Walter Isaacson Returns (biographer & historian)

Walter Isaacson (The Greatest Sentence Ever Written) is a biographer, historian, and Professor of History at Tulane University. Walter returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why he embeds himself into the lives of his subjects to write about them, how empathy can get in the way of success, and discovering the secret sauce of Elon Musk. Walter and Dax talk about his interest in people that try to learn as much as possible about everything knowable, the belief that growing up as a misfit can instill the drive seen in innovators of the modern age, and why an understanding of engineering is crucial to the political and philosophical conversations taking place today. Walter explains evaluating truths in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle and strategy to create common ground throughout American history, and his assertion as a historian that even heroes have great flaws and villains have backstories. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Isaacson.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 0:08Dax Shepard?

  Recently married to our guest. Walter Isaacson is back. We had him on last time to talk about the Elon book, I believe. Is that what he was here for?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  No, Doudna, Jennifer Doudna.

• 0:19Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right, Jennifer Doudna. And then I read the Elon one afterwards. All to say, he's back with a new book called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. I gotta add, in case you didn't listen to the first Walter, which you should.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:30Dax Shepard?

  Walter, in his own right, is the most fascinating person. And I said this in the first interview, he deserves his own biography because he was the CEO or president of CNN.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:39Dax Shepard?

  He had a whole crazy epic career before he was a biographer.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I know. So cool.

• 0:44Dax Shepard?

  His new book is called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. And it's about the most powerful sentence in the Declaration of Independence. And he just breaks it down word by word and how meticulous it was. It's extremely fascinating.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  It's very fascinating.

• 0:57Dax Shepard?

  All the compromises that are just within the sentence.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00Dax Shepard?

  Fascinating. Please enjoy Walter Isaacson. We get support from Quince.

• 1:06Speaker 01

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• 1:15Dax Shepard?

  I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.

• 1:38Speaker 01

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• 1:55Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time and he looks iconic.

• 2:04Speaker 01

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• 2:24Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that, too.

• 3:00Speaker 01

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• 3:12Dax Shepard?

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• 3:27Speaker 01

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• 3:31Dax Shepard?

  It's an easy, everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's also the thing. When you do it first thing in the morning, you already feel kind of self-esteem because you're like, I already did something good for myself.

• 3:48Dax Shepard?

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• 4:30Dax Shepard?

  Don't say anything as one of my questions.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can sit there.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Can I use this?

• 4:36Dax Shepard?

  We can't nail it with a couch. This is the third iteration. We put pillows out. And what we have found is that there's no unifying.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Comfort level.

• 4:45Dax Shepard?

  Architecture for a couch.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:47Dax Shepard?

  There's nothing universal that everyone agrees on. Again, it's always going to be polarizing a couch.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I know, and I used to hate throw pillows. My wife has always got to. I think, why do people have these? And now suddenly I'm like, hey, there's a pillow.

• 5:01Dax Shepard?

  I have the same anger about the pillows.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I love throw pillows.

• 5:05Dax Shepard?

  Decorative.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Oh, I hate decorative.

• 5:07Dax Shepard?

  The fact that you're just going to pitch it on the floor every night and we're going to repeat this busy work?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Oh, you guys would hate my bed.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  You and I have the same. I'll bring my wife next time. You can convince her. Even at our house, we have like four throw pillows on the bed. I said, nobody's going to come see the bedroom. Why?

• 5:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  It's not for show.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's pretty.

• 5:26Dax Shepard?

  We need a good social scientist to tackle this. What is going on? What evolutionary?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Dubner probably could do it for you. Dubner knows everything.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sure does.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  He's been on your show quite a bit, right?

• 5:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, we love him. I would throw Duckworth in the mix, too. I'd want her eyes on this, too. Angela Duckworth.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  It's an aesthetic. It's making your nest look nice.

• 5:46Dax Shepard?

  And that's where I think the work would lie is the value of aesthetic. What aesthetic do you prioritize?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  It is interesting.

• 5:55Dax Shepard?

  Fascinating that an aesthetic would be an essential pursuit.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Well, you see, an aesthetic with no usefulness is bad. Now, there's a Venn diagram in which something is aesthetic and useful.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Oh, you wouldn't hate living with me. I just bought this little tray yesterday. It's for nothing. I don't know what I'm going to use it for it, but it's so cute. So now it's just sitting on my counter and I have to find a use for it.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  It's like a little candle on the table. You're not really going to like that.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Well.

• 6:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like, I think we would agree decorative columns on a structure is offensive. If they don't really bear any weight or they don't serve any purpose,

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 6:33Dax Shepard?

  You're pro column.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Well, my dad was an engineer and we grew up in New Orleans. Column heavy, but they are weight bearing columns.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  So they're necessary.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  As we learned in Hurricane Katrina, where occasionally a column would go off.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. It also might be a deep like, this is a nice space. It's inviting, so you're included into gatherings or you become an integral part of the community.

• 6:59Dax Shepard?

  If you present a beautiful environment people are drawn to.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:04Dax Shepard?

  That it would facilitate gathering and fellowship and council.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  What are the rooms called in the Arab world that are just the whole couch on the outside and lots of beautiful cushions?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  It's a room where people gather.

• 7:17Dax Shepard?

  And it's designed to facilitate.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And beautiful.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Community.

• 7:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay, so we saw each other. I don't know, did you sign an NDA about that birthday party? Are we allowed to say we were at it? It's just reputational cost to ourselves.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  I think it's reputational cost. I would, I don't know, for my birthday party, I'd say, don't tell people you were there.

• 7:38Dax Shepard?

  Well, we've been very public about our ongoing relationship with Bill Gates. So I have nothing to hide. But I did see you there, which was a delight because when we interviewed you, I guess, five years ago or close to five years ago, it was over Zoom, which is never really quite the thing.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  It's amazing that you now get this in person because it is so much of a different dynamic.

• 7:57Dax Shepard?

  Yes, like you can just imagine having shadowed Elon on a screen that someone held that wouldn't really work, right?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  And I think that in the days of AI, we're going to learn that actually physically being there counts. And when I was doing Steve Jobs, when I was doing Elon Musk, doing Jennifer Doudna, and I did the show with you on it. My rule was I don't do it based on interviews. I do it based on you letting me embed myself in your life for two years and just watch you and shadow you. And so then you can make it a narrative.

• 8:27Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you mentioned this. I watched you doing a Michael Lewis sit down, which was really fascinating. We adore him as well.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:34Dax Shepard?

  Mention, I guess it's the Heisenberg effect, is that what it's called?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is when you observe something, Heisenberg said, if you observe the particle, that's the quantum mechanical thing.

• 8:43Dax Shepard?

  Whether it's a particle or a wavelength.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. So the question that Michael Lewis and I have, because we both have the same method, which is, I'm just gonna ride alongside you and watch, is by watching somebody, are you changing their behavior? And to some extent, yes, but surprisingly for me, with Elon Musk in particular, me being there did not seem to change him at all, because I would talk to all of his team, they'd say, you gotta come to this meeting, because he's gonna really come down hard on us, and we want to make sure that, you know, you're there taking notes.

• 9:15Dax Shepard?

  Documenting.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  And I'd come, and they'd say, well, that didn't help any, you being there.

• 9:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Well, you even saw like interpersonal relationship feuds and stuff like that, that you were privy to.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Especially with Grimes, which is a very interesting relationship, the mother of some of his children, and Siobhan Zillis, these are all really smart, talented people. You know, I didn't want to wallow in the personal life, but the personal life is connected to the professional passion and just to the inner person.

• 9:42Dax Shepard?

  Yes. That's huge. Well, I think it approaches the most fascinating question we all kind of have with these unique geniuses, is like, how are they shifting gears into interpersonal, familial, because they are in an environment, most of their day, where their opinion's the most important, and they declare things, they don't really debate things. So all of us are quite interested, is like, how does that work in, quote, "real life"?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  There's no one formula, but there is a through line of all the people I've written about. Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, well, Steve is a little bit different, but Elon Musk is, they aren't perfect in their personal lives. I shouldn't put Steve Jobs in that category, he had a great personal life. But, you know, Ben Franklin sort of sets up household in London with another woman, he leaves Deborah back home. Einstein was not ever gonna win.

• 10:33Dax Shepard?

  He was first.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Husband of the Euro board, and Elon, enough said.

• 10:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. Could you rank your subjects in most susceptible to Heisenberg effect and least susceptible? It seems like Elon's at At the top, as far as he was least.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Least susceptible because he doesn't have emotional EQ incoming signals very well.

• 10:53Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  In other words, I'm sitting here looking at you all and you know, we kind of know what each other thinks. Elon, his brother Kimball said that he was the one who got the empathy gene, Kimball. Oh, wow. And so sometimes Elon just doesn't have those receptors. Secondly, and he said this to me very strongly. He said, if you worry about what people think about you, you'll never succeed. He said, that's the problem with empathy. Sometimes empathy is really vanity because you care what other people think and you want them to like you. And he said of me, which wasn't particularly nice. He said, that's why you screwed up running CNN. You cared too much that the people there liked you and you should have gotten rid of half of them. Empathy is not your friend when you're running something.

• 11:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So A, how did you take that criticism and B, how true?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Well, it had the odious smell of truth to it because I look into myself. I'm never going to get a rocket into orbit or give people to Mars or change a whole electric vehicle or AI. I think it's partly because you have to just be hell bent, passionate and intense. You have to care what people think of you. You have to build teams, but you have to not obsess over wanting everybody to like you.

• 12:05Dax Shepard?

  I want to share this with you because I think you would get a kick out of it. Maybe he already told you personally, but so, yeah, we're on this trip with Bill to India.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  For his foundation work.

• 12:13Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And so we're traveling around with him on his plane all week. And those are really special moments because there's really no other obligation, which he has many. You can really just shoot the shit. And of course I had just read your Elon book and I wanted so bad to know if he had read it, what he thought. Because obviously for people don't know, Elon really, at least at one point hated Bill. And they had a very ill fated tour of SpaceX where he started confronting him about shorting his stock and. Then went on a tweeting campaign.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  All true.

• 12:42Dax Shepard?

  We're sitting there and I said, you love Walter Isaacson, right? And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I really like Walter. We're friends. I said, so did you read Elon book? And he goes, oh, yeah, yeah, it was great. I really liked it. And I was like, okay, great.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 12:54Dax Shepard?

  And a little bit where their overlap is, the criticism from Elon just doesn't really register. It doesn't seem. He has a similar gift in that he's not terribly affected by these opinions.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think Bill has a lot of incoming criticism and he has to have a bit of a thick skin. Although I think Bill Gates actually feels it. He has a lot more empathy than people would think.

• 13:14Dax Shepard?

  I think he does.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  But I also think he correctly says of Elon Musk, oh, he just runs down everybody. He says nasty things about everybody. You just got to live with it and that is true.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's not taking it personally.

• 13:25Dax Shepard?

  And he said, oh, and then my favorite part of the book is he goes on to talk about the chapter where he had invited the CEO and the head engineer of the solar panel company he had purchased to come down and install the solar panels on the roof of his house in Cape Canaveral, wherever the hell he launches. And Bill was trying to explain the part where he starts yelling at them on the roof at midnight. Why did you make that part? What is that designed for? That doesn't even go with that. Have you guys ever installed? Bill's enjoyment of incompetence being exposed was incredibly telling.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Well, I'm so interested to hear this because Bill Gates never told me that. And it is totally true. And that's why you have to embed yourself. I remember being on that roof at midnight in Boca Chica, Texas. He goes into what's called demon mode, Elon does. And he's like, why are there these parts? He said, the best part is no part. You got to get, and they said, well, we can't because, and he turned out to be right. And that's the sort of secret sauce of Elon Musk is he understands the details of engineering. And I think Bill Gates would appreciate that.

• 14:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and you have to build in a little bit of compassion and understanding, despite the fact that they're so enriched and successful, which is. I think it's easy to overlook the frustration that exists when you truly are often the smartest person in the room. What I got a glimpse in of like, oh yeah, Bill has lived on a planet where he's been trying his hardest to get everyone to catch up to his speed. And that is frustrating. So for him to have observed another guy going through it and then letting it rip in that fashion and how much enjoyment and humor he got out of it, I was like, oh yeah, this is very illuminating.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  You know, it's particularly interesting because those are the two smartest people I've ever dealt with, you know, Elon Musk, in some ways, there are others and different types of intelligence, but Elon's intelligence is understanding material science and engineering. And engineering is a lot different than pure science or running a company. And Bill understands physics, understands science so well, but he's never been a pure physical engineer. I'm not talking about software engineer. And they had many big disputes, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. One of them in which Elon turned out to be more right than Bill was that you could have EVs doing things like semi trucks, that you could make batteries that could do it.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  And I think it's almost because Musk can visualize lithium ion batteries and how much power they could have and how you would make the engineering. And it's an important trait because our country is now missing this ability to totally manufacture things and learn from the manufacturing process. For example, Steve Jobs, he had so much beauty embedded in everything he did. His design sensibility was great. His ability to understand human emotions, interactions, much better than Musk. I mean, Musk built a cyber truck, which still doesn't speak to most people emotionally.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Back to aesthetics.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:28Dax Shepard?

