Coltan Scrivner (on morbid curiosities)

Coltan Scrivner (Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away) is a psychologist, researcher, and author. Coltan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss always preferring to do nitty gritty research in the field rather than a sterile lab, studying human fun and fear responses to haunted houses in Denmark, and his four domains of morbid curiosity. Coltan and Dax talk about why in nature there’s a lot of danger without safe opportunities to learn about it, that bar fights actually take place a lot less than if we were chimps, and how bodily injury is an effective cue for danger and violence. Coltan explains ghost hunting in Georgia while not believing but seeing anyway, the 24-question scale he created for measuring morbid curiosities, and whether serial killers over-index in liking horror. 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 Lily Padman.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  That's just farted.

• 0:07Dax Shepard?

  Shut up. You don't know anything about farts. And no, I didn't. And nor did I our guest, Colton Scrivner. Colton is an author and a psychologist. He is an internationally recognized expert on morbid curiosity and the psychology of horror and true crime. He has a very fascinating book called Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. This is great. Why do guys like MMA? Why do women like true crime? We get all the answers.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  It's pretty interesting. All of it's interesting. Humans draw to morbid stuff.

• 0:45Dax Shepard?

  Yes, so that we can protect ourselves ultimately.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  It has a good, there's a good reason for it. We're just so fragile.

• 0:52Dax Shepard?

  We're so scared. Please enjoy Colton Scribner. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Audible, for supporting this episode. Armchair's Audible's Best of 2025 Collection is here. The year's top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals across every genre. Their editors spent countless hours listening and debating to handpick this year's must-listens. If you want to finish the year with something you know is going to hit, check out Audible's Best of 2025 and discover why there's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com/bestof2025. We get support from Quince.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.

• 1:40Dax 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.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really Shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories. They skip the middlemen and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 2:20Dax 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.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 2:31Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.

• 2:49Dax 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.

• 3:26Dax Shepard?

  Colton, how are you? Are you on a big, long press tour?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah. So I'm in LA until Thursday. I got in yesterday, had a talk at Orange County Library down in Foothill Ranch.

• 3:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  And then I had NPR this morning.

• 3:38Dax Shepard?

  Who, Larry Mantle?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It was All Things Considered, at least.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Oh, All Things Considered, great.

• 3:42Dax Shepard?

  Good, or a lot of cachet.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  A lot of cachet.

• 3:45Dax Shepard?

  Elevated. Had you been on NPR before?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, several times, but not in studio because I live in the Ozark Mountains. There's not really a good NPR studio over there.

• 3:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, how close to the lakes?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  I have Beaver Lake and Table Rock surrounding where I live. So I live in a little Victorian town and the Ozarks, like a little travel destination town.

• 4:04Dax Shepard?

  And you're hosting a zombie festival there?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I did last Saturday. It was fantastic.

• 4:08Dax Shepard?

  Tell me, how many zombies showed up?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I have to ask the police, but they give me these like magical estimates. Last year I said, how many people do you think came? And they're like, oh, probably 20,000.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  What? Wow, that's awesome, though.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Fifteen thousand though.

• 4:21Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:22Dax Shepard?

  Do they all buy tickets?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  No, it's a free event.

• 4:24Dax Shepard?

  It's a free event? You could be getting filthy rich off this. Ten dollars a pop.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Sell merch.

• 4:28Dax Shepard?

  You sell merch. What kind of merch do you have?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, what does it look like?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  We have shirt this year that has a big, we have a brain buffet. It's a gelatin brain eating competition.

• 4:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  And you have to dress as a zombie, eat a big anatomically sized gelatin brain, which is a lot harder than you think it is.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 4:43Dax Shepard?

  That's a lot of jello.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  That's a lot of jello.

• 4:45Dax Shepard?

  Cause what, the brain weighs like two pounds or something? Is that a couple pounds of jello?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  We should know from Jared.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Surely.

• 4:51Dax Shepard?

  I used to think it was more, and then you corrected me in a fact check. I thought it was like five pounds.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  I think it is like five, right?

• 4:57Dax Shepard?

  I think that's your whole head, maybe.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  What does he say? The human brain weighs?

• 4:59Dax Shepard?

  Let's find out.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  I'm gonna bet it's six pounds.

• 5:01Dax Shepard?

  Six pounds?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna guess six.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I think it's...

• 5:04Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna say three, cause it's safe. It's between us.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 5:07Dax Shepard?

  You be dumb enough not to say.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I think it's eight pounds.

• 5:10Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, if anything, I think I'm under it. I would say six or more.

• 5:14Dax Shepard?

  We're gonna get a real answer here.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  This is not a dried out brain. This is like a fully wet.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:18Dax Shepard?

  How much does a human brain weigh? Three pounds?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  What? No.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Maybe whoever wrote that, their brain weighs...

• 5:25Dax Shepard?

  A newborn, a newborn is point eight to point nine pounds.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:29Dax Shepard?

  An adult male is thirteen fifty to fourteen hundred grams. Adult female, sorry girls, twelve hundred to thirteen hundred. No wonder they're so stupid.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I've been looking for a reason.

• 5:43Dax Shepard?

  It's right here in black and white.

• 5:47Dax Shepard?

  Wow, that's an incredible turnout, and I can't imagine there's accommodations for everyone there. Do people camp?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  A little of both. So, Eureka's a tourist town. There's about two thousand people that live there, which I love. Victorian houses and architecture everywhere, kind of like preserved in time.

• 6:01Dax Shepard?

  Spooky?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Spooky. America's most haunted hotel there, supposedly.

• 6:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay, and you went there specifically because of that architecture?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  I grew up a couple of hours from there, so my parents went there for vacations. We would go sometimes as an adult when I was in grad school in Chicago. If I would drive down to Oklahoma to visit family for holidays. It's about halfway, so I would stay there. After grad school, I was living in the Bay. I was working at Meta as a researcher. And I went to Eureka Springs. This would have been twenty twenty-three for New Year's, like twenty-two into twenty... I stayed at this little Airbnb and then behind it was like an old school Victorian bed and breakfast that was for sale.

• 6:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I was like, I bet I could run a bed and breakfast.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  So I moved.

• 6:40Dax Shepard?

  I bet I could run a bed and breakfast.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  That's a big swing.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Almost all of my things, I bet I could do that.

• 6:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little naive optimism.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yes. I moved in and kind of renovated, got it going again. It was in pretty good shape, but it needed a few things.

• 6:53Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  And then after about a year, I got an innkeeper and I moved to a different house in town.

• 6:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:59Dax Shepard?

  And what was the year like where you were interfacing with all the guests?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  It was cool. What I like about Eureka is that it's a small town. I know all my neighbors. It's very homey, artsy little town. But it gets like a million visitors a year for a population of 2,000.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 7:14Dax Shepard?

  Mostly because of the lakes in the summer?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  People come because there are festivals all summer, all fall, all spring. There are lakes that people come for in the summer, lots of good hiking, mountain biking, and people just come to shop.

• 7:25Dax Shepard?

  We're missing the boat on Eureka.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  And I want to go to the spooky zombie.

• 7:29Dax Shepard?

  Brad Pitt has a property there.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Brad, invite us.

• 7:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And then you teach at ASU, no?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I don't teach. I'm just a researcher at ASU.

• 7:37Dax Shepard?

  Okay, explain that.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  I have an affiliation with the psychology department there, working on a National Science Foundation grant, looking at risk management and how we can use scary play to better plan for risks in the future.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 7:47Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, right, right, right. Okay, now we're gonna start at the beginning. So you grew up kind of by Eureka.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Four hours away, actually.

• 7:53Dax Shepard?

  Four hours.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  That's substantial.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:56Dax Shepard?

  In Missouri?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Oklahoma.

• 7:57Dax Shepard?

  In Oklahoma.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  He's also from Oklahoma. Brad.

• 8:00Dax Shepard?

  Brad's from Missouri.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Wasn't he born in Oklahoma?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yes, he was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

• 8:05Dax Shepard?

  Born there, but grew up.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  For like one minute and then he left immediately because he's a smart man.

• 8:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  But we still count it.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:12Dax Shepard?

  Anyways, what did mom and dad do in Oklahoma?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  My dad, since I was really young, has been a boiler operator.

• 8:19Dax Shepard?

  Where is still using a boiler?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 8:22Dax Shepard?

  He's on a steamship crossing the Atlantic?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  He worked at the college, I believe. It was OU Health Science Center, University of Oklahoma's Health Science Center. They have boilers and chillers for the hospitals. He works at the VA now, just down the street, but the Veterans Hospital has boilers, chillers.

• 8:35Dax Shepard?

  These things bust down so much that they have to have an on-staff.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes, like when there's government shutdowns, he's still working.

• 8:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. And then mom?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Mom has had a couple of different jobs growing up. She also works at the VA now. Both blue collar. They worked really, really hard and were good parents. They always provided, made sure that we had what we needed, even though we weren't super wealthy.

• 8:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, do you have siblings?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Younger sister.

• 8:56Dax Shepard?

  And is she academic as well?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  She's not. I'm the only person in my family that's gone to college.

• 9:00Dax Shepard?

  And did they make fun of you for that?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And I just kept going.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you can't stop.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't want to leave.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  They're very supportive of it. My sister is an airplane mechanic.

• 9:07Dax Shepard?

  Are you mechanical? Because it sounds like it should be in your genes.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I enjoy doing things with my hands. You wouldn't want me to work on an airplane.

• 9:13Dax Shepard?

  Not one I'm a passenger of.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  No, no. But I do enjoy it. There's something satisfying about making something with your hands.

• 9:19Dax Shepard?

  Endlessly rewarding. Especially if you don't have the right parts and you have to fabricate or you make something work that wasn't designed to work. That's where all the joy is.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  You do that in science a little bit sometimes for experiments. Things go wrong. I love field studies for that reason. But I do research at haunted attractions. You kind of have to come up with stuff on the fly because you take it to the field, something breaks, something doesn't work, you have to improvise. That's like the most fun. I hate the like sterile lab environment. Much prefer doing the nitty gritty, like in the field, real stuff. It's very fun.

• 9:46Dax Shepard?

  And where did you go to undergrad?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Oklahoma Baptist University, and I'm not Baptist.

• 9:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay, were most of the student body Baptist? Or are they like you?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  A lot of them were. But it was a good experience because obviously Oklahoma's very religious. And I think, you know, especially universities now, it was a good experience for me to have four years of understanding that that world that I'm not really a part of is normal, for the most part. They're like normal, nice people.

• 10:08Dax Shepard?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  There are some crazy ones, just like there's some crazy ones in any.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Everywhere. We're all crazy.

• 10:13Dax Shepard?

  We've had plenty of crazy atheists. I've been one of them at times.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  But it was good. It was a small, private school, so we had small class sizes. It was a good learning experience, especially for someone who didn't have anyone in my family who went to college. Shouldn't really know anything about college. So having the smaller class sizes, knowing your professors, it was much better.

• 10:30Dax Shepard?

  Right, and what did you major in there?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Anthropology.

• 10:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay, wonderful. Cultural or physical?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  We just had anthropology.

• 10:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  He was a cultural anthropologist, but was very biologically interested.

• 10:41Dax Shepard?

  And then you go to graduate school.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Went to master's first, University of Central Oklahoma, where my advisor was the former head of the FBI lab, and I did a forensic biology.

• 10:50Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fun.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Wow, that's so cool.

• 10:52Dax Shepard?

  What kind of things were you?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  DNA was my thing.

• 10:55Dax Shepard?

  DNA. So it's gathered, it's put in some machine that does it all?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  We kind of learned the old school technique, which was the gel electrophoresis, putting it in the gel and letting it run down. And you see the bands. You've probably seen that on like CSI or something.

• 11:10Dax Shepard?

  One battle after another.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  It's in there?

• 11:12Dax Shepard?

  That was the system they chose to use. Remember in their scene of their father and daughter?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  And you see the lines line up.

• 11:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Did you see one battle after another?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a big part.

• 11:21Dax Shepard?

  Yes, very. In fact, might be a spoiler.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I know.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  I also couldn't remember. They tell you what's gonna be bad and what's gonna be good. But then when we see it, I was like, I don't remember what was good or bad.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  You got confused.

• 11:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you dug that. So you got a masters in?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Forensic biology.

• 11:39Dax Shepard?

  What do we get our PhD in? Behavioral?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Kind of, yes. So the department was weird. It's an interdisciplinary department. I've always had an interdisciplinary background. I find it the most interesting and fun way to ask questions. Anthropology and biology undergrad, forensics, forensic biology, masters. My PhD was at University of Chicago in comparative human development, which had anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and psychologists, kind of all in one department. My track within it was behavior biology. So I was really interested in the biological aspects of why humans behave like we behave, which meant asking a lot of questions about how animals behave, about how humans may have evolved over time.

• 12:16Dax Shepard?

  Evolutionary.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  It was sort of an evolutionary biology kind of track.

• 12:19Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, when does your interest in horror movies begin? Obviously predates all this, right?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Okay, you mean non-academically.

• 12:27Dax Shepard?

  Non-academically. What was your gateway horror film?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  I think it was a game, actually. When I was a kid, probably too young to be playing it, but I remember finding a copy of Resident Evil, the original, old-school Resident Evil 1, and playing that on Playstation 1 when I was five or six or seven.

• 12:41Dax Shepard?

  Is that a ghoul with a shotgun? Am I thinking of a different game?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Resident Evil's a zombie game. It's like the apocalypse. In this case, they were at like a mansion, zombie apocalypse, third person, but fixed camera, so you can't turn around. Back in the day, you couldn't just save a game whenever you wanted. You had to like go to a safe room to save it. That's what made it like extra scary, right? You had to find the safe room to be safe. That was my gateway into it. It was a terrifying game for me. But it was like, if I can find the safe room, I can plan and collect myself and continue on.

• 13:07Dax Shepard?

  Regulate.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:09Dax Shepard?

  Great. When then does your academic pursuit start looking into the world of spooky?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Probably around the first year or second year of my PhD. And like any good, curious PhD student, I was just interested in everything. Okay, I have to kind of specialize in something. And so I got kind of interested in these paradoxes about human behavior. So one of those is that humans are interested in violence, but they find it morally bad. Right? So in almost every case, we punish violence and push it away. But there are some cases where it's not only okay, but it's actually entertaining, right? And we promote it.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Like football.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yes, or the Romans in the Colosseum is the classic example. You find examples of this, usually it's ritualized in other cultures and ritualized through games in our culture, too. And it was interesting to me that we could make this distinction in something that seemed so black and white.

• 13:56Dax Shepard?

  And really quick, when you started, was the current explanation, oh, this is kind of a collective processing of this fear or aversion we have. There's something cathartic about us all being able to gather and witness the thing we're afraid of without participating. What was the common explanation back then?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  There wasn't, certainly wasn't one that was founded on empirical work, really, right? It was kind of theoretical conjecture, which is fine, but there was no, here's the study that tells you why we do this. Some of it was that, some of it was that there were some researchers who thought about it as a type of play in the case of sports and preparation or ritualization of certain actions that we don't do anymore. I was really interested in how individuals made that distinction. Because if you see violence out on the street, it feels bad. But then if you see it in a boxing ring, it feels good. And I was interested in, within someone's mind, how are they making that distinction and what is going on? And so I did some eye tracking studies to see where people would look when they looked at different types of violence, whether it was sanctioned or unsanctioned, and had them talk about it and tried to tie some of their eye movements to what they were saying and how they were making sense of it.

• 14:57Dax Shepard?

  And in those early ones, what were you finding? Was there a category most people looked away from and a category most people looked at?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so humans are really drawn to faces, right? That's why this is a better format than on a phone. We get a lot of information from faces.

• 15:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  And almost nothing can draw our attention away from faces, except an act of violence. What I was noticing is that, yes, people still paid attention to faces and acts of violence, but they were much more interested in the Act itself like the point of contact. If I showed someone, for example, a picture of you and I giving each other a high five.

• 15:26Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  That's like a friendly point of contact versus you punching me in the face. Similar scenario, not friendly. In the violent scenario where you're punching me in the face, people paid attention to your fist in my face. Face is a bad example, but maybe arm or whatever.

• 15:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yes.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  The point of contact itself rather than.

• 15:41Dax Shepard?

  Our faces.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:42Dax Shepard?

  But during a high five, they stay locked on the faces.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll glance at the high five, but then they look at the faces more.

• 15:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  And so it kind of draws, that was my first inkling that there's something about danger and violence that really just draws our attention, in this case, our visual attention.

• 15:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it makes us kind of myopic.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And a lot of people, when they experience violence sort of secondhand, like when they see it, for example, they talk about it being frightening. And I started thinking, well, it is kind of weird that humans also expose themselves to things that scare them.

• 16:11Dax Shepard?

  Willingly.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Horror movies or true crime or whatever it might be, haunted houses, haunted hotels. And I thought, well, I wonder if that's related. And so I started looking into the literature and no psychologists were researching this. Nobody that studied human behavior empirically was doing this work. And that seemed insane to me because it's something that is so common. Again, not just in our culture, but in every culture that we have documented. I found one guy who was interested in this and he was a literature scholar. And he studied horror literature and he lived in Denmark.

• 16:37Dax Shepard?

  That feels right that he lived in Denmark.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  That feels about right.

• 16:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're dark.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Scandinavians, yeah. So I reached out to him and I said, hey, you are the only person in the world I can find who is interested in this topic and I'm interested in this. We should do something together. And he said, yeah, you should come to Denmark. I would love to do a study at this haunted house. Empirical studies aren't really my forte, but he had a good theoretical idea for what might be going on. So we teamed up and I skipped some important tests that I was supposed to take during my PhD and flew to Denmark for a month. And we did this incredible study at a haunted house. This first study was, we wanted to know how do people have fun when they are feeling afraid? So we strapped people with heart rate monitors, right? And we thought, okay, if we can measure what their hearts are doing, what our bodies are doing when they're having fun, maybe we can tease apart how they're having fun. And then we put up cameras throughout the haunt at different scary points to see what their faces were doing.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Were they screaming? Were they laughing? Were they looking surprised? And what's cool about this one is, especially at the time, this would have been in 2070. Seventeen, probably. Halloween was still kind of fairly new in Denmark as a event. They knew what Halloween was, but they didn't really have haunted attractions. If I wanted to go to a haunted attraction in L.A. right now, I could walk out the door and find a bunch of them.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 17:42Dax Shepard?

