Andrea Dunlop (on Munchausen by proxy)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Monica Padman and I'm joined by Dax Shepard. Hi. Hi. I'm Dax. Oh, I'm Dax. I like to lift weights and eat steak. Boobs.

That wasn't fair to Andrea Dunlop at all. Not really. Andrea Dunlop is a writer and a host of an award-winning podcast, which we talk about a lot in this episode, called Nobody Should Believe Me. This was tasty. This is all about Moonshousen, and Moonshousen by proxy, one of our favorite topics. This episode is so fascinating. I've just told everyone I've encountered since then about this, so a lot of people are waiting for this episode to drop.

She's also written several books. Women are the fiercest creatures losing the light. She regrets nothing. We came here to forget and broken Bay, but please check out. Nobody should believe me. The podcast it's phenomenal. And we discuss a lot. Really get into it here. Yeah. Please enjoy Andrea Dunlop.

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

- Hi, I'm so sorry I'm late. - Oh, no problem. - Dax, nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you, Andrea. - I have to wait till Monica arrives, see her out my window, then color coordinate my outfit. So I'm always delayed. - It'd be pretty awkward if you guys clash. - Yeah. - It wouldn't work. It just simply wouldn't work. - It's not in the stew. - You're gonna have trouble telling you apart now though, you know? - That's one of the main issues. - We hear that a lot. - Truth be told, you're mildly responsible for my tardiness.

I am? Yeah, because I got really sucked into your podcast while I was working out. We love to hear it. Yeah, and I was getting distracted. That's a really good compliment. I'm going to take that one and carry it with me. Yeah. Yeah, I was distracted listening. Then I was distracted. Oh, I want to write that down to bring that up.

And then I was like, what are we doing up here? Oh, we're in the middle of exercising. Let's get back at it. Sure, sure, sure. And then I would cycle through that loop again. That's amazing. As long as I didn't cause any injuries, I'm extremely glad to hear it. They usually surface the next day. So TBD, I was lifting with bad form. Good thing I have insurance.

I don't know if my liability insurance covers that, but we'll see. That'd be a pretty wild claim to levy. I mean, I deal with very litigious. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. There's nothing they can't find a way to see someone over. Look what she brought us. What?

we got? They have really cute tote bags with her books in them. And they say armchair expert on them. ACX. My friend who works for Land's End is also a huge fan. So we collaborated. Yeah, Margaret. You're from Seattle or you live there? I am. I'm from there and I live there. And you grew up where exactly? I grew up in Woodinville, Washington. It's a little suburb northeast of Seattle. It was very quiet and rural when I was living there. It's gotten a lot

Is it north of Bellevue? It is east. Do you ever go to that janky water park that was just south on the floor? I guess it's the 405 that loops through there. Wild waves, baby? Yes. I just told Monica a story. That's Monica where my shorts failed me. Oh, it is?

Yeah, I went down this long slide and I got up out of the water and the girls was like, oh, your entire ass is out. Amazing. The whole back of the shorts ripped apart. Anus. I'm so glad we've both been there. Wild Waves, that was a real like destination when I was growing up. Maybe it is janky. I haven't been there since I was a kid, but I mean, it was practically Disneyland. Of course. And I shouldn't have said. Take responsibility for your feelings. Yeah.

Janky was the wrong word. It probably is janky. A, I loved it. B, everyone should go. It's a wonderful place for your family to make memories. But also, water parks in general, it's a tremendous amount of people with recycled water. And the thought of being fully nuclear genitals out in the very public water, I think, is why I leapt to janky. It was a janky situation, it sounds like. There we go. I was the jankiness. We actually took the kids earlier this year to Great Wolf Lodge. Are you familiar with Great Wolf Lodge? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and that really solidifies your point of all water parks...

have an element of jankitude. Can I add in too that Great Wolf Lodge, which is fantastic. My children have never been happier. Vegas for kids. But there's an added component, which is it's indoors. It's a water park indoors? It is a water park indoors. That way it's all year round. Oh, so moist. Very humid. It then occupies two of the three states that matter can be in because it's in liquid and now it's also in the air.

The communalness. You know what I'm saying? That is not for me. It really is. And it gets packed. So there was just a point when we were at the water park where I was like, there are too many people in this wave pool. Think about the E. coli. Nope. I shan't think about that. I'll never go into it again. Just...

All the people and all the variables of all the germs and it's all just trapped in a Ziploc bag. But it's a really fun place. No one should miss out on it in their life. Okay. What were mom and dad doing in that area? Were they in Arrow at all? Yeah. So my mom was a homemaker, which was lovely for us. And my dad was...

He is an entrepreneur. He has always worked sort of adjacent to aerospace stuff. So when I was younger, he was doing sort of consulting and business turnaround work. And then he eventually bought an aerospace subcontracting firm where they made parts for all those companies. And then he developed software for manufacturing. And so that's what he does now. He is 76. He is going strong. And you have how many siblings? Just the one. Just your sister. Mm-hmm.

And she's older? Little under two years older. So we were very close in age. So you have, actually, let's go through some of those things first before we get to the podcast. So did you go to University of Washington? No, my husband did. So, you know, go dogs, all that. Yeah. I went to the University of Redlands actually down here. I think LA people sometimes know it. It's a very small liberal arts college.

I played tennis there. It was great. I had a good time. Redlands is a place you debate getting off to get in and out on your way to Palm Springs. I think that's the best way to describe Redlands. It's a very small town, but it's very cute for a college town. I wanted to go to a big school, and then I actually loved going to a teeny tiny school. So it was a really good experience.

But did you have a fantasy of L.A. and Southern California growing up in Seattle? And you get to Redlands, you're not really there. You're very close. That is very true. And yes, I was hell bent on going to school in California, partly because of the tennis, the lure of being able to play tennis outside all the time. Like I wanted to change. I think I only applied to schools in California. I played to like one school in Washington.

Would you go watch matches down at La Quinta? Yeah. So my parents have a little place out there. And so we went to the tournament for years and years. Indian Wells. Yeah, Indian Wells. PGA West. Which is really fun. I really want to go. Oh, it's so fun. Once I started watching that tennis show. I need to get into this because everyone's been talking about it this week. Oh, it's so good. And Challengers. Oh, I was thinking of Challengers. What were you thinking of? On Netflix, there's a doc series called...

Yeah, it's by the people who make Drive to Survive, Box to Box. They make all these incredible, compelling sports documentaries, and you can watch them about sports you would never be interested in. Golf. I can't stand golf. The fucking show is amazing. Can't get enough of it. Currently, the Tour de France one just came out. I'm in the middle of it right now with my daughter. Oh, fun. It couldn't be better. This is how I feel about football. I do not like watching football, but I love Friday Night Lights. I love a football arc. I love football as a metaphor, but I don't love watching football.

Totally. It's a metaphor. Okay, what did you major in at Redlands? I majored in creative writing. You know, that would be one of the things too I wanted to but didn't have the balls. I should have maybe just done film and television at college. I didn't. What did you major in? Anthropology. Okay. And I now know you've never heard the show because I say it almost every episode and people make fun of me for it. Exactly.

Okay, so you did creative writing. And what is the work output when you're majoring in that? Are they encouraging you to just write volumes and volumes of work? Yeah, I mean, you just write a lot of very bad work. And that is your job when you're that age. I also want to say I have listened to a bunch of episodes of the show. Thank you very much. You don't have to have listened. It's just shocking you would have made it through an episode where I didn't say. Maybe you have PTSD. Maybe you removed it. Yeah.

It definitely could be white noise. That's very funny. But I wrote an entire novel when I was in school that alone is an accomplishment, right? I always tell people when they're trying to get into writing, I'm like, well, you have to write so much bad. Like, don't try and publish the first thing you write. That's a fool's errand. But I wrote a ton. I found...

an incredible mentor called Pat Geary, who was one of my first professors there. I stayed in touch with her, dedicated my first novel to her. So yeah, it was really wonderful. They're one of the only programs that I know of that has a workshop program for undergrad. That's usually something you find in like an MFA. And it was very funny because when you tell people you're a creative writing major, they're like, well, okay, good luck with that. And then I'm like, my major has applied more to my life than like almost anyone else's.

I know. Sure, sure, sure. So learning to write is a useful skill, as it turns out, before AI takes it all over, I guess. Well, that's upon us. But you're right. Almost every occupation benefits from something well-written. Yeah. So when you graduate, though, finding employment as an author. Right. Yeah. You can't just go and apply for a job. Right. You're kind of an actor at that point.

Where it's like, you're going to write and then you're going to submit and you're going to do your essay, essay envelope or whatever it is. I've sent out 10,000 of those. What's that? That is the, I can't remember what it stands for. Self-addressed stamped envelope. So they don't have to pay for postage to send it. You submit your work and then you're kind enough to give them with postage the thing they'll send your rejection notice in.

It's a unique humility. With book publishing anyway, it's all electronic now, so you don't have that anymore. This is 95 I'm referencing. Oh, I mean, me too. I graduated in 2004. What was your approach? Because I got this enormous book. I think maybe even my mother got it for me for Christmas. And it was like an encyclopedia of who you could submit to. And Monica, it's...

hundreds and hundreds of pages of addresses. Yes. What was that called? It was like a reference for all submissions. For publishing? Yes. And it was as big as a dictionary. I just transfer that info onto envelopes. I think by the time I was submitting, I did a few of the SASE, but they were moving a little bit to electronic. Oh, thank God. Yeah. But I did send some of those out.

One of the best pieces of advice I've heard, and I think it still holds true. There are many literary agent databases now online and lots of information you can find there. But I still think one of the better ways is to find books you like and look in the acknowledgements because people always think they're agents. Oh, smart.

- Smart. - Oh. - Yeah, and then you can say, "Oh, I'm a fan of this work. "I know you represent this person. "Shows you've done your homework." - So is that the route you took? You first tried to get representation. - Yeah. I've never been a writer of short things. I'm in general sort of a person that can't shut up, which is why I have a podcast. And so I was never able to write short stories. They're always just the beginning of a novel. Even when I was trying really hard when I was in college, when that was the assignment. I just need more time. And I need thousands of words to figure out what I'm even writing. So I moved to New York.

I wanted to work for a magazine because you'll know of that year. That was everyone's job. If you were a romantic heroine in like a rom-com, you worked for a magazine. That's right. The it girl job. How to lose a girl in... How to lose a girl in... Devil Wears Prada. Like it was just so in the zeitgeist. It was a trope. Also for women who are elder millennials as I am, the hold that women's magazines had on us culturally.

that we didn't have TikTok or Tumblr or any of these things. Cosmo, baby. Yeah, and that was like your window into another life. Primarily blowjob tips, right? Oh, yeah. So many in Cosmo. But, you know, we also had great ones like Sassy and Jane. That was where you got sort of your feminist culture and I look into what it would be like to live into a big city. So I interviewed at a bunch of magazines. I interviewed at Vogue. It was terrifying. With Anne Wintour. Not,

Both Anna and Trey. She's doing the first round. I interviewed with the managing editor. No, you know Liz interviewed with Anna. Oh, that's terrifying. But that must have been on like a third round of interviews. I don't know what happened. She is not first on the gate. I don't know. So it was assistant to the managing editor. But I did not get it, which was great because then I got a temp job working at Random House. Oh. And then I was like, oh, yeah, like I am a book person, really. So I should be here. So I worked at Random House the entire time I was in New York. I was a publicist at Doubleday for most of that.

So I was working in the industry and it was such a good learning experience. Publishing is a bananas industry, but it was so fun. I worked with these iconic editors like Phyllis Grant and Nantalees and Doubleday published some of my favorite authors like Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood. It was a very main character moment as the kids. Yes.

Every time I was like walking in the lobby with my coffee. And so then I was just working on my own stuff. Finally, I had a period where I wasn't doing much writing and then got back into it. Can I ask really quick? You said it was a bananas industry. Could you give me a couple of highlights? We don't know enough. I feel like if I made that comment about Hollywood, I would have some specific bad

aspects of it. Oh, I guess it just depends on how much of the interview what I did. Growing up on the West Coast and then moving to the East Coast was a huge culture shock. And publishing is the most East Coast blue blood. Everyone went to an Ivy League school. Lots of people that went to like Dalton and these other private academies in New York. Summer's on Martha's Vineyard. Yeah, because summer is a verb. It's that crowd.

It stayed the same for so long. It is so technology resistant and Doubleday merged with Knopf. Knopf is like the most, you know, it's just this very elbow patch legacy industry. It just is very, very resistant to change. And I've seen that on both sides.

I have so many people that I've worked with in book publishing that I just absolutely love and who are brilliant. But it's also an industry that is really only available to certain people. And I think it suffers because of that. Well, and also, am I right in that I don't know where they're at currently, but they certainly suffered an incredible downturn in sales and whatnot, right? It was a shrinking industry. No.

Not really, it just is never growing. We interview our friend Jedediah Jenkins. His father wrote this series of books in the '70s or '80s about him walking across America. That's part of what the Forrest Gump character is based on, is his dad.

Those sold 15 million copies. No one's heard of that book. That was like an average selling book in the 70s. Now the biggest selling memoir is McConaughey's at like 3 million or something. So something tells me the volume has changed. I don't think 15 million was ever like. Publishing has always been a business of really small numbers. Most books that come from big houses don't sell more than a thousand copies.

copies. Wow. I just read there was that big lawsuit, the DOJ versus, you know, there's supposed to be this merger with, I always want to call it Random Penguin, but it's Penguin Random House. And then Simon and Schuster were trying to merge and the DOJ intervened and they ended up stopping that merger. And so it was this very interesting look into because so many industry people testified.

and it's a very opaque industry. And so you got all of this information about advances and royalties and basically the book publishing industry just makes their money off backlist and huge marquee authors and then the occasional sleeper hit and then everything else.

Exactly. But I mean, if you look at someone like Colleen Hoover, who's the best selling author in the world right now, she has shelves of her books in airports. It's like the biggest publishing phenomenon in the last several years. You sort of never saw anything like that before in terms of someone especially selling like sort of across their whole catalog. So you have those huge outliers. I do think it's gotten harder to make any kind of living as a mid list author. I think it's sort of gotten more pushed to the sides. I like learning about them.

