Welcome. Welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by Monica Monsoon.

Hi, there.

I got to make an introduction to someone on an email with you, and I took so much pleasure in listing you as all your many acronyms. Not acronyms, your pseudonyms. Pseudis.

You called me Monica Monsoon.

Miniature mouse. Yeah. Actually, what I did is I combined a couple things because I did Monica Monsoon. Padman. I made a new thing. Basically, it was just like the monsoon was in the middle with quotes, like, you were a boxer, like Iron Mike Tyson, right? Yeah. Monica Monsoon, Padman.

When I. In college, senior year, we had senior shirts and you would put a fun name on the shirt on the back of the shirt, and mine was monster.

Oh, really?

Tell me more about that, because mon.

Yeah, of course. I see the phonetic connection. Monster.

That's fun.

Were you a little monster?

Well, I am a little monster.

Oh, okay.

In a good way.

Right. Okay. I'm going to work on that. Maybe I'm bringing monster to your. Added to your pseudonyms today we have a returning guest who's a friend of ours, Jared Cohen. You'll probably remember the last time he was here, we talked greatly about his collection of presidential hairs. So fascinating. He's obsessed with presidents, and I love it because he keeps writing books about them but under different lenses to talk about different issues, but always through this look at the presidents.

The book that he's here to talk about is really interesting about legacy.

Yeah. Life after power is the name of the book. Two previous books are the new digital age and accidental presidents. Jared is a businessman serving as the president of global affairs and co head of the office of Applied Innovation at Goldman Sachs. He's held a bunch of different titles. He used to work with Eric Schmidt, who we've also interviewed at Google. He can do it all.

He really can. And he's such a nice guy.

He is. You're going to love him. Please enjoy Jared Cohen.

He's an object. He's an object.

Jar.

Are you okay?

Are you coming?

I feel great.

Money. How do you feel in your.

God.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere.

But it's the truth.

Okay, good.

Dax, I feel like you look more ripped than when I saw you last time.

I didn't go back and look. I often do, but how many years has it been?

So I last saw you in Montana.

That was three years ago.

Your jawline's good.

Oh, well, thank you. You know what that might be a result of? When I was there, I was in my big boy face.

What does that mean, by the way? I started nodding as if I knew what it was.

I had been a medium boy my whole life, medium built. And then I decided I want to be a big boy. So I went up to about 215, 220. So when I was there at that time, I was like, 215, 220, and probably my jawline disappeared a bit. First of all, thank you. You have a very dominant chin. Yes. I'm pretty jealous.

I thought about wearing chin putty to look kind of extra sexy for you guys.

That would be preposters, because you already have. You look like you could definitely be the coach of an NFL team.

But I want one of those 19th century chins. It's like a little bit of Hapsburg descent, but not too much Hapsburg descent. Right.

Where it's like a good 40% of the total vertical space on your face. Yeah.

Like maybe he comes from totally defunct monarchy that squandered power a couple of hundred years ago. Yes.

I have to ask right off the bat, has your hair hairs? Yeah. Has it grown? Has your hair collection grown?

Monica, I'm so glad you asked. The answer is yes. And I've added additional oddities to the mix.

By the way, I last saw you.

All when I came on in 2019. Since then, there's an opportunity to collect two additional presidential locks. Trump, which is the holy Grail. Although I've declared I don't collect hair from the living. But let's be honest, if I could get it, I would. And Biden writes too soon. You can't collect the hair of the incumbent.

Feels like jinxy or something.

So since I saw you last, I got Eisenhower's hair, which you might say is ironic because he was bald. Very extra, very small pieces of hair. I've got a whole blob of John Tyler, obviously. It's great. I've got these weird. I'm embarrassed.

I don't think I've ever heard John Tyler. That was a president.

So John Tyler was the 10th president. You want to hear a wild fact? He was born during the term of George Washington, and he has a grandson who's still alive.

Whoa.

Oh. Doesn't that compress time in a way that's weirdly scary?

I've spoken to him on the phone. He's super old. So basically he fathered 15 children, the eldest of which he fathered in his late seventy s. And then that kid fathered, I think, like, another, somewhere between twelve and 15 children, the last one in his late seventy s. And then that kid is like, 102 or something.

Wow.

Okay.

So for either of those men to have fathered children in their late 70s, clearly they had either mistresses or had remarried, which seems a little unusual in the 18 hundreds.

John Tyler was a widower. President. He famously. As president, he did not kill his wife. He famously got remarried while he was president. So he was the first president to get married.

A White House wedding.

The wedding itself was held in New York. Have you ever been to the restaurant Indochin? That's where the after party was.

Wow.

Yeah. Surprised you didn't know that.

It's so funny that this isn't Jared's occupation. I know none of this pertains to his job, other than maybe some guiding principles when you are in vastly different situations. But back to the 15 kids, and then the 15 kids, the son of him. How do we explain how he was having kids in his seventy s? Are these legitimate children?

Look, he was very fertile.

Well, clearly a viral man.

Yeah, very viral.

But that means he had a wife in her 30s, presumably.

Yeah. Younger. There was a delta.

Okay, sure.

It's a resizable delta.

I mean, thirty s is being very generous. I'm sure she was like, I didn't.

18 sometimes when I say this, I had mentioned that one of our guests who was born in the mother was older. Oh, Billy Joe Armstrong, lead singer of green day. And I said, well, your mother was pretty old when she had you. And people got really mad about that. What is old? And I was like, by 70s standards, it was abnormal for a woman at 39 to have a kid. Now that's normal.

It is a late pregnancy.

I was really placating those people when I said she was in her. Had to bet my life he probably was with a 24 year old when he was 70.

Again, the Delta.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you've written yet another book that involves presidents. This is book number five.

This is book number five.

And how many of them have dealt with presidents?

This is my second one about presidents. I actually have a children's book about presidents coming out in September. Don't worry, I'm not going to hassle you to have me back on the show that soon afterwards.

Okay, we'll talk about it now.

Yeah. Okay.

So that'll make three of six about presidents. And people who had heard your 2019 interview would know that this is a total hobby for you. I mean, you have a ba in what?

History and political science. A childhood passion in presidents, an adult passion for collecting weird presidential oddities and artifacts. Yeah.

Oh, did you add the new item you're collecting?

So I have the vial of poison on a very high shelf because I have young kids that Charles Gatot, the assassin of James Garfield that his sister sent to him in prison so that he could take his own life and avoid facing prosecution. Okay. And I recently acquired the pencil that he used during his trial. And then a piece of the leather from the limo that JFK was riding in.

No.

On November 22, 1963, when he was.

Assassinated, which was a 64 Lincoln continental.

I will confess, dax, I have not committed the brand of the presidential limo to memory, but I can tell you that the leather seat was blue. Okay.

It was blue.

That must be one of the biggest ones you have.

It goes with a lock of JFK's hair, which is pretty rare, that I've also acquired.

I don't want to be too morbid, but if you had gotten a lock of hair from that scene, I feel like that would be the most valuable.

So I have a lock of hair from Lincoln. It's drawn from the most famous lock of Lincoln's hair with great provenance from the night of his assassination. It was taken by his physician, and I know the guy who has the lock. When I was younger, I got my first Lincoln autograph, and this was my kickback for overpaying for the autograph, was I watched him pull six strands of hair from the most famous lock of Lincoln's hair, and I now have it kind of tied in a ribbon on my wall.

Oh, my goodness. And I know we talked about this last time, but clearly an option for you in the future is to clone all these humans when we have that capability. And you could be the father of all the founding fathers.

That's my hope.

That's got to be the ultimate where this is going, because you're not going to open an oddities museum.

Am I not going to open an oddities museum? We've all thought about it. We've all fetishized it, but I probably won't do it. Okay.

And then to add just a bit more accolades to you, so then, also, you are a Rhodes Scholar, and you got a master's in philosophy, international relations from Oxford. International relations. Why does it say M. Phil?

They don't have masters from Oxford. It's called a master's in philosophy. It's just the british system. Same way with phds. It's a doctor in philosophy there.

Oh.

That kind of answers a question I never thought to ask. Sometimes you say a PhD, and sometimes you say a doctorate or doctoral at Oxford.

It's a Dfill in the US, it's a PhD. They're both snobby about each other's systems.

And so then, in 2019, you had a different job. You, at that time, were the CEO of Jigsaw. Jigsaw. Thank you, Monica. But you were also still working very hand in hand with Eric Schmidt, who ultimately we had on, and I think I text you, I put him in a category of, like, five other guests where when it was over, I was like, I think that person sees the entire picture on planet Earth, which is a very rare thing to witness.

Eric has the widest angle lens of any human being that I've ever met. And you mix that with his own tremendous curiosity and his intellectual generosity. And you don't just get the benefit of his knowledge. You get the benefit of learning from him. I've been a beneficiary of that my whole life. If I think back to kind of the original reason why I got the idea to write life after power, I was working for Eric when he was CEO of Google, and he transitioned to executive chairman of the company and working hand in hand with him and partnering with him as he thought through. What does it mean to go from being CEO of Google to executive chairman? What do I want next? In my professional career? It was so humbling as somebody early in my career to be along for the ride, for somebody who'd had the success that he had. And it always got me interested in this question of what's next? And I'd been interested in presidential history my whole life. But after going through that experience, I started reading the end of the biography. You have these sort of thousand page Ron Chernow biographies, and you kind of close them for the last 50 pages after they're done with the presidency.

And most of the time, it's not.

An interesting story or even heartbreaking or even heartbreaking rant.

A lot of them ended up extremely depressed, isolated, solvent. By the way, most of the early presidents remember they were a lot of slave owners. They were big landowners. They left office completely penniless. You didn't have presidential pensions until after Herbert Hoover.

Washington's whole plantation was in a total state of disrepair.

George Washington. I mean, imagine people don't know this part of the story. So he leaves office and he goes back to Mount Vernon. He never leaves Mount Vernon again. He spends all of his final years chasing down people who owe him money. He has to start a whiskey business, not because he's passionate about whiskey, but he's completely broke. And then on top of this, he's the most famous man in America. So all these tourists come to Mount Vernon and they just kind of get dropped off there. And he's stuck hosting them and paying for them.

He does. He's endlessly kind and patient to them.

And he has no choice. And he's dealing with voyeurs. And so this idea that you go from being the most powerful person in the world to all of a sudden just an ordinary citizen, it's the most dramatic retirement you can imagine.

That's a great point. And Eric is a good comp for that because you're climbing, you're climbing, climbing, then you get to whatever the end goal is of that. And then I imagine you start looking around and go, well, what's next? Nothing's going to top this. And we were just talking about this. I had gone to a resort over Christmas. It's where you want to end up. And I'm looking around and I'm looking at all the people, and I cannot help but notice that generally my trips to holiday inn expresses the people are much happier and people are having more fun. And I was like, what is going on? And then my conclusion was, you've reached the end of the line of hoping for something more or wishing for something more, or thinking of something that you're aspiring to. It's like, well, there's not a nicer hotel for us to really think about being at. And just the kind of hopelessness that all of a sudden takes over in those moments. And so, yeah, someone like Eric or these presidents, I have to imagine it's like, what on earth would I do next?

So it's interesting, this elusive question of, what do we do next? We're all going to ask it so many times throughout the course of our life, and you never know when you've achieved your greatest moment of power. I think if you look at Eric as an example, you would think that being CEO of Google is as high as you can get. I would argue that his journey and broadening into kind of unmatched public intellectual after that, with expertise on such a wide swath of topics, far eclipses what he achieved as CEO of Google. And he built one of the great companies of all time. And I think he would even acknowledge that that was not something that was predictable. And this is part of why being alongside him while he was going through that journey inspired me to ask the question, who else has kind of figured this out? And this relationship between ambition and happiness is very interesting when you look at these former presidents. So I look at seven in the book, each one of them answered the question of what's next in a very different way. Each one of them found, I think, greater purpose and meaning after they left the White House than their journey to it or during their time in it.

And yet many of them were still unhappy later in life. And part of what fueled their ambition after the White House is they didn't know how to not be ambitious. They were just successful because they found a way to channel it that helped them recapture that sense of purpose. I think in some respects, the only president that I focus on, that I think has achieved genuine happiness is George W. Bush. Right.

Yeah, we'll get to him at the end. But you chose seven presidents, and they're spanning all the different eras, which to me seems a bit obvious, but they also span different parties. That was intentional, right? I imagine that you wanted this to remain apolitical and a everything else, it.

Kind of worked out that way, but it wasn't intentional. So if you look at the 45 men who've been president 46 times because Cleveland was president twice, you eliminate the eight that died in office. You eliminate the handful that died shortly thereafter, you kind of ignore the one who's sitting in office today or just left because too soon. And you canvass the rest of them. And I was left with seven by default because there were really only seven that I thought were worth writing about with George W. Bush. I looked at that a little bit differently. I wanted to look at the active, living presidents and ask the question, which ones stand out? He's the only one whose popularity has doubled since leaving office, and yet he's invested less time and energy into shaping his legacy than probably all of them. And so that was worthy of its own study.

Is that him, or that's lucky for him that the world took a turn where we now look back and think, oh, my God, he was so great. I mean, just circumstantially.

