Alvin E. Roth (on moral economics)

Alvin E. Roth (Moral Economics) is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Stanford professor, and author. Alvin joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in Queens with two schoolteacher parents, skipping a traditional high school path to attend college at 16, and how early academic exposure shaped his curiosity about markets and human behavior. Alvin and Dax talk about pioneering kidney exchange programs that have saved thousands of lives, the surprising ways incentives influence behavior in everyday systems, and how market design applies to everything from matching students to schools to allocating scarce resources. Alvin explains the difference between repugnance and disgust in economics, why some markets are morally contested yet necessary, and why solving complex social issues requires designing better systems rather than relying on good intentions alone. Take printer ink off your to-do list with HP Smart Tank | hp.com/SmartTank Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ 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

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Um, today we have Alvin E. Roth. Uh, he is a Nobel Prize winning economist and a Stanford professor. Ding ding ding ding ding.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  My goodness.

• 0:16Dax Shepard?

  His previous book is Who Gets What and Why? And his new book is called, This Is Tasty.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:24Dax Shepard?

  Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales. What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Really interesting.

• 0:34Dax Shepard?

  Super, super interesting. We learn about the difference between repugnancy and disgust. He himself pioneered this kidney market that has saved tens of thousands of lives. Yeah, uh, really, really great topic. Uh, please enjoy Alvin E. Roth. 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.

• 1:11Speaker 01

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• 1:52Speaker 01

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• 1:59Dax Shepard?

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• 2:32Speaker 01

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

• 2:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 2:38Speaker 01

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• 2:56Dax Shepard?

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• 2:57Speaker 01

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• 3:10Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

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• 3:24Dax 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?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  You are. You and the other girlies can shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at SKIMS dot 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.

• 4:00Dax Shepard?

  You're visiting, I presume, from the Stanford area, yeah? Okay. You're originally from Queens. Both parents were schoolteachers?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:09Dax Shepard?

  And what was their specialty? Were they just generalists?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  They taught in high school and they taught a discipline that no longer exists. It was called secretarial studies. And they taught mostly young women who weren't planning to go to college and were going to become secretaries. And they taught them typing and stenography.

• 4:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  So one of the skills that a secretary needed to have in those days was to be able to take by hand dictation.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:33Dax Shepard?

  Right, and then your words per minute was your currency, I imagine?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Then accuracy.

• 4:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Both parents specialized in that?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  They did.

• 4:41Dax Shepard?

  Did they meet in pursuit of that knowledge?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  They probably did. And they were both New York City schoolteachers. And part of the implicit contract was you were supposed to go back and get a master's degree. And I think they met then.

• 4:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay, they met in graduate school?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:54Dax Shepard?

  How much older is your older brother than you?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Four years.

• 4:57Dax Shepard?

  Four years, and did you look up to him?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 4:59Dax Shepard?

  So he started this. He started taking classes at Columbia on the weekend? And that encouraged you to do the same?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  He did.

• 5:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what grade?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  The entrance exam was in ninth grade. I don't think I started classes till 10th grade, but I'm not positive about that.

• 5:15Dax Shepard?

  All to say, you end up beginning college full-time at Columbia before you've gotten a degree, yeah?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  So if we're talking about a high school degree, I don't have a high school.

• 5:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you don't have a high school degree, which I like a lot. And you started full-time at 16 at Columbia?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:31Dax Shepard?

  So you were a wonder, Ken. Do you reject that term or do you embrace it?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I don't think I embrace it. I was not a great high school student.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  But they let you into college without it?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  They did. It's a private college. And the thing about having some acquaintance with Columbia professors was they let me in.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:47Dax Shepard?

  And you got your first degree quickly, yeah, in three years? And it was in operations research. What was operations?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Well, operations research was and is a collection of applied mathematical tools. Mostly they're tools that had their origin in World War II. So various kinds of optimization and some kinds of statistics, things like that.

• 6:07Dax Shepard?

  And then you went to graduate school quickly thereafter, which you went to Stanford. And you get your masters and PhD there in three years. Again, this is accelerated now.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  I did, yeah.

• 6:18Dax Shepard?

  What was the hurry? Was it just happening?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  It was mostly just happening. I wasn't in a hurry. But again, I wasn't a talented student. I liked being a student, but I was ready to also. Think about things on my own.

• 6:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay, how do we transition from operations to economics?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I'm often asked that. My story, which I'm sticking to, is that I didn't change what I did, but the disciplinary boundaries moved around me. So I studied game theory was the topic of my dissertation. And in the 1970s, it looked like operations research might be the natural home of game theory. But then economics adopted game theory, and doing game theory made you an economist, and there I was.

• 6:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay. Did you love Janus von Neumann?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  He's a father of game theory. It would be delightful to have met him.

• 7:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  He was a polymath and an unusual man. Most of the game theory we do today isn't very directly related to what he did.

• 7:13Dax Shepard?

  I'm fascinated with him. I read a great biography about him last year. He is the one who basically comes up with the concept of mutually assured nuclear annihilation, right? This is what he models out.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  So he didn't ever talk about things like that. He may have thought about it or talked about it, but not written in his game theory book. But you might be thinking of Thomas Schelling, who was a game theorist who also shared a Nobel Prize in economics with Bob Alvin. And he worked in the Rand Corporation and thought a lot about nuclear disarmament and armament and mutually assured destruction.

• 7:42Dax Shepard?

  But that is based on the shoulders of game theory, no?

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:45Dax Shepard?

  You have a lot of long stints. You do University of Illinois for seven years?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Eight years.

• 7:51Dax Shepard?

  Eight years?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Seventy-four to eighty-two.

• 7:52Dax Shepard?

  And then you do University of Pittsburgh for a long time as well.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Eighty-two to ninety-eight.

• 8:00Dax Shepard?

  Are you astounded when you look back that you've had kind of full careers at all these different places? Because you then also went to Harvard for 14 years. Like, these are really long tenures at any one place.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I'm old.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  We did different things at each place. I met my wife at Illinois. We had our children in Pittsburgh. We saw them off to college in Boston. And then we moved to Stanford in 2012.

• 8:24Dax Shepard?

  Does academia inoculate you from this? Or do you feel like you were able to pick up the worldview of all these places you spent all this time in? I always think of myself as being from Detroit, and then I've been here for 30 years. And I definitely Downloaded a different worldview through being here. And I want more of those worldviews. And I just wonder if you could feel that you absorb the culture and the points of view.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I think I can absorb the culture of the different places. Partly, there's a lot in common about fancy economics departments, wherever they are. People sometimes ask me, what's the difference between Harvard and Stanford? And in many ways, they're pretty similar. If you're in the economics department, you're reading the same journals. You're seeing many of the same people. So 70, 80% of it is pretty similar. The difference is, at Harvard, when you look away from campus, what you see in the foreground is Wall Street and Washington. And at Stanford, when you look away from campus, you see Silicon Valley. You know, I think they change a little bit what students study. Not completely. I have Harvard students who are working in the Valley. And I have Stanford students who go to Wall Street and Washington.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  But it's a little more close to you. It's more likely that those are the data you think about, those are the people you meet.

• 9:37Dax Shepard?

  Right. Okay, so in 2012, I guess your last year at Harvard?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:42Dax Shepard?

  You win the Nobel Peace Prize with Lloyd Shapley?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Not a peace prize, that's a prize for peace.

• 9:47Dax Shepard?

  Oh, oh, so sorry.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  We won an economics prize.

• 9:50Dax Shepard?

  Still by the Nobel Committee? Is it not the same?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  It is, it's different. There's a Nobel Prize in Economics, there's one in Physics, and one in Chemistry, and

• 9:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  One in Physiology and Medicine, and one in Literature.

• 10:01Dax Shepard?

  So you win that for the theory of stable allocations and practice of market design? So it is in your designing of markets. And one in particular, which we'll talk about. But I think as we get into your book, Moral Economics, I think we need some base, shared vocabulary and understanding so we can march through them. And I think the best place to start is, how do you define a market? What is a market for the labor person?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  That's a good question. So I have a very expansive view of markets. Because a lot of the markets I study aren't primarily monetary exchanges. So that surprises even some economists that I speak of markets that way. But I think of markets as tools that Human beings build so that we can cooperate and compete and coordinate with each other. And so there are lots of markets. There are commodity markets where you don't care who you're dealing with. You can get 5,000 bushels of hard red winter wheat from any farm. They're all the same. Or they can be marriage markets where you care precisely about who you're dealing with. That's the whole point. It's a matching market that gets you married. And there's lots of things in between, like employment labor markets.

• 11:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think we're all most familiar with thinking of markets in terms of the commodities markets. Or what is the supply and the demand? And how is that going to affect the price of things? And that's certainly one specific kind of market.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yep, that's a giant kind of market.

• 11:24Dax Shepard?

  But ultimately, we could think of markets as just being a broad tool that matches anybody with something that they want or need with someone else that has it. Now, whether that's going to be done through paying for that with money or if two people are just going to agree, I want you and you want me. That's more of the matching model. That's ultimately what your Nobel Prize was for, was matching markets that you designed.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Or helped design or redesigned, yes.

• 11:53Dax Shepard?

  Yes. So let's talk about matching markets because there's a bunch of different ones that maybe people wouldn't realize are markets.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  That's a good question because, in fact, I wrote a book in 2015 called Who Gets What and Why? And that has some things in common, one market in particular in common with my new book, Moral Economics. But that's a sort of optimistic book about how sometimes markets are broken and don't work well. And if we think hard about them and learn about their details, we can sometimes fix them. And so there were matching markets of that sort that I helped intervene in. And one of them is the market for first jobs for new doctors, new American doctors. And that's a market that if you know someone who's graduating from medical school this year, right around now, they'll already have interviewed at residency programs. Then they'll have submitted a rank order list of how much they like places, first choice, second choice, third choice.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  And the residency programs, the employers will do the same thing. And then an algorithm that the algorithm used now is one that I helped design. An algorithm will match them to each other.

• 12:51Dax Shepard?

  Why was it inefficient before? You got involved, what were the baked in challenges?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  There were longstanding kind of inefficiencies that had to some extent been resolved before I got on the scene by creating a centralized clearinghouse. And those are, when you think what marketplaces have to do, they have to make the market thick. They have to bring people together who want to transact with each other. Then they have to deal with congestion. If there are lots of jobs, it's hard to consider the offers in a timely way and not be pressed to answer more quickly than you'd like because you'd like to see what else is coming along.

• 13:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the congestion, right, is everyone's gonna pick the top three tier hospitals in a very populated area. That place is gonna be inundated with requests. And then as we try to move on to someone's second choice, now another new moment of congestion.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  It also is that people are gonna make lots of applications and therefore employers are gonna get lots of applications. And that's something we've seen in a modern way, that the cost of applying to things has dropped faster than the cost of evaluating applications. So colleges get lots of applications, residency programs get lots of applications. On dating sites, people with nice pictures get lots of pings.

• 13:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, if you're the hospital and you get all these applications and you go, great, I want these 20 graduates. You have no clue if you're their ninth choice or their seventh. So you've wasted all this time on an applicant who really doesn't intend to go there but might have sent it as a backup plan.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  So a centralized clearinghouse helps coordinate that. But one of the particular things that hadn't kept up to date with the way medical education and the labor market of doctors work was the first centralized clearinghouse dates back to the 1950s. But in the 1950s, almost all graduates of American medical schools were men. And by 1970, about 10% were women, and today it's 50%. And so more and more, there are couples graduating from medical school who need two jobs, not one job. And if they need two jobs, you can't do a good job of getting them two jobs unless you ask them, which two jobs do you want? What's your first choice of two jobs? Because that's what they want. What's your second choice?

• 14:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that sounds very complicated.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  It's a little complicated to build an algorithm that can handle that. But it makes it simpler for couples who are looking for two jobs to look for them in a sensible way. Instead of getting one job in Alaska and one job in Florida.

• 15:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was gonna say there probably is some ranked priority of they'd like to be at the same hospital. Then second to that, they'd like to be at two hospitals in the same city.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And they have opinions about which hospitals and they may be in different medical specialties. So they have a lot of things to think about. But one of the reasons it's important is when the clearinghouses didn't take care of that, the married couples didn't go where they were matched. Because I like to say that the iron law of marriage is that you can't be happier than your spouse. So if me and my spouse get matched to a pair of jobs that doesn't suit us, we can keep looking for jobs. And that disrupts the match for everyone. So that's something that's been fixed.

• 15:40Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now, what's interesting about markets is that globally, there is very little consensus about what markets should and shouldn't be allowed, right? We have much different laws in the US as we do in Europe, as we have in Asia and so on. Here are some of the markets that exist somewhere and don't exist other places. Selling plasma, kidneys, surrogacy, sex, work. And the concern generally does ultimately find its way to fear that the rich will coerce the poor or underprivileged. In most of those cases, I just said, that's the primary fear. But you have some countries that allow one thing and not the other. So it's not like it's even consistent against like, oh, there's no part of the body that can be sold.

• 16:25Dax Shepard?

  Well, no, that's not really how it works. And you attempt to explain this through repugnance. And so I would love for you to explain repugnance in a repugnant market.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  In the book, I say that what I call a repugnant transaction is a transaction that some people want to participate in and other people think they shouldn't be allowed to participate in, largely for moral or religious reasons. And furthermore, that these are transactions that the people who object to them might not even know that they have happened if they haven't been told. And by that last thing, I'm trying to rule out things that do obvious harms to people. I can easily object to markets if they harm me. But that's not what my book is about. My book is about these other markets where moral considerations come into play.

• 17:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, gay marriage is a great example of it. If the two people that are married don't inform you that they're married or they don't wear a ring, you have no sense of whether or not this. Market transaction happened.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  That's right. So same-sex marriage is sort of a prototypical repugnant transaction. There are two people who want to marry each other. There are other people who think they shouldn't be allowed to. But it's not clear what the harm is that's done to the people who object. But this has been a giant political issue in the United States and in many other places. So it's clear that some people have strong objections to same-sex marriage.

• 17:39Dax Shepard?

  And implicit in him as well, like disgust, you use the example like, we don't serve saliva in glasses at restaurants because universally everyone thinks that's gross. That's disgust. Whereas repugnant transactions have to have fans and foes.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. So there aren't any laws, I don't think, about you can't serve beverages made of spit. But there are laws in California, you can't sell horse meat for human consumption. You know, you can go up and down Los Angeles to restaurants and you'll never find horse meat on the menus. And that's because it's not an ancient cowboy law. It's the result of a 1998 referendum that passed by a big majority in California.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 18:17Dax Shepard?

  It was that recent.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. What that means is that there are people who think you shouldn't eat horse meat. But the reason there's a law against it and not against drinking saliva or eating worms is that you don't need a law against eating worms. No one particularly wants to eat worms. But people do want to eat horse meat. There's lots of places in the world where horses are delicious.

• 18:35Dax Shepard?

  And we'd all agree that I don't think you could establish a hierarchy of horse, cow, sheep.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  I think the same referendum that made it illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption made it illegal to sell dogs for human consumption. So I think it's pets is the idea.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  But it's such a fine line.

• 18:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, pigs are pets.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Well, no, not in California.

• 18:54Dax Shepard?

  People have.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  They're mom.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  No, no, of course they're not included legally. Right. We have a law in California that you can't sell horse meat for human consumption. It's a felony.

• 19:03Dax Shepard?

  There's another concept that's relevant to bring into the repugnant transaction, which is it does seem to overlap with this concept of paternalism. So what do we mean when we talk about paternalism?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  So I don't think the ban on horse meat has much to do with paternalism. We don't think that eating horse meat is bad for you. But we think that drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. We think that taking addictive drugs is bad for you. We might think that being served sugary soft drinks in giant. Glasses is bad for you. I mean, there've been attempts to ban that.

• 19:34Dax Shepard?

  Some sense you know better than the person knows for themselves.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Right. And paternalism is a very interesting word because, of course, often we apply it to children. And, you know, if you don't properly supervise your children, you might be neglecting them. Sometimes you have small children, you have to say they can't do things that they really want to do, but that will harm them in some way, and you have to stop them because you, their parents, know better than they do. So there's a whole field now of experimental and behavioral economics, which says that all of us former children, just because we had enough birthdays, doesn't necessarily mean that we know what's good for us. And we might also like some laws that limit things you can do. So one that comes to mind that isn't that controversial is prescription drugs. There are lots of drugs that might be good for you, but we think you need advice before taking them.

