Dax Shepard opens by introducing Lukas Gage as an actor with 'an incredible story' and credits him with roles on The White Lotus, Euphoria, Fargo, and You, plus a new Netflix film, Voicemails for Isabelle. Monica adds that he was 'very open' and 'incredibly vulnerable' in conversation. The episode's first sponsor block covers American Beverage's Good to Know ingredient transparency website, Quince's affordable European linen shirts and home goods, and an Allstate car insurance read. The tone is warm and anticipatory, setting up a guest the hosts clearly admire.

The conversation begins with a mutual confession: both Dax and Lukas independently chose not to speak to each other at Phineas's barbecue because they feared spoiling the podcast chemistry — neither knew the other was doing the same. Even David Letterman, Dax notes, exhibited the same nerves before an interview. The story pivots to the Road House premiere in Austin, Texas, where Gage recalls being completely out of his depth standing next to Post Malone, Jake Gyllenhaal, and a heavily drinking Conor McGregor. Dax reconstructs the evening in forensic detail: watching McGregor drain a fifth of whiskey during the screening, the security blockade outside the bathroom, McGregor hijacking every Q&A question directed at other cast members, and Dax tentatively beginning to make jokes at McGregor's expense with the very real risk of physical consequences. The night ended when McGregor's manager passed out in the audience — a providential exit for everyone.

With the premiere chaos resolved, Gage turns to the actual filming experience, describing the Road House set in the Dominican Republic as resembling a fight camp, with every man shirtless, jacked, and in Conor McGregor's orbit. Gage reveals that McGregor physically fractured a disc in his back during production — a fact he shared publicly as a brag rather than a grievance. McGregor reportedly took offence, but Gage insists the intent was complimentary. Jake Gyllenhaal observed Gage clinging rigidly to his preparation in the early days of shooting and intervened with a single piece of advice: treat every take like a rehearsal, because nothing matters and everything will change. That note, Gage says, freed him entirely and he performed better from that point on.

Growing up in Encinitas and San Diego, Gage describes a family built from multiple relationships: a half-brother whose father died in a motorcycle accident before he was born, another brother whose father was an abusive man his mother met while being represented on drug charges, and a full brother Travis. Gage is the youngest — 'her favourite mistake.' His father was a prodigy who enrolled at Cornell at 14, worked as an anesthesiologist, met his mother in a bar at 28, and departed when Gage was a teenager to start a new family. Life in Encinitas was fun — surf PE every morning — but home was chaos. Gage describes crying out for attention through biting classmates in elementary school, performing naked Jackass-style stunts for his older brothers on a skateboard, and generally getting rewarded for bad behaviour. His brothers were his closest friends, and that earned attention shaped his entire identity.

Gage describes a San Diego adolescence defined by easy access to hard drugs. Tijuana was a 20-30 minute drive, and students would park at the McDonald's on the US side, walk across the border, buy drugs, and return in time for afternoon class. A girlfriend showed him the ropes. His brother Corey began using heroin at just 14 years old — a common trajectory in a city where the drug flowed freely. By the time Gage graduated, approximately eight of his classmates had overdosed. He connects this directly to the geographic reality of living on the border, a pattern he describes without sentimentality but with clear weight.

In one of the episode's most striking segments, Gage describes spending Father's Day at his dad's house at age 13, only to be woken in the middle of the night by strangers and physically removed — what he calls 'getting Paris Hilton'd.' Both his mother and father had secretly arranged the placement at a wilderness program that promised transformation through isolation, hiking, and emotional confrontation. The reality was rice and chicken in bags, solo tent-building, isolation punishment, and being 'knocked down to build you back up.' When Gage tried to escape by crafting an SOS letter from arts-and-crafts supplies, he was put in isolation on a mountain for a day. The outcome was the opposite of the intended one: he came out more defiant, more distrustful, and twice as difficult — a pattern he describes without surprise, recognising the wilderness program industry's well-documented failure rate.

Gage mentions his veneers and the conversation turns to how he got his teeth knocked out — at 18, at a party, defending a gay friend who was being attacked by a man in a pink tank top calling him homophobic slurs. Gage threw the first punch after the man started attacking his friend, and five men beat him until his teeth, nose, and orbitals were broken. The attackers' lawyers argued self-defense and no one faced charges — a result Gage calls 'bullshit.' Dax connects this to the subconscious component of Gage not yet being out: he was defending both his friend and some part of himself. This opens a profound discussion about childhood sexual abuse, with both men sharing the specific guilt of having felt curious or complicit — and how a Johns Hopkins expert Dax interviewed helped him reframe that guilt. Gage credits hearing Dax talk about his own abuse, rather than a therapist telling him it wasn't his fault, as the thing that actually got through to him.

Dax and Monica run through a cluster of sponsor reads. Allstate promotes its auto insurance quote service and Roadside Plan. A public-health adjacent read raises awareness for Peyronie's disease (penile scar tissue causing curvature), directing listeners to TalkAboutPD.com. Helix Sleep promotes its quiz-matched cooling mattresses at helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off. SoFi promotes its high-yield checking and savings account, claiming it earns over 8x the national average savings rate of 0.39% with eligible direct deposit, plus a $300 welcome bonus.