It's an astute observation, Monica. I think it's a combination of the two. So, one, he has this unique ability to move on. I went and I spent two days with him in Kenny Bunkport. I did hours and hours of interviews with him.

Can I ask quickly, was that a hard interview to get?

Yeah. I had known him over the years I worked in his administration. I think it was a hard interview to get only insofar as he hadn't given any interviews about his post presidency before, certainly at this length. I watched him paint for hours.

He loves to paint.

I think that is a crucial part of his finding purpose.

Look, I think Bush has this psychological uniqueness where he's not introspective. What he says, know when it's over, it's over. I don't miss it. I genuinely believe him to sort of understand how a human being can detach in that way. It's like a psychological thriller into, like a powerful and ambitious person's brain that is counterintuitive to everything that we know. I think that he has a rigorous adherence to the principle of one president at a time. Other presidents say they do, but they can't resist the urge to insert themselves. He never once has inserted himself. He never once mentions his successor by name.

He didn't do anything. During the debates, when Trump was blasting.

Jeff, he said nothing publicly. So it's a remarkable discipline. So I think that Americans appreciate that reverence for the Washington principle. It's aged really well in the era of Trump. And it's not that he doesn't have ambitions and causes he cares about. He's done with politics. What's interesting is that he's found a post presidential voice through painting that allows him to push those causes in a way that doesn't undermine his successors and the causes that he's pushing. The story of american immigrants, the story of veterans, these are some of the things.

How's he doing it with the painting?

So he had a painting instructor who told him, paint the portraits of people, you know, who other people don't know. And he said, I've known a lot of veterans over the years, and he just started painting them. I've known a lot of great american immigrants. A lot of them served in my administration. A lot of them have gone through the programs of the Bush center. He just started painting them. And it reminds people in the United States that while they didn't like the war in Iraq, while they didn't like a lot of his policies, there's aspects of who he is as a person and what he championed that they don't mind reflecting positively about.

Yes.

Well, I think he has a touch of what McCain had, which was, I obviously was on the different end of the political spectrum than McCain, but he had these moments where he displayed great character and integrity, just these moments where you're like, whatever our differences, I can tell there's a good man, and I think that burbles through with George W. Bush. I know there's some sect that wants to try for war crimes, but suffice to say, I was vocally anti the Iraq invasion as well. But all that to say, my personal experience was I went to this really great resort in Africa with kristen in 2012. We were there during the rainy season, so there was no guest but us. So we were talking with the different staff members. We got a lot of FaceTime with them, and we were kind of gossipy, asking who had been there and what it was like. And Bill Gates had just rented out the entire place for his family. And then George W. Bush came up. Every single one of the people that worked there said their favorite guest of all time was George W. Bush, that he spent every single night out at the fire talking with the staff late into the night.

There's no cameras around. There's no way he thinks that's getting back to anybody. And I hear a story like that, and I'm like, you know, I don't agree with him on a lot, or rather, I didn't. Who knows where he stands now? But I can't not take that in as data of someone I appreciate or admire in some way.

Well, what's interesting about Bush one, he took several trips to Africa after leaving office. He had championed this PEPFAR program that has had a meaningful impact. PEPFAR? Yeah, the president's emergency something or other focuses on countering HIV AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. And it really moved the needle in terms of reducing the spread of those viruses across the continent. But as president, with the secret service around and the protocol and so forth, he never got a chance to actually experience the effects of it. With each of these presidents that I write about, they're such seemingly unrelatable figures, right? How many of us will ever become president, right? You can't imagine a human being that is less relatable to the rest of us.

It has been 45 of them.

And yet when you delve into their post presidencies, you feel this connection and relatability to them, which is what got me so excited about it, because it's counterintuitive, the fall from power, whether it's being fired by the american people or just being termed out, it's a greater fall than just about anything else. And there's a vulnerability that comes with that fall that I think all of us find more relatable in each one of them. There's some question that they grappled with that I found relatable in Bush's case. It's this whole question of what's our legacy, what's our purpose in this world? And it's not that he doesn't care about legacy. He just has a very quarrelsome and almost agitated view of trying to shape your own legacy in your lifetime. And what he says is, look, they're still writing books about the other George, meaning George Washington. By the time they get around to me I'm going to be long gone. And he looks at it as just kind of sad and tragic that people would waste the short time that we have in life trying to shape their legacy after. And I reflected on this conversation with him, I've always had this saying of like, I don't want to be ancient Egypt, meaning I don't want to waste my time trying to build a tomb that I'm never going to get to see and that explorers are going to find later on and probably get sick as soon as they enter it.

And I think all of us, by the way, subscribe to that. There's these demons that lurk on our shoulder telling us to think about the future and think about our legacy when our actual legacy, it's our children, it's our friends and our family, but more importantly it's our enjoyment of the present.

Well, right. So I'm always trying to understand why I think most people think about a legacy. It doesn't interest me at all because I'm not going to be here to observe it. And then I wonder is it part of me being an atheist which predisposes me to that because I don't think I'm going to be up in heave and watching people regale with stories of me. So since I'm not going to observe it, I don't even give a shit. But I do wonder if that's somehow rooted in my lack of belief in an afterlife. But back to Bush. Oh, go ahead, Monica.

No, I just had a thought for the first time.

Oh my God. How did you enjoy it?

It's so rare to have a new thought that I have to share it. I think Bush is maybe the only present definitely in my lifetime that maybe has no ego or very little ego and little narcissism. I think some narcissism is the reason these people come to power. Like I think it might be part of it and that's okay as long as it's managed. But I don't think he has it, which is why not to defame him in this. But a lot of people thought he was not smart, but I think it's actually because he just didn't present with this ego and this trying to be smart or on or brilliant. He didn't care.

I think that's right. The apathy about the judgments that get levied in his direction mattered very little to him as president. They matter far less in his post.

President. I'm buddhist.

Well, I think it has to do a lot with where you come from. And I'm going to argue that his transition was aided in this in a weird way. So the lanes in his family were taken. The dad was the head of the CIA. He knew all things. He was a genius. He was a master politician. Jeb was probably doing better in school. He was the family fuck up. He was getting in trouble. He was running a baseball team into the ditch. He was comfortable in that role. So I think part of it is just the benefit of he wasn't the shining star everyone was betting on. And lo and behold, he ends up in president. People start slinging mud at him. He's like, yeah, that's kind of my role in my family. I'm used to this. So that's one thing I think is on the table. And then I'm curious if you think the way he seemingly so easily let go of that experience, do you think that's been informed by the fact that it maybe wasn't even his agenda to begin with? He inherited the mission, and therefore it was easy to let go.

There's two things there. One, I think George W. Bush, personality wise. Again, each of these seven presidents I write about, they found purpose in the post presidency for a different set of reasons. Sometimes by design, sometimes they knew exactly what they wanted to do. And being done with the presidency unshackled them from other burdens. In the case of Bush, he's just kind of a chapter guy. He lives his life in chapters. There's a beginning, a climax, and an end, and then it's on to the next chapter. But I think when you talk about legacy, that's really one of the big themes of the book, is how we think about legacy, and there's no blueprint for it. And different presidents will be more relatable to other people. But the burden of legacy means different things to different people. So if you look at Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, who's the first one that I write about, is the co founder of the Republic.

He's 33 years old when that happens.

33 years old when he co founds the Republic, he doesn't want to be in service after that. He tries to retire three times. And he has to serve as secretary of state. He has to serve as vice president. He has to serve twice as president. There's only three things etched on his tombstone. Author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. And what's interesting about that last part, which is what I focus on, his burden as a founder, was they knew that they left potentially terminal flaws in the architecture of the republic. And if they didn't train the next generation to be able to iterate on those flaws and improve upon the republic, what he founded would never survive. So he always wanted to build the country's first arts and sciences university, divorced from a sort of strict adherence to religion and theology. And so he had this idea for the University of Virginia. It juxtaposes in a very interesting way with what's happening at university campuses today. At 82 years old, in the final chapter, final year of his life, he opens the doors to the University of Virginia.

And with that inaugural class, in the first six months, a group of students cover themselves in masks in a way that is sort of like the anonymity of social media. And they start rioting across the campus that he designed. They throw bags of urine at professors. They beat one with a cane, leaving him, like, bloodied and humiliated. They chant, down with european professors. And then here's the catch. In this weird twist of southern honor, none of them would give each other up. So Jefferson, who is the rector for the university, he calls an all student assembly to bring them before the disciplinary committee. The disciplinary committee for the University of Virginia was Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Three presidents, by far the most intimidating disciplinary committee, past, present, and future. And here's the best part of it. So Jefferson stands to address the students, who, again, won't give each other up. And before he can get words out, he starts hysterically crying. And so the image of an 82 year old Thomas Jefferson bawling in front of them causes little five foot one James Madison to stand up, put his hand on Jefferson's shoulder, and before Madison can speak, the students, one by one, confess and get expelled.

Listen, this is the great hack. I watch it with my wife all the time. My instinct is to. When there is a rabble, when there's crazy teenagers, they need to be dominated. Some alpha's got to step in and control this. And I've watched the kill them with kindness approach, and it is shocking. I was just talking about this. I was driving with my best friend Aaron in the car yesterday, and someone cut me off. And I said, you know, I've been really trying this thing where instead of engaging with the person that cut me off, I just try to remember how I feel when I cut someone off, which I do often. I feel like an asshole. And then I'm sitting in my car, and I'm an asshole. And if they're really nice about it, I feel like even more of an asshole. But if they start honking and flipping me out, then I'm in it with them. And so I'm like, that's got to be my new policy. But, yeah, what an unforeseen outcome for him to just be emotional and vulnerable and saddened by the whole thing and that that elicits that response.

Well, when you compare and contrast that with today, I love this story because it's a reminder that authority matters and who sits in the seat of power matters not just because they have power, but they command such a level of respect that you don't end up with this tyranny of the majority against the leadership, whether it's at a business or a university. And this is why I love history, because everything that we see today, as crazy as it seems, we've seen some version of it before. And a lot of the clues and the ingredients that tell us how to navigate it and tell us to calm the heck down because we're having a present day freak out. They exist in these powerful anecdotes that are lost in the annals of history or sort of stuck in the footnoots of history.

We are collectively living the same way we live individually, which is we rediscover the same fucking epiphany every six months. I don't know about you, but Monica and I talk about all the time. I have a realization. I'm like, oh, my God. Of course that's what I got to do. And then my second thought is, oh, my God. I knew that eight months ago, and I forgot it. We had this great comedian and actor Rami Yusuf, and he was telling us that the arabic word for human is forgetful. And you're right. We've done all this before. We just think we haven't.

Yeah. And social media has not just compressed the volume of content that human beings are willing to consume. It's made us impatient to dig into the facts around the present. And it's made us lethargic about reflecting back yesterday, let alone several hundred years. And to go back to this question of legacy and burden, so much of how we pursue a legacy, whether we're a very important person in our own mind or in reality, is a function of the burden that we feel. And so John Quincy Adams is another interesting example.

This one blew my mind because to me, this is a lesson in one's ego, because as much as we do repeat history this is unimaginable in the current era.

Oh, yeah. I mean. So John Quincy Adams'presidency was basically an intermission between two of the greatest acts in american history. The first one kind of top down architected for him by his famous parents, John Abigail Adams. That kind of manufactured a president, and his presidency was a disaster. I mean, he almost drowned while skinny dipping in the Potomac and had to ride back in a horse and buggy, naked, to the White House. He was basically like a political stillborn on day one. So he accomplished nothing as president. But what's interesting is his second act. He went on to serve nine terms in the House of Representatives.

Nine terms.

A man who began his career appointed by George Washington dies serving in the House of Representatives alongside Abraham Lincoln. This living connection between these two generations and what's fascinating about John Quincy Adams, he felt a different burden from Jefferson, which is he only knew how to serve. He grew up in one of the great service families in american history. And so when the presidency is done, he doesn't know what to do. He's already served everything else. He just hasn't served in the House. They convince him to run. He ends up in the House. He has no plan. And over the course of a couple years, in a much lower station, he finds a much higher calling, and he ends up inadvertently becoming the champion of the abolitionist movement because he's bored in Congress. And so he's just reading petitions. But a lot of those petitions are from abolitionists. And he sees the reaction from the slaveocracy in Congress and thinks, how dare you try to silence these petitioners? They then try to silence him with the gag rule that says, you can't talk about slavery in Congress. He fights it. He bamboozles them. He outsmarts all of them.

And ultimately, he gets the gag rule repealed. He goes on to basically take abolitionism, which was really a fringe and a radical cause in the 1830s. And by the time he dies in 1844, he's really transformed it into a mainstream movement.

He's done a bunch of the legwork for Abraham Lincoln to walk in and take it to the next.

I mean, just imagine that a freshman congressman named Abraham Lincoln serving alongside this shrinking, frail, sort of weird looking human named John Quincy Adams. Who's this living relic in the House? Where's that magic today?

Yeah, he becomes a real defender of free speech in addition to helping forward the abolitionist movement. But the notion of Obama becoming a congressman for nine terms, I feel, like, ego wise, that's unimaginable. I don't know if it's a different.

Time, yeah, it feels like a big step down societally.