Okay, so you have published several novels. And how does writing We Came Here to Forget end up filing into Moonshousen, Moonshousen by Proxy, and your podcast? I started writing We Came Here to Forget when I was pregnant with my older daughter, Fiona. The reason that timing lined up is because getting pregnant really brought up for me all of the things that had happened with my sister. And so it was something that I always knew that I would

write about eventually. As any kind of artist, you're not going to avoid your big things. A lot of that experience ended up in that novel. The piece that was based off of the family history was very closely based off of what happened with Megan. When that book came out five years ago, you know, at that point, I had never spoken to another person who'd been through that experience. It was so isolating that

Isolation of it really compounded what was already an incredibly traumatic situation. At the point that I published it, my sister was in the midst of a criminal investigation for her younger child. We'd become estranged 14 years ago when she was investigated for her older child. So that criminal investigation was happening and a family court judge

gave her her children back in the midst of that investigation four days before my novel came out. So I found that out from a cease and desist from her lawyer. So that's how I spent the publication day of that book. As I have since learned, it is very hard to sue someone for defamation, especially for fiction. But it was nonetheless a very unpleasant experience. So she was actively trying to sue you? Yeah, I mean, a

A cease and desist is a cease and desist, right? It's an expensive piece of paper. Generally a bluff. And it feels very serious. I don't think if I... We've gotten that. Yeah, I'm sure. I don't think you can talk about challenging material on a long-term basis and not get one. I almost think, especially with what I cover, if I hadn't gotten any, then I wouldn't be taking enough chances. So I made the decision to talk about it publicly because I think one of the most powerful things that storytelling can do

is make people feel less alone with their experiences. We cannot be the only family that has ever been through this. And what year was that? So that was the summer of 2019. Just to put it in context of pop culture at that time, is the movie out yet, Mommy Dearest? Mommy Dead and Dearest. Yeah, so Mommy Dead and Dearest had come out around that same time The Act came out, which was Hulu. And I know you guys interviewed Joey. Yes, we played just as a good performance. Also Aaron Lee Carr.

who did Mommy, Dead and Dearest. The documentary in particular is excellent and Sharp Objects came out. So it was having this weird little pop culture moment. So I was doing an interview with a journalist. She introduced me to Dr. Mark Feldman, who has interviewed in Mommy, Dead and Dearest and is by far the most public facing expert because he's willing to do media interviews, which most of them do not want to do.

for a lot of good reasons. He's a psychiatrist and he's a professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama and has written five books on the topic of factitious disorders. So I connected with him. We became fast friends and he was the one who introduced me to the Munchausen by proxy committee. That's part of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. I was actually just giving a presentation at their conference or

before this. And so I went down to meet with them. I really thought that the book would be the thing and then I would be done with it. Of course, that is not what happened. Really, it was in the beginning, just talking to Mark, just asking him these questions and trying to make sense of my own experience. I'd read his work because I'd found it just Googling, trying to find information. But it was such a relief.

to talk to him and to explain the story to someone that had context for it. Because whenever I had tried to tell anyone in my life about it up until that point, which I didn't do that often, they would be so shocked and so upset. It wasn't a very helpful experience. I gotta say, I'm really delighted to have had the personal experience of not directly, but my wife worked with somebody who clearly has Munchausen. So I can relate to the very bizarre position you're in.

It feels unapproachable because you're recognizing the person already is caught in a huge yarn of reality they're spinning and you get this sense that to poke at it will be to collapse this person. It's much weirder than I would have predicted. Now, mind you,

I remember saying to my wife, like, why don't you tell her, hey, I know what the fuck's going on. I feel like I would say something, but I saw how awkward it was for her. And then everyone around it, like everyone's aware of it, but no one's saying a thing. The best defense you think you have is to ignore it and not give it the attention it seems to be craving. Anyways, I'm glad I saw it first hand because I think even I would have a much more confused reaction.

understanding of why people don't just go like bullshit. Yeah, exactly. And certainly for me with my relationship with Megan and she did have these previous munchausen behaviors. Yeah, we should back up a little, I think, because if people are just entering, can we get what happened? How did we get to the point where I was even writing

Yes, yes. My sister and I were close in age. We were close growing up, at least from my perspective. And we had, again, from my perspective, very lovely childhood. There's no obvious traumas that happened. You can never know what someone's experience is. But my parents can remember stuff from when she was a kid. But in my memory, starting in kind of our teenage years, there was just always something. There was always a health thing.

So there was a back injury and she ended up having a couple of surgeries. There was a knee thing that she had a surgery for. And without documentation, I don't know if any of that was real or if it was real and exaggerated or if it was never real. It's just impossible to know. There were a couple of incidents. I mean, the big one when we were in high school, when she was, I think, 17, her hair started falling out. And that's obviously extremely dramatic for a teenage girl. Nightmare.

Everyone was noticing it. It was lots of attention. And my mother took her to the dermatologist and the dermatologist pulled my mom aside and said, it's not falling out. She's shaving it.

Take a second. Take a second. Yikes. Okay. Yeah. So that's one of those things where obviously that's alarming, but no one said it could be Munchausen. Like no one gave us context. That's a big leap. It feels like. And teenagers in general, but like teenage girls sometimes do really strange things for attention. Yeah.

It's extreme, obviously. My mom tried to get her to go see a therapist. She didn't want to. You can't make a 17-year-old go to therapy, really, if they don't want to. She would have these sort of big periods of also normalcy. There was kind of always a health thing, but she went to college. She became a nurse. Oh, boy. I'm so sorry, too. And is it your sister or is it Hope? Because what would be fun, too, to start paralleling, because your podcast is you're investigating this person, Hope, from Texas. Yeah.

all of these insane parallels are becoming obvious to you. Maybe you saw them before or as you're learning them, because I think too, my stereotype might've been,

Hope, at least, who we'll talk about as well, she's like an overachiever. She's popular. She's managing all of her younger siblings. It's not kind of like my generic stereotype. Oh, this person's a loser, wants attention, is so desperate for it. They had avenues for approval and attention outside of this. So your sister just in general was what? Part of the reason I was so drawn to the Hope E. Barr story is because of all those parallels. Right.

It's easy to look at someone who engages in these behaviors as an adult and think, oh, they must have had a traumatic childhood or they must have just been this really sort of desperate person because it is a desperate behavior. Yeah, yeah. With Megan, she was so well-liked. She had this huge group of friends, many of whom I was close with, a couple of whom I'm still in touch with. She was in the band. She was a really good athlete. She was one of the captains of our swim team. She's pretty.

Yeah, that makes it interesting.

Well, you do some light paralleling with addiction, and I think there is something in that, that they're in a dopamine deficit cycle where it works, but it's short-lived and we need it all the time and more extreme. And it makes it that very compulsive behavior, right? And that's why you sort of see it escalate over time. Okay, so how do you begin...

investigating hope. And let's talk about hope for a minute because the childhoods are similar and then even more interesting, them as adults and parents becomes really similar. Say her last name. Yeah, Hope Ybarra. It sounded every time like you were saying Capybara. Capybara.

The large rodent from South America. Yeah, actually, our transcription sometimes put Copybar in there and it was very funny. Yeah, I was like, well, I don't think that's what I said. So when I first met with the APSAC committee that I had mentioned, I met Detective Mike Weber, who's a frequent guest on the podcast. He's my collaborator on the book. And here was this guy who'd investigated all of these cases and just knew so much.

So I started just talking to him about his cases. And I think that was really around the time that I thought I was just a big podcast listener and just loved podcasts. And I was like, this would make a great true crime podcast. This would be a great way to get this visibility and information out there. And were you initially not intending to even involve your own story into it? No, I wasn't. The experience around publishing the novel was not great. I didn't enjoy getting involved.

Those letters from the lawyers. And it's never been something I've been super comfortable sharing at that point in my life. It felt extremely vulnerable to be sharing that. A betrayal of your sister. Yeah. I spent a lot of years trying to think, how can I talk about this to...

in such a way that will hurt her the least. Yes, of course. But still be true to my experience and still get across to people that what I'm saying is from a lived experience, right? I'm not just a novelist who's writing about this because I thought it was interesting. So I was still very much in that stage.

So story was covered a little bit in the media. When I read about it, I just was so stunned by the parallels. The things we've talked about, that they were both seemingly just very charming, very smart, very close families. Parents still married. No obvious signs of why this person became this person. And then the pattern of the abuse was so different.

similar. And I've come to learn that these similarities are really across the board. But I mean, Hopes was the first case I really did a deep dive in. And in particular, they had this detail of the both faked pregnancies with twin girls. What? They were wearing maternity clothes. They had names. They memorialized them afterwards. They both lost their twin pregnancies. At like the same six months in, which, you know, is a

devastating time to lose a pregnancy because it's past even, I think, the viability line. So it just was so similar. Hope had back stuff. My sister had back stuff, even sort of at the same ages. I mean, it was just stunning. Okay, so let's talk about Hope's early childhood because there there's all these insane similarities between your sister and Hope. They were both in the band and they even sort of look a little bit alike.

She had a back injury in high school, same timing, very mysterious. And then she was in a wheelchair. My sister was not in a wheelchair, but she did wear a very visible back brace for a long time. But your sister had surgeries, you said? She had a couple of surgeries, and then there was an issue with one of the surgeries. I know people listening are having all these questions, which is something had to have been wrong if a doctor performed a surgery, right? Or no? I'm going to defend the doctors a little bit for one second.

So a Lane Norton guess we had on talked about this very large scale study where they gave MRIs to people without back pain. 10,000 people, huge study. 40% of people have a herniated disc, but it doesn't hurt.

So the problem is if your back hurts, they give you an MRI 40% of the time, they're going to find a herniated disc. And obviously they're going to assume it's that. But there weirdly is seemingly no correlation between a herniated disc and pain with 40% of the population. So the back is tricky.

If you are having back pains and we start MRIing every single quadrant of your back, we're likely to see some stuff that we might believe is the issue in my most charitable defense of it. That's a really interesting piece of data. Back injuries are one of those things that can be really tricky to get to the bottom of.

I mean, I had a back injury when I was in college from tennis. It was a bulge disc or something. And then I went through a course of PT and it took forever. And then I later found out that I had another back injury from activities. I had like a crushed facet. So I've been through a couple of rounds of that. Super common. Put yourself in that mindset. If you didn't

want to get better and you just kept saying the pain is excruciating, I can't walk, they're going to escalate interventions because they're taking that report of pain seriously, which doctors should. It isn't really on the doctors. And I'm watching my father-in-law go through it right now, which he has been suffering insane back

pain. And I've seen it's affected his walking. And he's with the best person in LA. He flies here and they're trying their hardest. But there's a lot of guesses still. It's not the most obvious thing. And he's had some procedures and they were OK. But do they see something on the MRI for Chris's dad? They do. But the point I'm making is I guarantee if we MRI'd your back,

fully, we would find stuff. I just had the full body scan, the Pronovu. I have four different spine issues. I'm in no pain. But if I had a lot of pain and I went right now, they'd be like, well, I don't know that we got four things right here we could look at. Yeah. And if you tried this intervention and then that intervention and you're saying nothing's working. PT's not helping. Medication's not helping. Eventually, they may escalate to a surgery. And that is what happened. The conviction to go get the surgery knowing...

God, okay, here's... Do they know? Well, great. It's hard to know if they at all end up believing their own story or do we know for sure they don't actually ever believe their story? So that was one of my first questions for Dr. Mark Feldman. And I've subsequently talked to another wonderful colleague, Dr. Mary Sanders at Stanford, who's done a lot of research into perpetrators. And they do know. This behavior is very...

very distinct from people who are having delusions about their health or their child's health. That is a separate problem, frankly, much easier to fix. This is characterized by willful deception. So they understand the truth. Now, they

are very adept at compartmentalizing it, which I think is the explanation for why, and you were talking about how strange it is and how difficult it is to call someone on this behavior, even when it's very obvious and everyone around is like, this cannot be right. I always say about my sister, there's like a reality distortion field around her.

When you're talking to her, she's extremely bright. She is extremely articulate. She seems very credible. She was a nurse, so she's medically knowledgeable. When you're talking to her and you try to question her, she's very articulate.

She gives you an explanation. You can't outmaneuver her. You can't. In the moment, you're like, oh, and then later you're like, wait. You're getting gaslit. Exactly. And people use that term willy nilly these days, but it is true. Their boyfriend said he wasn't hungry. It's gaslighting her. It's like we can't use it anytime someone says you don't like her that you don't find. Yeah. It makes you doubt yourself so deeply because you just think, how was I believing this? And I thought I saw things that didn't turn out to be real.

Can I argue, too, there is an added layer where the stakes are inordinately high because if you're wrong, it's so cruel to be shaming someone who's actually suffering. I think that's the component that's baked in that makes it really hard to confront. Let alone someone who has a sick child.

Yes, or having lost, like, if you want to go, I don't think you were really pregnant. Oh my God. But you have 10% of you is like, what if she was? And not only has she lost children, I'm now accusing her of being a liar. You need 100% conviction to confront that. It's very hard, as it turns out, to prove that someone was never pregnant. How can that be hard?

Well, it's like non-falsifiable. How are you going to? Exactly. Because you don't have that person's medical records. And I mean, with my sister, it ended up unraveling because she had told different stories of how she lost the pregnancy to a bunch of people. As soon as we started talking to each other, we realized, OK, this is not adding up. And then it became this what I've now realized is a very common pattern and was very familiar with my sister of first, they just deny and they get very defensive. How could you accuse me of doing such a thing?

Starts there and then they minimize. So she would say, OK, well, I didn't lose the pregnancy just then. I lost it earlier and I was too embarrassed to tell you. And then once that unravels, they project. So then it was somehow her fiance's fault for I finally caught up with him years later to get his end of the story. And he had broken up with her because he'd seen her being inappropriate with him.

with his child and then she had come up with a positive pregnancy test the next day and so he never really believed it but he also was like well what if I'm wrong and I'm gonna be a dad it's just very very hard and if you want to believe the person if it's someone that you love you

It's also very hard to accept that, oh, this person has just put me through grief. I grieved these two nieces that I thought I had coming and I was grieving for her. This person has just exploited my emotions. That's not an easy thing to grapple with. It's much easier to just find any explanation, regardless of whether it makes sense and be like, and she's fine now and everything seems fine. And this was just a hard time and we're going to move along. Was she wearing like a fake bra?

A belly bump? It's not funny at all. But the idea that she's getting dressed in the morning and putting on like a costume.

It is a little funny because it's so absurd. I think it's okay to fight those moments and you need to when you're looking at these stories. I don't know. I mean, she looked pregnant, but bodies are bodies. One can look pregnant and not be pregnant. She probably ate more during that period. It's possible. Was it your story or is it hopes that one of the sisters was feeling the stomach and was certain she felt a kick? That was me. So you felt your sister's stomach? It was at my aunt's house and I was home for the holidays because this is when I was living in New York.

And she said, oh, put your hand on my stomach and feel the baby kick. And I felt something. That is the level that I believed it. Right? Yeah. And I don't know what that was.

was. I don't know. Also, how confident in her. I know. Her story. That's cocky. Feel it kick. Another friend of hers, when we were catching up about the whole saga, told me that at one point she had one of those like Dopplers because she was working at an OBGYN office. She was a nurse at an OBGYN office. So she had, so you can listen to the baby's heartbeat. And she told her friend, here, listen to the baby's heartbeat.

Oh, my. And she said that she didn't hear anything, but she was like, oh, well, I just must be using it wrong. It's this level. And that's why you don't question it. And she had fake ultrasounds that she was showing people. Obviously, I mean, she works at an OBGYN clinic. She has plenty of access to that kind of stuff. No one would ever go to an ultrasound with her. She would bring us pictures. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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Okay, so in Nobody Should Believe Me, your podcast, we're learning the story of Hope. And hers is really, really fascinating. So she was in a wheelchair for a while, but as luck had it, she was able to get out of it.

She made it a goal to be able to walk across the stage for graduation. And by God, she did it. So there was like a victory. And then she never was in the wheelchair again. Then she went away to college. I feel so stressed out.