  Three quarters of a mile away, haunted hair ride.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that Universal right down the street as well.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  In Denmark, there weren't a lot of them. We had to drive an hour from the university just to find this one, and it was one of the first. It was so fun driving to this. So we drive about an hour from the university, pack our car full of all of our gear. We turn off on this road, and it's just thick, dense forest on both sides. Just this really narrow road, like kind of a old road. We drive for probably a quarter to half a mile into this forest, and we come across a clearing. And there's an old abandoned fishery there, and that's where they had made this haunted attraction. It was great.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  So scary.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  We were interested in how do people have fun when they're feeling afraid, and what does that look like? And so we measured their heart rates, we looked at their faces to see what they did during the scares and after the scares. We interviewed them to have them talk about the experience, and did they think it was play, or fun, or were they too scared? Did it meet their expectations? And what we found is that people have kind of a sweet spot of fear, where their fun is maximized. So if you imagine on your x-axis here, you've got one to 10 for how scary something is. And on your y-axis, you've got one to 10 for how fun it is. You get kind of a normal distribution, right? But it's a bit skewed. It's got to be a little bit scarier. So like a seven or a seven and a half out of 10.

• 18:56Dax Shepard?

  Not a five.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Not a five, not a 10, which is interesting, because if you look at marketing campaigns for horror movies or haunted attractions, they always try to say, this is the scariest thing you'll ever experience.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  And that's not necessarily what people want. It's not necessarily when they have the most fun or when they enjoy it the most.

• 19:10Dax Shepard?

  I'd imagine it changes too between film and real-life participation. You have some degree of separation that maybe you can handle 10.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yep, but people still do regulate their fear and their anxiety even in horror movies, right? Sometimes you need it to be scarier, so what do you do? You turn down the lights, you really get immersed in it, right? You imagine it could be real.

• 19:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And then other times, you need to dampen that, right? You need to close your eyes or cover your eyes, watch it with the lights on, watch it with a friend, do things that make it less scary. So you're always trying to regulate. A lot of the research I'm doing, I think that's a really magical type of play, because what you're doing is you are. Are practicing regulating your anxiety and regulating your fear, which is something you can use later in the real world.

• 19:46Dax Shepard?

  Like immersion therapy.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Emotional exposure therapy.

• 19:51Dax Shepard?

  OK, so what you found was that people had a sweet spot. Their fun peaked when the scariness was beyond the halfway point, seven or so.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  And that was their heart rate and their expectation of how they rated it, how scary.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  How fun it was and how scary it was. OK.

• 20:06Dax Shepard?

  You don't have the data for it, but did you attempt a biochemical explanation? Because adrenaline is, in the right context, very pleasurable. Like, was it adrenaline? What all was happening?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I've done a couple of studies at this haunted house.

• 20:18Dax Shepard?

  OK.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And we tried answering that question a little later. We didn't use biochemical measures, in part because this would have been 2021 and people were still a little weird about spitting in tubes. And that's usually how you measure things like cortisol. But what we did do is there was this idea for a long time that people like horror movies because the adrenaline. It's intuitive, makes sense, seems true, probably is true. But I thought, well, that doesn't really explain all of the horror fans. Just anecdotally, I was like, well, I know a lot of people who are just not adrenaline junkies, but they love horror. And so what I did is I collected 50 or 60 statements about why people like horror. And I showed them to hundreds of people. And I said, how much do you agree with these things? And I wanted to see which questions were answered similarly. And you can kind of group them into factors.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  And what I found was there were three factors that kind of emerged from that data. One of those factors was sort of an adrenaline junkie factor. People who scored high in that liked horror because they liked the way they feel when they're afraid. They like the rush.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  But you don't, right?

• 21:15Dax Shepard?

  I don't get scared, is my thing.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  You are an adrenaline junkie.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  You need like a higher level.

• 21:20Dax Shepard?

  But that's not a source of adrenaline for me.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  No, so that's an excellent point. And that was part of the reason I didn't think that was true, because a lot of true adrenaline junkies don't get scared enough from horror films. So it wouldn't make sense to me that adrenaline is the main driver of horror interest. It is a driver for some people, but it didn't seem like it could be this answer for everything.

• 21:39Dax Shepard?

  Universal explanation.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And so what I found was that in addition to the adrenaline junkies, we also found people we called white knucklers. If you squeeze your fist real tight, you get kind of a white crust. Your knuckles where the blood escapes, right?

• 21:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Group that because when they walked through the haunt, they were squeezing their fists really tight.

• 21:53Dax Shepard?

  They like the fatigue. They're in it for the fatigue afterwards.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  But we asked them, we said, how scary was it? And they're like, oh, it was so scary. And we're like, did you enjoy how scary it was? And they're like, not really. You know, I didn't really enjoy the feeling of fear, but what they enjoyed was the opportunity to challenge their fears.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Right?

• 22:10Dax Shepard?

  The accomplishment of it.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Exactly right. And they reported that they felt like they learned something about themselves. Either the limits of their fear or what they were good at dealing with or not good at dealing with. That was the second group. We thought those two would pop up because we had some ideas from other research that suggested that, yeah, there's a group that likes the adrenaline and a group that doesn't seem to like it.

• 22:26Dax Shepard?

  You know, when they do test screenings of films, they show it to 300 people, then they keep behind 30 or 40 people in a focus group and they kind of ask them more detailed questions. I sat in on the test screening for this movie I was in called Zathura. And there were a lot of moms with kids at this screening and they were part of the test group. And the moms were regularly complaining that the movie was too scary. And then upon follow-up question from the guy conducting it, he would say, well, which part was it that was too scary? And she would turn to her kid and the kid would always say, oh, I liked that part where the Zorgon did blank. And the kids always said, I liked.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Liked it, yeah.

• 23:09Dax Shepard?

  The parents said it was too scary. They whatever screamed or whatever in the moment, but immediately you find out like the kids liked that.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yes, kids are spooky. I think a huge misunderstanding about kids is that they actually love spooky stuff. And parents know this intuitively, right? If you ask them, what kind of games do your kids play when they're pretend playing with others? It's like a violent game where they're playing a predator prey chase game or there's monsters in the game and they're pretending to be monsters. Or there's a scary environment, the lights are off, or they're playing under a blanket.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Is it gendered?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  A little bit. I mean, boys are a little more likely to engage in that, but at really young ages, like five to eight. I'm not a developmental psychologist, but from what I've read and what I've seen, boys and girls both kind of like scary play. Going back to this white knuckler thing, there were a group of people who really were afraid, but they still liked horror. And so the question was why? Because there are other people who are really afraid and they don't like it. That makes sense. That makes the most sense.

• 23:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the big question is why does someone enjoy?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I think that's me. I do enjoy it, but I get really worked up and scared.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  But I do like it.

• 24:09Dax Shepard?

  Explains you to a T. And in fact, one of his exact examples is something you did.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 24:15Dax Shepard?

  Which I got a bang on over reading. Okay, so of the haunted stuff, you walked away with what? More questions or some conclusions?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  A little of both, which means it's good science, I think.

• 24:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  But real quick, there was also a third group.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Oh, a third bucket, yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  There was a third group that we didn't expect. This one we called the dark copers because they seem to be using scary experiences to deal with difficult emotions or difficult times they were going through in their life. So horror helped them kind of get over their anxiety or their depression or existential questions they had.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 24:41Dax Shepard?

  In that it interrupted the pattern they were stuck in?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  That's part of it. But also horror deals in those emotions, right? Horror deals in anxiety, it deals in depression, it deals in threats and danger and awful things that happen. And I think it just helps to play that out.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And you get through it, like knowing that you've gotten through it maybe feels relieving?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Of course. And some of the biochemical explanations come into play there. It's like, I got through this. I didn't enjoy the fear necessarily, but man, overcoming it sure feels good.

• 25:08Dax Shepard?

  Yes, it gives you a bit of optimism or hope.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:11Dax Shepard?

  Which is, oh, I might also be on the other side of these other things.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so how do you take that work and then turn it into morbidly curious?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, we haven't talked about morbid curiosity that much.

• 25:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah, tell me about. So that's just haunted houses?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is before I had really done much work on morbid curiosity. I was interested in fear and how we play with it. And that combined with interest in people's interest in violence that I had, I kind of combined those next year or two after that and realized that there were a lot of overlap between them. There was a lot of commonalities between them. So I developed this concept of morbid curiosity. And of course, everyone has heard of this. I didn't come up with the term, right? Everybody kind of knows what it is, which made it all the more shocking that nobody had really done any research on this psychologically. There were a few studies in the eighties. But nobody had ever followed up on them and some of the methods were a little outdated.

• 25:58Dax Shepard?

  Well, you read ridiculous things all the time on Instagram. It's like people who like serial.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  That go to sleep when watch serial killer movies are psychopaths.

• 26:07Dax Shepard?

  Psychopaths, there's all these declarations of like, if your partner likes, and I'm always like, how did we come to this conclusion?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  I don't think we did.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Engagement farming did.

• 26:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. So you broke up morbid curiosity into four domains.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I did that because that's what the data was telling me was there. So the way you develop scales like that, you give people lots of questions, kind of like I did with those three horror types. Things that you think tap into this central concept or central theme. And then you see how they're answered similarly between people and those break out into groups. And so what I found is that, yeah, there seem to be four types of morbid curiosity. So one of those is the minds of dangerous people, which is an interest in understanding people who might be dangerous, but maybe don't signal that they're dangerous, right? So true crime would be a great example of latching on to that type of morbid curiosity. There's violence, which is an interest in an act of violence. So this is kind of going back to that study I did where there was a violent action and people were homing in on the actual contact point.

• 27:05Dax Shepard?

  UFC's are your best example for this.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  That's a prime example. And then you have bodily injuries, which is kind of the outcome of violence or the outcome of a dangerous situation, right? Could be an accident, doesn't have to be an act of physical violence.

• 27:18Dax Shepard?

  This is rubbernecking.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 27:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you see a car accident, you're like, oh, fuck, I gotta look. Is there a head hanging out? I don't wanna look, I gotta look.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  That is what morbid curiosity is. It's this mixed emotional experience of, ah, man, I really kind of want to see it, but I hope it's not there, but if it is, I want to see it.

• 27:33Dax Shepard?

  I'm repelled by it and drawn to it at the same time. It's like the polarities of a magnet all at once.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  It is weird.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  In the book, I give an example from Plato where he talks about this man who was walking on the city walls and this was written 2,000 years ago. And he gives a perfect example of morbid curiosity in a different culture in a different time. He doesn't call it that. I think Plato's looking at like our reason versus our emotions and that's how he's using this story. But when I read it, I thought, oh, my God, this is morbid curiosity in ancient times. And so he tells the story of this man who's walking along the city walls and he sees the city executioner. He sees all of the criminals bodies who have been executed there and he can't help. But look, he doesn't want to look. He's telling himself, I don't want to look. And then he runs up to the edge. He says he throws his eyes open and he says, there you wretches gaze upon your glory, talking to his own eyes.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  His eyes want to see it, but his rational mind doesn't.

• 28:20Dax Shepard?

  He's shame filled.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, yeah. But perfect example of that experience. It's not that you're hoping people are dead and if they are, I kind of want to see it.

• 28:29Dax Shepard?

  I'd also put fail videos into this category.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Exactly, fail videos into the bodily injury. Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Is part of that because we like storytelling so much as humans? It's like almost this might be a story.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Well, it is. It's a story of what not to do, especially the fail videos. Horror doesn't tell you what to do in a dangerous situation. It tells you what not to do. Or it shows you what not to do, right?

• 28:51Dax Shepard?

  Shows you how the people went down.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Don't go in the basement. Don't split up. Don't go into the forest.

• 28:55Dax Shepard?

  Don't start making out with a hot girl. A lot of people go down the way. Yeah, it's no time to get frisky. But I think all of them, right, Monica, are your fears of things. So like, we're all afraid of bending our leg backwards. We're afraid of falling and hitting our head.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Happened to me is the fear.

• 29:10Dax Shepard?

  It's a potential in the world we live in.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do a show where we talk to listeners and we just did one about the dentist and Dax was like, we can't do that again.

• 29:19Dax Shepard?

  I can't do that prompt again.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  He has like a fear of his teeth falling out and I don't. So that wasn't that hard for me.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  That's like one of the most common nightmares, is your teeth falling out. Yeah.

• 29:29Dax Shepard?

  But I would love to know. So yes, I know that is, but I would love to see data pre and post orthodontia. Because my theory is like my teeth are getting twisted and cranked for so long in my life that it may be.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  But I also had braces for three years.

• 29:43Dax Shepard?

  And you don't have that.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And I really don't have that.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Well, it was probably good for humans in particular to be nervous about their teeth.

• 29:50Dax Shepard?

  It's their livelihood.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Before, 100 years ago, people's teeth weren't in great shape. When you pull up our ancestors' bones, teeth are strong and they last a long time, but when you pull them up, man, they look a little rough.

• 30:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're using them as tools back then.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Set of hands. So yes, your teeth falling out should be afraid of that. That's normal.

• 30:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 30:16Dax Shepard?

  Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Audible, for their support. So Audible just dropped their Best of 2025 Collection, and I gotta say, this is one of those things that actually makes your life easier, Monica. Their editors have been doing the heavy lifting. We're talking countless hours of listening, heated debates, and the whole thing. They've handpicked the year's top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals across all your favorite genres. And what I love is that they're not just highlighting the giant releases, though those are in there. They've also dug up some real hidden gems, the stuff that might have flown under the radar but totally deserves your attention. I love a good recommendation. My queue is out of control, so anytime there's a curated list like this, I breathe a little easier. Two titles I'm excited about: Sunrise on the Reaping. Anything Hunger Games related is an automatic ad for me.

• 31:02Dax Shepard?

  And Someday Now, which everyone says is incredibly warm and reflective. If you want something solid to close out the year, this is a great place to start. Check out Audible's Best of 2025 and discover why there's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com/bestof2025. 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.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  That's where your AG1 routine earns its spot. It's not fixing your sleep or your alarm time. It's giving your body what it needs so the dark mornings don't tank you before you even start. One scoop, cold water every morning before anything else.

• 31:49Dax Shepard?

  AG1 Next Gen has 75-plus ingredients, vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, superfoods, backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials. Key nutrient levels improved with three months of consistent use.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  That's the part people miss. It's not a one-day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.

• 32:07Dax Shepard?

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

• 32:18Speaker 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.

• 32:25Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Go to drinkag1.com/dax and for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/dax. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that armchair experts sent you. 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

• 33:08Dax Shepard?

  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?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 33:32Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. We get support from our sponsor, Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Glibron. Foundo is a once daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Foundo should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundo is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundo if you're allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes. If you're nursing, pregnant, Plant to be or taking birth control pills and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundao with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Once Daily Foundao is available by prescription only in 0.8 mg, 2.5 mg, 5.5 mg, 9 mg, 14.5 mg, and 17.2 mg tablets. Learn more at foundao.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundao.

• 35:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so physical violence.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, minds of dangers, people, violence, and bodily injuries. And those kind of run from pre-event to the event to post-event, right? That's kind of like a spectrum there of what could happen in a dangerous situation. And then there's the fourth one, and it took me a while to disentangle what this really meant and what it was. The fourth one, I called it paranormal danger to try to encompass a broad range of things. And let me give you some examples of it and then tell you what I think it is. Examples would be anything to do with ghosts, or aliens, or even deities, ancestors, spirits. I think what's going on there is people have historically used agentic beings that they can't see to explain misfortunate events. There's a long recorded history of that. There's a lot of good anthropological work on that, witches in particular.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  And so I think what's happening is that's tapping into dangers that we don't understand. We tend to give those agentic beings, right? We tend to say, oh, well, the ghost made that knock in my house, or the witch cursed me, right?

• 36:02Dax Shepard?

  And like you say, there's like a trillion variables out there.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's very culturally dependent.

• 36:06Dax Shepard?

  It feels at least comforting to narrow it to this somewhat agreed upon.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Because how else are you going to take an action against it, right? If you don't have a thing that you can take an action against, you feel helpless. And that's a terrible feeling. It's better to guess. In human life, almost everything that happens to us happens to us because someone else. Did something. Most of the things that happened to us are because we live in communities and for most of our history lived in small, tight-knit communities. The good things and the bad things that happened to us often involved other people. So it makes sense that we would have this bias to kind of think that if a misfortunate thing happened to me, maybe someone else did it.

• 36:40Dax Shepard?

  Anthropomorphize it a bit.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Yes, and maybe they're really powerful because I didn't see them do it.

• 36:45Dax Shepard?

  You point out, which I like, is that everyone that has these beliefs or thoughts or curiosities about aliens and ghosts, it's generally negative. It should be just as likely that the aliens arrive and go, hey, here's how you fix global warming and here's unlimited energy. Have fun. They're benevolent and nice.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the ghosts are telling you, hey, that stairwell is not very safe. Don't walk down. It needs to be fixed.

• 37:05Dax Shepard?

  That's what took me out. I don't want to see it happen again.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Casper is the exception.

• 37:09Dax Shepard?

  And not a huge hit because of it. Oh.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Ghostbusters is a much more likely scenario.

• 37:15Dax Shepard?

  I think it really illuminates what purpose those things serve, simply by the fact that they're almost never positive.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, we use that as a way to just try to explain it and then get a grasp on it. So, okay, here's something that it could be. Now, what can I do about that?

• 37:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  That's how we develop rituals around these things and all sorts of crazy beliefs.

• 37:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so those are the broad strokes of the four categories.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:37Dax Shepard?

  So, let's talk about minds of the dangerous people because I think this is the phenomena that you see most covered. We have a very robust true crime podcast space, docu-series. Which we've just entered. Yeah, docu-series space. What else would we include in this category?

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Conspiracy theories.

• 37:54Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what a conspiracy is, is someone plotting to harm you. True crime and conspiracies would be the two major media examples.

• 38:02Dax Shepard?

  So, anecdotally, from my perspective, this is very gendered.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yes, there's the data back that up. So, true crime in particular, women tend to not only seek it out more, but enjoy it more. And enjoy specific scenes sometimes more than men.