  I need some thrill, Bill.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  I remember walking around the design studio as he's trying to figure out what he called the tamperers, the curves on the iPhone and stuff, making it beautiful. But what Steve then did was it was then sent to China to be manufactured. Whereas Musk says, no, I've got to make my own manufacturing lines. I got to put my desk, my engineers and my designers right on the manufacturing lines so that they can have the instant feedback of the engineering.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  How do you write about these people who are the most brilliant people in the world? Because then you yourself have to understand what they're talking about.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Well, that's the joy of doing the book. I mean, we talked about it when I talked to you about Jennifer Doudna and the Codebreaker and CRISPR. Well, learning a little bit of biology and learning the chemistry of it. You can learn anything. I mean, this is almost the theme of your show.

• 17:23Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, I think we do a similar thing, which is like, oh, we have a physicist in two hours. I gotta brush up on that. I gotta be able to be an intermediary between the layperson and the expert.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And one of the things your show does is you can be an expert on physics at this point, music at that point, psychology the next time. People who dive into many different subjects tend to see the patterns of nature, and that's where creativity comes from.

• 17:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so I'm quite envious. Again, we just had a very tiny dose of it. We had a week of it. And you've had, at times, years of it with people. And I remember, we said out loud to each other all the time, like, this is an insane privilege. We're getting to go meet with all of the heads of tech in India and go to a secret room where it's Chatham House rules. And we're getting to hear, I don't know, six of the 20 smartest people on the planet about this topic, discuss how they're gonna tackle it. And it's such a unique and special thing to be a fly on the wall of. Of all these subjects, which one did you find yourself just kind of endlessly grateful?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  I think it was the one I talked to you about, which is biochemistry and understanding how our cells work. And we talk about coding and AI and stuff. Well, in the next 20 years, cells are gonna be, molecules are gonna be

• 18:36Dax Shepard?

  Engineers.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  The new things we have to code and engineer. So it was fun to learn that. I struggled a bit with Einstein, even though my father's an engineer, my grandfather, my uncle, so I grew up with some of this. I was okay with the physics. It was the tensor calculus I was trying to learn for general relativity. And that may have been the wall I

• 18:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  That's so hard.

• 18:58Dax Shepard?

  It's humbling when you hit that wall, right? Because you're gonna be like cruising along.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Because you keep saying to yourself, as I said to you, you can learn anything. And then, wait a minute. The tensor calculus of general, and I had Brian Greene and others, and I don't understand it. He'd explain it to me. And then 20 minutes later, I'd say, wait, I can't figure that out again. Bill Gates is that way, and you saw it on your trip to India. If there's anybody who dives in and can be curious about everything, from malaria and public health to nuclear power and new ways of doing it, even in the 1970s or so. He'd take these think weeks and he'd bring books with him, and he would just learn everything you could about a subject. Leonardo da Vinci was that way. It's like, I need to learn everything about a subject. And he would dive into Euclid,

• 19:45Speaker 02

  because the printing press had just come to pass in 1500 in Florence. And he'd say, I've got to get the Euclid book that's in the bookshop down by the bridge. So he could learn that. And then he'd learn botany, and then he'd learn optics. And there are certain people in this world who try to learn as much as possible about everything knowable, from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci to Bill Gates to Ben Franklin. And those are people who are interesting.

• 20:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you get this sense that, oh, boy, they kind of have a comprehensive view of all the things, all the dynamics that are at play, which is so many things to juggle. We asked him, hey, of these promising longevity texts that are on the horizon, which do you think is the most promising? And he's like, well, we have a company that we work with that we think is doing a lot of good work. But you've got to remember, the Earth is 5.2 billion years old. And the first cells, we have two independent cells. He took us through the evolution of every single cell till we got to mammal, also incorporating all of the geology that was happening and all the chemistry that was happening in the atmosphere and how everything was changing. And I was like, I mean, my God, this guy had to tell us the history of the planet to bring us up to speed to say where we're going next, and it took an hour.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  It's interesting, as you look at AI, which will be able to absorb billions of bits of information, and the question is seeing the patterns, and that's what a great human can do, is learn so many different things, and then abstract patterns. And I've just been reading books about AI, which is how do you get to that level where you get the abstraction of patterns that the AI can do?

• 21:28Dax Shepard?

  It can juggle so much data.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Sort of an intuition, too.

• 21:31Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Einstein once said that every great advance is a leap of intuition, but every leap of intuition comes from years of having absorbed data.

• 21:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's so true. Okay, so all this to say, why have you not ever done Bill?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  First of all, I tend to think childhood is the sweet spot.

• 21:50Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  I mean, whether it's Elon's difficult childhood in South Africa.

• 21:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, the wilderness camps he was sent to define him.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we biographers believe that dad and childhood are two keys to understanding. Well, Source Code, which is Bill Gates's first of, I think, a trilogy of memoirs, that is as good as it gets when it comes to memoirs. There'll be a certain point I'll write something about Bill Gates, but I can't top that book.

• 22:18Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that makes sense. Now, you just circled the point I wanted to explore, which is certainly with Elon, the whole thing is just driven by this relationship with his father. That's the fuel in the tank, as was Steve Jobs in some interesting way in that, right, he was adopted and that whole story. So of your subjects, all are male except for Daudna. Was her driving force a mother conflict?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  No, it was actually a father, too. I don't want to say that it's a pattern of everybody, but is Barack Obama, who's been on your show, his first line is, I think every successful person is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of the father, and the same is true of me, is what he He said, so Jennifer had a very, very supportive father, who just believed she could do science and took her on explorations. I think that was a key to the childhood there. She felt like an outsider. I think I'm handicapped like Michael Lewis. My friend grew up with him in New Orleans. We had magical childhoods. We'd grown up in New Orleans with wonderful parents and friends.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  I think sometimes having a rough childhood and feeling like a misfit, feeling like an outsider, instills in you a bit of that drive of how do I fit in? And you look at Leonardo, who's born out of wedlock and is not legitimated by his father, and he's gay, and he's left-handed, and he's distracted.

• 23:47Dax Shepard?

  Line him up.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  And he goes in this small village of Vinci and finally goes to Florence, where the Medici embrace him. But you could do it. Einstein, being Jewish in Germany, yeah, you feel like an outsider.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  And you go down the line.

• 24:01Dax Shepard?

  Or just even alienated by their genius as well.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  They feel a misfit in who they are. And Elon Musk, being bullied as a kid, having a father who was psychologically abusive to him, who took the sides of the bullies who beat up Elon. Elon is slightly on the, I'm not very good with social signals, scale. So he's sitting there in the corner of the bookstore, growing up all alone, reading Asimov, reading Heinlein. I saw one of the books, Stranger in a Strange Land. It's on your shelf there. Elon would read these things and he'd feel like a stranger in a strange land.

• 24:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Just to remind folks of one of the stories in that book about Elon, right? Is he had, at this wilderness camp, got beat up so severely by another boy that he was in the hospital for four days. And when he came home and was presented to his father, his father proceeded to shame him for losing the fight.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  For hours, I mean, just made him stand in front and say, you're a loser. You'll never amount to anything. While Kimball, the younger brother, had to watch. And Kimball says, it's still the most searing experience of life.

• 25:02Dax Shepard?

  And it's not to excuse things, but minimally, when you're evaluating these crazy things you observe, it is useful to remind yourself of what.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  That he's a person. People are people.

• 25:13Dax Shepard?

  He was forged.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Humans are humans. Exactly right.

• 25:15Dax Shepard?

  He was forged.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Fought by fire. I think that's a title of my first chapter.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  But I get some pushback, and so does Michael Lewis sometimes, of. Oh, you're trying to explain away Elon being demon driven and stuff. I say, I'm trying to explain it.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:32Dax Shepard?

  People conflate an excuse and an explanation.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  You're trying to excuse them. And I say, I'm trying to explain them. You can be the judge, but I'm going to tell you what it was like, how it was growing up. And I think successful people have some demons in them.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  A question for anybody like that, and we probably all do, even those of us with good childhoods have a few demons. Do you harness your demons or do your demons harness you? And Elon has spent a lifetime struggling harnessing his demons.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  It's not even helpful to have a story that doesn't show all the pieces because it's a cautionary tale, too. You need to hear about the father and the bullying and stuff so that whoever reads it moving forward knows that results in this.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  May Musk, who's just this wonderful person, the mother of Elon, you've probably watched her. She's a fashion model in their seventies. But she said to me at the very beginning, and we were talking about her ex-husband, Elon's father, saying, the challenge for Elon is the danger that Elon becomes his father. And you see that struggle and you see that Luke Skywalker learning that the dark side of the force. Well, hey, that's my father. And that's a pretty ancient struggle. You're right. You want to explain all the sides so people understand where the demons. But you don't have a lot of drives that are insane drives unless you have a few demons.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  I know.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  And maybe that's why I'm a better observer of people than somebody who's going to shoot rockets to Mars. Because, you know, I got some drives, but they're not insane. But they're not going to change the world the way Steve Jobs did, the way Elon Musk did, the way Einstein did.

• 27:13Dax Shepard?

  I guess Bill's comforting in that way that his parents were, by all accounts, spectacular.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  His father and mother were, that's what Source Code, this book he did about his childhood. And the Terry O camp that they used to go join, the games that they played. Now, he was very competitive and ambitious.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  But his father, who just died, maybe, what, five or six years ago, has got to have been one of the wisest, sweetest people.

• 27:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, gentle giant, an enormous man with a big heart.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  And he did one of the great things for Bill Gates was he helped negotiate that original IBM contract that said, and you get to keep the source code.

• 27:49Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, yes. And then the mother's incredibly admirable proportionality of pushing him to be social and then surrendering to who he was.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Sort of big in the united way, understanding that it's not just about taking things, it's about giving back. I did do, years ago, a cover story in Time Magazine on Bill, and it begins with the mother, and the mother taking Bill to a psychologist, because Bill is always resisting or always refusing to do things, and the psychologist saying to the mother, I think Mary, her name was, "Give it up. Just let him be who he is, because if you struggle with him, he's gonna win." And that's why I think Bill turned out a little bit differently. He has incredible drives. Early years of Microsoft.

• 28:34Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  I mean, he is, you know.

• 28:37Dax Shepard?

  Psychopathic. Yeah, yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Admittedly, he says so.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  But he has been somebody who has been, then, it's about something larger, like taking you to India and explaining why. And all the people I've written about, at a certain point, realize it's not just about me and my success, it's about connecting my success to something larger than myself.

• 28:59Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now, having studied all these people, here's, I guess, my fear. And my conclusion is, they don't come in the shape we'd like. And I think our current society has lost a little bit of tolerance for what comes with these once-in-a-generation types. We want them to also be perfect, and I think that's unrealistic. What do you think about the reality of what makes these people? And what kind of tolerance we have to have in society?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  You have to have tolerances for geniuses, and that's when I was doing the Elon Musk, being interviewed about him, you know, people who just really hated him. I'd say, "Wait a minute, do you want a society without Elon Musk?" Or George Packer wrote a great book on Richard Holbrook, who's not quite up there with Elon Musk, but this diplomat who was just such a pain in the ass. And yet... As Packer ends the book, is the way I end the Elon book, could you have had a kinder and gentler subject, still being the one getting the Dayton Accord, shooting the rocket to Mars, whatever it may be? So I think we have to tolerate, and you know, people push back at me, but tolerate sometimes the craziness of genius. That said, I think there was a period, up until about four or five years ago,

• 30:07Speaker 02

  where we had become quite intolerant of, say, Oh, yeah, yeah. And I think that as we got into an age where in 140 characters, you had to declare somebody a hero or a villain.

• 30:22Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  And you couldn't say, wait a minute, with Picasso, it's more complicated than that. With T S L A, it's more complicated than that.

• 30:29Dax Shepard?

  Michael Jackson.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Exactly, and so we became a society in which, either because of the algorithms of social media or the talk radio or cable news, you had to immediately declare somebody was either totally evil or totally great.

• 30:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, everything binary, quickly.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  And you couldn't sort of explain, well, it's a little bit more complicated. As you said, these are humans. Yes, exactly. And do you want to have a planet in which the people who are pushing us forward

• 31:02Dax Shepard?

  also have great bedside manner?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Steve Jobs wrote, when he came back to Apple, having been sent into the wilderness in the 90s, he wrote this ad to declare what Apple was all about. And I remember, late in his life, he recited to me and started crying. And here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square hole, the ones who think different. And it goes on, and then it ends with, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. So are you going to be tolerant of the misfits, the rebels, the crazy ones? Well, yes, but you also have to remember That you can decry the bad parts of them. I mean, Shakespeare teaches that. In our current age, everything's so binary. We don't understand that.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Look at Shakespeare's great heroes. Even Henry V. By Agincourt, speech, whatever. He kills all the prisoners, the French prisoners. He does horrible. Likewise, even the villains in Shakespeare, Othello, Iago, they all have backstories. Yes. And nobody says, hey, Shakespeare, you shouldn't try to explain away their flaws. I think we need to get back to understanding the complexity of human nature.

