Matt Murphy (homicide prosecutor)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. This is a real departure from previous experts in the most exhilarating way. This was riveting. And it's a ding, ding, ding from Monday's episode. Yes, from Anna Kendrick because of her new movie, Woman of the Hour.

Our guest, Matt Murphy, was a technical advisor on it as well as an actual prosecutor on the case. Matt Murphy is a former homicide prosecutor and a current legal analyst for ABC News. Maybe you've seen him there. And he spent two decades

assigned to the sexual assault and homicide units of the Orange County District Attorney's Office, which you'll learn in this, is the third biggest in the country. Three million people under their purview. Yes. He has tried some of the most headline-y murder cases of all time. A lot of shit was happening in Orange County that I kind of...

Didn't realize. Yeah, he's like Golden State Killer. Dirty John. He has a book out called The Book of Murder, A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death, which is fantastic. It's so good. And he profiles all these different cases he's worked on as well as

Educate you a ton on how the actual mechanics of that job work, which I find fascinating. And then his own personal journey, which is this job took an enormous toll on the rest of his life. Yeah. Yeah. This was awesome. I loved Matt Murphy. I hope you do too. Oh, oh.

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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 awesome.

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He's an armchair expert. He's an armchair expert. He's an armchair expert. He's an armchair expert.

We're pretty willy-nilly, Matt. Don't let this nice set fool you. We're kind of, um... Just my speed. Cattywampus. Cattywampus is a good word. Now, you're handsome. Let's start with the fact that you're very handsome. Devilishly, devilishly so. And I'm being sincere now. It has to be a little bit of an advantage when you're a prosecutor to be handsome. It'd be preferable that the jury likes to look at you, right? You know what's tough is...

For the women, pretty women prosecutors, it's brutal. It is. Because people don't take them seriously. As a guy, you walk in, the bailiff's your buddy. You talk about fantasy football. The court clerk wants to set you up with her divorce friend. Uh-huh. And a lot of the women have it tougher because half the women on the jury will want to hate her for her suit. Mm-hmm.

The court reporter is jealous. The men feel emasculated that she's smarter than them, so they hate her on the jury. It's a minefield. So Matt, this will be a fun interview for us because we've not had anyone weirdly in this realm. We've had a lot of defense attorneys on, as they tend to write books. Yeah, so we've not had a prosecutor on, and I can't tell you how immediately, how many questions I realized I had. Oh, I love it. Yeah, first of all, you're a California native, which is weird. Yeah, I grew up, actually, we were just talking about it, not far from here.

Really? Yeah, I grew up in Beverlywood. Why don't I know where Beverlywood is? Nobody knows where it is. It's not Beverly Hills. You know where Rancho Park is by Fox Studios? Oh, yes. Okay, so literally, Cheviot Hills. Cheviot Hills, yeah. Okay, so it's the second part of Cheviot Hills on the other side of Motor. Okay. So it's basically Cheviot Hills. And what did mom and dad do that you were living there? My dad was a doctor. Mom was a nurse. Met at LA County General. Oh.

Oh, that's going to be cute. They were working together? They were working together. Yeah, it sounds cute. I don't think two humans have hated each other more. I should not exist. I kind of nerd out on some of these astronomy things. And somebody tried to calculate...

the odds of humans existing with like Jupiter and absorbing all the asteroids and like whatever that list is, I'm the least likely person to actually exist. How long did they stay married? They were married for 10 years, probably talked to each other for at least one. Well, my sister's two years younger than me, so at least eight years they'd...

Okay. What kind of doctor was he? GI. He started doing rehab centers. Probably made a lot of money doing that. He did, and he got in like in the late 80s. He was one of the pioneers. Anthony Kiedis and scar tissue. Did you ever read that book? I haven't, but I know Anthony and I know his story. That's a good read. So he actually talked about my dad in that book. Oh, he did? What drove him maybe working in the county? No, no, no. He's like the hopeless alcoholic for a long time. Your dad was? Both my parents, yeah.

Oh, interesting. I'm a thoroughbred baby. Did your dad get sober? Yeah. And then he wanted to open a treatment center. Yeah. He was sort of like a passion life, big AA guy. In 1975, he got a DUI, and it was undignified experience for him. And he was a prominent dude, and he got sober. My dad got his fourth DUI. He was going to go to prison, and he went to rehab. And it stuck? It stuck. Yeah, he died sober. So it's an interesting experience to grow up in prison.

AA, right? I was an AA kid. Me too. Really? Did you go to like Alateen? Made me go. I lived with him in high school because my mom was still drinking. And he was a legit guy. He was all in. It was like a religion to him. Was he into Course in Miracles or ACOA or all the other fringe outgrows of the 80s AA? ACOA? Yeah, sure was. When I moved in, that was the condition. I had to go to Alateen meetings. Matt.

You've heard me say this. So I never lived with my dad. They got divorced when I was three. And then in ninth grade, he had gotten in a terrible car accident and he needed someone to help him. And I was about to get murdered at the new high school I was going to go to. So many kids hated me. So I moved in with him and he said, yeah, come in. There's virtually no rules. You have no curfew, but you have to go to one meeting a week. Holy shit, this is so funny. And so I started going to like...

or whatever it was, he encouraged me to go to like the Al-Anon portion. I was like, these aren't my folks. I'd rather be in an actual AA meeting. So I was going to AA meetings before I ever had a problem. I ultimately did have a big problem. - So I moved in in ninth grade. That was the rule. No curfew, no nothing. I had to go to an Al-Ateen meeting a week.

and the rules basically were, I mean, this is kind of bad, but don't get caught with whatever I was doing because I heard a thousand times I'm not going to bail you out of jail. And, I mean, we used to go to punk shows down the street from where we are right now, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in the day. Oh, really? But, I mean, they were more funk back then. We are both tall, lanky gentlemen that were in the punk scene living with dad having to go, hey, this is pretty fucking nuts. Private school?

No, I went to public school. Okay, so I went to public school up to ninth grade, and then I went up going to Loyola with actually a bunch of Los Filos kids. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Wow. Do you live here still? Manhattan Beach. Okay. Yeah, and then I'm splitting time between here and New York, man. You are the correspondent for ABC News? ABC for true crime. All things murder and mayhem. Oh, boy. Okay, so let's find out. So this is incredible that you had that experience because the group of friends is so unique. The kids I met in there were a

A blast because they were already fucked up and got sober. Totally. And a bunch of kids that you could really relate to. I had friends that came from really nice families. My family was so fucked up that when I got in there with those kids, they were sort of my people. Did mom ever get sober? She got sober at 75. Whoa. No way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right when I thought I was completely done. She was a nurse, so she retired. And like a lot of retired people, she went off the rails completely. Yeah, of course. And a friend of hers called in a welfare check.

And they went in and she was a 4'2 blood alcohol level. And that's what finally kicked in. I can't believe she was in a coma. I know. They found her, passed out. At 75 of course. At 75, 4'2. She would have lived to be 160 if she had been. Yeah, I know. Scotch-Irish genes, you know. And she had to be a 5'0 at least at her peak. Oh my God.

- Oh my God. - That event. - Was she in your life? - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I loved my mom forever. She died a couple years ago. Well, you have to 'cause dad leaves and now he's the bad guy and she's-- - But he lived with his dad. - I lived with her and then I moved in with him in ninth grade 'cause she was a mess and my brother and sister too. - How do you get college bound from this childhood? - I wanted to get the hell out. - Where'd you go to college? - UCSB. So I'm 15 years old. I grew up surfing here. I took a surf trip with a bunch of buddies. Like when your first friend gets his driver's license,

And then you're packing like eight kids into the car because now you have freedom. We went up there and there's a place called Campus Point at UCSB. You live in Santa Barbara for a spell. For one year, yeah, yeah. And I was lured there by visiting Ivy right out of high school. And I was like, get real. Disneyland has nothing unhappiest place on earth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's impossible. And I went up there. I'd never been. I'm 15 years old and we roll on it. It's like one of those classic Southern California days. And the one day of the year that Campus Point is firing. So it's the best wave I've probably ever seen at that point. And there's

beautiful girls everywhere on bikes. And it's like, where the hell is this? And that was it. All I wanted to do. It's like I found the next phase. Okay, so you got BA at UCSB. And then where'd you go to law school? San Diego. Went down there. Lived on the beach for another three years. Okay, you were just chasing beach lifestyle. I was. I got the sun damage to prove it, unfortunately, now. And when you were going after a law degree, was it your intention to be a prosecutor?

or a defense attorney? I kind of stumbled into it. I started a sexual assault education program as an undergrad because we could make fraternity pledges and sorority pledges go. So like I got your classic women's center orientation and where they were yelling at all for being men. And then I had a friend that got sexually assaulted. It was actually somebody I was dating.

when I was on semester at sea and I came back and it was a horrific experience. So I thought I could maybe take a different approach. It caught on. So that caught the eye of the FBI. And this woman, Kathy Harper, her whole thing was sexual assault. That was her background with the DA's office. I got recruited by the FBI and by her.

In law school or under? In law school. In law school. Yeah. Okay. It was kind of cool. And this fancy PI firm offered me a track to make a bunch of money. I decided I'd give the DA's office a whirl. Boy, really quick, you asked 23-year-old me, I'm probably going to the FBI. I want to kick some doors down. It looked really, really cool. But...

The rule back then was that they wouldn't assign you to an area where you went to college, where you grew up, where you went to undergrad. I'm a talentless surfer. Trust me. Way too lanky. But I loved it and I just wanted to keep doing it. So at age 23, it was like, this means I can't surf anymore, which is the logic.

Totally. I was frigging, you know, 23 going on 15-year-old. So I thought DA's office, my plan was to do it for three years. And then at the end of my first day as a junior law clerk in 1992, I was hooked. I knew it's what I wanted to do. The longer you stay, the more interesting it gets, the more skill you get as a trial lawyer. And that office back then, it was a trial philosophy office.

So they really wanted you to get as skilled as you could. It's like a craft, picking a jury. And I sucked so bad when I first started. But it starts getting more and more fun and stressful. And then you start doing felonies. And then it gets more interesting. I kind of resisted mentors for a long time. And then...

I don't know what it was, but I had a couple of these guys take me under their wing. And then I really felt like I had an actual teacher. So I'd go in and try things in a courtroom. And then you'd start dealing with real victims. I went to sexual assault and I spent four years there. And when you sit down with a crying mom whose kid has been...

sexually abused. Sexual abuse is so ubiquitous and so many of us have had that happen to us over the years. I've had juries where the judge, they'll ask a question, you know, have you or anybody close to you been a victim or experienced something similar? I've had every hand go up in the box, 12 out of 12 jurors. So then you start dealing with that and with real pedophiles, the predatory ones especially,

You do some good when you get one of those guys on a tough case. When you win those, you are impacting the lives of all the victims. Of dozens of people, probably, yeah. And then you get Tom's side, which is varsity, and that's where it gets fascinating. That's what I wrote my book about, was that journey showing up and knowing nothing about murders and starting at ground zero. And I tried to take the reader through my experience on that.

Well, let's set the stage. First and foremost, you're here because we just interviewed Anna Kendrick and we just saw her movie, which is great. It is a factual case. Of course, it's been artistically interpreted, but it's a real life case from the 70s. And as it turns out, you were on that

case, an iteration of it. But you were with the DA's office in Orange County, which I think this shocked me even knowing about Orange County, but it's the third largest DA's office in the country. And under your purview is 3 million people. Right.

I don't think people would really know that. New York, and then you got L.A., and then Orange County, and advised for third, depending on the population. I think Detroit, I think Atlanta had a really big one for a while. But yeah, it's up to third largest DA's office in the United States. And so you had a 27-year career there, 17 of which was with homicide. And in that 17 years...

you prosecuted and/or worked on a lot of the cases we know about from pop culture. "We're Out of the Gates," "Dirty John" I read. I was like, "What are the fucking odds that we'll meet the person?" So that's pretty wild. But I think we start at the beginning because it's a wild ride. First and foremost, when you were working the sexual victims unit, you were warned by an early mentor. You said the move is to find a buddy. Hopefully you have one, to have someone show you the ropes.

And they said to you, your love life is going to be in shambles after this. And you're like, not a chance. Because of SVU? The subject matter. I think it's for a variety of reasons. But Matt was like I would have been like, get real. I'm mid-20s. What are you talking about? Superman. Superman.

Yeah. And it was a buddy of mine. He's a couple years older than me in the office, still one of my best friends. And he's like, dude, forget it. And basically, the women tend to do a lot better in that unit for whatever reason than the men do. There's a thing called pornography, not that I've ever watched it before. However...

It's like one. You do know it exists. I know it exists. I've read about it. Anyway, it's like 10 hours a day of anti-porn. You're immersed up to your eyeballs in the worst stuff you can imagine. And it doesn't take you long before you realize it's 99.999%.

men, you know, male sexuality. It really does kind of screw with your head a little bit. That line between normal sexual drive and healthy relationships. Well, it's a continuum and you're like, oh, I'm here. Where does it get pathological? Right. It screws your head like nothing else.

It's hard not to bring home. - I'd very rather see murders, for sure. - Honestly, it's a lot easier. And I mean, a lot of murders, there's a sex element to them, like Ryan Hall. - I wanna get into that. - Golden State Killer was one of mine as well. - Oh my God. - A lot of the serial killers start out with sex crime, fundamentally. And I talk about this a little bit in the book. My next book,

Hopefully, if I get another deal, it's going to be about serial killers specifically because I feel like there's so much meat on that bone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're going to build to that because I have a lot of sexual questions around that. I mean, truly, it seems like, at least from the stuff I consume, there seems to be a really ubiquitous...

sexual insecurity driving a lot of this. That's an interesting observation. I've never heard anybody say that before. Really? I think you're exactly right. An insecurity element. I got to think about that. Like, let's just say, my penis is so small, I can't be with anyone in the normal way. Yeah. But I can force myself on this and then I can end their experience. I can give you kind of a newsflash here that nobody knows and I don't mind saying it and I hope he's listening. Joseph D'Angelo, Golden State Killer. Yeah. Tiny dick. Uh-huh.