This is like really. Can I ask really quick, what is the overlap with sociopathy? Because I got to say there's so much of this is like where everyone else is kind of a pawn there for your approval and adoration or sympathy. The line and no fear of consequences. All this stuff also feels like it would give you that diagnosis on the DSM. This total inability to own fault and apologize seems also very sociopathic. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

I've researched a little bit here and there, but I don't know a ton about what the criteria exactly is for being a sociopath. It is tricky or being a psychopath or what the difference is. But either munchausen behavior and certainly munchausen by proxy behavior, especially at the extreme end, entails a profound lack of empathy. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. If you are capable of that, what are you not capable of? We do know that there's a lot of crossover with the cluster B personality disorders. So narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic, borderline, and then high rates of severe depression. That'd be a great name for a punk band, just real quick. Cluster B. It's such a fuck you. It's so antisocial.

Okay, so hope, this is another fascinating aspect of it. It over-indexes with women and healthcare professionals, nurses, children of nurses, nurses.

In this case, Hope was in chemistry. Yes. But she lied and said she had a PhD. Tell us about that. She just had a fake PhD. So she said she had one. And when she was being investigated for the abuse of her younger daughter, that was one of the things that then Detective Mike Weber dug into. And it turned out that

I believe she had been actually fired from her job because they discovered that she was not, in fact, a Ph.D. And it was a Ph.D. level job. She was the lead chemist. And she was ordering pathogens from a clinic that they no longer used as a supplier, which raised this flag and interest in who had ordered them. And then they went through some surveillance tape and they discovered that it was Hope that had ordered them. She had these petri dishes of pathogens.

And then allegedly she contaminated some water for one of the coworkers who got sick and then rubbed a pathogen on the phone. The guy who had called out all this got this crazy rash on his face. This is where it crosses over into she's also kind of like poisoning Colleen. Yeah. This feels psychotic. Isn't there something in vague like the caring piece? That's the biggest part of it. But I mean, there is a very, very strong vindictive quality behind it.

because it's that behavior of like splitting people. You are either with them or you are against them. And if you are against them, then they can be extremely vindictive. The elements of mental illness or personality disorder are interesting to look at, but it's the behaviors and the harm to other people that we should be focused on. And if someone is capable of making their own child sick,

then they are not a safe person to be around for anyone. No, yeah. And it is mostly focused on that dynamic of being able to then be the heroic caretaker and that's the intrinsic emotional reward. But this is not a person who's playing by the normal rules of society. That's so far outside what most people would do that you have to sort of assume the worst. So she...

exhibited all this Munchausen disorder on her own. And then she has real pregnancy. She has fake pregnancy. She has three different kinds of cancer. Eight year long cancer journey. And so these two things can be happening simultaneously, right? The Munchausen disorder and the Munchausen by proxy. How soon does it begin with her children? For her oldest child, her son, which she had when she was in college and that's when she

met her husband and that's part of the reason they stayed together, according to Fabian, who he interviewed. There was no evidence of abuse with him. And that happens sometimes that there's one child that doesn't get any or that it sort of escalates as they have younger children. There was evidence of abuse with her middle child, her older daughter. I wonder if there's a gender thing because the boy's not her gender.

it's not as clean of a, oh, what do they call that? Like projection. Yeah. And that is a clear extension of your own ego. Yeah. It's your proxy, right? Yeah. And it's a little not your story because it's a boy. I think that's a really good insight. There is no long-term data on survivors available. I do have a colleague at Harvard who's working on a study, but certainly anecdotally and in the nonprofit that I founded, I have seen far more female identifying survivors. And so I

I do think that it's possible that there's a gendered aspect, not just to the perpetrator, but to the victim as well. Her middle child was born five weeks premature or something. She went into labor with one of her pregnancies early because she allegedly fell down the stairs. Because she allegedly fell down the stairs. And then she lost

the alleged twin pregnancy that was not real because of alleged treatment for her alleged cancer. Right. She said that the chemo had caused... But was she on chemo? No. None of that was real at all. No. She never got any treatment. She was in support groups. She had a blog. She had a following. There were people donating money to her. She said she lost her hearing because of the treatment. So she had like a cochlear implant. There's so many aspects to this. But one of them is...

just how fucking busy the person has to be. It's so much convincing someone to implant the cochlear implant and remembering where you're at in your lie and where you're at in your treatment schedule. Talk about a lot of balls in the air. It must be exhausting to be perpetrating

this many lies. - Takes a lot of research, takes a lot of time. We always kind of joke about there's always these binders of health information that they have about themselves. People who are suffering from actual chronic illnesses may need to have this kind of thing to keep track of while they don't want to, but it's a little bit of a red flag. - Yeah, my favorite Abraham Lincoln quote is, "No man's memory is so good that he can afford to lie." And that's so true. Lies are very hard to remember.

At this point, when she's on her second child, the amount of lies she's been telling, this is 10,000 lies. So what does she start doing to the daughter? With her daughter, she said that she had a diagnosis of cerebral palsy. Was it that or cystic fibrosis?

Cystic fibrosis was her youngest. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. So with her middle daughter, you know, she started this whole thing and she had, I think, some leg braces and this child was a gymnast. She did not have that diagnosis. And then the most extreme abuse was with her youngest daughter. And so she had just this absolute ubiquitous trajectory in these cases where she was born early and then had failure to thrive and then had the nasal gastric, which is the nose feeding tube, and then

escalated to the surgically implanted feeding tube through her stomach. And then she got this diagnosis of cystic fibrosis. And it was not just cystic fibrosis. It was the most terminal, the most serious. She was doing the charity walks and really making it such a huge part of her identity. Before we move on from the feeding tubes,

So some of this stuff does require a medical professional. Some of it, she can just be telling people she got results. But certainly the feeding tube, was it that she was restricting the calories of the baby so much that they were like, well, fuck it, we got to give this kid food? Well, so Dax, you have two kids and I know you're a few years away from the baby stage. But when you go to those early appointments, I have two very young kids. It's very fresh for me.

weigh the baby and how are they eating? And there can be plenty of issues, especially if you have a premature baby. All these babies are always premature. You know, they can often have some issues around feeding. And so you monitor that. Do you think she was getting her hands on Pitocin and self-inducing labor? I do, yeah. Wow! And of course, I can't confirm that in either case. I think it's the same with my sister because...

because it's too much of a coincidence that every one of these cases involves premature and increasingly premature babies. Yeah, because having a preemie. Well, and then they're going to have real issues. So it starts off this pattern of they're in the NICU, they're having developmental delays and feeding issues and et cetera, et cetera. And so that happened with both of my sister's children. Not very long before she had her daughter, she had a baby that was born at 24 weeks and either was a stillbirth or died.

And then my niece was also born at 24 weeks, which if you know, was like right on the viability line. And she survived. She survived. And we know for sure the one she lost at 24 weeks, that really happened. That really happened. We found a death record. And my sister posted pictures on social media of her in the hospital holding a baby.

Oh, my God. I mean, again, if you post on social media in that moment, I don't want to be judgmental of anyone that's coping that way. We don't want to say that. Again, that's just a very interesting choice, minimally. There are so many of these things where there's a context people could be doing them where there's a genuine need for support and people do get support that

way and people have the right to do that. But showing the baby on social media seems uniquely... Showing the baby, I think, crosses a line. Yeah. It's very performative. It is. And I really encourage people to not post pictures of their children in hospital settings. There are perpetrators that can take those photos and use them. There is a version of this behavior where it only plays out online. And so for many, many reasons, I think that is a very bad idea. And these perpetrators are

often post the most ghastly pictures of their children. My sister has taken her story of being, quote, "falsely accused" to the media. The media has published those pictures. I have seen innumerable pictures of my niece

As a tiny preemie baby, in my mind, that is contributing to the abuse. You would never post pictures of children if you discovered that someone had inappropriate pictures of their children. You would never publish those pictures. People don't think of it in that context. You're participating in the process that they're going to get their hit. Oh, hugely. I think those people are responsible for a big problem.

piece of the harm, right? Especially when you have these stories. The gratification. You're playing into that person's narrative. When you're presenting the parent as a victim of the system, you are part of the problem. Yeah. Yep. Okay, so cerebral palsy for the middle, for the youngest cystic fibrosis,

There's also a moment where she knows that anemia would be good in this situation. Yeah. One of the complicated things about these cases is that medical child abuse itself, either than in a couple of states, is not a crime. So it's not a crime to lie to doctors, even if you're harming your child by lying to them.

So you have to find a way to fit it into an injury to a child charge or child endangerment when you're on the criminal side. You know, the family court situation is different when we're talking about a criminal investigation. And so when Mike Webber was investigating Hope, he was looking for something where they could put it to

to a charge. So one of the things that came up was that she had had some very severe episodes of anemia. And there's a very chilling detail where I think it's called iron dexatride is the treatment that you give someone when they're having a very severe anemic episode. Children can have a really strong anaphylactic shock reaction. So Hope brought her youngest in. She was legitimately anemic. They tested her. She wasn't getting any nutrients. Oh, it's worse than that. Oh, no. Oh, my God. Sorry, Monica.

The doctor said, "Well, we have to do this test. We give them a little bit. There's a protocol." And so Hope said, "No, no, no. She's had it before. I'm in a hurry. Just give her the thing." And then sure enough, they gave her the test dose and she had a reaction. Obviously, it's just very chilling and demonstrates this person is not looking at the best interest of their child for any means.

Another ubiquitous thing in these cases that was present with both my niece and with the youngest in this case is that they have all of these health problems so they have a port put into their chest so that they don't have to have injections every time they need medication. Obviously, there are many children that legitimately need these and it's a good thing that it exists. However, extremely dangerous and really ups the chance that you could end up in a deadly situation in these cases. Prone to infection. They can be prone to infection, but if you are talking about an abuse situation, they give a perpetrator...

Immediate access. Exactly. Immediate access for poisoning, for tampering, and in this case, for taking blood out of her child. Draining blood so she would be anemic. Draining the blood of her child so she would be anemic, so she could get a treatment that would make her sicker, so she could get more... And have anaphylactic shock. So she could get more sympathy and attention. Oh my God. This is so disturbing. I mean, it is. I can't, like...

The only thing I'll say, though, is the part I can relate to is when you're an addict and either you can't get the thing you want or you can get the thing you want, but you're going to need such an extreme reason to.

in the amount of computations you make and the weird story or process you can come up, you're the most creative you've ever been in your life. This is just so detailed and thought out. You really get a sense of how much time the person's putting into, I'm going to do this and then I'll do that and I'll drain the blood. And then, I mean, it's just so complicated. That's a really good insight with

the mental gymnastics that go on. And certainly when perpetrators are caught out in a criminal context and when they're trying to justify their behavior, a thing that comes up so much is my child was really sick and I knew that if I didn't do this thing to get the doctor's attention that they wouldn't treat her the way they needed to be treated or they weren't taking it seriously enough. Or they'll have these other justifications of something you see all the time in these cases as celebrities visit. I don't know if you're a football fan, but

Richard Sherman, who's a very beloved Seahawk, visited my niece in the hospital and it was a big feel-good story. They'll say, well, look at all these things my kid is getting. They get to meet celebrities. They get to go on make-a-wish trips. It's good for them in some way. They find these unbelievably complex justifications for their behaviors. And there is that addiction parallel where what used to do the trick no longer does. And so it has to keep getting more and more extreme, which is why there's such a high instance of death in these cases.

Do the kids know? What we are finding, talking to survivors, is that most survivors do not understand that they've been abused until much later in their life. And there's a very strong parallel to child sex abuse survivors here because...

There is a very high instance of dissociation and even DID. It is usually when they have gotten some distance from the perpetrator, you know, the psychological manipulation in these cases is so profound. But the kid did know...

that her blood was being drained? No, she was very young. So she was not really able to report. And of course, she wouldn't know that her mother was doing that. They tell them a story. So what we know from survivors who've been able to tell us about their experiences is that their mother, and I say mother because it's 96% mothers,

gives them a whole sort of justification. Listen, this is the only thing you guys got. It's all us white dudes shooting up everything. It's like, thank God you guys do something that's fucking gnarly. No, but you're more on target than you know with that. I think that the reason that women perpetrate in this way is because people abuse power where they find power. One of the only place we give women unchecked control is over their children. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so true. What survivors report is that their mother will give them this explanation. They'll say, you are sick.

I'm the only one who understands what's wrong with you. And if you don't perform this illness, if you don't cough, if you don't corroborate the story, then they will not take you seriously at the doctor and you will die. So they really pull their children in, obviously not to blame them for that. They're unwitting collaborators.

Well, also, if the perpetrator is clever enough to be fooling medical professionals, all of their adult relatives, yeah, a six-year-old's probably going to be something they can manage. Well, and think how much influence you have over your children. You create their entire world. Yeah, I was going to say, you're telling them a lot of stuff that makes no sense intuitively. Like, if you get an actual cold and they come in, they're like, you got to drink electrolytes and I'm going to put this washcloth in your head and you got to sit here. It's like...

You don't know that any of that is real. They present it to you and that's the program to recovery. You don't question most things your parents tell you. And you sort of are, I think about sort of the cult-like elements of this relationship. And you're like, well, what could be a more perfect cult leader than a parent? Like you talk about the bite model, behavior, information. You already control all of those things as a parent. As an abuser, you can easily exploit that with that. Yeah. Yeah.

This is horrific. So now let's talk about one of the big problems and why nobody should believe me is a very worthwhile endeavor is that flagging this to authorities, helping shine a light on this or getting an investigation going or confronting this is really, really hard and it's not been very successful. So what's kind of the history of this and then how'd the process start in Hope's case?

Luckily for Hope's children, they live in Tarrant County, Texas, which is one of the only places that they are adept at

at finding this abuse, investigating it, and actually prosecuting and taking action on it. They have a little system that works really well. Number one, they have Cook Children's is the big children's hospital there, and they have a child abuse pediatrician. There's only about, I think, 250 child abuse pediatricians. This is a very rigorous subspecialty. Dr. Jamie Kaufman, they have an

excellent child abuse pediatrician there. So they have the expertise to detect it. They have some people in the CPS realm that are also very good and very knowledgeable there. And it just tends to be sort of an institutional knowledge. Someone works a case, gets really interested, does all the due diligence, and then everyone goes to that person for the next case. And then on the law enforcement side, you have Detective Mike Weber. Hope was one of his first cases. It was not his very first Munchausen case. It was the first one he got a conviction on. But he was working crimes against children for a long time. So he'd worked them

other types of child abuse cases and then got one of these cases and again, just sort of took it on and realized it was a problem and wanted to help and wanted to pursue this. And he's just an excellent law enforcement expert on how to investigate these cases. They're extremely complex. They involve these incredibly complicated, time-consuming, not insurance-reimbursed medical record reviews.

He took that on and now he works for the sheriff of Tarrant County and the sheriff of Tarrant County, we covered their story in the second season of the podcast, is actually the adoptive father of a survivor. No kidding. That happened in his family. And so Sheriff Bill Weyburn has really taken this on. So they have a little bit of institutional support and they are the only

only place in the country that has really a system that is functioning. So that's not to say that there aren't any other people that are doing good work on these cases. There certainly are. But they have all the pieces. Yeah, and mostly they fall apart. And unfortunately, my sister's case is an example of that, where there was extraordinarily strong evidence, I found, as I started digging into the public records. And for whatever reasons, which obviously this happens all the time with all kinds of crimes, there just wasn't the will to prosecute. So Hope

got first, what, signaled by someone at the hospital? Actually, this was another extremely strong parallel between our two cases and one of the reasons that I really was so eager to meet her family. So how Hope's case unraveled.

was that she also had this cancer journey. She had had two remissions. - Monica, with remission parties where she skydived into the backyard of her parents' house. - Yes. - So it's just like this ping-ponging back and forth from like apex wellness to apex fragility. - Yeah, exactly.

