Hello, welcome to the armchair expert. This is Dax Shepard, your host. I'm joined with Monica, your co-host.

Hello. And before we get into this episode, which is with my ever beautiful, talented TV sister Eric Christensen. I guess it's a disclaimer I'll say this is something

I've been wanting to bring up for a while and it's just kind of a context I'm hoping people will think of this podcast in and the thing that I liked a lot about majoring in anthropology was this kind of mindset they forced you to adopt so that you could understand other cultures and at the time

it was called cultural relativism. I don't even know if it's popular anymore if that's

even what they're teaching but the point of cultural relativism was to not go into learning

about something with the goal of judging that thing.

Because if your goal is to judge it as moral or amoral or good or evil it really gets in the way of you understanding

that thing and it's a very tempting thing I quick I am often quick to say whether I think someone's an

asshole or they're they're a saint.

But when you want to study things, your knee jerk reaction is this is evil, that's

the explanation, that's all we need to know about it but as you learn more

about the culture and the environment they're living in you may ultimately come to the

conclusion that this is a very bad practice or whatever but by not jumping to that

yet it allows you to learn about why, when, how things happened.

And my goal in this podcast is to do that to understand why something is the way it is and from

that person's point of view and the interest is in more of the pursuit of causality and not a conclusion.

So that is my disclaimer to say that we're going to talk a lot about Scientology in this episode

and I applaud Erica for being so honest about it and you

might be at home saying you should be trying to prove to her why that's wrong and I just want

to say to you that that's just not my interest my interest is to find out what it does in her life and why she's drawn to it and I think she did a very good job of letting us in on that and no one's trying to convince you that's's right. No one here is trying to convert you to anything.

Not even AA as much as I talk about it. Oh, one more thing before we get into, Erica. This week we're going to have a bonus episode, something new we're starting

called Experts on Expert, where we'll talk to people who actually know what they're

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