Podbit · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Randy responded to a 911 call from a 14-year-old boy who had inserted a Super Soaker water gun — barrel, tank and hose — into his rectum. The boy called without his mother's knowledge, hoping the paramedics could quietly remove it. They couldn't, took him to hospital, and mom found out anyway.
Where this was said
At 3:48 · chapter starts 3:03
Randy interrupts his Florida road trip to share a story from his decades-long career as a paramedic in a major metropolitan area. The call came in unusually described: 'self-inflicted trauma involving a foreign object.' When they knocked on the door, the mother answered insisting they had the wrong address — until they confirmed her son had made the call. Upstairs they found a 14-year-old, blanket drawn up, in serious pain. Once his mother left the room he was more forthcoming: a Super Soaker 10,000 — barrel, water tank and all — had been inserted rectally via a hose attachment that he'd presumably been using as a makeshift enema or bidet. Randy and his partner attempted removal with KY jelly, failed, detached the water tank from the tube with a blade to reduce the bulk, and transported the boy to hospital where he was sedated and the object removed under anesthesia. Randy told him simply: 'I was your age once' and that experimentation was common. Dax and Monica reflect on the unique cruelty of being 14 and having your mother discover not just that you masturbate, but how. [1] — Randy "Randy responded to a 911 call from a 14-year-old boy who had inserted a Super Soaker water gun — barrel, tank and hose — into his rectum. T…" 03:48 Randy closes by sharing that his daughter Megan, a film editor in California, is a devoted listener who encouraged him to submit.
Randy worked as a paramedic for 35 years in a major metropolitan area before retiring to Florida.
Randy's most memorable call involved a 14-year-old boy who had inserted a Super Soaker water gun (barrel, tank and hose attachment) rectally and required hospital sedation for removal.
Randy retired from a 35-year paramedic career and figured out the secret fast: own a house that needs work, take up golf, and stay relentlessly busy. If your muscles aren't needed, they simply go away — and so does your sense of purpose.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
You rarely control your first reactive thought. But you can train your second thought — the response to the trigger — by asking whether your initial reaction is the most helpful one and replacing it with something equally true but more constructive. Over time, that second thought becomes automatic.
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