Like, micropenis small. Really? I don't think that's ever come out in any of the books, but yeah. I intuitively know that's part of some of these things. There's something to that. It's going to work in tandem with my other hunch I have about all of them is they're kind of all smart, and they're underachievers. A lot of them are really smart. And they think they're supposed to be someone important because they were intelligent enough to be so, and then they underperformed. If they have this entitlement, I should have been this, and I'm fucking angry. You have no idea how right you are. It's entitlement.

entitlement. And there's a myth out there with a lot of serial killers that they're a product of abuse. I've had an issue with it. I showed up looking for Buffalo Bill, thinking all serial killers, like I saw Silence of the Lambs. I know what it is, you know? Yeah. And I got there and a lot of serial rapists tend to be super arrogant, entitled, just like you were saying. They're very, very smart. A

They were told they were great, and then they get out there in the real world and women aren't so interested in them. And there's a component of that for sure, and they feel entitled to do it. I was owed this. And I'm going to take it. And they get off on it. There's kind of this myth out there. One of the most common questions you get when you're actually prosecuting those cases is, what made them do it? And the answer is, they fucking want to do it. And a lot of times, can I swear on this as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want to do it. It turns them on.

and they get off on it and they feel like they're entitled to do it. God's powerful. That's right. They get off on the power. And they're proving to everyone. Right. The more sadistic fear and pain they can inflict on their victims, the better. Alcala, you know, Anna's movie. How do you say his last name? Alcala. He grew up in East LA, actually Cantwell High School, which is another college prep school. Oh, really? That was a varsity letterman. Oh, my God. Genius level IQ. Mensa certified. The whole deal. Brother went to West Point. Hero in Vietnam. Oh, my God.

Totally successful, mother who loved him, never abused or bullied by anybody. And the guy probably murdered 100 people. Anna Kendrick, I got to tell you, so I get a call in the middle of COVID.

from her people and it's, hey, Anna Kendrick wants to talk to you about a movie. Of course, I'll talk to her. Right away, she was super sensitive about the victims and wanted to make sure that if they were making a movie, she was sensitive to that. And the way Orange County works is a little different than most DA's offices. It's called a vertical system. So I was assigned Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach, Newport, and Irvine. And then I became one of the two cold case deputies, which is how I got Alcala.

and we start the night of the murder. So we'd go to the crime scenes ourselves, we'd help with warrants, work with the detectives from the minute the murder happens all the way up, and then the detective that you're with that night is with you at counsel table when the jury comes back and they're for sentencing. So it's a real team thing. So as a result of that, first thing I would do is meet with the victim's families after I filed charges in whatever kind of murder it was.

And you bond with those people. You get really protective of them. So when she said she wanted to make a movie and wanted to make sure she did it right from the victim's perspective. Yeah, she's telling their story, not his. Yeah, right. Which I think is admirable. But it left me with a ton of questions about him, which you're going to answer. Yeah, I can answer them. No, I think it's a very cool and respectful approach to it.

The new serial killer to me is the mass shooter because it's, to me, very similar. The type, the insecure boy, almost always, who has trouble with women or girls but feels entitled and is on this power trip. I feel like serial killers have moved into that

and it's the same type of person. So the FBI would say that's a spree killing and a little bit different. The psychology, and I like your theory on that, for the true blue serial killers, like the Bundys, the Jack the Rippers, there's a sexual component. The school shooter tends to really be that outcast, kind of picked on, bullied kid. I was going to say the way I've seen it,

seeing those folks as a little different. And I witnessed it so much growing up in the way I did in the time I did, which is the system ruined a lot of kids that didn't fit in. There's a lot of kids that are so hurt by that. I'm not justifying it, but I think it's a different motivation. It's not I'm entitled, it's that...

You guys are making me suffer so much. I'm going to make you suffer back. It's like a revenge. It's a different animal. And I go through kind of the taxonomy of murders. A domestic violence murder is very different than a child abuse murder, which is very different than like a tweaker robbed a 7-Eleven murderer. You know, like the conspiracies to kill for money. So they're all a little bit different. You always wind up with a dead body at the end, but you start seeing some of the same things over and over if you do them long enough. Like serial killers love to collect trophies.

It's almost like they go to school for it. Well, again, they're proud of themselves. They've proved that they're smarter than everyone else. For anybody that's interested, I got into probably the Alcala chapter more than anything else in the book because the deeper you look in serial killers and the psychological motivations...

to me anyway, the more fascinating it gets. And when you get into the history of them, I always thought it was a product of modern American life, sort of the disaffected youth and all that. And then you get into, I read Mindhunter by Douglas, who was the FBI agent who wrote Silence of the Lambs originally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then from that, there's a great FBI paper, and they talk about the first...

real attempt to get a handle on him. And it was this guy, Dr. Von Kraft Ebbing. And he wrote a book in the 1880s. He was a contemporary of Freud. And he was a German psychiatrist, never been to America. It's a whole section full of serial killers that we've never heard of going back hundreds of years, European. So it's not an American thing. It's timeless. Yeah, it's timeless. It's something in the human community, psyche, whatever it is, that there are those guys. And the only primate that

that we have that kills for pleasure other than us is chimps. And what do chimps have in common with us? They're incredibly intelligent and they have a very stratified hierarchy. So if they're low status and they feel low status, the outcome of that is often homicidal or chimpicidal. What is it, like 98.9% of our DNA is shared with chimps? Did you see Chimp Crazy? No. Oh, you must on HBO.

Everybody's face gets ripped off. Yes. Again, look how chimps kill people. Tigers, they get you around the neck, they kill you. They want to eat you. A chimp unleashes fury. It's a crime of passion. They want to make you suffer. They don't even really necessarily want you dead.

They want to man you and mangle you. They just want to hurt you. Yeah. It's so disturbing. It is. It is. It's in us all. It gives you that sense it's just so close at all times. Circling all the way back, what was it about the being and the sexual? Do you think you could articulate specifically? One is like you're seeing horrific graphic things. That's disturbing and that will not make you horny. That'll make you anti-horny. Anti-horny.

But I think deeper and more interesting is coming to terms with where you're at in this weird thing. You possess this same weird drive and we all have levels of perversion. Is it almost like seeing a glimpse of your own sexuality gets scary to you? That is a real effect of that. Your job is taking down the guys that are hurting people with their sexuality.

Right away, you become so paranoid of your own sexuality as a man. You have to govern this drive and you maybe get a sense of like, wow, ungoverned, I'm afraid of who I would be or who anyone would be. That's a huge part of it. And also for me, as a guy, we all have to learn. You have to control those urges. And that's something that I think men in a sort of traditionally masculine way can't.

We learned that very early on. And among other men, a lot of people don't talk about this, the dude who can't control his urges becomes an outcast if he doesn't get his ass kicked very quickly by the other man in whatever little crew he's in. If he's surrounded by any sort of decent group of guys. So you learn to control it. And then in that unit, what happens is you overcompensate. And I think that I became, I mean, this is probably way more information.

But what's great about your book is it's your personal story interwoven with your professional one. I became passive sexually probably to the point of being a lousy partner. My girlfriend at the time was gorgeous. Got her master's in architecture and graduated from UCLA. She was a catch in every way. And then here I am. You're retired from sex. It's scary.

Yeah, I retired at age 28. Yeah. Probably didn't do much for our relationship, actually. You're in that unit for a while, and then you get called up to the big leagues, which is homicide, and everyone's aiming towards that. And you have this kind of well-worn stereotype or trope, which is you're nervous the first time you go to a crime scene because you know of these people who've come before you who show up and throw up. And we see it in movies. Right. I just rewatched Seven. Oh.

It's a great movie. Such a good movie. Masterful. It's so good. Oh, gosh. I mean, Kevin Spacey, who I think is getting uncanceled now, I think. Is he? He just did a Broadway thing. Oh, really? Yeah. But, uh...

Oh, my God. I don't pretend to know how any of that stuff works, but amazing actor, if nothing else. Yeah, well, that is true. I won't take that from him. But Brad Pitt in that was amazing. Morgan Freeman was amazing. They're incredible. It'd probably be the equivalent of you're an actor, and you have just wound up doing your first scene with somebody like a Morgan Freeman. I had the biggest imposter syndrome ever. You were inordinately young for the position as well. I was on a rocket, and I looked like I was 12, and I go to the crime scene, and

come on, everything you see on TV, the new guy always pukes, right? I'm literally walking into that going, don't puke, Murphy, don't puke. Because if anybody's capable of throwing up on a dead body or doing something that dumb, it's me. I'm 33. I was surfing that morning trying to get over a broken heart from the UCLA grad because she...

She moved on. Yeah, she moved on to a guy who is my buddy Greg. She wasn't retired sexually quite yet. She was not. She was not. And my buddy Greg, as he put it, the guy she wound up marrying, he's just like you, dude, just a little better in every way. Walking to that crime scene, we had a dead guy on his back in a kitchen. And the majority of the crime scenes are inside. And a lot of them are domestics, which is what this wound up being. But...

I walk in and it's like, don't puke, don't puke, don't puke. And I look down and he had a folding knife in his left hand and a wallet chain in his right back pocket and immediately jumped out at me like, why would a right-handed guy have a knife in his left hand or a left-handed guy have his wallet in his right back pocket? And here's another thing that isn't in the book. First thing, the detective Byington, who wound up being one of my best friends and he wound up being the lead in so many of the stories I talk about in so many of the cases, but

he lifts up the shoulder because what happened was the killer, who was his mistress, I guess we could call her. He was married, having an affair with her. She had just gotten broken up with by her boyfriend, who she still lived with. Right. And so she starts seeing our guy. And I don't know if he's still living with his wife or if they were separated. And this is super weird. And this is also not in the book. His brother had a dream. His brother is a really deeply religious guy to the point of being kind of out there a little bit. Has a dream where his brother is...

killed. Again, my whole thing with the families and he told me this. He has a dream that he sees his brother's death. And so he talked to him and said, God came to me in a dream and showed me your death and he's going to strike you down if you don't end this sinful relationship and go back to your wife and kids. That's a true story. Oh my God.

And if that isn't the weirdest frigging thing, and I'm not religious, but we always kind of thought he had this talk with his brother and he went over to end it and she couldn't handle two breakups. So she shot him. He was hauling ass for the stairs and there was one graze wound to his arm. And we see all these bullet holes on the wall upstairs, broken glass. As he's going down the stairs, she got him once in the back. Then he goes down and he's on his back and she shot him twice in the heart.

Once in the temple, once in the mouth. So the detective, I'm 30, this is my first murder scene. I'm just thinking, don't throw up, don't throw up. He lifts up his shoulder to show me the two bullet holes in the wood underneath, which is significant because it indicates degree between a first and second. Also, it was a six-shot revolver and there were eight holes, so she had to reload, which legally is all very significant. He lifts up the shoulder and I'm in the don't puke mode.

the guy groans. Oh, no. Because, yeah, a lot of people wonder. The air came out of his mouth? The air came out of his mouth. And it's like, ugh. I mean, it's

It's like haunted house, haunted house. You're just trying to act like you've been in this situation a thousand times. Yeah, I've seen this a million times. It's like, are we sure this guy's dead? Dead men don't talk. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do. Oh. Yeah, so that was my first one. And then what happened? She bails out. This is my first week in the unit. I want to add, she is financial manager. Financial planner, 41 years old, never been in trouble a day in her life. Ties to the community, grew up in Newport Beach area. So she's got a right to bail. And back then it was $250,000. And she's...

She can make it, and I've got no arguments to keep her in, and this is statutory bail. She gets out and tracks down the ex-boyfriend who had just broken up with her and they were still living together. He's in a hotel, and he falls asleep. Unbeknownst to him, she brought in a tire iron from the car, bludgeons him to death.

in his sleep. Next night? Yeah, right after bailing out. And then goes to the place called the firing line in Huntington Beach, rents a gun and- Kills herself? Suicides, yeah. In a firing range. This is my first week. And I think I've got the shortest career in the homicide unit because I must have screwed something up. My boss, who is wonderful, he's like, how is this your fault? You know, he's like, she had a right to bail. I hate to tell you this. I'm so relieved that was the first story.

Because I'm so sick of us men killing everyone and hurting everyone. Anytime a woman's a piece of shit, I'm like, well, thank God there's a couple of them. Somebody on their team is doing something wrong. It is weird because normally women kill themselves. Normally she would have killed herself first before killing everyone else. It's the tire iron where I go, oh, bitches can get down too. Boy, we can all be nasty. If you can go in and bludgeon someone to death with a tire iron, I mean, that is a...

Dude move. And not only like, she didn't hit him once or twice until he was shaking. She bashed his face into the point that we needed fingerprints to identify him. We had a pretty good idea who it was because he ran out of the room. She went Tonka. Full Tonka. That's one of the chimps from the doc. You'll learn. Full Tonka. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

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What is the experience working with detectives? And maybe delineate that you guys have different roles. What the detective has to do versus you have to build a case, these are kind of separate things. So what are the pros and cons of those relationships? First of all, beginning with the FBI, I got to work in some of those task forces over the years. And the FBI agents, in my experience, are some of the best people I've ever met.

Yeah, they're so cool. They are so cool. A lot of people don't know this. A lot of them are lawyers. They tried to get me out of law school. The FBI, as an administration, like when they want to tell you no, and there's no logical reason for it, you hear the word protocol, and you deal with some of the most ridiculous shit dealing with the FBI. Yeah. And the agents are wonderful. So they made up for some of the negative experiences you deal with with the admin. With the bureaucracy. So the philosophy of the vertical unit, there's a guy named Francisco Briseño who just passed away. He was a pre-record judge, but he used to be head of the homicide unit. Vietnam War hero, campaigner.

came back with a guy named Ed Freeman, who back in the early 80s was a World War II war hero. So you get these two guys and they built the Homicide Unit and they came up with this vertical concept. And what they wanted was for their young women and men in the Homicide Unit to be able to bond with their detectives to eliminate a lot of those problems. So especially Southern California is a patchwork of small cities. My cities of Newport, Costa Mesa, Laguna, and Irvine are all small police departments.