That's a great way to say it. They're living for the victory lap. It's all that praise of, oh, you're such a fighter and you're so strong and let's celebrate you. But like how greedy to want both ends of that spectrum. Like I want to be the most pitied and vulnerable and then the most admired and celebrated. Yeah, so she had these two remissions and remission parties and then she...

called her family together and I talked to both of her siblings. I was close with their siblings, they were lovely. Her sister was pregnant at the time and she like flew into town and again, maximum dramatic effect. And she told them that the cancer was back and this time she wasn't gonna survive. She couldn't fight anymore.

Told her parents she was dying. She went with her mother to pick out her coffin and choose where she would be buried. Talk about needing to up the high. Not even going to fight it this time. So this is a declaration that I'm dying. Right. They did a local news piece on her where she was saying, oh, I just want to die at home and we might be losing our house and people donated money. And so it was this very extreme thing. So then Hope goes to the hospital and she is in palliative care.

And the doctor who is treating her there calls her mother, Susan, and says, "I can't find any information about the doctors treating Hope. Can you tell me what her main doctor who's been treating her cancer's name is?" They had been living with them because they'd been taking care of her. So Susan starts looking around for prescription bottles and that kind of thing. Can't find anything. So Susan calls Fabian, her husband.

and says, "Hey, can I have the password to your insurance so I can look up this information?" He says, "Yeah, sure, sure, sure." She looks up, cannot find any evidence that Hope has ever been treated for cancer. So they tell the doctor that, and her and her husband go to the hospital. They confront Hope.

And Hope, at that point, cornered. Can't really keep it up. So Hope goes to the psych unit and then she is diagnosed. Very unusual, actually, to get an official diagnosis on this kind of thing. Because people usually don't seek treatment. So unless you're really caught, unlikely that you're going to get an official diagnosis. But she is diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome. And then...

her family starts wondering, well, my God, like her children have been sick. She had this pregnancy. You really go in that spiral of if this isn't real, what else isn't real? Yeah, you're interviewing the family. And I imagine you had the similar thing, which is like once you start entertaining the idea that this is what's going on, you're now going through your entire history with the person. And now all these things, I imagine, too, it's like when you find out you've been cheated on, you're like,

Oh, that trip. Oh, that phone call. The betrayal trauma that's part of it is just so disorienting. They obviously become very concerned about her daughter, who is also allegedly terminal and has been having lots of ER visits, health crises. So I believe Susan flagged to one of the children's doctors, listen, we've had this whole thing about hope's answer. And that's when they started looking. And then they contact presumably the detective in Child Protective Services. Yeah, so it sort of went up

the chain. My mother had a similar thing where she went and spoke to one of my nephew's doctors about our concerns. Susan, unfortunately, had passed a couple of years before I did this project. But I have a very special place in my heart for her and for that whole family because it is very, very hard to admit that your child is engaged in this behavior. You have to. By the way, my wife and I argue about this all the time. She's like, what if you found out one of our daughters was a serial killer? Would you call the police? I'm like, never.

I would take her to an island with just the two of us and I would live out our lives there. I would remove her from society so she couldn't kill anyone. But no, I wouldn't. The only event I could is if she was harming then my grandchildren. Your grandkids. Yeah. Which is something maybe terrible about something, but I don't know. This is the one example where I think I'd be willing to turn my child and would be to protect her other children. And that's the right call. And a lot of families don't do that. Compassion around.

Fucking turning your kids into law enforcement. Horrific. And I have not entertained in my own head the serial killer question. You and your husband should have that debate. I'm going to guess right now your husband's going to go, no, I'll never turn him in for anything. I love the private island idea. That seems maybe not economically feasible. Well, exactly. It's a great idea. If you can swing it. Most people can't do that. I didn't say I was going to buy the island. I think I'm just going to find an island we can get marooned on. There's probably going to be people there and she's probably going to kill them. Or you might be next and then who's going to keep her there? It's a lot of logistical questions. Yeah, yeah.

I know and I'll miss the other daughter. You have to. When they are hurting so many people, it's easier when we do think about them hurting kids. Like in general, the idea of kids being hurt, I think we can all get sort of quickly on the page that that's unacceptable. You would think, but

What I have found in the way that people either within that person's community or the way the media treats these cases is the idea of specifically a mother harming their own children is so aberrant to people that they will reach for any other explanation, no matter how conspiratorial they have to get. They will find some other explanation for what they are seeing than that person is harming their child.

It's in the top tier of taboos for sure. 100%. Yeah, it's up there with the ones we discovered yesterday. Pedophilia. They're all kid related. That's why. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare.

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So once everyone was mobilized, what was the criminal proceeding? Was it easy for them to get a conviction? In Hope's case, she took a plea deal. In part, that may have been because she didn't have...

a lot of access to hire an attorney. Her family was not going to pay for an attorney for her. But impossible to know why she made that choice. But she got 10 years. It would also save her the embarrassment of having to hear all of it out loud in front of a jury. I also wonder how much these people also get off on a big dramatic court battle. I think that can also be part of it, right? It's another chance to possibly be the victim. That's not the path Hope took in this case. That's curious. I would love to ask one of them because the other...

ways they're getting attention, either by being a victor over an illness or pitied for having an illness. Those are all very positive things.

Whereas to be the perpetrator of a crime would be very negative attention. You would think except that, unfortunately, the media climate right now, where you have the big story that's been in New York Magazine and NBC News with Mike Hicks and Boggs, Do No Harm series is this medical kidnapping narrative. Heavy scare quotes. What's that? So medical kidnapping is a conspiracy theory. And it's...

It is the idea that you as an innocent parent could just take your child to the doctor with an illness or an injury and that they're accusing all of these parents of abuse and snatching their children away, kidnapping their children. I get why it's appealing because I've had that fear. It crosses your mind. I go through a whole weird spiral every time I have to take my kids to the doctor for something because I'm like, what if they think I'm faking it? What if I am exaggerating? You know what

There is a visceral fear. Now, the thing is, you know, has no parent in the history of the world ever been falsely accused of this? Of course not. Everything happens. But the cases that have been covered in the media, one of them was my sister. My Kixenbog covered my sister. Oh, and she was seen as one of these innocents? As a falsely accused parent. And they absolutely excoriated the doctor who turned her in, who I very strongly believe saved my niece's life. It's just so...

so unethical and they make the doctors the villains. So they're de-incentivized to flag this stuff. To report it. And now with the Kowalski case, you know, the Kowalski family, which was featured in that Netflix film, Take Care of Maya, they were very much presented as innocent. And then this poor mother died by suicide during this investigation and they won a $261 million verdict in Florida. Now that case is going to appeals, but if that verdict stands,

That demolishes legal protections for mandated reporters because the deal that doctors are supposed to have in other mandated reporters is that if you have a good faith suspicion of child abuse, then you report that and you are going to be protected. In fact, it is a federal crime for you not to report. And there have been cases where hospitals have been sued for not reporting and the child went and died.

Yeah. So you can't have a slander case brought against you, basically. Right. And you can't, you know, and so now doctors are in a position, particularly child abuse pediatricians who've gotten so much flack, where if they do their job, they are then subject to not only legal action, but absolute reputational ruin, which is what happened to the doctor in the Meyer Kowalski case, Dr. Sally Smith, who we had on the show. This reminds me of Dr. Death. Did you listen to Dr. Death? It's like

The reason Baylor basically didn't out him and put in his file what an incompetent surgeon he is, is that lost wages for a spinal column surgeon over the course of the next 30 years is like a $40 million risk for them. And you're like, fuck me, that's what's driving this? Right. Not in the Kowalski case, but in many cases, I mean, hospitals...

can be complicit in this. They do cover up sometimes for things where they bury things and they don't report things when they should. There's a case in Colorado, the Olivia Gantt case was another Munchausen case, six-year-old girl, I believe, and the hospital released her to her mother, taking her to home hospice care when they suspected that she wasn't really sick and she died. And the grandparents eventually sued the hospital and settled out of court because they were

they didn't report. I don't know what doctors are supposed to do now because they can get sued for both. Again, what sucks for them is like the whole problem's on their plate. They're not perpetuating any of this and somehow they're getting sued on both sides of it. Fuck, I don't know the Kowalski thing. Should I watch that doc? I was like, I don't think I can watch it. It's tough, right? Because we do have a history in this country of both a satanic moral panic, which was bullshit, and we had a sexual child abuse moral panic in the 80s where a lot of people went to jail that didn't do anything. So,

It's a murky and complex landscape. Absolutely. And the medical kidnapping panic that we're in the midst of right now. And sometimes people will say that to me, right? You're trying to start, you, Andrea, are trying to start a moral panic about Munchausen by proxy. And they're like, this is just like the satanic panic. People will say that to me.

Sorry, I just brought up a trigger word. No, no, no. It's actually such a good analogy because I think what we are going through with medical kidnapping is analogous to the satanic panic. And I think people took the wrong lesson. That also files nicely into the elite narrative that the elite is trying to, and doctors are implicitly elite. And the state, it's about parents' rights and the state have the right to intervene.

in these situations. Make your kid trans. Exactly. And it's the same people. That is where it's getting its political momentum. Yeah, there's this insane interest right now on the right with child trafficking, which is complete bullshit. The amount that they think it's happening and who's doing it, no. The data does not bear out that it is happening to the degree that it's happening. But I think with the satanic panic, the way I interpret that series of events, the

This is when we were accusing child care workers of taking children into underground tunnels and abusing them as part of a satanic ritual. Wild, right? But this was also the time culturally where we were grappling with the fact that child sex abuse is way more common than what we believed. It just isn't.

is fathers, uncles, baseball coaches, people who are close to those children. Yeah, here's where the males are back on the scene. Thank God, about time. A little disproportionately. And I think that people believed the satanic thing because it was easier to believe that

And that's an easier problem to solve. Then if you get rid of satanic childcare workers, the problem is solved. Whereas if you have to recognize that this is fathers and uncles, it's not so easily solved. So I think right now we may be in a moment of reckoning with Munchausen by proxy where

It's much easier to say, oh, this is bad doctors. This is an institutional problem. This is an institutional problem. And the solution is to fire all these child abuse pediatricians rather than reckon with the fact that it's mothers who are doing it. Well, also, if I'm to believe the data in Body Keeps the Score, which I'm inclined to do, I'm going to mess these numbers up. But these are vaguely what it was. It was like 50%.

50% of all kids will experience physical abuse in a house that requires a trip to the hospital. 40% or 30% of all couples have physical violence in the relationship. I think what's scarier and crazier is that

It's a very violent fucking world we live in, and a lot of us experience violence, and that's almost too much to acknowledge. Yeah. And sure enough, the medical kidnapping panic, there have been some Munchausen by proxy cases in there. There's also a lot of like abusive head trauma cases and non accidental injuries.

And when you read the police reports of how these went down, you think this is not a false accusation. This is a person who wasn't held accountable for what they did. And I think, yeah, those statistics line up with my research on just the prevalence of child abuse. Unfortunately, it's extremely common. Not only did we not used to recognize that it happened in terms of physical abuse, we didn't used to see that as a problem. That was only after I

It's more like where the line is.

Not a small number of people who would like to go back to that. Yeah, I think for those people, they were really just trying to find the line between like a good old fashioned character building ass whooping and then like child abuse. Too much. This is a very arbitrary line. Where is that line? You're already playing in a very murky... Physical discipline used to just be the norm, right? Yes. And then when does it transfer into abuse is very arbitrary and nebulous. Yeah. What do you think...

This is impossible to know. And this is, by the way, what plagues the sociopathy studies, too, is that people don't seek help for this. So, A, what is the current estimation and what is the suspicion of what it really is? Like, how many people are currently experiencing Munchausen by proxy? The best and most recent study I can point to is one out of Children's Hospital in Seattle, actually. And I'm going to be paraphrasing this. Go Dawgs.

And one of the authors of the study was Dr. Carol Jenny, who is a legendary child abuse pediatrician. She's the author of the book on medical child abuse. She also happened to be the doctor who evaluated my sister's case. So lots of interesting crossover there. So this study examined, again, I was talking about the ubiquity of these G-tubes, the surgically implanted feeding tubes. And so they did a study on those patients and then how many of those patients were confirmed cases of Munchausen by proxy. And then they held that up to the number of

abusive head trauma cases, which abusive head trauma is the most common form of physical child abuse. They found that the instance was, I believe, one third or one half. So pretty significant. That's one study. That's one piece of data. And every expert I've spoken to says we are not in a climate of overdiagnosis. This is underdiagnosed. And I have met only one survivor who was permanently separated from their child.

their abuser. The rest, there was attempts at interventions. Maybe they were removed for a little while after, you know, in one case, there was a child death in the family or something like that. But even the ones who I know who lost siblings to this abuse were never separated and their parents were never held accountable. So I think

It's way more common than what we know. Also, though, just to be very charitable to everyone that is working in this space, the option isn't great. So the incentive to keep them with their family is quite high because the alternative is foster care. So it's like we have a suspicion of some abuse, but we also know foster care...

we're going to quadruple your incident rate of going to prison. We know what the product of foster care is. So it's like the option is so fucking terrible that you're heavily incentivized to keep them with their parents. You're right. I never want people to think that I don't take removing a child from their parents seriously. With these cases, when you've reached the point where it's being investigated, it is often a life or death situation.

I guess I point that out because often we want solutions to a specific avenue of the problem. But really, you have to keep zooming out and go, what piece of what system is this? And why is it so hard? Well, one of the reasons would be this. I've been saying on here forever, foster care should be like going to Hogwarts.

It should be like the golden ticket for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? It should be the greatest place, the most well-funded place, the best experts in the world. If you already have been fucked and you've got to end up in foster care, let's make this like the greatest on planet Earth. And if you start with that piece, then this other piece starts getting perhaps a lot easier for the rest of the people. You're so right. There are many of these cases I look at. There are cases where there are family members who would

willingly take that child in. And then, okay, you have a good option. That seems like a much easier choice. Or you have a father who's protective, who's trying to get the kids out of that situation and recognize what's going on. Those cases are a lot more straightforward. That's certainly not every case. There was another case in Florida, the Jennifer Bush case, where it was very severe, well-documented. Her mother was convicted. She was taken out of her mother's home, put in foster care, had horrific experiences. And then when she came of age, she reunited with

her mother and now she vocally denies being a victim of this abuse because it was an out of the frying pan into the fire situation. So I don't want to understate how complicated these systems are. And it's at this intersection of child welfare system, the criminal justice system and the medical system. I mean, some of the most fraught institutions in the country, you could not possibly have a more complicated morass of things going on.

Yeah, you need to fix all four of these domains and they've been pretty impervious to change thus far. Yeah, it's really complicated. So were you able to talk to our hopes children adults now? They are. They did not want to be interviewed and I am very respectful of that. I interviewed their dad and I interviewed a bunch of other family members. And so your sister, she cut off ties with you and the whole family 14 years ago. After your mom passed.

confronted her. After my nephew was born, and we had a lot of experience already with some of these behaviors, we were very concerned when he was born early and then very ill and having all these escalating interventions. And my parents went to speak to our family doctor who'd known all of us for a long time, and she was the one who gave them that terminology, Munchausen by proxy. And...

