleep. I remember like, I gotta watch the show. I gotta know what I'm doing. And I woke up to the credits. I was like, oh no. Went in for the job interview. Got it. Naomi Scott, Adam Scott's wife, she interviewed me. Yeah, she was the existing executive producer assistant. She was finding a replacement for herself. Yeah, so I got the job as the assistant to the executive producer and I loved it. This was just a...

A huge quote step down. Yeah, I was making about a third of the money I was making. I was working about five times the hours. This is when Jimmy Kimmel Live was actually live. So we would shoot the show from 9 to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. It was the longest work day ever. I lived in Hermosa Beach. I would drive to Hollywood on an hour commute. I had to be at my desk at 9 a.m. and I would leave at 11 p.m. It was terrible, but I loved it.

I was so happy to be a part of this live show. I loved watching people like come up with ideas and they were on the air that night. It was incredible. In terms of the way the process works, do you want to hear like how it goes? Yeah. Okay. So around five o'clock in the morning, one guy wakes up, a writer assistant, and he combs the internet for what the stories of the day are. Those are in our inbox. They go to head writer and we then edit them. So by 7 a.m. every day,

All of our 19 writers have an email that says, here are the top stories of the day that we're going to focus our monologue on. You're not limited to those. Please don't be. Like we prefer if someone goes, I've got this interesting observation about something that's not in the daily news. But, but,

But primarily our monologue is based on what has happened today, what people are talking about at home. We have an 8.50 a.m. deadline. So you read all these headlines and stories and then you write a couple pages of jokes and bit ideas. So bit ideas are the things that are like fake commercials or a man on the street bit, a pre-tape with a celebrity. Jimmy gets about 50 pages by 9.30 a.m. How many staff writers are doing this? 19. The 5 a.m. person. Shout out to Nick.

what up Nick big props how many stories does he give before it gets whittled down he'll give about 11 to 12 stories we narrow it down to about 6 to 8 stories I would say okay great so the 19 writers get 6 to 8 stories then they write two pages on that and now Jimmy gets a thick

50 page document. He whittles it down to about five pages. That's sent to us by 10 a.m. So now we have a pretty clear understanding of what our monologue is going to be. Then we all start writing more jokes. So we'll say like, here are the topics, here are the ones we still need better jokes on.

this bit could use some work. This is what I love about late night television. You can be in your bed in your pajamas writing a bit and then you get an email and by 10 a.m. you've got a director, a producer, a graphics guy, you're making wardrobe choices, you're piecing this thing together. Oh, the pace is so awesome. You're writing it, you're rewriting it, you're having the head writers punch up on it. Then Jimmy always does a punch up and then you shoot it, you edit it, you are oftentimes racing it to something

air our shows at 430 by the time you've been assigned to you're going to do this bit it's 10 a.m. and hopefully it gets approved and it's ready for air by 4 p.m. so it's been filmed edited everything scored yes it is what a pace it's incredible it's insane it's interesting though because the victory of getting that is so great but if it tanks oh

It hurts. Because you worked so fucking hard. You worked so hard. You spent your whole day. You haven't eaten. You're like, did I even drink water today? But the other side of it is that those failures are very short-lived because time to go tomorrow. Got to do it again. From 7-Eleven with Bill Gates. So there's a spectrum of...

When I'm testing my own thinking and I see some flaw, I'm like, oh, you're so dumb. I've got to think better. So I'm very tough on myself. If it's a group of engineers at Microsoft that I've worked with for 10 years and who know I think they're smart and we're in it together, we're going to win or lose together. And there's no doubt of that. I can say that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I think there's footage of you saying that. I don't say it much anymore. From then.

- 80s and 90s are some good footage. - But we have very limited time. The stuff I agree with, there's no need to mention. So when I moved from Microsoft, where it's really top engineers,

And some of the people sitting in the meeting would be people who work in the field. Their genius is often a softer set of skills than thinking all the numbers through that this could be 10% short of. Community building and relationships. And the idea of using a little bit of sarcasm, it can come across as I'm not even sure you belong here. And so at the end of the meeting, you want feedback on was it motivating the people in this meeting to find a solution or did it motivate them to not work?

work on this problem or refresh their resume when I wanted to keep them. So I did have to learn a lot about new domains when people can say five smart things at Microsoft and one dumb thing. And I

I'm not wasting any time on the five smart things. I won't bring them up. That means good job. Even inside the foundation, it's not that hardcore. And as soon as you're meeting with partners, you better say, oh, thing one, two, three, four, five are so smart. But maybe, well,

I am in many contexts where I'm meeting with politicians and... Prime ministers. Potential partners. Early in my press days, somebody would ask a question that had some assumption built into the question that was really wrong. Mm-hmm.

And I'd be like, hey, your thinking's not very good here. Right. And then I remember it was one I did in France when I was like 23 years old. And the guy around France said, did you want that guy to feel bad at the end of the interview? And I was like, no. Yeah.

But he feels bad. And I was like, but he was wrong. And he's like, yeah. But was it important to correct him? Well, I had been behaving like I was in a meeting with very tough people. So, yes, it does take a while to understand all the different situations you're in. Well, one of the most interesting things I've ever seen happen. We both wrote it down at the same time. Yeah. I was like, oh, my God.

She asked you in a quick fire, if you had a superpower, what would it be? And you said, I wish I was smarter. I would want to be smarter. Yeah. The whole room could not handle that answer, including us. I mean, I don't know. You tell me. It didn't feel like that was faux humility. That's truth to you.

No, I'd like to be smarter. More than you'd like to fly. Like in my mind, I'm like, well, you've already got smart covered. Let's fly. Let's get invisible and take a walk through the showers or do something that you can't already do. I'll double down on the thing. I'm semi decent and I'd like to be truly decent. Zero ego. We should tell people we didn't get to play spades, but we will in this lifetime. As soon as your schedule gets freed up more by AI.

We're going to shellac you in spades. When malaria is eradicated or when the machine takes it over, I will write a book about optimal spades. Well, Bill, from the bottom of my heart, this has been such an incredible experience. I wouldn't have learned any of this without your invitation. I really don't know how we're here. Monica and I the whole week have been like, he's got to be wondering why the fuck.

Why did they let them come here? India, to share together the beauty and mystery and the challenges of India, it's wonderful. And it's so human. It does make you remember, OK, the great things that we have. You know, as much as the U.S. is in this deeply polarized, troubled state, we are the gold standard.

Yeah. So much learning and aspiration. So I think to come here, it always takes you out of your normal life and it gives you distance. It gets you to appreciate some things. And in a way, things are simpler here because they're still dealing with the basics. And they're kind of focused on...

on some great things and so much talent and energy in the country. Anyway, it's fantastic you could come. Yeah, it's palpable. It's like we've almost got to time travel to a period where America was in this stage. That sense that they're going to do it. That's fascinating, yeah. But even today we were driving by something and there was a little girl with her grandma and she was just like pulling on her grandma. Annoying her grandma. Being so annoying. And I was like,

Man, everyone has to go to another country and just see this so they recognize we really are all the same. Everyone is pulling on their grandma's shirt. And even in the very poorest country, taking care of your children and doing unbelievable things to help your family. Yeah, that you wouldn't even do for yourself. It's really cool. It's unifying, yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much. From 723 with Phineas.