And when you go in, it's like that day. I think in a way, Byington was trying to freak me out a little bit. It was a little bit of a hazing the new guy and can this guy hang sort of thing. Rite of passage. It's a rite of passage. And right when I walked in the door and I left this out of the book, they were literally, it was like seeing straight out of TV, they forensically processed the living room part of this townhome and they were eating a pizza. And the guy said to Matt, he goes, she killed the shit out of him. Yeah, basically stapled him to the floor. And this guy is, a lot of detectives are phony.

funny as shit. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you got to. You have no choice. The gallows humor. Another interesting thing about the best detectives and the best prosecutors, too, I think, it's the guys that are one bad decision away from being the same people they're investigating. A thousand percent. Those are the ones. Well, because you can understand, I have this, too. I'm a scumbag.

I'm a recovering addict. I can drop into a mindset pretty easily of feeling like I'm owed something. I'm justified for this. As far as detectives go, there are detectives who literally are Boy Scouts that live this very Joe Friday life, you know, just the facts, ma'am. And you encounter those and they're great at the documents, the police reports, there's no spelling errors in them and they have their advantages when it comes to the real world.

really bad. The serial killers you got to catch, the cases that are impossible that nobody else wants to take a run on. Give me the mutant that almost got fired a couple of times. And that's the person. Yeah, you got to get in their head. Well, that's the person that's going to win it for you. And that's the one that you can also, when they're sitting next to you during jury selection, that's the person you can lean over to. I keep saying guys, a lot of these are

are women. Some of the best investigators I worked with were women. - But I'm sure increasingly so over the course of your career. - Increasingly so. - In '92 or '93. - Even then, they're the women that have been divorced a couple times. It's the same thing. - They're paying the same price everyone else pays for that job. - 100%. And they're the ones that, the more twisted they are, that's the one you can lean over to and go, "Juror number 10,

What do you think? And you need that kind of guidance, especially when you've been doing it for a while. I needed as much help as I could get. But you know what's interesting? We would do these juror questionnaires on the really heavy stuff, like the serial killers and the death penalty cases. This sounds crazy, but I do think we should just mention for people who are 25 years out of jurisprudence,

When the case begins, you're starting with an ample amount of juries and you're going to get to kick some off as the prosecutor and the defense is going to get to kick some off. So you're trying to figure out who's going to be helpful, right? You get 20 challenges on a life case for no reason. They're called peremptories. So I can boot a jury for any reason other than race. But if they come in and they're wearing a shirt you don't like, you're allowed to kick them if you get a bad feeling in your gut. And so when you come up through the ranks, I could have 37 misdemeanor jury trials before I touched my first felony. And you don't get to do questionnaires in any of those.

And questionnaires, you get to ask them all kinds of things. And I learned over the years that you got to trust the gut, not the paper version because they can look really good on paper. It's kind of like dating in a way. Also, people answer questions in a way they think they're supposed to answer versus there's a quadrillion bits of information coming at you that are nonverbal. Which is the most important thing from chimpanzees on up. But back,

to, oh, so the police, they're very helpful. Right. So those detectives, yes, sorry, I took us on a tangent. The thing about a vertical unit is you get a relationship with them. You win a couple tough ones and pretty soon those cops are listening to everything you have to say because they want to win. I would meet with the families, but these cops would do the death notifications. And imagine that. I think the most extreme emotion I've ever experienced is, of course, for the dads too,

But for the moms who have had a child that's been murdered, and imagine you're a cop who has to break the news to them. No thanks. And that cop, when they go through that, you talk about tolls on relationships and alcoholism and all that. When they got the right guy and they know they got the right guy, they want to win that case. And when you bring it home for them and then you win a tough one,

Well, it's this beautifully symbiotic relationship, which is you got to gather everything perfectly and then I'm going to slam dunk this. And when you're in the foxhole like that with somebody and you go through a really hard trial, that detective sitting next to you, you come to love them and they love you back and they wind up being some of your closest friends. I would imagine that y'all's integrity gets...

tried probably more than almost any other job. I'd imagine it's quite tempting. I bet it's presented all the time that you could massage something and you would know I'm kind of violating this person's right, but I know they're guilty and it's worth it.

I bet that comes up a lot. It definitely happens. And as a defense lawyer, I've seen more of that. I defend a lot of police officers and I'm dealing with a case right now where they pulled some stuff that I've been shocked as a former prosecutor. I can't believe that anybody would do that. That the prosecution's doing. However, when you do it long enough and they let you actually be a pro as a prosecutor, you learn pretty early in your career that the only thing worse than a family losing a loved one

is losing a loved one, getting a conviction, and then having to do it all over again because somebody doesn't turn something over. Because here's a hypothetical I could imagine happening. I could imagine finding a bit of evidence that—

And now if I take that on, I'm legally obligated to turn that over to the defense, right? And I might go, I'm just going to skip that altogether. I didn't see that. I don't have to incorporate that because I don't really want to turn that over. Those little question marks probably arise. So when you came through, there's a guy named Chris Evans who's now a Superior Court judge, real world guy. He was a fireman who went to law school at night. And so he was a citizen of the actual world, uniquely gifted as an actual trial lawyer. And I used to go watch him when I was a law clerk. What he told us was,

make sure the defense has everything, and then beat them with it. That was what we got taught. And so for anybody that's holding evidence back, number one, it's totally illegal. In the state of California, it's actually a felony. But the people that do the dirty tricks as defense lawyers or prosecutors, they're trying to compensate for a lack of game. Yeah.

And if you've really learned the craft and you've studied it, as a prosecutor, if you can't convince a jury, you shouldn't win the case. Even if you're convinced the guy did it, you can't cheat to win. You have to have a level of respect for the system. You really do. And your reputation's all you have in that business. The best prosecutors really are kind of like, my buddy Jim Mendelsohn was an actual fighter pilot before he went to law school. And they're gunslingers. They want to fight. They don't want to cheat and win. No, there's a spectrum of talent in anything. But like the guys I was in the unit with, and you know, guys including women, they were some of the most

twisted, diabolically genius people. They were superheroes in my eyes. And they would turn everything over, the ones I worked with, because they would never admit they sweated any defense lawyer they ever came up against. They wanted to beat them, and the tougher the case, the better, as weird as that sounds. Now, if they were prone...

To be problematic, where was it generally going to surface? Muni court and doing misdemeanors. The ones who suck are never going to get to homicide in the first place. And so you wind up with kind of the exact opposite. You wind up with a bunch of people who were kind of brazen, sharp-elbowed, who relished the challenge. As a prosecutor, though, one of the tough parts is...

There are three things alleged on every appeal. The appellate defense counsel will always accuse the trial lawyer defense attorney of being incompetent. So they get accused of incompetence. The judge gets accused of some sort of malfeasance and forgetting to instruct on something, some sort of incompetence. And the prosecutor always gets accused of misconduct. Right now, the

police have had a hard time and some of that goes over into prosecutors and there's people that are open to that idea. And also what gets made, what do I watch? I'm very heartbroken and interested when I see on Frontline the confessions and they got seven confessions from seven guys who are all

below a third grade reading level that were scared. That sting of injustice on that level and innocence is so strong that obviously you could probably mis-evaluate how prevalent. Who knows? I sit on a board with Purdue University. It's a post-exoneration board where our whole task is trying to find people in Indiana that have been falsely convicted. And I work with a guy named Timmy Donnell on that who's an exoneree. I've

I freaking love this guy. Of all the people on the board, and there's a bunch of rich, fancy, famous people, Timmy's the guy. So he did 21 years for a murder that he actually did not commit. And it's coming from a career prosecutor, actually innocent. There's a bunch of mistakes that were made, and they kept offering him deals and refused to take it because he really didn't do it. What a proposition to present to somebody. Oh, yeah.

Talk about a devil's arrogance. And he's like, no, I'll stay in prison before I'll admit something I didn't do. And talk about the man of integrity. Absolutely, it happens. And if you've got a heart, which you clearly do, it's the worst injustice imaginable. That's why our system's set up the way it is. To let many guilty people go is preferred to a single innocent. That's right. And that's the way it should work. It gets problematic when we get into the serial killers that are going to victimize other people. I think it gets into a problem there. And I think where jurisprudence is most important

problematic is in sexual assault. It's still almost impossible to prosecute. 100%. In my opinion, let me hit you with this. I was reading Missoula, the John Krakauer book on the kind of rape epidemic at Missoula. The problem prosecuting these kids and then the problems with the juries, even if they get the stuff they need, it needs degrees.

like murder. I think that's one of the problems is you have these jurors looking at these young people and there's no degree. So it's all in or all out. And they have a hard time finishing a young person. Yeah. Not that they shouldn't be finished. That's not what I'm saying. But I think if there were degrees within it, it could move the needle. It's a really interesting idea because you're absolutely right. Like a 288, that's sexual abuse of a minor. There's one charge. I mean, there's different subsections of rape, but that

word is a heavy thing. And a lot of jurors, you're right. I prosecuted, my niche was date rapes. And you don't want to tag a kid as a rapist for life for a misunderstanding or a drunken miscommunication. You have two people in a blackout or reconstructing two people's blackouts. And it's a really tough thing. Words are important. Maybe if there were degrees. But who's going to come up with the degrees? That's very tricky too. To me, there's some things that are

worse i'm gonna get in trouble for just saying that worse than others but there are look i was molested there's worse versions of the way i was molested i can tell you if someone was molested if that was my parent that's fucking worse if it were reoccurring for years yes if there was violent for me there's degrees of what i experienced for sure but you know what's interesting about that a lot of people you encounter that not to spin off on a tangent a lot of people think that that's like a zombie bite so many people have been molested i still don't think the public understands that

I admit it. I say it out loud. I didn't know of an actor when I was a kid that said he'd been molested. I thought I was the only person. Now people are talking about him. I will bet a majority of men in Hollywood were the victims of sexual abuse at one point or another. Because I'm ready to come to terms with the idea that a majority of men in general in America at one point or another were sexually abused as a kid.

Yeah, the conservative estimates are like 25% of us that grew up in the 80s were. And our parents, they were smoking and drinking and we were wildings in our generation, for sure. Completely unprotected. But one of the things about it is there's a weird stigma that needs to be relaxed, especially when it comes to men. A lot of people think it's like a zombie bite. We know it happens when you get bit by a zombie, right? Or bitten by a vampire. Oh, yeah.

Like you will then become a predator. You will then become, right? Yeah, I grew up with that paradigm. Right. So a lot of people keep quiet, and that is not the case at all. In fact, it's the exact opposite. A lot of people that have been sexually abused know how fucking awful it is, so they would never do it. And I understand that there's some psychology behind it, and some people that are horrifically abused, it affects them. But the vast majority of time, and this is four years in sex and 17 in homicide, which half are sex cases anyway, right?

the majority of the offenders were never victims themselves. And I'm here to tell you, that is a pervasive myth. I think that's another part of the stigma, that people are going to be like, oh, I don't want to leave them around with my kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I want to hear about a few, you do a dozen or so cases throughout your long career in the book. I guess...

since it was prompted by Anna's movie, let's talk about him for a minute. The notion that this motherfucker was on the dating game blows my mind. Right. So tell us about him a little bit. So he grew up loving home, never abused or bullied by anybody. And this is the best investigators. He went through three different capital trials.

which means you have A through K factors is what it's known in a bifurcated jury system in California. So those are the factors the jury gets to consider in weighing whether there's any mitigation. So A factors like circumstance of the offense, how brutal it was, B factors, other crimes of violence. And you go down the list and essentially a serial killer is motivated in a life or death sort of way to come up with any sort of abuse possible as a mitigating factor to present to their jury. So you had three great defense teams. They were unable to uncover a single instance

So he grows up in a loving home, successful siblings, mother who loved him, aunt very much in the picture. Father died when he was young, but went to prep school, varsity letterman on the yearbook committee, graduated from UCLA film school, genius level IQ and handsome for the day and charming. For the days. I mean, currently he would be

He needs a haircut in 2024. But yeah, he's a good looking dude back then. Is the part in the movie where he worked at the LA Times as a photographer? He was a typesetter and he worked for the LA Times, gainfully employed. So this guy, actually not far from where we are, 1968, he kidnaps, rapes, and almost murders an eight-year-old girl named Tally Shapiro. So anybody that wants the background, Anna's

Movie was wonderful. The detectives were involved in it. I give it an A+. And the final scene, the only way it could have been more true to real life is if she'd made it longer. Phenomenal job. So anyway, so he kidnaps this eight-year-old. Good Samaritan sees it, follows him to this little Hollywood bungalow. And all of this is in the book. I think people would be interested in it, I hope. But this cop, his name is Camacho, LAPD officer, hero cop, shot in Vietnam,

comes back from the war, shot in the Watts riots. It's his first day back at work. Oh, my God. And he gets a welfare call. And nothing about it seemed any more right in 1968 than it would today. So he knocks on the door and he hears one second.

Kicks the door in and Alcala's going out the back naked and he finds this little girl, eight years old. She's been raped. She's in a coma for 32 days. She's got a barbell across her throat, seconds away from death. So this cop saves her life. Alcala gets away.

gets to the East Coast, enrolls in NYU film school. He'd already graduated from UCLA. After that event, he decided to get out of town. He fled. And inside his apartment, they find hundreds and hundreds of photographs of young women and boys in positions of vulnerability. Oh!

out in the woods, in rooms with him. Some of them are sexual, some of them are pornographic, some of them are remodeling. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things. What age is he at that point? So this is 1968, mid-20s, I think, at this point. So he's, like, prolific. This guy is the real deal. Yeah. Okay, so goes to New York. They catch him. He's working at an all-girls sleepaway camp in Vermont. And there's a rainstorm, and two little campers go running into the post office to get out of the rain.