• 38:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes. I'm sorry, there's one thing I wanted you to set up before we go through these categories, which is just break down what human modeling is, this gift of human modeling, and how we differ from other animals.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  So, one of the questions I get a lot is, are humans the only morbidly curious creatures, right? Are we the only ones that are like that? Is that a unique human trait? And the answer is- Yes and no. No, we're not the only creatures that are morbidly curious, but yes, we have a very unique flavor of it. So, one of the best examples of morbid curiosity in animals would be predator inspection. So prey animals, let's say a gazelle or a zebra, these are really pretty easy examples for people to imagine if you're a zebra or gazelle and you're on the savanna, you're having your brunch. And in the case of a zebra, a lion walks up, or a gazelle, a cheetah walks up. What do you do? I'm imagining if I'm a zebra, I'm gonna run away. I don't wanna hang out if there's a lion nearby, right? The problem with that is, do either of you have cats at home?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:06Dax Shepard?

  No, but I've witnessed a lot of cats.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  You've witnessed a lot of cats. You probably know that cats just sleep most of the time.

• 39:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, 22 hours a day.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  22, and that's true of most cats, including big cats. And so if you run every time that you see a lion, you're gonna exhaust caloric resources. You're gonna waste time that could've been used towards grazing and actually building those caloric reserves to run when you need to run. That's exactly what a lion wants you to do, is run all the time, right?

• 39:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  And the lion has to only hunt when it's hungry, because you've seen The Lion King, right? What happens if you hunt something, like hyenas are gonna come in and try to take it. Lots of other hungry animals are gonna come in and try to take that if you don't eat it right away. And then it's gonna spoil, or vultures are gonna come in, scavengers will come in. So lions and other predators are incentivized to pretty much only hunt when they're hungry, which means prey animals are incentivized to understand when their predators are hunting and when they're hungry, what their motivational states are. And what you find is that many prey animals will engage in predator inspection. And in particular, those that are adolescents or subadults, so they're young and healthy, but don't have a lot of personal experience with their predators. So they have the most benefit, and they're at the lowest risk because they're healthy and probably able to get away.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  And of course, environmental factors influence it. So is the grass really tall or really short? Because if it's really tall, you might get ambushed. If it's really short, and maybe you're further away, you feel a little safer, right? Kinda like we feel when we watch a TV show. That's all great and fine, and predator inspection is pretty commonly observed in many different animals. One of the explanations for it is that prey animals can learn about their predators that way.

• 40:31Dax Shepard?

  And you said they'll also observe another member of their species get hunted if they have the opportunity.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:38Dax Shepard?

  Because they wanna see how that plays out.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 40:41Dax Shepard?

  And learn from that.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  All of life is one big learning experience, and you gotta take the opportunities you get. And when it comes to dangerous things... In most of nature, there's a lot of danger around, but not a lot of good opportunities to learn about it, because it's typically dangerous for you to witness something.

• 40:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you learn about it while you're getting chased.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And that's not a good time. You're gonna have really accurate information, but it comes at a pretty high risk, right?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Fast forward to humans. We have language, transmissible culture. We tell stories. What does that allow us to do? Well, it allows us to retain almost all of the learning benefit of a situation, but remove virtually all the cost. And we can envision future scenarios that we've never encountered. Or maybe variations of a scenario. What if this happened in the woods versus the savanna versus the lake? And so stories allow us to very, very cheaply simulate potential situations, in many cases, potentially dangerous situations that might happen to us at some point. Maybe we heard about a story, and then we tell a fictional version of it to amp that up a little bit. It was a wolf. Well, what if the wolf was larger and hairier, and it was a werewolf? And so we do these super stimuli, where we make them bigger and scarier and more memorable.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  And we still gain the learning benefits from that.

• 41:49Dax Shepard?

  So because we have this ability to create an imaginary scenario, we can kind of practice within it, and we feel a little safer. It's comforting, right?

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:02Dax Shepard?

  So, given that that's how our brains work, naturally, if someone produces the content for us, or we have actual footage, we're gonna be drawn to that, because it's better than even the other thing that's been working for us.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  And we're incentivized to create that content as humans too, because it's good for you to pass on dangerous information to people. Again, historically, that would have been people you live next to, your family, your friends, your trading partners. And so there's a bit of an incentive to kind of tell these stories. There's also some evidence that you get a bit of a status boost.

• 42:32Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, it's like cultural capital as well.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yes, because you're an important person, right? Because you've experienced this, or you have this secret knowledge.

• 42:40Dax Shepard?

  And you've survived a thing I'm afraid of.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Or you know about it, at least. Maybe you just have some special knowledge that you were given by someone else who survived it, or whatever that might be.

• 42:48Dax Shepard?

  Yes. So if we look at the broad data of who is raped and murdered in this country, it's very lopsidedly female.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Very lopsided, yeah. Murdered, probably not, but they're very... Different types of people who murder you if you're a man versus a woman. If you're a woman, it's usually someone you know very well, or someone you are trying to get to know well. It's much more likely that a man is murdered by a stranger.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And in general, mostly women and men are murdered by men.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Yes, men murder almost everybody.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, yeah.

• 43:15Dax Shepard?

  For the people that are drawn to true crime, and they're really exploring dangerous people, and then there's like details within there. You already hinted at a couple. One of the specific fascinations, and they all seem to have a very similar arc, is they're after the why, or what did the person not notice about the attacker that they should have? That's what they're after, yeah?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the juice. Humans face a really unique problem when it comes to dangerous social members. So lots of social creatures have dangerous con specifics is what you would call them. So a chimp, for example, there's gonna be an alpha chimp who's a jerk, who's gonna beat up on you if you try to take the fruit that he wants, or the mate that he wants, or the space that he wants. But that alpha chimp is going to be reactively aggressive. He's going to tell you, don't take that, in his own way, with his fangs and yelling. He's gonna tell you in his own way, you should probably not take that or else I'm going to attack you, and I'm probably going to win, right?

• 44:08Dax Shepard?

  You'll get a warning.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the gorilla will stand up and beat his chest. Humans, our ancestors almost certainly did something like that, right? We descended from a common ancestor with chimps. We almost certainly did something like that, but there was a shift. I don't know if you've read any of Richard Wrangham's work.

• 44:22Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  You would love it. Richard Wrangham, he's a biological anthropologist at Harvard. He's done a lot of work on human violence. Two books on violence you really like.

• 44:28Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, juicy.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  He's great. His work is where I got this idea from. He talks about this shift in human evolution where, once we developed language, we could now conspire with each other to overthrow a much stronger dominant jerk, who is domineering the group, right? If you don't have a favor among your group, then they can work together.

• 44:47Dax Shepard?

  No matter how tough you are, three other members can kill you.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  No one can have full power.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that shifted the social dynamics of humans a lot. And it did another thing, so. Wrangham says we domesticated ourselves, basically, through that process. We got rid of our reactive tendencies to a degree. Humans are still reactively aggressive, particularly males. Our fights exist, but they exist far less than if we were chimps. We would not be able to sit in this room together, having never met.

• 45:08Dax Shepard?

  Something would have happened.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Something would have happened.

• 45:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You would have made some move I misinterpreted.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would have been a tense situation, not a fun situation for anybody. Yeah. So, humans are much less reactively aggressive than most other animals, and certainly most other social primates. But we developed a new kind of aggression. We developed what's called proactive aggression. So now, we can sit back and we can plot and think about when we're gonna attack someone and how we can do it when they're unprepared. We make that distinction in our criminal justice system. So, if you kill someone out of a crime of passion, right? You come home and you find your wife in bed with someone else.

• 45:42Dax Shepard?

  Your brother.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Your brother especially. You're gonna commit a crime of passion, right? And you're gonna get punished for that. You'll go to jail, depending on the state and the circumstances. Let's say, 10 to 40 years, 10 to 30 years.

• 45:54Dax Shepard?

  You'll walk in Kentucky.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you might walk in Kentucky. Yeah, in the southern honor cultures, you might walk. But if you decide that you don't like your wife anymore and you're just gonna kill her, and you plot that, now it would be first-degree murder, and you can be put to death in certain states. And we reserve that for premeditated aggression. We intuitively recognize that this premeditated aggression is a problem.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  And we punish it more harshly because we recognize it's a problem. And so, for millions of years, primates basically signaled to you, "I'm reactively aggressive, don't mess with me." And then it was like overnight, when we had language, now, we have people who can plot, and they're not showing us that they are aggressive. That's why you get the, "I could never imagine that he would have done this," with Dahmer and Bundy and all these charismatic serial killers. And that makes us really curious about them, because the only way to learn how you might avoid those people, and who they are, and how to find out if they're truly dangerous, is to hear a story about something that's already happened where they did it.

• 46:52Dax Shepard?

  I mean, we could get into whether or not this is a fool's errand.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  It could be.

• 46:55Dax Shepard?

  Because I don't know that there is the thing.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  There's probably not the thing.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Well, there's not the thing, but there are patterns.

• 47:02Dax Shepard?

  There's some things that you can have as red flags. But I mean, look, I've old enough to have known people who've gone to jail for heinous things and I'm like, fuck, I don't know. I didn't know.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  And you can go too far. A lot of my work counters a lot of myths that people have about morbid curiosity. One of those is that it could lead you to be violent or all these things. None of that has panned out. But there are some negative side effects. If you only consume true crime at the expense of everything else and you sit inside your room all day and you don't go outside and touch the grass and go to the supermarket.

• 47:33Dax Shepard?

  That's the thing that seems like it's on the table minimally is you could have a misled belief of the likelihood of this happening to you.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  The counter to that is just to consume other media with it. Go out into the real world, go to the supermarket. It's an easy fix, right? It's easy to avoid some of those downsides. And the downsides that have historically been associated with being a horror fan or being morbidly curious don't seem to pan out. It doesn't have anything to do with a lot of bad things in human life.

• 47:59Dax Shepard?

  As I was reading this, I was like, oh, I've picked up some of these things. I know now, which I wouldn't have known, you don't ever go to a second location. Like, whatever gnarly thing's happening to you on the sidewalk and they want to put you in a car, it's better to have it out on the sidewalk than to go to a second location.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:17Dax Shepard?

  I don't know that because I've been in that situation. I know that from this type of media.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  As you mentioned, you learn things throughout your life. And interest in things like horror and true crime do decline with age, which makes sense because if you were learning something about it, then you should feel a little less interested, a little less curious about it. Now, you might find other reasons to enjoy it, maybe because your friends still like it, maybe because you built a community around the horror genre. There are a lot of other reasons why you might still enjoy horror. But that curiosity that drives you from the beginning might have shifted a little bit.

• 48:46Dax Shepard?

  This blew my mind. There's two reviews you cite in the book. One is when Saw came out and it became this huge, you know, that franchise has made like a billion dollars.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  I saw it in movie theaters.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:58Dax Shepard?

  A film critic called anyone that would watch it a depraved lunatic. But that's not even the craziest one.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  I watched it.

• 49:05Dax Shepard?

  Remember Siskel and Ebert, Gene Siskel?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:08Dax Shepard?

  He saw Friday the 13th and he hated it so much that in his review, he both gave away the ending, so no one go see it. And then he fucking doxxed the Paramount chairman, Charles Bloodhorn.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  And tried to doxx, uh, what was her name?

• 49:23Dax Shepard?

  Lead actress?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:25Dax Shepard?

  And said, like, send these people.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Hate mail.

• 49:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Why?

• 49:29Dax Shepard?

  Isn't that fucking bonkers?

• 49:30Speaker 02

  So when I first started looking into this, I was looking for what scientists had to say about the psychology of people who like slashers. And what I kept coming across were what film critics had to say. I think it's a film critic's job to hate certain movies, but it's not their job to say something about the psychology of people who like those movies. That's a very different kind of territory. It made me realize that people have these intuitions and I kind of understand it. Like, oh, you like movies where there's a lot of suffering and people are getting hacked up. I kind of understand the intuition that there might be something wrong with you. I can sympathize with that, but the data doesn't bear it out, right?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not accurate.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  It's not accurate.

• 50:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay, let's get into physical violence. Every single boy who went through school had a very plausible threat of getting beat up by another boy.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:10Dax Shepard?

  And so the fact that the UFC is huge, I do think a lot of people judgmentally look at that and go, it's so barbaric. And the people who like it are so toxic masculine. I'm like, no, these are guys who went to bars and were afraid another guy was gonna beat the shit out of them. And it's a very living fear to be beat by another man.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so watching two people who are some of the best in the world do it, you can learn a lot.

• 50:31Dax Shepard?

  You can learn a lot and then get into like, there are parameters. We like a little bit of parameters.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, even the UFC has rules, right? It's the most unbarred fighting, but there's still certain rules.

• 50:41Dax Shepard?

  And there's someone there to break it up if someone's about to be killed. And that's what maybe someone might enjoy UFC, but they might not like watching a bar fight on the street.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Or it's a different kind of attention, right? The bar fight on the street might be a like, I can't look away, but I don't really wanna see it. Whereas the UFC is, I'll pay money to see it. People hate unfair fights. It's also why there's weight classes in the UFC. If we really wanted to be unrestricted, early UFC, it was bananas, right?

• 51:04Dax Shepard?

  And why it was so great is to see little guys beat the shit out of huge guys.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, which violates your expectations, makes it more interesting. Okay, well, if he can do it, what is he doing right? I think most sports have an element, I mean, American football is the classic example, right? It's a violent sport. Now, we try to buffer that with padding and helmets and we try not to have people really get injured. But the basic premise of football is to knock other people down.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Slam your bodies into each other, yeah.

• 51:26Dax Shepard?

  Dirt your will physically over your opponent.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 51:30Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  You know, you hear it a lot, especially now complaints that sports are getting too soft. Basketball maybe is not as rough and tough as it was 20 years ago. They don't fight as much in hockey. You see it in a lot of sports and when it starts to go away, you hear about it.

• 51:44Dax Shepard?

  People don't like it. What about bodily injury and gore?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  It's interesting and it's really broad, I think, because it's really about a couple of things. It's about learning the limits of the human body. So like, well, what happens if a bone pokes through my skin? What do I do? What does that look like? How do you not die in that situation? And what can cause that? Cause I can't practice on myself. Like, how much force does it take to break my bone? But if I see somebody do something that doesn't look like it's a lot of force and then the bone breaks, I should be a little more careful in those situations, right?

• 52:11Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Would we put pandemic in this category?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Parts of it can be. For example, there was a big Ebola scare a few years ago. It was interesting because Ebola is not that contagious. Unlikely to become what COVID was, but man, is it scary. And it's scary and only in its extreme forms. You get something that looks like a person who's been attacked by a monster, bleeding out of the eyes. And these are very rare instances even of Ebola, which is a pretty rare disease, right? But those are memorable. And so you really don't want to get it. Even if Ebola had a lower death rate, it would still be much more frightening because of that. Because bodily injuries, what they do in most cases is they index violence really well. So if I'm walking through the woods and I come across a body and the body's got kind of a cut on its neck right here, right? A small cut. I'm gonna be a little worried, but I'm not gonna freak out.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Now, if I'm walking in the forest and I see someone missing their head.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  I'm gonna freak out, right?

• 53:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we got big problems.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  But why? I think that's an interesting thing. Why do we freak out more?

• 53:08Dax Shepard?

  Nature couldn't have done that.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Right, it wasn't an accident.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  It wasn't an accident. And not only that, it takes a lot of force to pull someone's head off or cut it off, right? Whatever did that was probably agentic, probably very strong, probably still close by, very angry, very aggressive. So it gives cues to the thing.

• 53:26Dax Shepard?

  Didn't eat it, it's doing it for fun?

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Is it hungry? Yeah, is this just for fun?

• 53:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. We make interpretations about the thing that caused the injury. And so bodily injuries track really well and it index really well with danger.

• 53:39Dax Shepard?

  What data do you have on contagion ding ding ding?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I love it. Great movie.

• 53:44Dax Shepard?

  How many times did you watch it?

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Did you love it before 2020?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  It was the first time. I watched it for the first time during COVID and then I watched it like every day.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  How did you find it? How'd you know to find it? Cause it came out in 2011?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe it just popped up on my Netflix.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Oh, you think I looked it up?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  I think you looked it up because I think Contagion was only available on Apple TV or some, at the time, obscure platform.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so maybe I looked up what our pandemic movies.

• 54:14Dax Shepard?

  How many times you watched it? Dozens of times.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:18Dax Shepard?

  Every day we get to work and I'd be like, what did you last night? I watched Contagion again. And I'm talking, that was five minutes a week.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  It's a great movie.

• 54:28Dax Shepard?

  I don't think that can be the explanation.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  There are a lot of great movies, though.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  It has my boyfriend in it.

• 54:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, A Few Good Men.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  I know. I mean, of course, it was of the moment.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Don't we watch movies to escape the world? Why would you escape into a world that was basically the world you were living in?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  The horrors we were living... Also, to double up on that, I had just had a seizure

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  a week before.

• 54:50Dax Shepard?

  Shut down.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  And that movie starts with a seizure.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Seizure, yes, it does.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  So there's two things happening that really...

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Like, I have to watch this every night now.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  And I remember I said, because the first time I watched, I was with Kristen, who was there for my seizure. So we were watching it and I was like, did it look like that? I, like, needed information that I didn't have.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Information about yourself even, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the good news is, I don't know about watching it, like, 12 times. But you are not alone on watching it for the first time. If you look at Google Trends data and you map the film Contagion, you see a little bump in 2011 when it came out, and then it's fairly flat. And then in March of 2020, it shot to the highest point that it had ever been on Google Trends. And what's interesting is if you superimpose searches for COVID on that or coronavirus on that, you see the same bump in March of 2020.

• 55:40Dax Shepard?

  Perfect correlation.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  That blew me away when I saw that because I knew that Contagion was popular and it was spiking in popularity. And I, of course, was like, well, I think I know why. But I never expected it to be this just perfect superimposition.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want to know if they get through it. Because we were in it. It was the very beginning. It wasn't like it was the end. Tell us what happens.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Yep, it went from, I think, 200 and something on the Warner Brothers catalog to number two, despite not being on Netflix, which is the most popular platform, right?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  I must have bought it.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  I think you rented it. Yeah, I think you rented it. You paid for it, yeah.

• 56:13Dax Shepard?

  What if you rented it every time you couldn't?

• 56:14Speaker 02

  You're just renting it every time?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna buy it.