• 32:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 32:14Dax Shepard?

  Or just pick that I don't want anything new. Or I don't even incredibly hard done.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  I will say, I think that sort of cancel culture and everything else, pendulum has swung away from that recently and maybe too far. And look at whether it be Donald Trump or many other people in public eye. I don't mean to get political here. They are breaking all sorts of guardrails and maybe we should be now saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, don't go there.

• 32:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on. So frustrating. 15 minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Co. and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Inuit TurboTax. You know that feeling when you drop your taxes off with somebody and then nothing? You're just sitting there wondering if they've even started,

• 33:27Dax Shepard?

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• 34:13Dax Shepard?

  That's TurboTax.com, only available with TurboTax Full Service Experts, real-time updates and iOS mobile app. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 34:23Speaker 01

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• 34:34Dax Shepard?

  That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.

• 34:38Speaker 01

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• 34:54Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I need it. I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.

• 35:05Dax Shepard?

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• 35:25Speaker 01

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• 35:32Dax Shepard?

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• 36:14Dax Shepard?

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• 36:57Dax Shepard?

  Now, my question on the father thing, just to land that is you personally, I can't imagine you're attracted to these stories that have this driving force of a father-son relationship and you yourself not have thoughts on yours.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  My father was the smartest person I've ever met, the nicest person I've ever met, the most loving person I ever met.

• 37:19Dax Shepard?

  Fuck you, I guess is what I want to say.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  My mother too, one of the smartest people I ever knew and the most supportive. And I joke with Michael Lewis, who also had a great family, is that, well, maybe that's why we're the observers and they're the ones shooting the rockets to Mars. My father was an engineer.

• 37:38Dax Shepard?

  Mechanical?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Electrical was his main thing, but he had an engineering firm that did electrical, mechanical and structural. And so one of the things about it was he taught me, you can learn everything, as I said. And this I think should be the tagline of our charity. You can learn, which is in our house, which is still our family home in New Orleans on Napoleon Avenue. Huge basement and we had workshops, but it was also electronics and I'm kind of old. We remember tubes and he could test the tubes and change them in the radio and soldering irons and Heath kits. And we'd spend so much time doing hardware engineering and stuff. So I learned a love of science and engineering from him.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  And I think I went astray because then I studied history and literature in college. If I had had to do it over again, I would have become an engineer like my dad.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  You wish you had?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yes, because engineers can appreciate the beauty of history and poetry. But sometimes the humanists I know, they get, oh, you know, I love Shakespeare. I love this part of history. But then you say something about a circuit and exactly what a resistor does or why a transistor makes. No, no, I can never do science. Well, yeah, you can.

• 38:53Dax Shepard?

  Maybe not at the same pace your colleagues in class did, which is, I think, what informs people whether they can or cannot do something. It's like, oh, did I pick it up at the same rate as the people around me? Oh, it's not for me.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  That's a really good point because when I went to college, I was going to do math and physics and science. And it was hard. And if you went to a Stephen Greenblatt teaching Shakespeare, whoever you were, you'd be welcome. If you went to a physics course, and I took a couple, and I took a biochem course, and you weren't a scientist, you were made to feel you just don't get it. You'll never get it. So they were not as inviting as they should have been.

• 39:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Well, do you think maybe then you felt like I'm not going to be as good as my dad at this? So I might as well pivot?

• 39:33Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't quite know what it was. But I do think that nowadays, being able to fully understand the beauty of science and engineering is crucial to being part of the political and philosophical conversation. And what I've tried to do in my books, like James Watson, another person who's complex and has been canceled. But he writes A Double Helix. And it's a fun, beautiful tale, inspired Jennifer Doudna. But he smuggles in a lot of science. So to try to make Einstein's special relativity. Here's this patent clerk who can't get a job at a university or anything. But he's trying to learn how to synchronize clocks because people are having patent applications

• 40:17Speaker 02

  because the Swiss are pretty insistent that you can clocks be synchronized. And he's saying, well, what if I rode alongside the signal that was synchronizing the clocks? Would time be the same to me? So understanding through the life of a person, trying to convey that science, to me, has a certain beauty to it.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:37Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I wanted to ask your opinion as a professor at Tulane. Whose current enrollment, I looked it up this morning, is 62% female, 38% boys.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  I didn't know that, but that's interesting.

• 40:50Dax Shepard?

  Is that something that you've observed in your time there? Are you worried about that? What are your thoughts on the changing kind of demographics of college students?

• 41:00Speaker 02

  That's a good question. I'd not noticed it in particular. One of the things that I have noticed is that when people came in five, six, seven years ago, their parents would say, I just want them to learn coding. I want my boy or girl to be a great software engineer so that they'll have a job. AI comes along and ChatGPT can code better than 99% of most college coding students. But in some ways, connecting human feelings and emotions to the technology, that's the skill. I've started with some of my students, including students who do AI and are computer science students,

• 41:44Speaker 02

  but also my history students. I'm pairing them and we've created a company called Boswell and Company. And what it does is it believes that everybody's got a story worth telling. And it uses Google Gemini Notebook, but also Anthropic to gather all the data. And my students interview people and their families. And we put it all together and we produce a biography for them. The reason I say this is because the people who can connect the humanities to the technology will succeed. And people say AI will destroy jobs? No, AI is going to open up whole new fields. Maybe 500 people get a biography or memoir written each year. It should be 5 million. Everybody should be able to do it.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  So we will have whole new products. And our little company, which is doing it for people we know who ask us, commission us to do it, that will just show how this AI combined with the humanities will find new products and new jobs for people.

• 42:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's almost a tall order because that's, I guess, what everyone already recognizes about him. Well, what makes Jobs so unique was that he seemingly had the emotionality of the interaction being a priority as much as how good the product itself functioned. It seemed like he was very smart at recognizing you have to emotionally connect to this device.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  And one reason was just who he was, a great genius. But when he went to college to read before dropping out, he didn't sit there studying computer software engineering. He studied calligraphy, dance, music, art, and he really got a grounding in the humanities. And a sense, just a two-word sense, that's so important, beauty matters, just what you said. You said aesthetics matters, but he made it simple.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, same thing.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Beauty matters. And we're talking about Bill. I mean, Bill made some great products, but they both made a MP3 music player approximately the same time. And Microsoft made the Zune, which was really good in many ways, but Steve made the iPod, which was an object of desire.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:56Dax Shepard?

  It was a declaration of your identity.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Even those ads and the earbuds and everything. So, understanding the emotional connection, the humanities connection, is what made the iPod beat out the Zune.

• 44:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you're not sitting at Tulane going, "Where are the boys and what's happening? And we got a problem on our hands."

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Haven't thought about that now. I'm gonna have to go back.

• 44:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I generally don't desire more boys to be around either, but...

• 44:21Speaker 02

  We probably have a problem in our society, which is the K through 12 education and everything else. It used to be a sense that the world was gonna be a better place for each new generation. For example, if you're born when I was, in the 1950s, you had an 80% chance of having a better life than your parents. If you're born when my students were born... Say, hate to say it, but like the year 2000.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yes, crazy.

• 44:50Dax Shepard?

  Or even in the book, you say the eighties.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  The book, I say in the eighties, right? But also in the year 2000. You have less than a 50% chance of doing better than your parents.

• 44:58Dax Shepard?

  Less.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  And so this explains a whole alienation of a new generation. But it also explains, I think, the resentments in our politics and other things.

• 45:07Dax Shepard?

  So the greatest sentence ever written is your new book. And it is conveniently coming out a month or two before we enter our 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the country.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Happy birthday.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:22Dax Shepard?

  So that would be a very obvious reason to write this book. But I don't think that's the primary goal of the book.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  It was definitely a goal and a thought, which is you're about to have a birthday party, and I don't know that your fam- my family's pretty well. But you know, if I have a big extended birthday party, there are people I hardly can speak to on some of my cousins and sisters. But you put it aside on your birthday and you say, we're family, we're common ground. Here's what we share. We have had this happening in our society, maybe for the past eight to 10 years, where it just gets more and more polarized so that anything that happens, like should I wear a mask in COVID, anything becomes so political and partisan that we polarize ourselves on it. Well, we're about to have a birthday party. Wouldn't it be nice if we could say, well, here's what we all agree on. Here's what the common ground is.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  And so I wanted to do something that says, what is our mission statement as a nation? Let's read it, understand it, and for a year at least, get along a little bit better to say, well, yeah, we do hold these truths to be self-evident.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so there's a lot. We're going to go through each one. It's so cleverly broken down. But I will say, what strikes me immediately is, I think we do suffer from not knowing history. Ask yourself, well, how did it come about? How did we learn to live in a group of 330 million people as one unit? And there's some stuff that predates our country. There's Hobbes and Locke. There's people that propose this notion of a social contract. And you're going to leave the wild, where you have unlimited rights. You see something you don't like, kill it. Who cares? Take what you want. We're going to give up some liberty because we believe the net benefit's going to be much larger if we give up some of our liberty so that we can coexist peacefully.

• 47:12Dax Shepard?

  So maybe just even that notion is maybe a bit more foreign to people than I think would be helpful.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've read the book, which is great. I love that because that is how we began because we're doing a parsing of the sentence. We hold these truths to be self-evident. And you saw it with the word "we" and what does that mean? Well, it's not "we," the 62 people gathered in Philadelphia. It's the social contract that we've decided to have. And our founders, particularly Jefferson, Franklin, and to some extent John Adams, they were reading the people of that time. And you mentioned them, John Locke, David Hume, the people who are saying, "How did we come out of a state of nature in the prehistoric times where we're all fighting each other? And how did we agree on how to have a government?"

• 48:01Speaker 02

  And that's what the social contract is. Rousseau writes a book, Hobbes writes the book on it, Locke writes it. And these founders who are doing this Declaration of Independence, they base it on that Enlightenment period, meaning these philosophers like John Locke who said, "How is it we come together as a society?"

• 48:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think people, a lot of people at least, have this notion that I will live in this society and I will give up nothing to do so. That it needs to be exactly how I think it should be, and anything short of that is unacceptable. It's like the original buy-in is not floating around. It's like, "Oh, no, no, I'll be giving things up to reap the rewards of all this."

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like when I'm driving here and there's a red light. Okay, I agree. I generally stop it.

• 48:46Dax Shepard?

  It's inconvenient to you.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  And that's part of the social contract. And if you're going to have a society, a contract isn't just, "I get everything." It's, "Here's the deal we all hold hands and make." So if you look at the Declaration of Independence and you look at the sentence that I call the greatest sentence, it's, "We hold these truths," and that's a contract that we've made. And if we all realize that, maybe just that understanding it's a social contract and that we have common ground, that helps reduce the temperature a little bit of some of our... Partisan poisonous debates at the moment.

• 49:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so as a historian, lay out a little bit of the context in which they're going to write this document, because I think people might think of it as being more monolithic than it was. Like, it was anything but a unified group that had inhabited the colonies, yes.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  There isn't even a total consensus in January of 1776 that we're going to break away from the crown. But at a certain point ingrained in us is this notion of individual liberty. That's what Locke brings us with the social contractors. We're all in a state of nature as autonomous individuals, and then we make sort of let's hold hands and create a society. So it's based on individual rights, rather than the rights of the king, or the divine rights of kings, or the conqueror. That notion of individual rights is so important.

• 50:08Dax Shepard?

  First of all, I don't know that everyone would just know who wrote it.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  You know, the wonderful thing, especially those of us who've been editors in our time, is that this greatest sentence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," is not one person. They went through four drafts and then a final version. And of course, Jefferson is the first author. He gets to write the first draft. But you have a committee. The Continental Congress says, okay, we're about to declare independence. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind means we got to say why. And so they appoint a committee. It may be the last time Congress appointed a good committee, but it has Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams on it.

• 50:47Dax Shepard?

  All making notes, scratching things out.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  And so, in fact, can I grab the book?

• 50:51Dax Shepard?

  Yes, please, please, please.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Right here, we do it as the opening thing. This is the first draft. I don't know where your cameras are. Oh, wow.

• 50:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  And you can see.

• 51:00Dax Shepard?

  It's a mess.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  There is a total mess. But here it is. We hold these truths. And then you see Jefferson, he writes, "to be sacred." Ah. And Benjamin Franklin was a printer. So he had a dark black pen that did backslashes the way a printer. And he writes in, "self-evident." And so part of the book is just explaining that sometimes innovation is a team sport. Sometimes creativity is a collective endeavor. And that's what this sentence is about.

• 51:29Dax Shepard?

  And the forces at play, you already have Burbling, you have the South's entire economy dependent on cotton production and slavery.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Right, and you have Jefferson.

• 51:40Dax Shepard?

  And they're rich, right?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Who's enslaving 400 people at the time.

• 51:44Dax Shepard?