FBI 10 most wanted list. They look up and they're like, that's weird. That's Mr. Berger because he's a counselor at the camp. They catch him. They extradite him back to California. Winds up kidnapping and near death of an eight-year-old and he raped her. There's a photo in that. This is one of the scenes that sticks with me even though I wasn't physically there because I was 12 when it happened. Little white Mary Jane's in more blood than should ever be able to come out of an eight-year-old at the scene. So,

He survives miraculously. They extradite him. The prosecutor decides to give him a straight child molest case. And he goes in, he gets a life sentence. They paroled that guy after 34 months.

And that is a cautionary tale. So he gets out and they violate his parole. They catch him with a 13 year old girl that he was certainly on his way to killing. But they had marijuana. They went at prosecuting her for possession of marijuana. - Oh my God. - 13 years old. - Fucking God. - So he gets about a year and a half. They release him again. It's like Forrest Gump, again.

gets out, and then he kidnaps Monique Hoyt. She's a 15-year-old runaway, rapes her, sodomizes her. She wakes up. He probably thought she was dead. She comes to and says, we can't let anybody know what we did. He then had a moment of emotion, broke down crying, and then transported her wherever they were going, and she jumped out and called the police. And then the court has an obligation legally to presume the rape and kidnap is true, and

and assessed danger to the community. And in all the background, the judge lowered his bail. He got out and he kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl at Huntington Beach named Robin Sampso. So he gets convicted, goes up, case gets reversed once by the California Supreme Court. Convicted again in 1986, goes back up. Now it's the Ninth Circuit that reverses it. So the case has been twice gutted. Then it winds up on my desk.

So we don't know anything at this point. Since late 2002, 2003, I get it assigned to me because I'm one of the cold case deputies. And this poor family has had to go through this twice now. Every time a case gets reversed, they re-interview everybody. Oh, yeah. So we got to figure out what kind of evidence we have. The police in 1979 got into his storage locker. And again, different batch found hundreds and hundreds of photos. How can you do that?

How can he be? Of more young women and girls. What? I don't understand. So he killed 100 people after he was released from California State Prison. So he killed a 21-year-old computer programmer in Burbank, very close to where we are right now, named Jill Parenteau. We didn't know that. So once upon my desk, and I talked to my old mentor, and I'm like, what do we do with these? Because the case got gutted twice. And there was a photo found. This is kind of cool.

of a girl named Lori Wurtz. She was on roller skates in a place called Sunset Beach that's right next to Huntington Beach. That was in a storage locker. And it turns out that was from the same day that Robin Samso went missing. So we can put him in the area and then we're kicking it around like, how do we freaking prove this thing? And there were signs in the background saying,

that were still in the cement. And we found some guy in the Navy of all places that was able to give us an exact time that that photo was taken based on the shadows. So I'm locked and loaded. I'm ready to go again. No sooner do we make the decision that we're going to retry this fucker that we start getting DNA hits out of LA County for unsolved murders because California just entered the CODIS system.

So we get three DNA hits in LA County, plus a fourth. He was a suspect in one, Jill Parenteau, the computer programmer. So now we got five. So we constructed a whole thing. And then like a lot of good serial killers, because he's a psychopath, they can't resist the control. So he wound up representing himself.

Oh, this is a big move, isn't it? Oh, yeah. They over-index in representing themselves, don't they? 100%. 100%. Which is awesome because they all suck at traveling. Whatever disconnects them that makes them want to do it in the first place. Talk about admission of their arrogance. Oh, my God. And it's the greatest thing ever. If I were you, I'd just go like, so this guy's representing himself. I think that tells you everything you need to know. We rest our case. Oh, there's a great adage. I threw this in the book that you learn in law school. Anybody who represents himself as a fool for a lawyer and a jackass for a client.

It was surreal, but I had to deal with him every day. I had to go in and talk to him. Oh, my God. Because you got to move things along. You got to talk to the counsel, right? Yeah, and for me, being kind of twisted, it was fascinating. Oh, I would have enjoyed. Tell us. What was he like? Well, first of all, so there's this moment, like they don't give us any training on how death row actually works in California. And I just thought it was one big prison yard, like a prison within a prison in Salt and San Quentin. And I didn't know yet that they subclassify them. They have a yard they call themselves, and they divide it up into yards.

called the weenie yard, which are the guys that aren't dangerous to staff or other inmates. And so we just sentenced this guy, big white supremacist gang leader, super gnarly dude. He'd just gotten the death sentence out of Orange County. So he goes up. I'm sitting there waiting for the judge one day, and I literally had to talk to this guy several hours every day for six months, you know, because he's representing himself. So you develop a rapport. Can I ask you one hard question? Sure, sure. Because we interviewed the defense attorney that was representing the victims for Epstein.

And he had several lunches with Epstein while he was representing those people. And he said, he's so fucking charming. I'm there experiencing what they experienced and leaving going, boy, that was fucked up. Did you have any of that? A hundred percent. That's why the actor who played right now, Colin Anis movie was frigging brilliant. Oh, yeah, he's so good. He won the dating game. Of the three bachelors. By being charming and funny and the actor not.

nails it because it's like, who would get in a car with that guy? And the answer is almost everybody because they're so freaking charming. But that's the thing with Alcala. So I'm like, hey, Rod, just out of curiosity, what do you do when a guy like Billy Joe, talk about a cartoon character and this guy, it's freaking swastika tats everywhere, the whole deal. Aren't you worried that a guy like that is going to get to you? He goes, Matt, buddy, you know me. I'm on the weenie yard. I'm not violent. I'm never going to see that guy. He was offended.

that I would think that he was a violent guy. This guy murdered 100 women and smashed their faces in with rocks. And that other guy's a Philistine. Right, right, right. He's like, me? Totally. That guy's a racist. Proglodite? What are you talking about? He's got swastika tattoos. What do you mean? What do you mean? Do you think that he believes that in the moment, right? Oh, yeah, totally in the moment. And that's the charm. Watch the Bundy tapes where he's getting interviewed. It is fascinating. Bundy has a moment where the reporter says,

hey, what's it like to know you're going to get executed tomorrow? And Bundy's response, I'll never forget this. He's like, my odds of getting executed tomorrow are about the same as yours getting killed in a car accident on the way home. He goes, God forbid that should happen. So much concern for him. So much concern. God forbid. What a horrible analogy to use. Like, I'm concerned with you. And they did. They freaking juiced Bundy the next day to the betterment of all mankind.

The really smart psychopaths, they understand intuitively where that good heart opening is and they take advantage of it. Well, no one likes this, but sociopaths over-index in empathy. They're very, very good at knowing exactly how you feel and what you want to hear. That's exactly right. That hypersensitivity to it

is connected to their love of inflicting pain. Even for the sociopaths that haven't killed anybody, like the ones that are running businesses, there's that little element of cruelty that so many of them have. They get off on it. I want to go through a couple more because the book is just full of so many riveting cases that you covered. I didn't realize Orange County was such a hotbed of activity. Seriously.

But Skylar DeLeon? Skylar DeLeon. Yeah, so he was a Power Ranger. He had a speaking role. He's a child actor. No. Yeah. You know, he was, of all of the guys I dealt with, all the fraudsters, Ed Sheeran was one of mine that I talk about in the book. Skylar was the best liar of anybody I'd ever seen. Really? Yes. Because his name rhymed with it or? Skylar's a liar.

- Good job, Maya. - Couldn't help myself. - I like that. She's got a new Missoni sweater on. She's feeling pretty good today. - It's making me feel freaky. - It works, it works. This guy was in the Marine Corps for about a second and went AWOL. A lot of them also joined the military and go AWOL. Alcala did, my Nyeri guy did, my last one. That's another common thing that you see on the psychopaths. So he winds up putting together this scheme to basically murder people to get their money.

And there's this beautiful couple, retirees, Tom and Jackie Hawks. Jackie was in a motorcycle accident. She was in her 20s, couldn't have kids of her own. Mary's Tom, he had two young kids at the time. So she got to be mom. And then one of them had a baby. So they'd retired onto the ocean and sailed around on a yacht. Now they got a grandchild. And Jackie just wants to experience that. So they decided to sell the boat.

And they go out for a sea trial, which is basically a test drive for a yacht. Never seen or heard from again. Oh, my God. And so Skylar is there with all the bill of sale paperwork, fingerprints that we sent to the FBI. It was Tom and Jackie's fingerprints. They actually signed all the stuff. And there was one problem. The S on her signature didn't match, but everything else did. That became important. They show up with these documents that...

indicating they bought the boat. There was a notary that notarized the documents. They'd filed it with Prescott, Arizona. Everything legally they could do indicating they'd purchased the boat, they had done. And so we had to untangle that. I do an annual surf trip with a bunch of buddies to Indonesia. And you sit on a charter surf boat for 12 days or whatever. I was going to skip that year. And anyway, I catch my girlfriend making out with a groomsman at a wedding. So that's bad. That's bad.

So I decided at the last second, I'm going to take this surf trip. And I wind up on this boat, this guy, Gary Burns, who was a part of the boating world. He's a totally legit guy, but he had seen sort of the underbelly of it and met some smugglers and actual pirates along the way. There's Tom and Jackie, like three months later, they're missing. It's a Newport case. I'm working with Byington again, that same detective who moved the body and made the guy groan.

And we were at a dead end and we suspected something bad had happened, but we did two forensic workups of the boat. So the boat was found. Boat was found. They're not on it. Tom and Jackie are missing and you got Skylar and Jennifer saying, hey, we bought the boat. And here's all the documents indicating we bought it. By the way, when you find these people, they promised to teach us how to operate it properly. We would hate to have to sue them.

Oh, this is a pretty good, that's a cool angle. So I watched his interview. Credit to the detectives. I believed everything he was saying. He was on probation for a burglary at the time. And he goes, look, this is cartel money. My dad was involved in the cartels.

You can look it up. I can't tell you where I got it or they'll kill my family. It was so convincing. And it's like, I was buying this in a money laundering scheme. That's why I was buying the boat. It's all cash. It came up. This could almost work. Like this almost makes sense. And the thing is, there's a difference between what you suspect and what you can prove. And we had frigging nothing. And we had a weird story.

But it was convincing as hell. So I called Gary in Australia, the charter boat captain. And I'm like, dude, what are we missing? And without skipping a beat, it's almost scary how fast he said it. I don't even think I finished the sentence. He's like, missing anchors. Look for missing anchors. If there's murder on a boat, there's going to be a missing anchor. Everybody thinks they invented the wheel. Everybody gets tied to an anchor. That's how they do it. And we go back to the boat for like the 20th time.

Sure enough, been staring us in the face the whole time. There should have been two anchors on the bow. There was one. And so we hook him the next day and the whole house of cards fell down. So what had they done? How had they? So what they did is they lured him out to sea. They brought in this guy who was a Long Beach Insane Crip. But yeah, they got muscle. They went out. They lured him out to sea. They tasered them both. They threatened to beat her if he didn't sign. They threatened to taser him again if she didn't sign.

And they tied him to the anchor, begging for their lives, and threw him overboard. Was the intention just the...

capital gain? Did they just want the boat? Yeah, they wanted the boat. And they also had a power of attorney indicating that they should have had access to their bank accounts too. All money motivated. All money motivated. And then when we got the search warrant, we found an LAPD Interpol liaison card to a totally separate murder the year before in Mexico, a guy from Southern California named John Jarvie, who got into drugs. He was a pilot, had back issues. A lot of people have experienced that where you do sober, goes back on painkillers. Yeah.

fucks him up, and he gives him $50,000 in cash. Skyler cut his throat. Oh, wow. Did you watch this newest Zodiac doc? I haven't, and you know, here's my problem with Zodiac. Please. They never catch him. It is maddening to me. Well, the Zodiac doc is really, really well done, and I think it's exploring a different aspect, which really hit home as the guy, the Zodiac,

was a school teacher in Atascadero. Wait, did they finally figure out who did it? Oh, they know. Oh, I didn't know that. A thousand percent who it is. Oh, he just got away with it. Died before he got caught? He died. He was on dialysis. He died at like 58. Ah, okay. And why was he called that?

He named himself that. Very smart guy. He was a champion diver. He was a scuba guy. He was an enormous man. He's a teacher in Atascadero. He meets these kids. There's seven kids. The mom of the seven kids' husband is in Atascadero State Mental Prison because the dad had molested the kids, or one daughter in particular. Wow. She's in silver head. She's got seven kids.

This teacher shows up, and he starts taking them to the movies some nights. He's their teacher. She trusts him. He develops this relationship with the whole family. What's neat about this doc is it's not focusing as much on him like the other ones have. It's this crazy thing where you can know somebody who's been so generous and benevolent. This duality that can exist between what you think is a serial killer and then the absolute torture of getting presented evidence after evidence, but you know this man, and he was kind to you. Ugh.

And it's riveting. People want everyone to be a cartoon character of a serial killer. They don't want to be the teacher that was kind to you and, you know. That's the thing. And to see what they had to deal with. There's the victims, but then there's this whole family that it tore them apart and one brother finally admitted, no, no, it's him. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's heartbreaking for this family. Yeah, Rex Heuermann, that's the latest, that's the Gilgo Beach one. Another huge guy. That's more East Coast news, but he's kind of a modern...

I think he represents the next wave because he figured out a way to defeat modern forensic science. Oh, really? They made a DNA hit.

on a hair and it's mitochondrial DNA so the numbers are like 1 in 50 as opposed to 1 in 18 octillion he killed probably 19 they think and he was an architect in Midtown Manhattan wife, kids the whole deal yeah and he would wrap him in burlap which probably had something to do with fingerprints and yeah he got away with it for years and years but so did my Golden State Killer case that guy got away with it for years yeah stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare

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And Zodiac, so he would teach the kids ciphers, right? He'd teach them how to do ciphers. Like you draw a grid, A, B, C, D, E, F. You drew a symbol and taught them how to write code letters.