Okay, so now 12 years old, you go to a music writing class. My mom has always written songs. She's never made a penny off of it, but she's always done it. I don't actually fully know the origin of that in her life. I don't know what switch flipped for her that made her start writing songs. I should have asked her before this interview. That was kind of always in our house. She was sitting down at the piano.

singing stuff and I was like, what is it? She's like, I'm writing it. So that was real. People write new stuff and our dad doesn't write at all, but he's a pretty good pianist and he would sit around and plunk out Beatles songs or play pieces he liked. When I was 12, I started singing in this choir and I immediately was very smitten with this girl in the choir who was 13. I might've even been 11. It was never going to happen, but I was hopeful.

And I had this fantasy that I would be in the choir rehearsal room before anyone else got there playing a tune wistfully. Yes. And that she'd come in and it would win her over. This was really concocted. I know it well. I do too. And the only thing in my way was I had to learn.

how to sing and play piano. Easy hurdle. Small. And so I set about doing that and I asked my dad, like, I want to learn how to play this song. And he said, okay, there's like four chords in it. And he taught me the four chords. And that took like a week to learn just sort of shapes on piano. And then I said, oh, thanks for teaching me that. I want to learn this other song. And he was like, this other song is the same four chords. And that completely turned my world upside down. Like the idea that

I'd learned all this stuff without trying to learn all this stuff was so thrilling. And pop music is absolutely like that. I don't know if either of you play anything, but there is such commonality in the sort of music underneath the song that if you want to play some song by this artist, you're also learning 600,000 other songs. But you have a very strange order of events, which is you have written Ocean Eyes for your own band. Yeah. A couple of things happen. I get Logic Pro, the DAW, which is same as Pro Tools or Ableton or something.

software on my computer to record work start teaching myself how to do it go on YouTube to learn I have one friend Frank Dana who's popular at his school huge currency at 17 and it's like hey you produce right and you're like well not really and he's like that's fine let's do some stuff

What a huge vote of confidence. And the real truth is like neither of us were good at making music at all. But I suddenly was making stuff with him and we're putting it on SoundCloud and his friends are listening to it and telling me I did a good job at producing it. And I'm feeling so cool. I sort of say to Billy at some point in the summer of 2015, I'm like, do you want to sing on some stuff? I'll write some stuff for you and you can sing on it.

Had she been singing around the house? She's got a great choir. She's singing in a choir. She loves to sing. Can I just add really quick? What's really funny is when you're young, just necessity drives so much shit. It's like this dude's got to take what he can get. He finds out you kind of produced that good enough. It's not like he's paying. Yeah. And then you live with someone who sings. So it's like, let's get you on this. Right. It's just all kind of necessity. 100%. So she starts singing. She's 13. So she's just now at the age where she can maybe even tolerate me saying this.

do another take of that verse a little more angry or whatever. Right, right. And so we start recording and it's fun. And I've still got this band and the band is in sort of first stage of crisis. The other guys had finished high school. I was homeschooled and I was like, I'm going to die for this. Like just at 17. And our drummer, my friend David, who now is also a successful, great music producer, which is awesome.

is in the same boat I am. He's like, I'm going to not go to college. Like, I'm going to make music. And the other two guys are like, okay, we're going to go to college. College seems pretty cool. Our band sucks. I got into Florida State. We were not like Green Day. We were not making Dookie at 18. We were making like terrible music. And I write the song Ocean Eyes that I think is like,

I appreciate myself sitting there, but it doesn't feel like something for my band. There's a kind of a femininity to it, to me. I hear it and I think I'd rather hear a girl's voice sing this. Was the band, is the adjective melancholy? No, the band was like a stupid pop

band. I write this kind of sad ballad song. There's not even a place for guitar on this. How am I going to break the news to our guitarist? And so I say to Billie, do you have any interest in singing the song I wrote? And she sang it and I thought it sounded beautiful. And we recorded it and we put it on SoundCloud. The thing that I'd heard about happening that always seemed like bullshit, which was you put it online and it gets...

straight up happened. Like we put it on SoundCloud and the next day it was on a blog and then the next day it was on more blog and it just started to percolate. We were not on Ellen the next day. It was not viral, but it was happening. When people comment on the two of you. Me and Billy. Yes. And as people comment on us a lot. We had an argument. You're a duo. Whenever you're a duo, the comments are often, they can be at the expense of the other person or in relation to. Dax really hates that.

even though you did just do it in the thing we're cutting out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I feel solid about that one. But everyone feels solid. Yes, it happens a lot when they write an article about Monica. The inclination is to go like... I mean, you hear it as they're saying it's despite you or something that I'm good.

But it's tricky. It's tricky. But they're also trying to elevate me because I'm not the main focus. Instead of just saying she's great, it tends to be like if she weren't there or she keeps him from blank or the way they want to compliment her is somehow always at least feels disparaging to me.

whether it is or not. Does it bother you? It only bothered me when one of our friends, they were asked to quote and we're friends and I was like, well, that's a weird way to phrase it. What did they say? I wish I could remember the details. Was he like, Dax sucks and Monica's great? What did he say? He didn't know. Thank God Monica's there because that guy just fucking sucks.

That's what he said. So brutal. First academic to say that. It was an argument. We got in a debate. This was it. Was it the end of the Wyatt Kurt Russell episode? Probably. It was that Monica had been watching the Globes, right? Yes. Yeah. I heard this because I woke up to text from my friends in New York that were like, I didn't know you were going to be on armchair. And I was like, oh, and I listened to it.

Oh, yeah, because we kind of, we never do that, but we did it. Exciting. Yeah. Okay, so then you're familiar with the debate. I remember it. Should we talk about it? Yeah, let's talk about it. I remember both of your points. This is the day after the Globes or something. Monica's point, which was very kind, was Phineas stands there like a potted plant as they ask Billy a bunch of questions and then they go, bye guys. Wouldn't it be nice if they asked him a question? Yeah. Dax's point was...

was who cares? It's a little interview before the Golden Globes and she's wearing a cool outfit and he's wearing a suit and he's the millionth person that night in the suit. And it's not a representation of who's more important. It's a representation of the audience and the interview. A red carpet, like the conceit of a red carpet, which is let's get the most popular person here to talk about their outfit. Also, I'm going to throw this in there.

Red carpets fucking suck. Yes, yes. The interviews are awful. They're so uncomfortable. The idea that I get to stand there and not have to say anything is a thrill. You like it. Well, yeah. And there are great interviews. I don't want to be disparaging of all interviews. I just mean the format and the environment. If you watch an interview, you can see they shift the mic over to me and Billy relaxes and gets to not suddenly be nervous and have to come up with an answer to the question we've been asked 450 times in the last two months. It's brutal.

The closest analogy I can imagine is, you know, when the prisoners escape from jail and they shine that enormous light on the person's face. Because Kristen and I do a ton of interviews together too, right? When you get the sense that they're actually going and then the interviewer goes like, you guys haven't been out in public. And all of a sudden you just feel like, oh, fuck, that big old light is shining on me. I hope it's shining on her. I need a minute to think about this question. The best case scenario is that you're boring. And the worst case scenario is you say something and they never invite you to anything ever again. It's like very high.