  The wealthiest part of the country is the South that's dependent on slavery. You have already people in the North calling for an end of slavery in their colonies. So that's already a very contentious issue. And so, the way we word this is all incredibly important. And compromises are happening in all these sentences.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  And as Franklin said, you know, compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. You gotta compromise. And one of the problems, though, because it's not all great. Sometimes you make a compromise that becomes sort of an original stain on the nation. And they have to do that in even the Declaration. They're writing, "All men are created equal." Now, I try to explain it. They call it a self-evident truth because we all come from the state of nature. But how can they write that when one of them, Jefferson, is a major slaveholder?

• 52:36Dax Shepard?

  He's had children with one of his very underage.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Right, and the person who is in Philadelphia, in that room, when he has his mahogany desk, and he has Franklin and Adams there, is Thomas Hemings, the brother of his enslaved mistress, also a slave. They wrestle with this. The original draft in Virginia was that all men, okay, and they're endowed with certain inalienable rights, when they enter into a society, and that was supposed to exclude the slaves. Jefferson knew that just doesn't wash. And so you have the great contradiction if he just says, "All men are created equal." And yet, even at his death, he doesn't free his slaves.

• 53:17Dax Shepard?

  Or his own children.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Well, he doesn't free Sally Hemings, but part of the agreement with his mistress Sally Hemings, who was enslaved, was that he would have freed their children, and he does. So it's all, once again, human and complex. But fourscore and seven years later, meaning when Lincoln is at the battleground of Gettysburg, when they're consecrating the cemetery there, he harks back and he says, "A nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal." So you see the power of the sentence pushing us. To progress.

• 53:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Just want to put one more bullet point on we, which is important. Prior to this, governments, as everyone knew, were pretty much ordained by either God or a royalty that had been anointed by God. So they were never by the people. So we is very, very powerful.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  That same Lord begins the greatest sentence ever written, and it begins our constitution. We, the people. So you gotta understand that this isn't the divine right of kings or the power of conquerors. It's this notion of a society that says, we will create common ground. And that's why I wrote this, because I want us to understand the struggle to create the common ground.

• 54:34Dax Shepard?

  In the self-evident truths, you explain how Hume, David Hume, who Franklin was friends with and admired, said, there's two kinds of truths. There's synthetic, and those are based on facts. The example you give is like Philadelphia is bigger than Boston. Well, we're gonna have to go out and do some census work to find out the answer to that. Versus analytic truths, which is all bachelors are unmarried. We don't need to go survey bachelors to find out if they're unmarried. The premise of the statement is in itself.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Self-evident.

• 55:04Dax Shepard?

  Self-evident. So that's the distinction. And then all men, obviously, we're not including women, we're not including Native Americans. You point out in the book, at that moment, a fifth of all people in the colonies were slaves.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Right. And so to start with the self-evident, Jefferson had written, we hold these truths to be sacred. And Franklin has been staying with David Hume in Scotland, the greatest philosopher of the time, as you said, somebody who wrote about contract theory and had come up with this notion of self-evident truths, all bachelors are unmarried, versus truths you had to go around and look. Well, when you say, are created equal.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Franklin says that has to be a self-evident thing, because if you actually go around and look, you'll say, wait a minute, I just talked to Magic Johnson, Walther's not equal to him.

• 55:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  You know, somebody's not equal to Einstein. But what is self-evident is that we all had autonomy in the state of nature, and we came together as a society. We all had this notion of coming together as a country, so politically, we're created equal. But as you point out, they leave out a lot of people.

• 56:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  And so, the arc of American history is delivering on the aspirations of that sentence. And even Benjamin Franklin, to me, years ago, I wrote a book about Benjamin Franklin, he's still a hero. He had two slaves when he was a young printer in Philadelphia, he just worked in his print shop, and then he realizes that's bad, they wander off, he doesn't try to keep them. But he just knows it's something he's done wrong. In his whole life, he keeps a ledger of the errata he had made and how he rectified it. Like, he ran away when he was apprenticed, he breaks the indenture to his brother and runs away, he rectifies it years later by educating his brother's son. Anyway, he realizes the great sin was having once owned a couple of slaves.

• 56:55Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  And so he becomes president of the society for the abolition of slavery, he helps create schools for blacks and freed slaves in America. And his own personal arc, to me, is analogous to the arc of American history.

• 57:12Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  That eventually, we have to say, is all men, well, no, that's an expansive term, it should mean all humanity, that's what all men should mean. And likewise, if you're going to say created equal, you gotta make sure, black or white or female, whatever it may be, we all have equal rights.

• 57:30Dax Shepard?

  I was shocked to read this in the book, that Jefferson called slavery moral depravity.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 57:38Dax Shepard?

  And hideous blot. Yet is one of, in my opinion, as I read about all the forefathers, the most repugnant behavior in regards to his slavery. I mean, traveling Europe with a 14-year-old that you impregnate is, to me, about as fucking low as a kid. So it's interesting to acknowledge that he had this contradiction that was very much alive.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  And it goes back to what we were saying at the very beginning. Even the heroes have great flaws, even the villains have backstories. And we shouldn't just say somebody's all or nothing. Yeah. Wrestling with the complexity of Jefferson is so important. And, you know, we went through a period where either every monument had to be taken down. Yes, but we probably should understand the contradictions and the dark sides of some of these people. I mean, I tend to write about Franklin because he was very self-reflective.

• 58:32Dax Shepard?

  Who you want him to be? He follows the great arc of humanity.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Right, but you can't totally dismiss Jefferson. And you should have Annette Gordon Reed. I don't know if she's been on this show.

• 58:42Dax Shepard?

  No, no.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  And she wrote The Hemmings of Monticello. She's at Harvard, African-American historian. But she has this wonderfully complex view of Jefferson.

• 58:53Dax Shepard?

  I need that. I've been saying I need to read something pro-Jefferson.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Well, Meacham has a somewhat nuanced thing. And obviously, Annette Gordon Reed's book is extraordinarily good. In this book, I'm trying to say, man, this is outrageous. Taking his enslaved mistress, even as he's written this declaration, I try to say, yes. But look at these people who together created this sentence. For all of their flaws, they gave us our mission. And now, it's 250 years, our birthday of that mission. Because we can all agree on that sentence, let's reflect on it.

• 59:29Dax Shepard?

  So another major tension of the time, which is not foreign to us in 2025, is there was quite a bit of tension over how religious this text would be. That's the endowed by their creator, the next line.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Right, and begins with Franklin crossing out sacred and putting in self-evident. And we hold these truths. And then the sentence goes on, and you'll have it in the book there. You can look at the edits, and it says, "They're endowed with certain inalienable rights." And then you have what I think is John Adams's handwriting, because he's the most conventionally religious. And he puts endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So. Even in the editing of one half of this greatest sentence ever written, you see them balancing the role of rationality and reason with the dictates of religion and basically the divine providence that we had as a nation. They're creating a balance. We've lost that today.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Nowadays, you're using the Ten Commandments to divide us. I was at CNN when I was first studying this sentence, because I was doing it for my Ben Franklin book. And I go in one morning and somebody says, "Oh, we have a great crossfire show. Judge Roy Moore has put the Ten Commandments in his courthouse in Alabama. Federal judge says, 'Take it down,' and they're gonna have to send in the marshals." Everybody says, "Great. Who are we gonna get in favor of the Ten Commandments? Who are we gonna get against?" And I'm thinking, "Oh, good. We have a good crossfire tonight." And then, when I went back, I was saying, "The founders are using religion and rationality to balance us, and here we were in the press, and there they were, the politicians, using the Ten Commandments to divide us." So that's another lesson we can learn from the founders,

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  is this balance of the role of religion, the role of rationality, and the role of tolerance.

• 1:01:16Dax Shepard?

  I'm embarrassed to say, I had never even heard the term deists until I was reading this chapter. Many of them were deists. What are deists?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Deists were very big in both Europe and the United States in the 1700s. Voltaire is, to some extent, Jefferson and Franklin are. And what deism is, which was basically the creed of most of the people who wrote the Declaration, in the North at least, is, "You believe in God. You believe in God as a great creator, but he set the universe in motion, there are laws."

• 1:01:52Dax Shepard?

  And he stepped out, or it stepped out.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  And Einstein believes in that too, which sets a beautiful laws and a wondrous cosmos for us to live in, but he doesn't go around intervening.

• 1:02:04Dax Shepard?

  Picking World Series outcomes?

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that the saints who were here yesterday to play the Rams, I could pray as hard as I want that the saints were gonna beat the Rams, but there's no God who says, "All right, I owe Walter one. You know, let's have the saints beat the Rams." He doesn't intervene. That's the deist creed.

• 1:02:23Dax Shepard?

  That seems to have died out entirely.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  I think a lot of people, Francis Collins, a great scientist, who believes in God, who's a Christian. There are many people, I think... Who believe in a benevolent Creator, endowed by the Creator, as our sentence writers put it, believe that the world and the universe has a miraculous set of laws. But there aren't miracles in which suddenly the laws of the universe are broken because you prayed hard enough.

• 1:02:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was a Creator, not a super. It's not managing the apartment.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Exactly, and it was also called providence. In other words, the good Lord sets up a creation and we owe it to divine providence to understand the beauty of that creation. But it's not individual providence where the good Lord is intervening every day and deciding, I'm gonna help you out today.

• 1:03:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and they were even specifically saying, I'm not in for that Jesus was the son of that thing.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  I think they're all very rational. When I say, oh, let's pick Jefferson and Franklin because those are the two who talk about it. It's in the book a bit. Franklin is the best, really, because he's a very rational person. And he believes in the Creator and he believes that worshiping is good for a society. But Ezra Stiles, who was president of Yale, right when Franklin is dying, says, okay, but do you accept the divinity of Jesus Christ? And Franklin writes back and he says, you know, I've sort of looked at that my whole life and I've never decided to proselytize, to preach on it, because I'm just not sure and it's not something I know. He said, and I've quit worrying about it because I'm gonna learn soon enough the real answer. No, he was dying soon.

• 1:04:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  So if you look even at John Adams, he's that way, which is a believe in the Creator, but the notion of the divinity of Christ is something that some take on faith, but others feel they're not sure about it. Jefferson, in particular, takes the Bible and he creates what's called the Jefferson Bible, where he keeps in. All of the great wise sayings of Jesus.

• 1:04:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  All of the principles and the moral principles of Jesus. But he actually takes a razor and cuts out the miracle parts because Jefferson is such a deist and such a rationalist. He thinks that the Bible would be better if we just listened to the moral preachings, but didn't worry about how do you make, you know, loaves and fishes?

• 1:04:56Dax Shepard?

  He sent that book to his nephew or something?

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  The Jefferson Bible, you can see it in Monticello. It actually exists and it has the razor cutouts. It's once again, something I don't proselytize on. I think everybody should have their own set of beliefs, but I think the key there is to be tolerant. And this is what Franklin was saying. Different people are going to understand the divinity of Jesus differently. I think they all felt that we should have a respect for a great creator, a divine power that created us, but otherwise we should be tolerant.

• 1:05:30Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:05:37Dax Shepard?

  This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish. Cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

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• 1:06:20Dax Shepard?

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• 1:07:49Dax Shepard?

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• 1:08:32Dax Shepard?

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• 1:09:26Dax Shepard?

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• 1:09:41Speaker 01

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• 1:10:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so it's interesting. You got these three dudes that are really nitpicking over all the wording. And even in this group of three, you've got a really wide range of how religious like Adams is definitely more. He's definitely more of an abolitionist than is Jefferson. You're sitting down with what would seem to be kind of unbridgeable differences.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  They would seem more unbridgeable than our differences today.

• 1:10:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Our differences today is, okay, how much healthcare should be considered into something? That's a Medicaid Medicare.

• 1:10:47Dax Shepard?

  We want immigrants, but how many?

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  We're arguing over what should be in the commons? How much healthcare should be in the commons? How much police protection, whatever it may be? Those are pretty simple enough arguments compared to the ones our founders had to deal with. And they successfully craft the sentence and then craft a declaration and then craft what may be the most astonishingly. Successful constitution imaginable. And as Franklin says at the end, when they finish that sentence, they're voting on the Declaration, and then he does it with the Constitution as well. He said, "I never thought this was perfect, but it's as good as humans can do. And so with all of its flaws, let's be humble and hold hands and say, we have endowed this."

• 1:11:34Dax Shepard?

  That's another thing I think we've lost the appetite for a little bit is some places are just a good place to start. We're not there, but we need to start somewhere so the improvements can come.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Also, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin thing that you said where he was very much righting his wrongs over time. Nowadays, I feel like what's so upsetting is we would look, not we, but a lot of people would look at it and be like, "Oh, he was wishy-washy," or, "Oh, he's switch flip-flop."

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  He flip-flopped.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  It's so crazy.

• 1:12:04Dax Shepard?