• 20:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we're evaluating whether getting what you want is going to be ultimately destructive to you. So for the kid, the kid wants to stay up late, but we know we got to prioritize tomorrow at school. Or the child wants to eat a bunch of sugar before he goes to bed.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Play on the freeway.

• 20:35Dax Shepard?

  Play on the freeway. I think that would have appealed to me. When morally contested issues are criminalized, they often can give rise to black markets. So let's talk about that a little bit.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Okay, well, a famous example in American history is prohibition. In the 1920s, we passed a constitutional amendment against most forms of selling alcohol. And not many years later, in the early 1930s, we again amended the Constitution to repeal prohibition. And part of the reason was, in the meantime, there hadn't been that much reduction in sales of alcohol. It's just it had been handed over to criminals to administer that market. And the criminals were sometimes violent. They sometimes made things to drink that weren't good for you in ways that alcohol itself isn't bad for you. You know, there weren't quality controls. You know, methyl instead of ethyl alcohol. And the country got tired of feeling like they were accomplices in a crime that many Americans didn't really think should be a crime.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And it's a great example of the difficulty of banning things that people want to do, but also of the fact that regulations don't magically make the problems of alcohol go away. We don't let children buy alcohol, although there are children who get access to alcohol. But even us adults, you know, those of us with enough birthdays not to be children anymore, can drink too much and then maybe get in the car and drive. There are laws against that, but alcohol causes a lot of premature deaths, still, as it continued to do during prohibition. One thing that has really changed, though, is you can no longer buy moonshine whiskey from gangsters. They've been outcompeted by the fancy liquor stores that'll sell you aged-in-the-barrel Scotch and things like that.

• 22:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay, so the other thing I think we need to understand, again, because your book is trying to evaluate the economic morals, not the moral imperatives. We're not trying to levy a verdict whether something is right or wrong.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think about that, and I end the book by saying that one of the things about morals is you can't be morally obliged to do something that you're not able to do. But the nature of moral obligation has to do with something that you can do and can choose to do. So we weren't able to ban alcohol, and that makes it less of a moral issue. Some of us might still like not to have alcohol sold. And even those of us who enjoy fine wine and aged whiskey might be prepared to give that up if the problems that alcohol causes would go away. But that turns out to be something we don't know how to do. And that makes it, it seems to me, less of a moral obligation to try to put people in jail for selling alcohol.

• 23:04Dax Shepard?

  Right, but the concept of trade-offs is really, really important because that's how we're going to attempt to evaluate these different situations as we go through a list of very exciting and provocative, repugnant transactions. So talk about trade-offs.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Economics is about trade-offs because economics is about how to allocate scarce resources efficiently and how to make them less scarce. But if there were no scarcity, if everyone could do whatever they wanted, then we wouldn't have to deal with trade-offs. But if we live in a universe where things are scarce... Attention is scarce, resources of other sorts are scarce. Then we have to decide how to allocate those scarce resources. And that involves trade offs, whether or not we want to make them or are willing to make them. We have to think about the consequences of our actions, even if we're not pure consequentialists, even if we don't necessarily think that all moral judgments should be made only in terms of consequences. I think it's very hard to make moral judgments without paying any attention to consequences.

• 24:02Dax Shepard?

  Now, this becomes one of my primary axes I like to grind, which is I feel like there is currently, we're in an era of rejection of trade offs in that there's some notion.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  That's my one.

• 24:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  No, you're fine. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't mine.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Last year, I was scheduled to go to Israel and didn't go because there was a war in Iran on the days I was supposed to be there. But I downloaded an app that gives me an air raid alert whenever there's one in Israel. And that's what we're hearing.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Whoa, we're getting intel.

• 24:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I feel like our modern era, and I don't know what's driving it, whether it's the internet or social media, but there seems to be a willing naive rejection of trade offs, as if there's going to be a perfect solution to something. And anytime there's any downside, we must reject it wholesale. I can think of the war on vaccines, which is certainly you can produce for me some people who have experienced side effects. If you graph that number of side effects versus lives saved from that polio vaccine or name the vaccine, it's preposterous. They're not comparable. One is on a magnitude bigger, but because there's a trade off, the whole thing must be thrown out.

• 25:18Dax Shepard?

  And I wonder, do you think that's always been how people felt about trade offs? Or do you think that's kind of new and accelerating?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's a very bad way to talk about trade offs. You know, if you don't think about consequences, then you can be led far astray. And one of the examples I talk about at some length is addictive drugs, right? We all would like there to be no heroin addicts, but simply throwing them in jail turns out not to solve the problem. We still have heroin addicts, even though our jails are full of drug dealers and drug addicts. So if we don't like heroin addiction, I think we're morally obligated to think about how to abolish it, having tried one way. And so I'm a big fan of experiments. I don't know what to do about drug addiction, but I would like to see.

• 25:57Dax Shepard?

  An effort to figure that out. Yeah, I think people choose to not acknowledge that. This country fundamentally in the Constitution is trying to service two goals, liberty and equality, that cannot exist at 100%, both. So just implicit in our whole system is the notion of trade offs. We're gonna constantly be measuring, have we lost too much liberty for this equality? Or have we lost too much equality for this liberty? And so, admitting we're setting out on a journey that's going to involve compromise and trade offs. And we're gonna try to figure out what balance is suitable for us. I think needs to be applied everywhere. You can't really compute the world without acknowledging we're not gonna get perfection

• 26:41Dax Shepard?

  in any one of these without some cause.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I agree, and also I think we have to learn from experience. It makes a lot of sense to say, let's make heroin illegal. But what makes less sense is to say, let's make that our only tool for fighting drug addiction, given that it yields a lot of drug addiction.

• 26:59Dax Shepard?

  And then the last thing I think, and then we'll jump into some of the topics is just, we have to somehow evaluate what we can and can't get. We have to be able to determine whether or not these goals are achievable. And how do we do that?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  You mentioned already that there are different laws in different places. Some years ago, before COVID, I gave a talk in Berlin about controversial markets. And the three I chose to talk about in Berlin were prostitution, surrogacy, and kidney exchange. And the reason those made sense for an American to talk about in Germany is the German laws are just the opposite of the American laws. So in Germany, the only one of those three that's legal is prostitution. Surrogacy and kidney exchange are not yet legal. So let's take surrogacy to answer your question about how can we tell when things aren't working? The places that don't like surrogacy see themselves as protecting the vulnerable, the places that ban surrogacy. And the vulnerable who they identify are women who might be surrogates and bear children for someone else.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  But of course, if you're a German couple in need of surrogacy to start your family, you can come to California and have a surrogate baby and have your names on the birth certificate in California where it's perfectly legal. So then the German courts had to deal with How do we make this baby a German citizen so that she can go home with her parents?

• 28:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  And so the family courts started to have to create procedures where German surrogate parents could adopt their own child in order to have the child because no one's more vulnerable than a newborn baby. So one way you can tell the law isn't working is you're trying to protect the vulnerable and you're in danger of creating stateless babies who can't go home with their parents.

• 28:37Dax Shepard?

  Right, right. Now, you were working in theory and then admirably started working and like, okay, I think I understand how this works. Can I actually fix something? And you were called to help with the kidney exchange. That's a matching market, right? And I may love you and want to donate my kidney to you, but you and I might not be a match, unfortunately. And now there's another couple, and that couple wants to donate the kidney to their loved one, and they're not a match. But lo and behold, I might be a match. So there is some way to make everyone happy, and this is the system that you helped design. So what was happening and where did we get to?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so that has a long story. My personal part of that story may not be so interesting, but the big market part of that story is there's a terrible, terrible shortage of organs for transplant. So right now in the United States, we have about 500,000 people on dialysis, and we have about 100,000 of them on a waiting list to receive a kidney transplant, but we only do fewer than 30,000 kidney transplants a year. So the wait on dialysis is long and dangerous, and people die while waiting.

• 29:45Dax Shepard?

  And you said it's a top 10 killer in the US.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Kidney transplantation is the treatment of choice, but most people who need a kidney transplant will die without getting one. So there's a real shortage of kidneys, not just in the US but around the world. And part of that is related to the fact that it's against the law almost everywhere in the world to pay someone for a kidney. I should take a step back and say, we get kidneys from deceased donors, from dead people, but also from living donors because healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one. So as you were saying, if you loved me and I needed a kidney, you might be able to save my life by giving me one.

• 30:18Dax Shepard?

  What's the breakdown of that? How many are coming from cadavers versus living folks?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  1,000 are coming from cadavers and about 7,000 are coming from living donors. Okay, so still the majority is from cadavers? The large majority is from cadavers. Only a small majority of the donors are deceased because deceased donors give two kidneys and living donors only give one. Right, right. So we need more donors of all sorts, but it's flatly against the law to pay a donor for a kidney. We've just recently, in very recent years, started to make progress on reimbursing the costs that donors pay in becoming donors. That is, if you wanted to give me a kidney, if I had kidney failure, I'd probably be in a hospital up in the Bay Area and you would have to come and get a hotel room and you'd have costs. And it would have been illegal for you to reimburse me for those?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  It wasn't clear whether it was illegal, but it certainly was impractical. So mostly there was little or no reimbursement.

• 31:15Dax Shepard?

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• 32:28Speaker 01

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• 32:39Dax Shepard?

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• 32:54Speaker 01

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• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, your insurance is not going to pay for you to donate a kidney. Well, my insurance would pay for the surgeries, yours and mine, needed for you to donate a kidney to me. Okay, okay. But they wouldn't pay for the childcare that you needed while you were in Palo Alto.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Travel, all of that.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  So there were lots of things that they wouldn't pay for. I was on the board for a number of years of a federally funded organization called NALDAC, the National Living Donor Assistance Center, which had permission to pay certain expenses of means-tested donors, donors who were poor enough. And That's been liberalized, what can be paid for, over the years. But it's still the case that it's flatly against the law to pay for a kidney. And that's one of the reasons why there's a terrible shortage of kidneys.

• 34:41Dax Shepard?

  What was the number before you came up with this algorithm that could match two different couples wanting to, or maybe it was even, I don't know how big it can fan out?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  So there was hardly any kidney exchange. We came in at the beginning of kidney exchange. And the thing about kidney exchange that's so relevant to this discussion of what's allowed and what's not, is in kidney exchange, each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient's intended donor with no money changing hands. But it's the no money changing hands that makes it legal. It wasn't completely clear that this would be legal because the American law, the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, doesn't speak about money. It speaks about valuable consideration. It says you can't give valuable consideration for a kidney. And so the question was, was a kidney exchange valuable consideration? Congress passed unanimously, without any dissent, an amendment saying that that isn't what the law meant.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Kidney exchange is legal under the National Organ Transplant Act.

• 35:34Dax Shepard?

  Right. So once you were able to start pairing up compatible people who had already agreed to donate, what did the number go from?

• 35:42Speaker 02

  So it went from a handful a year when we started doing it, to it's about 1,500, more than 1,000 a year now. There's a little carefulness you need to do in counting because somewhat more than 1,000 people receive kidney transplants through kidney exchange. But some of the donors are non-directed donors. There are a couple of hundred donors each year in the US who want to give a kidney to someone and don't have a particular someone in mind.

• 36:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I've heard about these people.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  I've considered it.

• 36:09Dax Shepard?

  So admirable, you have.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I...

• 36:12Dax Shepard?

  Who needs it?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I already have one.

• 36:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I'm suspicious I'm gonna damage one of mine and need the second to back up.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, yeah, that's fair.

• 36:20Dax Shepard?

  You've gone further, at least I've heard you in conversation with other people, open up the idea. The obvious threat of buying kidneys is, of course, rich people will go to poor countries and take advantage of people who...

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Are very, very desperate and need the money. And so you have some solutions to that, though. So let me take a step back and let's talk about blood and blood plasma. Because there are also laws in many places in the world against paying for blood or blood plasma. These laws date from the 1970s, from many of them right around 1970. Before there was a test for hepatitis in the blood supply. And so part of the concern was that poor people, even when they weren't feeling well, but because they were being paid, would donate blood and it would had infection to the blood supply. And there was this worry, just as you enunciated, that the rich countries of the world, the global north, would suck the blood out of the poor countries. And there'd be this flow of blood from poor countries to rich countries.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  In most countries in the world, it's illegal to pay for blood and also for blood plasma, which is a blood product that's actually very important. And in the United States, those things aren't illegal. But there's a regulation that says that whole blood has to be labeled with whether it's been donated voluntarily or for pay. And so the equilibrium we're in is that whole blood in the United States is donated without payment. When I donate blood, they offer me an orange juice and a cookie afterward, but that's so I don't fall down. Yeah. But plasma is a product of blood, doesn't have to be labeled. In the United States, not only is it legal to pay for plasma, but we export tens of billions of dollars of plasma products every year.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you call this the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma. Right. So it turns out that only in a handful of countries is it legal to pay plasma donors. And those are the only countries that are self-sufficient in plasma. Everyone else who can afford it buys plasma mostly from the US. It's fascinating, isn't it, these little arbitrary lines we draw? Nevertheless, there's still a lot of concern that if you allowed blood plasma to be sold internationally, which we do, that somehow the rich countries would be sucking blood out of the poor countries. But of course, that's not the situation we're in. The United States supplies 70% of the world's plasma, and we're not a poor country. And we're the richest. So we should worry. It's a real thing to worry about that somehow rich countries would suck the blood out of poor countries. But that's not the present danger that we're in.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  The present danger that we're in is there are countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there isn't enough blood, and people are dying in large numbers because of shortages of blood and blood plasma. And in Western Europe, there aren't those deaths because they can buy it from the US. And in Australia, they can buy it from the US. So it's worth worrying about that we shouldn't have, you know, rich countries sucking the blood out of poor countries. But that's not what's happening. So it's important to think about the consequences. And one reason it's not happening is it turns out you need a sort of sophisticated medical industry to safely process and store and fractionate the plasma into useful pharmaceutical components.

• 39:23Dax Shepard?

  Right. OK, so then that brings us back to kidneys, because I was impressed with your solution to this.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  So there have been lots of proposed solutions. Regularly, there's some legislation being proposed that would try to relieve the shortage of kidneys. And right now, there is an act that's being sponsored by quite a number of congressmen called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which is a vicious title. It'll get a headline. It's suggesting a very modest change in the National Organ Transplant Act, which is that it would allow non-directed donors, so just a very special class of donors, to get a tax credit over a period of, I think, five years for being a non-directed donor. One reason they're saying a tax credit and one reason they're spreading it over five years is to get away from this idea that somehow people would have some desperate need for sudden cash, and that would cause them to quickly donate a kidney.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Right? This is meant to be a considered decision. We owe a lot to the non-directed donors. A pretty high fraction, in the neighborhood of half of the kidney exchange transplants that happen are in chains initiated by non-directed donors.

• 40:26Dax Shepard?

  But I heard you say you can imagine a scenario where we set a standard price for a kidney. Let's say it's $100,000. That was the example you gave. And an individual is not allowed to buy the kidney. The US government has to buy the kidney. Kidney, and then the US government administers those kidneys with the same system we already have in place to prioritize people. None of those factors are their wealth. When a donor kidney from a cadaver becomes available, it doesn't go to the richest person. There's some criteria.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  So that's right. The legislation that I just mentioned, of course, only the government can give you a tax credit. So the advantage of having the government do it is we're getting away from the idea that rich people would buy kidneys from poor people.

• 41:09Dax Shepard?

  Which is our primary concern.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  No one would be able to pay for kidney except the federal government. And then, as you say, we would avoid all the moral problems associated with having rich people buying kidneys from poor people and potentially exploiting them.

• 41:21Dax Shepard?

  Then I guess you get into a debate about whether it's significantly more risky to donate a kidney than it is plasma, like how do we gradate that difference?

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. It's not unreasonably risky to donate a kidney. You know, the deaths are one in 10,000, so that's a pretty modest risk. There are streets that you can cross in Los Angeles that give you a bigger risk than that, especially if you cross against the light. So I think that's something to seriously think about, and I talk about that. And again, that's a part of the market design issue, is as we're talking about these things, we should think about what are the objections? What is it that we're trying to avoid when we ban paying for kidneys? And part of it is that, you know, the rich are exploiting the poor. But, you know, we're also making it difficult for people to donate kidneys when they have to pay the costs associated with that. So that's something we have made some progress on, although it's still costly. I think that if you wanted to donate a kidney to me, you would probably have some out-of-pocket

• 42:13Speaker 02

  costs that wouldn't be reimbursed, just because it's time-consuming, it's time away from work.

• 42:18Dax Shepard?

  And we have to keep the alternative in mind, which is some 80,000 people a year are dying because they didn't get a kidney.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's exactly the alternative.

