Olivia Fox Cabane (on the science of charisma)

**Dax Shepard** (0:00)
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard, I'm joined by Monica Padman.

**Monica Padman** (0:05)
Hi.

**Dax Shepard** (0:06)
Today's guest is Olivia Fox Cabane. She is one of the world's leading authorities on the science of charisma.

**Monica Padman** (0:14)
This was fascinating.

**Dax Shepard** (0:16)
Absolutely, and a best-selling author. Her book, The Charisma Myth, is like globally enormous. It's such a huge book.

**Monica Padman** (0:25)
She's worked with some people, Selena Gomez. Ever heard of her?

**Dax Shepard** (0:29)
I have, and seen her. Yeah, charisma. There's a science to it. Everyone can have more of it.

**Monica Padman** (0:36)
You can. You can learn it.

**Dax Shepard** (0:37)
Yeah. Please enjoy Olivia Fox Cabane.
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Where do you live, Olivia?

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (2:58)
Amsterdam. Oh, you do? Oh, wow.

**Dax Shepard** (3:00)
Oh, lucky you. How fun.

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:02)
Thank you.

**Dax Shepard** (3:02)
How long have you lived there?

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:03)
So we moved there about a year ago, north in California to Amsterdam, so it was a bit of a transition. I'm autistic, so having a lot of humans around is hard.

**Dax Shepard** (3:12)
Not your ideal scenario. So you got diagnosed with autism very late in life. You have 40s?

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:18)
Yeah, so it turns out when I was seven, my parents took me to, so in Paris at the time, to a child psychologist, and he listed down everything that would be today considered to be the traits of autism, but girls don't have autism at that point in time, right?

**Dax Shepard** (3:31)
Right, right, right, right, or 8HD.

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:33)
Or anything, right?

**Monica Padman** (3:34)
Yeah, they have hysteria.

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:37)
But they can be prescribed vibrators in the 19th century or whatever.
And so in my 40s, my mother brought this up again and listed the traits, and I was like, hang on, this sounds like autism. So I got a full 12-hour evaluation, and you'll hear this from a lot of late-diagnosed women. All of a sudden, my whole life made sense.

**Dax Shepard** (3:55)
Yeah.

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:56)
It's like, you're not broken, you're just autistic. Yeah.

**Dax Shepard** (3:59)
Yes.

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (3:59)
Oh my goodness.

**Dax Shepard** (4:00)
So we have a friend, we have a close friend who also got a late-in-life diagnosis. You have all these other stories to explain all these other events, and then you kind of just have to wipe the slate, right? And go like, oh no, that was that, and that was that.

**Olivia Fox Cabane** (4:14)
But what a relief, you're not a bad horse, you're a zebra.