  But that's an unforgivable sin.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Again, on both sides, we do this on the political spectrum. We're like, "Oh, now they changed their mind. You can't trust them." It's like, that's called growth. We should be able to let people change their mind.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  When I learn more, I change my mind. What do you do? And that's an old line that he used.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  But we're stuck right now.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  We don't tolerate compromises or people who grow. That's what this book is about too, is we started a nation with a certain aspiration, but we had to grow and we had to get there. That's the core of it.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, and then we get into what I think is the most moving part of the book and the thing that I appreciated reading most. And that is just about common ground in the pursuit of the American dream. So it's kind of define these things. People are very familiar with the term common ground, but it had a literal beginning, common ground.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Right. Common ground back in feudal times was the landowners and the great dukes and the earls and the, they had their land, but there was a certain parts of the land that were put in commons. They were called the commons. Everybody could graze their herds or grow things there. And it was for what we then called commoners. That's how we get the name commoners. They were the ones who didn't own land, but they could graze on the commons. And it comes even from John Locke. John Locke is a strong believer of private property. He believes that if you...

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Mix your labor with things you find in nature. You have a right to make that your private property.

• 1:13:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  He is the philosopher who gives us the notion of free markets and private property. He has a caveat that says, as long as there is enough and as good left in the commons. So even in Boston, Philadelphia, and in Cambridge in colonial times, there was Boston Common, Cambridge Common. We think, okay, Boston Common is beautiful and it has a place where the swans go. No, but that was a commons where people could do it. So for me, that's the metaphor that is at the core of this sentence. What is this sentence talking about? It's saying a common ground.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  And so what they did back then was they put not just land in the common for people to graze on, but they said, we're going to put certain things in the common. Ben Franklin did. He said, okay, we're going to put a library services in the commons. And this is Ben Franklin and his little group in Philadelphia.

• 1:14:35Dax Shepard?

  You need to do two seconds on what a paradigm breaker that was having libraries. I don't think people understand the importance of just having access to books. How much that opened up your opportunity.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  It is the great symbolic nature of the commons in American dream that everybody has access to information. And Franklin said, when he created the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is the first library where everybody could come and use it, he said, we're going to create a society where anybody, whatever their birth, whatever their background, will be able to learn as much as

• 1:15:11Dax Shepard?

  Compete.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  the wealthiest people. And that allows everybody the opportunity. That's what America is about, having the opportunity.

• 1:15:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, because books were elite. You had to be rich to own books.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  And Franklin goes around as a young tradesman in Philadelphia, and he goes to all the wealthy people and he says, put your books in this library. Which ones can we borrow for it? So we can create a community. So that was the symbolic commons. Likewise, he says, let's do a fire corps, volunteer fire department. Even when he died, he still had his bucket by his bed because you had to keep your bucket if you're a volunteer fireman Oh, wow. by your bed. So in his deathbed, he still has it. But when he's like 18 years old, his friends are creating a volunteer fire. And they say, well, should it be for people who pay for it? Or should it be in the commons? They said, wait, it's not a good idea if we let some houses burn and some don't.

• 1:16:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, not a good look.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  So we put that in the commons. We put the night watchmen, corn, police in the commons. And he even does a hospital that's a public-private partnership done by people who donate, but there's a matching from the legislature and there's a lottery to pay for it. Cause he wants to put some healthcare in the commons. That's still what we're trying to do is argue how much healthcare should be in the commons. Should there be free charity hospitals? Should there be Medicare, Medicaid? And if we realize that our debates are simply about how much gets put in the commons, then we can disagree, but at least we know it's not some existential fight. It's just a question of balance.

• 1:16:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Yeah, I needed to read this part and be reminded of this part because what I hear mostly in our public discourse is just this hatred for billionaires. It's like a very common hatred. And we're seeing some cities move to maybe more socialist measures. So I think I'm kind of living in the defense of the free market a lot in my head. And I am someone who thinks to Locke's point, if I make a pottery out of the clay I found in the ground, it's not your bowl. You know, I do believe that. Absolutely. And you've got Locke exactly right. The principle I was choosing not to look at is the American dream, the core of it is I can transcend my class. I mean, that's really when we get into why do we form this country?

• 1:17:29Dax Shepard?

  We were rebelling in many ways against a very hierarchical class structure. That was hereditary. I'm born into nobility. I'm born into aristocracy. And so we would all agree that's, that's not how it should be. The fundamental reason we didn't want anything to do with them is we wanted a merit-based system that would allow you to transcend. And when I'm reminded of that, I do think, yes, the common goods are what ensure that. And they're hugely important because if we are not a place that you can transcend your social class, then we are in a nobility. We might as well be in a monarchy. And we have seen, and I acknowledge this increased elitism is now functioning virtually

• 1:18:10Dax Shepard?

  the same as inherited class when we look at the real statistics. So I just think this is a very important part of the book and I was really, really grateful to be reminded.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  What its purpose is, yeah. No matter how much you believe in private property or anything else, there's a moral purpose of saying, there'll be certain things that every kid has the opportunity to have, every kid has access to, every person, and that could be K through 12 education, we put that generally in the commons. It's under attack, aren't they? Police protection, we put in the commons, to some extent, healthcare. Why do we do it? Not just because we're being sweet and generous, but because we want to be a land of opportunity, which means whatever class you're born into, we're not like the old aristocracy we were fighting against when we created this country, in which if you were born into the aristocracy with land, you'd always stay there,

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  and if you were born a commoner, it was hard to rise. We want to be a land of opportunity, and it got called the American dream. That's the goal and the fundamental moral purpose of saying, what do we put in the commons and what do we not? Well, we can debate that, but without having some things in the commons, it's not socialist to say, hey, police protection and defense should be in the commons, it should protect everybody, and likewise, debating how much healthcare should be in the commons, how much higher education should, community colleges, or for that matter, state colleges and universities be free? Yeah. Is that something we want to put in the commons? Well, we can debate that, like, no, maybe we shouldn't. And we can incrementally try things.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  And we can balance things, and we can say... And just... Yes, but we're going into a new, you know, when we went from the agricultural age to the industrial age 100 years ago, we put into the commons a lot more, like, high school education should be in the commons, everybody should get it for free. That started with the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, when we were trying to go into an industrial age, we realized, well, now we're going into a new age of AI and other things. Well, perhaps more is required to put in the commons, but that doesn't make you a socialist to say, we should put, in order to have a land of opportunity, have more... Access to education and you don't have to make it all or nothing.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  We could take some of these hugely poisonous fights we're having and saying, "Well, it's just a question of calibrating. How much healthcare should be in the commons? How much public education should be in the commons? Let's not make these existential fights. Let's look at it through the lens of what makes us a land of opportunity? What makes sure that we all have, share some common ground? Because the moral purpose of the commons is not just to make things a land of opportunity, but it was also to give everybody a stake in society.

• 1:21:02Dax Shepard?

  A buy-in.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, a buy-in. Like, look, look, you may not have been born wealthy, but you all have a stake in keeping this society. And nowadays, some of the resentment comes because people enclose things. They make special VIP entrances.

• 1:21:19Dax Shepard?

  Well, hold on on that. I have a whole section on the sky boxification. I think this is fascinating. But I just want to say, yes, if we don't have that principle that anyone here can become anything they want, we don't really have a unique take on anything. I think that is the quintessential ingredient. And as it erodes, it's good to remember, no, that's actually the thing we should all feel pride on.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  That's why for the past 50 years, we've been the engine of innovation for this world since World War II. And yes, that notion of an American dream where everybody can rise, that was Ben Franklin's core principle when he's helping write this sentence. If you lose that, you lose something moral, which is every kid, every person deserves an opportunity to do the best they can. But you also, from a practical sense, you erode the buy-in people have for our system. They become resentful and they end up voting the extremes.

• 1:22:16Dax Shepard?

  These populist movements come up.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Populist movements come up or left-wing movements. And so if you erode the sense. That we all have a stake in society.

• 1:22:26Dax Shepard?

  Then communism does start looking attractive.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Correct, or socialism, or authoritarianism. And we're seeing that, not just in the United States, even in Japan, but all of Europe. And so, even if you don't believe in the moral reasons for having a commons, which is that everybody should get an education, be able to do well, you say, okay, but just for practical purposes, if we don't want to undermine democracy,

• 1:22:49Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  we ought to make sure everybody buys into it.

• 1:22:52Dax Shepard?

  Absolutely. Okay, so now, let's talk about the skybox-ification. Yeah, this is a bummer to read, and it's so true and so evident. And I am a beneficiary.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do this afternoon when I go to LAX. First, let's give Michael Sandel, the greatest public philosopher of our time, credit. He came up with the notion of skybox-ification. It's easy enough to understand. When I was young and went to Fenway Park, including with Michael Sandel, we'd all go in the same entrance, we'd eat the same soggy hot dogs, we'd sit in the stands together. Now, even when you go, and when I go, we probably

• 1:23:27Dax Shepard?

  Different entrance?

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  get to the VIP entrance, maybe, or you do at least.

• 1:23:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  And maybe we're invited to the skyboxes, and we don't all sit in the same stand. That's a metaphor for so many things in our society.

• 1:23:40Dax Shepard?

  And I gotta add, Wow, yeah. it's a dramatic difference, to the degree that now that I've been invited, I mean, I grew up looking at the outside of the Red Rope, but now on the inside of it, I can tell you, it's so dramatically different that there are things that I wouldn't even do otherwise now. It's so spoiling, and the gap is so big in the experience, so people are right to be pissed.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  I guess, right to be pissed is another way of saying resentment, is the way I put it. But sometimes it happens to me, you go to the airport, and you're in the priority lane, or the clear lane, and people waiting in line are giving you that look, like there's a slight resentment. These build up resentments. Probably when I go this afternoon to LAX, I'm gonna not say, well, let me give up the TSA pre-line, or whatever it's called, but... It happens in so many different ways. It used to be my father and grandfather, growing up exactly where I did in New Orleans, all went to the public high school, right in the neighborhood. Now, even K through 12 education. There's sort of a velvet rope that certain people get. Yeah, private is huge. Healthcare, you name it.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  And it goes back, like many things, and I mention it in the book. This book is not a heavy philosophy book, but there's a paragraph that mentions it from John Locke, which is in that period, they had what was called the enclosure laws. And what they did was, they had the commons. Everybody got to graze their sheep on the commons. But they decided that certain people could have the right to enclose part of the commons and make it private. That has a really good impact in many ways. You had a lot more productivity if it's private. The yields go up. You have a huge agricultural revolution. However, if you enclose off, if you fence off, if you velvet rope off, too many things, it has a bad impact.

• 1:25:27Speaker 02

  And so whether it's our understanding of our founders' personalities, or of Elon's personality, or of these things, we have to realize it's not all or nothing. There's a certain balance that, yes, we want people to be able to enclose things. We want maybe even to have velvet ropes. But if you do it too much, you get a resentful society and a society in which people cannot rise to their own talents.

• 1:25:52Dax Shepard?

  Maybe interesting or not, but Jefferson weirdly favored a meritocratic elite.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  He does come off perfectly in this book. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson start what become universities. University of Virginia and the Academy for the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania that becomes Penn, University of Pennsylvania. And they have different mission statements. What Jefferson says is, the point is, we are going to... Take the best forty, fifty kids, and we are going to groom a new meritocratic elite. And those people are going to become the leaders of society. Franklin, on the other hand, says, no, the university's purpose is to have everybody, whatever their innate talents be,

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  to have a chance to do the best they can with whatever assets they have, and we want everybody to move up. Well, creating a meritocratic elite, I don't blame Jefferson for all of this, but I blame my generation, which is, at a certain point, maybe fifty years ago, we created a meritocracy of credentialed people who went to the right schools.

• 1:27:09Dax Shepard?

  And whose children, most importantly. In practice, it became hereditary.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  How is it merit?

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we call it meritocratic because that was what James Conan Bryant did when they invented the SAT, and they say that's merit. People say, well, I believe in merit. What do you mean merit?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Is the ability to ace an SAT score pretty useful? But is that true merit? Franklin answers by saying, no, true merit is the ability to better serve your community and your country. That's what we call true merit. And so he was fighting Jefferson on that. So, we created, and I mean by we, sort of a baby boom generation after World War II, a credentialed elite who went to the best colleges and got their kids in the, quote, best colleges.

• 1:27:54Dax Shepard?

  SAT, tutors.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  And they became the ones who thought that they could understand foreign policy better. And once again, Michael Sandel has a good book, you gotta get him on the show, called The Tyranny of the Meritocracy. Because the meritocracy got a lot wrong after a while, including forever wars and things they got us into. But anyway, there is that notion that we created a new elite. And that wasn't the best thing to happen. And it really starts happening in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And that elite, it happened in the Clinton years. Whatever you may think of the Clinton years, it was bureaucratic. And people, including Hillary Clinton, would say things like, "Well, you should just go to college. And that way, you won't be left behind in society."

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  What made the 65% of the people who don't finish college look down upon and that elite view of the credentials should run our society was a bad thing.

• 1:28:52Dax Shepard?

  Yes. I think that's a big issue we've not yet figured out how to tackle. In general, I see that as an enormous problem the left has, that they are seemingly unwilling to confront.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's not necessarily the left. It's sort of the neoliberal liberalism of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is, "You'll be fine if you just go to college. And if you don't, it's your fault."