• 42:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so let's get into intimate affairs. You start with what brought us here, which is sex. How do we apply this lens to sex?

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Well, there have been lots of laws against sex, homosexual sex, for instance. And some of those laws were declared unconstitutional in Supreme Court decisions of various sorts, laws against sodomy, for example. But just incidentally, when Roe v. Wade was not so long ago reversed by the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, suggested that we should also revisit the laws that make banning sodomy unconstitutional and contraception, and of course, same-sex marriage. So these controversies are not over and done with. So historically, marriage, how has it evolved? Where did it start? So marriage is even older than I am. But of course, society has a lot of interests in marriages. And one of them, not the only one, but one of them is the care of children.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  So for a long time, sex with high likelihood led to pregnancy, which with high likelihood led to children. We, as a society, developed all these rules that said, man and a woman who have sex with each other had better be prepared for raising the child that might result. And a good way to be prepared is to be married and have formed a household and so that the child will have a mother and a father and someone will take care of the child. I mean, that's been true for the very largest part of human history. But good contraception changed that a little bit. That starts to make it possible to have sex without having children. The trade-offs have changed. Yeah, the trade-offs have changed. And so maybe it's okay to have sex without being married. And therefore, maybe it's okay to have sex without the intention of having children.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  And therefore, maybe it's okay for people of the same sex to have sex with each other, even though children don't result. And therefore, maybe marriages don't have to just be about children. So I think social norms and technology. I mean, I mentioned contraception there, but there's also in vitro fertilization. Maybe a lesbian couple can still have children. Maybe a gay male couple can still have children.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  A single person.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, a single person, right. So maybe our idea of who can be a parent should be different. And then maybe our idea of who can adopt a child should be different. There was a lot of reason for society to think that people who can have sex with each other should be married to each other to be ready to catch the baby. But many of those things are no longer so urgent. And we have come to recognize that marriage has other advantages to the people who are married to each other than just their ability to help each other raise children. And so we came to feel in the United States, not everyone, and not quickly and not easily, but we came to feel that maybe people should be able to marry each other, even if they couldn't have children.

• 45:00Dax Shepard?

  You bring up Alan Turing, you talk about him a bit in this chapter.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so Alan Turing is a great man. I mean, people should know his name, every computer scientist does. He sort of invented computer science. I mean, that's a too broad a statement. But computer science, you mentioned von Neumann and game theory. There's a sense in which you could mention Turing in computer science. During World War II, he was also a codebreaker and helped shorten the war by breaking the German Enigma code, by helping break the German Enigma code. He was British. But he was homosexual and after the war, he was convicted of being homosexual. I forget the criminal phrase. He was sentenced to be chemically castrated and he committed suicide. So today, it's legal to be homosexual in Britain and in the United States. You know, and this is sort of an ancient horror, but it's not that ancient.

• 45:45Dax Shepard?

  Wow, so he didn't get the chemical castration?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  No, he got it.

• 45:49Dax Shepard?

  He got it and then killed himself?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he wasn't happy.

• 45:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh my goodness. How does this pair up in marriage and adoption?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  So the question is, do we allow people of the same sex to marry each other? That was a repugnant transaction. You know, remember, I use the word repugnant not to mean that I don't like something or that you shouldn't like it, but that some people don't like it. That was a big fight. The first legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States came in the early 2000s in Massachusetts through a court decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Court. And then what happened wasn't that lots of other states fell into law. And what happened was lots of other states amended their constitutions to make same-sex marriage the only kind of marriage allowed in their constitution. And the reason was, the way the Massachusetts court ruled is it said, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a constitution that requires equality before the law and we're not treating gay people equally.

• 46:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, there's a legal right, marriage.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Right. The first thing wasn't that everybody legalized same-sex marriage. It was that they made constitutional amendments so that their courts couldn't find a right in their constitution. But eventually, in Obergefell, is the name of the Supreme Court decision. Eventually, the Supreme Court decided that equal protection of the law, especially once many states recognized same-sex marriage and others didn't, equal protection of the law required everyone to recognize it. And that's where we are now.

• 47:08Dax Shepard?

  This is another Nobel Prize winner, the IVF doctor. So what's the repugnant nature?

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Jonathan Edward. So he invented, he and colleagues, Nobel prizes always are, you know, leave out colleagues. He and colleagues invented in vitro fertilization in the 1970s. And by the time he got the Nobel Prize in... The late 20th century, maybe later than that. I think his Nobel Prize was just a little earlier than mine. So in the 2000s, millions of people had been born through IVF over, you know, the last 40 years. So he won a Nobel Prize for it. But at the same time, there were people objecting that he was a murderer. And the objection specifically about murder for IVF is that more embryos are created than are fertilized into fetuses and become people. And if you think that the embryo is a person.

• 47:57Dax Shepard?

  It's personhood.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  The ones that are not used are perhaps murderers, especially when they're discarded. The nature of repugnant transactions is you can be vastly celebrated. You know, the Nobel Prize is a giant week-long party in Stockholm. And at the same time, have people picketing and calling you a murderer. So these are fundamental disagreements we have when we talk about repugnant transactions and morally contested markets. But of course, IVF, some people think it's murder. But millions of people are alive because of it. They think of it as life-giving. And of course, millions more, you know, it allowed them to have children. But the children, the people born of IVF, they don't think of it as murder.

• 48:32Dax Shepard?

  How can we come to some conclusion through an economic model on that issue?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  So it turns out to be hard to prevent IVF. When you look at Western Europe, there are countries that prevent. These laws are always subject to change. But I believe in Germany, unmarried women are not allowed to have IVF.

• 48:51Dax Shepard?

  That's a shocker.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Yep. But in Spain, there's not an obstacle. So if you are an unmarried woman who needs to become pregnant and doesn't have another way of doing it, you can go to Spain and become pregnant. Then you come back to Germany and you're a pregnant German woman. You're undifferentiable from other pregnant German women. And you go into the healthcare system and you have a baby. And the baby is a German citizen. So it turns out making a law that says we don't recognize IVF can stop people who can't afford to travel to Spain. But they don't stop everyone. And so maybe it's an unequal law in that respect, too, right? It allows the rich to do things that we don't think should be the preserve of the rich.

• 49:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's almost reverse engineered eugenics in some bizarre way. It's like, OK, we're going to select for who can do this.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  One of the things I talk about in the book, Moral Economics, is often you ban something and you hand it over to criminals, which is very often not a satisfactory solution. But it's also hard to ban things that are legal in some nearby jurisdiction.

• 49:47Dax Shepard?

  Hence the abortion issue.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Abortion and surrogacy and IVF. Surrogacy is more complicated because you have to bring a baby home with you. But IVF, you know, you're a pregnant German woman.

• 49:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it could happen on vacation.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Perfectly legal on vacation.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  You're allowed to be a single woman. You just have to have gotten pregnant naturally.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  That's so strange.

• 50:08Dax Shepard?

  Interesting distinction.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:10Dax Shepard?

  OK, in section two of the book, we look at protection from harm. And these ones are great and probably the ones I'm personally most interested in. So step one is alcohol and drugs. And you do this fun thing where you list a lot of different drugs. You say caffeine, tobacco, heroin, marijuana, opioids, alcohol. And if you were asked to put those in order of threat, based on your community, where you live, the order would be what?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  The order of acceptability.

• 50:39Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  So coffee is most acceptable in my community. You know, it's a great performance enhancing drug. We regard it as food. I don't think we limit children.

• 50:49Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  It's great. So everyone likes coffee. Then we start to get to tougher drugs.

• 50:53Dax Shepard?

  Wine.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Wine in California is pretty popular.

• 50:56Dax Shepard?

  Not in Utah.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  But, you know, it's a big industry in California, which is in trouble now. You know, as wine consumption goes down, our friends in Napa Valley, some of them are going to grow condominium instead of grapes.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Which might make California less nice in some ways. But marijuana is also popular in some circles. I think I had trouble ordering those in what I guess is acceptable. You know, hard drugs are definitely not acceptable in my community. But some people have troubles with them, and some of them have gotten into trouble with them sort of inadvertently. That is, for medical reasons, they've been prescribed opioids. And then become addicted.

• 51:31Dax Shepard?

  I think you're right. Your assertion is that most places are going to end on opioids. Of that list of things, drugs I just gave you, most people are going to put opioids as the worst.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:40Dax Shepard?

  And they're significantly troubling. There's been years in the last decade where we've had 100,000 people die.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Overdose death.

• 51:47Dax Shepard?

  Yes, it's a very real threat, but let's talk about the numbers for tobacco.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so tobacco kills more people than opioids and alcohol kills more people than tobacco.

• 51:57Dax Shepard?

  In your book, of 3 million people that die from the CDC, 500,000 are cigarette related a year. And then for alcohol, it's 175,000.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  I think you're right. As I recall now, what I say is just conjecturing. Maybe the tobacco deaths are less repugnant because they're not sudden.

• 52:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the suddenness is really fascinating, isn't it? Why that elevates it so much in our mind.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  But of course, alcohol includes some sudden deaths, right? Both behind the wheel and just alcohol poisoning.

• 52:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like 60,000 people a year do die of a sudden version of alcohol death.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think some of this just has to do with what you're used to. We allowed tobacco, there were small attempts around the time of prohibition to make alcohol illegal. When I started writing the book, one of the things I thought might be true was that was that tobacco had never been illegal. That turns out not to be true. There have been laws against tobacco in various times and places.

• 52:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 52:50Speaker 02

  But, you know, you say, oh, really, right? We're now restricting tobacco and marijuana are sort of on opposite trajectories, right? Marijuana used to be illegal, schedule one, you know, like heroin. And tobacco, we'd give agricultural subsidies to tobacco farmers. And now more and more, we're saying you can't smoke inside buildings and on airplanes. And we're making it tougher to smoke tobacco and we're making it easier to smoke or otherwise ingest marijuana.

• 53:16Dax Shepard?

  Anecdotally, I've seen people confront people for smoking cigarettes in public outside multiple times. My children will do it. When I see people smoking marijuana, no one says anything. I think that's really interesting and telling. You walk around New York City now and people are smoking joints everywhere. No one's like. Making a big thing of it.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Part of it's societal, what we just have decided is in vogue and not, I mean, smoking's coming back.

• 53:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  A lot of younger people are smoking again.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  There's vaping and things like that.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  And vaping too, but even cigarettes, it's weird. I don't know what, I mean, I think maybe because people stopped talking about how bad it was for you, that people are kind of back on it, which is not good.

• 53:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think it's suffering from the same reality that the polio vaccine did, which is like, no one alive today saw someone walking with a walker at 19 years old from polio, so they're not afraid to not vaccinate their kid.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  I remember seeing people.

• 54:09Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure. My grandfather's throat was permanently paralyzed from polio. But, young parents who are deciding whether or not to get a polio vaccine, they didn't see it, so it's out of mind. And there's a big upswell of younger influencers are smoking in public, and I think it's because they've stopped seeing the lung cancer patients that we grew up seeing plastered everywhere as cautionary tales and people missing their mandible from dipping. Like, those went away. It was on the downward decline, and I think they took their foot off the gas, and now it's on the incline. But let's talk about prohibition. So what happens in 19?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  20s and 30s.

• 54:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  We prohibited most sales of alcohol, not sales for religious purposes, not sales for certain kinds of medicinal purposes. But, by and large, we prohibited the sale of alcohol.

• 54:54Dax Shepard?

  In the Volstead Act, you could brew in your home.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  So there was a big upsurge in the sale of wine grapes.

• 54:59Dax Shepard?

  Synagogue membership.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Membership in synagogues.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Oh, that's really funny.

• 55:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  I taught for many years at the University of Pittsburgh, and the state of Pennsylvania had, and I think still has, a liquor monopoly. It's only sold in state stores, and state stores are closed on Sunday. But the store that sold Judaica, Jewish things, and they could sell kosher wine even on Sundays.

• 55:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really? They went from no business?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  And you had to scribble something that was supposed to be what shul you went to, what synagogue you belonged to. But you could have gone in and scribbled something. They weren't interested in your scribbles.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 55:33Dax Shepard?

  Kind of like the medical marijuana card. Yeah, remember how. Yeah, there was a great comedian that said he went to get his medical marijuana card and they said, are you having troubles sleeping 12 hours a night? Yeah, exactly. They're just handing it.

• 55:45Dax Shepard?

  He said, yes, I can only sleep for about eight hours. Well, here you go, you need this.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. So that's right, but that wasn't the main way that alcohol came into the US. Some was production, there were stills. Incidentally, NASCAR, you know, the stock car racing in their national museum, they have a still. And one of the reasons is some of the heroes of NASCAR racing were people who they were modeled on. You were coming into town from the still and you had to be able to outrace the police.

• 56:14Dax Shepard?

  And particularly you wanted a plain looking car that was super modified to be really fast. So you wouldn't draw attention.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  To be really fast and to have a lot of product in the back.

• 56:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so stock cars, these big gangly cars are what they decided to race, not coupes, not Corvettes or anything, sedans.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  You can tell right away that a ban is going to have trouble when it starts generating folk heroes. You know, when the people who violated are Robin Hood, not Al Capone. Now, they were also Al Capone.

• 56:39Dax Shepard?

  And the Kennedys famously got a lot of their wealth through this?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  There was a lot of importation from Canada. Canada went through various forms of prohibition and trying it without ever stopping the production and sale of alcohol. And so you could legally buy whiskey Seagram's in Canada and then illegally bring it into the United States. There's a big border, there's a big Atlantic seaboard. I think the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago was gangs fighting over importation, not just production. How is all the Canadian liquor going to get into the United States and be sold?

• 57:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  So it was very hard to stop, you know, much as it's hard to stop surrogacy by making it illegal in Germany if people can come to the United States. It was hard to stop drinking alcohol if it could be legally sold in Canada.

• 57:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's funny, we've only had success in the war on drugs one time really. And that was during the Quaalude epidemic of the 70s and 80s. Because it turned out there was only a single. Chemical factory in Switzerland that was capable of producing this. So if they could shut that one down, they could succeed and they did succeed. But that's about the only victory. When they've tried to do math, it's like you've got several hundred chemists in India that are making the precursor compound. So it can go elsewhere. It's like unless there's a single source to these things, they're nearly impossible to ever shut down. But we got to evaluate what the efficacy of trying to pinch it as much as we can.

• 58:05Dax Shepard?

  So let's talk about drugs because I grew up saying, I had a very libertarian view on it. I thought that should be decriminalized. I thought it should be taxed and regulated and get rid of the black market. And then the experiment was run in front of my eyes in San Francisco and in Portland and a few other places on the West Coast. And I gotta say, I have completely reversed my position on it. And there's a lot of these trade offs that are maybe not obvious when you're first evaluating it like, okay, let's even say that addiction went down and the deaths went down. Well, the city itself now, it's an open air market. We were in San Francisco doing a live show and there's people, TV trays just selling it, people shooting dope in the stairwells of these nice brownstones. It's like, well, the whole city's now paid a price for this.

• 58:49Dax Shepard?

  So there's so many variables we need to evaluate. Tell me about drugs and how you make a case for both sides and what you think it leans towards.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  I think drugs are a case where we don't know what to do. We're losing the war on drugs, but it's not accepting our surrender. Our federal prisons have forty some odd percent of the prisoners have drug convictions. So we're imprisoning people like mad.

• 59:10Dax Shepard?

  By the millions.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  But we're not making drugs so scarce or even so expensive that poor people can't buy them. So we're losing the war on drugs. But as you say, when we just say, so we're making it non criminal, that doesn't drive down the number of addicts.

• 59:24Dax Shepard?

  Or overdoses, they uptake in Oregon.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And having people with Narcan available doesn't exactly solve the problem either. So we need to think of better things to do and we need to. Experiment to find better things to do. So I don't know what the solution is. The solution may well involve incarceration as part of the solution. But incarcerating people and then letting them out still drug addicts, or soon to again be drug addicts, isn't helpful. So incarceration is going to continue to be part of the solution. It seems to me we have a responsibility to make treatment part of incarceration.

• 59:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and really quick, talk about the paradox between contracting a killer and selling drugs.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Right, right. So I have a sentence in the book that says something like, why is it so easy to buy drugs and so hard to hire a hitman? And that has to do with the social norms about drugs and commercial killing.

• 1:00:16Dax Shepard?

  There's almost zero convictions a year of hired hitmen.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  It's not even in the FBI crime statistics.

• 1:00:20Dax Shepard?