What you're kind of getting at, it's this story of reinvention. So part of this question of what we do next and part of what we learn from these presidents is there's an element of reinvention, and it depends on what they want. In the case of John Quincy Adams, he reinvented himself as a public servant, and he got to experience something new. It didn't matter that he was in the House of Representatives and had been a president. It's that this was a cause that he decided to take on, not that his parents decided to take on. Right. Whereas you look at Herbert Hoover. Here's a man who lived to be 90 years old. He's defined by three and a half years of the Great Depression before he was president. You could not find a more revered man. I mean, this was the man who fed the world after World War I, fed largely black communities. After the devastating Mississippi floods in 1927, he had risen from being an orphan to a self made millionaire. And then he becomes the sort of symbol of the wealthy class with the Great Depression, and his name is in tatters.

He was a man who needed to be. Needed, to quote Arthur Brooks. And he lusted after an opportunity to serve. He spends his 30 plus year post presidency recapturing the title of the great humanitarian. And once FDR dies, it was like the never ending presidency that just kept tarnishing him. Harry Truman, who also didn't like FDR, resurrects him. And Hoover kind of repeats it all over again. He becomes a great humanitarian, feeding the world. This time, after World War II, he reminds the world that he was a great executive because he's brought in to reorganize the executive branch of government. And then he achieves a bipartisan status in 1960, being asked to reconcile Richard Nixon and JFK so that during the cold War, America looked unified. And what's interesting is when he loses his bid for reelection in 1932, he is sort of grappling with recovering his good name, which is vanity, and recovering his platform of service. And only when he decides he's done with politics in 1940 does he relinquish that vanity. And he finds a sense of peace with a very focused path towards figuring out how to serve the world again.

And what's interesting is he does, in his lifetime, recover his good name. He just then posthumously ends up having it tarnished again. And so his story is a fascinating one, not of reinvention, but recovering what he once had lost. Right.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. Grover Cleveland. I didn't even know this about him. He's the only president to ever run for a non consecutive term and win, which obviously has some very interesting parallels we should talk about with what's happening now. He lost his popularity, and he tried to go back in time and become president again and recapture it. But for him, that didn't work out.

So well, did it? Grover Cleveland. I include him as the story of kind of a comeback. So if each of the seven presidents represents a different model, Cleveland is the only president who has recaptured the presidency. Now, that's obviously very relevant to today. It's increasingly looking like for the very first time since 1892, and the only time since 1892, you're going to have two presidents in a rematch as the nominees of the two major parties. It's happened only once, and only three other times in history have former presidents even run on a third party ticket. Van Buren did it as a free soiler in 1848. Millard Fillmore did it in 1856 as a no nothing. And Theodore Roosevelt did it as a bull moose in 1912. But this particular rematch we've only seen once in history but differently than today. Grover Cleveland never lost the popular vote. Cleveland loses his reelection in 1888 because he takes a principled stand on the tariff, and he basically does a kamikaze mission against the democratic party wishes, where he loses the presidency, but he achieves his goal.

So he had won the popular vote.

But he lost the electoral college. And Cleveland represents a cautionary tale because there's an interesting aspect of this, and Monica and I were, in a very juicy way, talking about this before. Cleveland becomes the second president to get married while president of the United States, his best friend, Oscar Folsom, died in a very 19th century type of accident, which is a horse and buggy accident. And textbook. His daughter, Francis Cleveland, became her official guardian and huge age difference between them.

Back up. I got distracted by Monica's great joke. What a perfect timed classic. So his buddy dies in a horse and buggy accident. Then what happens?

So then he becomes the legal guardian of his young daughter. Her name is Frances. He calls her Frank. She calls him Uncle Cleave. He starts courting her when she was in high school. And while he's president of the United States, he's courting her while she's the.

First term or the second?

This is the first term, okay? He ends up falling in love with her.

He's courting a.

Men always find time.

Well, by the way, just for the record, we'll get back to the story in a second, but just one tangent. Poor Grover Cleveland is going to have his name resurrected because Donald Trump is likely going to be the republican nominee for president. So there's a natural parallel. And while one might think, oh, this is great for Cleveland, people are going to finally remember him. It's a disaster for him because he was involved in a very not okay for the Metoo era. I don't think the resurrection of Cleveland is going to age very well.

Well, according to someone you're the legal guardian of. It didn't go great for Woody Allen and age gap and a high school student.

No.

This is going to be very uncomfortable leaving high school. The secret Service rolls up, and the guy that's trying to take you out of date, the president's at your high school.

Well, there's an amazing story.

Annie's your dad, kind of.

He basically is her father. So there's an amazing story. So while he's president, he proposes to her by letter.

How old is he at the time?

He's close to 50 at this point.

And she is.

She's in her 20s. They started the courtship when she's a preteen. So he sends this letter of proposal, and she accepts. And to get ready to be first lady, her mother takes her on a trip across the Atlantic to get refined in Europe. And the telegraph operator intercepts a love letter that he sends and assumes that he's secretly engaged to the mother.

Well, that would be the most natural assumption.

So the papers print this, and he throws a tizzy fit. Why do they keep trying to marry me off to old women? Don't they know that I love her daughter? So he's offended.

Oh, thank God. They think it's the mom.

Well, look, eventually they were going to find out. So she ends up as the youngest first lady in history, 21 years old. Oh, that'll never be replicated. So he's happier than he's ever been. And when he throws away the presidency, all he wants is to retire, have children, have this happy family. But all she wants is to come back and be first lady. So when they're leaving the White House, she tells the White House butler, make sure the furniture is exactly as I left it. Make sure all the decorations are exactly as I left it. I'll be back in.

She's living out a kind of princess fantasy at that point. The king married her. Yeah, sure, Stockholm syndrome. Classic stuff. But she decorated the place and wants it. The know, and I can't imagine she was terribly attracted to him.

No, he was disgusting. Big mustache, very heavy, kind of opie. He doesn't get compared to William Howard Taft just because Taft was the more enormous of the two. But he was a close.

Wow, wow, wow. So when he comes back, what's the second go around like?

So the tragedy for him. So he decides to come back to the presidency, in part because she wanted it. But he was very worried that his successor, Benjamin Harrison, was going to take the United States off the gold standard, which was going to bankrupt the country. He was worried about a rising tide of imperialism, and he genuinely felt that he was the only one who could come back and save the country from economic ruins. So he gets elected again, so wins the popular vote for the third time. By the time he takes the oath of office, the country has descended into the worst depression in its history. A group of opportunistic settlers, along with the de facto us ambassador in Hawaii, decides to depose Queen Liliukalani and set in motion the annexation of the islands. And then on top of that, he sort of lost his time at peace with his new family. And so he's miserable in those last four years. And while he retired, happier than he's ever been after the first term, he retires after the second term and has a second post presidency, leaving him depressed. Having lost those valuable years, he had saved the country from the ruin that he worried about.

But it takes him years to recapture the level of peace that he found after his first term. And so I like including this chapter because so many people, regardless of, again, whether they're top of their game or not, want to come back, right? You want to get back what you lost. And Cleveland offers a cautionary tale that there's certain factors that you cannot control, and maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. The problem is we focus on the success stories. Michael Jordan came back and won three championships. Steve Jobs came back and became this iconic figure. But there's a big graveyard of people that tried that and didn't find success.

They are the exceptions to the rule.

Absolutely. Okay.

And then we have William Howard Taft. I like this one the most. He didn't want to be president at all, but his family very much wanted him to be. And his good budy Theodore Roosevelt wanted him to be. But he had wanted to be on the Supreme Court originally. That was his dream.

Each president is meant to represent a category of problem that somebody's grappling with. So all of us know somebody, or maybe we include ourselves in this we know what job or opportunity we've always wanted. And by the time it came our way, the timing wasn't right. There was a reason we couldn't say yes. Life was taking us in a different direction. So we defer this dream. Taft wanted nothing more than to be on the Supreme Court. He was ideological about his love for courts and the justice system, and it was his dream. And he married a woman named Helen Narin who wanted nothing more than for him to be president. He had three brothers who wanted him to be president, and he had a mentor and friend, Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted him to be president. And Taft was just one of these figures who, he was heavily influenced by the people around him. He ran his court as the patriarch of the family, like an impotent leader influenced by those around him. And so he turns down an opportunity to serve on the Supreme Court three times. And when he turns it down for the third time, reporter asks his son, do you think your father will be president of the United States or serve on the supreme Court?

The response is, Ma wants him to be president. And what's fascinating is he never gives up on the dream. He appoints six justices to the Supreme Court, more than any other president in history, including a chief justice. But he very cleverly appoints a chief justice who's at such an advanced age that hopefully he'll die.

Do you think that was calculated?

It's known to be calculated.

Oh, wow.

He gets lucky. In 1920, Warren Harding names him to the supreme Court.

Well, first he loses an election in a very embarrassing way. He comes in third for his second term.

This is another tragic story of relationships. William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt were best friends, and Taft never wanted to be president. But when Theodore Roosevelt and he sort of split and ended up in this vicious feud, that was really driven more by Theodore Roosevelt's desire to become president again, which required him to break the friendship. Taft decides to be zealous about trying to get reelected, to deny Theodore Roosevelt the chance to be president again. Theodore Roosevelt storms out of the republican convention and forms a new party as a bullmoose, and he ends up splitting the republican vote. Split would be conservative. He basically wins almost the entire republican vote and hands Woodrow Wilson the presidency. And so he assumes he's never going to get this.

But an incumbent coming in third again, that's such a rare.

Not just coming in, they're coming into a distant, embarrassing third. So Taft was politically destroyed, lost his platform.

Can I ask you to bring it into current politics? So the fact that Theodore Roosevelt stormed out and just decided, well, obviously the party's going to run the incumbent, but I want to run again. So I'm starting this thing. Obviously, we've passed this point, I imagine, but that seemed semi foreseeable for the Democrats, this go around, because a lot of people don't want this incumbent to run again. And I imagine there's some presidential hopeful that thinks, even though I won't be the party nominee, I got to run against. That seemed like it could have happened.

So it's very interesting. Like, when I set out to write this book, obviously, I wasn't thinking about the 2024 election, because writing books takes forever. And we find ourselves in a situation where two men, one who's an advanced septogenarian and one who's an advanced octogenarian, both presidents are about to embark on a rematch. And we're in this situation despite the fact that both of them have less popularity than last time, because you have two presidents that don't want to give up power. We've never been in this set of circumstances where you have these two candidates that are so old in both presidents. And so this question of a third party, naturally, has come up a lot in the context of the 2024 election. But the history of third parties is very important. There's only one time in history that a third party candidate has won the presidency. And it was 1864. We were in a civil war, and Andrew Johnson was picked by Abraham Lincoln to form a new national democratic union ticket. But this was a peculiar set of circumstances during the civil war. Every other third party candidate in history has done nothing but take votes away from one of the two major parties.

And so here we're about to enter, as we kind of go into less than a year until the presidential election, the open question of third party selfishness. There's any number of third party candidates that will enter the race, and they'll tell themselves all kinds of stories. This is the righteous thing to do. It's about the issues. Maybe I have some kind of a chance. But make no mistake, any third party candidate, whether it's no labels or someone else entering the race, is going to take votes away from one candidate or another. I believe that RFK Jr. Will take away from Trump. I think everybody else takes away from Biden. The problem is, this election is going to come down to a handful of districts in six states. And so even single digit, thousands of votes, 10,000 votes here, 10,000 votes there, it matters a lot. And it can flip a state.

Yeah. Anyone who is doing it to be like, oh, Biden's too old, but who's a Democrat is fucking us up. I mean, that is just the truth. We can't hand over anything to Trump at this point.

Well, again, and I just love seeing how often these debates funnel into, this is a very kantian utilitarian argument. So if I'm a, and I'm like, no, no, I will do the right thing. This is unacceptable. These are the two options. There's virtue in that claim. I reject that. This is so. It just is really, like, does the means justify the ends or the ends justify the means? I think both are very compelling arguments and I don't think anyone should be embarrassed to feel either way.

But you say this a lot, right? You say, are we living in a world that should be or a world that is. Sure, and we are living in what is. And right now what is, is Trump and Biden. And we have to make decisions based on that for four more years. That's it.

I have a fantasy, though, where, yes, it's Trump or Biden, but there's this enormous silent majority that is just participating because they believe in that. So it may turn out that 60% of the country, and I think that's probably accurate, doesn't want either of them. My pick wouldn't be a Democrat or a Republican. It'd be like a hardcore centrist that goes, no, no, I'm going to split both these fucking votes.

I think the most dangerous third party candidate is the invisible candidate of not voting. This to me, is the biggest wild card, which is given that both candidates are, let's just say, not terrible.

But hold on. Biden is not a terrible president just because he's old. He has done a good job. It is not fair to say he.

Went to Hawai and looked at 3000 people who had just had their entire life burnt to the ground. And he said, and know exactly what you went through. Our house burnt down, which wasn't even true.

Taking one sound bite, one thing that he said versus what he's done over the past four years, it's not fair, especially compared to what was before that and what will happen again.

Here's what I think, Monica. He isn't even within the top thousand best options to run the country.

But are you even following?