• 1:29:17Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And then some assumption that you had the same odds of attending college as everyone else.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  And frankly, that if you went to an Ivy League college, somehow you had more merit. Yeah. And we have to try to understand, and this is what this book is about too, there has been a backlash, a populism on the left and the right, and globally. Certain people in the old neoliberal consensus who look down on the populist backlash. And I'm saying, "No, no, no. There's really a lot of reasons, people, to use your technical term, are pissed."

• 1:29:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  And the reason they're pissed is we started losing the common ground. We started losing the American dream. We started losing the notion that we should be a land of opportunity. And that's why, if we're going to heal this great divide, I just hope for our 250th. You don't have to read my book. Just read the sentence. We hold each other. And everybody should understand this sentence and say, "Okay, I get it. Now let's live by it."

• 1:30:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, talk about going forward. That's the last thing I wanted to talk about. Franklin said, "Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." How can we all hang together?

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  I think Franklin is the great guidepost because he is a great entrepreneur. He believes, like you do in many, and yes, you can succeed with private property. You can make things. He gets to Philadelphia because he's running away from being an indentured to his brother. He's got three coins in his pocket. It's a most wonderful scene. He tips the boatman, buys the three puffy rolls, gives one away. He says, "When you're really poor, you're always more generous because you want people not to think you're poor." So he's with his three coins, being generous. And he comes into Philadelphia and it becomes a land of opportunity for him, Market Street. And he becomes from that penniless, oh, not penniless, three pennies, kid

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  to, in some ways, one of the wealthiest people in America. Hard to count, landowning and slave ownership and all that. But for somebody who creates printing shops and franchises them up and down the coast and has becomes a publisher, he becomes enormously successful. And so that's the point of Franklin. But then he creates a group in his community and says, "Okay, how are we going to serve the common ground?" And that's when he forms, with his leather apron club, he calls it. Because it's people who go to their shops each morning, put on their leather apron. It's not the elite, it's the shopkeepers. He says, "We, the middling people, shopkeepers, artisans, those of us who go to work every day,

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  we not only have the opportunity to succeed, we have to figure out what should we put in common so we become a land of opportunity." So I say, if we're going forward, try to be like Franklin, and I talk about it at the end of the book, which is he starts a street sweeping corps, a police corps, a volunteer fire department, a hospital, and of course, the library. An insurance fund for widows and orphans where everybody chips in, almost like you'd have social security today. He said, "That's good for everybody if we put these in the commons." But he also has a revolving loan fund for entrepreneurs who want to start businesses. That's still today in Philadelphia and Boston, those revolving loan funds that he started are still helping people in East Philadelphia start little businesses.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  He is a believer in capitalism, believer in enterprise, but also in making sure everybody has an opportunity. And then he does many other things, not just these loan funds. But during his lifetime, he donates to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia. And then at one point, they're building a new hall, which is still next to Independence Hall, still called the New Hall. He writes a fundraising document. And it says, even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send somebody here to preach Mohammedism to us, we should offer a pulpit and we should listen, for we might learn something. And then on his deathbed, he's the largest individual contributor

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  to the congregation Mikkva Israel, the first synagogue built in Philadelphia. So when he dies, instead of his minister accompanying his casket to the grave, all 35 ministers, preachers and priests link arms with the Rabbi of the Jews in Philadelphia and march with him to the grave.

• 1:33:36Dax Shepard?

  Did you say 22,000? Is that the number in the book?

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  That's the number of people who were at the funeral procession. And then it's led by the clergy of all.

• 1:33:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're witnessing this.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  And that's the type of nation they were trying to create 250 years ago. That's what they were fighting for 250 years ago. And that's what we're still fighting for today. And the sentence can still guide us.

• 1:33:58Dax Shepard?

  I know so many people have hard ons for the founding fathers, you know, these young dudes, who I don't know if they've read any of the stuff. Right. But I want them to know. Yeah, they're not. Like, if you want to idolize these guys, please idolize the right stuff about these guys. Yeah, that's incredible.

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  And you have to realize when people read my biographies, they may say, I'm just like Elon. You know, when people do something that sucks that. See, wait a minute. Have you ever sent a rocket into orbit? You're not.

• 1:34:24Dax Shepard?

  Two, 5,000 satellites.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  My books are not how-to manuals. They are real people. So learn from the good, learn from the bad, learn the cautionary parts. But in this case, the greatest sentence ever written, there were deep flaws when they said, all men are created equal, but. They did set us on the right mission.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:34:46Dax Shepard?

  You're right. The greatest sentence ever written. I very much encourage you.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  It's very short.

• 1:34:51Dax Shepard?

  And I was gonna say, if you have a short attention, this is the Isaacson book for you to take on. Walter, it's so great to have you in person. Such a difference. I really, really enjoyed getting to sit down with you face to face. And I love this.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Glad you did this. This is really important.

• 1:35:05Dax Shepard?

  And I needed to hear several parts.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  I think we all should, you say, how can we do going forward? The two of you have a great platform to do it, but everybody listening has a great platform. Every day, wake up and say, at least for our 250th birthday, I'm gonna try to think, what can I do that helps bring us together and unite us versus being part of the things that polarize us?

• 1:35:26Dax Shepard?

  We're on the same mission. What a delight. I can't wait to have you back when you write your next book.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Can't wait to be back.

• 1:35:31Dax Shepard?

  All right.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some host eggs.

• 1:35:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, should we tell everyone our incredible discovery last night flying back from Nashville?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:47Dax Shepard?

  As we were checking into our flight?

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Dax Shepard?

  That if Delta grows up and starts a company?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Dax Shepard?

  It's like Delta Company, but then she abbreviates it to Delta Co.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:35:59Dax Shepard?

  Delta Co. is Del Taco.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I can't wait for her to start it. I wonder if Del Taco will come after her for infringement? And she'll go, I've had this name. This is my name.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  This has been my name my whole life.

• 1:36:10Dax Shepard?

  I countersue.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  They can't come after her because it's Delta Co. It's just pronounced Del Taco. Yeah.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  I mean, this is great. She has to start one now. Like, she has no other option.

• 1:36:24Dax Shepard?

  I actually should look into incorporating her immediately.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  You really should.

• 1:36:27Dax Shepard?

  Well, sometimes you just get a little blessing lands in your lap, and that's what it felt like last night.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  I agree. Um, do you wanna talk about the fact that I'm platinum?

• 1:36:36Dax Shepard?

  That was embarrassing. That was pretty embarrassing.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  So, yes, we flew back last night because we had a really fun interview that we did in Nashville. And then we came, um, back home, you, me, and the kids. Kristen had come home earlier.

• 1:36:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  And we're in line, ready to, you know,

• 1:36:55Dax Shepard?

  Check our bags.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Check our bags. And somehow we got on the subject. Oh, I think Lincoln asked, are you platinum? She said, "What are you?" or something like, "What rank are you?"

• 1:37:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, which why on earth would she have brought that up? I don't even know if she knows about the frequent flyer.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  She knows now somehow.

• 1:37:13Dax Shepard?

  Well, now she does. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  I think they just overheard something. They asked me and I said, "Well, I'm platinum." But it was, it was a sim because I had written down already that I wanted to talk to you about this because when I was flying out on my way to Nashville, there was a man in front of me, a young man, young, fit man.

• 1:37:35Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Um, who-

• 1:37:37Dax Shepard?

  You left out the fit part.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  I did, but I'm adding-

• 1:37:40Dax Shepard?

  And even the young.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  I did.

• 1:37:42Dax Shepard?

  How young? Eighteen?

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no, like my age.

• 1:37:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, Jesus. Okay, so middle aged?

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  How dare you? Um, no, because he, he was young to, to have, when the lady checked him in, say, "Thank you for being a diamond member," whatever.

• 1:38:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what are they even saying?

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  I forget.

• 1:38:06Dax Shepard?

  Diamond club?

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I overheard it and I was like, "Diamond, whoa." But I'm platinum, like, that's the highest, so like, maybe diamond's right below it, but I don't remember them ever saying diamond to me. A lot was going on there by us. So then, you know, I checked in, "Thank you for being a platinum flyer member," whatever. And then I went and, uh, had to look it up. Diamonds that above platinum.

• 1:38:32Dax Shepard?

  Do you, do you remember how many miles you have to fly to earn that status?

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Like, over fifty.

• 1:38:36Dax Shepard?

  Fifty million?

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's, Rob, do you wanna look?

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:38:40Dax Shepard?

  Rob, do you know how to look?

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  Lifetime is three million actual miles.

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  Lifetime, okay.

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  You need to spend twenty-eight thousand dollars in medallion qualification dollars each year.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  MQD.

• 1:38:52Speaker 04

  I mean, what are we talking about? MQD.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  Not just miles flown, it's like 11 per dollar.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:01Dax Shepard?

  I know nothing.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Well, I looked it up and I was like, you know what? This guy, and then it got me so curious, like, who's this guy? Like, he flies so much and he's so young.

• 1:39:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  And he's so fit.

• 1:39:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  But also, so the youth was interesting because it's like, oh, he, he flies a lot. It's not like he's like 80, then Diamond might make sense.

• 1:39:25Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's like.

• 1:39:26Dax Shepard?

  And this kid was born in an airplane.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was very curious.

• 1:39:30Dax Shepard?

  Do you know, I have a friend who, and maybe I've already told you this story, but he had, it must have been Diamond status or something, right?

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Elusive.

• 1:39:39Dax Shepard?

  And when you have that one, you get the free upgrade like every time.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:45Dax Shepard?

  You can buy a coach ticket if you're Diamond, you will get upgraded to first class. Almost all the time. He had this crazy status and he liked to travel and he wasn't rich.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Dax Shepard?

  And his weird thing was, and I remember one time it was like, the end of the year was approaching and he needed another 15,000 miles. And he went online and he found, like, just started searching for like the longest trip possible, uh, for the cheapest.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:40:11Dax Shepard?

  I want to say on like December 30th, he flew to Malaysia and then just fucking flew back.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  No. That's where it's getting out of hand.

• 1:40:21Dax Shepard?

  Keep his Diamond status.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Oh, but see, I get it. I get you want, you want it. It's very elusive.

• 1:40:26Dax Shepard?

  You don't want to lose it. It's the loss bias or whatever they call it.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. You have a little bit of glitter, I see.

• 1:40:33Dax Shepard?

  Um, you know, I put on that birthday hat at Brick Top's. And I still have glitter in all these places. Yeah, that, that thing got everywhere somehow.

• 1:40:46Dax Shepard?

  I have washed my face, rest assured. I don't know, like it's embedded, or maybe I have consumed some and they're now getting expressed out of the pores.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  I think that's fun, maybe all year, there's just gonna be glitter popping out.

• 1:40:59Dax Shepard?

  So back to line, we discover your platinum and we discover I'm gold. Well, I tell you, oh, that's weird. I just got an email and I'm terrible at logging, putting my number in when I fly. And I got a whole reason why, you know, it's so boring, but it's like every time I've ever tried to use those miles, it's a fucking joke. Every time it's a blackout, every, it ends up, when I've used it, it ends up being like 120,000 miles to get a coach seat or something. And I'm like, this thing's a fucking racket.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  I haven't had that.

• 1:41:29Dax Shepard?

  Now, a lot of people have great luck with it and I, and I concede to that. All to say, I go up to the counter first with the girls to check in and the woman behind the counter at some point says like, thank you for your gold status. And then you start laughing immediately kind of behind and then I like look at you and then obviously she clocks this whole thing somehow. And so then I step away, I've checked in the bags and now you step up and we're like, whatever, eight feet away from you. And when she checks you, she's like, oh my, we are so delighted to have your platinum status. She like screamed platinum status.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  It was really funny.

• 1:42:05Dax Shepard?

  She hit platinum status like three times.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  She did.

• 1:42:08Dax Shepard?

  She was a party.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  She was, she was really fun and it was very funny. Um, and then.

• 1:42:14Dax Shepard?

  The flight?

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Dax Shepard?

  Me holding in the farts and the pee.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  Oh, well, yeah, you, you had a lot of farts and pee that you kept in.

• 1:42:21Dax Shepard?

  The gal next to me was asleep.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Dax Shepard?

  And, um, boy, she looked like she was really peacefully sleeping. I could not bring myself to wake her up.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Dax Shepard?

  To, to get out.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31Dax Shepard?

  And a couple of things happened. One, I had to pee really bad.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Dax Shepard?

  Two, I had to fart so bad.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  I'm just really surprised you didn't do it.

• 1:42:37Dax Shepard?

  I couldn't do it because I was like, if this, a woman wakes up because she smells something, I, I just, I, I couldn't do it and I had a bad hunch it was gonna be aromatic.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:50Dax Shepard?

  So I held it and it was so uncomfortable. And then additionally, mid-flight, Delta comes up to my seat and she goes. Will you get my bag down daddy? And I go, I can't because she's sleeping. I can't step over blah, blah, blah. And she looked like kind of frustrated to the point where I felt really bad.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:06Dax Shepard?

