Elizabeth Smart
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Umbrella
4.6 • 69.9K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 142 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elizabeth Smart (Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart) is a child safety advocate and founder of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation. Elizabeth joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why advocacy became her opportunity to let other victims and survivors know they’re not alone, growing up not thinking her life would be in any way extraordinary, and details she remembers of her kidnapping at knifepoint in the middle of the night at age 14. Elizabeth and Dax talk about how her perspective on her experience has evolved now being a parent herself, the twisted, manipulative history of her abductors, and the ways her brain grasped for hope in such a dire situation. Elizabeth explains how she outsmarted her captors leading to her rescue, her challenges with the justice system, and her approach to protecting her family today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. |
| 0:02.5 | Experts on expert. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Happy 1,000th episode. Can you even believe it? I can't believe it. I think of it very much like A.A., which is like you can't stay sober for 30 years, but you can stay sober for a day. Yeah. And then you can kind of blink and it is 30 years. Yeah. |
| 0:22.5 | It's like, if you told us like for a day. Yes. And then you can kind of blink and it is 30 years. |
| 0:22.2 | Yeah. |
| 0:22.5 | It's like, if you told us like, okay, man, you're going to, you're going to do a thousand? I'd be like, that's too. We can't do that. We can't. We're not capable of that. Yeah. But look at it. And one episode at a time, we got to a thousand. That is very exciting. |
| 0:34.9 | I'm proud of us. |
| 0:35.6 | Me too. |
| 0:36.5 | And what an incredible episode |
| 0:38.2 | to have for our thousandth. Elizabeth Smart, which, you know, I think if you were on planet |
| 0:45.4 | Earth in 2002, you knew about Elizabeth Smart, but you could be like me. Yeah. And knew someone |
| 0:53.2 | was abducted, but that's where it ends. |
| 0:55.6 | Yeah. |
| 0:55.9 | This story is so unbelievable in so many ways. |
| 0:59.9 | And there's an incredible doc out now on Netflix called Kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, and it's incredibly well-made documentary. |
| 1:09.5 | This is such an interesting conversation and very meaningful |
| 1:14.3 | and heavy. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sometimes hesitant to give trigger warnings for all episodes, |
| 1:20.1 | but boy, boy, this one warrants a major, major trigger warning. Yes. Obviously, there's |
| 1:25.6 | abduction, there's sexual assault. |
| 1:30.4 | There's a lot, a lot, a lot of darkness in this story. |
| 1:39.9 | But I think you, like us, will find Elizabeth smart to be impossibly well adjusted and driving. Has a positive outlook. |
| 1:41.2 | Yeah, it's remarkable. |
| 1:43.3 | Yeah. |
... |
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