I was living with my parents at the time. I just moved back from New York to my late 20s. And they sat me down and told me that. That was kind of this day where my life just split in two. That's a before and after for me because I was like, oh, that makes all this terrible feeling that we've been having make sense. And if we confront her on this...

she'll cut us off. She'll never speak to us again. And that is what happened. So my mother called, I believe, the gastroenterologist who was treating my nephew and said, we've been having these concerns and we've spoken to our family doctor and this is what she said. And he asked her, do you think it's time for

for an intervention. And she was picturing some like, we all sit down together and talk it out. - This is how your behavior affects me. - And everyone sort of circles the wagons. And that was not what he meant. And we got a call not much later that there'd been an emergency removal. And my brother-in-law called us hysterical. They've come, they've taken the baby.

And there was an investigation, just a DCF investigation, not a criminal investigation. It lasted several months and then they just opted not to do anything. So we thought, well, that's great. You guys just blew up our family because the DCF revealed that my mother had made that call. Her name was in the paperwork. So then we were enemy number one. Did you have some hope, though, that her being investigated would be aborted?

big enough of a warning for her to stop doing it in the future? I was so naive. Going into that, I really thought, okay, they're going to do something. And then I felt that way the second time too, because the police were involved and I knew there was video evidence and there was all of this stuff. And I was like, okay, they've got her. And I sort of then felt very foolish for ever getting my hopes up again after the first time. But we thought like the cavalry's here and someone's going to protect

this baby. And there was this period where after the investigation was closed, her husband made some other discoveries of deception and kind of got back in touch with us. And there was this whole back and forth for a minute where we're like, oh, my God, OK, he sees it with his own eyes. He's going to come to his senses. Then we'll be able to intervene and help her get help. And that's very much the context I was seeing it in at the time. And then what eventually happened was they asked my father to help them sue Children's Hospital for falsely accusing them. He declined to do that. And so then they said, oh, you can't see your grandchild.

Oh, my God. They have their kids. Yeah, and my sister is now, I believe, doing medical forensics work, and she is helping defend other people who are being investigated for this abuse. So she's become a local expert herself. This is really tough. Wow.

It's not where I thought my life would end up. Yeah. I have to tell you. You must feel some obligation to like kidnap your nieces and nephews. It's a strong compulsion. I'm not recommending it.

I'm not going to. Nobody call the authorities. You know, when I went into the project, I didn't think I would talk about my story at all. And then I thought, I'll talk about it a little bit. I did in the first season. And then in the second season, after I had done a FOIA request, Freedom of Information Act request, into my sister's case, into the second case, because there was a police investigation, so that's more public records you can get. Once I found out those details about what had happened to my niece and the extent of the evidence against her and the fact that the prosecutor had not acted, I could not live without

with that information being just mine. Yeah, you wanted to sound the alarm. Yeah, and so I did. I named her. Her name is Megan Carter. She's been in the press. And I shared what I knew because as I've been researching these other cases, one of the last resorts

is to sound that alarm and let the people who are still allowed to be in that child's life know that this is what's happened, this is the history, so that they can protect those children. And the more eyes on those children, the better. And what we have found is that either people reporting or any investigation, that kind of thing,

even if it's not ultimately successful with a conviction or separation or where the child's safe, it still slows things down and it slows down the pattern. I have no idea how my niece and nephew will react to all of this when they come of age. I'm sure they've been told many things about me. But it was very important for me to let them know that I

saw what was happening and that a lot of people had tried to intervene and a lot of people had taken big risks because when I talk to survivors when they are going through their medical records, when they're going through their past history and they're having to grapple with the fact that their parent did this to them and then

When they find that other people really tried to help them, that means a lot to them. Well, again, it's counter evidence to this earth shattering worldview, which is I can't trust anyone. It is helpful to have some data to say, no, no, actually, there were people I could trust. It just wasn't this person. Right. Are we allowed to talk about Gypsy Rose? Because I'm curious, her post discovery, it seems to have had some long lasting effects. And I wonder if there's any kind of predictable pattern there.

Well, Gypsy Rose went to jail. She did. Yes, she was in prison for seven years. And then she got out and she married a very old man. No. Did I imagine that? I mean, there's a lot of tabloid behavior around Gypsy Rose. So I am always a little careful to talk about her. I think it was you that told me not to talk about her in the past. I'm happy to share my thoughts. So obviously, you know, Gypsy's story has been covered more than any other survivor story. I watched both things and now I'm forgetting. Did she kill her mother? She conspired with

A boyfriend that she met online to murder her mother. Okay, great. Not great, but now I remember. She did go to prison. She was in prison for seven years and she just got out last fall. Her story itself has been covered ad nauseum. She did a Lifetime series, partly from prison and partly when she got out. And she has been in the tabloids a lot. She's sort of an end of one because there's no one else who's gone on this trajectory. I think people, whenever they're looking at anything about Gypsy Rose, they need to understand how psychologically intense Gypsy Rose is.

this trajectory is of going from being in this horrific abuse situation to prison to being suddenly and immediately famous. I mean, all the things. I'm really anxious. Yeah, you don't want to contribute to, yes, that's fair. Yeah, and I,

I haven't covered the case at all on the podcast just because it's been covered so thoroughly elsewhere. And so all I really can say is I really wish her the best. Her father and her stepmother seem lovely. I know some people who've met them. Someone I'm really close with, Bjorker, was the expert in the Lifetime series. And she has a couple times posted about the nonprofit that I founded, Munchausen Support, which was very appreciated. People are...

acting insane about her. Like there's been all of this thing about like, oh, was she really a victim? That's not up for discussion. Yes, she was. There's no actual legitimate questions about that. And yeah, I mean, is it complicated that she also committed a murder? Yes. And I think most of us can find a lot of empathy for why she felt like that was her only option. I didn't feel bad at all when that was the outcome. That's self-defense. I agree with you. And I think what we should feel bad about is the fact that

that was the only option she felt she had, that she was ever in that situation. It's never a win if someone has to commit murder and live with having murdered. Now on top of it, your mother. In particular, their parents. Children who commit patricide, I mean, it's a horrible trauma. I think Gypsy was incredibly traumatized by having been involved in her mother's murder. I really hope she can find a life outside of the public eye for a while. I think that's probably unlikely because I don't know what her other options for...

Employment are at this point. It's a real conundrum. Are they going to make a reality show about her? There's all this. They are, right? She has the second sort of piece of the lifetime. Yeah, I'm never judgmental of how people end up carrying on with their trauma. If you're a sexual abuse survivor and you strip and that's empowering, I'm not to say how anyone should be dealing with their trauma. There was no really old boyfriend in the mix? There's a prison boyfriend. Oh, okay. There was not a big age. Okay, okay. I feel like

I did think she was like married and then got divorced. Yeah, she married her boyfriend in prison. Oh, okay. And then they got divorced shortly after. Probably for the best. I don't know that a relationship that starts in prison... This seems like a strange dynamic to me. Not to be too judgmental. Well, you marry your co-workers. It's very common. Well, the podcast is tremendous. I recommend people check it out. It's very, very well done. You've won lots of awards. Congratulations. You know, I wonder if there's...

some added element in all these stories of embarrassment in the same way that people don't report being conned because when you start listing it, you know, we're now 20 years out from when the behavior started or 35 years out in a rapid fire list. It's fucking insane.

There's these patterns. And once you're aware of them, then you go, oh my God, yeah, it's insane. So I wonder if there's some element of embarrassment associated with it that you were compliant in it for so long. You do. You feel ashamed. You feel stupid. You know, with my sister, with the fake pregnancy, you're like, okay, so that happened. And then we acknowledged it happened and we just moved right along. It's like, how did we do that? You can't make sense of the whole when you're

in it. It's one of these phenomena that once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And that's one of my big hopes with the podcast is that as people listen to more than one case, I'm glad that the Gypsy Rose Planchard case got us talking about it. Her being in the public eye will open the door for more conversation about it. I think that's a very big positive. But when you are looking at more than one case...

you see how strong the pattern is and you see how it's the same things. It's the same types of diseases that show up. It's the same types of the pattern of abuse is so strong. The traits of the abuser are so similar. And I think that is what will help, you know, I will never stop asking myself and my parents, my God, will never stop asking themselves.

What if we had known sooner? Yeah, intervene before. And that's not going to be an option for my family. But I hope for other families that if they see this behavior way before the person has children, that an intervention could be possible there. Oh, this was the last question I actually wanted to ask. Is there any treatment that bears any results for people who...

get outed and then actually explore? A couple of my committee colleagues, Brenda Bursch and Dr. Mary Sanders from Stanford, who I mentioned, they do have a treatment model. They have had some success with perpetrators. It is going to be a very, very, very small percentage of perpetrators who are able to be treated because the very first step in what they call the accepts model, it's sort of similar in some ways to like a 12-step program. So the first step is

full accountability for their actions with the details, a full accounting of their behavior. I thought my four-step was bad. I can't imagine making that four-step. Most perpetrators are never going to do that, regardless of whether they're sitting in prison. Hope your bar didn't do that. I interviewed her. She was not accountable for actions. She made excuses. She was still lying about being deaf. Most perpetrators will never get there. And I absolutely commend a perpetrator that is able to do that.

to go through that. It's much better for their children if they can have some kind of accounting from that person and ability to possibly have some kind of relationship with that person, obviously on their terms, but anybody who loses their relationship with their parent, that's going to be a trauma in and of itself.

What could be possible in the future is if we caught these behaviors much earlier. I think the further you go down the line, once you've committed one of these really grievous things like bleeding a child, starving a child, suffocating a child, which is honestly most of the places where people get caught, right? They don't get caught until they do something pretty extreme. That's much harder to come back from once you cross that kind of Rubicon.

I could see where someone would be tempted to have the erroneous thought, well, they won't kill the child because that's the source of all of the pity. But no, because that's the last big hit. A grieving parent of a dead child is like the number one. It's also an accident. Right.

Right. So sometimes it's that they just pushed it too far and they miscalculated. And I think there are cases like that for sure. And then there are other cases where I think it was 100 percent intentional. And the point was then to become the face of the foundation that supports that disease. Then their identity becomes about being the parent of a dead child. Yeah, because even Hope's last round of cancer saying, I'm going to die of this, it's almost like she needed to elevate it to that.

You can see where the ultimate fantasy for these people would be to be at their own funeral. That's their speedball. The notion that they would be sitting watching everyone grieve them. Right. And I think even when it's an abuse situation, one of the first introductions for most people to this term at all was in The Sixth Sense. Oh, my God. Yes. The throw up girl. I was so scared of Misha Barton. Yeah.

You hated that. I hated that. I hated her so much. I was so scared of it. I was like, what's happening? And my mom told me and then I got so scared. I think they go and visit and her mother's sitting at her funeral. The thing about that portrayal that felt so emotionally apt to me, and I don't know that this was necessarily intentional, but sorry for a spoiler for a movie that's like 30 years old, that he sees dead people and then the person who sees it. So it's like the...

the idea that only one person can see it no one else in that scenario understands what's happening that is such a good description of i feel like something that i've talked to other family members and survivors about is like you feel like you're in a horror movie and you're the only one who knows you're in a horror movie everyone else thinks you're in like a hallmark movie you're still main character energy but not in the movie you want to be no definitely not i just got chills the movie's

so good. I should rewatch. I mean, it was so good. The twist. I know. I feel like it's the best of all his twists and I feel like he really leaned on that formula for a while. I think he got a little high on that formula, but that movie, wow. I hated her. I would tie it with Usual Suspects.

Kaiser Sose. Also good. Yeah, good twist. There's a couple of big old left turns. Well, Andrea, this was awesome. I hate to say fascinating, but it is fascinating. I don't know if that's the right adjective. Well, it's just fascinating because we don't know much about it. Again, it's the most taboo notion. I mean, if we weren't curious about it, then people wouldn't learn about it. The fascination is what's going to help us.

get people to recognize that it's a real thing. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about munchausen, just doing it on yourself. I mean, there are versions of it that are much more and much less destructive, right? Like not everything is a good bajillion dollar cancer hoax. Almost every kid wants crutches. I do like anchoring it in those kind of things because I think then we can sort of start to understand the behavior. You love to take a sick date. You're like, Mom, I'm just like a little light

more lingering, you know? She keeps checking on you. Yeah, and it's like, you get that care, you get a break from life, people circle around you. When you get a cast, like, oh, you get so much attention. Like, I was so bummed I never broke anything when I was a kid. I never got to have my cast moment, you know? Or like, you get that, you get that attention. People can relate to that. And it's just like, if you lean too hard on that, you know, and that became your coping mechanism, or if that was the only way you felt like you could get your parents' attention or other people's attention.

I keep saying it's the last question, but you reminded me of a couple I had. One last question is, is there any predictable cause for this? Not that they know of. A lot of people, I think when people grow up to be perpetrators of horrific crimes,

Crimes would really like to have a neat narrative where they can tie it back to some child abuse. And of course, that is also common. We know about ACEs scores and how you are going to be more likely to perpetrate crimes if you suffer from child abuse. But there is no known link. Some of the cases were kids who had child abuse in their past and some, like my sister and Hope Ybarra, no evidence of that, no whisper of that even. It's like sociopathy. They're looking to find origins and they can't. It's more comforting if you can find an origin because then you think, oh, we can prevent this. My child won't grow up and do this.

I have no business having this opinion. I don't work in either of these fields. But to me, sociopathy feels very structural. I just feel like that one you're really born with. It's so unique and interesting. And the ones that do explore it, it's from the beginning of their memories are that way. Whereas the nurture part. Yeah, the empathy piece, having grown up with my sister and sort of being able to trace and talking to my parents about their earliest memories of her doing things like this. It does seem to be sort of a

wiring thing, at least to an extent. Yeah. Okay. Well, fascinating. Thank you so much. I hope everyone checks out the podcast. Nobody should believe me. Andrea, so fun having you. Yes. Keep at it. Thank you guys so much for having me. Our pleasure. Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Miss Monica.

Are you wearing a Harley Davidson shirt? It's vintage. Oh my God. Yeah, I got it in New York at a vintage store. I got it in Milwaukee. Well, originally it was in Milwaukee. Okay, now when we were Zooming during my holiday, I couldn't tell that you were tan now in person. Yeah. Very tan. And much less tan. Really? Oh my God. When we got back from Palm Springs, I was dark.

Robbie, can I go? My levels don't sound the way I like them normally. Maybe that's better. What do you want louder? Okay. Sounded a little different. Well, we haven't been in here in a minute. We haven't. Maybe that's right. Oh, are we just going to deal with it? I think we're going to have to. It's really loud. It is loud, but it is fortuitous things to come. This is the filming space being built below us.

So that we can do video on fact checks. That's true. So this is going to be an annoying fact check to listen to. Maybe we'll keep it pretty quick. Unless you enjoy the sounds of construction, which I don't mind. Okay. Now, what do you think here, Monica? We're partway through. Yeah, here we are. There is a door on the bathroom. I mentally prepped before I came here today. Okay. And was it sufficient? My mental prep? Yeah. Yeah, it's fine.

You know what's interesting is I can't even tell what it was. What? I mean, I know that's not what it looked like, but also I guess that chair was over in front of the door. Yeah. And then the walkway was there. But it almost feels like it's different distance than it was. You said it still looks shitty. Yeah, I did. I said, actually, it's fine because it still looks shitty. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think it's far from being done and looking nice. No, but why don't we do it like this? No, no, no, no. Oh, my God. All right, whatever. No, no, no, no.