  So she left, she went back to her seat. And I was thinking, I was like, God, if you're a little person and you just can't reach your bag, how powerless that is. But you have a daddy and so you ask him and he says, no. I was starting to feel really kind of quite bad about it. To the degree that when we landed, I wanted, I said to her, hey, if I were you and I were little and I couldn't reach my bag and I, I'd be very frustrated. And I'm really, really sorry, but I just really didn't want to make. And then she hit us with, she had had an enormous calamity.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, she had.

• 1:43:35Dax Shepard?

  She had poured an orange juice all over her shirt, all over her pants. Through her underwear. So this poor girl, when she was wanting her luggage, she was soaking up with apple juice and sticky. And then the best part is she was explaining to us how she dealt with it. Which again, I'm kind of glad I didn't get her bag because she just had to deal with it.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, true.

• 1:43:52Dax Shepard?

  And she, I think she told us she was pulling her pants down.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no one could see so they could air out.

• 1:43:59Dax Shepard?

  I just imagine like walking by in one of the rows and there's just this little kid with her pants down.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, just watching their iPad with their pants down.

• 1:44:08Dax Shepard?

  Watching that 10 things I hate about you.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. But okay, so there was a guy next to me on the flight. And.

• 1:44:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I peeped him.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Oh, you did?

• 1:44:18Dax Shepard?

  I mean, I saw that there was, you were sitting next to a guy.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was sitting next to this man. And in the middle of the flight.

• 1:44:23Dax Shepard?

  Sorry.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:25Dax Shepard?

  I did receive a text message at one point before we took off. And I looked and it was a text message from my friend Monica, who was several rows behind me. And she just said, I heard you cough.

• 1:44:39Dax Shepard?

  I am the worst, man. I'm just, I am the worst.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  It's distinct, your cough. But I just know your cough, ever, everyone, no one else, everyone just hears people coughing.

• 1:44:49Dax Shepard?

  I just really can't figure out if it's a tic or I have a condition. Cause I have a lot of stuff. It's not like I'm just dry coughing. God, this is disgusting.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  I'm so happy you say, you're saying this out loud. Cause I didn't feel like I could ever say this to you.

• 1:45:04Dax Shepard?

  I think you've already said this to me.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  I have?

• 1:45:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, about the nose blowing.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I just think you have some tic.

• 1:45:10Dax Shepard?

  I do.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11Dax Shepard?

  I have tics.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  You have, we all have things, but like, I think you have, um, I, I noticed it in editing. That's when I really notice it, where I'm like. He's not, he, it's, it's like, it's a tick that you're coughing and like, um, clearing and stuff. And like nose blowing and stuff because, because, I know, I got, it's like anthropologically interesting.

• 1:45:38Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  It's not annoying, it's fine.

• 1:45:39Dax Shepard?

  But is it chicken or the egg? I think I have like some issues. I had asthma, blah, blah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it's like out of nowhere.

• 1:45:48Dax Shepard?

  Right. It's entirely psychosomatic.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  It's not, but it is. It's eighty twenty.

• 1:45:54Dax Shepard?

  It might be eighty twenty.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  I mean, in here, sometimes I feel like it happens.

• 1:46:00Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you're really scared to say this. I can tell.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Well, like either if you're like a little, if you get a little like agitated or something, I think, I think like something.

• 1:46:09Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you mean you saying that?

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Like, I know that face.

• 1:46:14Dax Shepard?

  I just felt like I was like, oh.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really funny. We all, we have so many.

• 1:46:21Dax Shepard?

  I just want to thank everyone in my life. Like clearly everyone in my life is very tolerant of the amount of noises I'm making.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  It's fine. Who cares? Anyway, so there was a guy next to me.

• 1:46:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  And, and he was young.

• 1:46:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and what did you say, fit?

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  No, he was like, he seemed a little younger than me. So he was prime. Um, and he was reading his book and stuff. He was, it seemed like he was solo, right?

• 1:46:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  Some point in the flight, like look over and he's talking to the, a girl, a young woman. Um, next to him on, but I was next to him, but on the across the aisle. Okay, yeah. He was reading his book and he was just like being, I, he wasn't talking to her. Until all of a sudden he was into me in the middle of the flight. Like, I look over and he was just like talking, you know? And, and I kind of am looking and I'm trying to listen a little bit, but I have the headphones in here. So I couldn't really hear, but it seemed to me they were meeting.

• 1:47:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, meet cute.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  And I was, I was like, oh my God, um, I'm, oh, meet cute is happening.

• 1:47:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  And at then, this is funny. Yeah, then I was like.

• 1:47:36Dax Shepard?

  And you got jealous?

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I did. I was like, what the fu- I'm sitting right here.

• 1:47:44Dax Shepard?

  My seat, hey, hello.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  I'm sitting right here.

• 1:47:46Dax Shepard?

  Diamond status, platinum, what are you, platinum?

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  I'm sitting right here and he, he hates me so mu- I'm so gross. He has to go across the aisle.

• 1:47:56Dax Shepard?

  He'd rather cross the aisle.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:47:59Dax Shepard?

  No, but hold on, now you, I gotta.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02Dax Shepard?

  You can't build this argument because I was already witnessing it before you ever sat down.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  I know, but listen, okay, so.

• 1:48:08Dax Shepard?

  The trolley had left the station.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  So, so they're following it, like, you know, they're, they're flirting. So they're chit chatting and I was like, oh my God, a me cute. And I was like, oh man, I feel conflicted about this because I love me cute. So I'm like, I'm happy this is happening for them, but also like.

• 1:48:25Dax Shepard?

  Hello.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  I'm right here, like, this is so rude. So, and then.

• 1:48:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, it could have turned into a challenger situation.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Oh shit, I know, and I looked for the movie on the plane, it wasn't.

• 1:48:36Dax Shepard?

  That's safest.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  So, so then I would have really got his attention.

• 1:48:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. And when you nudged him and you pointed during the three way. And then you nudged him and said, nudge her. Hey, you see what's happening here? Does this interest you, this concept of three people getting together intimately?

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so then at one point, and I am an observer and I am kind of closing my eyes a lot in the flight. So this is part of it, I guess. So then at one point, I look over and I'm like, oh, he has a wine. He hadn't had a wine.

• 1:49:15Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  Or a drink or anything.

• 1:49:16Dax Shepard?

  But his date was going great.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, I was like, oh my God, he has a wine now, like, they're like literally on a date. But then I look over and I was like, oh, she's not there anymore, okay. Then I was like, oh my God, she went to the bathroom? She asked him to hold her wine?

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  I was like, what a move.

• 1:49:38Dax Shepard?

  Hold on a second. Well, that's an interesting conclusion. Why, why isn't it his wine?

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:49:44Dax Shepard?

  You think you would have saw him order it?

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  I was like, I would have known that.

• 1:49:48Dax Shepard?

  I got you. You look over and the wine had just materialized.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:49:51Dax Shepard?

  I got you. That's more.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  It had materialized. It was a white wine. I was like, I know her. She was like, do you mind holding my wine? Like, she didn't want to leave it out in the open, like with this other stranger, like the counterpart to me.

• 1:50:05Dax Shepard?

  Think how that guy felt.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  I know. I felt horrible for him.

• 1:50:08Dax Shepard?

  What if you two would have caught eyes and rolled your eyes?

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  We gotta be cute.

• 1:50:12Dax Shepard?

  That would be fun, but what would be more fun is if you guys just caught, you guys were both watching them and then you got caught eyes with each other and you both rolled your eyes.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:50:20Dax Shepard?

  These two losers, because you were hurt.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. These two assholes, what the fuck?

• 1:50:28Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:50:34Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Instagram Teen Accounts. So, we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up, and one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:50:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so Instagram has got something called Teen Accounts, and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So, anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:51:19Dax Shepard?

  Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on, and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age-appropriate experiences for teens.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with Teen Accounts.

• 1:51:39Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  So I was like, I put it together. I was like, oh my God, what a move.

• 1:51:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  Will you put me in line? But it's also a scary move because she doesn't know him. Like, he could put something in there.

• 1:52:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  He should have asked me if she was being smart. But anyway. And then I do see her come back and she, you know, she's smiling at him. And then she sits down and I am, I'm watching at this point. I'm watching them, my show, my TV show. And he gives her the wine.

• 1:52:21Dax Shepard?

  You were right.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  I was right.

• 1:52:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  Thank you. Then I really in my head was like, they are just being like, the way she said, "Thank you" did not feel like, "If you held my wine."

• 1:52:34Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh my God, it's for sure me cute.

• 1:52:40Dax Shepard?

  How do you know they weren't together?

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Then.

• 1:52:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:52:46Dax Shepard?

  I forgot. We're in a Seinfeld episode. I forgot.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Stop, stop cutting to the end. Stop fast forwarding. So then, I'm, you know, stewing.

• 1:52:56Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm. Wow, you had a lot going on back there.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  I did. And I was like, God, I, you know, I can't get a stylist. No one wants to me cute me. And, um, and, and then there was like a second of turbulence, like not very long.

• 1:53:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't even remember it.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, I'm kind of like, just close my eyes and then I look over. They're holding hands.

• 1:53:23Dax Shepard?

  Monica, they were already together.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Nope. They're holding hands across the, I was like, oh my, they've gone from strangers to in love on this flight.

• 1:53:33Dax Shepard?

  They just went on the flight and they're holding hands during the turbulence.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  This went from zero to a hundred so fast. And then I did have to think, wait, how are they, did they come together? But how? Because like, he was just reading his book. He wasn't talking to her pre-flight at all. I don't know. And it's still unclear. But I do think they went home together.

• 1:53:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, cuz they came together.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  No, cuz they fell in love. It was an eventful flight.

• 1:54:01Dax Shepard?

  It was.

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  A lot happened.

• 1:54:02Dax Shepard?

  We got home very late.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:54:04Dax Shepard?

  Very, very late.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  We really did.

• 1:54:05Dax Shepard?

  But we had so much fun in Nashville.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  Yes, we did.

• 1:54:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes, we had a very fun birthday party.

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was your birthday. We went to your favorite restaurant. It was so good.

• 1:54:16Dax Shepard?

  It was so delicious. And I wanna give a shout out to my neighbor Nate. I got so fucking lucky with our neighbors in Nashville.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:24Dax Shepard?

  Uh, one of them is Nate, my neighbor, who were the same age. I kinda like that.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  That's fun, yeah.

• 1:54:31Dax Shepard?

  It is. I really like it. But he has grandkids.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:54:35Dax Shepard?

  Cuz he started real early.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. In some ways, we're living different lives cuz he already has grandkids. But I just, I guess if I see a guy my age that's like crazy active with his grandkids, he's so active with his grandkids.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  That's fun.

• 1:54:49Dax Shepard?

  I just immediately go like, that's a fucking guy right there. That's a stand-up dude.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:54Dax Shepard?

  And my experience having neighbors in Michigan, way different than my experience having neighbors in LA. In general, I don't know people that are friends with their neighbor. I don't have a single friend in LA and I have thirty-five.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:07Dax Shepard?

  They do not hang out with their neighbors.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:55:10Dax Shepard?

  I'm friendly to my neighbors.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:12Dax Shepard?

  But when I go back to Aaron's house in Michigan, there's no fences in the backyards. And when it's summertime, it's like, everyone's grilling, everyone's talking, people are walking back and forth in the yards. You know, it's a community. Here, we're just very anonymous. You know, there's just so many of us and we're very anonymous. And so, uh, whatever. It's just been thirty years since I had that kinda neighborly feeling. And I really love it. It's special. It feels like protective. Like, I got your back. I'm watching out for, hey, I noticed this thing at your house. And I, you know.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:43Dax Shepard?

  It's just very nice.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Actually, yeah, that's funny. I noticed that when I was in, when I was home in Georgia, I was at my friend's house, Christina. Kids were coming over. And I was like, that's so cute. And I did have that growing up also in Georgia and in Tennessee. We would just like go to each other's houses.

• 1:56:02Dax Shepard?

  Just in general, I do, I do cherish that whole neighborhood vibe with a bunch of little kids.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  It is really nice. I agree.

• 1:56:09Dax Shepard?

  I think we need to do one last thing.

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:56:12Dax Shepard?

  And it's a New Year's resolution update because it's pretty comical.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:56:16Dax Shepard?

  Which is if people remember, my, my resolutions were sprints.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:56:21Dax Shepard?

  And, um, and not being affected by people's emotions.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:24Dax Shepard?

  And so, uh, uh, January 2nd on my birthday.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:56:29Dax Shepard?

  And I, this part I feel a little guilty about, but I didn't ask anyone to do it. But I think people did sprints because it was my birthday.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  Sure, they did, yeah.

• 1:56:36Dax Shepard?

  So it turns out like six of us.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Not me.

• 1:56:38Dax Shepard?

  Not, you knew better. And mind you, we made a ton of jokes about don't get hurt. Also, I laid out this whole strategy, like anytime I get back into sprints, I like to do like 70% the first time, then 80 and I build my, maybe my fifth time doing sprints, I'm full out.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:54Dax Shepard?

  There were six of us.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Dax Shepard?

  And my, I caught my competitiveness took over. And Eric was like, I could hear Eric behind me. So I was like turning on the turbo jets.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:57:05Dax Shepard?