Okay, so to arbitrate between the two of you, it is a matter of fact, from the polling that both of them are less popular. That is a statement of truth. So I worry about large segments of the population not voting. Not voting is, by the way, depending on what state you're in is a de facto vote for one candidate or the other. In each state, there's one candidate where the voter turnout problem with certain communities is a bigger vulnerability. And by the way, for Biden, there's a real question about Michigan. If the war in the Middle east persists of large numbers of voters in Michigan choosing not to vote, which, again, by not voting there, it's a de facto.

Really quick drill into that, because I'm.

From Michigan, in and around Dearborn, very, very large arab american population, very upset with Biden's handling of the war in the Middle east.

Supporting Israel.

Exactly. And so if you're the Biden camp, there's a concern that you have that come November, if the war is still going on, I assume the policy stays the same, that there's a risk of some of those voters not turning out.

The only hiccup for that logic, in my opinion, is Trump is even more pro Israel than Biden.

So that assumes a level of mean. I think there's a recency bias that we find with a lot of different parts of the electorate. And, look, it's very hard to get in the heads of the electorate as well. I mean, the one thing we know about polling is it's consistently wrong. And yet we continue to put it up on this pedestal as right. How many times do the polls have to be incorrect where we basically just declare they don't matter? The problem is, absent something else to fill that vacuum, we can either make up our own facts or we can.

Rely on whatever we do the best we can. We poll. That's about all we can do. But I interrupted you, so that's what's currently on the table. Are we? Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

We got sidetracked with William Taft. When he does end up getting appointed to the Supreme Court as the chief justice, what is his career like then?

William Howard Taft is a fascinating case study in what it looks like to defer a dream and finally achieve it in the last chapter of life. His last ten years of life, where he's chief justice of the Supreme Court, are by far the happiest years of his life. And so, look, it's an incredible story of persistence, and it's a reminder that the most powerful position we may achieve in our lives is not necessarily the one that makes us the happiest. He's the only president to serve at the top of two branches of government. So he's a unique figure in american history.

And was he a better chief justice than he had been a president oh.

He'S a much better chief justice than he was president. I would describe him as a boring but very important chief justice. First of all, he believed that the Supreme Court needed its own building for proper separation of powers. I mean, imagine this. The Supreme Court used to be in the basement of the Senate, so talk about meddling from the legislative branch. But the Supreme Court, before he took over, was kind of a somewhat feckless institution, overwhelmed by cases, no ability to stack rank and arbitrage. And he sets in place a series of reforms that massively improves the efficiency of the court and radically transforms it into the institution that it is today.

What I take away from that is ego, basically, kind of like what we were already talking about, that you have to step over the notion that you're demoting yourself, that your greatest happiness might be a job that was under, in quotes, the one you previously had.

I think a lot of the presidents that I write about did this. Jefferson. If anything, I think he felt the presidency was a blow to his ego and a waste of time and not necessary for him to ensure that the next segment of the republic was preserved. In the case of John Quincy Adams, the ego was in being hyperactively serving the country. In the case of Cleveland, he didn't lust after the presidency, remember? He didn't want to come back. His ego was wrapped up in making sure the country wasn't economically destroyed. I think Carter is the first one that you really have to talk a bit about ego, because when he's defeated by Reagan for reelection in 1980, it's really devastating. He loved being president, perhaps more than anybody. And he leaves office, and he says, my faith compels me to do whatever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can. And he makes a decision to do the opposite of what George W. Bush did and not leave the spotlight. He's a million dollars in debt, so he has to deal with that first because his peanut farm pretty much went bankrupt in a blind trust.

But Carter leaves office and says, you know what? Screw this. I'm not going to stop being president. I'm going to transform the idea of being a former version of my greatest act into an institution in and of itself. And he builds a post presidential administration, and he does some great things. I mean, guinea worm basically doesn't exist anymore. It was a disease that was curable, was devastating large portions of sub saharan Africa, and he basically eradicated it from the globe. But he did a lot of annoying things as well. So when George H. W. Bush is prepping to go in to get Saddam Hussein and any rocky forces out of Kuwait. Jimmy Carter secretly writes a letter to all the permanent members of the Security Council except for Margaret Thatcher, because he doesn't trust her, basically asking them to turn on the United States and not vote for a UN Security Council resolution. Jim Baker says, if this isn't a violation of the Logan act, which is that you can't moonlight us foreign policy without being government, I don't know what is.

So now, as a child, when Carter was in, but he's probably the first president I remember seeing on tv. And I guess my thoughts about Carter, if I had to summarize him, was that he was genuinely a very nice and good and principled man and that maybe he proved the point that you can't really be so nice and principled as the president because you're dealing with adversaries and enemies that are not playing by the same moral code as you are. He seems to be a test case of that. When he leaves office, the iranian hostage crisis is in full swing. There's people in Tehran that are waiting to be rescued that he doesn't really know how to navigate that, and the economy is in a fucking nosedive. So is my summation of him, in my mind. Is that semi accurate?

I think that's right. Carter leaves office just about as unpopular as Herbert Hoover left office, and he spends his final hours as president working to finalize a deal to get the hostages out. And as one more insult to Carter, the Iranians don't sign on the dotted line until after Reagan's been sworn in. And Reagan very graciously sends Carter to go greet the hostages. There's an argument that he did it to just get Carter out of the country so he wasn't a nuisance. But what's interesting about Carter and Trump side by side, if you go back to the founding fathers, they created a republic to be the anti monarchy, and they were very worried about ex presidents. So Hamilton, in Federalist 72, writes, does it serve the stability of our government to have half a dozen or so men elevated to the highest office in the land, wandering around us like discontented ghosts? He legitimately was asking, what the heck do we do with our ex presidents? And here we are, 200 plus years later. And I think we have an answer to Hamilton's question, which is, ex presidents can either be your greatest ally or they can be your foe.

By the way, Carter was both. Carter was a tremendous ally to George H. W. Bush when they sent him down to Panama to monitor the election and challenge Noriega. He deployed valiantly, consistently with the administration and did a lot of good. But when Bill Clinton sends him to North Korea because he knows it's Carter's, lane, instructs him to be a messenger, makes it very clear you don't have any purview over us foreign policy. And Carter says, fine. And then Carter negotiates his own nuclear deal, and Clinton finds out about it on CNN. That's an example of a disenchanted ghost. Again, you look at Donald Trump, who's been a thorn in the side of his successor. It's interesting that we're still grappling with this question of what to do with ex presidents. We just have examples now of how they function. But the founder's question persists.

Carter was the longest living post presidential chapter of his life for 42 years. He was out and about after he left office.

Yeah, we have to say active post presidency because he's still alive. He went into hospice care almost a year ago. But you're right, though. His active post presidency ends at 42 years. And what's interesting is you compare and contrast Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. Both of their popularity has surged in the post presidency more than just about any other post president. But they did it in very different ways. Carter did it by being a thorn in the side of his successors, but also being a partner to his successors by doing good work. That reminded people of some of his virtues. Election monitoring, disease eradication. People like seeing old, gentle presidents. Kind of endearing.

He's always, to me, felt like Mr. Rogers, if he was a politician, like, oh, good, Mr. Rogers is there, he's going to worry about these people eating.

It's interesting, when I tell people that I wrote a book on seven post presidents, the first name they always say is, oh, you must have included Carter.

Wow.

Why do you suppose?

I think some of it is. If you look at the age of Americans, most Americans today know Carter as a former president and never experienced him as a president. I was born in 1981. I was born in the year Reagan was shot, not the years that Carter was president. So I only know him as a former president. So I think his longevity, the fact that he's not been an invisible post president, he's the one that everybody immediately thinks about. I think we can all agree that regardless of one's age, you're probably not reflecting a lot on Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft and even John Quincy Adams, despite his famous last name.

Now, you didn't include him for obvious reasons, I guess, but where are we tracking Obama thus far, it appears to me that he has launched kind of a media business. He seems to be like a middle ground between Carter and Bush. And by the way, I just want to flag. I admire both qualities. I admire that Bush has such reverence for the office, that he has proceeded the way he has. And I admire that Carter got into that game to change the world, and he never quit trying to change the world. I see the virtue in both things. It appears that Obama's somewhere in the middle of those two on the spectrum.

So far, if I look at Obama's post presidency, it's very tbD. And I say TBD because we wouldn't be talking about William Howard Taft if he hadn't eventually gotten to serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court. So sometimes they arrive at it late.

What if Obama goes back to the Senate? Wouldn't that be mind blowing?

Obama left office a pretty young president. He left office still relatively popular, which is unusual. A historic figure with a real following. I would argue that there's been two follies so far. One, I think his post presidency lacks definition. Maybe not to him, but to those of us sort of voyeuristically looking on, I think there's an element of we don't get it yet. We see the activities. But if you ask me, what sense of purpose is he driving towards in the post presidency? It's hard for me to ascertain at this moment.

I think it's kind of an unfair level of expectation we have, too. It's like, by all rights, he should be able to hang in Martha's vineyard and ride out the rest of his life. He aged himself 16 years within eight years. The dudes deserved it. And yet I do feel this weird thing of, like, he's such a principled, powerful, and effective human that I guess I think he should do stuff. What do you think, Monica?

Yeah. I think it's because we love him so much and we miss him actively because of the way things have gone. I think we're feeling a little bit desperate. But he is, though. Did you guys see the movie, the Julia Roberts and Mahership? No. It's a movie on Netflix right now. Leave the world behind. It's a book, but his company produced the movie, and it's so obviously hitting you over the head with these separations and polarizations are going to kill us. So he's trying to help and sort of impact us and tell us what.

To do or mitigate the divide.

Cautionary tales.

Yeah, that's what I would want him to do.

I think he's trying to do it without doing it in the political arena, because the political arena is ridiculous right now.

Part of the problem is he's sort of straddling the Carter and Bush model. So he's injecting himself enough into the debate to not be able to absolve himself of responsibility and say, I just want to hang out in Martha's vineyard. But he's not diving into a set of issues in enough of a way to drive that agenda. I accept the fact that there can be something in between Bush completely moving on and expressing himself through painting and Carter never going away. There's every reason to believe Obama might get there. I didn't include him because I don't believe he's there.

There's no conclusion for you to really draw yet, but the book does draw conclusions. And through these examples, there are lessons in managing stress and in transitioning jobs, shifting from someone who lives to work to someone who works to live. Tell me what philosophies you walked away from and which ones you cherry picked ala Carte, that you hope to infuse into the sadly second half of your life. We're almost there.

I'm 42 years old. I found at times, myself sort of tortured by writing this book. It's a weird thing for somebody who's 42 to obsessively spend three and a half years digging into the last chapter of life, you're left feeling quite insignificant because you realize these people achieved a level of influence and impact that you'll never achieve. And a lot of them struggled in that final chapter of life. I felt sort of tortured by that. And in the midst of writing this book, I also transitioned jobs. I spent 13 years at Google and Alphabet and then went to Goldman Sachs. And it was a stark contrast. I went from remote work in an unregulated tech company where I had total flexibility, to a regulated industry where you pay for coffee, you go into the office five days a week, you wear a suit. You can't just take a bath at two in the afternoon.

Why did you take that job? Because that's where you're at currently.

Almost all my friends, plus or minus their 40th birthday, made a decision to either not just change jobs, but change careers or double down on what they're.

Doing post Covid or 40. What's more relevant, I think the combination.

Of the two forced a lot of.

Us perfectly for you to not know.

Yeah. And it's funny, when you're working remotely, you kind of tell yourself this story that I'm living the dream. I see my kids all the time. I can be on my own schedule. And only when I started at Goldman did I realize there's a set of rituals that I was missing. The ritual of saying goodbye to my kids and going off to work and then coming back and having them greet me at the door. The ritual of giving a shit what I looked like and a vacation. Not like working where I sleep or working where I eat or working where I go to the bathroom.

Give you a compartmentalized life that maybe you missed.

Yeah. And so that was sort of interesting.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. What is your role there?

So I'm the president of global affairs and I also co head innovation at.

The firm, because every time I've emailed you in the last year, you've been in a dramatically different time zone and we literally can't get on the phone. You've been in the Middle east for the last three months and you were in Africa at one time. Obviously something international is afoot with this job.

Part of the reason I went to Goldman Sachs, which is not an intuitive move, you would think the other direction would be more intuitive. I've always been interested in this relationship between business and geopolitics. Geopolitics has always been my passion. And basically, until Covid, unless you were at a tech company or like an energy giant, geopolitics didn't really impact business that much. Right? You had a tech competition between the US and China, but it hadn't turned into this very, very complicated relationship.

So really quick, give an example that's so on the surface right now is you have Taiwan, who's currently making all of the chips that we all need. And China very much believes Taiwan is part of it. And there is great fear that they are going to invade and claim it. And then because they're holding this tech, Taiwan's going to get a lot of international support, probably including us, that otherwise wouldn't be on the table. So, like, when you look at tech and finance, it's so intertwined.