That's true. And then the point I'll add, too, and you're here to answer this, which I appreciate, is I was also making the point that there has to be some expectations on your end. Like who you're trying to be, and my guess is that you're trying to be Quincy Jones. You said it, Timbaland. Pharrell.

I'm imagining that the space you want to occupy, you also recognize Quincy Jones was behind the Michael Jackson, but Quincy Jones is the genius that is in all these other things. I can't imagine as you endeavor into the job you have that you're expecting to be all that popular. Does that make any sense? I think that everybody in every avenue of their life

is hoping to be seen for their work, right? If you do something, if you build your kids a playhouse and they go in and they go, well, whoever built this did a great job. And you go,

I built it. Yeah, exactly. Whoever's right here. You know what I mean? Like you want recognition. I feel very seen. I feel very lucky about how much recognition I already have. Most producers and songwriters have less than I do. I'm aware of that and I don't take that for granted. And being as famous as Billie is a nightmare. I would never want that. She wears it really well and she is actually a rock star. I say that like as a person, like she is a

charismatic enigma. The air gets crackly in the room when she walks in. And it's cool to see that. I don't feel that way when we're in my basement making a song, but like I see it at a function and I don't want to have that and I don't pretend to have it. And the consequence of that is she can't do anything. It's a heavy price to pay. But I guess back to the thing about... So who's right? Well,

Well, I think that both of you are basically practicing empathy and you're both talking about the same thing, which is you're recognizing the Robin Andy Richter of The Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. When we got to that. Yeah. You probably know implicitly how it feels to be the person always there, always participating in the thing who's not the masthead. Yes, exactly. I put out some music under my own name and I don't feel any better or worse about that.

in terms of like, if somebody goes, I love your thing, I go, thanks. I don't have, oh, that means so much more to me than saying you like Billy's thing. Because I feel like we worked on it. This really ties exactly into the red carpet thing. It's truly just the ultimate message for every human being is like, if you feel it for yourself...

none of the other stuff matters. You have to give yourself validation and self-esteem. And what is obvious to me is you've given it to yourself. So whether or not the interviewer from E! Entertainment, if that's even still an outlet, really doesn't matter. You also give it to each other. I mean, like, that's the other thing. Billy is so generous and effusive about me to me privately or publicly to me. And I for sure feel the same way. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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I couldn't make myself feel better the way that other people made themselves feel better. I just remember being a kid sitting behind a little girl in school and I looked up and she had barrettes in her hair and I felt this, take that barrette and you're going to feel better. It didn't make any sense and yet I knew it was accurate. I should have started there. It didn't start with the stabbing. But yes, that's the first time you feel the relief. And little transgressions like that usually did the trick. But on this day when I assaulted this child, I

I had been doing a lot of little transgressions and they weren't working. And I could feel it. As a kid, you're like, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? But as a kid, I had a harder time talking myself through it. And there was a little girl standing next to me and she had just been getting on my nerves as they do. And I bent down and she kicked my backpack. And when she did, she knocked out my pencil box that was full of pencils. And then I just remember picking up a pencil and stabbing her in the head with it. Wow.

And I remember what was problematic other than the obvious was it wasn't just the pressure that disappeared. It was replaced by this euphoria. Yes. Yes.

And I knew enough to know that ain't great. This is untenable. We're going to run out of heads to stab and I'll be kicked out of here quickly. So you did know that, though. So that's interesting. You knew this isn't good, that I like it. I always knew right from wrong. Cognitive, it wasn't internal. That's the difference. That's part of one of the erroneous stereotypes is, oh, sociopaths don't know the difference between right and wrong. Oh, yes, they do. Also, you hear sociopaths track things.

Highly empathetic, actually, if you go by the Paul Bloom definition, that actually they're quite good at knowing what you are thinking and needing to hear from them. Because they've spent a lifetime mirroring. We're paradox. Yes. Okay, so David, how do you come to experience something that you would label your version of love or how did that grow? Well, we met when I was 14.

14. So really young. And I'm grateful for that because I don't think that we would have been a match later. But I remember at that time, I felt very isolated. I was looking for a buddy to kind of bounce stuff off of. And in that moment, he just happened to come into my life and he was that buddy.

I could tell him anything and he didn't judge me for it. He just took it in and rolled with it. And he looked at my actions objectively and he would let me know if he didn't think something was a good idea, but it was not met with any type of negativity. So we dated for a summer, you know, I'm 14 years old, but it was so matter of fact, my feelings about him when I met him, I remember thinking, my name is Patrick. I

I am attending this summer camp. I just met the guy I'm going to marry. I'm going to have pizza for dinner later. I remember writing it in my journal, but it didn't feel like what all of the girls that I knew. Oh, you know, this romantic love and I know I'm just going to marry him. It wasn't that. It was very matter of fact. You didn't sit around wondering if he was thinking about you or talking about you? No.

And so when we broke up, it was more like a, that's weird. I really thought I was going to marry that guy. It's so strange. I never had a feeling like that before. And it was so pronounced. I wonder what that was because that was so true in the way it came through. But we never really lost touch. And he went one way, I went the other. And I lived an entire lifetime before we got back together. And when we did, we had this wonderful honeymoon period. And then

reality set in, which is I have this personality disorder and I'm really struggling with some things. And David really had a hard time not taking it personally. So for him, it was I don't emote the same way he does.

therefore I don't care about him as much as he cares about me. And everything was seen sort of through a very egocentric lens, not in the sense that he was in the wrong, but I think it's a very relatable feeling. If you go in for a

a big hug and the person doesn't want a big hug, your instant reaction is, oh, I guess she doesn't like me very much. Of course. But I'm just not that person, but I've never been that person. So that was a struggle. It's you have to take yourself out of this equation in order for you and I to work. You have to see that you are one type of person. I am one type of person. We love and demonstrate that love very differently. Neither way is right or wrong. It's just different. And if you were expecting someone

that one day you are going to fix me, we should just stop. It's not in the cards. No, it's just not. The irony is that's all relationships. And that's what I've heard. Yeah. It's just that it's so clear here and there's no arguing like, okay, you have this personality disorder. It's almost helpful. Exactly.

You're never going to get what you want. You either accept that and we move forward. But I think when you have this neurotypical relationship, there is this fantasy belief that, no, you will end up manipulating them. Yeah, and we have limitations too. Of course. In the exact same way that also cannot be transcended. That's why I wrote this book, because there are so many relatable elements to this. And I think that if the sociopathic camp and the non-sociopathic camp could just drop it for a second and get together and sort of talk,

You would see how much we could learn from one another. But with David, he did have an argument. But you're doing illegal shit and it's my job to protect you. It always came from a place of morality. The things you're doing are immoral and I need to help you stop doing those things. So he had that really effective, logical argument that was tough to push back on. But ultimately, I need to want to stop doing these things for myself. I would have left out the moral part. I would have just said the things you're doing are illegal and are going to end up getting you incarcerated.