It can be pretty. Yeah. They're not going to do that much. Like all they're going to do is fill in. They're going to fix all the drywall and then paint it. Paint it. And you'd definitely be able to shut the door and go pootie in there. It's just kind of nice. Yeah. It's just a good practice for me. To accept change.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, give up some control. That's fine. It's good. It's a good practice. That's a good topic to bring up. Oh, let's do it. Yeah. Lovely holiday. I guess it's a mix for me. On one hand, I'll get home and I'll go like, oh, I love home. I love my bed. I love everything.

But I think because we were gone for so long, two and a half weeks, I got home and I had that, oh, my God, there's so much stuff that needs to be done. Yes. So much stuff I haven't been keeping my eye on. This project up here. Like, I got home and I pulled in the driveway and I was like, oh, I got to go check in and make sure everything is and the doors are coming on time and all that stuff. Yeah. And I was like, I don't, I'm just going to, I'm just going to ignore. Yeah, you might want to tell them to take lunch now that we'll be out of here in an hour.

Even I can't defend that. That was really... You have to come to it on your own time, but you do often meet me. Anyways. Yeah. So you were feeling overwhelmed. I was feeling overwhelmed yesterday, too. You are. I've been feeling overwhelmed. Oh, just a general baseline overwhelmed feeling? Yeah. What do you think it's about? I have some guesses, but I don't know. I've just had a loss of sleep. That was on minis lately.

On minis? New York Times minis. Oh. Minis crosswords. And they were doing loss of sleep clues? That was one of the answers. Was loss of sleep. Yeah. Okay. Mine is, I'm reminded how much comfort I get out of my militaristic program and all my habits and my rituals. Yeah.

And I start feeling a little unmoored after. Yeah. So I also was like, okay, wake up. You do the whole gym thing. You got to get back to seven exercises and get the protein. You got to start hitting the protein again. You know, just climb back up on the hill. Do all the things that make you feel good. Resume writing. I had a little break where I hadn't written since really I went to Idaho.

And now it's time to get back, Dax. It's time to go. But sometimes it's good to take breaks. Yeah. It reminds me that I'm never happy in either place. Either I want a big break and then I'm on a break and I'm like, I gotta get back to my routine. I'm underselling what a great trip it was. That's misleading. But you don't feel like you had a break?

Yeah, I definitely had a break from this, but I was also recognizing how much say-so I have in my own life when I'm in my normal routine.

You know, like I really do get to pick many hours of my day. I decide what I want to do, which is such a nice freedom. Yeah. And traveling with eight people. I'm just one of eight people. Yeah. Oh, you know, everyone's going to vote on where to eat. Everyone's going to vote on where to walk to, which things to sightsee. The whole thing. Yeah. It was a good dose of compromise for me. But after 21 days of it, I was also excited to go like, oh, I'm going to do whatever I want between noon and two. What are you going to do?

Well, we got home. We also have house guests. Oh, who's in town? Ange and Rory and their baby. Oh, cute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, she's so sweet looking, Monica. You should meet her. I'll meet her. I met a baby yesterday. I met baby Cleo. Oh, you did? Yes. Matt of F1 and Laura, their new baby. She's so sweet. She's sweet. Oh, my gosh. She's so like.

She's chill. She's very chill. She slept for a long time in my arms and on my pillow. Oh, yeah. You put a little pillow on your lap and she took a nap? Yeah, because I got, you know, my arms get tired. Oh, you needed a nap too? Yeah. Maybe you should just come over and nap with the baby. That could be how you spend your time with the baby. I did think, maybe just because I'm feeling anxious, that I would be so anxious. As a mom. As a new mom.

I think I would just really make sure they were breathing the whole time. Yeah. I'm afraid they'll stop breathing. Yeah. I think that's a common fear. Because they're so small. It's like, how are they even breathing? Once like three months comes, I don't feel that fear. Yeah. But this like brand new, they just came out of the body. Very vulnerable looking. The body cavity. Yeah. They just escaped. They're just so small. They are. They're indefensible.

Yeah. My vocab's not back online yet. Okay, you'll get there. That's not a word either. Yeah, it is. But not in that.

Yeah, you're right. Indefensible is more like someone did something bad. Yeah, yeah. And you can't really defend it. Well, anyway, they're very fragile and vulnerable. They are. They are. They are. But it was so cute because her hands are so dainty and gorgeous already and like long fingers. They look just like Laura's. Okay. Wow. Elegant? Yeah, they're very elegant. And Laura's already buffed her tiny nails. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. They look so cute. It's so, so cute. It was interesting because I had a lot of baby. I had a couple of baby things in a row. Because you went and saw Callie's baby boy, too. Yes. Noah had a birthday party. Oh, his first or second? First birthday party. And it was a strawberry theme. And so he was a strawberry boy. And it was so cute.

Strawberry boy. Callie is known for her themes. She loves a theme. One time she was really dead set on having a bird day party. Okay. So then it was a bird theme. I would like that. Yeah. She's very creative. So it was a strawberry party, strawberry boy. And he's also so cute. I mean, I see him a lot, but...

He's so cute. And then I met Cleo and now I'm going to meet Rory. No, no. Rory's the husband. Okay, I'm good. Well, I am going to meet Rory, the husband. And I'm going to meet a baby. But I was feeling kind of, I will say, I was feeling a little ornery and petulant Saturday. Okay. Because the birthday party was Sunday. Then I met

Clio. I met Clio yesterday, which was a Monday. I don't know. I was feeling like. You feel left out? No. Okay. It's not left out. It's a very specific feeling. It's really hard to put into words. Okay. As a single person, you start, sometimes you can start calculating things.

Like how much time, effort, energy, money that's gone into other people's marriages and children across the board. It's like, oh, yeah. And then, you know, these showers and these parties and these travel for this and this, you know, whatever. Sometimes, and I think single people can relate to this, it starts feeling like, well, I'm never going to get this back.

Or I might, but I might not. And then it's just like, God, there's just a lot of. You feel like you're paying into social security, but you're never going to get to collect. I mean, that's an interesting analogy. Not that like, that's why you do it. You just start realizing like, oh yeah, that's what we prioritize, right? We prioritize marriages and relationships and kids and family, right?

We very much prioritize family. Yeah. And so no one thinks twice about supporting that. Again, not that I need it. It's not I'm suffering. I need all this stuff and no one will get it for me. But at this point, most of the people I am attending weddings and showers also don't. Yeah. The reason these started is because 14-year-olds were getting married. Starting a life. Exactly. Needed a blender. Making one cent an hour in the...

The shirt factory they worked in. Yeah. But that's changed. But we still do this. We still, like, prioritize that. It's just interesting to be on the outside of it. And not that I, especially after reading all fours, I was very much feeling a lot of gratitude that I...

have spent this chunk of life on me. Oh, good. So that was the walk away from the book for you. A lot of walkaways. But one was that. I'm not going to be 50 and say like...

Who am I? Yeah, right, right, right, right, right. Yes, because you're very distracted by the needs of everyone around you when you're in one of these systems like I am. Yes, and when you start young, a lot of women start very young. Yeah. And there wasn't time. Yeah, 38, their kids go to college and they're like, hold on a second, what was I all about?

They never had time to figure it out. No, that is a blessing. I will say, though, first of all, what you just laid out makes total sense.

That's certainly one way to look at it. And if I were in your shoes, that's most likely how I'd look at it. I more look at that shit as like, there's nothing else to do. Like anything that's an excuse to be social is used as an excuse to be social. Like there's no real need for everyone to come together. And these things end up just being that excuse for everyone to come together.

like a wedding a shower it's the same as your birthday you have a birthday party we all come together and we buy you presents like we're just all in need of some excuse to be communal and so there are some built-in ones you get one shower one wedding but you also get 36 birthdays

Yeah, but you don't get a party and presents for getting a promotion. That would look crazy. No, I'm only pointing out that you have 36 birthdays where people come together and buy you presents. Yeah, but everyone does that. These are things that are life accomplishments. A life accomplishment is getting married. A life accomplishment is having a baby. A life accomplishment is being...

being successful in your career too, but we don't do that. Right. And we shouldn't. I'm not saying everyone needs to come give presents for people doing that, but that's an accomplishment too. And it, to me, I feel that we don't look at it like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is fine. It's just interesting. I think actually, it's just kind of anthropologically interesting in 2024. Well, people have housewarming.

Yeah. And that is definitely like, come help us fill up this new space that we... We're not with presents. Yeah, people bring over housewarming gifts. And they're supposed to be kind of home to Corey. It's like any one of these moments where it's like someone's stepping into some big life they can't really fill. So they got...

They're getting a kid and then they need to get 50 items that go to support that kid. Oh, yeah. I'm also, I'm so happy to support. I love giving presents. Yeah. I love throwing money at all these things. Yeah. It's fun for me, actually. But it's, I'm just bird's eye viewing that it's interesting.

But you could have a big housewarming party. No, I'm not going to do that. I mean, I do want to have people over. No one is going to bring presents. No one needs to do that ever for me. But I do want people to see it. And maybe I'll do that. I don't know. I think you should, yeah. Yeah. Also, there's no problem with asking for presents. Like, it is a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. When I was just with Laura and Matt, they were like, oh, my God, the amount of Amazon purchases already. Really? Yeah. I mean, yeah, you just...

Things are just popping up nonstop. Matt's got to be in hog heaven, though, because he loves to order stuff from the internet. Yeah. Like when we were doing F1, he had certain hats and collectibles. Yeah, he was like all over it. He got Lewis Hamilton's non-alcoholic tequila when that came out. Yeah, he's on it. Yeah, he's doing good. They're both doing really, really well. Oh, good. And they seem really happy. Are they really happy? Yeah, it's so good. It's so sweet. Oh, good. I got to get over there and witness that. Yeah, anything else from the end of the trip? No.

Yes, I rented a boat, which was really fun. Oh, yeah. In Copenhagen, they make it so easy. They don't have liability issues anymore.

Throughout most of the world other than the U.S. of A. We love to sue each other. We love. It's a very litigious country. God, do we like to sue each other. So it says right on there, nothing required. They don't ask one question. They don't ask if you know how to do it. They hand you a map. That was a really fun. So cool to just go through all these canals. And then there's this area of, and people from Copenhagen are going to be mad I can't pronounce it, but I tried all weekend. I couldn't. It's called like Kronk.

christianalini okay it's this huge area of uh copenhagen that was taken over by squatters i think it was like ex-military barracks and stuff so there's this whole area that everyone just squats and there's all these weird stores open up there's like anarchist writing everywhere but it's also kind of pretty and people and there's rules posted everywhere which is like

Nudity's fine. No hard drugs. No explosives. It says everywhere, no explosives. Interesting. And so it's this little pocket of like, I don't want to call them hippies or like anarchists, hippies. Are they unhoused? Well, they're housed in these buildings they've claimed. Yeah, and they've made them pretty and decorated them. Kind of like the slum rehabilitation we went to in India. Yeah, but-

nicer, but yeah. So we had walked through the whole thing totally by accident. We wanted to ride bikes. So we went to a found a place that rented bikes and it was in this area. And then we walked the whole area. It was pretty cool.

So then the next day, when we rented the boat, we got to go through that same area, but on the canal. And when we were walking through there, we heard swimming in the canal. So we wanted to swim. So we went over there. So I pull up to this dock. This whole trip was quite an education for all the kids. I'm going to back up even three days before. Okay. Three days before, we go to this Michelin star Mexican restaurant called Sanchez for Kristen's birthday. Nice. Nice.

And preset menu, very delicious. Again, I'm not used to eating that way where it was like three hours and there's 45 minutes between courses sometimes. Rob, aren't you drooling? Sounds good. It was really good. But we had cabbed there and decided to walk back. When we're walking back, it's getting sketchier and sketchier. And we're with the kids. And so we're like, okay, there's, oh, here's a woman. She's got blood all over her wrist. There's syringes all over the girl. Okay, she's shooting dope.

And then there's three dudes smoking heroin off of a aluminum foil tray. And then there's, oh, you notice there's a lot of strip clubs in a row. Then there's this huge window with all these fleshlight pussies and dicks in the window. And like, you know, we're just on this walk and like every five feet it's getting worse. We're having to explain more and more stuff to the kids as we walk. But then you're also having this thing where it's like,

Yeah, this is what a trip to Europe is when you're young. Like, you see the red light district in Amsterdam. Like, this is all part of going somewhere, you know, just trying to embrace it. And then also, like, explain why, what these penises and vaginas in the windows are. Whoa. So that was, that was three days before the book. I didn't know Copenhagen had, like, that CD of a scene. Yeah, I think a lot of these...

old European cities. Like, I think Berlin, Amsterdam. They have a red light district. Yeah. It's like where you go to be naughty. And we just happened. But I didn't know it had like, like suicide on the street. Oh, this one woman was, she was dealing with a lot. That's really upsetting. It was so weird. At any rate, so that was three nights before the boat ride. So then we pull up in the canal to the quote beach at Kristiania. And this was,

This huge dock's just full of like 40-year-old men with their dicks out and everyone's bare naked. Oh my. I'm like, well, then this trip's been quite an education for them. So that was eventful. Yeah. Do you want to discuss the

The picture you posted or the video? Oh, of Eric. Yeah. I probably should. I think that's unwittingly. I think that's maybe the biggest post of my Instagram life. No way. Oh, I like a day after I posted it had like 5 million views. It's like 3000 comments. I've never posted anything that had that kind of action. Yeah.

That was a complete out of nowhere surprise. We were playing spades on the roof of this hotel. And then Eric said, I'm going to jump in the pool. And then all of a sudden he came strutting out in that outfit. And...

The good folks of Denmark, they were nonplussed. They did not even notice. I saw your name. I thought it was you. Oh, you did? For like a second, it was your Instagram. Sure. But you thought I posted a video of myself in that outfit. Also, then I was like, oh, gosh. That's not a good move. Even if I had done it to make them laugh.

I couldn't post it. That would be violating etiquette. I think that's accurate. They could post it. So you were probably like, oh my God, he's so narcissistic. He put on this slinky bathing suit and then he posted it of himself? Well, no, it was all very fast. Yeah, tell me in the millisecond of thoughts. Well, I just thought, oh my God, what's he doing? Do you think I relapsed in Copenhagen? I didn't. I knew there's enough bullshit.

people there that that hadn't happened but there was a little bit of uh yeah you were grossed out for me i was just like it's self-indulgent yeah yes exactly and then it was immediate that it wasn't you right and his walk is so funny the way he looks as he's walking towards us because he at that point knows i'm videoing him and so him trying to keep it casual oh

It was very funny. We have expectations of people. They're all different. Because as soon as I knew it was him. Then you love it. I laughed. Yeah. It is so. Authentic to him? It's so authentic. Uh-huh.

that i can't i'm just like yeah that's who he is well again this is all like this kind of what we're talking about earlier and this is not news to anyone but like life is just your perspective i can see everyone's point of view on that on what like if you're there at the pool and you're like these fucking americans need so much attention they need to be so individual yeah legitimate perspective

Or, God, this guy looks so silly. Obviously, you put this effort into this thing just to make everyone laugh. That's like a nice way to look at it. Sure. And you just get to pick. I'm just very aware of that right now. It's like, oh, yeah, you get to choose how you react to all this stuff. Yeah, of course. It's like you're filling in so much stuff.