It's so intertwined, but it's even bigger than that. So when Covid happens, the geopolitical center of gravity moves from this kind of war on terror framework that we've been in for 20 years to a competition between the US and China, where the US realizes, oh my gosh, we're completely reliant on China for all types of supply chains, not just tech. China realizes, oh my gosh, it's a huge, huge problem that the US has such a dominant position with the dollar as the reserve currency. And by the way, the two countries are basically locked in a battle for the world's technological infrastructure being built, and they have very different models. So all of a sudden this happens, and every single business in every sector and geography finds them caught in the crossfire of this competition. And all of a sudden, this platform that I'm on at Google, which is really about tech, I feel it shrinking, which is a funny thing to say, because you think about the reach of Google. Google is the best platform in the world to talk about tech, but all these non tech businesses are getting dragged into the geopolitical dynamics.

And I was sort of in search of a platform that was broader. And David Solomon, who's the CEO of Goldman Sachs and a DJ. And a DJ. We'd been friends for 13 years, and we'd always get together once a quarter for a meal. And I remember we were each other's first dinner during COVID where you could go to a restaurant. And he said to me, there's a huge shift with all the businesses that we work with, which is all they want to talk about is geopolitics. And it strikes me that we need a machinery to offer them an opinion about where this is going, but we need to just commercially help them navigate it. He said, I don't know exactly how it's going to work, but come to Goldman Sachs and let's figure this out together. And honestly, it's been the most extraordinary year and a half of my career, because how many times in your life do you walk into a new building in a sector you've never thought much about or worked in, where every day you're learning something new and you've got hundreds of new people that you didn't know exist? The last time that happened was like summer camp, honestly, right.

Or college or something.

It's a very unusual and precious experience.

But isn't it the most energizing? And it slows time down again for you? I find that to be a great gift. When you can submerge yourself in something that's completely out of the operating system, that's working in the background, your subconscious forcing you to be present and mindful and thoughtful. The context can do that for you.

Someone I know you've had on a number of times, Adam Grant, who's a mutual friend of both of ours. I sort of somehow convinced Adam to be my unofficial therapist during COVID I couched it as be my coach, which he sort of reluctantly agreed to it really turned into therapy.

The medical board probably prefers that.

Yeah, exactly. But this is at a point where I felt so overcome by worrying, and because I could sense my platform shrinking, but I couldn't quite define it, I started to get very anxious about what's next. I was living to work, meaning my entire day was taken up by working for some sort of unknown outcome. And Adam encouraged me. He said, have some structured worry time. He's like, what are some things that you habitually do? I said, I love taking baths. I just sit in warm water for hours.

You're so unique with the oddity collection.

You're a very special person.

You are. I wanted to say about nine times throughout this. The fucking recall of the names and the date, it's bonkers. It's like talking to Wikipedia.

Also this morning, I was looking you up again, and I saw the Goldman Sachs thing, and I was like, is this Jane? I got nervous, and I was like, oh, wait, it's a new Jared, right? Because no one can transition industries like that besides you.

What admiral taught me was two things. One, if you're a worrier, you're a worrier. Focus on what you have agency over, which is just give yourself some structured worry time. So when you work out, when you sit in hot water, just decide, that's what I'm going to worry about.

Right?

That's what I do. And it gave me a lot of clarity. And what's interesting about this job is I don't quite know how the transition happened mentally for me. But if I reflect on my sort of year and a half at Goldman Sachs, I would say the biggest and most important attribute for me is going from somebody who lives to work to somebody who feels like I work to live. I don't know how long it'll last, but at least at this moment in time, it's the first time in my life where I don't think about what's next. And so people ask me, what do you want to do next? And I say, honestly, I woke up this morning. I feel like I have the coolest job. The people I'm interacting with, the things that I'm working on, the issues that I'm grappling with, are the exact ways that I want to spend my time. I go home, I see my incredible three daughters and wife. I go to sleep. And what I want to do next is I want to just do that again tomorrow.

Right?

Rinse and repeat. I would say, to the extent that I do worry time now, I worry about that being a fleeting chapter of my life and getting sucked back into the morass of what I experienced before. And maybe we should all just be paying attention to our forecast indicators that when you find yourself working and living to focus on what's next, maybe you need to shake something up in your life.

We bring it up nonstop. Yeah. The more you can be obsessed in pursuing process over results, generally, the happier you're going to be, because the results are completely unknown and out of your control. But the process is largely in your control.

Yeah.

Now, I think there's a pervasive stereotype about finance people, and even Goldman Sachs, I think is a triggering word for a lot of people post 2008. But I will say we've talked with it. Like Ray Dalio in particular. I think I went into that interview with one sense of what Ray Dalio might be, and then after we met him, I'm like, this is one of the most spiritual, thoughtful, generous, creative people. Are you finding that to be the case where your own stereotype of that sector has been challenged?

I wouldn't say I had a dogmatic view of finance. I viewed it as something that I would never be interested in. Right. And finance as a topic in the abstract was never something that I gravitated towards. But in context, I find it really interesting, because if you look at all the geopolitical tension, we're probably in the most unstable geopolitical moment in more than two decades. And if economists are saying we're going to have a soft landing in 2024, the geopolitical landing is going to be a very, very hard one. Yes, there's a war in the Middle east. Yes, there's a war in Europe. But it's this sustained tension between the US and China that's going to get worse for longer. Taiwan gets all the oxygen. I worry more about a conflict in the South China Sea. But I worry that the short term dynamics around supply chains, where we remain overly dependent on China for a number of supply chains that can't be diversified, is what's at greatest risk of shocking the system.

I also think people are generally a bit naive about how much the economy plays a role in our overall social stability. When you look at times where unemployment falls below some threshold, that's when revolutions happen. It is such the bedrock we build everything else on, and it can easily be undervalued. But I think it's incredibly important.

If you look at every economic anomaly that you see today, it has some geopolitical explanation. If you look at every geopolitical dynamic, it has some economic explanation. And so what's interesting about being at a place like Goldman Sachs, you sit at the nexus of these two things. So I'm able to look at the world now through both vantage points. And sometimes I'm led to a conclusion about what's happening geopolitically by an early warning signal I see in the economy and vice versa.

So is it safe to say your role right now is to be looking at the geopolitical landscape of different regions and or countries and trying to predict how stable that will be for business?

So that's part of it. There's like twelve questions that are persistent right now. If you talk to any business, including Goldman, everyone's asking the same obvious set of questions about us, China tensions, supply chains, the war in the Middle east. It's a predictable set of questions. I view each of those questions as the equivalent of a picture on a puzzle box. And then I go and I find all the different pieces of expertise that exists throughout Goldman sachs that exists with clients of the firm, and I piece them together into some kind of conclusion about what's happening. And then I take that conclusion and I show up to all the businesses that we work with, whether they're sovereign wealth funds or multinational corporations or family office. And you realize that the combination of what we know as Goldman, what they know because they're seeing a lot, you end up with an enormous amount of expertise in the room. So that's the first part of the job. But then the second part of the job, which is more exciting, is given this sort of one plus one equals three dynamic, can we generate a new opportunity together that we're only able to think of because of this combined expertise?

So one model is there's a set of mandates that as a business you're chasing, there's another model, which is you roll up your sleeves with the businesses that you're working with and you come up with a mandate together and you chase it in partnership.

How are you in the Middle east currently? You've been there for the last three months. What lens are you looking at that through? What are you seeing that's really not being talked about?

In the last three months, I've been in just about every country in the Middle east and North Africa. I've met with the leaders of most of these countries. And the social mediaification of this war is unlike anything that we've seen before. There's more hours of footage uploaded to all the major platforms than there have been minutes of the entire war.

Oh my God.

And it's being algorithmically targeted in ways that we've never seen it targeted before. It's creating an element of identity politics on the ground. But more importantly, it's creating a reservoir of content that I believe is going to risk radicalizing the next generation.

It'll resurface for the next 20 years.

And I like to remind people, the 911 hijackers, they were radicalized by watching far less footage that had no algorithmic component to it. Coming out of Bosnia in the scale.

Yeah, I just listened to a daily about the Houthis, and I was really shocked to learn that all the recruitment, or a good deal of the recruitment, is happening on TikTok. And I guess my knee jerk was, how could that be allowed on TikTok? Why aren't there any guardrails?

I think the challenge with all of these social media platforms is they're so vast, they are very difficult to regulate. The adoption is at such a scale by young people that you can't put it back in a box. It's become a seemingly intractable problem. I remember at the height of ISIS, I had interviewed a lot of former ISIS fighters. And when I was at Jigsaw, we spent a lot of time in iraqi prisons interviewing incarcerated ISIS fighters. And the thing that we were always struck by is how much the Internet took somebody who was never religious. Sometimes they actually were another religion before. How fast technology allows the radicalization process to happen. And that was a very different algorithmic moment. And so the algorithms are just an evolutionary accelerant in the radicalization process. And radicalization takes on a lot of different forms. But the most pervasive attributes of radicalization are it's the process by which one learns about an issue in a bubble and how that bubbled information reinforces explanations for why they don't like something that is happening in their lives, and it becomes a great diversion. And the more it distracts from a trouble that they have day to day, the more zealous they become about it.

Yeah, it has a self accelerating quality to it.

To me, this is one of the seminal challenges of our generation.

And isn't that what jigsaw was kind of addressing when I was at Jigsaw.

And it's still thriving, but part of the reason I founded it was I believed as you added another 5 billion people to the Internet, all the problems of the physical world would spill over online. And the only way to get ahead of that was you had to build technology to address the challenges that were destabilizing the Internet. What we found is it's very difficult. If you look at dis and misinformation, one of the biggest challenges with it is all the evidence suggests that once somebody has absorbed the disinformation or received it, you really cannot retroactively change their mind. This is why fact checking doesn't work totally.

We've had a bunch of experts addressing this. It does nothing. You will never out fact somebody. You're not going to hold up a book to them and get them off their position.

It's actually even worse than that, because all evidence suggests that when you try to interject to tell somebody something's wrong or something's falsified, or you should double check your sources. No matter how you slice it and dice it, that interstitial or that injection makes somebody more likely to share the falsity that they've absorbed.

It encourages them and fuels them to be even more double virulent. Oh, my God, Jared, you're so smart. I've had 20 minutes to think about our little dust up, and I want to say a, I apologize.

Oh, you don't have to.

I just want to acknowledge I know why I'm so emotionally activated by this particular issue is, to me, it's very reminiscent of let's ignore the truth for our loyalty to a patriarch. Let's lie in service of our loyalty feels very dysfunctional family. The alcoholic who we're pretending is not an alcoholic, it's really ripe with childhood stuff. For me, the notion that I'm saying, no, this isn't the best option. Everyone's saying no, but you're a Democrat. It has more weight than it should, and that's on me. And obviously, I'm not promoting anything that would elect the other person that I like even less. It really brings up, let's all just ignore these things that are uncomfortable because we're on this team, and that's our dad.

I definitely understand that and I appreciate it. And I will say, and I include myself in this, everyone in this room is extremely privileged. We're so privileged that we get to look at the Maui Comet or these little things that are just like, these things that aren't that impactful for what they're doing. And I think that's just because of our privilege. And if you're in it and you're looking at really the state of the country and what's going to happen, it's just so much a no brainer. It scares me that we would be pushing anyone away from that. And if Trump gets elected, we know him. At this point, it's not going to be a presidency. It's going to be four years of him getting back at his enemies. It's going to be a pretty big disaster that we can't have. But, yes, I appreciate that.

Yeah, something else is happening in my body when that topic comes up.

I get it. Yeah, it's hard.

What do you think about all this, Jared?

The country's at a pretty critical inflection point right now, and I think it's very easy to make it about Biden or make it about Trump. I actually think it does a disservice to the inflection point to focus on the people. At the end of the day, 70 million people roughly voted for each of them, and probably some version of the same will happen again. This election is not going to be an election where one candidate blows out the other. And so we're missing something systemic that's happening in this country, and we're doing a disservice to it when, again, we focus on two individuals. I'm not trying to trivialize, at the end of the day, they're the likely.

But you're the emblem on the hood of the car. The car is the issue, but we're really hyper focused on just the emblem that sticks out of the end of it.

People are really not just upset on both sides, but the polarization is getting much, much worse on both sides. And, look, if you had asked me in 2019, and maybe you did, I would say we've been through polarized moments before. What's unique, though, is we've never been through such a polarized moment. In an era of not just social media, but hyper algorithmic targeting within these social media platforms, it's unchartered territory because it's adding machinery into the mix that's guiding a lot of this polarization.

You're right. And even in my lifetime, I've seen these little swells of this issue or that that is divisive. But what is great is humans fatigue. And I think if there wasn't this intervention with the tech, naturally, I think it would dissipate a bit. I think we're all exhausted from it, but we have this thing that's smarter than us, that's hacking a region of our brain that is the cocaine that can keep you up past 24 hours. So it's like we have fatigue, but we have this dopamine machine in our hand that can get us back online and make us rally for another 2 hours.

This idea of mental isolationism, I think it just doesn't work for the same reason that geopolitical isolationism doesn't work in an era of globalization. Yeah. Every time I talk to people, the words I hear, I'm overwhelmed. I want to opt out. And it's just not pragmatic and it's not realistic. That being said, I do think that there's interjections that we have to make in our own lives. I had sort of a big transformative moment over New Year's. I'm not sure what triggered it, where I just decided that it's not just that I'm on my devices all the time. It's like a real addiction. I feel it when I don't have my phone. I am reaching for something.