I would not argue with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's leave morals out of it for you. From 687 with Vanessa Marin. I would only ask you this because I know on your podcast and in your book, you're pretty open. What is your own sexual life at this time? Because you do see people go into psychology because they have a lot of unanswered questions about themselves. They hope to get some tools maybe that they can address. How would you evaluate your own sex life at that point? I was...

I was still very curious about sex and interested in it. But the biggest thing that I was really struggling with was orgasming with a partner. I had learned how to orgasm on my own pretty easily. It felt pretty straightforward. It felt like this very fun, exciting, cool thing that I could do with my body.

And I could not replicate that experience with any partners. And it was not only the orgasm itself, but sex with a partner was very performative for me. It was all about my male partner's pleasure, what he wanted to do. He was taking the lead.

And so there was an internal struggle that I had for many years of this interest in sex and this fascination by it and wanting to pursue it for my career, to spend my life on it. But also this huge imposter syndrome of I have so many things within myself. I cannot find it within myself to initiate sex, to give feedback in the moment, to show a partner what my body likes and responds to. Say I might like to bring my toy with me to the next session. Yeah. And anything like that.

I really struggled with feeling like sex was something that I gave to a partner, did for a partner rather than something that was for me that I got to participate in. That is so common for people. Yeah. And I think especially for women. Yeah. I was just going to say, did you feel this frustration of going, this shouldn't be happening to me because I have the knowledge?

Yeah, I felt like a horrible imposter. You know, I'm studying this. I want to help people with this. And I'm not really walking the walk myself. But a lot of that was because, you know, I was doing all this research and learning and exploration, but I wasn't learning any practical tools.

I'm learning about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, and that's great. But like, what do I do in the moment with my partner when he's doing something that I don't like rather than just faking it and saying, that's so great. Keep going. Yes. Because there's the awkwardness. It's so vulnerable and you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Yeah. Big thing that came up was I really wanted to make it seem like we were clicking when I was having sex with somebody that I really liked. Like, I want it to feel like the chemistry is there. It's so easy.

and effortless between the two of us. And so I had this idea in my head that my pleasure and my body were more complicated or needier than my partner's. And I felt very much alone in that, which I think most people have had the experience of feeling alone with some sort of sexual struggle that they've had.

Were you talking to your girlfriends about it at all? A little bit, but talks with my girlfriends were more kind of braggy. Like, oh yeah, we had sex last night. Oh, it was so great. We didn't really get into the nitty gritty of, I'm really struggling to orgasm. Is anybody else? It was sort of this feeling of, we're talking about it openly and look at us evolved college girls, but at the same time, like not being willing to be truly honest and vulnerable with each other about what was actually going on. The imposter syndrome that I felt made that so much harder for me. I was like,

I can't admit to anybody that here I am, this little sex therapist in training and I'm not orgasming with my partners. I'm not enjoying the sex that I'm having. Like, I can't admit that to anybody. Had a guy said to you, how can I help you orgasm?

Would you have even been able to answer that or been confident enough to express what would have helped? I was never asked that. You weren't. I'm not sure, honestly, how I would have responded to it. I probably would not have been honest. I probably would have said like, oh, what you're doing is great. Right, right. You're always making me orgasm. But the final straw for me when I decided to stop faking orgasms and finally figure this all out was actually a partner who did the exact opposite. So...

We had been hooking up and I had faked an orgasm. I had gotten really good at a great convincing performance by that time. And he'd been using his hands on me and he said, I can play you like a fiddle. Oh boy. And I just, my stomach just...

turned in that moment, like just huge pit in my stomach. And I thought, this is so gross. This guy is so proud of himself and this sleazy, like I can, what a weird thing to say to someone, right? I can play like a fiddle. And so that was the moment for me of like, I'm not doing this anymore. Let's start with the fact that the male orgasm is almost a given. The female is much more elusive. So a guy's pride and esteem. Okay. Tell me. So there's nothing interesting

inherently more complicated about female orgasm than about male orgasm. What the problem is, is the way that we're all having sex. You know, male-female, cisgender relationships, the type of sex that we're having heavily prioritizes male pleasure.

Penetration. Right, right, right, right. Most male-female couples, we use sex and intercourse interchangeably. Like when we have sex, we're having intercourse. To the degree that in the 80s, people would ask like, how are two lesbians having sex? Yes, exactly. I mean, even think of the bases metaphor. Exactly. At the home run. And it's the test of virginity. It's the thing, right? So if we look at intercourse though...

A man is getting stimulation of the most sensitive part of his body. His clitoris. Yeah, okay. So you know about this, which is great. We'll tell everyone. Yeah, most people don't know. Fetuses in the womb, we all start off like as the same little blob. And when we're differentiating into we're going to be born a man or born a woman, the tissues start to differentiate around 8 to 11 weeks. And the exact same tissues that make a penis...

make a clitoris. So it's like having a ball of clay. I can mold it into a mug or I can mold it into a bowl. It's a different shape, but it's the same ball of clay that I'm starting with. So the clitoris and the penis are biological equivalents. They're called homologous structures, and they both are the pleasure centers of their respective genders.

So if we go to intercourse, like a man's getting stimulation of his penis and a woman is getting stimulation in her vagina. So the clitoris has anywhere from 8 to 10,000 nerve endings in it. The penis has 2 to 3,000. The

The vagina, there's not really even an accurate scientific tally of how many nerve endings are there, but it's not a particularly sensitive part of our bodies. You're going to pass a baby through there. Yeah. I mean, the funny comparison that I always like to make is that intercourse for a woman is like playing with a man's balls.

Sure, it might feel good. It can feel pleasurable. It can feel fun to do with a partner. But for the vast majority of men, it's nowhere near enough stimulation to lead to orgasm. And we don't make men feel bad about that, right? There's not some alternate universe where we're like, you know, God, the penis, it's so complicated. Why do I have to touch that? Why can't you get the orgasm from the balls instead? From 764 with Allegra Kastens. ♪♪

With OCPD, so number one, it's egocentronic a lot of the time. And what that means is if someone has a preoccupation with control, perfectionism, organization, orderliness, they tend to think that that is the right way to be.

That's so key. We've got to triple down on that point. It's very in keeping with their overall value system. That's exactly it. It could impair other people. I also want to say that. I'm not saying that OCPD is a likable condition. And actually, someone was upset about my video about you because they thought

I was saying OCPD is likable. That's not what I'm saying. Like dismissing that. What does it stand for? Sorry. Obsessive compulsive personality disorder. This is what you have. Okay. When we're talking and we use these terms and you'll go, I'll be a little OCD in this thing. Got it. Yes. Where you might see excessive list making,

excessive attention to detail. People who say, I really need my spreadsheets to be in this way. They get mad at others often who don't align with the way that they view things. There might be excessive devotion to work. So much perfectionism that can interfere with the person's ability to get a task done. But they think,

It's kind of like my way or the highway. This is how things should be done. There's a lot of inflexibility and a lot of rigidity. I think people often also don't talk about OCPD accurately, but when people are saying I'm so OCD, I think what they're saying is I'm detail oriented. I like to organize. Well, that is not OCD. OCD is an egodistonic condition.

Well, now I will say this, and this is a time I misuse it. I am so uncomfortable when things that are hanging are not level. And I'll go, oh, this is my OCD. But that's my OCPD if I was going to say it. Yeah. Even. Because it should be level. In your head. I don't disagree. You know, like I don't think...

