Podbit · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
John saved his most disturbing story for last: a patient who identified as a cat and wanted to experience what it felt like to give birth to kittens — with three actual live kittens. She died of sepsis after keeping them for days. Dax's only ethical line: you cannot involve other animals.
Where this was said
At 26:18 · chapter starts 21:55
John's story begins with a patient arriving by ambulance with abdominal pain and a small amount of bleeding, initially denying any foreign object. A rectal exam produces clear plastic on the doctor's glove — the casing of a bratwurst — and a CT scan confirms three of them, arranged in a pattern that looks like a fidget spinner. The patient had been home alone, wife out of town, and one bratwurst felt good, so he tried two, then three. Surgery was required. Days later, the surgeon casually mentioned that the same man had previously been treated at the other hospital in town. John's second and third images reveal an apple (cored and strung with a retrieval string) and a toothbrush holder — the latter requiring the surgeons to open his belly, remove dead bowel, and fit him with a permanent colostomy. [1] — John "John's 2013 patient lied through the whole first visit, but a CT scan revealed three bratwursts. That already led to surgery. Then John's c…" 14:34 Dax draws an immediate parallel to his own addictive escalation logic, noting that 'one pill felt great, so two must be better' is exactly the same algorithm. John then drops a bonus story about a patient who identified as a cat, wanted to experience giving birth to kittens, inserted three live ones, and died of sepsis. [2] — John "John saved his most disturbing story for last: a patient who identified as a cat and wanted to experience what it felt like to give birth t…" 26:18
The bratwurst patient visited two hospitals in the same area across multiple incidents and ultimately required a colostomy after his bowel died from a toothbrush holder obstruction.
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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