  And they carry a virtually similar penalty.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  That's right. In both cases, if we catch you selling narcotics or killing for hire, we will lock you up as long as we can. And we're pretty effective at both of those. But again, the prisons are full of drug dealers and there are hardly any hitmen. So the way I thought about that in the book is the following. Supposing at the end of our chat, I say to you, you know, you're a guy from Los Angeles. You probably know where I can buy heroin on my way home. Well, you'd be really surprised. Probably most of your podcasts don't end with that kind of request for information.

• 1:00:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  And you'd think, whoa, you know, this guy Al is crazy. That's really too bad.

• 1:00:57Dax Shepard?

  Or confident.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's really too bad. You know, he seemed so coherent when we were talking to him, but he must be getting senile. And that would sort of be the end of it. Maybe you'd decide not to publish the podcast because you wouldn't want to have guys like me on your show. But supposing I said to you, you know, I'm an academic and every time I write a paper, there are referees. You know, the joke in academia is referee number two. You know, he's always the one who hates your paper. And I just can't take it anymore. I've identified one of my academic enemies at UCLA. And you look to me like the kind of guy who would know where I could hire a hitman. What do you say? Well, probably you don't know where I could hire a hitman. But even if you did, you wouldn't tell me because that wouldn't be a good thing to do. But afterward, you wouldn't just say, oh, that sure took a strange turn, that conversation. You'd say, maybe we should call the police. Yes, exactly. Here's someone who wants a murder.

• 1:01:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  You know, we should call the police. And if you called the police, first of all, if you'd called the police when I said, where can I buy heroin? They'd say to you, so you met a professor who asked you where he could buy heroin? And you're calling the police? You know, we're very busy. There's lots of real crime in Los Angeles. Leave us alone. But if you called him and said, I talked to this professor from the Bay Area and he wants to hire a hitman to kill someone in Los Angeles. They'd say, "Is it too late? Call him back and tell him, you know, before he gets on the plane, he should come to this bar in Burbank. Ask for Joe and Joe will take care of him." And Joe would take care of me. A lot of the convictions for attempted hiring of killers is when the person doing the hiring talks to an undercover policeman.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  There are so many drug deals, it doesn't make sense to try to preempt them one by one. But there are so few murders that it makes a lot of sense to try to preempt them one by one. And the police would be glad to send some tough-looking guy in plain clothes to talk to me and have me explain who I wanted murdered and then arrest me.

• 1:02:42Dax Shepard?

  What fresh perspective do we need to apply to this drug?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  First of all, I think we're doing great on hitmen. We should keep it up.

• 1:02:48Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh, yeah, yeah. Well done.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  We have this really tough law against commercial killing and it seems to be largely working. Most murders, people are killed by people who love them or who they know or who live in their neighborhood. And commercial killing is very little. Let's keep it that way. So I like the laws that say if we catch you, we throw you in jail as long as we can. The same laws are not doing the same good job for addictive drugs. So I think we ought to be experimenting with what to do. And I applauded the experiment of decriminalizing.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  We had to try it.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  And I agree with you that they didn't work. Even the plans, you know, the thing about decriminalizing is that's cheap. Whereas the other part of the plan, which is make treatment readily available and easy to get when you need it, which is like right now, before I go take another dose of drugs, that turns out to be expensive. So we let people buy and sell on the street and we didn't do anything to help them or didn't do very much to help them kick the habit.

• 1:03:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we kept citing these different experiments that were run in Portugal and Spain, but we just applied one side of it, which is none of the resources, none of the help. We're just like, okay, let's decriminalize.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  I think in Portugal, they're also having recognition that they weren't giving enough help and they were getting open-air markets and things like that. And that's a real cost, right? Cities have to be good to live in. I mean, most of us live in cities.

• 1:04:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and you're evaluating their rights against mine.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So you don't want to find hypodermic needles in the school playground.

• 1:04:08Dax Shepard?

  No, no, no. No one wants to live in that city or play on that playground.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:26Dax Shepard?

  So what kind of experiments do you think would need to be run?

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things we don't like is deaths with overdose. So one thing that people have been talking about is safe injection spaces. So that wouldn't cut down on addiction, but it might cut down on overdose deaths. So that you're in a place where there's someone keeping an eye, that you stay conscious. Now, that's pretty controversial because a place like that would need some police protection. Not everyone who comes is a nice person. Whereas the police think, you know, do you want us to protect these guys? Our job is to arrest them. Right. So we'd have to think hard about how to organize the laws and the rules and what would happen. Again, what you'd really like is treatment. So we need to understand more about how to treat addiction. There have been some technological progress in that, you know, things like methadone.

• 1:05:10Dax Shepard?

  Well, GLP-1s are now starting to show a lot of...

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So that would be great if there could be drugs and maybe you could have them prescribed so they'd be available to you. Maybe you could be mandated to take them, sort of in the manner of methadone. So I think we need to be on the lookout and we have to be thinking about how we can combine police services and criminology and housing for the homeless. You know, a lot of addiction is to painkillers and people who are homeless are, in a certain sense, in a lot of pain. Some of that process, if we made it easier to get decent housing. These things all probably touch each other in various ways that I don't claim to understand, but I think we have to be thinking about them that way, not just as a criminal problem that we have to solve.

• 1:05:49Dax Shepard?

  I think we have a really interesting example in our laps right now that we don't fully understand yet, which is we all recognize alcoholism's an issue. No one disagrees with that. We tried through prohibition and it only decreased alcohol consumption for the first three years and then it rebounded beautifully. We're weirdly in a phase right now where alcohol consumption is in a nosedive.

• 1:06:15Dax Shepard?

  And I don't know that we have a great explanation of what's driving that nosedive. But I think we had better find out what it is because I think it's very interesting that we're getting the thing we wanted, but we didn't do anything.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Right. Now, there are surveys that suggest that the number of daily users of marijuana now exceed the number of daily drinkers.

• 1:06:38Dax Shepard?

  So my current theory, but again, I haven't seen any of the work on this. But yeah, my assumption is that where you're seeing weed consumption available, you're seeing alcohol go down. And for me, objectively, I'd rather see people consume marijuana than alcohol. I think it's far less dangerous.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Jonathan Haidt would say, and does, I think, that the reason alcohol is down, and also probably why the reason marijuana is up, marijuana, you can do that in isolation. People smoke at their house by themselves. They do gummies. Alcohol is a social drug.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Not for alcoholics.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Well, for alcoholics, but I mean generally, alcohol is a social drug and as younger people are being more isolated on their phones, social media, they're staying in. They're not going out and hanging out with friends and getting a drink. They're on their phone. So I think he would say, yeah, that looks good, but actually it's not good because everyone's so isolated. And I think there's something to that potentially.

• 1:07:34Dax Shepard?

  It's probably dynamic and multifaceted.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Dax Shepard?

  But, um.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Everything is.

• 1:07:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was pointing out to him because his worldview is everything about the internet and social media is bad. And I said, what about this uptick in healthy eating and reduction in drinking and better savings? You can't ignore all these other things that are upticking hugely as the suicide rate goes up 9%. But yes, that's his explanation. But regardless, I think we need to know what the explanation is, right?

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  There might be multiple explanations, but there's no question that, that a lot of things are affected by social norms. But social norms aren't things that we know very much about how to change. You can't legislate them. They seem to change slowly. You said that there's an upsurge in tobacco smoking. It's not just health concerns that drive down alcohol. One thing that's driving it down is there used to be some thought that maybe alcohol had some protective properties. That drinking red wine was good.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Dax Shepard?

  Good for your heart.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  I'm still sticking with that a little bit.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Those were the days.

• 1:08:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  I miss those days.

• 1:08:30Dax Shepard?

  Doing my heart a favor with this glass of wine tonight.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Exactly. So that cuts it down a little.

• 1:08:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, there's probably different causality within each socioeconomic rung. I'm meeting a lot of people in my circle that are limiting their drinking because of the new studies that have come out, that are concluding it's terrible for you, right? But that's not why an 18-year-old, their longevity is not at the forefront. That's not why they're doing it.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  But I think there are these cycles that are generational too. In other words, if your grandparents drank cocktails, then your parents drank wine.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  And now you're smoking weed.

• 1:09:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you don't want to do what your parents did in some way. There's some rejection. Okay, can we talk about vaccines for a bit? And then I just want to talk about what emerging controversies you see coming our way and how we can apply this market view to them. So vaccines, we kind of brought it up a minute ago.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so vaccines turn out to be controversial. Who would have thought? And they're controversial at the highest levels of government right now. So we're seeing measles again. We'd sort of had measles beat, but it used to be a really dangerous disease. And of course, it has negative externalities. If your kid goes to kindergarten and there's somebody with measles in the kindergarten, then your kid is going to have to bring measles home, especially if your kid isn't vaccinated. So it's a dangerous disease. So we just went through COVID where miraculously, technologically, vaccines were developed with uncanny speed. I remember the long trek to polio when I was a small child and eventually getting first Sot and then Sabin in elementary school. They lined us up and walked us through the gym and we all took a sugar cube with a purple liquid in it.

• 1:09:56Dax Shepard?

  It was oral?

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Sot was a shot and Sabin was oral.

• 1:09:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  That was a big deal because I had contemporaries who were in leg braces and parents wouldn't let you go to public swimming pools in the summer. Polio was a real vivid threat, but it took years to get a vaccine. So we very quickly got COVID vaccines. Now, of course, after you got COVID vaccines, you have to test them. And testing vaccines is a little complicated because you have to test them in places where there's lots of COVID. You have to find hotspots because testing them in a place that COVID has already swept through isn't a good way to test them. So the way you test vaccines is you have to predict it a little bit. You find a hotspot. You enroll 40,000 people in your trial. 20,000 of them you give the vaccine to and 20,000 you don't. You have to wait a couple of months because even in a hotspot, people can go through their daily life without getting exposed.

• 1:10:45Speaker 02

  So you have to wait till enough people have gotten exposed in the two groups so that you can see the big difference, hopefully, between the vaccinated group and the unvaccinated group. And that tells you that the vaccine is working.

• 1:10:55Dax Shepard?

  What are the ethics of giving half that group the placebo, though?

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  People don't seem to object to that because you don't yet have an authorized vaccine. So the whole population is not getting the vaccine.

• 1:11:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  But there was a movement for what are called human challenge trials or human infection trials. So there were a lot of people who signed up with an organization called One Day Sooner. Their argument was, we, mostly we, young, healthy.

• 1:11:20Dax Shepard?

  Males.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Males.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Are willing to test vaccines. So we're willing to be exposed to the disease to be part of a vaccine trial, some of whom would get the vaccine and some wouldn't. But we also don't know if the vaccine is going to be effective. And their argument was, young, healthy males, you know, people in their 20s who have no comorbidities. It's mostly not a dangerous disease. And if we could even get a vaccine available one day sooner, hence the name of the organization, think of the trillions of dollars that would save, given that the world is shut down for COVID. Well, we didn't do those because by and large, people thought it would be immoral to give people COVID when you didn't have a vaccine for it.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Even if they're signing up themselves?

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Even if they're signing up. And thousands of people signed up because we were all locked down. People signed up and they were passionate about it. They'd say, you know, this gives me a chance to make a difference instead of just passively hiding in my house from this dread disease. But we didn't do it. And there was a lot of discussion. I got involved in some of it about, maybe we should. I mean, we let people fight fires, even though running into a burning building that everyone else is running out of is dangerous. And we don't have a vaccine for fires. But we honor firefighters who protect us. And so these people had that kind of feeling. They wanted to be firefighters. They wanted to help you beat the pandemic. But we didn't allow them to. And possibly that was a mistake in the sense that. It really was costly

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  to the world to have all those lockdowns, just as the disease itself was costly. But of course, that's now a minor story now that we have government officials who are against measles vaccines. We already know that measles vaccines work.

• 1:12:50Dax Shepard?

  Here's where I think the moral conundrum comes with vaccines. So I'm a very outspoken vaccine advocate. There are people that protest, my wife and I, when we go places, the anti-vaxxers, right? So I'm very declared on, but I also totally, in a libertarian way, think if you don't want to get you, Alvin, don't want to get the measles vax, I believe that's your right. I don't think you should have to put anything in your body you don't want to. So I'm fine with that, and if you can track measles, that's on you.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Should I be able to send my child to a public kindergarten?

• 1:13:22Dax Shepard?

  Where I'm gonna go, where the moral conundrum for me lies is the children of someone making that decision, they're minors, should they have to inherit your decision on it? And are you putting a minor at risk? That's where it's most juicy in a moral debate. So how do you feel about that zone?

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  I think it depends on what the morality argument is. What comes to mind is there are small groups of Christian believers who don't like blood transfusions. Jehovah's Witnesses are among them. And they don't like blood transfusions because their reading of scriptures says that God is omnipotent. And if God wants to save you, he saves you. And if he doesn't want to save you, he doesn't save you. And you shouldn't mess with that decision. But of course, they also have children, and sometimes their children need blood transfusions. So Witnesses have a population center in Boston. And there are some hospitals in Boston that are used to treating witnesses and the children of witnesses. And if you're a Jehovah's Witness and an adult, and you say, no transfusion,

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  they won't give you a transfusion, and you might die of whatever your disease is. Or you might have to forego certain kinds of surgery that would require a transfusion to make them safe. But there are now hospitals that treat witness children. And there is sort of a well-grooved pathway where the parents say, no transfusions, we're witnesses. And everyone understands that. And if the child needs a transfusion, there are judges who you can go to for an injunction that say, this child needs a transfusion right now and you can get it. And everyone understands that. And from the point of view of the witnesses is we said, no, God works in mysterious ways.

• 1:14:55Dax Shepard?

  Our hands are kind of clean.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and God wanted him to live.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  God did this.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  God could have stopped the injunction, so we're good.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  There's some workarounds.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Dax Shepard?

  It's like the Amish can be driven to the hospital in a car, but they can't operate the car themselves. My mother's boyfriend, Dan, his mother died, she's a Jehovah's Witness, because they refused a blood transfusion.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  As you say, an adult can refuse, but the question for children. And the fact that I know about these hospitals means that Jehovah's Witnesses know about these hospitals. You send your kid to this hospital because they have a good record of treating the children of witnesses. And God works in mysterious ways. I think that we have more difficulty seeing the merits of opposing views when we're talking about something that we think is a matter of morality than when we're talking about other things.

• 1:15:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Can economics help us through that?

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Well, there are ways of arguing that might help us. In other words, there aren't enough kidneys for transplant. But we were able to get kidney exchange going, even though there are people who are pretty opposed to most ways of increasing the number of transplants. But that was a way of increasing the transplants that didn't arouse so much opposition. That's not true everywhere. Kidney exchange still isn't legal in Brazil and in Germany.

• 1:16:02Dax Shepard?

  Even if you're a donor?

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the rule in both places is you couldn't give me a kidney. My brother could give me a kidney, but you can't. Yes, it has to be a first order member of the family.

• 1:16:10Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  And the German prosecutors have no sense of humor about this. So if my brother wants to give me a kidney and you want to give a kidney to your brother, but we're incompatible, the fact that everything has been satisfied except the medical compatibility issue, they wouldn't allow you to give me a kidney and my brother to give your brother a kidney. But those laws are subject to change. The German Health Ministry has a draft that they're trying to put through the Bundestag.

• 1:16:33Dax Shepard?

  And they'll have us as an example, we're running the trial.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. Oh, so we have permission to do clinical trials in Brazil, right? So it's against the law to do kidney exchange in Brazil, but just as unapproved drugs, you can do clinical trials. There are now a few, a small number of kidney exchanges going on in Brazil as a clinical trial to see if it works in Brazil. And we're confident it will work in Brazil because it works everywhere else. The hope is, once we have 20 or 30 people who got transplants that way, can go to the Brazilian legislature and say, this works, let's make it legal.

• 1:17:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay, so what about the road ahead? What are some emerging controversies?

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  So one is betting on sports, or on other things for that matter. Sports betting on apps and prediction markets. And for a long time, we didn't allow betting on sports, or we'd limited it. I think you could always Pretty much bet on horse racing in the United States. Because after all, how can you not bet on horse racing?

• 1:17:22Dax Shepard?

  Don't eat them.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's part of the fun. That's why you don't eat them.

• 1:17:26Dax Shepard?

  They're for betting, not for eating.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. But still, you would go to a racetrack to do it. So one problem with sports betting on your phone is it's potentially addictive.

• 1:17:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, not potentially.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  You could bet throughout the game on specific things. Will the next free throw go in? So it's addictive. Another thing is you can try to influence the athletes so that your bets will come in more.