I want it level, but it should be crooked. I think I want it level and it should be level. Totally. And that might not be distressing to you at that time, where if someone had, let's say, just right OCD or perfectionism OCD, that would distress them. And they would feel the urge to do that over and over and over again until an internal sense of rightness is achieved. So there is that aspect to OCD, but it's also a very small sliver of how OCD can manifest.

And is it fair to say as well, it's also spectrumy. So it's like, even as you're describing it, like, yeah, I want it level. It should be level. Also, it's deeply unsettling in a bad luck way. So it's like maybe it's just like inching towards. Is it a spectrum, I guess? That's a really great question. To be diagnosed with OCD, obsessions and compulsions have to take up at least an hour of your day or cause clinically significant distress.

distress or impairment in functioning. So yes, technically speaking, now there are more severe levels of OCD. Some people require residential treatment, whereas others can be treated in an outpatient setting once a week. But if you meet criteria for having OCD, there has to be some kind of impairment in functioning or distress. That's a great metric to an hour a day. Yeah. Now, okay, I'm going to go through the five taboos because yeah, this must be so distressing to be trying to evaluate what you are

in spite of all these intrusive thoughts.

And I also think just really quick, because I found myself figuring out the difference as I was reading, obsessive and compulsive, these are kind of two pieces of something. It's an order. Yes. So obsession is repetitive, unwanted thoughts, images, or urges that are intrusive and often distressing for the person. So it's recurrent. It's not just one thought that pops in. Like, I think I heard you say, well, I have intrusive thoughts from time to time. We all do. People without OCD can let them go. Yeah.

Like that was an odd thought. And you move on with your day. For the person with OCD, it sticks, it multiplies, and it replays all day long. That is the obsession. It could be a what if. So what if I'm a pedophile? It could be a sexual phrase. I used to have so many of those. And then that causes a lot of discomfort, whether that's anxiety, panic, guilt, shame, and the person feels compelled to perform the compulsion.

The physical or mental act that the person is performing to neutralize the obsession, to prevent that bad thing from happening, to solve the obsession, to alleviate the discomfort. And that just reinforces the obsession. And you're stuck in that. Yeah. So that's great. So I guess when I was thinking about it, it was like the compulsivity is what you're observing, right?

But that might not even be reflective of the obsession. They might not be connected, you're saying, right? Well, just like, yeah, if you were observing someone from the outside and you notice that they have some of these compulsivities, it's not so intuitive. It's like how they're choosing to regulate and address and fix and nullify the obsession isn't

so direct. It can be, but also it might not be. Right. Some people with sexual obsessions will wash, let's say, their vagina or penis after having an unwanted thought because they think that that's the thing that neutralizes it. To the outsider, it would be like, why are you washing that during the middle of your workday 18 times? You would think they were a germaphobe. There we go. So you can't always tell. Or it could be if I don't tap this wood, then...

I'm going to snap in my sleep and kill my child, right? And people wouldn't think that the tapping of the wood has something to do with that. And you also don't always see people's compulsions. Mine are all mental. Nobody would have ever known that I was performing compulsions because they all happened in the mind. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

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of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash dax to get started today. From $7.99 with old Malcolm Gladwell. There's a couple of times in this book, like the story that frames the book is the story of how Purdue, a different version of the story of how Purdue takes OxyContin from an unknown drug into a

the most damaging prescription drug in American history. And there, I think it's very useful for us to know how, if you're super evil and very smart, how you can hijack a system for your own purposes. They hijack the system. They realize that if you want to corrupt the medical system, you don't have to corrupt every doctor. You don't even have to corrupt anybody.

99% of doctors. They did that whole thing on the backs of a tiny, tiny fraction of doctors living in very specific parts of the country. That's a kind of chilling, really important, if chilling thing you need to learn about the world. That part of it is really mind blowing. So yeah. And they had help. And it's really interesting because we don't really talk, we talk about the guilt of them, which is warranted.

but you have like McKinsey, right? They're the ones that discover this and you're framing it, the whole thing through the lens of COVID a little bit where you introduce the, this, this one event at a, a meeting, one person early on in COVID who's a super spreader. And we learn why people are super spreaders, you know, their vocal cords emit some of the saliva when they're dehydrated and all this stuff. And it turns out that one person ultimately was probably responsible for like a

a million cases or 300,000 originally, but really a one human being resulted in 3 million infections, which is kind of mind blowing. And then these doctors, they broke up at the time Purdue was spending a fortune, having sales representatives all over the country, talking to virtually a hundred thousand doctors and this bright company McKinsey was like, well, let's really put this in a diagram and see what's happening. Well,

In decile 10, the doctors are only prescribing it once or not at all in a year. And there's 99,000 doctors in that decile. And if we go all the way up to the top, those doctors of which there's only 384 of them, they're prescribing 300 plus doctors.

So fuck all the money that's being spent on four through 10. And let's just put all the money in three, two, and one. And through that, they end up prescribing millions and millions and millions of tablets. This is this really important principle. I had talked about it in the first tipping point. I call it the law of the few. The idea that when you have an epidemic, the work of the epidemic is done by a very small group of people.

But I don't think I took it far enough. So I return to that idea in this book. And you're right, I start with the COVID example and I say...

Our assumption in the middle of COVID was that every person who was infected had a roughly equal risk of infecting someone else. Turns out that's just not true, not even remotely true. The overwhelming majority of people who were infected with COVID did not spread the virus very far at all. The spread comes from a small number of people who, for some reason that we don't entirely understand, but probably just genetic reason, produce...

a huge amount more virus. When they talk, there's way more particles coming out of their mouth than anybody else. And even that, we thought it was coughing and sneezing, but then these aerosolists who study aerosol and particle disbursement, they look at it and they go, oh, no, no, no, no. It's from talking. It's just talking. And what happened at this conference? This person got up and fucking lectured to everybody. Stands up. Hosed down the whole room with this. Ew, this is gross.

for an hour and everyone was infected. The one person. So the logic of that says, if you want to understand how to stop COVID, we should really have been trying to figure out who these super spreaders are. There's not a lot of them.

and just an address there, make sure they're not out and about when they're infected. Give them a week long, you know, a trip somewhere. It would be cheaper. They just quarantined all those people for like three weeks, it would have been done. We didn't have to. So what we, we treated everyone the same because we didn't really understand how epidemics work. When you understand how epidemics work, you realize, no, no, no, no, no. You need to be worried about the one person in a thousand.

So that same logic is used by Purdue in creating the opioid crisis. They understand that, wait a minute, all along, we've been spending, taking our sales budget, and we've been trying to reach every doctor in America who prescribes painkillers. Wrong. Why? We're wasting our time. Turns out there's a handful of doctors, a couple of hundred doctors throughout the country who are prescribing painkillers.

way more OxyContin than anybody else. And more than that, who are really, really receptive to when we send a sales rep to go and see them and that sales rep, you know, takes them to a ball game and buys them a fancy dinner. They just respond to that and write even more prescriptions. It's so scientific, I got to add. They have the data in these companies, McKinsey and, you know,

other people, they're so scientific about it. They basically figure out, okay, you have these doctors. If you see them 25 times a year, they're going to write less and less prescriptions. Above 25, they're going to go up and up. Some of these doctors had 300 insight rep contacts within a couple of years. Like they're nonstop with these people. Like every day, some drug company rep is showing up at your door bringing gifts. And they're attractive.