• 56:17Dax Shepard?

  There's no way I'm watching it again. I've already rented it six times.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  And you get the bill from Apple. It's like $200 and it's just contagion.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now paranormal I want to talk about because you went to Savannah, which people consider Savannah the most haunted city in America.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:32Dax Shepard?

  Monica spent a lot of time in Savannah.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  My mom's from Savannah and I spent a lot of summers there.

• 56:37Dax Shepard?

  Walk us through how it earned that title because there's a bunch of fascinating historical stuff.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Savannah's an old city, so Americans automatically think it's haunted because it's more than like 50 years old.

• 56:46Dax Shepard?

  More people have died there over more time.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Yes, way more graveyards than a city its size should, right? And most of them are buried under the foundations of homes now. It had a couple of really nasty yellow fever outbreaks. It was obviously the site of a lot of battles. Half of the squares there are like, well, this battle took place in the Civil War or this war or that war.

• 57:06Dax Shepard?

  It's slavery there.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  There was a huge slave war. I mean, there's just a lot of dark stuff that happened in Savannah. I went to what's called the Sorrel Weed House, which is this beautiful mansion on one of the squares. And it's famous for being haunted and I went on a ghost hunt there and overnight when it was, I think, like 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM or something like that. I don't believe in ghosts, but I love ghost hunts. I think they're so much fun. I've seen things I can't explain.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 57:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, talk about the cat toys.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Yes, okay.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I'm scared already.

• 57:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, this is gonna get you.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Oh, no, really?

• 57:34Speaker 02

  The cat toys actually happened in Eureka Springs where I live.

• 57:37Dax Shepard?

  Oh geez, I'm sorry. I've conflated.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  We can talk about that and then we'll go to Savannah.

• 57:40Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  So, Eureka Springs where I live, there's a famous haunted hotel there, the Crescent Hotel. I live a quarter of a mile from the Crescent. And before I moved to Eureka, I went on a ghost hunt there, an overnight ghost hunt. One of the things we did is I was with a group of maybe three or four other paranormal investigators and some of them were like professional ghost hunters. And they brought these two little clear balls that had a red button on top. And I thought, what kind of sneaky cool ghost gadget is this? And they're like, no, we bought these at Dollar General. These are cat toys. Immediately as a scientist, I was like, okay, I'm interested because this is not something you created. It's not something that you can mess. It's just a super simple $1.

• 58:19Dax Shepard?

  Now, did you see him pull them out of the package?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like fresh out of the package. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they pulled them out, you push the little red button on top and that's what turns it on. In the case of a cat, when a cat hits it, it lights up, right? Fun toy. So, we turn these two balls on, we put them on the bed in this room. And then we kind of shook the bed to see how much does it take to really set these off? And you kind of had to really shake the bed, like, put a lot of pressure on it. And then we stepped back against the wall, we kind of stomped our feet to see if that would set them off, and it didn't. So they were pretty secure there, on a big plush down comforter. One of the investigators said, "Okay, we've heard that this room has a spirit living in it. It's called Michael's room."

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Ew!

• 58:55Speaker 02

  And the story is, this Irish stonemason, he was working on the crescent, and he was kind of a ladies' man. He liked to flirt with women as they walked by.

• 59:03Dax Shepard?

  Tell me more.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  He leaned over to whistle at a woman and fell.

• 59:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he got his...

• 59:07Speaker 02

  He got it.

• 59:07Dax Shepard?

  Just reward.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Just dessert.

• 59:10Dax Shepard?

  Just desserts.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Right on a beam that was in that room.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a bad way to go.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  It's a bad way to go.

• 59:15Dax Shepard?

  And then he died to only love.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah.

• 59:17Dax Shepard?

  Catcalling women.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Catcalling.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  So that's the story of why this room is supposedly haunted and very active. Because he's still kind of a poltergeist, he still likes to kind of mess with people.

• 59:27Dax Shepard?

  He's a purr.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  He's a little bit of a purr. Yeah, and supposedly, women get more experiences in that room.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Ew!

• 59:32Dax Shepard?

  I bet they do.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  You know, it's a whole thing. So we were in this room, they put the cat balls in the bed, turn them on, and they say, "Okay, we've heard this room has a spirit living in it. We'd like to ask you a few questions. There are two balls here, the left one we'll use for yes, the right one we'll use for no. And if you'll just light them up to let us know your answer to our questions." And then this person said, "We've heard that there's the spirit of a man named Michael in this room. If that's true, would you please light up the yes ball?" And then there was like, one beat, and the yes ball lit up. It gave me chills, hair on the back of my neck, the whole thing, and I couldn't explain it because... Again, I went in with my science mind, I was like, "Okay, let's test, what does it take to set this off? This is a very simple toy, it's not a fancy gadget you created that you can control in some other way."

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  We did all the control testing we could, and nothing else happened that night, we were there for hours, nothing else happened. But the first thing we did happen, and it was unexplainable.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  So there were more questions and nothing?

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Nothing, nothing lit up, we tried other gat, nothing really happened.

• 1:00:28Dax Shepard?

  You guys weren't hot enough.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  We weren't.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Oh, that sucks.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, there weren't enough women in the group.

• 1:00:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he's like, "Go get some broads, I'll make this whole room light up."

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Ew! Ghosts are so weird, because if you ask me, "Do you believe in ghosts?", no, I don't. But I am scared of them.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  It's weird.

• 1:00:46Dax Shepard?

  The one I love is I had a professor at UCLA and she did her work in Sub-Saharan Africa. And her work was on spells and witchcraft.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 1:00:54Dax Shepard?

  And she got a spell put on her while she was there. Now, she does not believe in them. And she got insanely sick and she saw the doctor and then went to the bigger city to see a doctor.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  And they said it to spell.

• 1:01:07Dax Shepard?

  Ultimately, she got sent to a tent and a shaman lady removed the spell and she was fine. And she's like, I don't know what to tell you. I'm back in LA. I don't believe in ghosts, but I absolutely had this experience. And my friends, that's the power of culture. I cannot believe in it and be there and get it.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  I talk about a study in the book. It's one of the few studies where I was like, ah, I wish I had thought of that study. And the short of it was that you imagine you get 100 people, let's say half of them believe in ghosts and half don't. Then you mix them together and you split those into two groups. You got 25 and 25, right? So 50 people, 25 believe in ghosts, 25 don't. And then another group, the same thing. Now, in group A, you tell them, when they come into the lab, do this study. Hey, just so you know, we need you to sign this form to let you know that someone died recently in this room. If people were told that there was the possibility of a ghost being in the room, they reacted to strange events during their lab experience in the same way. It didn't matter if they believed in ghosts or not. Their body kind of lit up in the same way. If there was an inkling that there might be a ghost in the room.

• 1:02:06Dax Shepard?

  As opposed to if the experiment started and you said, hey, just warning, there was a shoddy electrician that did all the wiring in here.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why the lights are flickering.

• 1:02:14Dax Shepard?

  It's getting fixed in a couple of weeks.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Dax Shepard?

  You would think nothing of it.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. They just didn't say anything in the control condition, right? There was no story of a ghost. So the manipulation was a light went off for seven seconds and came back on in the middle of one of their tasks. And it was dark and quiet in the room. They were supposed to be meditating.

• 1:02:28Dax Shepard?

  You would hate that.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  And if you're just in there, you're like, okay, well, I guess the electrician didn't install his light correctly. But if you're told, we have to sign this death on the premise form, one of the grad students says he saw a ghost. Then you're like, oh, why did that light go off, right?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  So much is framing.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  And even if your conscious mind is like, I don't believe in ghosts, right? You still, your body feels the same way.

• 1:02:48Dax Shepard?

  The amygdala takes over.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  It does.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  I'm nervous about this.

• 1:02:51Dax Shepard?

  Fuck that, we believe in ghosts. Something's gnarly around here.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Guys, we have to believe in ghosts.

• 1:02:55Dax Shepard?

  We have to take this threat seriously.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:03:05Dax 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?

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:03:23Dax 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.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:03:50Dax 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.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  I am really glad Instagram is helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.

• 1:04:10Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do, the conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff, but there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends, docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left. What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working, not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, is different. It's already right there inside your email, your docs, your browser.

• 1:04:53Dax Shepard?

  You don't go to it, it's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important? It flags what doesn't add up before it leaves your hands. It knows your style, your workflows, and it just backs you up without getting in the way. A thought partner that's already up to speed, at your service, not after your job. So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.

• 1:05:22Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Skims. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the girls who get it, they get it.

• 1:05:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but for those of us who are clearly not girls, walk me through it.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Well, you know how much I love my Skims fleece joggers because the plush fleece is so soft. It's cozy. It's really comfortable without feeling too heavy. Well, I went to friend them and she would not stop talking about how comfy they were. She almost didn't give them back to me, which was upsetting, but I'm a girl's girl, so I let her have it.

• 1:05:55Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  So the sleep sets are awesome because they are very soft and comfortable, but they're cute. If I'm in my sleep set, I feel fine about going down the street to pick up my food. I'm still looking cute, but I'm comfy and I'm cozy.

• 1:06:09Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  A really fun thing to do is if you're going on vacation with your girlfriends to get matching Skims pajamas. I've done this with Callie and it is so fun. First of all, the pics are so cute, but also it's just fun and friendship.

• 1:06:23Dax Shepard?

  So a girl's girl is looking out for your friends with better loungewear. I get it. Am I one of your girls now?

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  You are. You and the other girlies can shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. It's destroying athlete, creator, and YouTube Maxer. YouTube Premium enhances how I use YouTube with awesome features like offline downloads. So I can download my favorite training videos before I hit the gym. So no Wi-Fi doesn't turn leg day into loading day. Plus I get ad free videos, background play, and so much more. YouTube Premium is like YouTube got some extra gains. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium.

• 1:07:12Speaker 06

  Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads. So I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad free, I get background play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful.

• 1:07:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so Savannah, though.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Savannah, Sorrelweed House, famously haunted, went on a ghost hunt there. I was in the basement of the Sorrelweed House. And it's very dark in the basement. And there were a few things that happened, like I felt something brush my leg. And I talk about how if I would have been on a historical tour of this house in the middle of the day, and I felt so, I would have been like, oh, it's a cobweb, or whatever. But of course, because I was there, my expectation is that it's supposed to be haunted, even if I don't believe in ghosts. And so it kind of gave me chills in a way that it wouldn't have. And then, over in the corner of the basement, running along one of the walls, the big house, there are some posts, it kind of makes a hallway on that side. And there's a little old wooden chair in the corner, looking down the hallway. Supposedly, people see the ghost of an old soldier, a Civil War soldier.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  It's always a soldier.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  And he's angry, he's like a big, tall, angry soldier.

• 1:08:36Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  He's always in some kind of uniform, he's got a hat on. So I was like, well, ghosts don't exist, I'll go sit in the chair and see what I see, right?

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Sit!

• 1:08:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to sit in the chair and you like, look down the hallway, right?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  So I sit down in the chair, and I'm looking down, it's probably like a 25-foot hallway. It's a pretty long hallway. And it's dark, you know, all the other people are on the other side of the room. And I know that they're not in the hallway, because there's a bit of a wall there. And I sat there for 20 or 30 seconds, just looking, kind of sitting quietly, and then you start to kind of see things. What was that, right? And then you start to see, like, a little face, and you...

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  No!

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  You start to kind of, and my explanation would be, well, I was hallucinating it. In any case, my body didn't care, it reacted the same way. And so even though I was sitting there telling myself, I know there's not an angry soldier.

• 1:09:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  But do you know?

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  But that's the point, yeah, do I really know?

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, this is when you get into, I bring this up a lot. There's a logical truth, and there's an emotional truth. And those things sometimes are overlapped, and quite often, they're just not. And we want to say the emotional one's irrelevant, but it's not irrelevant.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  And sometimes it's right.

• 1:09:39Dax Shepard?

  It's probably governing more of our decisions than the logical side is.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and probably making more correct decisions sometimes.

• 1:09:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  This is a question that we honestly do not have an answer to.

• 1:09:48Dax Shepard?

  What part?

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Afterlife, ghosts.

• 1:09:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  These are, we really do not know. It's unknowable. So that's where our beliefs can really get very muddy, I think.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Because you can easily be like, well, I guess I was wrong about that.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  You see enough of these and you're like, okay, maybe I need to shift my worldview a little bit, right?

• 1:10:04Dax Shepard?

  Tell me about the morbid curiosity scale. How does it work?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  I created this scale because if you study humans, the easiest way to measure a personality trait of some kind, or an individual difference, is to have a scale. One that's validated against behavioral tasks and you're pretty sure it measures a real thing that you think it's measuring. So of course, because nobody had really done any work on morbid curiosity, there was no scale. So that was one of the first things I did, was try to create this scale. So it's 24 questions.

• 1:10:27Dax Shepard?

  Can people go online and take this?

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Yes, on my website.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  We're gonna take it on the message.

• 1:10:31Dax Shepard?

  Did I say the website name?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  ColtonSchrifner.com. And then there's a morbid curiosity scale. You can download it if you want to use it in your research, or if you just want to see how you score and how you compare to the average of the studies that I've done at least.

• 1:10:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  You can go take it and it'll tell you your overall score and how that compares to the average, but then also the breakdown of each of those domains.

• 1:10:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, nice, nice, nice. Okay. Well, let's talk about dreams for a second.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Sure. I've never studied dreams. And when I wrote the first draft of the book manuscript, I didn't have a chapter on dreams. It was two paragraphs in one of the other chapters, maybe eight or nine. I was seeing these connections with nightmares and I was like, this is interesting. I need to mention it. And I mentioned it briefly and then my editor came back and was like, you need to say more about this. This is really interesting. And I was like, okay. So I dug more into dream research and I was like, okay, Camille was right again. She knows more about how to write this book than I do. So I ended up writing a whole chapter on dreams. And the idea is that there's this great theory about why does dreaming exist in the first place? Why do we have the machinery for it? How did we develop the machinery to hallucinate a full experience? And, and we hallucinate it not just cognitively, but emotionally.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Our bodies would move if there was not an off switch that's triggered, right? You can snip that connection in other animals. You can see they get up and they sleepwalk, right? Or they act out their dreams. And some people have disorders that cause them to do that. And so not only is the machinery there for you to hallucinate this entire experience that, yes, it's a little weird. Dreams are really weird, right? But they're still cohesive. There's still a story. And not only are you You're doing that cognitively, but you had to also develop a switch to turn your body off so that you don't get up and do the thing. That, to me, says, okay, this has to have some kind of selection pressure, because that is not an accidental.

• 1:12:11Dax Shepard?

  That's a lot of evolution there.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  That's a lot of engineering. The aliens were, uh...

• 1:12:15Dax Shepard?

  They were busy.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  The first question is, why would we have that machinery? And so you need something really compelling to build that, or to start to build that. And this guy, I'm gonna butcher his name. His last name's Ravantswo, I think, Anton Ravantswo. He's a Finnish neuroscientist and philosopher. He's developed this theory of the threat simulation theory of dreaming. So he thinks that the first dreams were probably nightmares, because dreaming about a danger and rehearsing that emotionally, sending the signals to your body that would be relevant in that situation to move your body, rehearsing it cognitively, rehearsing something dangerous would be really valuable.

• 1:12:51Dax Shepard?

  We should add, that works. That's military training. There's a great book on killing. The amount of people that didn't fire their guns in World War I was kind of shocking. And they trained people out of that. If you, over and over and over, simulate this activity...

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Well, simulations work. Pilots do simulations. Like, you don't want your pilot to be the first time he's ever thought about flying a plane, his first flight.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Simulations work. We use them all the time. And so, yeah, if you can simulate something while you're sleeping, even better. You don't have to waste time during the day doing it.

• 1:13:17Dax Shepard?

  And you have access to a lot more stuff, weirdly.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  You do, you do. And you make connections you wouldn't make otherwise. And when you wake up, certainly before we kind of knew what dreams were, you're gonna wake up and you're gonna tell everyone you know, because you don't know why you had that. Did I go to a new world? You know, we don't really know what dreaming is. Did I travel to see my ancestors? And there are cultures that believe that, reasonably so. You know, if I was born a thousand years ago, I'd be terrified of dreams. I wouldn't know what it was, right? Sleeping in general is a little weird. You kind of just die at night.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  It's so weird.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  You die at night, you go to another world, and then you come back and you wake up.

• 1:13:46Dax Shepard?

  You're so vulnerable.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  For so long, too.

• 1:13:48Dax Shepard?

  Thirty-year day.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  And so his premise is that that would have provided a selection pressure to start to shape the cognitive machinery necessary for dreaming. And then, once that takes off, you can use dreaming to simulate all sorts of things. But that was kind of the initial push. I thought dreaming was a fascinating example of maybe very early morbid curiosity, like our unconscious morbid curiosity. Now, we're thinking about things that could happen to us and we're simulating them in our dreams. Presumably, that happened before we started talking about them, before we had language. Because dreaming seems to be very evolutionarily old. We have evidence that cats and rats dream, and we're separated by, I cite in the book, I forget what it is, you know, 50 million or 100 million years or more from them. Octopuses, who we are hundreds of millions of years separated from. In fact, they have entirely different nervous systems, but so far back.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  So it's not conserved from octopuses, but it developed twice. Octopuses dream. So it was so important that our line developed dreaming, but then the octopus line also developed some kind of machinery for dreaming. So that suggests probably there's some selection pressure for that. And octopuses, when they dream, they tend to act out some of those dreams through their color changing. So they'll change colors and do defensive maneuvers, they'll shoot ink sometimes.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  So they'll do things that are defensive in their dreams.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Wild.

• 1:15:00Dax Shepard?

  The brunt of this book, hopefully, will make people feel less guilty about what they enjoy. Do you think it could alleviate some of the fear that parents have when their kids are playing video games?

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Or just doing anything spooky, yeah. That's one of the most common questions I get is, should I let my kid watch scary movies? Or is there something wrong with them? That comes from a good place. You don't want to let your kid feel afraid, you don't want to see your kid feel anxious. But if you don't let them do that in a playful way when they're young, it's going to be difficult for them to learn how to regulate those feelings later on when they're adults. So when you're a kid, you're a sponge. I mean, you are just soaking up everything in your culture, you're soaking up new skills, your brain is using more calories when you're a kid than it ever does when you're an adult, because it's just processing like crazy. And so if you play with fear, you play with anxiety in these playful settings, whether it's a video game, or pretend play with your friends, or a scary buck goosebumps, or a scary movie that's maybe appropriate for kids but still scares them.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  They develop those regulation skills because like we talked about at the beginning, you are regulating how afraid you are in order to achieve that sweet spot, even when you're a kid, right? So you're practicing and developing those tools that'll be useful later in life.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  When you did the haunted house stuff, was it very different for people who were in groups versus alone?