And he was submitting these to the San Francisco Chronicle, and they were running them on the front page. And there was these ciphers. They couldn't break. One of the ciphers got broke last year. 50 years long, his cipher didn't get cracked. He was like the killer. He was writing nonstop, I'm the Zodiac. What? Figure out this cipher. It'll tell you what I'm going to do next. I mean, it was so twisted. Oh, my God. And he's a very smart dude and very competent and a pedophile, as we come to find out. Does he kill all his kids?

He killed teenagers who would be making out at make-out points. Yeah, they're equal opportunity, these guys. Oh, my God. Boys, girls, women. He was into self-aggrandizement. He killed a cab driver for no reason because he wanted to kill the guy in front of a movie poster of a movie he loved and he used to teach the kids. I mean, it is...

- So dense with craziness. - I gotta watch it. - You gotta watch it. - Yeah. - In my heart to this family, I can't help but try to think of it in terms of addiction. And I think about like, are they like me buying Coke? Like, okay, we're buying Coke this time, but we're not gonna buy Coke anymore after tomorrow. Are those deals being made in their head? Are they trying to quit? - Here's the difference in my mind. And I mean, everybody in my family's an addict.

For the addict, we can have sympathy. It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know, Stevenson, right? The duality of man. The vehicle he had to use was spontaneous transformation. Like Dr. Jekyll was a noble man working for science. Mr. Hyde was the monster they would kill. And when you know it turns you into something and you know that you're hurting other people, addicts only hurt themselves.

typically. There's collateral damage, but in general, yeah. Sure, there's collateral damage, but it's not predatory. Right. It's secondary. I just wonder, are they trying to quit? Yeah, is it like a compulsion and then they feel guilt? Or they're like, I'm doing this till the day I get caught. I'm just so curious. There's an arrogance that goes along with it. I don't think you see in addicts. And also, sadism is an inherent part. It's

thing called the hair psychopathy checklist. It's like the most common traits of actual psychopaths and grandiosity is on that list. But the very first serial killer case I did was a serial rapist in Dantan, Huntington Beach finally killed one of his victims named Victor Moreno Guerrero. And he was living in a tiny little place and he had a notebook

You write Victor King, self-portraits with a crown on his head. Oh, my God. Textbook-type stuff. Addicts, it's a little different, right? Yeah, for sure. I only meant the element of trying to quit. For a lot of those guys, they get off on it so much, it's more the opposite. They can't wait to go out and do it again. I don't think they feel guilty about it at all. Okay, I had some questions that have just kind of always been on my mind about someone with your job. How do you deal with the frustration of no?

knowing you have someone and you don't have the evidence and you're not gonna have it. What does that do to you? How do you compartmentalize that or how do you process that? - Yeah, the answer is not very well. I lost a lot of sleep over those. - I'm almost shocked there's not more vigilante justice. I bet back in the day there was. - It's funny you raise that. People forget there's a social compact and one of it is somebody murders your family member or somebody you love, the deal is we don't exact revenge.

because the state is supposed to do it for us. And that's what a lot of people forget as we tack back to like early release. And I'm as pro-reform as anybody, but for the sexual predators and the really bad guys are the ones that unnecessarily hurt a family or a victim. - Is the biggest predictor, I have to imagine rapists are just in route to that. - And all rapists don't want it being serial killers.

But virtually all serial killers were rapists. They start out with like peeping or flashing and they work their way up. They'll steal some underwear. The beef I have with the FBI definition on serial killer is it's too broad. It's two or more victims by the same perpetrator at different events. That encompasses gang members and mafia hitmen and drug dealers they get in beefs. The real predatory guys are the sexual offenders. There was this great documentary about...

chess masters. And there's this very common pattern for chess masters. This happened to Bobby Fischer. It's happened to a lot of them. They spend their whole life anticipating doom and they exercise their brain in that way.

And when they are not concentrating on chess, a huge percentage of these chess masters become paranoid. It's a liability if all your focus... So are you aware that you have had a unique view of life? And do you attempt to correct for that? A lot of bad guys. Yeah. You have a little bit of a misleading worldview, I might argue. In the same way, let me add one other one. So my wife's mom was a nurse.

And she came to me on the first time we met and she said, oh, great. I'm glad I'm meeting you. You have to help me get Kristen off of birth control. And I said, well, I don't think that's my position. Do you know how many strokes I see at the hospital from birth control? And I said, I bet you see more than anybody. That's who they come to. But if we look up right now, car accident deaths per 100,000 and strokes from birth control, I would be more...

apt to get her to quit driving a car. It's not a realistic, but I understand why to you it is. No, I think you're exactly right. Of course. There's this nice old man that we were on the same schedule and he would ride his bike past this elementary school in Manhattan Beach as I'd be on my way to work. And for years, I'd pass by this guy a couple of times a week. And after about a couple of months in sexual assault, it was like, there's that freaking pervert. I know what he's up to. You know, you definitely get jaded for sure. And you're right. I would have a very skewed worldview. And I don't think anyone couldn't.

So I have zero judgment saying this. It'd be weird if you didn't. I'm skewed by my weird experience in life, right? I travel around and meet a bunch of artists all the time. I think the world's full of creative, wonderful people. I'm delusional. I mean, I've stepped over 100 dead bodies over the course of my job. Yes. That definitely gives you a viewpoint. Now, here's a great question. So I have a tolerance and an appetite and a capacity to understand gnarly stuff still needs to go on in life. People got to do gnarly jobs.

Some cop answers a call to domestic disturbance and they walk through a door to a house they've never been in. They know violence is happening. That is a very intense, gnarly situation and we need people to go do that. I think some people have lost their appetite for the reality of what has to go on. They have. And so to those people, I'd argue like, hey, you have to have some understanding that gnarly shit's got to get done. And guess what? Gnarly shit getting done goes wrong often.

You have to have some tolerance for how ugly and gnarly all this is. And split-second decisions, too, that police are put in all the time. And that is not to excuse any of the clearly racially motivated, horrific things that have happened. Yeah.

Everything's happening. And you have to have some tolerance for this. And you also have to have some self-correcting if you're you. And I'm wondering how one even does that. You know, I scuba dive a ton. I still surf every morning I can, even though I'm getting rickety in my old age. But this is going to sound weird to say. I started shark diving a few years ago.

Nothing quiets your mind more than cageless shark diving. And it's a lot safer than anybody would think. And sharks get a bad rap. I'll take your word for it. I'm going to Cuba in two weeks to go shark diving there. And it is a frigging blast. That's been really zen for me. And like you, I got to be very careful about using anything chemical to balance that out because that's a very slippery slope in that job. Yes. Well, okay, great. That was one of my questions, funny enough. The rate of domestic violence is really rough. It's over indexed. The rate of alcoholism is really fucking high among police officers. Yeah.

Do all those same things plague DAs? Yes. I don't think to the same degree, though, as cops. And I think that we still have it a lot better than they do. And it's rough to be a police officer right now. You're putting your life on the line for $80,000 a year in a community where— You're hated. Where the community is being taught to hate you. That's, I think, what really gets them. As you even pointed out in the book, most of your colleagues aren't.

in thriving long-term relationships? No, not in homicide. They're not. And my mentors, and I don't really mention this because I kept them out. The rule is you're either a genius, and there are a few that came through the unit that are able to balance out and be great husbands, wives, and fathers and mothers. But generally, you go into that unit, if you're single when you go in, you're single when you come out. And if you're married, you're probably getting divorced. Yeah. Because you can't do the job, at least me, I wasn't smart enough to have good bandwidth on both sides.

And I decided that I had to go all in. Well, how can you be at dinner not thinking about this thing that has to get done in order to get this person off the street? Like to be able to leave that at the valet is a tall order. Yeah, when you have the responsibility to the moms, that's what it always came back to me is when you meet the mom and they want you to bring it home for them. And for me, I'd wake up in the middle of the night. What's hard about the dinners is when you get the call outs. You know, I talk about this in the book. I had a notorious case out of Costa Mesa and I got the call in the middle of

The woman I was dating at the time was her birthday. And for me, being awesome boyfriend that I was, it was just like, all right, we're out. That's tough on relationships. But in retrospect, I was a lousy romantic partner for a lot of that time. Obviously, it's hard to watch people you know are guilty.

and you don't have the evidence. But what about the opposite? Is there ever a time where you're like, God, I hope it's the right one? So that's a great question, and thank you for asking me that. The answer is no, because your ethical obligation, your sacrosanct duty is to do justice. It's not to get convictions. And when you entertain a doubt, especially if you're working for a good office like I was back then, it is understood as soon as you say, I have a doubt. But a lot of times it's not just whether the person did it or not. A lot of times it's on an enhancement. Like I had a case where somebody

We go and it was a very wealthy couple, Newport Beach, about to get divorced. And I filed a murder for financial gain because you only need any part of the motive being financial that satisfies the element. And the guy was so rich, we were afraid he was going to run anyway. And UK citizenship and all that. And then we get into the computers. And as soon as the forensic analysis comes back, like six weeks later, FBI. So maybe eight weeks if we were asking for it in four weeks.

The real problem is he was going out, visiting the services of sex workers, I believe is the politically correct, and he was bringing home STDs. That's what they were fighting about. So now I knew what they were fighting about, and it wasn't money. And we also learned in the course investigation, each side of the family had tons of cash. So I had to dismiss that right away, ethically, even though...

concerned that he might run. And what did he do? He freaking ran. But yeah, so ethically, whenever you entertain a doubt, you got to dump it. And I had another one, a guy actually charged with murder. He was a choker. He had a whole history of domestic violence where he would choke his ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. So it was his third fiance and they get in a big argument and she's found dead. He calls 911. The riggers already set in. She's been dead for hours. She had bruising to her strap muscles, which happens in strangulation, petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, which is when the

blood vessels burst. There's always telltale signs for when somebody's been strangled. So he fought with her, choked her, caused death with asphyxia. Easy, charged him with murder. We get the tox back, toxicological results for blood. Turns out she took about 500 sleeping pills and you die of asphyxia. Right, right, right, yeah. So that's one had to dump it. You don't pass go, you immediately call the court, you go in and you dismiss it. We prosecute him for the domestic violence he went to

prison for that. But yeah, so that's part of the job. Okay, is murder reflective of the time and culture the way everything is? Is there a trend in murder? Is there a style in murder? Has it changed since the 80s? That's a really interesting question. So murder itself, I think,

The motives have been the same for 100,000 years. Jealousy, greed, anger, lust. It's like the four horsemen that you keep seeing over and over. Throw a little booze in there, Fourth of July barbecue, dispute with the neighbor. Next thing you know, the gun comes out and somebody gets killed. So it's the same thing over and over again. What we're seeing now, and I think that this is kind of a weird byproduct of the fascination with true crime, is you're getting guys like Rex Hureman who are figuring out they don't want to get caught.

So they're getting smarter about it, almost like a Dexter type thing. And that's the new thing. Most of them aren't smart enough. The vast majority of murders are one-offs. It's situational, never to be repeated again. But for the real predators, they are getting smarter. So that part is a yes. There's also a social media impact on

the way some of the psychopaths are able to manipulate the public. And we've just seen a big example of that. I don't want to necessarily go down this rabbit hole, but the Menendez brothers, you know, that's a fascinating thing. We got Netflix and we've got this outpouring of people that feel very, very strongly because they think they were sexually abused. Therefore, we got to let them go. And it's a dicey area. In keeping with my normal trying to always find the middle ground, what's interesting is there's two options on the table.

in this debate. They either were not molested and they belong there or they were molested and they don't belong there. Here's my position. They're molested and they still belong there. I know where you're going, right? Yes. I watched the trial and what is undeniable is their testimony would be seen so much differently today than it was then and I'm grateful it would be seen the way it should be today. For sure. I think that was a fucked up family and I think

really bad shit happened to them. I don't think either of them are that good of actors and I know that world and I believe them. Does that mean you can cut down mom with a shotgun? And therein lies the rub. Remember, and this is one of those things that forensically, it's Mossberg 12 gauge. That is a

Six cartridge weapon. And there were 13 shots. And it takes a while to load a shotgun. It sure does. It takes a while to load a shotgun. It's a pain in the ass. You cut your thumb sticking them in there. It's a pain in the ass. And they practiced with them. They bought them with fake ideas. But Lyle Menendez went out to that car, got ammo, reloaded the shotgun, and literally put the gun to his mom's face and...

and blew her face off. We can say everything we want about whatever Jose did or didn't do. Yeah. Great. Unless you're after the money, why do you kill mom? In that debate, nobody will come up with a good answer. Well, how about this? I can't even make that argument. You were supposed to protect me. Right. You turned your eye. You could have saved both of us from all this. Exactly right. Still fine. But then we're talking about a revenge killing, not self-defense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So it's just interesting. Again, to me, what's frustrating is it lines up the way every fucking thing lines up, which is it's binary. You're on this side or you're on this side.

Exactly right. Well, no, because your middle ground also has a flip, right? Your middle is they're abused, they should serve time, and maybe it's time to let them out. That's not in a legitimate position at all. Yeah, that's how I feel. Yeah, they've been in there for 30 years. I think they've done enough. They're not strangers. They killed their parents. They raised them. I've got no issue with that. My problem is the zeal that everybody's gone into. They've all forgotten that.

the first trial and they've all forgotten how Lyle was bragging about how he lied on the stand in the first one. There's so many nuanced pieces like reloading and shooting mom in the face. Buying two portions of Rolexes. Spending spree that started four days after the murder is all that. Yeah, it's all rough. Not good. No one's

I guess some people maybe are saying it's good. Some people love them. Bill Maher has a great thing. I'm going to butcher the quote, but it's brilliant. It's basically, America never reacts, it just overreacts. Right, we don't have act. We have overreact. Which is exactly what you were just saying. There's a middle ground that everybody ignores. It's because everything has to line up politically. So it's like, all of a sudden, once you find out what your identity is, what's our team doing? Well, I don't want to lose my team. God.

It's not a coincidence you're presented with two options because there's two fucking parties and there's two identities in this country. Which is madness. It is madness. COVID, you got to act like there's not a disease to be a member of your group? That's nuts. You got to act like we got to be separated forever to be a member of your group? You can't let it go? What happened to the great rational middle that I still think exists? It does. It does. And see, with juries, that's a job as a DA. You have to get a disparate group of people who are across the spectrum and get them to agree on something basic, especially for murder.

