Introducing: Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

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[3] Hello and welcome to the armchair expert.

[4] I'm Dachshepard.

[5] And I'm Monica Padman.

[6] Welcome, Monica.

[7] Let's tell everyone what this podcast is all about.

[8] Because there's so many.

[9] How would you select?

[10] One billion.

[11] There's over a billion known podcasts.

[12] Some of them aren't even known yet.

[13] And so we just want to tell you a little bit about what makes this one unique.

[14] First of all, it has a stupid name.

[15] So it's called the armchair expert, right?

[16] Yeah.

[17] Why is it called that?

[18] It's called that because I learned this expression in a biology class in college.

[19] And it was in reference to the 17th century evolutionary biologists who sat in armchairs.

[20] And they theorized about how the world worked, how evolution worked.

[21] And then they did absolutely no lab work, no field work, no stuff.

[22] studying whatsoever.

[23] They just said this makes sense and if people thought that made sense, then everyone ran with it.

[24] It's very you.

[25] It's very me, right?

[26] Yeah, because I make a lot of big sweeping statements and generalizations and I rarely back them up with any kind of research.

[27] Yeah, but you bring a lot of fervor to the table.

[28] I do.

[29] I do.

[30] I have conviction when I say them enough so that you might take it as a fact.

[31] So that's where Monica's going to come in.

[32] She's going to keep me honest at the end of every one of these conversations, she's going to fact check me. And she's going to expose me when I'm a fraud.

[33] Yep.

[34] Which is probably going to be very rare.

[35] 90 % of the time.

[36] No, because I know my shit inside now.

[37] We'll see.

[38] And we're going to talk to a bunch of people.

[39] Yes, very interesting folks.

[40] Yeah, from a variety of disciplines.

[41] We'll have some actors and we'll have actors and then we'll have more actors.

[42] And then I think we're going to have some actors on maybe.

[43] We're going to have some Thespians on and some stage people.

[44] Now, we're actually going to, we're going to have musicians.

[45] We're going to have hosts of things.

[46] We're going to have academics on.

[47] We're going to have people who wrote books.

[48] We're going to talk to people that we find interesting.

[49] And when we do so, we're going to be trying to find out not how they won, not how they stood on a podium at some point, but rather, how did they recover from the little failures we all experience?

[50] Yeah, personal histories that lead us to where we are because I've been sober for 13 years and I talk to lots of people who are also trying to get sober and rarely do I learn something of value from someone's story of triumph but I always learn a lot from people's failures and yeah that's relatable fuck -ups which I have a ton of and I'm going to be dead honest about I only have two you've only fucked up twice What were those?

[51] You'll have to listen.

[52] You'll have to listen and throughout the podcast you'll find out.

[53] So that was the Easter egg.

[54] By episode 200 you will learn Monica's two character defects.

[55] Correct.

[56] So please subscribe and listen to us, talk to really interesting people and try to get them to be honest about the messy business of being human.

[57] I love you, subscribe.

[58] Love you.

[59] Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[62] What's up, guys?

[63] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

[64] and let me tell you, it's too good.

[65] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[66] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[67] And I don't mean just friends.

[68] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[69] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[70] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.