• 1:17:49Dax Shepard?

  Those are coming out more and more and more. Almost daily, we get another scandal.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  And it used to be that there was always this climb associated with gambling in sports about influencing the game. And it used to be that the typical kind of involvement of criminals in sports was in point shaving. So you're a basketball player and I'm asking you to not win by so much.

• 1:18:10Dax Shepard?

  Cover the spread.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Your team will still win.

• 1:18:12Dax Shepard?

  Could even be losing. As long as you lose by six, I'll still win.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  So there were some famous scandals of that sort in the 1950s. One of them that I get to follow occasionally on the internet because one of the protagonists was named Alvin Roth.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  So in the book, I had to proofread the index and they had one entry for Alvin Roth and I made them change it, I hope they've changed it, to Alvin, quote, "Fats," end quote, Roth, which is how he's talked about in Wikipedia.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  But he was banned for life from the NBA and would have gone to jail, but was allowed to join the army instead.

• 1:18:44Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And this is where we get back into paternalism a little bit because we had, of course, Michael Lewis on and he had a great 10-part podcast about the impact on young males of this online betting. And it's stark. The rate of bankruptcy, the rate of suicide, all these metrics are skyrocketing.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  No, it's a real addiction. Not everyone is subject to it, of course.

• 1:19:05Dax Shepard?

  But it's significant. And again, we have this little bit of a crossroads, which is like, you should be allowed to destroy your life in some sense. You know, we believe that in this country. You should be allowed to drink alcohol if it's on you. But we know better, right? We know better for these young men. It's very paternalistic for us to say you shouldn't have the right to become insolvent.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  You should be allowed to drink alcohol, but we don't serve it in elementary school caf- We try to regulate a little bit. Bartenders have a certain responsibility. They can cut you off and they may have to. You know, they may be liable.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  There's a warning label on the bottle.

• 1:19:36Dax Shepard?

  Also, we stop serving alcohol in public at certain times.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Yes, so gambling, maybe it'll benefit from being re-regulated that way. It's a pretty recent thing that we've allowed this sports betting. A Supreme Court decision again. So there's two things we've talked about. One is the addictive feature of betting on the game. The other is the effect on sports. If you're asking athletes, if you're pressuring athletes not to make the last free throw because you've got to bet. And of course, we're seeing this now with prediction markets. If you know someone who knows that the president of Venezuela is about to be abducted, you could make a lot of money on a prediction market by betting on that. You know, that's a little worrisome if you worry about corruption in high office and what's for sale and what isn't.

• 1:20:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think prior to this, you just had the credit default swap market, which heavily incentivizes these people for businesses to go bankrupt and heavily incentivizes them to start rumors. Like Bear Stearns was a rumor.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  We've learned a lot. We have to keep up with it because it's always changing. We've learned a lot about regulating financial markets. We don't believe that insider trading is OK on securities markets.

• 1:20:39Dax Shepard?

  Unless you're in Congress, but yes.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Unless you're in Congress. Yeah, what can you do?

• 1:20:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what can you do?

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  So I'm a big fan of regulation. Regulation is part of market design. We shouldn't be just thinking about banning things or allowing them unrestrictedly.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  We should be thinking about managing them, especially when there are things that we can't ban, even if we would like to, like alcohol. So decriminalizing drugs, we probably need to treat addicts more like patients than like criminals compared to what we're doing now. But maybe not, completely not like criminals because it's very compelling to be addicted to something. You know, I think there's a quote I found that's attributed to Mark Twain, which probably means he never really said it, which says, quitting smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  We can regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. You know, we've had all sorts of. Financial settlements with tobacco companies having to do with what they knew about the addictive qualities of nicotine. And similarly, we've started to restrict and think about how to regulate vaping, which might have something to be said for it if you're a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker. Maybe switching to non-combustible is good for you. But if you're a middle school student, it's a terrible idea to get addicted to nicotine, which is apparently, you know, a very powerful addict.

• 1:21:50Dax Shepard?

  I'm the product of this law. It happened, and I was furious. They outlawed in California flavored tobacco, and I liked wintergreen. So I was having, like, my father-in-law bring some from Nevada, right? I'm like smuggling it in. Every time someone would come to visit, they'd have to bring me a sleeve. And then I finally quit, like, two years ago on New Year's. But I'll say it was largely helped by when I walk into 7-Eleven, it's not even there. There was a hurdle for me that I would be lying if I said didn't help dramatically.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:22:21Dax Shepard?

  And it's all but gone now because everyone liked all the flavors. And I'm like, God, I hate to admit that that kind of worked because the aging libertarian in me was like, I hate that it helps, and it's true.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  No, that's right. So the morally contested markets, behavioral problems with things like addiction are not going to be zero-one solutions. It's not that you pass a law, and we're done. We passed the law. Everything's good.

• 1:22:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we're going to inch towards a better and better percentage is all we're going to do.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  And we're going to have to think about trade-offs and do experiments and learn what works. And that's really what I'm concluding in this book.

• 1:22:54Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Well, Alvin Roth, it's been a blast getting to talk to you. The book is Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. I love your book. I hope everyone checks it out, and it was a delight to meet you. Thank you so much.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you guys, too.

• 1:23:14Dax Shepard?

  Hi there, this is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Miss Monica. I have my glasses on, not to cover up my sty.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:23:25Dax Shepard?

  My journal entry this morning started as such. My sty's the captain now.

• 1:23:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so I just want to read you, I got a couple of screen grabs I want to share with you.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Wait, we're not done talking about your sty.

• 1:23:44Dax Shepard?

  Well, I just hate it. I wanted to say I have my glasses on to read this, not to cover my sty. Okay, go ahead and ask me about my sty.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Um, how does it feel?

• 1:23:51Dax Shepard?

  The same.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  But you're on antibiotics, right?

• 1:23:56Dax Shepard?

  Drops.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Drops.

• 1:23:58Dax Shepard?

  Not oral, not oral. And I've been hot compressing like a very good boy. I know, but I've been hot compressing.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:06Dax Shepard?

  But what I'm gonna read is in reference to our foot fetish debate.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:11Dax Shepard?

  Or us trying to figure it out.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:13Dax Shepard?

  So this was interesting. This is from, um, MissMissa13. Watching the fact check, Rachel mentioned the homunculus and brain mapping. Your foot fetish combo is explained in big part by this. If you look at a diagram of what your brain thinks your body looks like, WRT nerve sensation, e.g. sensitivity, the genitals and feet are right next to each other and huge. Hence, the arousal stimulation is very subjective and nuanced based on the topography of someone's nugget.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:24:47Dax Shepard?

  That's pretty fascinating.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Dax Shepard?

  I have no way to fact check that. I'm not gonna consult a neurologist. I thought he was green grabbing another one. Another one was just really walking us through why she loves feet. Her thing is like, bare feet represent...

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  It was a woman.

• 1:25:03Dax Shepard?

  It was a woman.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:05Dax Shepard?

  And she's like, bare feet to her represent a level of comfort and safety that you can take your shoes off and be vulnerable. Like, the whole thing to her reads as this like intimacy kind of

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could see that.

• 1:25:18Dax Shepard?

  Offering of vulnerability.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  I could definitely see that. It's like my sick thing.

• 1:25:23Dax Shepard?

  Ding ding ding, I took the Dremel to my toenail last night. I didn't even, I wouldn't even know I was gonna talk about feet so much. Nah.

• 1:25:32Dax Shepard?

  So mostly because I'm wearing lace up shoes today.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:35Dax Shepard?

  It's just too much. I'm so lazy with my footwear. I love a slip on nowadays. And when I decide to wear these shoes, these high top Converse, I literally go, well, I'm gonna lace them up now and I'm not taking them off till I go to bed. I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  I know. You even put your shoes on the bed.

• 1:25:53Dax Shepard?

  Don't say that.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  I've seen it. I've seen it.

• 1:25:58Dax Shepard?

  Or maybe in the top comforter.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Those, cuz like probably you just don't feel like taking your shoes off.

• 1:26:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I would kick off normal shoes. But if I gotta bend over and.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  But you don't wear enough loafers for someone who likes to slip on.

• 1:26:10Dax Shepard?

  Well, but I have slip on vans and I have my low top Converse loose enough that I can slide in and out of them.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  But you've never tried out a loafer?

• 1:26:17Dax Shepard?

  I hate loafers. I've tried many times.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:26:20Dax Shepard?

  I, they look great on you. And everyone should wear loafers. They look great on everyone. On me, they look preposterous.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:26:28Dax Shepard?

  If anything is like outside of my vibe, I really think a loafers where the rubber meets the road.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  No, I could see you in a loafer with like a sweater.

• 1:26:37Dax Shepard?

  That's a different person, but yeah.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  No, you, you wear sweaters. I've got you multiple sweaters.

• 1:26:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  I've got you sweaters. You wear them all the time.

• 1:26:45Dax Shepard?

  That's true. You have a, you have a knack for choosing sweaters I, I love.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  And you wear a cardigan sometimes?

• 1:26:52Dax Shepard?

  My great Burberry one.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:55Dax Shepard?

  That's in massive rotation.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great one.

• 1:26:57Dax Shepard?

  Just wore the green row one recently.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, great one. You could wear, definitely wear that with a loaf.

• 1:27:03Dax Shepard?

  Monica, I know you, like you're picturing it seems organic, but I promise if you saw me in a loafer, you'd be like, hold, hold on, what's going on? Cuz then I gotta wear a dress pant.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:27:13Dax Shepard?

  Loafers and jeans is a very specific dude and I'm not that dude. That's a Connecticut, went to Harvard.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  No, no, you have, see, you have an old school, like you have an old school mentality.

• 1:27:23Dax Shepard?

  Old school flair.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  You know, you have an old school mentality about what you can wear loafers with and who's wearing loafers and that kinda thing.

• 1:27:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  You have an old school mentality.

• 1:27:35Dax Shepard?

  Not a lot of blue collar tradesmen wearing loafers. I'll just say that. And that's, that's kinda where I anchor my.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  I know, but like.

• 1:27:41Dax Shepard?

  Go ahead. Blue collar tradesmen aren't wearing Burberry sweaters either.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just gonna say, you're just not him anymore.

• 1:27:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I know. But I, I, I. Yeah, whatever. I intend to stay that way.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:27:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Um, okay, I have something so sim.

• 1:27:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay, tell me.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  So I was at a restaurant with Jess that I frequent a lot.

• 1:28:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  And that we frequent a lot, him and I. And the server said, you know, I just want to flag for you guys that on our system, and I think a lot of systems, on our system, it just shows the last three digits of the credit card.

• 1:28:25Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  And him and I have the exact same last three digits of our credit card.

• 1:28:30Dax Shepard?

  Serendipity.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:28:32Dax Shepard?

  Kismet.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Which is like, I was like, oh my god, like, I thought that was so cool.

• 1:28:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  And then it's immediately scared Jess.

• 1:28:40Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Which, the reason the guy was flagging it is like, so when you guys like, if you split, there's a chance that it's gonna go to the wrong card. It's gonna be like attributed to the wrong card.

• 1:28:54Dax Shepard?

  Why do either of you have credit cards on file at restaurants?

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  We don't. You say, why don't we?

• 1:28:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, how are they gonna, how are they gonna mix up a split if you've handed the person your credit card?

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Well, no, we put it on the table.

• 1:29:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Still not understanding. What sounded like to me is that it's in the computer system and that they might click the wrong thing.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  No, it's not that.

• 1:29:16Dax Shepard?

  Then what is it?

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  I don't know, but Jess, of course, went back there. He wanted to see on the computer.

• 1:29:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  And he did. He said, yeah, it is like...

• 1:29:25Dax Shepard?

  The last three.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Dax Shepard?

  I still don't understand what the issue is, because you're gonna hand them the credit card every single time, right? You don't have a long, you don't have an account or a tab at these places.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  No, we don't, but maybe they swipe-

• 1:29:36Dax Shepard?

  Throw it on 682. That would be a problem.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Okay, maybe they swipe it and type in the amount? Because with tip, it's like with tip and stuff, like if I'm tipping- Fifty dollars, maybe they typed that in to the back of the credit, or like, they're like, oh, this is the credit card that gets fifty dollars tip. This credit card gets a hundred dollars. It was obviously enough of a thing in their system for him to have brought it up.

• 1:30:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just wish I understood how it could go on.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  He says it shows up F and then the last three digits. And ours are the same. Isn't that crazy? Of all the numbers in the world?

• 1:30:17Dax Shepard?

  Yes, that part's very exciting that you guys have the last three numbers. And isn't it the last four? Everywhere my credit card is.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  That's why, the last four is not.

• 1:30:25Dax Shepard?

  They don't match.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the last three.

• 1:30:28Dax Shepard?

  Do you want to tell us what they are to help people? Um, hack your credit card and his? Mine is too.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 1:30:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  So are all?

• 1:30:41Dax Shepard?

  Mine is?

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  No, okay, hold on. No, American Express cards do not all end in?

• 1:30:47Dax Shepard?

  Well, I know that.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Well, I just looked.

• 1:30:49Dax Shepard?

  Cause I've had different cards. I have multiple MX cards and only one of them ends in, we're not gonna say the number, but the same now as it turns out as you and Jess. That's nuts.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  But maybe like, maybe there's only a few endings. Okay, well MX cards often end in similar digits. Like a hundred X or two hundred X. Due to how they are issued and replaced.

• 1:31:11Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  It says many users report last four digits ending in one zero zero one, one zero zero three, one zero zero seven, one zero zero eight, one zero one three, et cetera. Well, don't say et cetera. Huh. Anyway, wow.

• 1:31:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  So the three of us split at this restaurant. Hooey. Anyway, that was just very sad.

• 1:31:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. The thing I had wanted to remember to talk about, continuing with my grossness. So we got the pink eye, which is not pink eye, it's a sty.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yep. It's a pig sty.

• 1:31:46Dax Shepard?

  It's a, it's a big sty. Uh, the toenail? Hmm. Just ground it, gross. So.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  Cause why, it was getting fluffy on top.

• 1:31:55Dax Shepard?

  You know, it won't grow out. It'll just only grow up. I don't want to talk about it. So.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Oh, you brought it up.

• 1:32:01Dax Shepard?

  I know, but I'm in detail. I don't need you to be able to like picture exactly what's going on.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  You love talking about gross stuff.

• 1:32:07Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm already hitting you with a third thing. So I have this stye, I have the toenails. So I'm trying to just limit those two things.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:13Dax Shepard?

  So I can tell you that.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Your stye is making me very thirsty.

• 1:32:16Dax Shepard?

  I love a certain T-shirt. You know, I wear the same brand T-shirt mostly all the time. Velvet.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Velvet by Graham and something.

• 1:32:24Dax Shepard?

  Graham and crackers.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:26Dax Shepard?

  I've been noticing lately that there's a lot of, um, right out of the wash, directly from the washer and dryer. There's antiperspirant buildup in the armpit, in the fabric.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:32:39Dax Shepard?

  Yes, because I am caking on my antiperspirant, then I'm wearing the shirt, and then somehow, so much is transferring that it's not coming out in the wash.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:32:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and it affects the armpit. It makes the armpits of the shirt not fully clean and.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Weird.

• 1:32:52Dax Shepard?

  Exciting. It's like, got a film of antiperspirant over, uh, post-wash.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:59Dax Shepard?

  And so my response to that is like, to order more shirts.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  Because it can't have this like gooey, cakey armpit.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33:09Dax Shepard?

  And so I guess two weeks ago, week and a half ago, I'm like, well, stop wearing deodorant. Stop wearing antiperspirant.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33:17Dax Shepard?

  Stop wearing deodorant.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:18Dax Shepard?

  My expectation was like, that's not gonna be a thing. I might have more sweat, but.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  You're not gonna smell.

• 1:33:24Dax Shepard?

  I don't smell.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Oh, no.

• 1:33:28Dax Shepard?

  Monica, I'm hoping this is a detox period where it's like my body's still expelling all of this. Clearly, I'm putting a lot on because it's like ruining my shirts.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:37Dax Shepard?

  But I'm, I'm like, okay, it's just gotta get all out. It's probably, it's, it's trying to find homeostasis. It's, I've been caking it on there for a decade, yeah, however long. I have been pretty regularly been like, oh my God, my armpit smell.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  You smell it.

• 1:33:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, within a day. And I'm like, what is going on? I don't, I don't smell. I'm having a real crisis of consciousness.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  I understand. That would really stress me.

• 1:34:01Dax Shepard?

  Identity crisis.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  But what, you said one time, you smelled one time.