This stuff predates Democrats and Republicans. It predates empires and kings. This goes back to Hammurabi cuneiform. Like, what happens when you kill somebody? Well, there's degrees of badness in it. One of the first laws they wrote down literally

literally the first letters dealt with killing people. And the Ten Commandments, that's a sequel to a lot of the first writings. How do we deal with each other as human beings? And I can tell you from my experience, the grief of a mom or a dad losing a kid to murder is the same now as it has ever been. And together as a society, like if we can't all agree on that, we're lost. Yeah. I think that that might have something to do with the fascination in true crime because it

It's kind of a refuge where people can get away from the screaming heads. It's one of the last areas where people, regardless of their political affiliation, can agree. Yeah, yeah. Have you been involved in any penis chopping's off? I have been involved in penis chopping's off. You have? No, you haven't. Oh, yeah. I thought you were being funny. I was kind of being funny, but also I wondered. Oh, no, I've had a couple.

What? A couple? Yeah, I've been involved in a couple. But my last trial was my Hussein Nayiri case. This is actually a great story. It's a good one to go on. Yeah, yeah. It was a marijuana dispensary owner gets kidnapped and the marijuana world in California is still like the Wild West. So the way it works is you can't bank.

from marijuana proceeds. So it's all cash. Really quick so people understand, the federal government hasn't legalized it. So any proceeds that were in a federally FDIC-insured bank, you could go in and get all the money. That F in the FDIC stands for federal, which is a federal crime. So they can't use Visa, MasterCard. So we've legalized marijuana in the state of California without a plan in effect to deal with that. So the result is it's all cash. You immediately open up the door to an actual narco trafficker who,

saying, I own a dispensary. Here's how I explain this million dollars of cash. I put it in the bank. The cartels are involved in so many dispensaries in California. It's a problem. It's just sitting there as a great laundering situation. But you got legitimate business guys that are coming in and they're squeezing out and they're lowering the margins for the criminal element that's been responsible for that business. It's like the old bootleggers for years and years. Like those guys weren't...

Seagram's whiskey makers, there were criminals that were willing to fill the need of bootlegging back in the 30s. As a result, the bad guys in the marijuana world know who's selling a lot of product and they know who's got a big pile of cash at the end of every day. So this guy, he owns a dispensary in Santa Ana, totally legit, super licensed.

And in fact, the guy didn't even use weed himself. So he's like a legit business guy. They put trackers on his car and they surveilled him and they took him. He was out in the desert on a meaningless trip with a friend and they got it in their little brain. So that must be where he's burying Alibaba's treasure. So they kidnap him out of Newport. They drive him out. They torture him the whole way out. They get him to the GPS coordinates where they'd stopped. They're like, give us the money. And

And he's like, I've told you for the last time, the money's in the safe because why wouldn't it be in the freaking safe? Yeah, yeah. I don't need to use the desert. But again, psychopath in love with his own brilliance. They've tortured him and he's like, for the last time, it's in the office. It's not out here. So he's like, fuck you. And he cut off his penis. And he took it with him.

What? So they also kidnapped his roommate's girlfriend. So imagine this. She's along for the ride, basically. They didn't torture her. So in the middle of the Mojave Desert, they dump her out. They're still bound. They throw a knife down, and they're like, if you can cut your way out, you might be able to get out. If you can't, you can just fucking die. So the van drives off. So she manages to get this blindfold off and sees lights off in the distance, and she's in her pajamas and goes running through the California desert. First car she sees is an off-duty sheriff's deputy going to work. Oh, my God.

And so they're able to get to him before he dies. And now the search is on. And so long story short, our mastermind

fled back to Iran, where he was originally from. And he grew up in California, a California kid, but he still had citizenship and still had family back there. We don't have a great extradition policy with Iran, as I can remember. They're not real big on that, which is a huge problem. So we've got the mastermind of this thing. We wound up, and this is kind of cool, they do a canvas of the scene. So a canvas is just when the cops go and knock on doors, right? So they knock on a door. You're old enough to remember Bewitched.

You're too young to remember Bewitched. - No, I know Bewitched, yes. - Do you remember? Mrs. Kravitz always looking out, knows there's witches in the house. - Monica's 59 years old. - Can you believe? Look how good she looks. They've got a neighbor, and you never get anything on a canvas. When you're out of Leeds, it's a due diligence thing, but she's like, "As a matter of fact, I did see something. "I saw these boys, it looked like two went up on a ladder "into the house where the kidnapping happened, "but I didn't see them come out. "They were wearing hard hats "that looked too clean to be real." And the cops are like,

please tell us you can describe the truck. And she's like, well, with the license plate due? She wrote down the plate number. And of all the brilliance and all the planning that went into this, we had a really smart psychopath guy and he had helpers. And one of the helpers was a stoned moron. That's why if you get a kidnap, if you get a kidnap,

- 'Cause somebody's doing something. - 'Cause someone's peeing this off, you better be doing the whole thing. - Yeah, so anyway, he used his own truck for that event. So we catch one of them, the other guy flees through Iran and we get pretty much everybody else, including the wife of the mastermind. So we've got her, she was in law school at the time. - Oh my God. - And now the game became, can we lure this guy out of Iran? It was one of the coolest things I ever got to do as a DA. So we flipped her to help us lure him into the Czech Republic.

And I still can't believe it worked, but we threw a net on them, the Czech border police. And that was a case where the FBI were heroes. So the former Soviet countries absolutely will extradite to the U.S. because they actually trust our legal system. The U.K. is terrible. France is even worse. Spain, not so good. Oh, really? Surprisingly so. But yep, pain in the ass to get anybody out of those countries. So we could pick any country in the world.

We get him here. Extradition is successful. We put handcuffs on him in New York, transport him back. We're preparing for trial. And he frigging escapes from the Orange County Jail with two guys who were in there for murder. And they were on the loose. You read headlines about this back in the day. You don't remember. But for a week, they're out. You got this guy out of Iran now. You've lost him. I don't know how present you were at whatever girlfriend's birthday it was happening that week, but I'm sure you were not fucking thinking about it.

That was not popular either. He's out and he left my photo on his bunk along with my trial partner, Heather Brown, who I love to death. And it was escape from Alcatraz. They tunneled out through these plumbing tunnels behind, repelled off the roof. Literally something out of a movie. Leaves my photo on his bunk. And Iran, a lot of people don't know this, have pretty warm diplomatic relations with Mexico because they're both OPEC countries. Mm-hmm.

And they have a full-blown embassy in Tijuana, like about 15 minutes from the border. Oh, jeez. So all he has to do is head south. So I'm convinced. The guy we spent a year outsmarting. Oh, my God. That we got outsmarted by. And instead, for whatever reason, he went north. And so we got him in San Francisco. A week later, they recaptured him. That was my last trial as a prosecutor. And he took the stand.

And that was my final question to him was, dude, tell us, why couldn't you just leave it there and give the poor guy a chance that it would be reattached?

You asked that? His court stenographer had to type that question. And he was enraged by that question. I mean, he was so pissed, which is the goal. You want the violent guys to flash in front of the jury, which allowed me to argue in the end. Ladies and gentlemen, I asked him something he didn't like, and his answer was, you're done. Personally, you're done. You're done. You got a movie moment out of it? I had a movie moment out of it.

You can't handle the truth. You got it. And then the beauty is you connect that to closing where it's like, ladies and gentlemen, think about this. In between you, a group of people who are deciding his fate, a superior court judge, and in a courtroom full of armed guards and bailiffs, he threatens to kill me. Yeah. Whatever your done means. Imagine what he's like in the back of a van when he's not getting the million bucks that he thought was buried out there. Oh.

Nuts. Yeah, so Hussein Nayyiri. Yeah. Did he ever say what he did with the penis? Did he Lorraine Bobbitt it and chuck it out the window of the van? He flipped one of the three guys in the van and he said they threw it out the window down the road. Now, I never called him to testify, but it was one of the co-conspirators. Weird. Yeah. What does one do if they're walking down the side of the road and they see a penis there? I mean, immediately you should call the authorities, right? No one misplaces them.

Intentionally. Yeah. Well, Matt Murphy, this was awesome. The Book of Murder, A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death. There are a dozen of those stories in there as well as your own. What else I want to add about it is it's a great education on a district attorney's job. You learn a lot about...

jurisprudence while you're hearing about all these crazy cases. Hopefully an interesting way for the reader. The Audible's doing really well. I narrated it myself. Learned I write in tongue twisters, but thank you for saying that. Yeah, so everyone check out The Book of Murder, and I look forward to your next book. This has been incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, good. I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong.

Just real quick. What if I was, people do this. Some people wear sunglasses inside. And a winter. Yeah. So you might like it. What if I wore sunglasses? I don't like not being able to see your eyes. Yeah. It's a bad look for me, but just what if. Try to wrap your head around the fact that I'm the type of guy that like, I'm always wearing my shades, you know?

I'll catch up. I'll be the dude in my shade. I'm always in my shades. I should have worn my leather. God, this is tricky, okay? This is a deep thing. This can change exactly how you feel about somebody, right? This little accoutrement. You putting that on is going to change your whole personality, right? Right, right. So what do I do if I hate your new personality, but I love you? What happens?

What happens? What happens? Yeah. I mean, really, like people do change over time. Well, also remember my uncle, he had had that procedure for his epilepsy where they told, they warned he and his wife, like he may have a radical shift in his personality. That was on the table. Yeah. It's an interesting question. Do you have a friend though that had a like, do you think a radical shift in their personality? Because I could be that friend to some degree from where I grew up.

Uh-huh, to those people? Yeah. That's interesting. Like, wow, this guy's like, he's sober and he's liberal. Do you think your personality's changed? Because those are just, those aren't, to me, personality things. They are, we might confuse them as personality things, but.

But those are like some beliefs and some just ways of walking through the world. Yeah. And I imagine you have a, I have a bias where it's like, I think I'm aware of the things I've gotten better at and I'm not necessarily sure which ones I've gotten worse at. So I think a lot of people that were friends with me in my early twenties, like they got me.

But I would alienate certain people or I was too provocative or I'd get drunk. And then I think a lot of my friends were often having to apologize for my, who I was to their friends that didn't know me. I think it was a little too much for some people. So of course I would chalk that up as like, well, now I'm, I'm, I'm better. Right. But maybe some people would be like, he's boring. Now I, I liked the guy that was a little too, a little crazy. Right.

This guy's a fucking yawn fest now. I just thought of an idea for a furniture line called, what word did I just say? Yawn fest. You want to do yarn fest? I want to do yawn furniture, like lawn furniture. Oh. But it's comfy furniture for taking a nap in. I like that. Yawn furniture. Is it still for outside? I think it should be. Sure. I feel like you must be in a really good mood today because you have your hair up and you have a bow in. And that to me is usually a cue. Yeah.

Like you got up this morning and you're like, I feel pretty good. I'm going to do a thing. And now here it is. That's a great guess. That's not what happened. Okay. I put my, I just grabbed the first clip I saw and put my hair up to do my makeup. Yes. And then when I was done with my makeup, I was about to take it down and I thought, oh, I'll just leave my clip in. It landed right. It landed right. It's hard to. Sometimes you just get lucky, right? It's hit or miss. Throw it up and then you pull off an orna.

Exactly. Yeah. I should have taken one grade out. Accidental perfection. That's right. Okay, so I guess you don't really want to talk too much about personalities. No, I love talking about personalities. Do you think you've changed a lot? Yeah. Yeah? I did an awesome podcast yesterday called She Pivots. Okay, great. It was really fun.

host, Emily Sussman. And she asked me what my personality was like as a kid. Like, was I, I must have been very wanting a lot of attention. Yes, because I went into entertainment. Yeah. And could not be further from that. I was so shy. You were shy. So shy. But you always made a lot of friends. So that's a little. I did make friends. I did it. But quietly and slowly. Right. I did it in the way I still do.

still make friends. Like, I'm not at a party out... Taking huge swings like me. Taking big swings, making, yeah, loud noises and like... Drawing attention. I'm not drawing attention. You know, I hate that. Right. I hate audience participation. And like, Jess is very like you, right? Yeah. Here I am. Yeah. And I love that. Like, I...

I do joke with him, though, that the first time I ever met him ever was at one of the Hanson Christmas parties. And he was like, had his like shirt off or something. It was doing a dance. I think those heightened events bring out an even heightened version of himself. And I was like...

This guy's dangerous. I'm scared of that person. I'm not, but I want distance from that person. Yeah. And I think that's what a lot of people's reaction to me was in my 20s. Yeah. Well, and that's so funny because I obviously have a pattern of thinking like, ah, I'm scared of that. I don't want that near me. And then I...

I always find my way towards those people. Moths to the flame. Germany. Opposites attract. Yeah, laws of attraction. I read that fascinating article about how they're like, they're so buttoned up and responsible, and yet they keep, they get drawn to the chaos. Mixed messes. Inexplicable. One of our old school go-tos. Our tropes. Anyway, so I used to be very shy. Yeah.

And I am not shy anymore. Oh, congratulations. But no one would, I can't imagine anyone would miss your shyness. Ooh, that's a great question. My mom probably misses it because I was probably nicer. I know what you're about to say. And I don't think you've ever been shy to your mom.

Well, no, I wasn't, but I was stuck to her hip. Okay. Oh, that would have been nice. Yeah, like a little monkey. Yeah, but actually this is probably a lesson for her. She probably didn't like that. She was probably like, can you like go away? No, she never said that to me, but she was probably like, I need some space. I've been working all day and there's this kid here. Yeah, stuck, glued to me. Glued. Oh, that's sweet. You were glued to? Yeah. Oh.