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Nobody goes to a haunted attraction alone.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:15Dax Shepard?

  Serial killers.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  Serial killers, yeah.

• 1:16:17Dax Shepard?

  Usually someone by themselves.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  I've done five or six different studies at haunted houses in Denmark, and in Detroit, and Austin. I don't know that I've ever seen someone come to one alone.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I would never do anything like that alone.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  It's not because they're too scared either necessarily, it's just not as fun.

• 1:16:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you want to share the experience with somebody.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  And so one of the things, have you ever been to a haunted attraction?

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  Okay, lots of couples go.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, intimacy.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  And you can see how your partner responds when they are afraid. So not just how you respond to fear and anxiety, but how do they respond when they're out of their element?

• 1:16:49Dax Shepard?

  Is my husband gonna shit his pants when?

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Is he gonna push me into the?

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:53Dax Shepard?

  Force majeure.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  How do they respond also with your fear? It is a lot of playing.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  And in a safe way, right? Like, that's the important part.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  But I've had a lot of fights happen.

• 1:17:01Dax Shepard?

  I've had a lot of people break up after a trip to a haunted house.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  I have a study I haven't published yet where we look at exactly that, like, relationship satisfaction after a haunted house. Based on how the men and women in those relationships responded during the haunted house.

• 1:17:14Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna find some ugly stuff. No one's gonna want to admit what you find. Okay, my two last questions are, you say in the book, I forget the percentage, but over the last 20 years, horror movies have doubled their market share.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  From about early 1990s is when we have comprehensive data.

• 1:17:26Dax Shepard?

  So it has doubled in market share?

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  Tripped this year. Doubled around COVID, achieved its highest share ever, I think it was around 12%. I just checked about three or four weeks ago, horror was at like 17%. And it's the only genre that's really had like an upward spike in the last... 10 years or so, all the other genres, action has had a small one. Almost all the others have had a downward trajectory. Horror has been on the upward trajectory. It's at like 17% now.

• 1:17:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so how do you explain that? And then part two of this question is, have you considered the increasing need for this stuff? As we have all of this architecture to be on high alert for things to keep ourselves alive? And we live in this insanely safe environment that is very sterile. And without any of the real threats that we've always, we have a big apparatus that has nothing to focus on, basically. Do you think this is a result of that in any way?

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so to answer that question first, yes, I think that's some of it. When you live in a safe world, your mind is saying, well, why is nothing bad happening? Are you unprepared?

• 1:18:27Dax Shepard?

  You might even see certain things tick up like conspiracy theory stuff that is harder to observe. But something must be afoot.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  And you're hearing, okay, all this bad stuff is happening around the world, but I'm not seeing it where I am. So maybe I'm just unprepared. Maybe other people are plotting against me and they're trying to keep their aggression secret from me.

• 1:18:43Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  And then the other question about why is horror on the rise? This is a conclusion that I came to in the past month or two, so I'm still kind of speculating about it. But when COVID became a global pandemic around 2020, a lot of people who had sworn off horror since they were kids. They watched a scary movie when they were a kid. They watched Poltergeist or something and they're like, I'm never watching a scary movie again. They had this urge to watch something scary, whether it was contagion or even horror. Horror had a moment during 2020 and 2021. A lot of people, I think, became horror fans again in 2020 and realized that as adults, they kind of like it. And they can handle it a little better. And I think that they've just been watching it more. And because they're watching more, filmmakers are taking note, production companies are taking note, and they're producing more of them. There's more money for horror now.

• 1:19:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's like a virtuous cycle.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  That's my speculation about what's gone on is that there is a new crop of horror fans that popped up around 2020. And now, four or five years later, we're seeing the consequence of that, which is horror being on just an upward trajectory. While everything else is kind of stale.

• 1:19:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay, and then my last question is, is there any evidence that killers or predators have watched or consumed more morbid media than others?

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  Not more, so do serial killers like movies about killing? Probably. Dahmer famously liked The Exorcist 3, which is a really obscure one. I actually don't know if he liked horror movies, but he loved The Exorcist 3.

• 1:20:01Dax Shepard?

  That was his movie.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  That was his thing. That was his kink.

• 1:20:04Dax Shepard?

  Not generally regarded as the best Exorcist.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  Not even in the top two, I don't think. And I talk about in the book Dahmer saying that he was morbidly curious. He used the term. He was being interviewed and asked why he went back to look at a body or something. He said, "Because I was morbidly curious." And he said, "In all these movies, it's stories about this stuff, but I actually do it."

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  God.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  And then I give the example of the Columbine shooters. They supposedly loved the game Doom and they loved Mortal Kombat. This is in the 90s when those are the violent games. And so, of course, in both of those cases, people were like, "Aha, that's why Dahmer killed and ate people, because he liked The Exorcist 3. And that's why those kids shot at the school, because they played Doom."

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Dax Shepard?

  Along with 10 million other kids who didn't shoot at the school.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Along with every other kid at school.

• 1:20:46Dax Shepard?

  Not statistically relevant.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  But we want answers.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Again, that's an intuitive answer, right? But then you have to ask, "Well, what about every other kid that plays violent video games? And what about the evidence that shows that it's not related to aggression, which is pretty much all the evidence now?" And if you actually look at, this is not work that I've done, but if you look at school shooters, which are almost all boys or men, and you look at whether or not they played violent video games, for the ones we have data for, they're actually less likely to have played violent video games than the average teenage boy, right? And that doesn't mean that playing violent video games keeps you from being a school shooter either. It probably just means it has nothing to do with it. They were probably social outcasts in other kinds of ways. They had interests that were different from other boys their age. And they also have all these other things going on besides that. So the question is, does morbid curiosity make you violent or dangerous? No.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  But if you have all these other things where maybe you lack empathy, and you have low levels of disgust sensitivity, and you have high levels of psychopathy, and you're morbidly curious, maybe then you get a cocktail of things, right?

• 1:21:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  But by itself, and even in combination with many other traits, it doesn't seem to be related to any kind of dangerous or psychopathological outcomes.

• 1:21:52Dax Shepard?

  Hmm, okay, good.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:21:54Dax Shepard?

  Hopefully that's comforting.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:56Dax Shepard?

  Morbidly curious. A scientist explains why we can't look away. Colton, this has been very fascinating. This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you. Of course, it was fun, thank you.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  They made some host takes.

• 1:22:16Dax Shepard?

  Is there a famous Sofia song?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:22:19Dax Shepard?

  I can't think of one.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 1:22:21Dax Shepard?

  Sofia, The Giraffe.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Do you think most Sophie, that's Sophie.

• 1:22:27Dax Shepard?

  Oops.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  I know. Do you think most names have songs?

• 1:22:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Wow, that's cool.

• 1:22:34Dax Shepard?

  You've heard your song, right?

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  A little bit of Monica in my life, a little. I'm not gonna sing.

• 1:22:39Dax Shepard?

  A little bit of Monica in my life.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Mambo number five.

• 1:22:43Dax Shepard?

  Do they say Monica?

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they do.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Dax Shepard?

  I was thinking of a different song.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:22:48Dax Shepard?

  You know, it's like Monica, Monica, I think I want your number, Monica.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Oh, but.

• 1:22:54Dax Shepard?

  Is that not it?

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 1:22:57Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's Gloria.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  But I like that.

• 1:23:03Dax Shepard?

  Well, you were like, damn, this actually sounds like it could be a hit because it was.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I knew it was a hit, but I didn't think it was my name and I was right.

• 1:23:13Dax Shepard?

  I think I know more, but I'd have to really think on it.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, we already know Mambo number five. That's pretty good.

• 1:23:18Dax Shepard?

  That's really good.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Dax Shepard?

  That's more than there are Dax songs.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  I know. Yours is trick.

• 1:23:24Dax Shepard?

  That's okay. That's okay.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  That's okay. You got a chair.

• 1:23:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I just got a weird fun list. You know, I follow this account on Instagram. I really like it. I'm shocked I haven't sent you, forwarded you any.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 1:23:34Dax Shepard?

  It's just all data and it's all global data.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:38Dax Shepard?

  Um, so this one was the universities producing the most billionaires.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cool. Yeah, but is it obvious or there's some twists and turns?

• 1:23:50Dax Shepard?

  I mean, it's obvious. What's interesting is this is the world over.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:56Dax Shepard?

  This is every university in the world.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:59Dax Shepard?

  And of the, let's see how long this list is. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 22.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Hmm. And I wonder.

• 1:24:07Dax Shepard?

  No, 21.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Are you feeling antsy to read them all? Cause like now you know what it's like.

• 1:24:12Dax Shepard?

  No, I more wanted you to guess.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:15Dax Shepard?

  Out of 21, how many are not American?

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Oh, are not. Okay.

• 1:24:20Dax Shepard?

  Wow, I can't count it loud.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I was gonna let you, cause that was.

• 1:24:26Dax Shepard?

  A good clue.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Okay, I think.

• 1:24:31Dax Shepard?

  Big world.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  It's a big, big world, isn't it?

• 1:24:34Dax Shepard?

  China's a huge country. Over a billion people.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  And, oh god, okay. Now, what about like undergrad and grad?

• 1:24:42Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Cause this is tricky, cause some of these people might have gone to an undergrad in one place and a grad in another.

• 1:24:51Dax Shepard?

  Do you think you're overthinking it, but let me see if it delineates that.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  I am thinking it through.

• 1:24:57Dax Shepard?

  I guess it would have to mean everything. Their graduate program, their undergraduate programs, like the school, how many did the school produce?

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Okay, this is hard because I think most billionaires um go to graduate school. Most.

• 1:25:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  And I think they come, a lot of them come here for graduate school.

• 1:25:19Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  So, I'm gonna say six of them are not.

• 1:25:26Dax Shepard?

  Great guess. Seven.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now what's crazy is how um dramatic the difference is, right? So, first place, what's your guess? Do what you know.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Harvard?

• 1:25:39Dax Shepard?

  Harvard.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:40Dax Shepard?

  Harvard has a hundred, has produced a hundred and four billionaires.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:43Dax Shepard?

  Third place has produced thirty-eight.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:25:47Dax Shepard?

  Second place, sixty-nine. Great number. Congrats to, I'll give it away, Stanford.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  I was gonna say.

• 1:25:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you wanna guess three?

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna, I wanna guess, you always get to guess.

• 1:25:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Um, MIT.

• 1:25:58Dax Shepard?

  Great guess, you wanna know what number that is?

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Dax Shepard?

  That's number five.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so, and what about not Yale?

• 1:26:06Dax Shepard?

  Is that a guess?

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Oh my god, you're, you're, you're mean about lists.

• 1:26:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, am I?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  I am, I'm fun about them.

• 1:26:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I'm sorry. Oh wait, ask me again.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Not Yale.

• 1:26:16Dax Shepard?

  No, no, no, not Yale.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Okay, um, is, Jesus, okay. Harvard, Stanford, not Yale, um, what was MIT again? Five?

• 1:26:29Dax Shepard?

  Five.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Okay. Uh.

• 1:26:32Dax Shepard?

  One above MIT is a shocker, the other one's like, yeah, I guess that makes sense.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Is um Princeton? No. No, I, I take it back, I take it back.

• 1:26:42Dax Shepard?

  I'm looking.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Cal Tech.

• 1:26:43Dax Shepard?

  I don't even know if Princeton's, oh no, Princeton made the list in the high teams.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Is Cal Tech on there?

• 1:26:50Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Oh shit. Um, okay. If you tell me the number three is UCLA, I will be so, I won't believe this list. Okay.

• 1:27:00Dax Shepard?

  That'd be great though, right under Stanford, ahead of MIT.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Is it IIT? Is that on the list at all?

• 1:27:07Dax Shepard?

  Um, there is an India one, but it's University of Mumbai, which could be.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  An IIT, yeah.

• 1:27:13Dax Shepard?

  Um, and that's pretty high up. So the first country to make the list after the US in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eighth place is University of Mumbai with 22 billionaires.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:26Dax Shepard?

  And I guess that makes them tied with Cornell, which is above them for some reason. Yeah. Okay. You want to hear third?

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Dax Shepard?

  Penn.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Oh, Wharton. Yep.

• 1:27:35Dax Shepard?

  So they have 38. So again, 104, 69 for Stanford, 38 for University of Pennsylvania. Now four, I thought was, I was like, really?

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Can you give me a hint?

• 1:27:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  That's what's fun about lists.

• 1:27:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay. There were a lot of protests here.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Berkeley?

• 1:27:51Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:27:52Dax Shepard?

  More recent, the newsworthy. I'll give you a hint. It's in New York.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  Columbia?

• 1:27:57Dax Shepard?

  Columbia.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:27:58Dax Shepard?

  Can you believe Columbia's four? No disrespect to Columbia graduates.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Shocked.

• 1:28:03Dax Shepard?

  But I, do you know, maybe one of the explanations for that, again, it's gonna sound like I'm taking the wind out of Columbia's sails, but you're already in New York. And the families there are already rich. People who live in Manhattan are among the richest people in the country. So.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  You're saying they were already?

• 1:28:19Dax Shepard?

  They probably entered already in a great position.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  They inherited billionaire status, some of them?

• 1:28:25Dax Shepard?

  Or they started with quite a bit and made it more.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  I just don't think of Columbia as, um.

• 1:28:32Dax Shepard?

  A money-making school.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Dax Shepard?

  It's like all academic.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  I think of it more create, some create, I mean, Callie went there.

• 1:28:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  And she is on track to be a billionaire. So it makes sense.

• 1:28:43Dax Shepard?

  That makes sense. So Columbia is number four. MIT, five with 28 billionaires.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm shocked that's not higher.

• 1:28:51Dax Shepard?

  Yale, 24.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28:53Dax Shepard?

  Cornell, 22. University of Mumbai, 22.

• 1:28:57Dax Shepard?

  Uh, can't pronounce this university, but it's in China.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:00Dax Shepard?

  Nineteen.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:29:01Dax Shepard?

  Tsinghua.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:04Dax Shepard?

  NYU.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Dax Shepard?

  Eighteen. USC.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Again, rich kids go there. So you start with a private school that's a lot of money.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, yes, that, of course, all of these are hard, like.

• 1:29:17Dax Shepard?

  It's much more common for someone to go from a millionaire family to a billionaire than I think it is.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:24Dax Shepard?

  From a welfare family to a billionaire.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:29:27Dax Shepard?

  Okay, moving on, USC. Uh, next is University of California, Berkeley, fifteen. U of M, fifteen. Tied with Berkeley. Peking University, fourteen. Moscow State University, thirteen.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:29:42Dax Shepard?

  Princeton, thirteen. University of California, Los Angeles, twelve. University of Chicago, twelve. Fudan University, twelve. Seoul National University, twelve. And Zhejiang University, twelve.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:29:57Dax Shepard?

  That was a fun list, right?

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, you did them all, you didn't do top ten. It's really, you know, lists, when you're reading them, you wanna keep going. And now you understand.

• 1:30:07Dax Shepard?

  I know, I know.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Now you really understand it.

• 1:30:10Dax Shepard?

  I have to, I'm gonna push back a little bit, though. Your lists.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:15Dax Shepard?

  Are rarely twenty-one. They're often a hu- a hundred. And I am scared of a hundred.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:30:22Dax Shepard?

  And.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  We'll just see, next time you're holding a list that's a hundred, and we'll see what happens.

• 1:30:26Dax Shepard?

  Okay, we'll see. We'll see. I'll continue to screen grab my favorite posts on Instagram.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  That is really fun. Now, how many universities do we think have produced one billionaire? Like, do we think almost all have? No.

• 1:30:44Dax Shepard?

  Well, there's, the whole point of this was, they just announced, like, currently, there's.

• 1:30:51Dax Shepard?

  Two thousand nine hundred and ninety some billionaires worldwide.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:30:55Dax Shepard?

  So, in reality, that's not a ton of billionaires.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:30:58Dax Shepard?

  Not a seven billion.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:31:00Dax Shepard?

  Like, sometimes you think billion is diluted. I do. Like, I'll, I'll start thinking like, I guess billion means what a million meant to me when I was a kid.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:08Dax Shepard?

  When you're a kid, you knew someone that was a millionaire.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:31:11Dax Shepard?

  It was, like, unimaginable. But you just, the news is, is populated with stories of people becoming billionaires.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:18Dax Shepard?

  I just read, like, the youngest female billionaire of all time was just crowned.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:31:21Dax Shepard?

  She's like a twenty-seven-year-old who created some, I think, marketplace where you can bet on all kinds of weird things, elections. And that's kind of what I discerned from what the article said.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:31Dax Shepard?

  But yeah, I think she's twenty-seven. Yeah, she's younger than Taylor was, I think, the youngest up until then.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  She really are. I, I mean, I don't want to shit on this twenty-seven-year-old, but it sounds like she's taking from the poor and the vulnerable. So, um, okay. Listen, I just Googled how many universities in the world. Th- this is annoying because it should be, it should be very clear.

• 1:31:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  But it says there are an estimated twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand universities in the world.

• 1:32:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, that is a great, quick answer to no, they couldn't have all produced a billionaire.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:32:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  I wonder if University of Georgia has produced a billionaire. I'm gonna look it up.

• 1:32:10Dax Shepard?

  I bet it has.

• 1:32:19Dax Shepard?

  Let's go, UGA.

• 1:32:23Dax Shepard?

  Let's go, dogs. Uh-oh. For the listener, Monica's jaw opened up, like, it reticulated like a, a snake about to eat a copy bar. And then it closed, and I'm not sure what that means.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Well, the University of Georgia, UGA.

• 1:32:36Dax Shepard?

  Right. Go, dogs. Roll tide.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Take it back.

• 1:32:41Dax Shepard?

  Roll dogs.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  You're not allowed.

• 1:32:43Dax Shepard?