• 1:34:06Dax Shepard?

  No, every day.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  No, no, no, sorry. I'm talking about like, years ago, you were like, you said, you're like, ah, he's like, my armpits smell weird today.

• 1:34:15Dax Shepard?

  You have a memory of this?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Um, and you said it smelled like bacon.

• 1:34:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I wish it smelled like bacon currently.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Is it classic B.O.?

• 1:34:26Dax Shepard?

  Classic B.O. Classic. And I'm like, no, I don't have, I don't smell like that.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  I've never smelled B.O. on you.

• 1:34:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I got this whole story about myself. My breath doesn't smell.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Your breath doesn't smell?

• 1:34:38Dax Shepard?

  What I'm having to do, thank you. And you would agree, I don't smell.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  I have never smelled you smelling bad.

• 1:34:43Dax Shepard?

  Well, guess what? I smell.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  Fuck!

• 1:34:45Dax Shepard?

  I know. So now I'm having to, unless I want to shower every single day, which I don't love doing, so now I've been showering every day.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Dax Shepard?

  But I'm also washing my armpits out, like after I work out in the sink upstairs.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:35:02Dax Shepard?

  I'm constantly like washing with a bar of soap in a sink.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  You're using soap?

• 1:35:07Dax Shepard?

  Well, what else can you use to get rid of that?

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  Splash water.

• 1:35:09Dax Shepard?

  I don't know if that's gonna deal with it.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:13Dax Shepard?

  Anyways, this is all like I've started a journey and I, I hope to report in like a month, everything's leveled out. And my body's back to like a natural state, but I'm not, I've not liked this at all. I'm like, what's going on?

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Well, I haven't smelt it.

• 1:35:27Dax Shepard?

  I have another theory though.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:29Dax Shepard?

  Because there have been periods where I didn't, and I don't remember smelling, didn't wear any purse around.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:33Dax Shepard?

  Eh, or deodorant. And, um, and it would be fine for days. And, um, my one fear is that I take this creatin. Okay, it's a powder in a scooper. And it's mixed with some other good thing I'm supposed to have.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:51Dax Shepard?

  And so what I noticed, I don't know, I, I, at some point I noticed every time I opened up a thing, I finally said out loud, cause Kristen takes it too. I go, hey, do you think the creatin, I didn't even get the full sentence out. And she said, B.O.?

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 1:36:07Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, yes. So I use this powder that has a light smell of B.O. in it. And then her father-

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  It smells like it even when you open it?

• 1:36:16Dax Shepard?

  We'll go inside after this and I'll let you huff it.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:36:20Dax Shepard?

  We haven't helped it yet. You don't need to get rid of it.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  I'm nervous I'll be able to smell. Maybe, maybe that's why I haven't smelled you because my nose is all clogged.

• 1:36:28Dax Shepard?

  That could be it. So Kristen's father, and shout out to Tom Bell. I've never met a man who researches things more than my father-in-law. Cause he's in the news.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Dax Shepard?

  I think that's why.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  It's a profession.

• 1:36:43Dax Shepard?

  But like if this guy's gonna buy a TV set, he's gonna read about every single TV set. And every review.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Andy likes to do this too, Andy Rosen.

• 1:36:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah, it's a personality type.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:36:53Dax Shepard?

  So her father's been getting into weight training, which I love and is adorable. We have more stuff to talk about.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Dax Shepard?

  And so he wanted to start using creatine. He found out that that's good if you're lifting weights.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  It's good for you guys. I'm on it.

• 1:37:05Dax Shepard?

  So he, he, before he buys it.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Dax Shepard?

  He's like, what kind do you use? And we're like, we use this brand. And then like a couple of days later, he said, I'm thinking about buying your brand. Like he hasn't pulled the trigger on it. Like, but I'm reading a lot that it smells like BO.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Stop.

• 1:37:21Dax Shepard?

  I'm like.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Oh, it's definitely that.

• 1:37:23Dax Shepard?

  How did you, how did you, you went and researched this thing that far that you went on a message boards where people were starting to talk about that it smells like BO? So he already knew.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:37:33Dax Shepard?

  And we were like, at the time, we were like, yeah, it does have a little smell like that, but, but it has not made us smell.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  But it has.

• 1:37:40Dax Shepard?

  So I guess the move would be for me to stop taking that, replace it with a different one for a while. I gotta be on it.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:47Dax Shepard?

  And see if that's it.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:49Dax Shepard?

  Cause maybe that's what's going on is I'm taking this thing that's already smells like BO.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Ew, I can't believe, oh.

• 1:37:55Dax Shepard?

  That's how much I want premium health.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  No, you can take another brand. Mine doesn't smell like BO.

• 1:38:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's not just pure creatine. It's this other thing I need, MBM. It's got some acronym.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:08Dax Shepard?

  But I think maybe that's the culprit because I've had a lot of different creatines and none of them ever smelled like anything.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. Literally. And it tastes like nothing too.

• 1:38:15Dax Shepard?

  It's not even a thing, I don't think.

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  It's placebo, but it works.

• 1:38:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  I'm on it and I don't smell like BO.

• 1:38:24Dax Shepard?

  Great.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  And I don't use deodorant.

• 1:38:27Dax Shepard?

  You do not?

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  I have not used deodorant in like 10 years or like 15, maybe 12.

• 1:38:33Dax Shepard?

  Now, I know a lot of people quit antiperspirant out of the fear of the aluminum, which I do think was just recently debunked. Doesn't matter, but you're not, you're not even deodorant for you.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  I don't use anything.

• 1:38:41Dax Shepard?

  You didn't put anything in there? No perfume, eau de toilette?

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 1:38:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  And I don't, I do not.

• 1:38:50Dax Shepard?

  I've never smelled.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  I don't smell.

• 1:38:51Dax Shepard?

  No, no, never smelled you either.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:53Dax Shepard?

  And Rob doesn't smell. We all got lucky.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  But Rob, do you use deodorant?

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  I do.

• 1:38:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I think you put three coworkers together in a small room. We've hit the lottery.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:03Dax Shepard?

  One person's gonna smell.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure. I agree. Um, no one smells here.

• 1:39:09Dax Shepard?

  We're so lucky, cuz it's impossible to address. We've gone over this.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:39:14Dax Shepard?

  Hey, Rob, I gotta talk to you. Um, you gotta, you gotta wash your armpits better or something. I like, how do you bring it up?

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  No, you can't.

• 1:39:23Speaker 04

  We had, we had a nanny. She, it was perfume, though, was too strong.

• 1:39:27Dax Shepard?

  That's easier.

• 1:39:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Natalie, talk to her.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:39:30Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great. Natalie's tough, right? Does she handle all that stuff for you, Rob, all the confrontations?

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. She likes it.

• 1:39:37Dax Shepard?

  I'm surprised I've never had to negotiate with, with Natalie for your wage.

• 1:39:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you're, you're, you're, you're dropping, you're dropping out.

• 1:39:52Dax Shepard?

  How was your event last night?

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  It was good. I was invited to an event, um, that was.

• 1:39:57Dax Shepard?

  Dream event for you.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  It was exciting. I got, I got to go to a preview of some clothing that was very exciting.

• 1:40:04Dax Shepard?

  They all know what one it is.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  I don't wanna know about it.

• 1:40:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, I know you're not gonna say it. You signed an NDA.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  I, I can't talk about it.

• 1:40:12Dax Shepard?

  How was the event? What was the thing? It was, it was a fashion-y show, it was a winner preview.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't a fashion, it was just like.

• 1:40:18Dax Shepard?

  Fall preview.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  I was, oh, from winter. I was invited to see a winter preview. This is what I know, this is how fashion works. Um, um, I was invited to see a winter preview of clothing, uh, that is not available yet, obviously, uh, off the runway, if you will.

• 1:40:38Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  And it was, it was very exciting to get eyes and to get to decide if I wanted any of the items.

• 1:40:45Dax Shepard?

  Ah, did anything tickle your fancy?

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:40:49Dax Shepard?

  Of course.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Of course, there were some items that tickled.

• 1:40:52Dax Shepard?

  Did you make any purchases?

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Um, no, because, so they're not available yet.

• 1:40:57Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I thought you said you were gonna maybe have acts.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, so it is, it's like, so I, I can say like, I want that.

• 1:41:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you're flying it.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  I want that, so like, put one, you know, they're gonna like, put one aside, make sure they have my size, you know, make me one.

• 1:41:12Dax Shepard?

  It's a pre-order, kind of.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Kind of, yes, yes, uh, but, uh.

• 1:41:17Dax Shepard?

  Were there any celebrities there?

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  No, not while I was there.

• 1:41:20Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Not while I was there. It's like, you know, you come in.

• 1:41:22Dax Shepard?

  There were different slots.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  No, they're not slots. There's, it was two days, yesterday and today, and it's a chunk of time.

• 1:41:28Dax Shepard?

  Are you going back today?

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  No, I already saw it, I already saw, I already did it. And then I did make a purchase of just the clothes that are available while I was there.

• 1:41:39Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah, they're gonna get you on the front end or the back end.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Something to walk out with, you know, they got me. I almost bought something for way too much money.

• 1:41:47Dax Shepard?

  Ooh.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Teeny tiny clutch, clutch purse, it was teeny, it holds like, it's like a card case, basically.

• 1:41:57Dax Shepard?

  For one credit card?

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, gold, had diamonds on it, it was vintage, it was, and it was engraved like, from way back when.

• 1:42:06Dax Shepard?

  Meredith was the name?

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Someone wore it, you know, on, on the runway, they wore it with their, with this dress, he pointed out the dress and they wore it, and I was like, fuck, I want, I wanted it.

• 1:42:15Dax Shepard?

  What was the price tag on that?

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  I didn't get it.

• 1:42:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  How much do you think?

• 1:42:20Dax Shepard?

  Golds and diamonds?

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a one ruby.

• 1:42:23Dax Shepard?

  Thirteen thousand dollars.

• 1:42:27Dax Shepard?

  More.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  I didn't get it.

• 1:42:31Dax Shepard?

  I know, congratulations.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  I'm doing so good not getting.

• 1:42:35Dax Shepard?

  Good.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  But it's not, but I'm not, see, this is the problem, it's like, I should just get that instead of, ultimately, I buy a bunch of things.

• 1:42:46Dax Shepard?

  I totally disagree, you're doing it right, because you have the illusion that that's gonna satiate you, and it's not.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  I know, you're right.

• 1:42:53Dax Shepard?

  So in fact, if anything, you should just buy even cheaper stuff and more often and just.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, cheaper in big quotes.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  And just, um. Fill yourself with items in your house until you're like the kid in a Shel Silverstein poem. The Garble.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  No, so far my house is like, it's, it's.

• 1:43:11Dax Shepard?

  Still clean.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:14Dax Shepard?

  And clutter free.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  It's clutter free.

• 1:43:15Dax Shepard?

  But you're gonna do your best to change that.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 1:43:18Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna have seven or nine armoires still. Even in that big house, you're gonna find out how to.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 1:43:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  The whole point of my house is I only have one armoire.

• 1:43:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, you have a huge closet now.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. The armoire is in, it doesn't hold clothes anymore.

• 1:43:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay, weed.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  Weed?

• 1:43:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so you keep all your edibles and your faves.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  No, it's in my, it's in my water closet, actually.

• 1:43:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, your toilet.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I keep towels in there. I keep toilet paper in there.

• 1:43:49Dax Shepard?

  Feminine products? Your Spanxies, are they folded up in there?

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  No, they're in my closet.

• 1:43:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  And they're not Spanxies. You were trying to say Nyxies.

• 1:43:58Dax Shepard?

  Nyxies.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  You forgot it was Nyxies.

• 1:43:59Dax Shepard?

  Oi, Nyxies.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  But mine are, um, mine are.

• 1:44:03Dax Shepard?

  Good eye, Nyxies.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Thinks.

• 1:44:05Dax Shepard?

  Thinks?

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Dax Shepard?

  For the thinking lady?

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  They, yeah, but it's with an X, you know?

• 1:44:10Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  You gotta have an X in women's underwear.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  I know, it's weird.

• 1:44:15Dax Shepard?

  It is interesting.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  It is really weird. Okay, speaking of shopping, so I had a West Side day last week.

• 1:44:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  I feel hot all of a sudden.

• 1:44:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great. Well, let's get it, you know, I always like to get it cold in here.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a West Side day, went to Venice.

• 1:44:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Whew. I know.

• 1:44:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  Very far away from where we live.

• 1:44:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, hour and a half.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  So it was like a real adventure I decided to do.

• 1:44:40Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, I went to Appicini, very famous, popular street in Venice where there's a lot of, um, stores.

• 1:44:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  And, and, and foodies and things like that. And, um, I did not enjoy myself.

• 1:44:58Dax Shepard?

  A little punchline. In what way?

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  I, I.

• 1:45:01Dax Shepard?

  Like, what am I doing out here?

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  The West Side is not for me. It's really just like what I took from it. I felt grateful that I lived on the East Side of Los Angeles.

• 1:45:09Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:45:23Dax Shepard?

  What things were irking you or not to your liking?

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  So many people walking. But I like that. Like, I like in New York, so many people walking, so it can't be that. It was hard for me to put my finger on what was going on with me. I think also so many people walking with their dogs. Nobody having any like awareness of other people.

• 1:45:49Dax Shepard?

  The dog thing.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  No. Well, it was part of it. I saw a dog eat somebody's pizza.

• 1:45:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay, well. Out of their hand, or they discarded it on the ground?

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  No, like, they were sitting outside eating their pizza at a restaurant. Yes.

• 1:46:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  And ate a stranger's pizza, and again, I'm not blaming the dog. I blame the owner who was like, "Oh, oh, sorry." It's like, "Oh, sorry?" is your reaction? That dog ate somebody's pizza? And he was like, "Oh, uh, it's okay." Like, you could tell he hated it, the guy with the pizza, obviously. Then he's like, he's stuck with, "Okay, now do I eat the rest of this pizza that has dog slobber on it?"

• 1:46:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  This is hard.

• 1:46:33Dax Shepard?

  No, there's that, you're not eating the rest of the pizza. The guy, the dog owner has to go get you a new piece of pizza.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:46:38Dax Shepard?

  That wasn't offered? If you stick around longer, would you have seen it?

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  No, I walked away, but I, but he was walking away. Like, he was like, "Oh, sorry."

• 1:46:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he was just on a walk? He wasn't a fellow diner?

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:46:50Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's insane. Unless the guy was penniless. Was he penniless?

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  No. He's walking his dog on the street. His dog jumps up, eats somebody's pizza, and he's like, "Sorry."

• 1:47:00Dax Shepard?

  This is one of these examples of how I constantly was seeing men yell at women in public, and I'd have to defend them.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Dax Shepard?

  Because my worldview is that, and I somehow saw that all the time. Like, I would never see a dog leap up and eat a piece of pizza.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  You would, if you were in Venice.

• 1:47:14Dax Shepard?

  No, but you're gonna, of course, of course you saw that, is my point.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  I didn't manifest it. It just happened in front of me.

• 1:47:21Dax Shepard?

  But it confirmed what you think about dogs. Is there unruly?

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  Not what I think about dogs. Well, first of all, yeah, dogs love pizza, of course, you know?

• 1:47:28Dax Shepard?

  Well, everyone does.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want, I want pizza right now. I'm having an issue.

• 1:47:32Dax Shepard?

  What's your issue?

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. I'm like so, I'm like all of a sudden sweating.

• 1:47:37Dax Shepard?

  Let's turn the air out. Let's make it colder here.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  But I don't know if it's internal. Okay. Oh, my God. Are we catching my first hot flash?

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  And I'm sick.

• 1:47:49Dax Shepard?

  You wanna give it yourself a second? Let's let it cool down for a second.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Remember when you were addicted to Halls?

• 1:47:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you didn't know me then.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  I know, but you just talk about it.

• 1:47:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Um, I'm currently addicted to Halls.

• 1:48:01Dax Shepard?

  They're addictive.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  I had four while we were.

• 1:48:04Dax Shepard?

  I want one now that you say. You know, at my height, I was getting the family pack every day.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:48:10Dax Shepard?

  Every day, like going to get a pack of cigarettes.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  I know, I'm eating too many Halls. I want one now. I wonder if I have one.

• 1:48:18Dax Shepard?

  You have any in your satchel?

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  I have one. Now, is it bad for you, Halls?

• 1:48:23Dax Shepard?

  It gave me farts, cuz I had so many of them, and I think the binding agent. I always think it's a binding agent, even though I don't even know what that means. I believe all those mint type things have binding agent.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Menthol, don't they?