I'm filling in so much stuff. It's that attribution error syndrome, right? Where it's like, I see this thing, that guy needs a lot of attention. Americans are discussing, they have to be so individualistic. Like I'm making all these character assessments based on this thing. Yeah. Or I know Eric and I think it's so funny and silly and everyone, it woke everyone up.

That was like a memorable. Yeah. But it's also true, not with him. Like it is authentic. It's who he is. He's very provocative. That's his MO. When it was him, the reason it was no longer weird is because it wasn't shocking. It wasn't inconsistent with my character. Exactly. Yeah. I think. It's more like we just want people to be consistent. Yes. Yeah. It's unpredictable behavior that is uncomfortable for people. Yeah.

And I think that's fine. Like, I think noting when things are not in concert with regular behavior is... I think we're wired that way to know, like, if something's wrong or if we're in trouble or whatever. Told you you're uniquely conscious of that. You're very high alert to people's patterns. I am, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I am. Because some people...

And I guess this is like the benefit of living with Kristen who's so different. She's not that way, right? Like I'm a big pattern person too. Like, well, why is that? Well, this is inconsistent. And then some other people, like they're not even really evaluating it, which is curious.

Now, I should have more updates about Europe, but I really mostly want to talk about the TV I watched on my way home on the many-hour flight yesterday. I finished Receivers. Okay. Now, like Sprinters, very similar. Is it Sprinter or Sprinters? Sprinters.

I'm seeing in the comments, sprinter. I can call it sprint. It's Netflix. Oh, maybe it's just, yeah, that's maybe what I was. Oh, okay. So I've got a wrong textbook. Very consistent. The pattern is confirmed. Yeah. Um, wide receivers is the same. I'm now obsessed with George Kittle. We got to get him on this podcast. Yes. He's incredible. Um,

And he plays the same position as Kelsey. Okay. And even Kelsey in this docs, like he's by far the best. He's a tight end. Tight end. Anyways, that turned out great. I loved it. I love all these wide receivers. They're incredible. They have such an interesting job. You know, I have no interest in football, but it's just like the gymnastics thing or the Dallas cheerleaders. When you find out the specificity of these jobs. Oh, yeah.

You can start to really, really admire and respect how specific the thing is. And they're just like, they're, I mean, this goes without saying, this is such a dumb observation, but they're so meticulous. They're masters. Fucking masters. And like when I watch them, like, yeah, guy runs out and he turns left and then he turns right and then he runs and then he catches the ball. Like there's so much going on and they're thinking so much about it. Yeah. And they're so meticulous.

many tiny details within this. Yes. And the results are proof of that. It's really fascinating. And I'm almost envious, and I think maybe you would be too, it's like their life has been narrowed into the most specific thing, which is running this route. Yeah. That's it. Their entire life is running this route. And if they run that route correctly, the rest of their life takes care of itself. Eh.

It doesn't. It doesn't. But that's the illusion, right? It provides all the money and it provides everything, the safety and the family. Yeah, but that's also when- It's misleading. It's misleading. And if you break your ankle, your whole life is gone. A thousand percent. Like the risk and reward is enormous because you're right, because it can disappear. But when it's working, you can see why it's such an intoxicating- For sure. Way to live. Because it's like, I have one thing in the world that-

to focus on. And if I do it correctly, that will afford me a group of people that can handle everything else. Yeah. That can make the rest of it all work. I just have to do one. I mean, what an interesting experience on life people can have. Yeah, I agree. To do one thing perfectly. I've been thinking a lot about teams lately. Team sports and being on teams in general, if you're doing it right and if you're good. Yeah.

If you're winning, then everyone is doing that, right? Like they're hyper-focused on being perfect, but knowing that it's for...

the group. Like it's not for solo, you know, accolades. It's like I do my thing perfect and then they do their thing perfect. It's different from mine, but we're all going to like everyone achieving at the same level is transcendent. Yes. The excitement they have for one another as they're thriving. They're not going like shit. That was my touchdown. And yeah, that's really cool to see them as pumped for each other. Okay. Okay.

Finished that and then per your suggestion popped immediately into Simone Biles. So good. Goddamn. So good. Oh, I love her. Oh my God. There's nothing cooler to me than being at the top of your game. More than top. She's five times better than the second best. Like it's insane. She's the best there's ever been. Five skills named after her. Oh yes, yes, yes. It's insane. People don't know this. In gymnastics, if you invent a trick-

And you do it a couple of times. If you perform it on the national stage. The trick then gets named after you. And there's like, they have, she's at. She's five. Yeah. There will not be another like her in any of our lifetimes. But.

To then say, I can't do it. Yes. Is, oh my God, like the amount of bravery that takes. Yes. To walk away. During an Olympics. And she got fucking blasted. Yeah. And so I gotta own my own bravado.

guilt or whatever in this. I wasn't on either side, right? I wasn't one of the people going, good for her, self-care, like all these catch words. I was like, I wasn't there and I wasn't, she's a fucking quitter, you don't quit in the Olympics. I wasn't there either. I felt myself somewhere in the middle where I was like, it is an interesting concept,

to celebrate someone quitting an Olympic event for self-love and care. For self-protection. Yeah, yeah. Only in that, does this, maybe just more of a philosophical fear of,

That if this is where we're all heading, and perhaps we should, we won't even have this thing. Because really what it's inching towards is like probably self-love and protection. It's not self-love to be, I want it like that. Because she could die. That's a big part of what everyone. Way more extreme than that. Absolutely. It was like life preservation. Yeah. Which you learn. But she wasn't in a place to even really articulate what was going on while it was all happening. Right.

So like a lot of us were just left with very little information other than she had pulled out. She had had a couple bad, whatever that- Vaults. Vaults. And then she was gone. But I do think I was, again, I wasn't on either side. I just was a little bit like, yeah, what if all the athletes go like, this is too much stress. It's not good for me. I'm going to quit.

A little grandpa, I mean, was like, well, but that's the name of... That's why this thing is what it is. It is the most stressful thing in the world. And again...

At the time, not understanding, oh, she has the flippies or whatever. Twisties. Twisties. I wish they didn't call it that. I know. It feels a little baby talk. It's like a childish name. Yeah, yeah. Instead of a serious, break your neck and die. Exactly. Yes. And she would have probably broken her neck and died. She said, when she talks about this, she says every time, still before she does that vault, she says, I hope I don't die. Yeah. I'm scared. Every one of her-

This is insane. Performances, she has said, I'm so scared. All I'm thinking is please don't die, which is crazy. When you're looking at her, it doesn't look like that. At all. It looks like she's like, let's go, motherfucker. Exactly. I'm about to rip this shit up. And she does. And she fucking rips it. She's so awesome. So awesome. All that to say-

Do you know what I'm saying at all? Like this notion that like you should get great glory and that it won't also be accompanied with great stress and great threat to your safety. It feels a little bit like you want your cake and eat it too. That's what I thought four years ago when I was just watching this. Not that she's a quitter or loser or all these terrible things people were saying about her.

I also had enough compassion to go like, this woman's clearly struggling and in great discomfort and pain and scared and she shouldn't do whatever she shouldn't. Who cares? I was also feeling that way. But in watching it, yes, I think it really...

walks you through everything that was going on in such a thorough way. And I, at that time, like probably a lot of people, the Nassar thing hadn't broke. It had, yeah. Oh, it had. But she wasn't as much in the conversation. She hadn't really, I don't think, acknowledged it publicly. So she's like now dealing and she even explains it as like that all came out and she's walking around and she feels like she has a huge sign on her forehead that says victim, that the world is,

Yeah, what a thing. Like I got to choose to say, yeah, I was molested. The world didn't go, we just found this file and Dax Shepard was molested. Now the whole world, and I had no choice in that. That would have felt crazy. Yeah. And that's what happened to her.

She didn't get to choose to come out. It just clearly by implication, she was probably involved and was forced to acknowledge. And it was just repressed. Like she just had repressed that for so long. And then, yes, she didn't necessarily get to decide to unpack it. Yep. Just like it was getting unpacked in the world. And so she had to come to terms with it. She was also in foster care. I know. With her little baby sister. I can't imagine the stress of that.

Her mom was an addict. And then the moment I fucking cried on the airplane. Oh, my God. I could cry right now thinking about it. I know. There's a moment where she goes to live with her grandpa out of foster care who has been remarried. And so at some point, the grandpa and the grandma adopt her and her sister. And the grandma is saying when she started calling me mom,

Mom's a really powerful word. Yeah, she said something like grandma's one thing. Mom is, I know. She said it's a very powerful word. And I started fucking bawling and I was thinking there is something so special and sweet about that. So sweet. And also her mom. She braids her hair. I know. And she said the only time I didn't braid her hair was Tokyo. Yeah. Oh my God. Tokyo.

Oh, my God. And you see, you know, she needs to know where they're sitting. There's a lot of, she needs a lot of reassurance. Yeah, she needs support. Of course, she was also abandoned. Yeah, they were all, and again, there's another thing I didn't even think of for Tokyo, which is it was during COVID. Exactly. And these people who normally have their support group don't have it. And it was like a great example of how important that is. Yes.

You're not a baby and you're not a quitter. Oh my God. No, for me, that's the hardest. It's harder than going and jumping and hurting yourself. And saying I might die. To say I'm going to choose my safety right now over. And my tribe's going to react in a certain way that's probably going to be bad. Yeah, my tribe, the country. And so what weight people got really fucking mean to her. That's why she's.

the go. Like, that's why. Not her skills, but the fact that she was able to do that and protect her is so incredible. And it's kind of funny that you say that because, I mean, I know, like, we're talking on this heightened level, the Olympics, the best of the best, whatever. But you're very adamant, and I feel like you live your life very specifically where you are not okay with

with compromise, well, David Letterman and the garlic bread.

You are not going to compromise you and your safety and your needs. To make people happy. To make people happy. Like that's like your tenant and your life force. And so I'm kind of surprised to be honest that because this is that just on the highest level. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You leave relationships that are bad. You don't just stick them out or let people hurt you or abuse you. You're like, no, I'm leaving.

Yeah, I'm not standing by any of it. I guess, I don't know. I'll tell you what I got nervous about. And I think this is being in an older generation. And I think it's quite naturally to worry that the generation behind you is somehow going to let everything crumble.

I think that's what the baby boomers thought of, you know. Yeah. I think that's what the World War II vets thought of the hippie generation. I think the hippie generation baby boomers thought that about us punk rock 80s people. Yeah. And Gen Xers and we liked boy George and what was gonna happen. So I get it, but I'm not immune to it. Yeah. So you hear these stories about

millennials at work and they need to have like a safe space to go relax for 40 minutes and they need a counselor and they need these things. And then, you know, you get this fear, like, is anyone going to be tough enough to do what needs to be done to run this world? Yeah.

That's like the kind of knee-jerk fear. Sure. I guess I'm also smart enough to know that that's what getting older is about. Yeah. So I know everything will be fine. Yeah, and also the counselor is there so that you can be tough.

So that you can be overworked or continue to go or keep pushing. It's not instead of. It's because there's a knowledge that we can't do. We can't live without help and support. And it breaks. Yes. Better angels of my nature will recognize those things exist not to placate these people, but because...

some consultant firm realize they'll actually get more productivity. So I'm acknowledging that, but I'm just, I'm owning up that I'm older and a lot of the stuff I hear, people feel too fragile. And by the way, the World War II generation thought the hippies were too fragile and the hippies thought we were too fragile. And I think-

they're too fragile. Sure. I think the older generations are too fragile. Well, I think they actually were tough, quote, tough, and then crumbling internally. That's making them a nightmare. Yes, and they're alcoholics and they're terrible family members. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Again, both things are happening. So I'm smart enough to know one thing, but I'm just being honest about it. Totally. And by the way, maybe the right answer is, is this is all preposterous. Yeah. You know, maybe, yeah, it's a preposterous thing where the 7 billion people are going to compete for one. Who's the best of 7 billion? What a crazy pursuit to begin with. So people are crumbling in the process or they're bailing out at some point. Yeah, that makes sense because it's already an insane proposition that we've

we've put 7 billion people into one competition. Yeah. I love it though. I love watching it. Can't wait to watch the sprinters.

I know, and it feels like there's going to be more episodes, but I don't know when. Of Sprinter or Sprint? No. Or of Simone? Yeah. I know. Was that it? One, two? I don't think so. It feels like there's going to be more. But maybe not because she won national, and that certainly sets you up for her to go to the Olympics. Yeah, she's going. She's there right now. How nervous are you? What anxiety level do you have?

Somebody asked me that. I'm going to do. So this is fun. I was invited to do a podcast on the day of the all around competition. Oh, fun. So I will you watch it? Yeah, I'm going to watch it live. And then right after we're going to record it. I'm not worried about her at all. I feel good about her, too. I'm not worried. I just again, I had similar feelings about her and Shikari.

Yeah, well, they've both been through a lot. They've been through everything. Yeah. I feel very protective of both those people. But I will say, I feel like, yes, she clearly had 24 years bottled up, trying to stay tough, trying to work through everything, trying to push everything down, trying to ignore everything.

compartmentalize, compartmentalize, and then yeah, ruptures. You get like, you put one too many things in the vault and the fucking door blows open and then that's it. And you have to sit there and deal with it. But it sounds like she really dealt with it. And I love her marriage. Oh, I know. I do too. I love it. They're so cute together. They're so cute. I love it when he met her because he's a football player and he's enormous. Yeah.

And when you met her, he like was actually freaked out by how small she was. She was so short. Yeah, he's like, I don't think I ever saw anyone that small. And she's laughing so hard at it. Like it made me realize they both feel safe in that relationship because they're kind of

Making fun of each other. Poking at each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in a very fun way. She must be way smaller than you. I want to meet her so bad. She's four something. Maybe eight or nine. Oh, my God. Of course. And this is not what you're supposed to want to do. I want to pick her up so bad. No, you can't. I know you can't. Don't pick her up. But I was thinking, well, could we ever be good enough friends that she was like, hey, if you want to pick me up, you can.

You can work on it. Okay. If you listen, Simone Bile, a number one fan. Or if this gets back to you. I would love to pick you up. Is that okay? Oh, maybe that's not what we lead with.

I don't think we should leave with that. Another really sweet thing with the mom. The family is watching far away while all this is happening. Like, they're not there. And she calls her mom. I know. And immediately she calls her mom. That's right. You go home. She handled it perfectly. Oh, I love you, mom. I know. I love her. I know. It's okay to quit. Yeah. She said, yeah, you do what you need to do. Don't worry. Yeah.

But the fact that she had to stick around and watch everything in the media and the whole thing. You know, here's the thing too. And answer questions. I'm curious how all this works. I want to know them. They need to do, by the way, listen to my first episode of Acquired. Which one? Howard Schultz, Starbucks. Did you listen to that one? No. Yeah. It's fascinating. I bet they're all fascinating. But there needs to be an Acquired on...

these athletes because they're required to do so much press. And part of me, now here's where I'm, like you were talking about with Letterman and the garlic bread. I would go, I'll go there, but I'm not doing press. I'm there to win a gold medal. I'm not there to fucking promote your TV show or your whatever.