Picking up from the sexual abuse discussion, the conversation lingers on how people signal safety by smiling through pain. Monica recalls Gabor Maté calling her out in real time for smiling while recounting something genuinely sad, and her slow realisation that the smile was a form of emotional management for the listener. Gage notes he did it earlier in the conversation. Dax articulates the mechanism: the smile says 'I'm embarrassed to be this heavy, let me carry it lightly so you don't have to feel bad for me.' All three recognise it in themselves, and the acknowledgment itself feels like a moment of genuine connection.

Gage's coming-out story resists the 'always knew' template. His first sexual experiences were shaped by abuse, and for years he used that fact as a psychological escape hatch to explain away any same-sex attraction: 'Well, I was molested — that's why.' He genuinely loved the girlfriends he had. His first male relationship was with his neighbour, lasting three years largely in secret — thrilling at first, then corrosive. He finally came out publicly in tears at a Little Mermaid audition. In parallel, industry advisors explicitly warned him that being openly gay would pigeonhole him into only gay roles — advice that still carries some truth, he admits, though figures like Jonathan Bailey are shifting the landscape. The queerbaiting allegations that arrived online were painful and absurd: accused of stealing gay roles while being gay. His accidental clap-back tweet — 'you don't know my alphabet' — became unexpectedly beloved. Gage also reflects on the particular cruelty of secret relationships within military-inflected San Diego, where hypermasculinity and shame compound the toxicity of hiding.

Gage's entry into acting came via a Compound W warts commercial in high school that he tried desperately to hide from classmates — gay subtext and all. A recurring role on American Vandal and a kids' show led him to write a heartfelt letter to Sam Levinson after watching Another Happy Day and recognising his family. Levinson was in New Orleans and Gage lied to a local agent about living there to get hired as a local. That relationship eventually led to Euphoria. The career-shifting moment came from a COVID Zoom audition in which a director forgot to mute himself and told his wife that Gage had a 'shitty apartment.' Gage called it out and improvised it into the scene, recorded the interaction on his end as all remote auditions required, and later posted it. He woke up to 100 calls and 100,000 follow requests — a hero for actors for one month. The following month, the internet decided he had orchestrated the entire thing as a marketing stunt to get onto White Lotus.

Filming White Lotus during COVID in an isolated Four Seasons bubble with no audience expectation — the show had not yet aired — created a pressure-free environment that Gage describes as the best comedy lesson of his life. Jennifer Coolidge, Murray Bartlett, and Molly Shannon would do something completely different on every single take, a freedom that bewildered and then liberated the then-25-year-old Gage. He connects this to the lesson Jake Gyllenhaal later gave him on Road House: let go of the plan, find it fresh on the day. Mike White, who created the series, is described as the most fascinating person Gage has ever met — the rare showrunner who also competed on Survivor and The Amazing Race before returning to HBO to set a show in France.

Dax reads for ServiceNow's AI specialists that handle busywork end-to-end, directing listeners to servicenow.com. Monica and Dax tag-team an Arm & Hammer toothpaste read emphasising baking soda as the number-one dentist-recommended ingredient for whitening and plaque removal. A brief Pacific Life insurance read closes the block with its 'nearly 160 years, confidence for generations' positioning.

Gage sets the scene: he had been crying on the set of Dead Boy Detectives to the point his representation staged an intervention and refused to send him new auditions until he checked into a facility. The facility diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder and put him on a cocktail of medications that made him manic and unrecognisable. He met a man, fell instantly and completely, accepted a proposal within weeks, and was brought to Buffalo Bills Casino in Las Vegas — the casino where his gambling-addicted mother used to take the family for birthday trips — to find Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and Shania Twain waiting. His childhood dream journal entry — that 'Still the One' would play at his wedding — was happening in real life, and he dissociated completely, not fully present for any of it. His vows deleted themselves from his phone mid-ceremony. He texted a friend to secretly relay them to him. The entire thing was being filmed for The Kardashians, which was also a surprise. Friends and family were terrified but tried to be supportive.

The discussion circles back to the emotional underpinnings of the manic marriage. Dax frames love and sex addiction as the best of all addictions — it keeps working until suddenly it doesn't — and Gage agrees completely: he stopped using substances and became addicted to romance instead. The most emotionally resonant moment of the episode arrives when Gage tells Dax that this podcast, specifically Dax's discussions of addiction, SLAA, and love addiction, was what led him to walk into an SLAA meeting. Dax's immediate reaction is to want to retire on the strength of that impact, before Lukas talks him out of it. Monica reflects that Gage had genuine love from his friends all along but couldn't access it because steady, reciprocated love doesn't produce the dopamine spike that chaotic obsession does. Gage describes giving the love he wanted and never quite being able to receive it.

Dax expresses genuine admiration for anyone who finishes a memoir, knowing from his own four-year-long attempt how hard it is to confront the chapters you most want to avoid. Gage reveals that the book's origin was a catastrophic week: his divorce finalised, his grandmother died, he was forced to see his estranged father at the funeral, and he was simultaneously being targeted online as a Nazi because of a different person named 'Lucas Gage' with a 'c.' While sitting at the funeral checking Twitter to read accusations that he was a cheater and a fascist, the question crystallised: why do I care what strangers think? Why am I living for this? The question that began as the book's introduction became, by the time he finished writing, its conclusion.