Probably. I'm going to guess. In the book, it says. Yes, yes. It's reasonable to assume that they're attractive. And they're going to see, you know, these are like some guy running a drug mill somewhere on rural Tennessee is getting visited hundreds of times a year by some sales rep from, and is just writing prescriptions by the boatload.

It's a little bit of an acquittal in a nice way of doctors in general, because even I, who I think I followed it more closely, I am an opiate addict. I was part of this whole thing. I get it. I was under the assumption that most doctors took the marching orders. You know, there was this huge campaign that, you know, they convinced people that everyone was under prescribing for pain. And they had all these, you know, pretty complex campaigns. But so I was kind of led to believe, oh, I think all the doctors loosened up.

No. And that's not true. 49% of all the opioids prescribed in that period were by 1% of doctors. Yeah. Yeah. It is. You're right. It does redeem your faith a little bit.

And I think this is another useful thing that comes out of thinking about these as epidemics and realizing that epidemics are propelled by a tiny fraction of the population. You realize that we're much too quick to condemn groups of people and professions. And that's not that I, you know, I was doing a podcast in parallel to the book. I was talking to a guy who studies medicine.

homicides on the West side of Chicago, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. There are 50,000 people on the West side of Chicago. And this guy said, "If you want to understand homicide, who's at risk, who's doing the dirty work, you're really talking about 400 people."

So he's like, our assumption would be if you walk around the West Side of Chicago, you think, oh, we're going to need a massive police presence on every corner and be stopping everyone we can be. This guy's saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're misunderstanding. It's an epidemic. I'm really interested in this question of how many people does it take to change the character of a group? I talk a lot about women on corporate boards.

For years and years and years, there were no women on corporate boards in America. Then they would, under pressure, corporations would put, you'd have nine men on the board. They'd have an opening. They'd put a woman on. So you have one woman, eight men.

What happens when you only have one woman? Is she heard? Does she make a difference? Do they listen to her when she says stuff? Do they treat her like a person? The answer is they don't. Yeah. It looks like they've changed the composition and created diversity. They haven't. There aren't enough. Really quick, the woman who you're interviewing who's saying it is heartbreaking. She's in a room with nine men and someone will enter and the person shakes the hands of eight of the men and literally walks by her as if she's not there. Well, they think that she's the secretary. Yeah. Yeah.

Or she'll have a point, no one will respond. 15 minutes later, a guy makes the exact same point and everyone's high-fiving the guy. Yeah. Yeah. So the question is, say I found all these women who had been on Corporate Boys and were the first one in. This is one of those great moments when you're reporting something, when everyone starts to say the same thing independently and you realize, oh, this is real. Yeah. So I call them up and I say, okay, so you were the first person on, you know, Fortune, name the Fortune 500 company. Yeah.

So they go, yes. What was that like? Terrible. Were you there when they appointed a second woman to the board? Yes. What was that like? Terrible. I mean, I had someone, I had one other person like me, but they still, nobody cared. No one listened to us. No one treated us properly. Were you there when they named a third woman to the board? Yes. What happened? Night and day. Really? It's like, really? Like at three. So when you get three out of nine women,

Boom. Well, she said, when you're there by yourself, you're the token. I'll listen to you. When there's another person there, you have a friend, a friend.

And when there's three of you, you're a block. You're a block. You're now start acting the way you really wanna act. Yeah. And they can't ignore you. And they suddenly wake up to the fact that you're a human being. Yes. And they have to take you seriously. It's this weird phenomenon. And it turns out this phenomenon shows up in tons and tons and tons of different situations where when outsiders reach a certain crucial tipping point in a group, the group changes. From 790 with Kat Bohannon.

It's very hard to enroll human women in phase one clinical trials. So that's that moment where you actually start trying to test out a drug. You're not in rats anymore. You're in a human body. Okay. And you try and see what are the side effects? What's up? Just enrolling enough women is presently a problem. What's causing that discrepancy? They're not reaching out or women are not participating. I think it's both. I think it's bidirectional. I think there's a lack of trust in the

among women who might want to participate. It might even be an interesting risk taker variable here too. Yeah. I think sometimes they're like, well, I got a well from both of you. Well, my well is new as in the last couple hours because I was at the cardiologist this morning. You okay? Yeah, I'm fine. Everything's fine. But I am probably going to go on a statin. Oh, wow. Yeah. And she was like, so, you know, great.

It's fine. You'll be fine. But also, if you are going to get pregnant, we're going to come off of it for a little bit before for about a month. And as soon as I hear that, I'm like, oh, my God. Well, and I have no current plans to get pregnant. But I was like, well, then maybe I should wait to start. Because what if I randomly decide to want to get pregnant the next week and then there won't be enough time? You know, your brain does start like running with you. And a lot of it is for protection reasons.

for your reproductive organs and such. Also, there was a huge diagram on the wall of how heart attacks show up in women. And it's very specific. It's not everything we've been told about how heart attacks show up. - Well, in the book, yeah, Kat says women die of heart attack more frequently

yet they show the signs of them less frequently or have less of them. - But the thing about heart disease that's so interesting is that we did have that really male model for a long time, which is that crushing pain on the chest and the- - The tingle down the arm. - And these like classic, typically male symptoms. And we're finally getting campaigns out to be like,

Yeah, actually, do you feel like you have indigestion? Right. It's a lot of stomachs. Which definitely doesn't trigger our slightly more likely to have anxiety disorders at all, which women also get more because it's like, so is it heartburn or am I dying? Right? So it's complicated, but it is starting to save lives. Yeah. Yeah. That like, just take your body seriously, that thing. The results of this asymmetrical testing women versus men are,

Kind of pops up in culture. I remember watching a 60 Minutes segment on women had been prescribed Ambien.

At the same dose men were for years and years and years, and women were having all these adverse effects to it, getting up and eating, driving a car, and people were like, what's going on? Come to find out when they studied it, it's almost twice as effective in females. Women are 40% more likely to be diagnosed with sleep disorders. We still don't entirely know why. I'm going to take a drug like Ambien to try and get some sleep, right? Yeah.

But then we find out when the car crash data comes filtering back in that female patients are getting in car crashes on their damn morning commutes more than male patients who'd taken it the night before because the drug is being metabolized differently in our bodies. It's exiting our bodies in different ways. It's effects on the tissues. And we're only just figuring it out because of what? Car crash data?

data? Right, right, right. Wait till that comes in and we'll make a decision. Yeah, so at the moment they were like, okay, this is a while back. They said, okay, Ambien, you should take half the dose if you've got ovaries. But at that point it had been on the market for 21 years. Oh my God. Yeah, a little...

I feel like we can do better. The weird thing about ears is that primate hearing changed dramatically. Well, ancestral primate hearing. When our mammalian ancestors moved into the trees, most primates still up there.