  I know, it's so fun.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Has many successful alumni, including celebrities like Ryan Seacrest. That's not true. AI is not right.

• 1:32:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he did not go there?

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  His sister went there. I, okay, now I'm worried, but I'm, I feel really...

• 1:33:00Dax Shepard?

  I'm almost shocked we've never interviewed Seacrest.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Wow, it does say he went there. Okay.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  So AI is correct.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  I'm shocked, too. He's your age.

• 1:33:09Dax Shepard?

  Old?

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  He's fifty.

• 1:33:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. It's all the more reason to be on the show.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  That's why I said it.

• 1:33:15Dax Shepard?

  He finds himself in good company.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Oh, but he didn't get a degree. I got two, so... Um, all right. He can have one of mine. Okay. Including celebrities like Ryan Seacrest and Georgia is home to billionaire. Oh, Georgia, the state is home to billionaires. Duh. Like the Kathy family of Chick-fil-A.

• 1:33:32Dax Shepard?

  Did the Koch brothers go there? Are they from Georgia?

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  I don't know. Specific lists of billionaire alumni.

• 1:33:39Dax Shepard?

  I'm conflating Coca-Cola and K O C H.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. I understand why. Okay, I don't think we have any.

• 1:33:44Dax Shepard?

  Colonel Sanders go there?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  What is wrong with you?

• 1:33:49Dax Shepard?

  That was a good joke.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't. I don't even get it. Why? Because he's from the South and he's stupid?

• 1:33:56Dax Shepard?

  Doesn't even make sense because he's from Kentucky, clearly.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:34:00Dax Shepard?

  But it's kind of funny.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  I didn't understand it.

• 1:34:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Ryan Seacrest is not a billionaire.

• 1:34:05Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  So seems like maybe we don't have any yet.

• 1:34:10Dax Shepard?

  You have a real task on your hands.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  Do you think people would be?

• 1:34:15Dax Shepard?

  Happy for you?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:16Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fair.

• 1:34:18Dax Shepard?

  I don't think any, it's so interesting. Like, I feel like unanimously people hate billionaires.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:34:24Dax Shepard?

  Yet 100% of people would want a billion dollars.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:34:27Dax Shepard?

  It's like, make up your mind. You can't want something and hate it at the same time.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  But you can because people are complex.

• 1:34:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we're full of contradictions. You're right. I found one. This is the guy that founded Calendly, Topo. Oh, Tonya. Are you reading from Jay-Z? Are you doing a China? But he graduated from UGA. Oh, that was his name? Yeah. I thought you were talking about product.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Oh, me too.

• 1:34:53Dax Shepard?

  I heard Chong Huang. Calendly founder?

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Cap Calend?

• 1:34:58Dax Shepard?

  Calend, Calend, I don't know how to say it. I give up. Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  What's his name?

• 1:35:04Dax Shepard?

  It's like calendar but L Y and no E R. Oh, my God. Calendar with an L Y and no E R.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  What's his name?

• 1:35:10Dax Shepard?

  I.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Okay, forget it. I don't believe in this man.

• 1:35:16Dax Shepard?

  Tona.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh.

• 1:35:18Dax Shepard?

  Oh, look at the zero to hero. Okay, great. Yeah. You have everything in. This picture. Awatona. You did a good job with Awatona, I think.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  The mastermind behind the scheduling app Calendly.

• 1:35:29Dax Shepard?

  I don't like the name of that. We didn't need Lee.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Hey, just.

• 1:35:33Dax Shepard?

  I love him. He's a wonderful person.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Obviously, it was working for people. I think it's great. Because, you know what? It made him a billion dollars. So it can't, the name can't have been too bad.

• 1:35:46Dax Shepard?

  Absolutely. Now, I'm gonna ask a very dangerous question. If he were white.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  Yes, this is a black man.

• 1:35:52Dax Shepard?

  This is a black man. If he were white, would you like the name Calendly?

• 1:35:59Dax Shepard?

  Come on.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  I don't know, because he's not white. One of just two US black tech billionaires. That's amazing. And he went to Georgia?

• 1:36:07Dax Shepard?

  So sad, but yes, amazing.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's sad, but it's cool that he went to Georgia. But he is taking my spot as the first billionaire to come out of that school.

• 1:36:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's okay. You can root for him.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Of course I do.

• 1:36:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. And what a great, and what a great name.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Actually, this is interesting. Do you think people don't root for him?

• 1:36:26Dax Shepard?

  I do, I think they do.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  From zero to hero?

• 1:36:28Dax Shepard?

  I think they do.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  They should.

• 1:36:30Dax Shepard?

  I think we all have, as we should, we have a different appetite for when black folks get a lot of money. I think when black folks floss and they're like showy and have big cars and stuff, we don't care.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:36:41Dax Shepard?

  When white folks do it, you're like, Jesus Christ, man, get it together.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Just calm down.

• 1:36:44Dax Shepard?

  But I, yeah, never bothers me if someone's, um, flossing and flexing. And that changes per ethnicity, which is so weird and funny. Like, each human being is just a human being.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Dax Shepard?

  You know?

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  But there are, I mean, there's just struggles that we can't, you know, there's societal struggles that are embedded and, you know, we know about all.

• 1:37:06Dax Shepard?

  Embedding.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  We know about all that.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  All right, so to be clear, I have, I don't have a billion dollars and I don't want anyone to come after me because I don't have that. Now, this is a ding ding ding.

• 1:37:31Dax Shepard?

  They are angry enough at what you got already.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  I know. And I actually, I think that's frustrating to me. A self-made lady, not born into wealth, one generation away from...

• 1:37:46Dax Shepard?

  Abject poverty.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  My dad grew up in a village, literally, in a village. That's a big deal.

• 1:37:54Dax Shepard?

  It is huge.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  So, people need to get on board.

• 1:37:58Dax Shepard?

  They need to wake up.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  They need to wake up. Now, woman of color, me.

• 1:38:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding. Two things to say about women of color.

• 1:38:06Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  One thing to say about women of color. The pant, this woman of color...

• 1:38:10Dax Shepard?

  Oh, the Pantone?

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:38:12Dax Shepard?

  I saw that today and I got very excited for you and I even followed a link to see the color.

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  You did?

• 1:38:17Dax Shepard?

  So that I could be supportive of this.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Dax Shepard?

  And the link had 300 pop-ups and I was never able to see the color.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Oh, well, it seems like you're not following me close enough on Instagram.

• 1:38:27Dax Shepard?

  I haven't been on Instagram today.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Okay. I posted about it yesterday because, um, as people may or may not know, I use the Pantone color of the year as my phone background. So, this is a very exciting day for me when it's revealed and I have it for the following year and it's, last year it was Mocha Mouse, nope, it was Mocha Moose, but it was really close to Mouse, so it was me.

• 1:38:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  This year is a disappointment.

• 1:38:53Dax Shepard?

  In name or color?

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  In color. It's called Cloud Dancer and it's white. The color is white.

• 1:39:02Dax Shepard?

  It is, like, is there wisps of blue in there? I don't like the background they chose, it's so confusing.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Well, the background they are trying to, they're trying to make it better by putting it on a sky. Which it is better on a sky because as it is, it's just white.

• 1:39:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't know if you're gonna be able to have a full white background. You'll be able to see anything.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is the issue. So it's a little gray.

• 1:39:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  It has like a teeny bit of gray.

• 1:39:28Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  And this really made me go down a mental rabbit hole.

• 1:39:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  You are gonna be able to see because, what do you mean? You'd still be able to see.

• 1:39:38Dax Shepard?

  That's that?

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  No, no, this is mokamuse. I'm not allowed to put it on early. It's bad luck.

• 1:39:42Dax Shepard?

  Also, like, once that white's there, you don't even see your calendar, and all that stuff that's white goes away.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's a little gray.

• 1:39:48Dax Shepard?

  Well, we're about to find out.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  I know. Now, that's the thing that sent me down a rabbit hole.

• 1:39:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  I was like, fuck this. White? That's gonna look so dumb on this phone.

• 1:40:00Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  How committed am I to tradition?

• 1:40:03Dax Shepard?

  You're very committed.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  And I'm extremely committed. Me as a person...

• 1:40:08Dax Shepard?

  It's a core tenet of your identity.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I was really thinking about that last night. I was like, man. Because somebody was like, oh, so are you just not gonna do it? And I was like, no, I'm, I have to do it.

• 1:40:19Dax Shepard?

  Cause it would be bad luck not to?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Like, maybe. I, I wouldn't go so far as to... Actually, I don't think I think that. I don't think it would be bad luck. I think I would be like... I think I would just be very sad.

• 1:40:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Like that something was ending.

• 1:40:34Dax Shepard?

  You lost something.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  I lost something. Something that I enjoy a lot and that, and that like makes me happy. I look forward to is no longer a thing. Um, is, is a little too much for me.

• 1:40:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  So, um, I'm gonna have a, a white background on the phone, but it didn't, I was like, God.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  At what point, I mean, that's like my controlling nature.

• 1:41:00Dax Shepard?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  At what point could I say like, you know, it's okay. You don't, you can put, it doesn't have to be that.

• 1:41:06Dax Shepard?

  I think it's funny how the mechanism to me seems very related to addiction, which is like...

• 1:41:13Dax Shepard?

  You do this thing one time.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:15Dax Shepard?

  It gives you this feeling. And you now just have to have that feeling all the time. So it's like, whatever first time you did this.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Dax Shepard?

  You liked how that felt.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:26Dax Shepard?

  And you want to use this mechanism to feel good.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30Dax Shepard?

  Again and again.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Dax Shepard?

  And I'm not saying like, there's anything wrong with that.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Dax Shepard?

  But it feel, it, it does remind me of addiction.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Right. So like, but I think most people would say like, they have traditions.

• 1:41:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  You know, and, and so when does it cross over into it being?

• 1:41:49Dax Shepard?

  A superstition.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  Pathological or a superstition or something that's actually not causing joy.

• 1:41:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Causing suffering.

• 1:41:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, I don't have this opinion, but I can imagine this opinion.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:03Dax Shepard?

  Which is the more traditions you have, the less real estate there is for new discovery.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:11Dax Shepard?

  Just in life, if you could imagine like currently we have like seven holidays or some, something like that where we all do kind of the same thing. And that's lovely.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:20Dax Shepard?

  If you had 364 holidays, that would leave a single day to discover something new or novel.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:28Dax Shepard?

  So there's gotta be a magic balance.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  I think it's a balance. I do think there's something really special and beautiful about consistency and commitment.

• 1:42:38Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  And it's hard to do both of those things in life. So I, I, it's meaningful to me. But if, yeah, if you make everything a tradition, then it's not special. But I don't think I make everything a tradition, but this is a tradition.

• 1:42:56Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:42:57Dax Shepard?

  When did it start?

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  Also, how do you get that image on your phone? Do you go to it, zoom in, take a screenshot and then do it?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Cause I have to use the actual thing.

• 1:43:07Dax Shepard?

  Buy.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  You probably can.

• 1:43:08Dax Shepard?

  Ah, fuck that. I always throw my money at Calendly.

• 1:43:13Dax Shepard?

  Way rather.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  It really rolled off your tongue and.

• 1:43:15Dax Shepard?

  It's a great name.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great.

• 1:43:17Dax Shepard?

  All good names roll off your tongue.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:43:19Dax Shepard?

  Starbucks.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Um, so I think it was like four or five years ago.

• 1:43:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Do you have dad in bed with it?

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  No, I'm not. I'm not, but it does bring me joy. It's like, oh, it's coming.

• 1:43:31Dax Shepard?

  I know, I know. Yeah. I, can you just get a phone case? That's in that color.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  Oh, no. See, and this is where. This is where maybe I am too stubborn. It's like, yeah, that's probably a good thing to do. That's a good solve. It's like, oh, I'm still, it's still part of it. But no, I need it to be the background because that's how it is and that's how it's supposed to be.

• 1:43:53Dax Shepard?

  There is a level of rigidity.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 1:43:57Dax Shepard?

  Think how rigid I am. What would you get, assess me out of 10?

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  On tradition?

• 1:44:02Dax Shepard?

  This is a dumb question because it's gonna be context dependent.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Dax Shepard?

  As everything is.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  I actually don't think you are like hyper.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm not like tightly wound.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  You're not hyper rigid. Well, you are in some.

• 1:44:18Dax Shepard?

  You go, you go, I don't really think you are. And I go, yeah, I'm not. And you go, well.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  No, you didn't let me finish my sentence. That's the problem. I was gonna say, you're, I don't think you're rigid at traditions.

• 1:44:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  But I think you have areas in life where you're tightly wound.

• 1:44:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well, you're right. I am a, that's why I'm saying was this dumb question because it's like, on one hand, I am such a creature of habit. I love routines more than anything.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Yes. You're very rigid about that.

• 1:44:46Dax Shepard?

  I am, I am. Now, I don't get upset, though, when I don't get to do it. I just do it. And when the times I can't, I, I'm, I'm okay with it.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Well, you know, sometimes you're like, oh, and I didn't get to work out today. And, you know, you do do that.

• 1:45:00Dax Shepard?

  If I go, if I have to miss, like, it happens at least once or twice a week where I, I can't work out because we have two guests and there's just no time. And I roll with that. But yeah, if it's three days in a row I can't work out, then I'm starting to, but I'm also starting to feel worse.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. I mean, yes, on the scale, no, you're not at a hundred of even that, even like the routine. Some people really can't handle any deviation. And then I think on tradition, uh, you don't have any, so.

• 1:45:31Dax Shepard?

  So, fuck it.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  No, I'm kidding. I think you like traditions, but I don't think you're married to them. And

• 1:45:39Dax Shepard?

  I do think I value novelty more than tradition.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Right. That's true. We're very different in that way. Me and you are so different.

• 1:45:49Dax Shepard?

  Love tradition, though. I love Christmas.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  That's, well, you love Christmas, but you don't have to do the same thing.

• 1:45:56Dax Shepard?

  No, no. In fact, we're switching the whole thing up this year. And last year was a different thing than the year before.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:46:02Dax Shepard?

  But I mean, insofar as I want the lights, I want the tree, I want all that stuff. And I want to watch the same movies. You know, I've already gotten through some of the movies. Yeah, and I do feel like if it's December 24th.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:16Dax Shepard?

  And we haven't watched Christmas Vacation.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Dax Shepard?

  I get this feeling like I fucked up.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:22Dax Shepard?

  Like, it's a real

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have that.

• 1:46:23Dax Shepard?

  How the hell did this happen?

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Dax Shepard?

  I'm disappointed in myself.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so this year, your trees were delivered, right?

• 1:46:30Dax Shepard?

  No, this year Carly went and got

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:46:33Dax Shepard?

  Three trees.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Yes. You guys did not go pick out trees this year.

• 1:46:38Dax Shepard?

  Which is the first time in 12 years of having kids that we didn't go do the thing.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and I, when I

• 1:46:43Dax Shepard?

  But as you remember from previous trips, it's often a disaster.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  But that's what's like, that's fun.

• 1:46:48Dax Shepard?

  Ah, you're right.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  And when you said like, oh yeah, Carly got the trees, I

• 1:46:52Dax Shepard?

  You had a little shiver.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Oh my God, you guys didn't go do that? And not, not for any other reason than like, isn't that like a tradition?

• 1:47:01Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  And so for me, I mean, that's Pig Day. That's Jess and I, we get our tree every year. It's, it's a whole thing.

• 1:47:08Dax Shepard?

  It would

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  No, I can't miss it.

• 1:47:10Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  And I, I mean

• 1:47:12Dax Shepard?

  Well, we can just tell people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  Peek behind the curtain.

• 1:47:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  Um, we have a, there was a bit of a debacle.

• 1:47:22Dax Shepard?

  We had a pod.

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  Not fight.

• 1:47:24Dax Shepard?

  No, just a, a, a pod complication.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:28Dax Shepard?

  A pod drama.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  We had a pod drama. And I'll say my perspective.

• 1:47:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  If that's okay.

• 1:47:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  So, yeah, we have these traditions.

• 1:47:38Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  We do secret turkey and, and Thanksgiving with everyone and it's so, it's so special.

• 1:47:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  And I feel that everyone thinks that.

• 1:47:50Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  And I, they do.

• 1:47:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  So, okay, that's great. Now, I have like so many traditions.

• 1:47:59Dax Shepard?

  You have about seven or eight.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  During that weekend specifically. It's my favorite weekend of the of the year.

• 1:48:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  And it starts off with Mon's giving.

• 1:48:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Then it's our Pod's giving.

• 1:48:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  So special. Then I have Black Friday tradition with Callie at Brentwood Country Mart.

• 1:48:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Where we get all the sales.

• 1:48:18Dax Shepard?

  Well.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  So all the deals.

• 1:48:21Dax Shepard?

  I've been told by some experts that there's not a lot of deals at that.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  I'm an expert in Black Friday. Nobody is. Nobody else is. Um, so we go there and that's like a beautiful, fun day I have with Callie.

• 1:48:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  You know, Callie is a family. So it's, everyone's like just making decisions to put that aside and make time for one another.

• 1:48:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  And then culminating Saturday with Jess, Pig Day. We go to Home Depot. I don't know if we're allowed to go to Home Depot anymore, but we do and we are.

• 1:48:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  And we get our tree and then we give birth to it.

• 1:48:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  And I do. Um, and then we put it up. He puts the lights up.

• 1:49:00Dax Shepard?

  And now we're in Christmas.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  And now we're in Christmas zone and and we're putting up all this stuff. And then we do a special lunch normally at Houston's. And it's a whole thing.

• 1:49:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  It's a whole day. It's a beautiful day.

• 1:49:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  And then this year, understandably, of course, um, you guys were like, we want to maybe go to Nashville.

• 1:49:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I sent a text to everybody.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  Yes, to the to the whole group that said like, hey.

• 1:49:24Dax Shepard?

  It's like 22 ish people. Well, not the kids included, but they weren't on the text. But anyways.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:29Dax Shepard?

  A lot of people.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  And it said like, we're tossing around the idea of going to Nashville for Thanksgiving. We'll pay for everyone, very generous. We'll pay for everyone to go. Basically, like, how do people feel about that?

• 1:49:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  Okay, and then I made a grave error. I responded very quickly. I'm also very on top of my phone.