So I wonder what the incentive is or what the requirements are. How much do they have to do? Why do they have to do it? It's self-serving in some way. If you want to get endorsement deals and all this, then it behooves you to go out there and be charming and look like you could sell some Wheaties. But if you don't have that motivation, why the fuck do you need to sit in front of 50 strangers where all they do is call out every hard time you've had over the last four years? I don't really get it either.

Where they got to go, you were disqualified from the last Olympics. And she wants to go like, bitch, I talked about this four years ago. I'm fucking over talking about this. That's not today. And-

Like right after they lose, they have to like go talk. He has to explain why they underperform. I don't get it. I mean, I get it because it feeds the machine that we're consuming as consumers. No, but I don't get why they, why aren't they just like buy? Yeah. That's what I want to know. Like when you sign up for Team USA, do you sign a contract? Maybe. Like certainly when you're on a Formula One team, they're like, look, you're promoting this race team. But they're getting paid. They're getting banked. Right. These aren't. These aren't.

I know that's why I want to know what's going on. Like, what is the leverage over them? Because with an F1 team, of course, if you want to make 40 million a year, you're going to do the press day before the race. But if not, if I'm there to try to beat Lewis Hamilton, I'm not talking to anybody all weekend. I'm sitting there and concentrating. Same. Yeah, I don't get it. Yeah.

Maybe someone can tell us. Okay. Well, that was our Olympics preview. It's right on our back. It's knock, knock, knock. It's tomorrow. Is it? It's opening ceremony. So Friday. Friday. Oh, what a day. I know. It's so fun. Well, this is kind of a ding, ding, ding because we were just talking about foster care and we brought up foster care in this interview. Yeah. Yeah. By age 17, more than half of foster children will have contact with the juvenile legal system.

Say that again. By age 17, more than half of foster children will have contact with the juvenile legal system. Ay, man. Within two years of leaving foster care, 25% of youth will be involved with the criminal legal system. Oh, God. According to a 2011 study, 70% of former foster care youth are arrested at least once before age 26.

It's really. This is the most abysmal report card we have almost in our whole society. Yeah. Where it's like we have a system in place that we know produces 25% of them will be criminals. I know. And we're like, yeah, that'll do.

Boy, I've never had a cause, really. I mean, I've been a part of some things, obviously. I've lent my name to things. Yeah. But my notion that getting into Foster should be getting into Hogwarts. Yeah, that's what you said on this. Yeah, I wonder if that's achievable. I wonder. I mean, I donate monthly, but you don't... Where does it go? It's all state-run. Yeah, mine goes here. Boy, you think all these billionaires, like even Gates Foundation, there's a lot of money that people helping...

And I wonder if there's been any... I mean, Ashton has done stuff... For trafficking. Right. But he knows a little bit. I don't know. I should talk to him. Yeah. Might be worth like...

And there's groups like Alliance of Moms that's a foster, that's like to help foster moms. And CASA helps. CASA, yeah, that's where I go. But because it's a state program, it's like, I wonder how you infuse private money with state to go like, hey, you guys are still the authority, but we'd like to build the place and we'd like to supply the food and we'd like to supply the counselors and the teachers. I know. I don't know.

How many people are, Rob, will you look up how many kids are in foster care in America? I have to imagine it parallels our terrible incarceration rate. About 390,000. Hey, fuck. That was 2021. 400,000 kids. Okay, so you gave some stats from Body Keeps the Score about abuse. And they were all wrong.

Yeah, you said they were going to be wrong. That's good. So that part's good.

So this is from Body. This is from Bessel van der Kolk. He wrote Body Keeps the Score. Good job. Over 500,000 children are reported for abuse and neglect each year. One out of four Americans reports having been left with bruises after having been hit as a child. One in four? One out of five was sexually molested. One out of eight has witnessed severe domestic violence. And a quarter grew up with alcoholism or drug addiction. I mean, guys, he's... Yeah, but you said 50%.

So just that's right. It wasn't 50. Yeah. So little extreme. What was I claiming was 50%? That kids have been abused enough to get into the hospital. Oh, so I doubled it. Yeah. Yeah. It's still horrible. Quarter. Domestic violence is very common in American families. In almost 20% of all marriages and intimate partnerships, couples slap, shove, hit, or otherwise assault each other. That was the number that...

I read, I remember going, there are five couples in the pod. Oh, yeah. One of these couples is physically hurting each other. That's wild. That's wild. I mean, it's not, but. Maybe. Maybe. I don't think so. Could be me. If I had to make my guess. I think people hear these, well, let's just, can we agree on this? People hear these statistics and they go like, yeah, but not in my group. And that's just kind of. Of course. But it's like, no, it's one in five.

It is like if everyone thinks it's not their group, these numbers wouldn't be real. That's what all I'm saying. So that is true. Yeah. That is true. Like if we were to find out one of the couples in our pod was smacking the shit out of each other, our reaction should be, well, yeah, that makes sense. The one of five. That's our odds here. Yeah. But it's unacceptable. So I would not like that. Yeah. So pod peeps, please don't.

Oh, this is a philosophical Jonathan Haidt. Okay. If two people...

Consent to hitting each other, is that fine? You're saying like in a real hypothetical where two people sit down, they decide. I like to smack you when I'm really angry at you. Yeah. And then the other person says, I like that too. And I like to smack you back. I like to smack you back and I like being smacked. And then he says, I like being smacked too. So everyone's really happy. Yes. But are there kids who...

We'll have to say no kids to clean this up. Okay. Yeah, I don't think Jonathan Haidt would introduce kids. Because that immediately no because of your- Well, that's an A score. And modeling. Modeling, yeah. Physical stature's equal-ish. Well, it doesn't really even matter because the woman's like, I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it.

I guess it's okay. I think it's fine. Yeah. So you got to make room for like, I don't know, is that like, what was that show where Sarsgaard and what's her name were in a very weird, psychosexual, abusive relationship? Oh, Big Little Lies? Big Little Lies. Remember that? And they'd have these weird, terrible, I mean, to me, they were terrible. But then they would both be sexually charged up and they were in this cycle of like. That's different though. And I think that's actually kind of,

Not common, but I think that's a thing that happens in abusive relationships, whether it's verbal or physical, where there's a big makeup time that's very heightened. Jonathan heightened. Yeah. So that's different. She was not consenting. She was being abused. But then it made her really horny. No, she probably was like, this is how to get out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is different. Terrible. In our hypothetical, everyone like really gets joy out of it.

Or even if they don't get joy, there is a catharsis that they are happy to have on the other side of it.

Then I don't know. I don't think it's for us to say. Now I'm more like, I don't know, because I think in order for me to say like it's fully, fully okay. Yeah. Is they have to get happy. They're giggling when they're getting hit. Yeah, they like it. I think that's a lot to ask. Well, I mean, funny, this is already crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Catharsis. I think there are,

they should try healthier ways. Well, let's put it this way. Let's take it out of the domestic partnership. Okay. And say like my brother and I sometimes we would be at each other's throats for like three hours. It would finally erupt in a fist fight or not a fist fight because we weren't allowed to punch each other, but we would wrestle. And it was not fun. But then-

On the other side of it, we would get along great. I know. It's not a good pattern. That's not a good pattern. Yeah, that one doesn't work because I was five years younger. No, even if everyone's of age, that's because you're trying to regulate. I guess what I'm saying is that he and I couldn't get out verbally, whatever needed to get out. But then we would wrestle and the whole thing would be solved in five minutes. That's an interesting part. Sure, I see that. But there's like a false idea behind it.

about intimacy that anger perpetuates intimacy and it's not healthy. No, it's not a good cycle. It's not a good cycle. It's not a good, really bad station. Ha ha ha.

Okay. The addresses. Okay. You said you guys for public, there used to be like a publishing book of addresses. Oh, when you want to self submit S A S E self address stamped envelope. Yes. There was that too, but it wasn't called the complete book of addresses updated.

date in 2016? No, it was just for writer submissions. I probably still have the book somewhere on a shelf. Really? Yeah, maybe I should bring it. It gives me PTSD, but. Let's read from it. Okay, I think people should look up the capybara. Capybara? Capybara. The world's largest rodent. It's really pretty cute. Oh, it's so cute. And they're like 150 pounds. 77 to 150 pounds as an adult. Yeah, they're huge. They look like goofy dogs. And they're 20 to 24 inches. I think they're

Quite nice. They're super cute. It says, remember that although they are cute, capybaras are still wild animals that are not used to human companionship. Wow, they're so cute that they had to put a warning on there. That's what they have to tell you about koala bears, too. Oh, exactly. They're vicious. And raccoons. Yeah. I think people know. That one intuitively people know. Sometimes little raccoons are kind of cute looking. Babies. There was a guy on my dad's lake who had a raccoon pet. Oh, okay. Okay.

Okay, so you talked about your body scan for a second. You said it was Pernovu, but it's Pernuvo. Okay, great. I had a porno body scan. I kind of did have a porno body scan because you can see my penis in some of the images. Yeah, can you see boobs and stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, she mentioned the bite model really, really quick, and she started to say it, but then she stopped, but I got intrigued.

So the BITE model, BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional Control. This model is used to target the methods used to recruit and maintain control over their individuals. Ooh. Yeah. Do you think people intuitively know how to do this or they actually study how to do it? Because I remember listening to the guy who created Dilbert, the cartoon. Do you remember listening to him on Sam Harris back in the day? I don't remember.

And his obsession was persuasion. And there's like all these really, really tried and true techniques for persuasion. And it made me nervous that people study that. Yeah. If you use it for good to like stop it. I know, but everyone thinks what they believe in is good. I think stopping cult behavior is good. Yeah. Unless you're a member of a...

and you're like, no, that's not good. You think it's a cult. I don't think it's a cult. Well, then, I mean, look, I live in a world where I do think there are right and wrongs. I do believe that. There's a lot of gray, but there's some things that are right and some things that are wrong. Sure, sure. But yeah, bite models describe cult-specific methods to recruit and maintain control. That's my question. Do you think these cult leaders, they've read up on it or they just intuitively know they grew up in a weird, abusive situation and then they...

got the tools and they're deploying them instinctually or they read a how to influence and persuade people book i don't well maybe both i don't know but my guess is they do know some things intuitively and that's not read up yeah i don't think it's always from abuse like what's his name from nexium he wasn't abused no he was a judo champion yeah um i already did that

um university of washington huskies sometimes you guys said dogs yeah and i don't like that because i'm dogs yeah do they say go huskies or do they say go dog all this i'm like i'm i'm trying to remember from brie because she went there should we call her you dub let's call her hi hi you're you're gonna be on the air is that okay do i have your consent

Oh, you do have my consent. Okay. You know, all of my knowledge about University of Washington is based on what you've told me. Okay. And really all I remember and kept with me is that you call it UW. Yeah, UW. Yeah.

You added an S. Okay, good. D-A-W-G. Dogtown. Oh, good. So she just said Dogtown. So here's, this is the real reason I'm calling because whenever I have someone on who has gone to U-Dubs, I say go dogs, but then it was pointed out that it's really Huskies. Do you guys say go dogs or go Huskies?

I mean, did I not just say go dogs? I think it's go dogs. But it is the Huskies. But I think, you know, maybe your more pretentious types might stick with the Huskies. Okay, so it's... And the rowdier sports fans, it's the dogs. Okay. But it's definitely the D-A-W-G. Wait, what's wrong? Yeah, D-A-W-G. Well, Monica's really mad right now. Hi, Bree. She said hi. Hi. But she also, that's what they're calling their team down in Georgia. Yeah, so I feel a little stepped on.

Maybe you should yell go Huskies, Monica, to get even. Oh, God. Yeah, exactly. But while I have you, could we recount the time that you and I went to the UCLA Bruins football game together? Okay, maybe. Do you remember that? The only thing that matters to me is that you and I had smuggled in probably a liter of alcohol and six beers, and we sat in the student section. We were both smokers, and we got there with the only two drinking. Fuck.

Do you remember that? Yes, I do, but that does track. And we were like, what the fuck kind of game is this? No one's partying, and we're sloshed and screaming. I remember that you could get the seats really cheap because we were students. Yeah, it was like eight bucks, and we're like, this is going to be our thing. So I almost want to say, I almost looked into season student passes, but we tried it, and we were like, this isn't our scene.

These are not our people. No, they're dead sober and they're good people. Exactly. No, we were like more like late night karaoke bar people. Yes. Yeah.

Also, I love that you tried to get her to remember a time after you had a liter of alcohol and so much beer. Oh, that's true. But you, um, Brie had a good memory when she was hammered for the most part. That's good. Yeah, I did. I actually, I still feel like, yeah. The only, you only, there was one day a year that we couldn't count on your memory. And let's say it at the count of, we'll say three, two, one. And let's say what day that was.

Three, two. Are you prepared? No, I'm not prepared. One day a year? Yeah, only one day a year could we not count on your memory from drinking.

halloween yeah oh damn it we were gonna say it three two one yeah a halloween all bets were off well i wasn't me on halloween right that's right bloody nurse bloody yeah brie was a bloody nurse many many times all right all right i love you thanks for answering that

Are you deep sea fishing today? Bree, what's the name of your chartering company so people in Washington can go and go out on the boat and go fishing? Well, it's not up and running yet, but next summer it is Fisherella Enterprises, but the boat's name is the Glass Flipper. The Glass Flipper. Yeah. That's a great story, too. What does that mean, the Glass Flipper? Okay. Well, you know my dad. He's very gruff. Yeah. He's a gruff old man. I love him. Girl. Girl.

Carol, Judas Priest, and...

Did not, like, say I love you a lot or anything. But when I was four, we went fishing on the boat. And he does now. Yeah, he's sweetie. We had, like, a cooler in the back of the... We were trout fishing. And we had them just swimming around, like, in a little live well. They were swimming around. And I was like, Dad, Dad, I was four years old. This one's mine and that one's Grant's, my brother. He's like, well, what are their names? And I was like, this one's Fisherella and that one's Fish Charming. And my dad was like...

"Um, well how do you tell the difference?" And I was like, "Duh, Dad. Fischerella has glass flippers."

So clever. He knew he had a smart one on his face. Yeah, that was the moment he was like, girl. He would go on to tell that story at the bar, BMW, wherever, and every time he would tell it in front of me, I would get a surge of so much pride. My dad really loved me. And now it's my brother and I doing the business together.

Oh, I love it. Oh, wonderful. All right. I love you. And thanks for straightening this up for me. All right. Bye. Go dogs.

Okay, that was a good update. So I feel a little vindicated. And whether she's right or wrong, who cares? To be fair, you shouldn't feel vindicated. Andrea should. She's the one that said go dogs. Oh, okay. And I kept my mouth shut in the moment, but I was like, that's wrong. I gotcha. But I've been saying it too and getting a little nervous as people have pointed out it's the Huskies. So I at least feel, I don't care if she's wrong. I would have cared if I was misreporting what she told me. Okay. Okay.

I told you, I started becoming obsessed that my hair's falling off. Did you get your... It comes Saturday. My new topical.

Would you ever get fake hair? Well, yeah, if they could. My dream would be that they could clone hair. That's like the promise where they could take one of your follicles off and then make a million of those. Yes, if that ever happened, I would get thick. I would get the thickest fucking hair and I would grow it so long like a lion's mane. I would look just like George Kittle.

He has gorgeous long hair. I love you, George Kittle. I know you don't listen, but if you're listening, tell Simone Biles I want to pick her up. All right, that's it. All right, love you.