Well, mainly in public. Okay. You kind of hide behind her body the way kids do? I guess. She would describe it as, yeah, it was like always kind of...

kind of glued to her. My cousins, Mandy and Kelly, who are the funnest people on planet earth. You'll remember they visited not too long ago and we had the blast. Mandy is the younger sister and she has same personality I do, right? Look at me. And then Kelly, who's my exact age, was very, very shy. And she would just move through the world hiding behind Mandy at all times, which she was much bigger. But I have such a clear image in my head of anytime we would leave our little bubble and be at a Kmart or a thing,

Kelly would be behind Mandy. Like, go ahead, you do all this stuff I don't want to do for us. Interesting. It's again, maybe a birth order thing. Oh my God, you would have loved this. So the update no one's asking for is I went to the dentist. Oh, right. And my hygienist was five X's into astrology as you are.

Wow. And she was really mad that you hadn't told me what my rising was. I've asked you. I said, I think she has. I think she made me take a test to find out my rising, but I forgot it. I only remember Capricorn. But she was a Capricorn, but she had like five. And this is the thing about you guys are really into it. All of a sudden you have like all the signs because she's like, I'm such and such rising and I'm this waning and I'm like, well, you've got now a fourth of the signs. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's- I loved her, by the way. Very fun hygienist. Great. She was swearing and stuff, which I love. That's fun. And of course I asked her, because it had been almost to the day seven years since I had been there last time. Sure, yeah. And she was like, whoa, seven years.

I'm going, no, and I'm going to ask you to do something that's really maybe even impossible to do because you already know the seven years. But I'm going to ask you to pretend you don't know that and objectively assess my mouth to see how long you think it's been. Because this is what I asked last time I was here. And this is when she started swearing. She was like, oh, my God, shit, yeah. You're just genetically lucky. You don't have any tartar problems.

She's like, you have no tartar. And you know what she told me, which I find really fascinating, is remember my calcium heart score, which I brag about all the time. Yeah, you do a lot of bragging. I do a lot of bragging. It's unbecoming of a gentleman. Do you think that's a personality change or has that always been there? Well, no. In fact, what I was going to say, the grody part of myself that I think is diminished is I used to –

If not directly brag, I was really trying to brag all the time. Okay, so that's gone down. It's gone down. That's good. And even now there's a zone of things I'll brag about. And there are things that I should be in trouble for, but I'm not. So that's the brag. So my calcium score, I was terrified to get it because of my diet. It's just me. Mm-hmm.

And so I was so relieved and delighted that it was zero. Yeah. Similarly, I haven't been to the dentist in seven years. I've been one time in 17 years. That's disgusting. Because it was 10 years before the last trip. Yeah.

I know, it's foul. Everyone is throwing up their tuna sandwich in their car right now. I am bragging about it. And then here's my other justification. This is what I told her. She's like, yeah, some people genetically are lucky. They don't build up a lot of tartar and that's you. And I said, I'm gonna take it because I have some other genetic stuff that's like psoriatic arthritis and stuff. So these things that I have that are just blessings from above. We all have a grab bag. Yes.

What a great genetic lottery I hit with my teeth. Yeah, that's nice. I'm really lucky because I hate going. Speaking of bragging. Yeah. Something that you've bragged about recently that I've been excited to bring up. So the cognitive test. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Now it's your turn in the catbird seat. But there was a huge revelation that happened recently.

I got my test results back. Uh-huh. Hour and a half long with Dr. Richard Isaacson. Mm-hmm.

Fascinating, fascinating. All the cholesterol stuff, you know, I started my stat and I told you that. Oh, right, right. All the cholesterol stuff, all the other stuff, turns out minus the cholesterol, which is really, really, really bad, but we're working on it. Everything's tip top. Wonderful. Yeah, everything's great. My liver's great, which I was worried about. Yeah, I would be too. Yeah, but it's fine. So I can keep powering through. You're built for it. Then the cognitive test results. And of course I was...

very anxious about this part of it. Yeah. You thought you'd convince yourself you did bad. Yeah. Even during it, I think I said on here, I said, this is very, very humbling. And she said, I have had people walk out and we got it, you know, and I was like, yeah, this is really bad. I'm doing horribly. I'm doing horribly. And then when he, uh,

And what I didn't even realize, we were taking an IQ test. I didn't realize that. Were we? Yes. The number is an IQ score. It is? Mm-hmm. Because there was none of the fun riddles that I love from...

IQ test. Maybe the kid ones may be different. No, no. A standard like to get an immense IQ test has a ton of computation and long form pattern recognition and prediction. Well, this is pattern. There was a lot of pattern. Or maybe not pattern recognition. There was identifying, but there was no prediction. It's not like they would go A, D, H. What's the next letter? I love those. That's true. Okay, well, whatever. Anyway, it is what it is. Okay.

So it was an IQ test? Yeah. Why didn't he give us an actual number? He did. Did he give you a number? That's my whole thing. Okay. Okay. So he said, cognitive test, don't worry. Your cholesterol hasn't affected your brain yet. Or if you're even smarter. Okay. Well, we'll get to that. So he said, hasn't affected your brain yet. You did fantastic. The guy-

you know, who evaluates it said words like superior, excellent, wow. So I was just so relieved at this. Yes, of course. And he said, you did a teeny bit better than your co-host. And I said, yes, that's so exciting. He's been bragging so much. Yes, yes. And he said, well, actually, I don't have the numbers. One of you did a little bit better. I was like, ah. Okay.

Okay, so one of us did a little better. And I said, oh man, well, if it was him, I think this is because of the seahorse and racism. Uh-huh, sure. And there was an Indian man also on the call and I was asking him about seahorses. He also was very hazy. Really? Yeah, he was like, sea monkeys. Wait, you had two people on your call? I had like eight people on my call.

Why did I only have one? I think I'm a very interesting case. Oh, wow. They brought in the- You did say I'm an interesting case. Okay. Okay. So anyway, while I was commiserating with the Indian man- Yeah. On seahorse sea monkeys, Dr. Isaacson told Holly to pull up our actual numbers. Okay. And when he was doing it, he goes, oh my God, are you serious? It took his breath away? Holly, are you serious? Is this real? Yeah.

We scored the exact same score. Oh my, what could be? To the 10th of a point. Oh my God, nothing could be better. Nothing. No one's hurt feelings. I know. Yeah. I think my dad did that for us. And obviously we both...

I definitely scored differently in parts, but it all added up to the exact same number. Because again, there's all these columns of intelligence and some of them I know I did terrible on. So the fact that like our terrible things evened out to be the same. So they give you an IQ score. We'd cut it out, but I will. I wrote it down, but now I forget it. But hold on. I sent it to Eric. I still don't think it's an IQ test, but I'm going to, unless it's great, then I'm going to say it's a really good IQ test.

Do you know what I'm saying though, where you have to get those really good riddles? This is an IQ test. Okay. Sorry. It's not like a memory test. Okay. Oh my God. Okay. The, our number is,

First, before you tell me, have you taken a bunch of IQ tests? I've taken a bunch. So I told my mom the number. Yeah. And my dad. I was like, good news is my brain is doing well. This, you know, whatever. I explained the whole thing and I was like, this is my score. And my dad was like, yay, that's great. And my mom was like, well, when you were five, you got five points higher than that.

Or seven, when I was seven. So I was like, okay, well, she's keeping me humble. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Yeah, reject that. I'm not trying to make you mad. This is my own self-preservation. That was your score. Okay. I don't know what to tell you.

That's lower than I want. Yeah. And actually, this is, I wasn't going to say this, but now I'm going to say this based on your reaction. Okay. To me, it's so telling about men and women. Okay. Because I'm taking this test and I'm like, I'm fucking this up. I'm doing so badly. Oh, right. I, oh my God, this is so embarrassing. I'm stupid. This is...

The self-doubt. Yeah. And then my score is- Exemplary. High. And I think men don't do that as much. Or let's take you who ended up with the exact same score as me. Okay. This is a great comp.

Because after we, you know, we talked after your test and you didn't think that. I mean, you weren't like, I did amazing, but you weren't. I wasn't. Remember, there were quite a few that I thought I did bad on. I don't think I was like overly bullish about it. I think I thought I definitely nailed a few things, that F thing, you know, I bragged about that. Right. Yeah. You did some bragging. Yeah. Before you got your score. I didn't feel like you for sure. On the spectrum, I didn't feel like you. Yeah. So I just think it's an interesting takeaway of how.

Doubt and confidence. How men and women walk through the world and when they're put through tests, like what is happening in their brains. I'm teeming with testosterone, which like is the chemical that convinces you you can do things you can't. Right. And it's just funny. Yeah. My brain was more what you were thinking, Monica, after I took the test. Right. As a comp, we got the same score, which is why I can say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I didn't do poorly. Right. Right.

And yet you thought you did. Yeah. Yeah. And I wish I could do these things with more confidence. Right. Like borrow some of that confidence.

I wonder like if we dug into it, what's under that, you know, is it for you that being smart is, is a very defining characteristic. And so here's this thing that has the potential to destroy your identity. I'm just throwing something out. This isn't what I think per se, but I'm just like spit balling now. Is it that the stakes were higher for you? Whereas for me, it's like, well, I know I'm going to tank a lot of this and I,

You don't. In fact, that's what our fight just now was. You're like, I reject that number. I'm higher than that. Well, because I've gotten better scores than that. And so, of course, I'm going to believe the one that made me seem the smartest. That's like my self-interest. Yeah, so you don't have what you're saying you have. You think you're, you believe and think. You're right. That's a paradox. Yeah. It's a paradox. Yeah, I don't know.

I think also like when a lot of girls are told like, oh, like girls don't score as high on tests or girls aren't good at math or girls aren't X, Y, and Z. Right. And so, yeah, I don't, I am in there thinking like, well, I, I mean, it's all subconscious, but it's like, yeah, I can't be very good at this. Yeah. And it'd be interesting.

To know what young girls now, because yeah, when you grew up, the admission rate for men in STEM at universities was still in the 80s probably, right? But now it's completely flipped. So now like two thirds of girls are getting into college and only one third of boys or whatever the number is. Yeah. Crazy now. Yeah. I watched the, I guess it was a holiday concert. Oh. Last night at Lincoln School. Oh.

Oh, nice. And as you would expect, lots of bawling. Yeah. I'm watching all these little girls. Yeah. It's all girls' school. So cute. And they're singing, and it's so beautiful. Yeah. And I'm crying. Yep. And then I look at Chrissy at one point, and I go, you know...

Daughters are really the best thing this planet has to offer. They're the best thing that this planet has to offer is little daughters. Yeah. Fuck me. They're all, I was looking at all of them. They're so cute and cute.

Oh, yeah. Got to protect them. Yeah. Oh, man. It was so touching. I was also tripping the fuck out that I have a daughter in a Catholic school outfit. Like, in a bazillion years, that is not what my fantasy of having kids was. Yeah. I know. Yeah. It was great. That's sweet. Do you think a lot of men feel that way? About daughters? Mm-hmm. I think a lot of men want to have a son. Mm-hmm.

I mean, I could spitball for an hour on why that is just historically what that has meant until recently. But the second you have a daughter, every man I know that has daughters, the first thing we say to each other is like, aren't we so fucking lucky? Like we got so lucky that we have these girls. And, you know, that study that just came out that adds like one point five years to your life per daughter you have. And it's cumulative. It does something very good for us.

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Tell me. It makes you love your dad? No, I mean, I love my dad, yeah. But no, it's like, it makes me so happy to hear that. And yet... And then you have a disconnect. I have a disconnect. Why do we stop caring about women after a certain... Like, really? I mean, not to be political, but women, I'm going to say for me, just took a big hit. And from men and women, right?

Right. Oh, yeah. So that is so curious to me how we can like look at these be so proud of our daughters and, you know, want the best for them. And I believe that. I believe that. I believe that most people want the best for their children and half of their children are girls. Yeah.

To me, there's just like a hypocrisy, not you, obviously, but there's a hypocrisy where it's like, I got to protect my family and I got to. And then you don't. Yeah. And this is where you and I often disagree, which is like, yes, if your conclusion is that it was an opportunity to vote for women and that was the.

thing that drove your voting, then it's very disheartening. Oh, but I mean more just, well, that too, but also just rights. I personally think that it wasn't a vote on women as much as maybe it should have been. And I voted that way, but

If I just look at the exit polls, that's not what people were saying was their concern. That's my point. That's actually my point, is it was not their concern. But let's just be as generous as we can. If you are somebody who is having an impossible time feeding your family, and your conclusion, right or wrong, is that it's because of the left—

Well, feeding everyone and keeping everyone safe would trump other things. It's like first order of business is like food, shelter, and water. Yeah. Once we have that, then we move on to these other things. So it could be that they very much want those. Well, we know 70% of the country wants those rights for women, but they may have said to themselves, but I am more scared about my income currently than

Uh, and that's gotta be what I'm going to vote to. And then we can disagree on what the best route to those people who truly are like, well, again, I, yeah, I, I think there's some misinformation about what would help those people, but they, to those people who really they're in, like, I can't put food on the table. I'm not,

I have no judgment of those people. I don't. That's a very specific situation. I am not talking about that group. And it's, you know, tens of millions of people. It is, but there's a huge percentage of people that did not vote for women's rights, that do not have trouble putting food on the table and chose to still, like, in my, again, the most generous thing I can say is chose to pick women

um, their tax dollars over women's rights. And that is, there is just, to me, there's a, there's a

between the way we think about young girls and then what happens overall. I think people just triage their priorities, you know? I think it's, and then, and for you, which is totally understandable, that's number one for you on all the issues that were being voted on. That was the number one one. And there's some other stuff you totally care about that went to number two, but

And if well, everything I cared about, unfortunately, not unfortunately, but was belong to one party. Sure. I didn't have to make big sacrifices. Let's put it this way. I do believe if you had virtually two centrist candidates on the right and the left and on the right, they were pro reproductive rights. And on the left, they were anti and they wanted to extend that.

I think you would have flopped. A hundred percent, I would. Right. So I do think it was in the same way that for the people that are pro-life, that one always trumps all the other ones. I think we often have certain issues that trump a lot of other stuff we care about. Yeah. Just bums me out. I can feel...