• 1:50:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  I responded very quickly. I can't go because I have traditions with Callie and Jess. By the way, normally we do our pods giving on Thursday, on Thanksgiving. And I was like, I have traditions with Callie and Jess Friday and Saturday. I can't go. But if it works for everyone else, have fun. Go do it, have fun.

• 1:50:42Dax Shepard?

  And a thumbs up.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  Now I'm gonna stop outing now from here, because I want to talk about just us. But then somebody responded immediately. And said, yes, oh my god, this is great, I'm so happy. And I.

• 1:51:01Dax Shepard?

  Got razzed.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  Die, like, something like really died inside of me. And it was a very outsized reaction. But it was very, very, I wasn't like, I wasn't being dramatic. I was feeling.

• 1:51:17Dax Shepard?

  Core fear was ignited.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Abandonment, I'll be alone.

• 1:51:22Dax Shepard?

  They'll get me disposable.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  I'm disposable. I thought this meant the same thing to everyone as it does to me.

• 1:51:30Dax Shepard?

  Everyone else is white, I'm brown somehow, I'm the one.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  It wasn't that, it was a little bit of pilgrims and Indians situation, but, no, it was just like, wait, why wouldn't this, why wouldn't? We, what? Like, it really, it was very destabilizing. And then I knew, I was like, well, I can't.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  I can't do this where I'm just like so upset on my own and like resentful of everyone because they've done this.

• 1:52:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Cause they've decided to go, even though I said you can go, which was my fault.

• 1:52:08Dax Shepard?

  Thumbs up.

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  No, be nicer.

• 1:52:13Dax Shepard?

  I'm being pretty nice, I think.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:52:16Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  And then I-

• 1:52:17Dax Shepard?

  I've only added one thing to this story and it was thumbs up twice.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  Okay, and then, and then I, I really couldn't do it. So I responded back, uh, cause then, then people, other people are chiming in.

• 1:52:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  And I said, I, I'm gonna be honest. This makes me so sad.

• 1:52:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  And so I'm gonna remove myself from the chain.

• 1:52:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  And that was a self-protection. That was like, I can't keep seeing these texts come in today.

• 1:52:45Dax Shepard?

  That's fine.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Um, and then I removed myself from the chain and then there was, then it was a drama because-

• 1:52:51Dax Shepard?

  Pod drama?

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was pod drama because I was very upset and then people were upset that I was upset, but they still wanted to go on the trip and then you wanted to cancel the trip and you were mad at me and-

• 1:53:04Dax Shepard?

  Well-

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  I wondered when you were gonna jump in.

• 1:53:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, just, I just wanna say from my perspective, I sent this text.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Dax Shepard?

  And then I didn't look at that chain. I missed everything. By the time I'm alerted that this pod drama's going on, Kristen has said, oh no, Monica removed herself from the chain. And I'm like, I don't even know what that means.

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Sure. You're not very tech savvy.

• 1:53:27Dax Shepard?

  I know, as we know. And then, so I then kinda go through, now I'm seeing the whole thing pretty far after it all happened. And then I just wrote, you know what, guys, scrap it. No problem. Let's just, we'll go back to-

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  I wasn't on that.

• 1:53:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh yeah, I sent it to everyone. I said, well, okay, that's probably not a good idea. So just forget it. And then, yeah, that caused its own thing, cause people were excited to go and then you and I had an issue, cause you're like, no, you have to.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  Well-

• 1:53:55Dax Shepard?

  And I was like, I'm not gonna do anything that prevents you from being with us on Thanksgiving.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  Well-

• 1:54:01Dax Shepard?

  Well, I was mad at you.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  You were. You're, you're skipping some steps.

• 1:54:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was mad at you.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  You were mad at me.

• 1:54:07Dax Shepard?

  I was mad at you for not being honest the first text.

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:11Dax Shepard?

  Cause I felt like it ended up trapping the person.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  I trapped people.

• 1:54:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Which, which I did do.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Unintentional.

• 1:54:20Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  I thought the right, that I was doing the right thing. And then immediately I was like, I, I also have to be honest.

• 1:54:28Dax Shepard?

  Where I was wrong and I owed you an apology and I'll still say I'm sorry is I was like, that felt like a test.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  I know, and it really wasn't.

• 1:54:36Dax Shepard?

  That was the part that I was like, I got, my own trigger is just like, I have certain people in my life, our life, that will test you.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:54:45Dax Shepard?

  And they need to, and I, that's a big one for me.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Dax Shepard?

  So now all of a sudden I was like, well, this was a trap.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:54:50Dax Shepard?

  Like you said, go, everyone have fun.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got, you got really worked up about that piece and I, and was not, I was not trying to do that. I was not trying to test anyone.

• 1:55:02Dax Shepard?

  But you know what I didn't have, which you might have thought I had, which I really didn't have? I had no, no part of me was like, oh, fuck, now we can't go to Nashville. I didn't have that. I was like, okay, cool. I floated the idea, it backfired, let's just, we'll stick with the normal thing.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:17Dax Shepard?

  And then my family will go to Nashville on Friday.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:55:20Dax Shepard?

  Or whatever.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't even, I don't care.

• 1:55:25Dax Shepard?

  Like, I wasn't upset to cancel the idea.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  But I'm, I would, I understand why that would make you sad and upset. You love it there, you want to go there, you want to spend your holidays there.

• 1:55:36Dax Shepard?

  Also several members of our pod have never been there.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:38Dax Shepard?

  So I was like, oh, this is great, this will be, we'll be able to get everyone together and...

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Well, and then that was all, there was also layers, I mean, it's so layered and so complicated.

• 1:55:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  But I, you know, you, then, you know, we record the next day and we're mad at each other and you, but I, I would, I was never upset with you or Kristen.

• 1:56:03Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  I mean, this is unfair to everyone else, but I wasn't. I was like, oh... Of course, they they are just offering up something nice. They're just floating it. I felt so sad when it was like just yeses across the board after I had immediately said I can't go. That was the painful part. It had nothing to do with the trip. The trip, great, like,

• 1:56:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  of of course you guys want to go do that. I would want to go if I didn't have these things.

• 1:56:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  So the problem is then like I come in, you're upset with me because of the it's this entrapment. And I am not upset with you, but then I'm like, oh, he's being so he's so mad at me.

• 1:56:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, for being hurt.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm like, where's the empathy? I'm so sad.

• 1:56:55Dax Shepard?

  I know, I know.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  We worked it out.

• 1:56:57Dax Shepard?

  We worked it out. And then the solution was we had things even on Wednesday.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  It was perfect.

• 1:57:01Dax Shepard?

  No problem. It was fucking great.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  It was perfect.

• 1:57:03Dax Shepard?

  And then we all flew at 7 a.m.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the rest of the group went and had a wonderful time.

• 1:57:09Dax Shepard?

  It was so fun. Uh, it was it was such a nice three days because as much as I absolutely love summer and you're there.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:57:18Dax Shepard?

  You know, I'm on the boat every it's like boat to breakfast, boat to dinner, but activity.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're moving around.

• 1:57:24Dax Shepard?

  Let's go downtown to Bricktops. Let's go out to this restaurant. Well, with 22 people, we're not going to a restaurant.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Dax Shepard?

  And it's winter, so it's not warm out. There's no boating to be done. You're not even going to ride the motorcycles that are there.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:37Dax Shepard?

  So we just sat in a house for three days, all of us, playing games.

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  I'm getting jealous.

• 1:57:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, sorry, I'll back off the details.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  I I I made these choices, but that's awesome.

• 1:57:47Dax Shepard?

  We did, um, Die Hard first night, Christmas movie.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  Never seen it.

• 1:57:51Dax Shepard?

  A lot of people hadn't seen it.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:53Dax Shepard?

  And everyone's like, isn't that a Christmas movie? So someone picked Die Hard. And then we did, um, Beverly Hills Cop.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:57:59Dax Shepard?

  And then we did Scrooged.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:58:01Dax Shepard?

  So it was like games all day, order food, and then movie at night.

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  Love it. Very cozy.

• 1:58:06Dax Shepard?

  Pool was broke, the hot tub was broke. You know, I was tons. I was like in, you know.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were in a little bit of fixer mode.

• 1:58:13Dax Shepard?

  Sauna work, so we saunaed.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:58:15Dax Shepard?

  And we ate fun food and we did a lot of fun stuff.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:58:18Dax Shepard?

  And it was great. And you were missed. It was such a fun time.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  I, I, I'm sad I couldn't be there.

• 1:58:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Um, but I'm also happy I got to do all the things.

• 1:58:26Dax Shepard?

  On top of the being excluded fear, I would imagine you're also like, already Nashville's this thing. It's like, I'm changing everything. I'm moving there. I'm quitting. Nashville, Nashville, Nashville. Not now, now Thanksgiving's in Nashville. Like, I'm sure on top of the other anxiety about Nashville, it's like, now we're, now our tradition got moved to Nashville?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:46Dax Shepard?

  Or was that not in the mix?

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  It was, it's not the Nashville specific piece.

• 1:58:52Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  It's the, everything is changing at a pace I can't currently handle right now.

• 1:58:58Dax Shepard?

  Right, right.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  Um, and, and it's, it's too overwhelming for me. But then I had to work through that.

• 1:59:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  And I did, and it's okay, and change is okay.

• 1:59:08Dax Shepard?

  And you gave me a huge gift, which it never occurred to me you could do this. So we had a full Thanksgiving on Wednesday.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:16Dax Shepard?

  But then when we got to Nashville, Hannah.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:19Dax Shepard?

  Sweet Hannah, most beautiful singer in the world.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:22Dax Shepard?

  She had made a whole other Thanksgiving. So we had two full-blown, sit-down, insane meal, eat-all-day leftovers. I'm like, this should be a double.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:59:33Dax Shepard?

  Should be a double-day holiday. And then we all flew home on Southwest on Sunday, one of the busiest travel days of the year.

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, very busy.

• 1:59:39Dax Shepard?

  And somehow it shook out. We're almost all 21 of us, ended up in a middle seat.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Oh my, wow.

• 1:59:47Dax Shepard?

  I, as you know, got sick.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were sick.

• 1:59:49Dax Shepard?

  Kristen got sick. Lincoln got sick.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:54Dax Shepard?

  Those packed flights, man.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Dax Shepard?

  Like, when you walk on, you're just like, okay, I'm gonna feel like shit probably for three days.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'll happen. That'll happen. Anyway, okay, so that was Thanksgiving. That was our pod drama.

• 2:00:06Dax Shepard?

  Pod drama.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Um, the second thing I wanted to say, it was ding ding ding to Columbia, um, because Callie went to Columbia, as I already said, and, and someone she went to Columbia with was at this event I was at last night, this Alison Roman book event.

• 2:00:19Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  That was very.

• 2:00:21Dax Shepard?

  Were you like the host or emcee or something?

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  No, I was not. Kate Berlant, uh. Was the moderator, I guess we'll say, sure.

• 2:00:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Master of Ceremony.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:31Dax Shepard?

  Motorcycle Club.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  And, uh, and it was so fun.

• 2:00:35Dax Shepard?

  She's hysterical.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  Cape Perland is so funny, yes, and, and so is Allison.

• 2:00:40Dax Shepard?

  That was the comedy show we were going to when I saw the cock, um, pipe.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Whoa, that's a ding ding. That's wild.

• 2:00:46Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  Um, anyway, so that was so fun. And then we went to a, um, they had rented out this little like bar restaurant thing after.

• 2:00:56Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  And it was just really lovely, but, okay, I had to check my laptop.

• 2:01:03Dax Shepard?

  Ooh, I wouldn't have done that.

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  I, I, I had like a real, it's like, I don't know what to do.

• 2:01:11Dax Shepard?

  That's my life.

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  It really felt like I was like giving a child.

• 2:01:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  And then during the talk, I was like, thinking about it. And I was like, what if something happens to it? Or someone else checked their laptop and they get switched?

• 2:01:27Dax Shepard?

  I don't let my kids touch my laptop. I don't let Kristen touch my laptops. Like, everything I've written is on there.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:01:32Dax Shepard?

  No one's allowed to fucking touch that.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  I was very scared, but for Allison, I did it.

• 2:01:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was even in a situation where I'd brought my laptop. Oh, I was gonna go to Zanku.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:01:42Dax Shepard?

  And do a little research with my laptop. So weird place to set up shop. Like, you're always at a nice place.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48Dax Shepard?

  And our Zanku's really something. It's like a bus stop.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, why would you pick that?

• 2:01:52Dax Shepard?

  Cause I was in the mood for Zanku. They do chicken right. They got a, they got a tarna. Fuck, so good.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  It's really good.

• 2:01:58Dax Shepard?

  Um, but I had brought my, uh, la- laptop. And then I was like, once I got there and I looked at the, the terminal.

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:02:06Dax Shepard?

  I was like, I don't want to eat in, I'm just gonna get takeout.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Dax Shepard?

  And then I got out of the car and I was gonna have my computer in the car. And I was like, gonna be able to see my car. Like, I walked halfway.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but.

• 2:02:16Dax Shepard?

  I was like, I keep my eye on the car the entire time. No, I don't even feel comfortable. I gotta hold my laptop. Oh, I mean, so I went back to the car, grabbed my laptop and held it like a blankie. And then I did do my stuff in there and it was great.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Oh, you did? You pivoted? Okay.

• 2:02:28Dax Shepard?

  I did. I was in there for like three hours.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Wow. Anyway, that was great. Buy Allison's book, Something From Nothing. It's really good. And I hope Max doesn't listen to this, but Callie was like, I'm buying her book for Max for Christmas.

• 2:02:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, sorry, baby.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  And then I said, you know what? I had already said that on my verbal gift guide on the fact check.

• 2:02:49Dax Shepard?

  So you're a poser.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  That's what I said to her. Okay.

• 2:02:53Dax Shepard?

  I used Callie as a resource.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  I know, for the Netflix thing?

• 2:02:57Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Interesting. I used someone as a resource, too.

• 2:03:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay, TBD.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Okay, that's-

• 2:03:10Dax Shepard?

  Do you think Colton Scrivner sounds like a character name in something?

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:03:14Dax Shepard?

  I do. I don't know what genre, like, old west movie or something?

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Oh, to me, it's like, um, Colton's, like detective.

• 2:03:23Dax Shepard?

  Detective Colton Scrivner. Could he be a detective in the old west?

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:03:28Dax Shepard?

  Like at the O.K. Corral, or one of those towns?

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  We can combine.

• 2:03:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Definitely. Okay, you said Casper wasn't successful.

• 2:03:37Dax Shepard?

  The Friendly Ghost?

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Casper's financial performance has varied. Oh.

• 2:03:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, the films.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  With the mattress company.

• 2:03:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, Casper Mattress.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Casper the movie. Make. Casper, nineteen ninety-five. Made over two-hundred-and-eighty-seven million dollars at the worldwide box office.

• 2:04:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that's pretty good, more than any movie I've ever been in made.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  A hundred-and-two-point-seven million domestically and a hundred-and-eighty-seven-point-six million internationally.

• 2:04:14Dax Shepard?

  Pretty good.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Pretty good, I would say.

• 2:04:16Dax Shepard?

  They didn't make a sequel, though, but that's pretty good for ninety-five dollars.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  That's also like-

• 2:04:21Dax Shepard?

  That's like six hundred.

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Free, everything needed a sequel.

• 2:04:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, perhaps.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Now, how long do cats sleep?

• 2:04:28Dax Shepard?

  Uh.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  Twelve to sixteen hours.

• 2:04:30Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And if you're a male lion, twenty-one hours.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  Ah, how long?

• 2:04:36Dax Shepard?

  It's crazy that male lions are so jacked, because they don't do anything but sleep and be ripped.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  Eighteen to twenty, eighteen to twenty hours. They have to conserve energy for activities like hunting, mating, and defending their territory.

• 2:04:49Dax Shepard?

  They don't even hunt.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:04:51Dax Shepard?

  That's what they haven't made. You know, they don't hunt.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:04:54Dax Shepard?

  No, their their manes are too big, so they can't hide. So literally, the women do all the hunting and then you stroll over as the male and you eat the hell out of the thing first up.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says the females do all the really hard work, killing the majority of prey.

• 2:05:08Dax Shepard?

  Yes, the only time they're needed is when the hyenas surround the carcass and then they'll go kill a bunch of hyenas. And when you need them, you need them.

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:05:16Dax Shepard?

  So they do deliver. They can fucking mow through hyenas. I've seen some incredible fights where like one male lion takes out nine hyenas. They're so strong. They, that's all they do. And then they fight other males that roam in trying to take over the pride. But then they just sleep, fuck, and then eat the food that they didn't catch.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:05:34Dax Shepard?

  Pretty good racket.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  How come I'm not a lion?

• 2:05:37Dax Shepard?

  Well, because you're a human.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:05:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Mostly.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  No, I mean, in in the game of like, what's our animal?

• 2:05:47Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  Why am I not a lion?

• 2:05:49Dax Shepard?

  You think you're like a lioness?

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I want to be.

• 2:05:52Dax Shepard?

  Or a male lion.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  Picking that. No, I'm not a male lion because I think I kill.

• 2:05:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  So I just wonder like, why no one ever thought of me as that? I also have a very long mane.

• 2:06:05Dax Shepard?

  Which makes you a male lion, though. That's maybe why you're not a lion. It sounds like a good racket to me.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:06:15Dax Shepard?

  Although I don't like, I wouldn't want to sleep 21 hours a day. I don't want to miss everything.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  I love sleeping.

• 2:06:20Dax Shepard?

  I have FOMO too much. What if something fun happens on the Serengeti?

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  You won't care because you're sleepy.

• 2:06:25Dax Shepard?

  One of my buddies killed a bunch of hyenas. I was like, fuck, I want to love to have seen that.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why you're not one.

• 2:06:31Dax Shepard?

  No, I'm a lioness. I'm a female lion.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  You're a female lion, I'm a male lion?

• 2:06:35Dax Shepard?

  I guess, if it's either or. But I need to be out and about and hunting.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  No one wants, no one thinks I'm a male or a female lion. They think I'm a chinchilla with no bones.

• 2:06:46Dax Shepard?

  Floating rib cage.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  I just, it's, it's like, it's so offensive.

• 2:06:50Dax Shepard?

  Or no rib cage. I can't remember.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Ew, it's like, why are they so squishy?

• 2:06:55Dax Shepard?

  That's because they're made for cuddling.