You're in a dopamine deficit, and you're uncomfortable like you're an addict.

I'm certainly not trying to trivialize addiction by drawing a false parallel, but I think we are all addicted to our devices. And what I find is some of the solutions are actually very simple. Like, I come home now, and there is no reason for me to be on my phone from the time I wake up to the time I drop my kids off at school or from the time I get home in the 2 hours while the kids are awake before they go to bed. And I find it's actually not enough to put it out of reach. So my thing is, I put it in my coat pocket, in a closet, in a different room, where I close the door. I'll tell you, the biggest impact that I've felt is I feel more present, but it actually changes the behavior of my kids as well. If they don't see me addicted to.

It, well, they're not. Competing also for your attention, which has its own set of outcomes.

What's hard is then I go on a trip when I'm away from my family, and I'm on my phone the whole time, and I come back just like, heavily addicted to it again.

Yeah. Well, Jared, you're incredible. I think you've absorbed Eric Schmidt's most impossible landscape of knowledge and even more impressive than last time. So I hope you'll come back.

Yeah. Thank you.

Such a good guy. You're such a fucking good guy. Of course you and Adam are friends. All right, well, be well. I want everyone to read life after power. It's incredible. There's beautiful lessons to take away from all these different folks who have, as you said, made the biggest transitions imaginable. So thank you, and good luck with the book, and we'll see you again soon.

Thanks, guys.

Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica, correct all the facts that were wrong. That's okay, though. We all make mistakes. Jared Cohen, fact check.

Jared, let's.

I think we need to disclose, for full transparency to the listeners, the cherries that we just went through an incredible ride.

Yeah. And you're going to go through the same ride.

I'm going to go through the.

No, the cherry.

Should they choose to listen to the cult episode of Armchair Anonymous. But heavy.

Yeah, it was heavy.

What's your energy at out of ten right now?

It's low.

Could you give it a number?

Well, I'm on malaria pills.

Do you feel yours at all? Because I don't.

I feel a little funny. Just a little bit, though. Not like crazy.

Okay.

Which is good.

Yeah.

It's just hearing a bunch of stories of people being taken advantage of is hard.

Yes, it is.

It's so sad. It's. The worst thing you can do is take advantage of a vulnerable person, especially.

The ones that were born into these ones where it's like, well, to leave it is to leave every single person you've ever known or loved in your life.

Exactly. It's all bad. It's. If you're born in, you're losing everything. If you were recruited in, it's because you're vulnerable to that and you got preyed upon.

Yeah.

Which is also heartbreaking, horrifying.

Yeah.

Rough, rough, rough. But that's coming.

That's coming your way. Maybe don't listen.

No, actually, I think this one should be mandatory. Required listening.

Oh, wow. We've never done that.

Then I'm going to.

Okay.

So use it or lose it.

Use it or lose it.

What's rl really?

Required listening.

Oh, required listening.

We're doing something a little different today.

We are?

Yeah. We're going to do a couple quickies.

Yeah.

Some facties on our good friend Jared Cohen.

Yes. Who we love.

What a good boy.

Brilliant.

Total good boy club.

Yeah. Best boy.

You mean best boy.

Yeah. And he is so smart.

He's so smart. I know.

It's crazy.

We talked to so many people. It really humbles you or humbles me. Like God. All the names and the dates and this and the that.

Wow.

I know. Pretty impressive. So we're going to do a little bit of facts and then we're going to play you our segments. There's four of them. Four episodes of the Puzzler podcast. AJ Jacobs, who we've had on this show before.

Yes.

We loved.

Very fun episode with him on.

Yes. Where we did puzzles.

So many puzzles.

Oh, it was great. And now he has a podcast where he does puzzles. He has people on to do them. And so we did that.

We were gas.

And this week, he did a Monica and dax week.

Like Fargo. Yeah, we got our own week. Like, we were a great television show.

Exactly. And they're quick little episodes. And so we're just going to play them for you after this. Maybe you'll enjoy it and then go.

Listen to AJ's podcast. Follow it. Yeah. They're very short and fun. They're a little blast.

Yeah.

I think a huge percentage of people do these different New York Times daily. They're like, five minutes.

Yeah.

World's one. There's the math.

Yeah.

I think people like little pops of intellectual stimuli.

Yeah. Okay, so a few facts for Jared. Okay, one, and this is the most important one. What's the brand of the presidential limo that Kennedy was assassinated in? Your guess was a 64 Lincoln Continental.

Yeah.

And it's a 61 Lincoln Continental. Okay, so you were close.

Yeah. Three years off.

Yeah, but close.

I can't even say I knew with any certainty, really, what year I thought it was, other than I think he was killed in 60. What year do you get assassinated? Maybe it's 63. So I was kind of assuming it was like, a current model. 63. Okay, so that thing had been around for a couple of years. Probably takes a year to build one of those things. All the bulletproof stuff.

Yeah.

Convertible. Not a great idea. I don't know that there's been convertibles since post.

I don't think they should ever do that.

Well, have you noticed what the pope rides around in the Pope mobile? He's got, like, a huge glass roof, so you can still. It's like he's in a convertible, but it's bulletproof.

That's so people can see him.

Yeah, they can see him.

You know, one time I was walking down the street home from here, and.

The president drove by in that monstrous.

Car, but it was kind of hard to. Well, which is on purpose, I believe. I didn't know what car he was in.

Was there a bunch of motorcycle cops? I mean, it was hundreds.

Hundreds of cars in succession. Same type of car and then motorcycles and all these things. And it was him. And then he went to little Dom's.

No way.

I'm pretty sure her.

I find that he drives around in a Cadillac limousine. That's like all the american presidents or the last bunch. I know this from working at General Motors because it's part of the fleet program. So I believe he drives around in a Cadillac limousine. But it's on a suburban chassis so that it can withstand a ton of weight because that thing weighs so much because of all the armor and stuff. But it has a fun name. Will you find out what the fun name of the president's limousine is? It's like the monster or the something.

The beast.

The beast.

Cool.

Yeah. And it looks preposterous. It's a Cadillac limousine, but the wheels are huge. It looks like a monster truck.

Wow. I don't remember that part. I just saw him and then I was at little Dom's after that. And you found his wallet. He was there.

There's no way they were letting people.

He stayed in the car, but someone came out and got his food.

Oh, okay. I believe that. I didn't believe he sat at a table and ate at Lil Dom's. They'd have to shut down the entire restaurant and they would have had to do background checks.

No, he would have been like, she's cool. I know her.

I've heard her show.

She's great. Yeah. So anyway, that was exciting. Okay, what does PEpFAr stand for? The US president's emergency plan for AIDS relief.

Okay.

Was George H. W. Bush the head of the CIA? Yes.

He was director.

He was a director?

Yes, under Reagan Regan, Ford brought Bush.

Back to Washington to become the director of Central intelligence under Ronald Reagan. Wait, he served as a 43rd vice president. Vice president under Reagan.

Oh, right. He was his vice president. He can't be the director of central intelligence and the vice president. Or if he has to investigate himself.

What about also, he was the president.

He's also the president. He's had a lot of jobs.

Wow. Remember, wasn't it him whose nurse gown was open? You saw his butt.

Oh, did that happen?

I think so. I hope that up.

When would he have been in a nurse gown in front of cameras for Halloween? Did he go as a patient?

H. W. Bush, did he go as.

A patient on Halloween?

No. He's old.

I know, but why would there have been cameras in the hospital?

I'm going to look up George H. W. Bush.

Butt or hospital gown too. Sounds nice.

Okay. I think I made it up.

Maybe it's on a cartoon. Maybe it's not like on the Simpsons. I could see them doing it.

It's never really been my show, but.

It'S impossible not to catch some episodes though, right?

Maybe it was somebody. I know it was somebody. And I remember thinking, this is a disgrace. Like, they don't need to do this. Anyway, you mentioned that Rami said that the arabic word for human is forgetful. Yes. The arabic word for human being is Insan, which is derived from the word nacion Nassian, which means to forget. Yeah, I know. I like that. Now, d fill versus PhD.

Right. That's what they do in England.

In England, they call it a defill. You hate that.

Sure. It's just one more thing to learn, I guess. Can't we all just call it the same thing?

Well, they probably did. Exactly. Then we're the ones that changed, and.

We just flipped it.

Yeah, because PhD is DPH. Yeah. D. Phil is a doctor of philosophy, and PhD is a doctor of philosophy. But we messed up all the letters. Why'd we do that? Why'd we put philosophy first?

Well, because they were the parents and we were the kids, and we wanted to have our own thing. Yeah. It's an age old story, really. Liberal arts education. Think about it.

Oh, one thing I really wanted to bring up. He says that William Taft's wife, it sounded like he said Helen Mirren.

Oh, sure.

And it's Helen Heron, which. So he said Helen Heron. But if you don't know Helen Heron, you heard that as.

And you're familiar with the actor Helen Mirren?

Actress. Wonderful, wonderful actress.

Celebrated and cherished actor.

Also, someone, if she asked for your dick mold.

Yeah.

Also someone, maybe Kristen would say yes.

Totally agree. Yeah.

If you don't know what we're talking about, listen to Bradley Cooper fact.

Right.

It might be real crazy conversation to just hop into. Yeah. I think Kristen would be fine with that. Penis mold to Helen Mirren.

Those are my facts. Obviously, Jared's full of facts. That's all he does is talk about facts.

He's a fact machine.

He is. But I trust him.

Yeah, we trust. He's a trusted brand.

He's a very trusted.

I guess I have one update about whiskey, because when I told the girls that I had told the whole story about whiskey on the podcast, they said, and then you told them about him getting lost. And it was like, no, because that happened the day after we recorded. So, same week, rough week for whiskers. Same panic, too. All of a sudden, no one knows where whiskey's at.

Okay.

And this is at a point where we have eight house guests, and then there's us four. So we have three families stand at the house, and then us four. And everyone is deployed to find whiskey. I sit it out. I'm like, someone needs to stay at the house, and if he just walks into a bedroom, I can.

Sure.

This is going on for a while. People are. People are in cars. Kids are crying. He's gotten eaten by a coyote. He's been hit by a car.

What time of day is this?

This is like midday on a Sunday.

Okay?

Everyone's on high alert and looking. There's a lot of little kids staying at the house. So all these little girls are really upset that the dog they just met has probably been eaten by a coyote. So again, it's just pandemonium. Everyone's unhinged. And then at some point, after about an hour of this, someone hears barking from the yard. So we have a dog run. I don't know how someone would get in trouble in this dog run. You let them out the back door of the house, and it's totally fenced in, and it's like fake grass so that they can pee on it and stuff and doesn't ruin it. Well, also, there's, like, a trench where the electrical stuff and everything has been buried. And there's a drop. So there's wood that covers that, so no one falls into that hole. Somehow whiskey got himself in there and has just been in a box.

No, with it closed.

Yes. He's under a wood. He's gotten himself somewhere he can't get out of. And he's under a sheet of plywood.

Oh, my.

Barking. And someone hears his faint bark.

Which he's. With all those wires.

The tricks will not end the wires. Well, no, there's nothing exposed down there.

Okay.

It's like an access box in case someone has to get into there.

Get there.

I guess he was able to. There was a big enough gap that he could get himself down in there, and then he couldn't get out. But he's just. He's under a pile of wood in the dog run.

So you got him out?

Yes, got him out.

But you didn't cry like you cried when Matt got under the pool.

No, because again, we're, like, hot on the heels of Valentine's Day, and I'm like, this dog won't quit. It's like every couple of days now, the whole family is going to be in a tizzy. Tizzy. And then I just want to add, too, because I had a fair amount of commenters say, like, why don't you just get him doggy steps to get up on the bed? And guess what? I did that. I did that a year ago because it was already annoying a year ago, back when it was still much better than it is now. Get him doggy steps. They're soft, they're inviting, they're nice. Put food on every layer of it. He won't do it. He will not walk up.

Let's remind people he has three legs.

I know. And he does. But he somehow gets up the steps in the house to the second floor when he wants to just fine. He's an obstinate little bastard. He'd rather be lifted than walk up those steps.

Yeah.

And he knows if he's.

Except he doesn't also want to be picked up.

He doesn't want to be picked up. And he doesn't want to stay on the bed anymore.

Yeah.

Last night, trying to watch the final episode of Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Other update. What an incredible. I'm like, I'm so mad. We're going to have to wait probably two years or something for the next.

I mean, they left it up to, like, they could or couldn't. They don't have to do another. But I want them to.

They must do another.

I know. Okay. So he is wreaking havoc.

And again, it was a power struggle. So I had put him on the bed. He jumped off, put him on the bed. I had done it four times in the middle of this episode. And then when he came the fifth time back and started barking, I was just looking at him. Absolutely not. I'm not picking you up. You got to stay down there. He, like, does this weird, like, I think they're called pat grunts. When the gorillas do it, it's like.

Pat grunts.

Yeah.

He's like, making this weird noise.

Yeah.

And he's barking. And then I look at him. No, I'm not going to pick you up. You won't stay up here. This is madness. It's very distracted during most of the finale. And then finally Kristen took him down to bed. Thank God. The problem is we have people staying in the room or his cages in his little box that he sleeps in his house.

Yeah.