I can really feel it. I don't know if you can sense this too, but I've been around a lot of women lately. Yeah. And like everyone's in a tough spot. Yeah, I feel it. Yeah. It's like. Well, I talked to my ex-girlfriend, Carrie. I sent you the text. Yeah. Then I FaceTimed her.

And we haven't had a FaceTime. Like we just check in with each other once every few months and or she'll send me a song she likes or I'll send her a song. But we had a full like hour and a half FaceTime to talk about this, all these issues. Yeah. Yeah. She doesn't need that from me normally. Like that's not something she's not reaching out to me to go like, how are you not freaking out kind of a situation, you know?

And so, yeah, I can see in—I can see—I see it. Yeah. You know, you brought this up, and I think it's right, that a lot of men, young boy, young men, feel not seen or not spoken to and—

And I really, I guess I'm just to our male listeners who are in a position of influence at all. It's on you, not you, but you as a group to help these men. I don't think it's on women to do it. It's not on women. It's on the party. The party has to have a plan for... Yeah, but I'm saying the way to change this

the seed, the culture. It happens from within. And we had Sharon on and she was like, it's not that. It's not the government that's going to come in on a white horse and change people's opinions and change. Exactly. It comes from within. Right. And I was also thinking about this, speaking of daughters and fathers, Kerala, where my parents are from, is a very matriarchal

Because originally it was the wealth was passed down through the female. Yeah, matri and local. So there isn't this, like, because I was like, why is it like, why doesn't my dad have this? And even my grandfather, who was much, you know, of an older...

old generation. He didn't have that at all. Right. And I was like, what is it? And I was like, oh, it's not that they're like special. They didn't grow up in a patriarchal environment. Yeah. And it's, it's for everyone to start moving more away from that. Well, so much of it too is just, you're kind of a product of your environment. And as,

As Keith Payne said, it's like, yes, we all believe we've thought through all the issues and come to the best conclusion, but it isn't as suspicious. I can predict 90% what your conclusion is going to be. I think that's relevant. And so I don't deserve applause because I'm a feminist. I was raised by a force of nature woman, and there was no dad around. I was seeing no lowered status. I just am the lucky beneficiary of having grown up with a gangster mom.

And I was just on a trip with a dude who's also only dated and is now married to gangster women. And I said to him, your mom must be a gangster, was she? And he's like, oh yeah, she's like the ultimate gangster. And I was just like, yeah, that boy-

Is the beneficiary of that. And I was the beneficiary of that. And that's just, we got lucky. You know, he was born into a house. You got lucky, but also there's societal things that make it harder or easier. Like when there's equal pay, it's easier to grow up in a household where your parents are equal. You know, there's, that's what these systemic things are about.

You know, that's why we have to change some of these things because you're absolutely right. It's what you literally are born into. Also, some people dispute this data, but let's just say for one second, it's true that men will date laterally and below them and that women date laterally and above them. Yeah. Or even like.

status-wise, educational attainment, these different metrics, right? But on social dating platforms, it's really pretty staggering. And I was like, why is that, right? Why is that? And what occurred to me is like, oh, yeah, for a guy who grew up in the 80s,

His dad worked and the mom didn't work or make money and probably didn't go to college and have a degree. So like his, the primary love in a boy's life was this woman who probably had less status than the man on the scene. So of course that makes sense. Whereas if you're a girl, you're,

Dad had more status and money and power than mom. And you're trying to marry dad. So like boys are trying to marry mom and girls are trying to marry dad. So of course this pattern exists. That's exactly what you saw growing up. Maybe for a large swath, but for a woman who has a level of success, a certain level has hit a certain level of success. I don't think that's, they're not looking for someone with more success.

That's hard. Like that's really rare and hard to find. But like a lot of women would not want to, these are air quotes, a deadbeat boyfriend.

But there's so many rich dudes that are happy to have a wife who's never done anything but look gorgeous. That's weird to me. Like, how could that be? Why is that, like, not triggering for a guy? And that would be hugely triggering for a woman. Most of the people in my life are with partners that are 100% on par. Comparable, right. They're all working together.

They're all working and make around the same amount of money. I guess my conclusion is hopeful for me, which is like, oh, well, as this primary structure evolves, perhaps...

the baggage of both those things will go away. Like, I think there's very much product of like 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s family structure, but it more and more and more people have either a mom who makes the same as dad or more, or I know a ton of people here, which I didn't exist in Michigan in the 80s. There was no stay at home dads that I never met a single kid whose dad stayed at home and

But here, I don't know what the percentage is, but all the time I'm meeting men at school who that's what they do. Yeah. So conceivably, their daughters aren't going to think that a guy who, you know, that that's that would never be an issue for them. Because the other the other conclusion is it's just so bleak.

Like there's the kind of, you know, Scott Galloway, who I love so much of what he says. His is pretty bleak, right? Where this is just going to get exacerbated because less and less men are going to college. So less and less men are even going to achieve something laterally significant or above. So it's just going to continue to self-perpetuate, which I can see that's a very defendable position. But I'm hopeful that as...

people's role models and parents evolve that they'll just, it'll maybe take care of itself. But why, what's his take on like why it would self-perpetuate? Why can't men get themselves to college anymore? Well, they're being outperformed by girls very simply. They're getting, you know,

Now that the reins are off of girls and the shackles are off of girls, well, lo and behold, they perform better. They test better.

You know, they're more mature. There's all these things. But it's... I don't think it's that, like... I don't think the sad is that boys are getting rejected from college. It's that they're not going. No. Well, in these elite schools with hard admissions, way more boys are applying than are getting in. Yeah. And... But metrically, girls are doing much better. They're getting in at a much higher rate. Yeah. But, I mean, we... I guess...

That's an outlier, right? Like trying to get into an Ivy League school. I mean, just a regular public college institution. There's no reason other than from within that group—

that they shouldn't be able to go. Like, that's what I... What is happening? But they can't compete. But... What if, though, they... What if they can't compete? Well, I think there literally would be affirmative action for men. Like, if... I think that if 90% of women...

If it was like every school is turning into 95% based on five because of merit. Yeah, what Malcolm was saying. Yeah. Yeah, that Tulane is becoming a women's only college. But, and then that gets into, but then why? Because is it?

Then draw more women and draw less men, you know, that whole thing, whatever. There's so many factors to it, but there would definitely be fixes for that. Currently, I don't, I just don't know why. Well, how about just anecdotally your high school experience? And I'll say my high school experience.

So, on average, girls were much better students than the boys. Like, the boys were highly distracted. You know, they were distracting in class. I was one of them. Yeah. And I think the only reason they weren't before blasting boys out of the water is that they didn't apply. Yeah.

Or they weren't expected to do that or they weren't encouraged to do it or they were discouraged to do it. But like once that, I think once that, like when everyone's aims were the same, I'm not shocked they've blasted by boys just from sitting in classes my whole life. Right, right. Boys were kind of, you couldn't get them to fucking...

Settle down for 10 minutes. Yeah. I don't know what's happening there physiologically, but I'm not shocked that now that the governor's off girls that they're doing better. That doesn't shock me at all. Well, it's not shocking to me that they're doing better, but it doesn't explain to me why men are just dropping off the map. I think what men are feeling is we made a very specific decision about 30 years ago about

Where we said, okay, our economy is transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a brain economy. We're going to invent stuff and we're going to administrate and we're going to do all this stuff. And then so NAFTA is a very appealing policy because we're not going to be manufacturing anymore. It'd be better to get cheap labor in Mexico. And a lot of decisions were made to pursue that goal of a brain economy. And we have the results. So I think...

At least when I was going to high school, in fact, I can tell you my, I told, a month or two ago, I said I reconnected with him, Joey Riccardi. Joey Riccardi wasn't a good student. His dad was a bricklayer. He had a work ethic like no one's business. He owns this incredible excavation company now, and he's done incredibly well. He could have never, he was not going to go to college. Yeah.

There used to be a lot more avenues like that. The trades, the trades were bigger. The trade, you know, I'm from Detroit. Like most people went into manufacturing and they had great lives and they had ski boats and, you know, so that has really fallen out so much.

That's a real issue. It is a real issue. But in the same way that when we talk about AI here, and if I say like, well, I think we should put regulations and you're like, well, we can't because we have to compete with these other countries. They're not going to stop. And I say that not because I don't agree with you. I say that because I think I'm working backwards from a reality. I don't think we should do that. Yes. So I'm making the same equivalency. Like if we said we're not going to be a brain economy.

How the fuck are we going to compete with China and India and these other countries that are full brain economies? But luckily, we have some models. So it's like Germany is doing both things. Germany is leading in tech and engineering. And yet they also have this huge manufacturing base. I don't think they're leading in tech.

Germany isn't leading in tech. Okay. They're very, they're a very high tech civilization. Yeah. And they have a, their own stock market. That's, you know, they, they have all the things we have. They're kind of winning on both fronts and they have a, they've made a lot of legislative decisions that the skilled late a, when you're in school,

They drive you if you're a boy to a vocational school. Yeah, I think that's very smart. And you pick up an actual trade there that you will make $45 an hour. Like you'll be a middle class, whether they're unionized or not, they just culturally. Yeah. I think because we have at least a model of it where it works, where you can have both things, you can have a brain economy and a manufacturing economy.

I think we need to do a lot better. I do too. But so that, that's sort of, how do we get those people to hear? Cause this is the truth. The, the, the party that wants to do that, the party that wants to do free community college to offer retraining and vocational skills is not the party they're voting for. So I don't know how to,

Get those people to understand that what is in their best interest and this country's best interest of that, of actual training that group to be middle class or above. And there is an avenue for that. Now, look, some of these things are dog whistles.

I'll totally agree with you. But it's very simple messaging. It's like 2016, Trump's the only person in America that's like fighting for coal jobs. We're going, we got to get into green energy. But what else did she say? And so we have to retrain. Hillary said retrain. I heard it so many times. Yeah. Retraining, retraining. And that's correct. Correct.

But listen, you can totally disagree with it on an environmental stance. But you had one side saying we're going to get into green energy, which is a very high tech energy. It's all happening in Silicon Valley. It's like the solar panel companies, the wind turbine companies.

And then you have oil and gas drilling, which is North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota. All these places where dudes are roughnecks and they can go make $60 an hour. And that thing they can do. Solar and wind sounds like they're never, that's never going to be for them. But coal mining and gas and oil, which the right is very in favor of gas and oil and the left's very against gas and oil.

You just got to acknowledge that that's a whole sector of jobs that a lot of these guys were going to have. And they think that one side wants to get rid of all those jobs, the last of their high paying jobs. If you can just table the environmental aspect for a second, I understand the appeal that that's not like hard for me to get. Is one side saying I'm going to protect all these jobs that the left says are too dirty for the world. The other side is saying we're going to green, which is high tech in Silicon Valley.

That all makes sense to me. And it's a lot simpler to understand than, than the reality. Something more complicated. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

All right. Here we go. So this is for Matt Murphy. Oh, this was a fun one. Yeah. The percentage of DNA that we share with chimps, 98.8%. Almost our temperature. That'll be my new way of remembering it. Okay, great. Blood alcohol levels, his mom was five and 0.08 is the legal limit. So that's really bad. Really, really bad. That's insane. Very bad. On the...

On the Wondery Plus episode, we do a little fact check now for the Wondery Plus episode. So for the Matt Murphy Wondery Plus episode, the facts are a little different. They're the same, but they're different because I found a different fact. Oh, wow. You keep going.

Yeah, because in that episode, I said that Kevin Spacey is currently in a play and he's not. He's not? No. Okay. He's unemployed currently? Well, I guess he's set to appear in a movie, Peter 5-8. Okay. And where he got the standing ovation, it was at a theater in Oxford, which is why I guess I was confused. It says his first stage appearance since being cleared of sexual assault.

After performing a brief scene by Shakespeare. So he just did a scene. A little one-off. Exactly. He did a five-minute scene. And that received a standing ovation. I guess so. All right. So he's not currently in a play. Okay. There was a standing O last night. Oh, that's nice. Do you call it a standing O? I used to, yeah. No, you're off of it. Am I doing something dorky? I haven't said it in a while. I love it. Go ahead. Is it a little dorky? No, it's fine. Okay. You said 25% of boys are molested-ish. Yeah.

And the last time we talked about this, I was like, yes, I found that stat. Now that stat's gone. They took it off the internet? Yes, it's gone. And what's left is one in six. I guess that's this big number. And then there's a site called oneinsix.org. Then all these other places are saying one in six. I looked a lot for the other thing and I couldn't find it. And I kept finding one in six. One could be data from today and one could be data from the 80s. Like I'm always referencing back.

body keeps a score. And that stuff was all about the generation in the eighties. But one is data from today and the other is data from last week. Oh no, that's, I don't have an explanation for that, but I could see where from my generation to my kids that it has dropped. Yeah. Also that's nuts. If you're at a football game and you're looking at those many thousands of people and you're saying one of every six people you see. It's awful. It's

It's crazy. Okay. That's more than that have been in a traffic accident. Yeah. I don't know those stats. Okay. So are you more likely to be sexually abusive if you were sexually abused? Again, some conflicting info. There's stopitnow.org, which we talked about. Stopitnow.org says, no, you're not more likely to be.

There is a study by the NIH. Among 747 males, the risk of being a perpetrator was positively correlated with reported sexual abuse victim experiences. The overall rate of having been a victim was 35% for perpetrators and 11% for non-perpetrators of the 96%

females, 43% had been victims, but only one was a perpetrator. A high percentage of male subjects abused in childhood by a female relative became perpetrators. Having been a victim was a strong predictor of becoming a perpetrator, as was an index of parental loss in childhood. And

That is all. Well, I love you. This was fun. Yeah. You rose to the occasion of your bar rap. Thank you. I rose to the occasion? Yes. It's a rose. Oh, it is. Yeah. Oh, my Lord. All right. Love you. Love you.

Hey, Armcherrys, quick question for you. Have you ever stopped to wonder who came up with

We'll be right back.

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