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 2:06:59Dax Shepard?

  You don't want to be made for cuddling?

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  They're made for squi- like, ew.

• 2:07:03Dax Shepard?

  For killing?

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  Speaking of, okay, so many people I have run into who listen to Armchair Anonymous. Every Armcherry brings up the rat story. That has really struck a nerve understandably.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  People can knock it over the rat in the water bottle. And now I, so I have that, uh, um.

• 2:07:27Dax Shepard?

  Tea kettle?

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  Tea kettle, electric tea kettle. I have that very one that's next to us in my house. And it's been acting a little funny.

• 2:07:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  And like sometimes it's like spilling and then the wa- it seems strange. And I got it in my head that there's a rat in the stem.

• 2:07:43Dax Shepard?

  Oh my god, the stem is like a quarter inch thick.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  I know, but I think the rat is able to get in there.

• 2:07:50Dax Shepard?

  Maybe an octopus could be in there, but not a rat.

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  I mean, a chinchilla could if it can disable its ribs.

• 2:07:58Dax Shepard?

  It still has its jawbones and stuff. It's limited.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  I think there's a rat in the stem. I really do.

• 2:08:03Dax Shepard?

  You really do?

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like tried to stick this like straw in there to see.

• 2:08:08Dax Shepard?

  You're crazy sometimes. That's madness. You can't look at that stem and convince yourself there's a rat inside. That's just, look at the stem.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Ah, it's in there.

• 2:08:20Dax Shepard?

  You can't even straw in that stem.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  That's what we thought. How did the rat get in that water bottle? But it got in and then.

• 2:08:26Dax Shepard?

  She left some part out of that story. She had the lid off for a while.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  She probably had the lid off, but still, that's still a small, uh.

• 2:08:36Dax Shepard?

  The fact that she was drinking out of it for a while is insane. Okay, I feel like I would definitely be able to taste.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  She said she, remember she had like.

• 2:08:45Dax Shepard?

  Fucking rat hair on her teeth? Ay, ay, ay, come on.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  She had a rat.

• 2:08:50Dax Shepard?

  I hate to judge our arm cherries.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  No, no, we're not judging her. That was a great story. But also it taught me a lesson that rats can get in teeny spaces. And they're in the stem of my tea kettle.

• 2:09:00Dax Shepard?

  You should be way more worried about getting a 28 inch butane tank up your butt. That also happened in Armchair Anonymous. But are you worried about that?

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  No, because I have control over that.

• 2:09:12Dax Shepard?

  And, and physics has control over a rat in that stem, so.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  I did, I stuck it. I just tried to stick this little like very tiny.

• 2:09:20Dax Shepard?

  That wouldn't even fit.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Brush thing in there. And it did feel like it was hitting something.

• 2:09:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the sides of the super narrow tube.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Anyway, um, I just.

• 2:09:33Dax Shepard?

  So you're gonna throw it away and get a new one? Are you gonna keep it in a Ziploc bag so you know that a rat can't get in it?

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  I should put a bag on top.

• 2:09:40Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  But that's ugly, so I can't.

• 2:09:42Dax Shepard?

  A rat can get through a bag. Bag too.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  But then I would be, yeah, you'd be able to tell.

• 2:09:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it couldn't reseal a Ziploc bag once it got inside. If you saw that the Ziploc was unsealed, you'd know you had a rat in there.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  Unsealed or.

• 2:09:55Dax Shepard?

  Not apart, yeah.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  Okay, uh, did the Saw franchise make a billion dollars? Yes, 1.1 billion worldwide.

• 2:10:04Dax Shepard?

  Worldwide.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Is Ebola rare? Yeah.

• 2:10:09Speaker 01

  It's considered rare.

• 2:10:11Dax Shepard?

  Not, not, not any numbers out of 100,000, just yeah.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  It's considered a rare but severe disease. That's what he said. He was right. There are no active Ebola cases in the US as of the latest information, just FYI. So that's good news currently. Okay. Is Savannah considered the most haunted city in the United States? Yes. Widely considered the most haunted city in America due to its long history of tragedy, such as fires, epidemics, and battles which have left behind many unsettled spirits. Other cities frequently mentioned include New Orleans and Austin.

• 2:10:50Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I've not had any ghost activity on my trips to Austin.

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  Also Salem, Massachusetts, obviously.

• 2:10:56Dax Shepard?

  That makes sense.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, on all these sites, Savannah.

• 2:11:00Dax Shepard?

  So do you think you got some of your fear complex by spending so much time in your childhood in Savannah?

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  No, because I didn't know that then.

• 2:11:08Dax Shepard?

  You weren't aware of the.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Thank God.

• 2:11:10Dax Shepard?

  Apparitions and spirits?

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:13Dax Shepard?

  What if your parent, your grandparents had any run ins? Are Indians big ghost folks or no?

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:11:20Dax Shepard?

  They're like reincarnation, which is great.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Dax Shepard?

  It's positive. It's not.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:24Dax Shepard?

  You don't linger. He's come back as a squirrel.

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  Well, I liked, I liked this at my aunt's memorial during the, um,

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  cremation. There's so much emphasis on this is.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  This, it's just this physical body.

• 2:11:41Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  That's gone now. But that's all it is. Yeah, exactly. It's just a vessel. Like, the, the spirit is still here.

• 2:11:50Dax Shepard?

  Driving.

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I like that.

• 2:11:52Dax Shepard?

  But is it here or is it elsewhere?

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  I just don't know.

• 2:11:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's too exact.

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  Not sure where it goes.

• 2:11:57Dax Shepard?

  It's not a science.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, okay, real quick, I think we can do it quick. We're gonna take a test.

• 2:12:05Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fun.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  The morbid curiosity test.

• 2:12:08Dax Shepard?

  Mmm.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  This is on Colton's website. Okay, I'm gonna ask you, okay?

• 2:12:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  If a head transplant was possible, I would wanna watch the procedure. Now, we got the same situation. Strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree.

• 2:12:25Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  Okay. I think the supernatural is an interesting topic.

• 2:12:30Dax Shepard?

  Disagree.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  Oh. If I lived in medieval Europe, I would be interested in attending a public execution.

• 2:12:36Dax Shepard?

  Ag- yeah, I agree.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  I am curious-

• 2:12:38Dax Shepard?

  I wouldn't want to, but I would want to.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Right. I am curious about crime and enjoy reading detailed news accounts about murders and other violent crimes.

• 2:12:46Dax Shepard?

  Sure, I agree. Yeah, it's fun.

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  That's funny, though, because you don't like it when your mom calls in and is like, "This person's dead."

• 2:12:53Dax Shepard?

  I don't like it because I don't like what feels like my obligation, which is to express a bunch of sympathy over someone I'm just learning was even alive.

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  Mmm.

• 2:13:05Dax Shepard?

  That's my issue. It's like, why are you telling me this? I don't even know this person. Am I supposed to join you in...

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  She just wants to feel like, she wants to talk about it, cuz it's upsetting for her.

• 2:13:15Dax Shepard?

  She just has something fun to report.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think she knows.

• 2:13:17Dax Shepard?

  Older women love reporting these illnesses and these deaths. Everyone's mom, I know, does this. Does your mom not do this?

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  Um-

• 2:13:25Dax Shepard?

  It's a very mom thing.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, not really.

• 2:13:28Dax Shepard?

  Once you pass sixty-five as a mom, you're gonna start keeping your ear to the street about anyone who's got any kind of disease.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  But I think it's to, it's like, it's a-

• 2:13:36Dax Shepard?

  You heard Mary's son. I'm like, no, I don't even know who Mary is. So, no, I don't know Mary's son.

• 2:13:40Speaker 02

  My mom does that, for sure.

• 2:13:42Dax Shepard?

  She does, yeah. I think it's pretty universal.

• 2:13:44Speaker 01

  But I think it's because she's, it's like, it's like gossip. It's sort of that same, like, it's spreading information in an attempt to, like, help.

• 2:13:53Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  But, you know, also, maybe your mom is freak, your mom, when she hears Mary's son is dealing with something upsetting, like, it's upsetting to her. It might not be upsetting to you.

• 2:14:04Dax Shepard?

  That is the assumption I should make, and I wish I were a better person. My, what I really think is she hears it and she's like, oh my God, I can't wait to tell everyone.

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:14:15Dax Shepard?

  I think that's what really happens.

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  That's how my mom says it, I feel like, too.

• 2:14:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I mean, your mom's just not doing it, right? I think your mom's not doing it to you. If you ask Kristen right now, her mom does the same thing. She like, half the calls are about people she's never heard of that have a sickness. It's a bizarre activity. If I just called you, it's like, hey, did you hear a guy in Bangladesh lost his arm today? It's like.

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  I would be like, I'd be like, oh my God. Like, I would hear that and say like, that's horrible. And I would think that you were telling me because you thought it was horrible and you wanted to share it.

• 2:14:48Dax Shepard?

  I, my mom thinks it's horrible.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:51Dax Shepard?

  For sure. But she, I think she's also so horny to spread all the information as quickly as she can.

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  Okay, speaking as the only woman in this room, I think, um, it's more like, this makes me feel unsettled. And like, I need to, I need to share that feeling so I don't feel so alone in this unsettled.

• 2:15:11Dax Shepard?

  I think there's probably a great evolutionary explanation. I think it was probably women's job, in whatever capacity, to be monitoring the health of everyone and reporting on it and pooling resources. And I think that was the domain.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's how I feel. If I hear something horrible happened, I'm like, I do want to tell people. But it's not like, because guys have a story. It's like, this horrible, it's horrible things happen.

• 2:15:38Dax Shepard?

  It's upsetting and you want to share in that.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I want, I guess I kind of am looking for like, comfort in that the world isn't, or, I don't know. I'm unsettled.

• 2:15:51Dax Shepard?

  And I think a guy's. First thought is like, I'm not telling anyone that. Like, oh, so and so's got gangrene. I think like, they won't want anyone to know. And no one's gonna enjoy hearing that. I, I just have a completely different instinct. Which is almost like, don't tell anyone.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's weird. I mean, that, to me.

• 2:16:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's different.

• 2:16:13Speaker 01

  It's different, it's different. But I, I just think you could give some benefit of the doubt that it's not like, oh my god, I got a story to tell as opposed to like, I really don't like this about life.

• 2:16:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but let me be very specific. I'm not judgmental of that instinct because I think all the things we're supposed to do, the mechanism that motivates us to do it is a reward. I think both things are true. I think it's serving a purpose, clearly it did historically, that these moms would be spreading this information. And I think they get a dopamine hit from the sharing of it, which is how the body encourages them to continue that practice. So it's like, I'm not judgmental of it, but I do think there is a horniness.

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  I don't know that that's fair. Okay, let's keep going.

• 2:16:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  I would be curious to see how an autopsy is performed.

• 2:17:01Dax Shepard?

  I have in the past been curious and I've watched one, so I would have to say I agree. I don't ever want to see one again.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  Agree strongly.

• 2:17:08Dax Shepard?

  Just agree.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  I would be interested in attending or watching a video of an exorcism.

• 2:17:12Dax Shepard?

  Disagree.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  If I lived in ancient Rome, I would be interested in attending a gladiatorial fight.

• 2:17:18Dax Shepard?

  Strongly agree.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  I would be interested in watching a documentary on motives behind real murders.

• 2:17:23Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  I'm interested in seeing how limb amputation works.

• 2:17:27Dax Shepard?

  Uh, what's the middle one on that one?

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  There's somewhat disagree, disagree, strongly agree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly.

• 2:17:33Dax Shepard?

  Somewhat agree.

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  Okay. I find the occult interesting.

• 2:17:37Dax Shepard?

  Uh, agree.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  If I saw a street fight break out and knew I could not intervene, I would try to watch it.

• 2:17:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, strongly, agree.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  My favorite part of a crime show is learning about why the killer did what he did.

• 2:17:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, agree.

• 2:17:51Speaker 01

  I would like to see how bodies are prepared for funerals.

• 2:17:54Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  A documentary on voodoo would interest me.

• 2:17:56Dax Shepard?

  Disagree.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  I would be curious enough to watch a duel if I lived in the Wild West.

• 2:18:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, strongly agree.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  I would be interested- And watching an interview with an in prison serial killer talking about his crimes.

• 2:18:07Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  I think the preservation of bodies like in taxidermy or mummification is interesting.

• 2:18:13Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  I am curious how a Ouija board works.

• 2:18:16Dax Shepard?

  Uh, strongly disagree.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  I prefer violent movies and TV shows to be uncensored.

• 2:18:20Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  Being a criminal profiler who studies the personality of murderers would be an interesting job.

• 2:18:26Dax Shepard?

  The middle one.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Somewhat?

• 2:18:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, somewhat dis- somewhat agree.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  I am curious what the deadliest toxin in the world would do to the body.

• 2:18:33Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  I think witchcraft would be an interesting topic to learn about.

• 2:18:36Dax Shepard?

  Disagree.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  I'm curious what a bottle looked like.

• 2:18:40Dax Shepard?

  I already know.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  I'm curious what a battle looked like in the Middle Ages.

• 2:18:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, strongly agree.

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  I'm curious about the minds of violent people.

• 2:18:49Dax Shepard?

  Agree.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  Okay, here are your scores. One is the minimum score and six is the maximum score.

• 2:18:56Dax Shepard?

  Four point seven.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Well, it's multiple things. So your overall morbid curiosity score is four point four two.

• 2:19:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:19:04Speaker 01

  Okay, your paranormal score two point three three.

• 2:19:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  Your minds of dangerous people score four point eight three. Your body violation bodily injury score four point eight three. Your violence score five point six seven.

• 2:19:21Dax Shepard?

  Wish I would've got six.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  Then I think you cheated.

• 2:19:28Dax Shepard?

  I didn't cheat.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  I'm just kidding, I know. I know you like violence.

• 2:19:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  All right, well, that's cool. So you're.

• 2:19:35Dax Shepard?

  Let me ask you something, though. When you say you like violence, are you turning your nose up to it compared to serial killer interest? Do you think some are worse than others?

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  I think, um, I don't think worse or better.

• 2:19:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  I think they're different, though.

• 2:19:50Dax Shepard?

  They're modeling out different.

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're modeling out different things.

• 2:19:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so I have a huge fear of being in a physical violent situation with another man. So I'm always gonna be interested.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  But you're also, you're, you have a fear of it, but you're also like, you're kind of attracted to it.

• 2:20:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09Dax Shepard?

  Like most things I'm afraid of, the motorcycle.

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:20:12Dax Shepard?

  Uh, speed.

• 2:20:13Speaker 01

  But you've started fights.

• 2:20:15Dax Shepard?

  I mean, first of all, yes, like in junior high, just straight up started some fights.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:20:22Dax Shepard?

  As an adult, I don't, I would say I haven't started fights. I just have such a clear category. I've seen guys walk into the bar and they want to fight. They're there to fight.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:32Dax Shepard?

  I've not ever walked in the bar because I want to fight. I walk into the bar, I see some behavior I don't like.

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:38Dax Shepard?

  The sheriff in me tells me, oh, I've got to protect everyone from this energy everyone hates.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:44Dax Shepard?

  And then I end up in a fight with that person.

• 2:20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think some people could read that as starting a fight as opposed to leaving.

• 2:20:51Dax Shepard?

  Sure, but I would, I wouldn't abandon the people that I thought were being put out by this energy. This happened perfectly on New Year's Eve, one year. Everyone was in town for a car show and we went out to Dell's, this bar that Scotty and I went and sang karaoke at all the time.

• 2:21:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:21:07Dax Shepard?

  It's like 1 a.m. on New Year's Eve, these guys walk in, they were at, they weren't at the bar all night. They just came in, they shoved two different guys just randomly, immediately on their way to the bar.

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:21:18Dax Shepard?

  Then one bumped into me aggressively and I turned around and said something. And then Scotty noticed that was going on and saw he had a friend, so he kind of got by the friend. And then the friend just immediately swang at Scotty. So like those dudes just, they rolled in, they were like gangbanger dudes, they rolled in to beat someone up.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:40Dax Shepard?

  And um, in that situation, in that bar, I think, oh, Scotty and I are best suited to deal with these two people. Of all the people that are at this bar. The other two guys that got shoved just got like shoved to the ground, couldn't do anything about it.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  But what about just like the bouncer?

• 2:21:55Dax Shepard?

  There's no bouncer at, at Dell's, it's just a bar with people. I mean, sure, by the time the police got called, two people would have been punched in the nose and they would have been gone and.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Dax Shepard?

  So I've seen enough of those situations, living in bars for a decade, that, yeah, in those situations, I'm like, okay, well, I'll be the guy.

• 2:22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:13Dax Shepard?

  These two are fighting somebody in this bar.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  I guess it's also the type of bar, maybe?

• 2:22:18Dax Shepard?

  Sure, it's not like a fancy.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  But not even fancy, like, I'm thinking of like my, the college bars, like, they're rough and tumble.

• 2:22:26Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  And no one in my group was like.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  Fighting or looking for fights or being like vigilant about the fights.

• 2:22:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. There might have been more fights where I came from.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 2:22:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like definitely the bar we drank at in Detroit, there was a few fights a week.

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:22:50Dax Shepard?

  Every Saturday night, there was a fight at the bar.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that's all been part of it, right? Like your bars are ones where there are fights. Those are the ones you're picking.

• 2:23:03Dax Shepard?

  For sure. We're all, we're all victims of our childhood. So it's like, it's all, yeah, the bars I drank at, probably the vast majority of people at them, their parents were divorced. They grew up like I did. That's why for whatever reason that bar appealed to them.

• 2:23:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:23:20Dax Shepard?

  That's the kind of bar they got taken to as a kid.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:23Dax Shepard?

  Like, it all makes sense. It's just like, yeah, we are all similar and we find each other.

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:28Dax Shepard?

  And then the people who went to country clubs, they're at a country club drinking. And most people don't fight at the country club.

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  I doubt it. Well, they have different kinds of fights, I guess.

• 2:23:38Dax Shepard?

  Sure. And I'd rather just throw down than the

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:41Dax Shepard?

  other version.

• 2:23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, four point something. I already forgot.

• 2:23:47Dax Shepard?

  Five point six violence.

• 2:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:49Dax Shepard?

  All right.

• 2:23:50Speaker 01

  All right, love you.

• 2:23:50Dax Shepard?

  Love you.