• 1:48:35Dax Shepard?

  Well, the menthol's the thing I'm addicted to.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:48:37Dax Shepard?

  But the, to keep all the ingredients together.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:41Dax Shepard?

  They need a binding agent.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  Is menthol bad for you?

• 1:48:44Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:48:45Dax Shepard?

  No, yeah.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:46Dax Shepard?

  Smoking menthol cigarettes is bad for you.

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  It's the, that's the cigarette that's bad, though, right?

• 1:48:50Dax Shepard?

  That's right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:51Dax Shepard?

  And inhaling menthol on fire is probably not great. But no, menthol's great for you.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Halls Mentholipus.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Um, Vicks Vapor Rub.

• 1:49:01Dax Shepard?

  Vapor Rub, Baby Rub.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, I love them.

• 1:49:05Dax Shepard?

  I gotta recommend a show, and I know you're not gonna try it cuz it's a reality TV show, but we like it so much.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not, I'm so sorry. I'm not done talking about the West Side.

• 1:49:16Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry.

• 1:49:17Dax Shepard?

  You took a long break, and I thought you were out of contact.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Something's going on with my body. It's like, I, I feel really strange. Um.

• 1:49:24Dax Shepard?

  Are you, um, how's your equilibrium?

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  Fever's breaking or something. Maybe, maybe I've had a fever and it's breaking. Let's hope that's what it is.

• 1:49:31Dax Shepard?

  Fun.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:32Dax Shepard?

  You're sweating.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sweating.

• 1:49:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  I feel really weird. Now I'm worried I smell.

• 1:49:37Dax Shepard?

  I might have given it to you.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:49:39Dax Shepard?

  Just by power of, uh, suggestion.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I do feel like I kinda smell all of a sudden, but I think it's the sweat mixing with this cashmere.

• 1:49:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you think the cashmere smell is not you?

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Sometimes certain, um, sweaters, if, if there's sweat on them.

• 1:49:54Dax Shepard?

  It activates something in the wool.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  It does, it does.

• 1:49:57Dax Shepard?

  It wakes up some dormant thing in the sheep wool.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  I hate it, I hate it.

• 1:50:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm in Venice.

• 1:50:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  A dog ate someone's pizza, and I'm like, ew, this place is wild, you know? And then I go into the store. I won't say what it is, because I'm gonna be nice.

• 1:50:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Went in, I guess they're known for having like vintage Levi's.

• 1:50:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  When I walk in, I'm the only one in the store. There's vintage Levi's on the left, and then there's other clothes. So I like, I kinda go and I like, look at the vin- like, for a second, I'm like, kinda looking at the jeans, but then I meandered, and the woman working at the store ignored me at first. But then she was like, let me know if you need anything. And I was like, okay, great. And then I was looking at some vintage shirts. Then some more people start coming in. She starts addressing these other people, great. I'm still looking around. One lady goes up to her and is like, do you have like,

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  dark, a darker wash than the one she's wearing? So they go over to the vintage jeans, they're looking. I then go over to the vintage jeans, and I'm looking. And she goes, honey, if you, if you wanna look at these, I'm gonna need to help you.

• 1:51:13Dax Shepard?

  That's the worker there?

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  And I was like.

• 1:51:17Dax Shepard?

  That's crazy.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You're not allowed to look at the jeans without supervision?

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51:23Dax Shepard?

  That would've been my exact sentence.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:51:25Dax Shepard?

  Hold on, you can't look at the jeans without supervision is the policy here?

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  I know, that would've been great.

• 1:51:29Dax Shepard?

  It's always great to start with a question. Questions are the-

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Meet a question with a question.

• 1:51:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're a judo move.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:36Dax Shepard?

  Make them explain what they just said. What did you just say?

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  She said, because, and then she made, like, she said something about sizes, but she just kinda threw it out. Like, she just was like, because like, sizes.

• 1:51:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  Or something. When really, she just didn't want me messing with the jeans when she was over there. It was this tights, or she was over there-

• 1:51:55Dax Shepard?

  I mean, she's afraid you're gonna get them out of order.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Maybe. But like, sorry bitch, do you want your clothes? I don't mean to, I just didn't mean to say that.

• 1:52:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you're gonna take that back? Let's rewind.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Sorry lady. Like, you know, it was just pretty woman, it was like, big mistake, huge. Like, I would've bu-

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Don't mistake me for someone who's not gonna buy these items.

• 1:52:19Dax Shepard?

  But, okay, here's where I'm gonna-

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  I know, now you wanna push back, cuz you think I'm-

• 1:52:22Dax Shepard?

  What am I gonna say?

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  You think it's, I'm like, projecting onto her that I'm not worth the money, or I know what you're saying. I'm sweating so much.

• 1:52:32Dax Shepard?

  I know, I do think you have that story. Like, I do think you're on high alert for that.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  I wasn't.

• 1:52:37Dax Shepard?

  But, if you had asked her, "Can I go look at a pair of jeans like this in darker before anyone got in there?"

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:52:44Dax Shepard?

  I don't think in any world she wouldn't have taken you over there and helped you.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:48Dax Shepard?

  The one woman said, "I'd like to see this in darker." So you didn't initiate that. The other woman didn't. And then I do think it's quite possible that if she was helping you and the other woman came up and started rifling through, that she might've said, "Honey, hey, you gotta be with me." I think all that's quite probable. Well, I'm not arguing she doesn't have a shitty bedside manner, but I- But your conclusion that it was unique to you because of who you are, I'm- that's the part I wanna push back on.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. But I am saying, she missed out on a sale.

• 1:53:17Dax Shepard?

  Great, but you also didn't initiate the jeans thing with her.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. She didn't- when I was over there alone-

• 1:53:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  She didn't say, "Hey, if you're gonna look at the vintage jeans, I gotta come help."

• 1:53:31Dax Shepard?

  Great, and I understand that point of view. But what's really funny is what keeps me from shopping. I just, I told you, I had to kill an hour and a half at the Maricón when my phone was being fixed.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Dax Shepard?

  And what I fucking hate is like, I wanna be able to walk around the store and not talk to someone every 30 seconds. So it's like every- I was wondering, like, cruise from the button-ups to the sweaters, but every five feet, "Excuse me, sir, can I help you find something?" "Oh, no, I'm just browsing." And then you're like, "Well, why aren't you in here? You're not shopping," you know? So I have the opposite thing as you, and that woman that works there's gotta try to assess, "Are you the me type or Monica type?" Cuz you want them to come over and go, "How can I help you?"

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  No! This is- I think you're misunderstanding.

• 1:54:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  I did not want her help.

• 1:54:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  I did not think I needed her help.

• 1:54:20Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  So for her to say, if you're gonna look at this, I have to help you, I was like, then I'm leaving.

• 1:54:27Dax Shepard?

  Kind of a very bizarre policy of the store or her own personal laziness about having to restock or reorganize.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  It was, it was just a mix of weird things. It was like, if that's really the policy, why didn't you tell me that earlier when I was kind of looking at them?

• 1:54:43Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  So are you making this policy up right now because you, because you feel?

• 1:54:49Dax Shepard?

  Pretty woman thing's ever gonna happen to you. You are very well put together and you have expensive clothes on all the time.

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  I know, that's how I felt. I was like.

• 1:54:56Dax Shepard?

  But, but, so that part, I think, I don't think that happens.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I, um, I left, you know?

• 1:55:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  I left, I, I just said, oh, okay. And then I left.

• 1:55:09Dax Shepard?

  Ah.

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  Because also I'm like, well, how are you gonna help?

• 1:55:13Dax Shepard?

  Sunglasses in a disguise, because you're like, fuck, I do need those pants.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:55:16Dax Shepard?

  I wanted to make a point. I wanted to punish her, but now I do need to get those pants.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:55:21Dax Shepard?

  And you came back in sunglasses and a scarf. And you're like, pardon me, uh, uh, how do you say, um, uh, hmm, pantalones?

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:55:31Dax Shepard?

  Azules, um, huh?

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I could have done that. Um, also, though, I was like, wait a minute. If this is the system where if you have to like get help for the jeans, you want me to just stand here and wait until you're done doing this whole thing with this other lady?

• 1:55:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's the problem with these boutique, that's why you gotta go into Target, they gotta dial.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  No, no, no real good store is doing this. Like, this is not, uh, this is not normal.

• 1:56:01Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  So, uh, but mainly I was very, and I don't, I didn't expect this from myself.

• 1:56:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  I did not like being called honey.

• 1:56:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  And I.

• 1:56:14Dax Shepard?

  You're from the south, I mean, you should, that's, that's pretty standard down there.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Maybe that's why.

• 1:56:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  Because it often, it is a very condescending thing to say to someone in the south a little bit. It could go either way, obviously, it can be used in a sweet way.

• 1:56:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  But it is often used in a condescending way.

• 1:56:32Dax Shepard?

  Especially if it's like, honey, that honey is pretty clear.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Honey, also, I'm like, I'm thirty eight.

• 1:56:39Dax Shepard?

  Honey.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  I'm not your honey.

• 1:56:42Dax Shepard?

  This is a huge off topic, but it just occurred to me if you were trying to speak French. I was thinking, if I saw you, I met you and you were speaking French. And I hope this doesn't offend Indians.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:56:54Dax Shepard?

  Or Moroccans.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:56:56Dax Shepard?

  But I think if you were speaking French, you could really pass for Moroccan.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Oh, alright.

• 1:57:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, or Algerian, French Algiers.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, just think about playing one in a movie.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Hire me, I guess. No, no, I don't do accents, so no.

• 1:57:13Dax Shepard?

  What if they're French?

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  I can't do a French accent.

• 1:57:16Dax Shepard?

  You could with some work.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  No, that would stress me out so much.

• 1:57:19Dax Shepard?

  You're incapable of learning a French accent?

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  I'm very bad at accents.

• 1:57:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:57:25Dax Shepard?

  I'm good at them, but I can't do most of them anymore.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  You can do French.

• 1:57:28Dax Shepard?

  I know, but that's.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  You're not interested.

• 1:57:30Dax Shepard?

  Maybe I will.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Okay, nice. So, anyway, I didn't realize that I find that now that I'm thirty eight, if you call me honey, and not, you're not my like lover.

• 1:57:46Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Or my partner or something, or.

• 1:57:49Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, honey. I hear it all the time now when I'm in Tennessee. And often it's so sweet, I love it.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  You can tell when it's sweet.

• 1:57:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, so I'm just saying, it's not the word. So I do think you'd be fine being called honey even at thirty eight if it was the fifty five year old woman that greets me at the gas station by my house.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  That's not what it was.

• 1:58:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  And then I remember there's a Taylor Swift song called Honey on the new album, so I listened to it after.

• 1:58:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh, God.

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  I felt seen.

• 1:58:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. She doesn't like it either?

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Well, she says, like, he can.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Travis.

• 1:58:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay, let's call it what it is.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  Can call her honey.

• 1:58:27Dax Shepard?

  And that's it?

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  Well, like, normally honey in the song, like, she's saying this, what I'm saying, but hers is translating better. Um, normally when people call her honey or baby or some other things, like, it's condescending and it's when this is happening and it's when someone's like belittling her. But he can call her honey if he wants.

• 1:58:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay, good. I bet he does. Frequently.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  I think he does. Honey's cute. You use honey a lot with Kristen. We use hun, honey. I think it's a nice pet name.

• 1:59:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  I would like to be called that.

• 1:59:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but be careful.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Not if you're trying to condescend me.

• 1:59:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, just be careful. It's a triggering word for you, so.

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  Well, if you love me, you can do it.

• 1:59:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what?

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  Um. What? Tell me.

• 1:59:19Dax Shepard?

  Oh, nothing. I just think, I, I, we all have these things.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:59:23Dax Shepard?

  That like, we don't want to be called. I have my list. You have your list.

• 1:59:29Dax Shepard?

  And I'm just struck when it's not me who's experiencing the emotions of it. How much agency you're giving away by being affected by it. It's just like, you validate this person by caring what they called you. And you give away a power, you give them a power over you that they don't deserve.

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 1:59:48Dax Shepard?

  You know, like, the most self-actualized version of oneself is just like, yeah, I can hear it and you and I can just think like, Monica, how could you care if this person called you anything? You're so above that kind of insult.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, this is where me and you. Me and you argue about this a lot.

• 2:00:12Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm. Making you feel a certain way versus I feel a certain way.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  No, that's not what I was gonna say.

• 2:00:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I thought that was gonna be the one.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  Um, no, like, I feel very, I'm like, we do not live in, on islands. People affect one another. And I am not like, trying to deny that reality. And you, and yes, you can be self-actualized, you can, you can understand.

• 2:00:34Dax Shepard?

  You have agency, so you can be affected if you allow yourself to be affected. That's what I'm saying.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  I know, but I disagree. I, I, I think we live in a.

• 2:00:42Dax Shepard?

  For you, it feels impossible currently.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Well, no, and not just for me.

• 2:00:46Dax Shepard?

  Well, because you're saying it can't be done.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  For everyone in life, humans. Humans affect other humans. Like, I don't think you can, I not, by the way, I don't think you should walk through life without feeling things from other people, good and bad.

• 2:01:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, I do because, again, let's, let's assume the worst about this person. Let's go all the way with this.

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  Well, no, she's not bad.

• 2:01:10Dax Shepard?

  But let's just do it. Let's say that she is racist and she knows you have money and she's jealous and she thinks you're a piece of shit that's inferior because you're brown.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:01:20Dax Shepard?

  And she's a terrible person.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  Okay, we get it.

• 2:01:22Dax Shepard?

  And she was trying to hurt you.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:01:25Dax Shepard?

  Think about where that's coming from. That's such an obvious bag of insecurity that that person has, that they're gonna now try to infect you with.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:36Dax Shepard?

  And you're gonna let them? That's my pride. Like, you're gonna let that person with their insecurities change your day? You're gonna, you're gonna get infected by it and let it be contagious? I think a strong, actualized version of you is like, what that girl's experience is that's making her behave that way has nothing to do with me. Her opinion of me means nothing and it has no effect on me. Someone else can behave like a knucklehead, but you can't internalize those feelings of I'm less than and I'm not worthy of being here. That's like, that's your department.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Sure, that's fine, but that doesn't mean, even if you're able to say like, well, that's that person's shit.

• 2:02:17Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean, it doesn't have to have an impact on you. It doesn't mean it won't hurt your feelings to be around someone who has just insulted you. Like, that is a normal reaction.

• 2:02:31Dax Shepard?

  But we agree.

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  You, you don't have to, it shouldn't ruin your life, ruin your whole day. It, you know, it doesn't, you don't need to go that far, but I, I definitely think it's okay to be affected by the way people treat you. It, again, do I think it needs to affect you to the extreme where it's starting to change your behavior or the way you look at the world? No, that's bad. But to be like, ow.

• 2:02:56Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 2:02:58Dax Shepard?

  I just think you're giving that person way more power than they deserve. Because they already act, they already demonstrated that they're a knucklehead.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Dax Shepard?

  It's like the, you know, again. Guy with a parrot on his shoulder at 7-Eleven, he says something to you, you just immediately write it off. It means nothing. What's that, what does this guy know about anything?

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  No, but it's not.

• 2:03:16Dax Shepard?

  Standing in front of 7-Eleven with a parrot on his shoulder.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  It's so intellectual, though, which I like, I understand, that's where you're coming from.

• 2:03:21Dax Shepard?

  You're saying it's unrealistic, not impossible.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:03:24Dax Shepard?

  Because I'm only debating you if you're saying it's impossible.

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:03:27Dax Shepard?

  I agree with you that it's hard.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  I don't think it's impossible, and I think it's circumstantial, but it is. I mean, yeah, I just live in reality where like, look, if I'm walking down the street and someone yells something at me, and they have a parrot on their shoulder, no, I'm not gonna think what they, like, they're a valid, I should be thinking about how to change my life.

• 2:03:48Dax Shepard?

  Or what they said about you's relevant.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  But it would still probably hurt, all of, like, I would just be like, oh, ah, like.

• 2:03:54Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Being, being yelled at or told something bad doesn't feel good, even if it's like, crazy. It, again, that doesn't mean I keep walking and I'm like, oh, man, what if he's right? Like, what if I am a stupid bitch? Like, it's just like, ah, like, that doesn't feel good to receive bad energy from people.

• 2:04:18Dax Shepard?

  As a thought experiment, just imagine he yells, "You're too tall."

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:21Dax Shepard?

  Truly, does it, does that statement, "You're too tall."

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  I know, but there, but that's objective.