So I don't know if we can put him.

Why don't you move the house to the.

My bedroom.

No, to the main area downstairs.

Because he does it. Because he'll bark in there. So we have figured out that he likes being in the one.

I mean, I will say, I do feel like you guys have.

A lot of people.

Like, you need Caesar and you need a good trainer. I'm like, I don't have time to train this dog. I already have two kids in several full time jobs. I don't have time to train this dog.

Right. You don't.

And I think he's beyond training, if I'm being honest.

But I just mean like, I don't think he's had a trainer and stuff. It's just he knows what he can get away with, and he does. Like any animal, like any person. I think if you just put him in his box and just let him whine and whine and whine. Like, eventually he'll stop.

Well, you would think. But no, he doesn't stop. That's what's incredible. He has such stick to itness. You got to applaud it.

You have to let it go.

Maybe for five, but the kids wake up, and then they're all upset. Why is whiskey barking and then they're not asleep? Because definitely, we've tried to let him, as we'd say, cry it out. Right? He's running the house.

This is a codependent enabling.

That's exactly what I told him when I looked at him. I said, I can't be codependent and lift you up anymore because you're upset. You're down there. It's just ruining my good time.

Right?

And then you're looking at him, and you're like, he doesn't understand any of this. He doesn't know how to.

That's why you got to get him out of the room and close the door.

I know, but then he'll just bark.

He'll bark forever. It's crazy. Then I'm like, well, let's put him in the dog run in this safe cage, and then. Can't do that. That's a whiskey update.

Okay.

I'm sure there's more to come.

Great.

Yeah. God knows what he'll get himself lodging a tree or something. But watch Mr. And Mrs. Smith. It's phenomenal.

It's so good. Do that. Listen to our puzles.

Listen to puzzles. Enjoy our puzzles.

Yeah. And try to play along.

Yeah.

Although we were pretty quick.

We didn't do too shabby, if I'm being honest. You shined in particular.

You too?

No. Well, good job. I was proud to have you as my partner.

Me too. I always am.

Yeah. All right. Love you.

Love you.

Hello, puzzlers. Welcome to the Puzzler podcast, the free perfume spritz at your puzzle department store. I am your host, AJ Jacobs. And I am with today's guests, the amazing Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, hosts of armchair expert and much, much more. Welcome, Dax and Monica.

Oh, we're delighted.

Thank you for having us.

Can we be on every day?

Absolutely.

I'm so sad you're not on this network doing this.

Yeah, it's a shame this will be a hostile takeover and a game of puzzles.

We are ready to be taken. Honored. Are you kidding? Well, today, speaking of podcasts, today's puzzle is called armchair export. That's not an e. That's an o, because we are very tricky here as a puzzler. Cool. So the idea is that all the answers in this puzzle are podcasts that you know and love, but we have changed one letter.

Oh, cool.

I'm going to describe the podcast. So, for instance, I kind of gave it away. But if this were a podcast from Dax Shepard and Monica Padman about shipping upholstered seats overseas, that would be armchair export.

Okay, I see how this works. I'm glad you gave us the example.

Me, too.

I thought you were just going to do one letter and see if we knew.

It'll be obvious.

But then I got scared that we'll expose ourselves as not knowing as much about our industry as we should.

This is true.

Okay, well, relatively big ones. Okay. But I'm here for hints, too. Well, I'll give you one more example. Just if the clue was a podcast about a guy who gulps a lot of drinks very quickly. And this was hosted by AJ Jacobs and is featuring guests Dax Shepard and Monica Padman.

Okay. The guzzler.

The guzzler.

Wouldn't it have been the chuggler?

Well, if that were a word and you changed all the z's to g's.

Chugging is the thing.

Juggler.

It's just one letter.

Change. Just one letter.

Good thing we practice.

We could do another puzzle where you change three letters and. Juggler.

Say any nail word you want. Really?

It runs.

All right. Are you ready?

Yes.

This is a podcast from the New York Times about. It's about the latest news in small ornamental lace mats. Little Lacey mats.

The doily. The doily.

The doily.

Who wouldn't listen to that?

Grandmas would unite around that one.

Yeah, they would.

This is a podcast about a former late night talk show host who makes meals for his hungry pals.

Yeah.

Conan, who needs a friend?

But is it called. You got it. You're there. Okay, Conan. Wait, what is the real one?

That's the question. We're trying to first start with the. We know it's Conan and he wants a friend, but we're not sure what the.

Perfect.

Yes. It's not want. He does more than want.

He needs a.

Now. So Conan needs a friend is a real name.

Yeah.

And then the clue was a show about a guy who makes food for friends.

Food.

Yeah.

He cooks for friends. Or he needs.

Can you add a k. Oh, that's good. I like that. I'm going to give you credit. That is not it. But I really like that because also, that could be a massage.

You're right.

Try to get it, though, correctly.

Conan after dark.

Conan needs a friend.

You're thinking too clever. This is just like, if you're giving someone something to eat, you are.

Oh, Conan feeds a friend.

Of course.

Monica right there feeds a friend. Nicely done. But I prefer the needs of friend. All right, we got two more. This podcast features first person true stories told from the point of view of a green citrus fruit lime from NPR. They're often, like, very almost twee stories.

It's this american life.

I made a face.

Okay. And then we got a lime in there.

Yeah, it's a lime. This american lime.

This american lime.

This american lime. Another potential hit.

Wow.

Love it.

We really worked through that.

I could see. I saw the gears churning. Well, this one actually is a little harder, but I'm confident. All right, so this one is a very big show. You may not have heard it, but it's a lovely show. It's a podcast about ropes, ties, and pretzels, among other things. It's hosted by Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark right here on the iHeart Rope network.

Ties and pretzels. Stuff you should dough.

Stuff you should dough. Oh, because I don't dough pretzels.

I like that, too, but it doesn't even work.

You're there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Stuff you should know.

I love that show.

We got to mess with. No new.

You got ropes, ties, pretzels, stuff you should not. Stuff you should. Wonderful.

Good job, Monty.

Wow.

Well done. Look at that.

Those are the nicest boys in the world. I want to shout out. Those are the nicest boys in the world.

So glad you said that. I am a huge fan as well.

Me, too.

Actually, Chuck was a guest right here on the puzzler. Oh, of course.

Did he kill it? Did he do so well?

Yes, he was lovely. And he was a good Chuckler. He just chuckled his way through it. We had a good time. Well, you did great.

You got them all.

I can't believe smart list wasn't in that mix. Right? I was already preparing. Like, how is he going to change one letter? Smart, made up word.

But that's hard because that word is so specific. Yeah, it's hard to swap out a letter.

One letter. It almost can't be done.

Shirtless.

Oh, I got a show about someone who's never had an accident in their slacks. Shartless.

Fantastic.

You just took it to a new level or maybe took it down to a new level. Shartless.

Oh, I hope that doesn't get edited out.

We'll throw an e on it and we will keep it in that people need to know. Well, today we have a movie themed puzzle for you because I know you are both movie fans and have appeared in movies. Actually, I will say briefly, I came up with several movie themed puzzle ideas. My first idea was rejected very vigorously by the puzzle staff. The first idea, though, if you go on IMDb and look at DaX, if you look at your list of credits, do you know what the volunteer at?

I wear that with great pride. If you can start a career as vomitier at party with no lines and work your way up to a cast member on parenthood, what a life. Sky's the limit.

Did it say vomit? The one I saw said guy vomiting at party?

I think I've classed it up by saying vomitier at party.

You're right.

It's actually lower brow guy vomiting at party.

Wow. I didn't know about the noun vomitier. I love it.

Well, clearly I did a great job vomiting because it led to all kinds of vomitier.

Is it a plan volunteer?

It's like group vomitorium. Vomitier at a vomitorium.

Wow.

It's got hints of Rome, ancient Hellenics, liberal artsification.

Well, I was going to do sort of a theme of other cinematic spewing, like the Exorcist.

We would have liked that.

Well, you're nice. Next time you're on.

Yeah.

Instead I would love to try a puzzle called name that title drop. And you might have heard the phrase title drop. My kids taught it to me. It is when a character says the title of a movie during the movie itself.

Oh, I love that. Okay.

Sometimes met with a round of applause if the movie is good enough.

Oh, yeah. There you go. I've seen that the most famous title drop, one of the most famous is Doc Brown telling Michael J. Fox next Saturday night. We're sending you back to the show. Exactly. So in this quiz, we're going to play you a clip from a couple of movies and we bleeped out the title drop. Well, we didn't bleep it out. I decided I would actually say the phrase title drop.

Oh, great.

Title drop. So I can express my acting chops in case you're casting anything. But here goes. Please play clip number one.

Village police department. Yeah, hi, look, I'm calling from Paris.

I have a son who's title trap.

I knew it from the. From the ringing. I love that movie so much.

Wow.

And it's timely because we're just coming out of Christmas. I've seen it recently.

This doesn't air until August 18, just to let you know.

Well, what is it, Monica? Tell us.

Home alone.

Home alone. Baby, you are.

That was so fast. That was crazy.

Yeah, she was way ahead of it. Do you think you would have got, um. It's hard to know because you were saying it before the clip was even over. I think if I'm recollecting correctly, I couldn't help myself. I'm proud to be in this game with you and business.

I have a feeling the rest are going to go to you because my brain doesn't work well like this.

Okay.

Auditorily, no sines like when people play music, I don't know the song until the song's over, basically.

Right.

But this was just the one I knew it was going to get.

Yeah. This is such a shoe in for you. You probably watched this four times in the last two months.

Exactly.

Yeah. I feel this puzzle is like if you love the movie, you know it. If you don't, then you're shit out of luck. All right, so here's clip number two.

I just want to say to the listener who can't see Monica. She's using her left hand to push the clip. And it's shocking how uncoordinated she is with her left hand. She's having the hardest time getting her finger just to the mouse pad.

And I relate.

I tried to write with my right hand the other day and it couldn't be done. So I'm not casting any.

Dax is left handed. I think that you don't understand because you have to use your right hand in life because this is a right handed world you live in. Right and left. These, like, right handers don't have to use their left hand almost ever.

True.

That's true.

Okay, are we ready?

Are you feeling some empathy for.

Yeah.

Nice.

Everything I think and everything I do is wrong. I was wrong about Elton, I was wrong about Christian. Now Josh hated me. It all boiled down to one inevitable conclusion.

I was just totally tidal job.

Oh, I love it. Do you know it?

I feel like these are really on a platter for you. I don't know it.

Clueless.

Clueless. Clueless.

Yes. These are great. I love this game.

Something does happen to my brain, though, when I see that you have it and then I immediately go like, oh, I don't have it. She has it. And then I can't even think any longer.

Mental game.

Is that what it is?

Yes. You need to get a little bit tougher mentally.

I need to block you out during. This is what I need to do. Yeah, but you're in my.

We want to be in separate booths.

We're going to call you back in 25. I'm going to patch in from central LA and she's going to stay here.

All right. Well, we have two. Oh, by the way, I could have done. I looked at your IMDb list for any title drops. There was one, but it was too late. I couldn't get the clip. But it was something along the line of. You're just jealous about my superior retailing ability. You'll never make employee of the month.

I feel like baby mama has to have been said in baby Mama as well. Don't you think, Mamica?

Yeah, not by you, not by me.

No. They wouldn't entrust me with the title drop.

Actually, I wonder if it's in there. I could see them not.

Yeah. They're so good.

Okay, I will fact check that. All right. What about this? Oh, yeah, we have two more.

Give Monica some time to get her hand up.

Ten to twelve minutes.

She just needs a little ten minutes. Heads up.

Tell her to start playing five right now.

Okay, we ready?

Okay.

All right. Clip three. This is clip three.

You felt it your entire life that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Title drop.

Matrix.

Matrix.

Good job. I didn't have that.

Well done.

Well, we've gone like girl movie now. Boy movie.

No. Matrix is very gender neoch. I've watched it many times. I didn't know it well enough. It's a great.

And by the way, this was a scene right before he offers him the blue or the red pill. I would have a hard time. I might take the blue pill personally. Oh, wow.

I should, because I've got way too lucky of a life. I don't know why I would want to find out. None of this is real. Although, if you've listened to the show, you know that we are under a very firm belief that we're living in Monica's father's simulation.

All of us, including you.

Yeah.

You're part of. So I guess you owe ashok a thank you as well. Because for me, I love the role he's assigned me.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you.

Monica's. Dad. I have some notes. I have some notes for him. Overall, it's not that. Now, this one, I do feel guilty because I happen to know that this is a favorite of Monica's. I don't know whether Dax, I think.

You like it, too, so maybe Monica, just kind of hold your outburst.

I'll hold my water.

Okay.

All right. Play clip number four, please.

You're a pack of vultures at the feast time.

I'll drop beach bloody. That's for you.

Yes. Well, you did say on a show, recent, maybe recent dish that you love this movie. Movie.

Let me play it again, but that's good.

Can we do a second?

Glad. I'm so glad you didn't get it immediately.

Can we get a second? Is it breaking the rules to hear it twice?

No.

Okay.

Play it as often as you want.

You're a pack of vultures at the feast time.

I'll drop beach bloody. It's English, right? Are we seeing some kind of a period piece or some kind of.