Right. Then our hearing had to change. We needed to be able to hear one another through this weird new environment. And we couldn't bounce sound off the ground. It was just this like, and there's leaves and shit in between us. We could be far away. So we needed to be able to produce and hear lower pitches than most other mammals. But the females needed to retain those higher pitches because our babies make very high pitched sounds.

Yeah. And it's absolutely true that human women still have a little of that legacy of retaining those higher pitches over our lifespan.

It's simple, right? You have a larger aptitude to start with and then your decline isn't as dramatic. Yeah. Now, remember, this doesn't mean just because you are a female person that it is your destiny to have babies. We're talking about evolutionary influences. Let me just go ahead and say that. Right. The reason you can hear the way you do is for many reasons and communicating with people. Okay. Okay.

However, it is true that female hearing is especially attuned to a range of pitches that tends to be associated with human baby's cries. That is true. Most people who are biologically male around age 25 or so will start cutting off the top range of the pitches that they can hear. It's just a predictable slope. It's not like you need a hearing aid when you're 30, but it's just that predictable slope of that high end of human hearing, you start losing it.

it's just like an aging thing. And the comedic punchline headline, yes, your husband can't hear you. No, I was literally, I was just about to say that. Like, oh, I think this is proving something I've been thinking for a long time when I'll talk with all these men in a room and they aren't responding. And I have thought, can they not hear me? They legit cannot hear you. They cannot hear you. It doesn't explain why they don't care. Sure, that's a different... That's just sexism and we've talked about how that's real. I guess like,

From 808 with Yuval Harari. I think when you read this book, you'll come away kind of understanding what an information network is and how powerful it is. So when do we see the first...

What's the first example we would look at historically, like an information network and its power? What information really does, information doesn't necessarily tell us the truth about the world. Information connects a lot of individuals into a network that can do many, many things that isolated people can't.

And to give you an example, if you think, for instance, about different types of information, if you think about visual information, if you think in terms of images and photographs and paintings. So what is the most common portrait in the world? Who is the most famous face in human history? The answer is Jesus. Oh, I was going to say Mona Lisa. Me too. We're so Western. I know. I'm so embarrassed. I mean...

Billions and billions of portraits of Jesus have been produced over the last 2000 years. And they've been like everywhere in so many churches and cathedrals and monasteries and private houses and schools and government offices everywhere. And the amazing thing about it, not a single one of them is true.

Not a single one is authentic. A hundred percent, not 99%. He never sat for a portrait that we know of. We don't know if anybody painted him during or sculpted him during his lifetime. Definitely we have no image from his own lifetime. And also if you think about, you know, textual descriptions. Yeah.

The Bible doesn't contain a single word, not a sentence, not a single word about how Jesus looked like. Really? There is a description of his clothes one time, what he wore, not a single description of what he looked like, whether he was tall or short or fat or thin. The color of his skin. Color of his skin, color of his hair, color of his eyes, nothing.

Wow. All the portraits, the billions of portraits, they came out of human imagination. And nevertheless, they have been extremely successful and important in connecting billions of people into a network which shares certain values and norms which can work together to build cathedrals and build hospitals and also go to wars and establish...

Inquisition and things like that. Voting blocs. Yeah. So whether for good or bad, this has been one of the most powerful networks in human history. Catholicism. Christianity, even more generally. Again, like every network, it can break up into several sub-networks. So there is always this tension between uniting more people together and breaking up into smaller parts. But this is what information does.

A subset of the information in the world may also tell us the truth about the world. Some information is true, but truth is a very rare and relatively costly kind of information.

of information. Most information is not truth. Again, it's fiction, it's fantasy, it's sometimes lies, it's sometimes illusions, delusions. A key point is that the truth is costly because it requires a special effort to produce truthful information. You need to research, you need to spend time gathering evidence and analyzing it and so forth. Fiction is cheap.

You just draw or write the first thing that comes in your mind. So going back to networks, the key is that if you manage to connect a lot of individuals into a network like a church or an army or a corporation or a state or anything like that,

they can accomplish far, far more than either individuals or a small number of people. And again, this of course goes back to sapiens. This is the key to our success as a species, that we can build these huge networks. We can build a network around money, this idea that this has some value or a deity or...

or national identity. - Yeah, and so sapiens began to explore this idea that Nexus now goes over history and also the future and looks at it from the viewpoint of these networks. So, okay, if we established that stories create networks and networks are important, let's look at history as the process, not of human actions,

but of networks spreading, sometimes collapsing, changing their nature. So for instance, a chapter about democracy and dictatorship, which looks at them not as different ethical or ideological systems,

but as different types of information networks. How they flow, how they function. Yeah, how information flows. Information flows differently in democracy and dictatorship, and this is what makes them so different. In dictatorships, they are centralized information networks. All the information or most of the information flows to just one place where all the decisions are being made. Putin's desk. Yeah, Putin's desk or Xi's desk or whatever. And also, they lack...

self-correcting mechanisms. The network doesn't contain a mechanism for identifying and correcting the network's own mistakes. Democracy, in contrast, is a different kind of network. What characterizes it is that information doesn't flow just through a central hub. There is usually a central hub. So in the United States, a lot of information flows to Washington, but most of it doesn't. Probably more to New York. Yeah.

Most of the economic decisions, social decisions, cultural decisions are being taken in New York, in Los Angeles, in lots of other places. A lot of the information never passes through any government office.

And you have strong self-correcting mechanisms. If the network makes a mistake, you don't need somebody from outside to intervene. The whole point about democracy is that you have these built-in mechanisms to identify and correct its own mistakes. So in democracy, you have this mechanism that every couple of years, people can say, we made a mistake, let's try something else. Of course, the problem, if you have only this, is that it can easily be rigged.

I mean, the weakness of democracy since ancient times is that you basically give enormous power to one person or one party on condition that they give it back after four years. And what happens if they don't? I mean, they have all this power in their hands. What happens if they use all this power to stay in power, to rig the elections? And we've seen it many times. In Russia, they have elections every four years. And presumably in the 1990s, when Putin first rose to power,

the elections were relatively fair and free. Then he used his power to dismantle and to rig the elections. And you saw the same thing in Venezuela. Chavez originally came to power, as far as we know, in free and fair elections. But then Chavez and his successor Maduro, they used the power to destroy the democratic system and then stay in

power. Yeah, they just had an election in quotes and it's a disaster. Yeah, I mean Maduro lost big time but because he appoints all the election officials and all the judges and everything so he says, no, I won. This just in, I won. Yeah. Yeah.

So if you only have elections, this is not enough. Right. You need an entire system. This is the famous checks and balances. And these checks and balances like independent courts and free media and the fourth state and federal system. These are all basically self. If you think about it in terms of information, these are the self-correcting mechanisms. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare.

We are supported by BetterHelp. There are so many things to love about December. It's holiday season. There are breaks from work and school on the calendar to spend time with loved ones, not to mention delicious seasonal treats. Staying cozy in the winter months is essential, and therapy can be a great way to bring yourself some comfort that never goes away, even when the seasons change.