Dax invites Gage to explain BPD to listeners who missed the podcast's dedicated episode on the condition. Gage describes arriving at the diagnosis with significant resistance, partly because of the traumatising way the facility delivered it — hours of group therapy, heavy medication cocktails that made him straighten his hair and lose himself, and clinicians who told him he displayed all nine diagnostic traits including suicidality, which he disputes. He punched his hand through a window during a crying episode on a Netflix set, which prompted his representation to force him into the facility. The episode opened a 50/50 door: was it self-harm or just explosive anger? The facility went with self-harm, and his defiance of that reading has never fully resolved. What he does accept are the splitting, the favourite-person codependence, the unstable intense relationships, and the volcanic emotional reactivity.

This chapter is the emotional and clinical core of the episode. Gage defines splitting in personal terms: there is no gray, someone is either the love of his life or someone he never wants to see again. His whole identity once orbited a single person's validation. Friends, family, and career fell away as that person became everything. He describes self-abandoning completely, becoming a bad brother, bad son, and bad friend in service of one relationship. DBT — which he hated initially — gave him the tools: checking in with senses, holding ice cubes when overwhelmed, taking emotional inventory. What felt humiliatingly elementary in the group sessions slowly became second nature. The metric of progress: recovery time from a splitting episode was once measured in months, then a week, then a day, and now can be caught in approximately 30 seconds of self-awareness.

The conversation settles into a meditation on why group therapy works when individual instruction doesn't. Dax articulates the core magic: if a therapist directs at me what's wrong with me, I get defensive. But if I watch a peer be brutally honest about the same thing, I find myself in them, and all the walls drop. Gage agrees, and extends it: popping into SLAA or AA even when you don't fully identify as an addict can be the most useful kind of therapy, because the person getting their one-month token at the front of the room is more instructive than the person celebrating 35 years. The episode's most tender insight arrives here — that shared vulnerability is a technology of healing that labels and diagnoses can't replicate.

Monica takes Gage through Voicemails for Isabelle, the Netflix rom-com in which Zoey Deutch's character keeps leaving voicemails for her dead sister on a phone number that has since been reassigned to a gorgeous man played by someone Gage describes as objectively hot. Monica, normally scrupulous about not watching guests' work before recording, stumbled on it anyway and loved it — she cried multiple times. The film is discussed as part of a deliberate effort to bring back the flawed-protagonist rom-com, in the tradition of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and My Best Friend's Wedding. Gage then reveals his next project: a Hulu reboot of Prison Break, filming imminently, in which he plays a West Virginia character currently requiring Appalachian dialect coaching. His research method: rewatching Demon Copperhead and bingeing Buckwild on MTV.

Dax thanks Gage for his vulnerability, tells him he's talented and likable, and notes that being public about both his sexuality and his BPD diagnosis requires unusual courage. Gage thanks them and notes Armchair Expert is one of only three podcasts he listens to. After Gage departs, Dax announces this is a summer-break rerun of a favourite fact check. He and Monica attempt to call an old friend — referred to only as 'Newman' — to track down the Atlanta radio station that became a running in-joke after a caller said 'hey y'all, really great station.' The call is inconclusive, but the question triggers Dax singing the entirety of Alan Jackson's 'Chattahoochee' from memory, which impresses Monica deeply, and leads to a warm story about listening to country radio in rural Georgia, Kristen Bell's crocheting, and taking Lincoln to a NASCAR race.

Monica confirms that Anna Kendrick was correct: Maine has the highest proportion of residents aged 65+ in the US, followed by Florida and West Virginia. Dax is surprised Arizona ranks only 12th. Utah is last, which Dax attributes to high Mormon birth rates. A producer pulls up 2019 life expectancy data: Hawaii tops the list at 82.3 years, California is second, while Mississippi (74.9) and West Virginia (74.8) are near the bottom despite West Virginia being the third 'oldest' state. The paradox prompts a discussion about religion, heaven, and why deeply Christian communities might not be in a rush to get there — Dax finds this puzzling and says so with characteristic irreverence. The segment closes with Monica reading from research on polygraph tests, summarising that there is no known physiological pattern unique to deception, making lie detectors better described as 'fear detectors.'

From the lie-detector discussion, Dax launches into an extended improvised bit voicing a sentient robot who attends parties while his owner Samantha naps and sings in order to seem less scary to humans. Monica gently challenges the robot's self-identification as a 'real boy,' which triggers a Pinocchio comparison and a genuine philosophical discussion about when it's kind versus harmful to indulge someone's comforting false belief. The segment also digresses into Monica's childhood trauma learning to bike in a closed garage in Memphis, her brother Neil's natural talent, a call-back to the San Marcos River tubing incident where Monica's top came off, and a NASCAR race Dax is taking his daughter Lincoln to at the Coliseum. A final Allstate car insurance sponsor read — about running out of gas on a long highway — closes the episode before the audio ends.