  And the goal was to do six 30 second sprints, which again.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Too long.

• 1:57:09Dax Shepard?

  Not to bore anyone. When I've done the sprints in the past, it's generally like 40 yard dash.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14Dax Shepard?

  A 30 second sprint's like 200 meters.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  I, I said this on the last, I was like, that's too long.

• 1:57:18Dax Shepard?

  It's too long. Anyways, on the fourth one, we're walking back and I'm like, ooh, my calf feels dicey. But I can get through two more sprints. And then on that same walk back, Eric was like, I'm out, just tore something in my butt cheek.

• 1:57:39Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, I'm still in and I got a third of the way through my fifth sprint. I was like, oh my God, I gotta stop. I think I might be tearing something.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad you stopped.

• 1:57:47Dax Shepard?

  All to say, the sprinting resolution, yeah, is, is proving to be more challenging. We're hoping, that was Friday, I'm hoping by this Friday, my calf feels good enough to resume.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  You're gonna do it again.

• 1:57:58Dax Shepard?

  Got to.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:58:01Dax Shepard?

  But it was very comedic to wake up the following morning and Eric and I can't walk. We're both like hobbling around the house.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:58:09Dax Shepard?

  Welcome to 50s.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  50s, no. That I said, I said, no one above 35 should be doing this. It's hard on the body, really too hard. Anyway, yeah, so that's over. Also, I want to give an update too. Um, I do have a stylist now.

• 1:58:27Dax Shepard?

  Yay.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  Um, and I'm really, really excited about her and she seems awesome. And so we're gonna, we're gonna give it a whirl. Um, all right, well, let's do some facts.

• 1:58:37Dax Shepard?

  Yes, ma'am.

• 1:58:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so Walter. Um, I got my dad this book for Christmas and he read it all, read the whole thing.

• 1:58:46Dax Shepard?

  In an hour?

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  It's a small book, um, but yeah, he blew through it. And, um, he loved it.

• 1:58:53Dax Shepard?

  He loved it?

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, did he, well, like, when he reads a book like that, will he then want to talk about some of the things he learned in? Or he just wants to say he liked it?

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  He does want to talk about it, but I had to go to my room because I was tired.

• 1:59:07Dax Shepard?

  So he did want to talk about it?

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Well, no, he just said, oh, I read one of the books.

• 1:59:11Dax Shepard?

  And you go, okay, I'm going to bed.

• 1:59:14Dax Shepard?

  Wake me up when you don't want to talk about that book.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  No, he just was like, yeah, it was really interesting and, I mean, he said a few things about it.

• 1:59:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Um, but they were watching a movie. I don't know, like, anyway, now he's reading Sapiens. I bought him that too.

• 1:59:31Dax Shepard?

  He had not ever read it.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  He doesn't read a lot.

• 1:59:33Dax Shepard?

  Not a big reader.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  He's busy.

• 1:59:35Dax Shepard?

  But now that he's fake retired.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. That was sort of it. He was like, you know, I wanna.

• 1:59:39Dax Shepard?

  We had a riot talking about his retirement last night.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, my sweet dad.

• 1:59:45Dax Shepard?

  I was saying, because your dad is retiring, but he's also coming back as a consultant.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, a contract. Yeah.

• 1:59:51Dax Shepard?

  Contractor or whatever.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  Contractor.

• 1:59:53Dax Shepard?

  And I was saying I would be a little mad if I was one of his coworkers and we threw a big retirement party on Friday. Everyone got hammered and they hang over. And then you got to work on money and saw a show sitting at his desk drinking coffee. You'd be like, what? That's how this works?

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  I know, I know. Luckily, no one threw him a party.

• 2:00:13Dax Shepard?

  Well.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:00:15Dax Shepard?

  Is he sad about that?

• 2:00:16Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't care about anything.

• 2:00:19Dax Shepard?

  He doesn't care about anything. I love how you, like, we both agree your dad's one of the smartest people on the planet. But then you also make room for him being the one of the dumbest people on the planet.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  Well, not dumb, not dumb, just.

• 2:00:29Dax Shepard?

  Unaware.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  Just not like. What he's not interested in, he's not interested in.

• 2:00:35Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  At all.

• 2:00:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  He doesn't care about a lot of things. Oh, you know what's fun? You just don't get to see your parents in other environments often than them being your parent.

• 2:00:48Dax Shepard?

  You don't get to see them with their other identities.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. But one of my dad's coworkers came over to pick something up. And she's a friend of my dad's too, and they worked together for a long time, but now she's in another department or something. But anyway, um, she was chatting with us and like, it was so fun to see like him in, with her, talking about their work and their history. And like, you know, my, the, her, his friend was like, I'm glad I'm not in that department anymore. It would be too sad to know you were retiring.

• 2:01:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like also.

• 2:01:29Dax Shepard?

  She loved working with your dad.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then even talking about like, how my dad is, and I mean, I shouldn't be surprised by this, but like, the best one there.

• 2:01:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, no joke, yeah, no doubt.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, your dad must have loved hearing that.

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:01:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  And, um, and I mean, I was so proud of him.

• 2:01:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Dax Shepard?

  You got a very good one.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:01:53Dax Shepard?

  There's a lot of them out there and you got a very good one.

• 2:01:56Speaker 01

  I got a really good pair, I have to say. I even, so I was getting my nails done this morning and I was talking to the nail esthetician. And, um, yeah, we got on the subject of my parents and we, because I was talking about moving into the house.

• 2:02:15Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  And, and she was like, wow, that's such a big deal. And I was like, yeah, it is exciting and. She was asking about like why Cam, I was like, oh, for acting and commercials, whatever. And I was talking about my first commercial, my first big commercial, the Herbal Essences commercial, and I'd forgotten some details, but I was telling the story and I was remembering that, you know, I had like, it was like three callbacks for that commercial. My agent called me and was like, can you be here in like two hours? Can you come in in like two hours or doing another callback? It's like three people, it's down to three people, you and two other people. And my parents were in town, I was with them, we were in Santa Barbara.

• 2:02:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh, where their favorite place.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Yes, India. And I said, I'm in Santa Barbara with my parents, like, no, I can't.

• 2:03:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  And then, you know, my dad was like, what's going on? And I was like, well, there's a callback and, you know, I can't. He was like, we're going.

• 2:03:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  Right now. And I was like, what? I was like, I don't think, well, and he was like, we're going. Like, I, you didn't come out here to do thi-

• 2:03:24Dax Shepard?

  To quit on the 99th yard line.

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  To hang out in Santa Barbara, like, so he drove us back immediately and then, you know, I booked it and it was my first big commercial and they were there. And they were there for my booking and my dad said, he said on that trip, because, you know, obviously we had been driving around LA and looking at houses and all these things and he said, you're gonna have one of those houses one day and I'm about to move into it. It's so, and then I was telling her this and I was like, she was like, that's, she was like, what, what a good dad. And I was like, he is, like, they are, and I really do not.

• 2:04:06Dax Shepard?

  You're right, as the child.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think about those specificities. I know, and I know, like, how good I have it, but those things, it's like, yeah, they're just really good ones.

• 2:04:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  And I'm very, very, very lucky. But, yes.

• 2:04:25Dax Shepard?

  But I hate, but you finish.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  But they drive me nuts.

• 2:04:28Dax Shepard?

  Sure, they're family.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  But that's because they're family, but I, I love them very much. So, anyway.

• 2:04:33Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm emotional now.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  I understand, I understand. They're nice people. Well, I have a birthday present for you.

• 2:04:40Dax Shepard?

  You do?

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my goodness.

• 2:04:46Dax Shepard?

  This is fun. This is a unconventional sized box.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:04:51Dax Shepard?

  You like generally when you get me something, it's a clothing item and it's in a bigger box.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:04:59Dax Shepard?

  Do, do, do, do, do. What's a shirt?

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  It is a clothing item in a tiny box.

• 2:05:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh my god. No way.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 2:05:08Dax Shepard?

  A Kmart shirt.

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  It's a Kmart shirt, but it's also a dare shirt.

• 2:05:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh my god, kids against drugs. Lame.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  I know. I thought it was a double whammy for you.

• 2:05:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the bumper says, Kmart kids race against drugs. There's a lot going on here. Why are they Kmart kids?

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:05:32Dax Shepard?

  How does one race drugs?

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Correct. How do you race?

• 2:05:34Dax Shepard?

  You can race on drugs.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a race. It was a race where they were against drugs.

• 2:05:41Dax Shepard?

  Do you know how old you were when this shirt was made?

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:05:45Dax Shepard?

  You were 11 years old.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:05:48Dax Shepard?

  You were just about to start racing against drugs.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  I, oh, I had been racing. I had been racing since I was five against drugs.

• 2:05:55Dax Shepard?

  And in 98, I was 23. I was on drugs.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The kids weren't really doing it for you, though, you know?

• 2:06:03Dax Shepard?

  They're racing me, but they couldn't keep up.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  No, they couldn't.

• 2:06:05Dax Shepard?

  Oh my god, this is great.

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  I just, it's a Kmart shirt. You had to have it.

• 2:06:10Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and I love it.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  I hope it's.

• 2:06:13Dax Shepard?

  I was just telling you that I watched a YouTube video on the history. It wasn't, it wasn't like the history of Kmart. It was just this graph that changed and it gave you the amount of Kmart's in different states, starting, I think, 63 or 8.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:29Dax Shepard?

  And when it occurred to me, I had no idea. And I'm bummed about it.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:33Dax Shepard?

  It started in Michigan.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:06:35Dax Shepard?

  And there were so many more in Michigan, all the way up until the 80s.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:39Dax Shepard?

  We were like blowing the rest of the country away. Eventually it got passed by maybe California or a couple, but it stayed really high. And I was like, oh, yeah, I, I, I was, um, my opinion of Kmart skewed by being born in Michigan.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  It's in your blood.

• 2:06:51Dax Shepard?

  I thought it was like as ubiquitous as Walmart.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Right. We had a lot of them in Georgia, but maybe later.

• 2:06:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think later.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:59Dax Shepard?

  And, and, um, and in Michigan, they were more numerous than Walmarts.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 2:07:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's in your history and your lineage. But you told me that story, but I had already, I had your shirt already. I was so excited.

• 2:07:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so Walter. So, he mentioned a room where people gather that has a couch on the outside and cushions in the middle. It kinda sounds like a riddle, you know?

• 2:07:23Dax Shepard?

  It does.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  But I looked it up. It says, "The room design you are describing is commonly known as a conversation pit or a sunken seating area."

• 2:07:31Dax Shepard?

  I want one of those so bad.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  You do?

• 2:07:33Dax Shepard?

  Yes, they're kinda making a comeback. I saw in some architectural magazine.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:07:37Dax Shepard?

  But as a kid, those were big in the 70s.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:07:40Dax Shepard?

  And so when I was a kid, they kinda had gone out of vogue, but you could still bump into them.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Dax Shepard?

  And I was like, "I want a sunken-in-living room so bad."

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I don't really know about them.

• 2:07:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like, just imagine the floor level's this and then it drops down another two and a half feet so that the couch hole area, square, is like so... Your shoulders are like just above the floor line.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:08:01Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I love it.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that's what he's talking about.

• 2:08:03Dax Shepard?

  It was on the back of TV Guide a lot.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Oh, is Bill Gates's... That's tricky. Uh, mom named Mary. Yes, Mary Maxwell Gates.

• 2:08:15Dax Shepard?

  Mary Maxwell Gates.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  I like that, Maxwell.

• 2:08:18Dax Shepard?

  Did you have Max and Irma's down there in Georgia?

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  Yes, we did.

• 2:08:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  Yes, we did have Max and Irma's.

• 2:08:23Dax Shepard?

  We were alive at the bull's eye of the franchise restaurant.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:08:27Dax Shepard?

  Like, there was no such thing as a Chili's in my youth and then around my teenage years, all of a sudden. And it was the most exciting thing in the world.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  Listen, I was by a Chili's last week and I asked my mom, I was like, "Have you guys been to Chili's lately?" She was like, "We went last week."

• 2:08:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  And I was like, "Yeah," and I kinda, I was like, "I wanna go."

• 2:08:46Dax Shepard?

  It's fucking delicious.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  I know, I loved it.

• 2:08:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  They used to have chicken tacos, but they took them off the menu.

• 2:08:52Dax Shepard?

  They did?

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no.

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:08:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, not caloric enough.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess not. Okay, well, so that is all of the facts.

• 2:09:01Dax Shepard?

  That concludes the fact portion of the program?

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's too smart. What are we gonna do?

• 2:09:06Dax Shepard?

  Thank you for my Kmart shirt, Monica.

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 2:09:09Dax Shepard?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  You're so...

• 2:09:10Dax Shepard?

  It was fun to open up a box.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  It was a trick, cuz it was a big shirt and a small box.

• 2:09:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 2:09:18Dax Shepard?

  That's a metaphor.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:20Dax Shepard?

  Big things come in very small packages?

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  We got there.

• 2:09:24Dax Shepard?

  All right, love you.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  Love you.