• 2:04:27Dax Shepard?

  But can we walk through that? This as an experiment? What do you think your actual reaction would be if a guy yelled at you, "You're too tall."

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  I, I'd just be like, he's not talking to me. I would be confused.

• 2:04:38Dax Shepard?

  Or, who cares what that guy said?

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  No, I would laugh. Yeah, I would just be like, oh, this guy's on drugs.

• 2:04:45Dax Shepard?

  It's nonsense, what the guy said.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  I know, but like, that is objective.

• 2:04:51Dax Shepard?

  But.

• 2:04:52Speaker 01

  Other things aren't. You being ugly, you being, like, these aren't, these are subjective things.

• 2:05:00Dax Shepard?

  They are, and what determines whether or not you're vulnerable to them is what your own self-esteem is. That's exactly what defines your susceptibility and vulnerability.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  I don't think that's always right. I, I don't. Like, I. I know I have enough money to buy stuff in that store.

• 2:05:21Dax Shepard?

  But you have some fear that people don't think you have money.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  No, I don't care about that.

• 2:05:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  People don't need to think I have money. That's like not important to me at all. Uh, people need to not think like

• 2:05:35Dax Shepard?

  You don't belong there.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  or exactly, or I don't belong.

• 2:05:39Dax Shepard?

  Alright, great.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  Well, not belong.

• 2:05:40Dax Shepard?

  But you're using the pretty woman analogy for a reason.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Well, that was just like easy to say.

• 2:05:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, no, but it makes total sense. And we all know what that means.

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, big mistake here.

• 2:05:49Dax Shepard?

  And that's what it was. It was a pretty woman experience.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't a pretty woman experience so much as I was, look, I really, I was like, I mean, we went off on such a tangent. All I was, I wrote down, a lady working at a store called me honey.

• 2:06:04Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  And I didn't like it.

• 2:06:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I hear you.

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  And that doesn't mean I think I'm a little girl. Like, I know I'm not.

• 2:06:13Dax Shepard?

  I'm aspiring in life to not let anyone have that control over my emotions because I don't enjoy the emotion of being triggered.

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Right. I don't have that.

• 2:06:23Dax Shepard?

  Aspiration.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  I don't have that aspiration to like not feel things from other people. I definitely have an aspiration to like not let something like take me down or like, you know, have a major impact on my mood. But, um, yeah, like I'm fine having interactions in the world that are not always pleasant.

• 2:06:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't like feeling annoyed. And I feel annoyed often with people.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Dax Shepard?

  And I'm happier when I'm not feeling annoyed.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, let's do some facts. Okay.

• 2:06:55Dax Shepard?

  Okay, Alvin.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  What are all the Nobel Prizes?

• 2:06:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:07:00Dax Shepard?

  Well, I was so embarrassed when you pointed out I used that wrong.

• 2:07:02Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people think that.

• 2:07:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Um, physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, economic sciences. So five of them are presented in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.

• 2:07:21Dax Shepard?

  Interesting.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:22Dax Shepard?

  Peace gets the most heat, right? That's the one we hear about the most.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  So, okay, I was gonna ask you, like, which one would you?

• 2:07:28Dax Shepard?

  Physics.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  That's what you think is the best or what you would want?

• 2:07:32Dax Shepard?

  Well, I just think it's like the most maybe substantive in, in

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  Medicine?

• 2:07:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 2:07:42Dax Shepard?

  I don't know. I just think like had someone not cracked the DNA code versus Obama. I think one is is more perpetuates mankind more. And I love Obama.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  I know, but that's actually, I don't mean him specifically, but that's that's an interesting debate, like what progresses.

• 2:08:03Dax Shepard?

  Like Obama was a great president and I don't know how we would quantify how many lives he saved, but I don't, he did not save as many lives as vaccines or

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:13Dax Shepard?

  antibiotics. Like those things are like quantifiably hundreds of millions of lives have been saved. Or this invention allows us to travel into space versus like you are a really good guy that encouraged people to be good and better.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  But that's huge.

• 2:08:30Dax Shepard?

  It's powerful.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  It's it.

• 2:08:31Dax Shepard?

  I'd put Martin Luther, I'd put Martin Luther in the in the camp of of the physicists.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, there are people who revolutionize the way the the rest of the world is gonna think about things for the rest of time.

• 2:08:48Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  And that is very powerful. Um.

• 2:08:52Dax Shepard?

  I guess if I was just picking between I have to live with like on planet Earth, either there was new, no Louis Pasteur or no Obama.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:09:02Dax Shepard?

  I know, we gotta ask the hard questions out here or we're not doing our job.

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna do that at all. I do not wanna do that. Um, I mean, look. I'm more, I'm most likely to get a piece or a literature prize of this. I, those are my actually only even remote options.

• 2:09:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that you could even be a contestant.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. So.

• 2:09:28Dax Shepard?

  So you're you're weighting those higher?

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah. It's funny, I go the opposite way in general.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

• 2:09:35Dax Shepard?

  I generally respect things a lot more that I can't do.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:38Dax Shepard?

  Which maybe is some kind of arrogance, I don't know, but.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  No, it would be arrogant.

• 2:09:43Dax Shepard?

  If I can't do it, it must be really impressive. Like, you can see where that's kind of arrogant.

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  I see, I see. Well, both ways, I guess.

• 2:09:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I can't do this abstract calculus to figure out how fast Alpha Centauri is moving towards us. So that's really, that person must be so special.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  I guess I'm glad we have all.

• 2:09:58Dax Shepard?

  Me too.

• 2:09:59Speaker 01

  Because they're all extremely important. Did you hear about Crater Carol, speaking of space?

• 2:10:05Dax Shepard?

  The moon?

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and...

• 2:10:07Dax Shepard?

  What's going on with Crater Carol? I just saw, there was a rock moving through the moon that was fascinating, the footage of that.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  Well, there was like a mark on the moon.

• 2:10:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  You know, they got the Earth.

• 2:10:17Dax Shepard?

  Skidmark?

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  You're gonna be upset you said that after you hear about this, okay? Because they go, you know, they go on that, what is it?

• 2:10:25Dax Shepard?

  Artemis?

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  Artemis, thank you. Okay, yes, and then they see this, and the astronaut asked if they could name it Carol after his, um, deceased wife.

• 2:10:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, yeah, I'm really upset I said that, yeah. That's great. What is it? Do we know what it is?

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  It's a crater, I think.

• 2:10:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  I've been calling it Crater Carol, so I hope it's correct.

• 2:10:45Dax Shepard?

  They've named, I see, uh, Einstein?

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Einstein, Dalton, and Carol.

• 2:10:51Dax Shepard?

  I wonder what Dalton that is.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  And the video's like going around of him, like, he's up there, and he said, "We want to name it Carol." It's really sweet.

• 2:10:59Dax Shepard?

  The one thing from this Artemis thing that I believe so certainly, one of the astronauts, you know, they went around the dark side of the moon.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 2:11:06Dax Shepard?

  Which is crazy, so there's no...

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  Do you think they listened?

• 2:11:09Dax Shepard?

  They should have.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:10Dax Shepard?

  That would have been cool. Um, they couldn't communicate, there's no radio communication or anything, so they're just kind of like, who knows what's happening on the other side, right? But I think when they came around it, or, I don't know, I don't know the timing of it, but the point is, one of the astronauts looked at Earth, and he was hit by this reality that we should all feel, I wish we could all feel, it's like, "You little, you little monkeys are on this fucking rock in the middle of an abyss."

• 2:11:38Dax Shepard?

  And it's, "You guys are all you have."

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:11:41Dax Shepard?

  And the fact that you're on this floating thing, fighting each other is such a tragedy. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, I'm not even sure what exactly how he said it. But I know that was the thrust of what he was saying, which I think about often. It's just like, if you're an alien hovering above Earth.

• 2:11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:55Dax Shepard?

  Like, what's going on? There's a bunch of people down there.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:11:58Dax Shepard?

  They're lucky enough to be this perfect distance, ninety-three million miles from the sun, where they can have water and oxygen and they live.

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:05Dax Shepard?

  And they're spending that.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:12:07Dax Shepard?

  Coming up all these fake differences between each other. You know what we all have in common? We're on a fucking rock floating through.

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm with you.

• 2:12:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's heartbreaking.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  But you also, you would say, well, evolution, we're animals and animals' status and everyone hates them in fights.

• 2:12:22Dax Shepard?

  Well, I was thinking that. I did, I actually, I forced myself to counter his point of view. And I was saying, what's interesting is you don't look, he's not looking at the Earth, seeing that a lion is fighting another lion in order to get access to the female. And going like, what a tragedy. The lion is spending his time on this floating, you know?

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:43Dax Shepard?

  So then I did, I was like, well, that's relevant too.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Sure. But also, it's not. It's like, we have brains that can.

• 2:12:48Dax Shepard?

  We should be able to. Oh, do you figure? We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  That's sweet.

• 2:12:55Dax Shepard?

  They're hugging up there.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  Oh, these astronauts are so sweet, naming the crater Carol and doing this. Oh, my God.

• 2:13:03Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Can you see? Is that the northern lights over the upper right tip of the?

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:13:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Earth is so like, I don't.

• 2:13:12Dax Shepard?

  It's a miracle.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  I like, don't believe in it.

• 2:13:14Dax Shepard?

  I don't either. I don't either.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Um.

• 2:13:17Dax Shepard?

  Alvin.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  Oh, he was making a point about, um, rules and laws and how sometimes you don't have to make laws because like, people just automatically don't do a thing because it's so repugnant.

• 2:13:31Dax Shepard?

  Oh, uh-huh.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  Like.

• 2:13:33Dax Shepard?

  Carry feces in their hand on the street?

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  Eh, no, he didn't say that. But, uh, worm, he said eating worms, but then I was like, I didn't want to say, but like, people eat worms.

• 2:13:41Dax Shepard?

  Sure. And he was probably talking about here, but yeah.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  I know, but like, a lot of cultures eat worms.

• 2:13:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  They do.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  They really do.

• 2:13:52Dax Shepard?

  But he was talking about here, horse meat's illegal.

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:55Dax Shepard?

  Cause here, we think it's crazy, but a lot of places, they eat horse meat. And then there are some things that are just, we don't need a law against it. Cause here, no, no one's eating worms. And so, the expectation is they won't be in your food.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Right, I guess.

• 2:14:09Dax Shepard?

  And you don't have to, you don't have to legislate against that.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  That's true, but uh, people eat worms all over.

• 2:14:14Dax Shepard?

  People eat poop, probably.

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  No!

• 2:14:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and there's cannibals, Monica, we, we have.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  That's different than eating worms, like.

• 2:14:20Dax Shepard?

  Well, okay, great, let's use cannibalism.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:24Dax Shepard?

  There are, we have evidence of certain groups being cannibals.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  It is illegal.

• 2:14:31Dax Shepard?

  Here.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, um, but not there.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:36Dax Shepard?

  But we don't have a law that says you, I don't think there's a law anywhere on any books that says you can't serve humans in a restaurant. I don't think that law exists.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Huh, well, not in a restaurant, but cannibalism is a law. There's a law against cannibalism. Remember that guy had to go to jail?

• 2:14:53Dax Shepard?

  In France. I don't know if, I mean, why would there be a law? Cause it would imply already murder, so it's like you've already crossed.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  Well, not necessarily, okay, what if?

• 2:15:01Dax Shepard?

  You're eating, you're at the morgue. Yeah, that's what he was, he was working at a lab.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  Or what if you just cut off a bunch, like, cut off some of your arm? And I ate it?

• 2:15:11Dax Shepard?

  There's been these cases, there's been consensual where people eat each other, like they, someone wants to get their part of their body eaten, someone on the internet wants to eat someone's body.

• 2:15:19Speaker 04

  So, in the US, there are no laws that explicitly prohibit cannibalism per se.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:15:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, cause again, you don't, you don't need it.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  But it is happening.

• 2:15:28Dax Shepard?

  But in Papua New Guinea, where it had been a thing for certain tribes, they might need to put that.

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:34Dax Shepard?

  They would have to decide to legislate against that.

• 2:15:36Speaker 04

  It says, most states have enacted laws that make it effectively impossible to legally obtain and consume human body matter, though.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:44Dax Shepard?

  Well.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  I'm so glad that's not my kink.

• 2:15:48Dax Shepard?

  Eating humans?

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, being attracted to.

• 2:15:50Dax Shepard?

  You would never be satiated. It's like if your thing, your kink is this thing you can't do, you would never be satiated in life.

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also just.

• 2:15:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  Can you own pigs in California as pets? Yes, you can own pet pigs in California. But it's highly regulated at the local level rather than state level. It is often considered livestock, not pets. Generally, only miniature breeds like pot-bellied pigs are allowed, often subject to weight limits under hundred and twenty pounds in strict city-specific zoning ordinances.

• 2:16:22Dax Shepard?

  Thank God Clooney's not a fugitive from law. Because I think he had a pot-bellied pig, famously, yeah.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Well, Kaylee

• 2:16:31Dax Shepard?

  We can't afford to have him as a criminal. But she has a farm.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Exactly, it's her livestock.

• 2:16:35Dax Shepard?

  She could own anything, probably.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  You mentioned Alan Turing. That was sad.

• 2:16:40Dax Shepard?

  That was very sad.

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  So sad. But that's a great movie, Imitation Game.

• 2:16:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I should re-watch it.

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  Great movie with Benedict Cumberbatch.

• 2:16:48Dax Shepard?

  I think that was his breakout, right? He was already like simmering, but then it was like, then it was like, sayonara, suck ass.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  I love him. Um, oh, when did Robert Ed- oh, I think he, okay, I may, may have misheard this. I, I thought he said Jonathan Edwards um, is the doctor who got his Nobel Prize in um, in vitro. It's Robert Edwards, which he may have said and maybe I misheard.

• 2:17:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  But he won it in two thousand ten.

• 2:17:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  Physiology or Medicine. Okay, so is IVF illegal in Germany? This is for single women. It's legal and available in Germany, but it's strictly regulated by the Embryo Protection Act. It is primarily accessible to married heterosexual couples with egg donation and surrogacy strictly prohibited.

• 2:17:40Dax Shepard?

  Strictly prohibited.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  Could you always bet on horses in the United States? No, it is

• 2:17:44Dax Shepard?

  Only if you ate them afterwards.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. No, it has not always been possible or legal to bet on horses throughout the entire United States. Um, has a long history. Faced significant legal, social, and regional restrictions over time. There's all kinds of restrictions.

• 2:17:59Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  In the early twentieth century, anti-gambling sentiment led almost all states to ban bookmaking, which nearly eliminated horse racing. So I guess that's not specific to horse racing.

• 2:18:09Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:18:10Dax Shepard?

  All right, then.

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Yes, Mark Twain is credited with saying giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it a thousand times. He's credited.

• 2:18:18Dax Shepard?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:18:19Dax Shepard?

  That's everything. Well, I do applaud Alvin's work with these, uh, kidney donations.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  I know. That was wild, actually. Should I give my kidney to someone?

• 2:18:29Dax Shepard?

  That's up to you.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  You don't want to advise? You love to advise, um, Rick Glass?

• 2:18:33Dax Shepard?

  This is just where I'm like, I'm shamefully selfish.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, because what if I need it?

• 2:18:38Dax Shepard?

  I want both, you know? I like a backup.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I probably need a backup since I had kidney stones.

• 2:18:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  They probably wouldn't even, maybe they wouldn't let me. Damn.

• 2:18:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Well, that would be the best case scenario. You tried and you couldn't. Yeah, get screened. It was like, I tried to give. What did I try to give?

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Plasma?

• 2:18:59Dax Shepard?

  I tried to give sperm in college.

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, and you weren't allowed. But that's not, you'd be fine doing that.

• 2:19:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  And you were getting paid. You would be paid.

• 2:19:07Dax Shepard?

  Well, that was the goal. Yeah, I was in college and I needed some money, but they wouldn't accept it. This is terrible sperm.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  What? Because it had low mobility?

• 2:19:17Dax Shepard?

  No, you need to have, or at least they told me, you need to have an inordinately high sperm count.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:19:22Dax Shepard?

  And I did not have a high sperm count.

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:19:25Dax Shepard?

  I like to think I had an average sperm count. They didn't specifically say you have a low sperm. It is, it wasn't high enough.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  You didn't have any problems getting pregnant.

• 2:19:33Dax Shepard?

  I've only tried twice and I have two kids.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  So it worked out.

• 2:19:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. All right.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  Bye!

• 2:19:38Dax Shepard?

  Love you.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  Love you.