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Systems thinking is super important when you work with couples and when you work with groups. The idea with systems thinking is that we each bring into the world a set of inclinations and traits and characteristics, but then when you're joining some kind of group or system, it could be a group of two, it could be a team, it

could be a family. The system needs all sorts of things from its members. Like it needs someone to volunteer leadership capabilities. It needs someone to be the caretaker. It needs someone to be the critic. We need all these functions. When you join a system, the system calls upon its members to volunteer certain functions. And we're each more and less inclined to volunteer certain things, but it will change depending on what team we join. Like with some teams, you'll find yourself, oh, I'm

kind of a leader here and with some teams you're like actually I'm a follower because there's someone else that's doing it differently and better than me now. So when you work with a couple you try to understand how they're each drawn into certain roles based on what the couple as a system needs.

So it's a very different way of thinking about, let's say, a crisis that a couple goes through. You're trying to understand what's going on with the system, with a unit as a whole that leads them to this crisis. How did they each take this role? When you're raising kids, there are certain things that need to happen and not everyone can do everything correctly.

What I was going to suggest as an example that people, I think, experience most strongly is they go out into their adult life and they kind of gravitate toward a system that they wanted. And then they return home for the holidays and you can feel yourself click into the role you were ascribed in that situation. And you're like, no, no, no, no, I don't want this role anymore. I feel like that's when people are really aware of it. Yes. And that's why around the holidays, I cannot go on vacation.

You have done a lot of work on disassociation. Maybe we could dig in a little bit of what that means for people. I think it's very common. It's a spectrum. The one I'm not familiar with that seems...

like a sister state is depersonalization. I don't know what that is. Generally, dissociation, going back to Freud, you really introduced the concept of repression. That if there's something you don't want to know about yourself or something happened to you, you repress it. Meaning it happened, you registered it, and then you push it out of mind. You forget. That was in quotes. That was in quotes. Yeah.

Dissociation is a different model of mind. It's when things happen that are either traumatic or to some degree something you can't tolerate. You either don't process it, you kind of leave it hanging and not fully comprehend what it means, or you shunt it towards a part of the psyche that is not your main part of your personality. You kind of...

keep it to the side to a part that's kind of not me. That not me over there just registered all those bad things that were happening over there, but I'm not going to pay attention to it because the me that needs to keep functioning is moving ahead in the world. That always happened to someone else because to take that on would be too much. Exactly. So there are many ways to dissociate. Some extreme ways would be

multiple personality, what we call dissociative identity disorder. You really shunt parts of the psyche to the side and they develop like a whole world of their own. And this one is so extreme that there's almost a lack of awareness that the other states exist, right? Right. One of the ways that we think about multiple personality is that one part of the psyche doesn't even know about these other personalities or there's amnesia for what the other personalities are going through. I treat people with multiple or DID. Yeah.

Well, this season we have someone that's approaching that. Right. Yes, Alexis. He has a dissociative disorder. And to the degree where he doesn't remember the arguments he's having with his partner. Yes. Alexis, what happens to him is he's very afraid of his own rage. And there are all sorts of reasons why. And when he gets triggered and gets enraged or triggered into like a trauma zone, he's

he really switches and becomes a very different kind of person. Who can defend himself. Who can sort of defend himself more. He's trying. Globally, he's actually making much more pain for himself. Right. That one is hard to watch. And going back to depersonalization, when people depersonalize, what happens to them is

in a way, they sort of remove themselves from what's happening. Being in a relationship with someone like that, like in this season... Like Kazimara and Alexis. Yes, feels...

so heavy like i hate impossible he doesn't have memories that the other person has that are painful and aggressive and hurt them but they don't even know that they did it it just feels so epic yeah it is epic i mean you saw the two of them what they had going for them is their deep psychological insight into all of this and first of all their profound love for each other

They were in process of working on this stuff. Alexis knew and wanted to get better at it. They were an incredible couple to work with. I want to earmark that case because it actually got kind of personal to you. And we saw maybe one of your bad word for it, but Achilles. Yes. Because, of course, as a show, you're the hero of our story. So it's interesting to have a pretty insatiable desire to know about you. And there's not a lot of info for us. Well, there is there.

There is and there isn't. I don't know your history. I don't know about your children. I learn you're from Israel or spent time, you know, little nuggets here and there. But a lead character normally would have had kind of an introduction where we get the backstory and then we take a journey with them. So it's part of the fun of watching it is you yourself as the lead character of a story we watch is a mystery to us, which is very interesting.

Go ahead. I have to respond to that. Yeah. First of all, it's uncomfortable. Sure. Just characterologically. But the therapist in a way is to some degree the lead character in a therapy, but also not at all. I'm doing the work. I'm the theory. I was really unspecific in what I was talking about. There's the reality of what's happening that happens to get captured. Yeah.

And there you're right. You're not the hero of that. Then there's a documentary series. That's another thing. I guess I'm less connected to that. As you should be. I'm almost letting you into the perspective of the viewer. That would be hard for you to probably touch, which is...

I turn on my television. There's a program presented to me. The couples change. One person stays consistent. The blueprint of my brain for story is that's my lead character. That's my hero. Now, that's not the reality of what's happening in the room at all. I'm not suggesting that. Right.

This is great. This is uncomfortable, right? Yeah. What about it is uncomfortable? I could guess. Well, first of all, I'm not... Look, people go into the profession of being a therapist or an analyst because they're actually quite private. Yeah, yeah. I like being private. I like the story being someone else. I don't like the idea of me being the main character. But I also have a theoretical belief. I understand what you're saying, but...

You're joining me not in being myself. You're joining me as the viewer. You're coming with me on this journey to understand how to think, how to listen. Not me personally. We're together. We're thinking about what is this human thing, this human journey we're on. If I had used the word guide instead of hero, would that be less... Triggering.

I don't know. It probably feels like you're dishonoring, really dishonoring what's happening. Yeah. By claiming to be the hero of it. Yeah. I'm channeling what I've learned to do. And you are. And I would feel that exact same way. Yeah. From 758 with the Avett Brothers. All right. We are loved. Whether we speak up or we are silent.

If we are willing, for we are done. If we're courageous, for we are cast. We may be burdened, but we are loved. And whether we stay true and do for another. If we are hidden,

Or we're discovered. If we're forgiven. Or we're forgotten. We may be lonely. But we are loved. Every stitch and seam. Every wish and dream. Even in tragedy.

their lies divine even as hope seems lost it may be found again I have felt alone but I've been if you are standing oh can I stop moving

If you are home or cannot remember Over the gravestone, under the rainbow Pain comes and pain go, and we are loved Every stitch and seam Every wish and dream

Even in tragedy, there lies divinity. Even as hope seems lost, it may be found again. I have felt alone. I have never been. If we are spirit.

Or we are human Crossing the river Or harboring change If we deny it Or if we face it May we embrace it We are loved

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Each week on Redacted Declassified Mysteries, we pull back the curtain on these hidden histories. 100% true and verifiable stories that expose the shadowy underbelly of power. Consider Operation Paperclip, where former Nazi scientists were brought to America after World War II, not as prisoners, but as assets to advance U.S. intelligence during the Cold War.

These aren't just old conspiracy theories. They're thoroughly investigated accounts that reveal the uncomfortable truths still shaping our world today. The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow redacted, declassified mysteries with me, Luke LaManna, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen ad-free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.