He's not mean. Well, interesting. The actor is English, but I believe the character is. Daniel Craig is the one who's saying it.

Oh, I got it. Yes. You love these?

Yeah. Oh, my God. Yes. Inheritance or knives out.

Knives out.

Knives out. That's it, exactly.

Wow.

Knives out. Beaks bloody.

Yes. He's definitely playing a southern gentleman, and he is English.

I totally. That was hard.

It was very hard because he sounded a little English and southern.

It sounded like it was going to be from the 20s. Sound like it was an old movie, a period piece.

Well, I love that movie. I love glass onion, too. Did you see that one?

Loved.

So we were three f four, which is.

Got it strong.

We did get it with a little clue.

Pretty big clue, because otherwise it would have been like I was too easy.

Right.

Thank you for showing you're human.

Oh, that was fun. This is so fun, AJ.

It is. AJ.

I love to have. You are amazing then. Well, anytime you want. Listen, if you want any puzzling on the armchair expert, you know, I am happy to provide.

We know where to go.

There you go.

Thank you.

Exactly.

We may rudely accept that casual invitation, as they say.

Yeah.

Are you kidding? Honored. And by the way, I did try to do an f one puzzle and I failed. Maybe a ten. Yeah.

All right.

Well, I hope you do better on these than I did. I feel good.

I'm nervous all of a sudden because.

This is a type of puzzle that we invented here at the puzzler. In the puzzler laboratory. And we think of it as a rebus for your ears. So we call it sort of an earbus trademark pendant. So the way it works is I'm going to say a word in a certain tone of voice or an accent and if you combine the word and my manner of speaking, it's going to reveal the answer, which is a two word phrase. So it's easier than it sounds. It's easier. So if I said, for instance, if I said tide, slow tide, high tide.

High tide.

Slow tide.

Exactly. Or rising tide. Either one. Rising or low to high. But yes, high tide or rising tide.

You're going to hate us as guests because we can't help but go long. But I just want to say that one of the funniest moments I was banned from doing this in a game we would play called. What was that game? Categories or something where there's like 15 words out on the board and you're going to say, okay, I'm going to say one word and you're going to be able to guess three of code names. Code names.

Oh, I love that game. Yeah.

And this was an outlawed clue that you'll remember it because I said proctologist.

Oh, yeah.

That was really australian was one of the things. And then, like, doctor was one and then toilet or something and everyone was really mad. I used an australian accent, but it's very similar tool.

There might be some bad accents. You ready for your first earbuds? Is banana. Nah, banana.

Do you know it? Yeah, but go ahead, let's do it on 3123. Banana split.

I love it and I love the delivery. All right, well, you're a natural. You're two naturals. Ready? We got live er. Live er. Live. I like. They're looking up, that means they're thinking live er. Just so you know, it's sort of in the genre of banana split.

So it's like live, though.

L-I-V-E-R. But I'm pausing between live and, er.

What happens with liver?

Half life? No, it's got the word liver. Yeah, it's something. Liver.

Well, what we got? Fatty liver? We got liver and onions?

We got chopped liver.

Chopped liver.

Chopped liver.

Nicely done. All right, you ready for more? You are on roll. All right, scientist.

Scientist.

Look at that. No hesitation. No hesitation. Unbelievable.

AJ, if these went on into infinity, we would sit here.

We would.

This is like our favorite kind of entertainment. It's like the button. I got drug button for a moment.

I got no plans. That's great. All right, well, what about this one example? Example? It's a two word phrase.

Quadruple example. Four. Example.

Great job. You're on fire. For example.

Sorry.

It's great. We're playing it fast. I love the spelling of four, but.

Yeah, you're going to get hung up on that.

I love that because I loved you. Solved it as you said it?

Yeah, that's always fun.

All right, what about this one motion.

Slow motion. Yeah. She was trying to be kind. She already had it before I was saying she had already had time to look at me to go, like, go ahead.

All right. We had only two more.

Only two more as you're nodding your head, too. So, like, if there's any effort to let me think. I had it before you blew that by nodding your head as you looked at me.

You are doing much better than I did with eight. Four. Okay, ready?

Sayers, naysayers.

Oh, good.

Nice.

That was good. I didn't.

You weren't even, like, condescendingly looking at me.

Don't get defensive over there.

I'm intimidated by your intelligence. It's a compliment to you that I'm.

You're upset. I think you both are right in there. Well, this one. This is a little callback to something Dax said. Rules football. Rouge. Football.

English. Rules football.

English.

Well, I'm a terrible actor.

Okay. Is it scottish?

Scottish rules.

No.

Say it again.

Rules football.

Australian rules football.

No.

Exactly.

What does that even mean? I don't get it.

Well, you're hearing it for the first time, which puts you at a deficit for sure.

Yeah. What is that?

I have heard that. I have no clue what it is. I don't know.

It's like a game. It's like sort of rugby mixed with football. Australian rules football. I mean, it's fun to watch. They don't wear helmets and they just beat up on each other.

Does everyone have cauliflower deer?

Well, if you have it, great for you.

Okay.

Yeah.

I didn't mean to shame anyone.

I didn't know about that one.

My apologies on the. That was a hard one because my accent was more like lucky charms leprechaun or something. I don't know what it was. All right, well, you did fantastic, even with the accent, so thank you. As many of your fans know, and you have a lot of them. At the end of your show, Monica often does a fact checking segment where you. Correct.

We do.

Yep. And you did it for my segment. Thank you.

Do you remember if you erred in any way?

I did, in the sense that I said I didn't know something. So you told me because the question was about turkeys and whether turkeys, do they come from turkey? Why are they turkeys? Are they american? And Monica found they are. They are native to America, and Turkey has no actual turkeys.

It's a feather in the cap of all Americans. Turkey hails from here.

That's right.

And just so you know, 99.9% of the facts being corrected are ones I get wrong. Generally, it's just to attack me and not the gas.

I am sorry, but I'm equal opportunity failure. So if you are going to mess up, I am going to call you out on it.

Yeah.

It's not going to slide by. Not under her watch.

That's right.

I'm ready to be fact checked. And in fact, I may have messed up the fact checking story about you fact checking me, so we're going to have to fact check that. But in this game, I am going to tell you two facts about puzzles, about the history of puzzles, and you are going to try to figure out which is true and which is fake. So one truth and one lie. Are you ready for your first set of potential truths?

Yes.

All right. They're all about puzzles. Option one is the current fastest solving of a Rubik's cube is 3.1 second. Okay, that's fact one. Fact two is if you turn a Rubik's cube randomly at the rate of one twist per second, it will take 3.1 million years to solve, on average. So the 3.1 second, or 3.1 million years, this is a toughie.

Now, my instinct is buy that 3.1 million years number, because I have tried numerous times to solve one. And I don't think if you gave me 3.1 million years, even spinning it intentionally, I wouldn't get it.

Okay.

And then also, have you seen these people do these? They're doing it with one hand. It's insane.

Blindfolded?

Yes, but exactly blindfolded. And I do think the younger generation is really on top of mastering the Rubik's cube now. So I think the first one's true.

You do?

Yeah.

And I think maybe the second one is just simply unknowable true. Okay. Got it. Our final answer is a is correct, and two is potentially unknowable.

You know your Rubik's cube. 3.1 second. Max park.

It sounds like a boy.

Sounds like. We don't know the name.

Increasingly.

It'S on YouTube if you want to see it. Is crazy.

I wish I had the.

And by the way, I never met him, but I did. For my book, meet the man. Who holds the foot record? Because you can solve it with your feet, and that's about 16 seconds.

16 seconds with the feet. That's a real thumb. Your nose at a simpleton. I can't even do it with our hands.

Was that a pun? Were you going with a pun, or. That was.

No, that would have been on accident.

But by the way, if you did the random thing, it would take 111,000,000,000 years.

No.

Yeah. It's crazy. There are 43 quintillion possible combinations, which is just. It's not unknowable, but unfathomable, but also.

A great use of time. Is there anything worth of dedicating billions of years of your life to.

It's got to be that are people who are solving it, then they know how to solve it, and then they're just working on the time. There's a trick or a hack.

There's a system.

There's a system. Yeah, exactly.

It's like chess, right? They've watched the many different permutations of moves so many times that they intuitively and immediately recognize the pattern and know what the response to that given pattern is. So they can probably glance at that cube and they go, oh, it's that pattern. It needs to be spun. Right, left. Imagine that's cognitively what's happening.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's why they can do a blindfolded, because they're allowed to see the cube before they put on the blind. Otherwise, that would be pretty impressive.

Oh, good, I'm glad you explained that, because I was like, how would someone do it blindfolded? That doesn't even make any sense. The colors feel differently. Like, what are we talking about?

Well, synesthesia is a little rough.

Synesthesia.

All right, are you ready for your next fact checking challenge? Yes. All right, this is why were readers of the Baltimore sun furious about the April 26, 2020, puzzle page? Was it because, a, the newspaper printed a crossword puzzle where the black squares were in the pattern of a satanic pentagram, or b, the newspaper printed a spot the difference puzzle where the two images were identical, so you had to find the differences. But the newspaper accidentally printed the same image, so there were no differences.

Well, I want to ask a question to you, I guess, as my partner.

Yeah.

He said, april 26. When is April Fool's day? That's the first, right?

Yeah, that's the first.

So it's not like they would do the identical pictures as an April fool's gag.

We've passed that by 24, but it was an accident. It could have been an accident, which is why it drove people insane.

Do we know if it was an accident or intentional? Well, it doesn't matter because in the.

Fake scenario, fake or real scenario, it was an accident. They did not.

Right.

I think it's the pentagram.

You do? And can you remind me where we are?

Boston.

Baltimore. The Baltimore. Baltimore.

I think it's the going to have. We're going to have different.

Like it.

Yeah.

You promise there would be arguments.

Someone's going to take the lead, right? Oh, okay. Well, that's our final answers. I say, Monica, I'm sticking.

Are the winner.

Yay. Oh, he loves when I win.

I do.

No victory is worth you being in a good mood.

Well, I'm very proud you went for that one. Dax and Monica. Yeah. I love that. It's one of my favorite puzzles of all time.

Think how many hours were wasted where people were like, where is it? I would enlisting their family members.

Exactly.

Oh, wow.

It's heartbreaking. It is just heartbreaking to think about.

They should lose their puzzling license over that.

All right, we have one last fact checking for you. I'm going to give you two riddles. One of these two riddles is the first recorded riddle in history and one is something I made up this morning.

Okay.

All right, are you ready? Riddle a. What gets fat without eating and pregnant without having sex? And you can try to guess or I can give you the answer. That's not part of the actual fact checking puzzle. But what gets fat without eating and pregnant without having sex is. I will say both of these are babylonian puzzles, so they're funnier in the babylonian rice or something.

Well, like, what gives birth?

Well, like, rice gets fat without eating. You just put it in water. Right?

Water is good. Water is.

I like the ocean or like, water.

Is a water but up in the air, like evaporation?

Clouds.

Rain.

Rain. Cloud.

Rain. That's it. Rain cloud gets fat without eating.

Sure.

It gets bigger and pregnant. I guess, like the.

Why does it get pregnant?

The baby is the water, the rain.

A little abstract.

I'm not on board.

I don't feel bad for not because I still don't see.

I don't see it.

I've never looked up in the sky and said, like, holy crap, that cloud has twins. Look at the size of it. Right?

Yeah. And you never see one plopping out another cloud.

Right.

Good point. Good point.

No one's ever said it's raining babies either. Let's just add that no one said.

That okay, that's interesting. All right, so you're skeptical of it, but maybe if you spoke babylonian. Sure, it would make more sense. All right, here's the other possible riddle. What is a crop that grows in all four seasons? A crop that grows in all four seasons.

And it's a riddle. So it's not just like corn. It's not like a real answer.

Right.

I don't know, though. Wasn't clouds was their attempt at a real answer?

Well, I already.

I feel like I know.

Me too. The first one is his. No, I think AJ's.

Oh, he thinks world think crops. Your early agriculture, civilization.

I just think whatever this riddle is, whatever this answer is, probably better.

Let's try to find out the answer. Let's work it for a minute. Good job.

Okay.

What was the crop in all four seasons?

What is a crop that grows in all four seasons? So, yeah, you got it. Is something that grows in all four. But it's not like you said, it's not like corn, but it is something.

That grows crop of, like crop. Top.

The top. That's interesting.

Oh, hair.

Hair.

That's got to be it, right?

That's it.

The first one is the first riddle.

Okay. Because it's so stupid.

This one was a little bit clever, so I think AJ made it up.

Okay. All right, I'll stick with you.

You are right. And thank you for thinking I'm more clever than Beverly.

You sure are.

Honored.

You would never say that cloud thing.

I mean, these folks, what were they thinking? I was just reading Hammurabi's code this morning, and I was equally flummoxed. It's no wonder this riddle didn't hold up.

Yeah, well, you did great. You busted me. I appreciate it.

Let's be clear. Monica did great. She's three for three. I'm two for three.

Two for three. That's still ACAC.

Oh, yuck. Really very magna of you puzzlers.

Please don't forget to subscribe to the Puzzler podcast, and we will meet you here tomorrow for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzlingly.