Steven Pinker Returns (on common knowledge)

Steven Pinker (When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life) is a cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, and author. Steven returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss how in general things have gotten better, that tracking the data can make one more optimistic than reading headlines, and the differences between private knowledge and common knowledge. Steven and Dax talk about how evolved language generates common knowledge, the role of conventions and ritual in human coordination, and the power of Super Bowl advertisements. Steven explains the counterintuitive fact that announcing one’s philanthropy actually does more good, why we have to expose ourselves to a universe of ideas to find out which ones are good, and why he’s not afraid of AI. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

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

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  We have one of the world's great thinkers among us today.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  We do.

• 0:09Dax Shepard?

  He really is one of my favorite. He's like, you know, he's regarded, of course, as being one of the smarter people on the planet. He's a Harvard professor. Uh, but he's, he's so optimistic. I rely on him to like, reset my pessimism.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he, as he says in here, he doesn't phrase it that way.

• 0:26Dax Shepard?

  He doesn't.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  But I agree with you. It sparks hope.

• 0:29Dax Shepard?

  Steven Pinker, he's an award-winning experimental cognitive psychologist, bestselling author, and Harvard professor. His books are Rationality, Enlightenment Now, that's a great one, The Blank Slate, The Sense of Style, and his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. This was a brain twister.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Also, um, this has sort of reshaped a little bit of the way I think about some things. And I think it might for other people, too.

• 1:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  It's really interesting.

• 1:02Dax Shepard?

  It is. Please enjoy Steven Pinker. We get support from Quince.

• 1:08Speaker 01

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• 1:27Dax Shepard?

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• 1:43Speaker 01

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• 1:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm gonna tell you this, it just got chilly for the first time this year in California, and I'm so excited, and I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 2:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel-quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef-grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here. And it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five-star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.

• 2:29Dax Shepard?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Okay, can we talk about how November is basically survival mode? Between the holidays, the travel, the hosting, the cooking, the everything. Sleep is the one thing keeping me from completely unraveling.

• 3:04Dax Shepard?

  It really is the foundation. And I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  That was me before Helix. I took their sleep quiz, which is so fast. It took me like two minutes. And they matched me to a mattress that actually fits how I sleep. Not a guess, not a firm or soft coin flip. It's a real match. I have a midnight mattress and I really like it. I was noticing it because I actually had to sleep in one of my other beds.

• 3:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Recently.

• 3:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  That doesn't have a Helix mattress on it. And I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.

• 3:38Dax Shepard?

  Temperature was all over the map.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  It was a mess.

• 3:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I need a new one.

• 3:41Dax Shepard?

  Look, they've got over 20 mattress models. So whether you sleep hot, need extra back support, or you've got a partner who moves around all night, there's one built for you. Plus, free shipping and a 365-night Happy with Helix guarantee. That's a full year to decide.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Helix has been named the most awarded mattress by Forbes, Wired, and more. So it's not just us being enthusiastic. The experts agree.

• 4:02Dax Shepard?

  Right now, Helix is running their Black Friday sale with up to 30% off. Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Hello. Sir. Nice to see you in person this time. Yes, great to see you. Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Hey, so happy to have you back.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Thank you. Well, then this time you really are having me back.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I know. It's much better in person.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  But last time, I think it was Delta or Omicron, that COVID was still happening.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  And you were gracious enough to allow me to do it remotely. Yes. Here we are, happy to be here.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  The real thing.

• 4:59Dax Shepard?

  In general, do you like going on the road?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Almost every author bitches about book tours, but I figure, you know, I spent all this time writing a book, people want to hear about it. How can I complain about that? I like the fact that people are actually interested in all the work that I did.

• 5:12Dax Shepard?

  How long did you end up in Berkeley? Because the last time we talked to you, you were on sabbatical in Berkeley.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I was there for a year.

• 5:16Dax Shepard?

  Had you spent that much time there ever before?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Not in Berkeley. I'd lived in Palo Alto for a year. I was a professor at Stanford early in my career, and I spent a sabbatical in Santa Barbara. So I spent more than three years in California.

• 5:28Dax Shepard?

  I had a sabbatical in Santa Barbara, too.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:30Dax Shepard?

  I was going to Santa Barbara City College.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I didn't know that. Okay.

• 5:33Dax Shepard?

  Yes, went there for a year and then came to LA. So I was just in Nashville for the better part of the last three months.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Building or?

• 5:41Dax Shepard?

  No, we built a house there and hoped to retire there and be on the lake. I was already suspicious of this, but I was also delighted to experience it so palpably, which is just three months there was very helpful in me looking at LA from the outside, kind of understanding where people are coming from with their different political things. Like to step out of your culture bubble is pretty profound. I mean, you're going from Harvard to Berkeley, so it's not like...

• 6:08Speaker 02

  It's the same thing.

• 6:09Dax Shepard?

  There's no Mason Dixon line being crossed. But did you feel like you got understanding of anything in that year there? You're like, I see where this is coming from.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Well, partly was exposure to the Berkeley granola culture. As one friend put it, everyone looks like they've just come back from gardening.

• 6:25Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  But also there's the rationality community, which Berkeley is kind of the epicenter. And I wrote a book called Rationality.

• 6:33Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  But also being exposed to some of the Silicon Valley people, they've acquired a pretty bad reputation, especially in the last eight months.

• 6:40Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  There actually was something refreshing about the old can-do spirit. I talked to them about carbon capture or planes that would run on synthetic fuels or even on solar power and... Kind of a dreamy, far-off look would go in their eyes and they try to imagine how to make it happen.

• 6:55Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Instead of complaining about how we're doomed and how everything is corrupt, they're, at least some of them, trying to solve problems. That was refreshing.

• 7:03Dax Shepard?

  It's still fertile ground for optimism.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  It is, yeah.

• 7:06Dax Shepard?

  People do feel very empowered to fix things. Did you get any perspective looking back towards Boston?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  The mindset that problems are solvable, that you don't just moan about what's going wrong, but you try to fix them using human engineering. Now, there's a lot of that at Harvard, especially at MIT, my previous academic home. But in the general intellectual culture, it's much more, let's bemoan everything that is going to hell. There was some refreshment there. Although, when I was there, there was already a concern about the reactionary turn that a lot of Silicon Valley people were taking. The neo-reactionary movement.

• 7:41Dax Shepard?

  What's that?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Traditionally, people in Silicon Valley were centrist, mildly libertarian. There has been a kind of lurch toward, this is gonna sound weird to say it, toward monarchy and religion.

• 7:53Dax Shepard?

  Kind of totalitarian.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, as opposed to the liberal democracy, which is not sexy, it's not revolutionary, it's not exciting.

• 8:01Dax Shepard?

  Right, it's not disruptive enough.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Disruption can be a good thing if you're improving stuff, but if you're thinking about how to make us lurch back to the Middle Ages, not so much. And I think part of it is there is such a reaction to wokeness, such a recoil.

• 8:14Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  That people are kind of springing away from what they see as the excesses of the left, but ricocheting all the way to the right. If the left likes it, then it must be awful. Partly exaggerated by the fact that a lot of the cultural mainstream went really anti-tech. Tech became the villain.

• 8:32Dax Shepard?

  Kind of replaced bankers.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we used to hate people in finance.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  You think that's just on the left, or do you think everyone had to sort of anti-tech?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Well, you're right. There's also a tech lash from the right as well.

• 8:45Dax Shepard?

  They fit perfectly two archetypes. Like, if you're on the right, they represent the swamp and the conspiracy of who's running everything. They're actually really running everything. And then, if you're on the left, you don't trust any corporation intrinsically, and if they have a lot of power, then, you know, they can fill a lot of buckets.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  I met with some people like Mike Brock, who is one of the tech entrepreneur and former CEO, who basically left to blog full time about what he early on spotted as a threat to ideals of liberal democracy, coming from a neo-reactionary in Silicon Valley. He was ahead of his time because we've now seen, particularly with Elon Musk, at the time it was Peter Thiel, a lurch from people who used to be pretty centrist, eclectic, to highly ideological.

• 9:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Now, what do you think's driving that particular niches, perhaps belief? I mean, I guess it seems very intuitive that perhaps they don't think the masses should be trusted with decisions because they're not quite as smart as they are.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:49Dax Shepard?

  Do you think that's the underpinning of that?

• 9:51Speaker 02

  There's some of that.

• 9:51Dax Shepard?

  Like, I try to wrap my head around how someone would go like, you know, the best move is one single person making all the decisions that can't be challenged. That seems so antithetical to reason.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  This entire country was founded on refuting that idea?

• 10:03Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Because we tried it, it was called monarchy, it didn't work out so well. You know, democracy, as they say, the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried.

• 10:12Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, that's fair. Well, what I always appreciate about you, and while I'll always need a dose of you if ever you want to come, is I am drawn to the optimists. I'm a bit cynical and skeptical, and so I really need you. There's a handful of you. I think you're very much an optimist. The ideals of the Enlightenment that you explored, and if we look at them from the long arc, they're kind of coming true. I like that message. I think Yuval's also a really good person in the intellectual space that's kind of optimistic. And then Bill Gates of all people.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely, Bill Gates. There's a website, Our World in Data. Proprietary is Max Roser, that I rely on. And with me and with Our World in Data, I'd say it's not so much optimism in the sense of putting on a happy face, rose-tinted glasses, seeing the glass is half-full. I think there's a role for that, because it gives you the gumption to actually try to solve things with some confidence that you might succeed.

• 11:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the right amount of delusion could be helpful.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Or even when you have uncertainty, you should know that within the realm of reasonable possibility is success. That's what makes it worthwhile. And how do you know? Well, our ancestors were faced with pretty big problems and they solved a lot of those. So why will we be the first generation not to solve any of the problems facing us? But you know, it's not really optimism. It's really more just attention to facts, to data that you don't get from the news. Cause the news concentrates on what happened yesterday. And anything that happens suddenly is almost certain to be bad, or at least way more likely to be bad than good. Cause things can go to hell very quickly.

• 11:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, rainbows are rare. You don't get the sudden really great thing.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  But you know, good things tend to build up a few percentage points at a time and they can compound and transform the world. Or there are things that don't happen. You don't see a headline about a region of the world that isn't having a war. You know, like Vietnam, for example. For those of us who grew up during the Vietnam War, that would have been huge news. No war in Vietnam for decades. Nah, you're a dreamer, you're a utopian. But of course, no war in Vietnam isn't a headline. No war in South America, et cetera. So what Rosling does, what Our World in Data does, what I try to do is show you the things you can't get from the headlines, like plotting deaths in war over time, plotting how long people live, how many mothers die in childbirth, how many kids die, how many kids go to school. And you see, there was never a Thursday in October in which it generated a headline.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  But if you look at the trends, it shows that we really are better off than people before us.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  And still, right? Still since the last.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  So I try to update it with swallowing hard, gritting my teeth. Because you know, I read the headlines too. There's a lot of bad stuff happening. Not everything gets better all the time. It couldn't, that would be a miracle. So war deaths have shaved off a couple of decades of progress in year 2024, last full year for which we have data. It kind of sent us back to the nineties. Things definitely got worse. People think, oh, that must be because of Gaza. It's actually much more Sudan, also Ukraine, and a bunch of other conflicts. Syria? Syria in its time was one of the worst. So if you look at the curve, World War II, it was just literally off the charts. Let's even start the clock in 1946. So even then it goes down. In the last few years, it's crept up a bit. Still not like it was even in the eighties. The seventies, the sixties, the fifties.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  So there has been progress, but not a miracle. It's not inexorable. It doesn't happen by itself. It happens because people rack their brains to try to solve problems. They don't always succeed, but sometimes they do succeed. So just the mindset of let's look at the data. Sometimes we'll find things are getting worse because sometimes things do get worse. Sometimes they get better. And by and large, in general, almost everything has gotten better.

• 13:40Dax Shepard?

  They tend thus far to be blips rather than patterns, right?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  When you're in the middle of one, you never know.

• 13:45Dax Shepard?

  Right, but I look at the homicide rate during COVID. It spiked and it got a little scary, maybe even doubled in some places. And in a sense now fallen and rejoined the initial curve.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  That's exactly what happened. And so one of the graphs that I plot is American homicide rates. In the nineties, there was the Great American Crime Decline, where violent crime fell in half in some places like New York by three quarters. And then it fell again in the two thousands. And then it shot up in 2020.

• 14:12Dax Shepard?

  And it left everyone scrambling for the explanation and everyone claimed it. Whether it was the broken windows theory or it was the stop and frisk theory. Or Dubner, was it abortion being legalized?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  I look at all those hypotheses and we don't know for sure. I think some are more plausible than others. But what you're saying is right. In that case, it was a blip in that I was getting really nervous like, damn it. What are the trends that I was really happy about?

• 14:35Dax Shepard?

  Throw this book away.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  That a U turn. Yeah. But you turned at a U turn. So we don't know whether it's a blip or a new normal of war deaths. Again, back to the nineties, not back to the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties. There's a huge war that everyone forgets about between Iran and Iraq, sometimes called the idiot war, where probably 800,000 people were killed, maybe close to a million in the eighties. People forget about that. Anyway, going back to the theme, some things have gotten somewhat worse. Another thing is democracy. The world got more and more and more democratic. Then about 10, 15 years ago, it kind of leveled off and went down a bit. Better than it was in the eighties, seventies, sixties, but not going in the right direction. Is this a blip? Will the momentum reverse? We just don't know. But some things do reverse. So updating my graphs, COVID screwed up a lot of them.

• 15:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Not surprisingly, but since the vaccines ended COVID and the immunity, the world has. Gone back on track on all the positive trends. And so we're actually at global records for GDP per capita. That recovered longevity that recovered after taking a dip. Extreme poverty and those are like really important. They affect billions of people.

• 15:40Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  We are, even after the COVID hit, better off than we ever were in history of the world. I like thinking, I think, is not so much optimism, but just tracking the data. And that makes you more optimistic than if you're reading the headlines, especially. And I'll bring in a little cognitive psychology here because it's my field. But there's a bias called availability, namely if there's an image, if there's a narrative that is available in memory that you can retrieve on demand easily. Because it's so vivid, it's so salient, it's so gory, so recent. That tends to distort your subjective feeling of risk or estimates of danger.

• 16:15Dax Shepard?

  Right, like if you were mugged last night, you have a different perspective on the crime rate.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Especially who's you, but even if you read about someone who was mugged or you read about a guy eaten by a shark on Cape Cod, then everyone stays away from the beach, even though there's, you know, one death in a century. Every year, people get killed in car accidents on their way to the beach.

• 16:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, by the dozen.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  So that's a distorter. That's in general, the story that I like to tell, let's try to follow the data, not the headlines.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:45Dax Shepard?

  OK, so this current book, it's immediately confusing, which you immediately start to unwind. But what we would call common knowledge is not what you would refer to as common knowledge.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes the professors, the mathematicians, the scientists will glom onto a word. It's a little bit misleading, but that's the thing about words. Once they stick, they stick, they get grandfathered in, there's nothing you can do about it. That's just what they're called.

• 17:09Dax Shepard?

  That's right. Awful is your example in the book.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  So, yeah, awful does not mean filled with awe. It used to.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yes. Terrific doesn't mean worthy of terror or causing terror.

• 17:19Dax Shepard?

  And tough shit. We're here now and that's what it is.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Incredible, I guess, same thing.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  That's another one, yeah.

• 17:24Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Common knowledge in the technical sense is, I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know that you know it, having an item. So that's common knowledge.

• 17:35Dax Shepard?

  But that takes a minute to really, like, you can say it, I read it, but you really need the diagrams and you really need to think about all the implications of that. So knowing that Stephen and I both know there are lights in here.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:49Dax Shepard?

  Give us some examples of this difference between private knowledge and common knowledge, because it's kind of fascinating.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so private knowledge is when everyone knows something, but no one knows that anyone else knows it.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Common knowledge is when everyone knows something and you know that everyone knows it, and you know that.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Now, it sounds mind boggling, like, how could I know that you know that? I mean, you start to get confused. It's even used as a source of humor in some cartoons and sitcoms.

• 18:12Dax Shepard?

  Well, give her Seinfeld, because.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Well, friends, I know it.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Everyone has told me about that episode. They don't know we know they know we know.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  And then Rachel says, Joe, you can't say anything. And he says, I couldn't even if I wanted to.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Oh, what a show.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  That captures the idea. So that has four levels of thoughts within thoughts.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  When it gets to three, it starts to get hard. When it gets to four, it's almost impossible. So what am I talking about?

• 18:37Dax Shepard?

  I think another great example of it is rock, paper, scissors. When you're playing rock, paper, scissors, and this is terrible, I'm assessing how clever I think my opponent is right away. And I think if they're just baseline clever, there is something that feels sturdy about rock. It feels powerful. If you're someone who doesn't do any thinking, you're really prone to throw rock. It just feels stable. I know you're smart, and so you've probably assessed that I'm gonna go for that, and so you're gonna go for paper. So if I think you're smart, I'm gonna go paper. So I generally, if I'm with someone who's smart, will start with scissors. We've gotten to three steps, and four, I think, is a lot for someone.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  There you go. So that's a great example of. Thinking about other people thinking, the fancy schmancy term is recursive mentalizing. Mentalizing means mind reading, getting inside someone else's head. recursive means you try to get inside the head of someone who's trying to get inside someone's head.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Mmm, my god.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  That's a great example, rock, paper, scissors.

• 19:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, also the great scene in Princess Bride about drinking the poison. Do you remember that whole thing?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 19:42Dax Shepard?

  But you would have known I would have put the poison. He's giving himself an immunity to the poison. They were both poisoned.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So are you saying it's what you just did is private knowledge?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Right, that would be private knowledge.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So, common knowledge is, if you were to say, "I'm gonna play rock," that would kind of defeat the purpose of that game. It is a kind of recursive mentalizing, get inside one another. The optimal strategy when you're playing it is to be totally random. Just have a perfect random number generator in your head, unless you can capitalize on some tell or some habit in the other person. It's called an outguessing standoff. There are other examples, like in hockey. Say at a penalty shot, the stick handler tries to guess where the goalie's gonna be. The goalie guesses where the shooter's gonna shoot, looking for a little tell in the other. And actually, it's one of these cases where randomness is rational. If you're predictable, then you're a sitting duck. Right. What would be then common knowledge, though, is you blurt something out.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  So if something is public, if it's out there, if it's visible, that generates common knowledge without you having to think through all the layers. You just intuitively know it. And I think that's what makes common knowledge so potent in human life. It's not so much that we can do the rock, paper, scissors, or they don't know that we know that they know that we know. We do do that, up to a certain point. But when something is just conspicuous, self-evident, public, out there, that's what generates common knowledge. So that's why certain public things make such a difference, even if everyone knew it the whole time. Conversely, it's why sometimes we try to keep things out of common knowledge, even if everyone knows it. There's a big difference between everyone knowing it

• 21:21Speaker 02

  and everyone knowing that everyone's knowing it. And that's why we ignore the elephant in the room. We use euphemism, we pretend not to know, we look the other way. And that's a big effect in human life and in politics.

• 21:32Dax Shepard?

  The emperor has no clothes is great. We all know that colloquially, but just walk through the basic steps of it.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  So the thing about the story of the emperor's new clothes, it is a story about common knowledge. Probably the most famous, because when the little boy said the emperor was naked, he actually wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. They could see the emperor was naked, but he's changed their knowledge nonetheless. He actually was adding to their knowledge.

• 21:58Dax Shepard?

  But the steps are important. So people are noticing the emperor has no clothes on. And they are presumably too nervous to say anything.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  And they've been told, anyone who can't see the splendid garments in different versions of the story has been cuckolded, is a heretic, is not very smart. So they've been intimidated. If you accept the story, they did doubt it, they could see it with their own eyes. They wondered, you know, are they crazy or am I crazy? When the boy blurted it out and everyone could hear him, that gave them common knowledge. And crucially, here's the other part of the story that is why I began the book with it. That common knowledge changed their relationship. And the reason that I think common knowledge is so important in just everyday social life is that our relationships depend on common knowledge. In the case of the story, it is instead of obsequious deference to the emperor, now it was ridicule and scorn.

• 22:48Dax Shepard?

  His days are likely numbered once everyone recognizes we've been asked to participate in this lie.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  There you go. So the reason that common knowledge was of interest to so many academic fields, logic, economics, philosophy, political science, is that a lot of large-scale social phenomena that depended on it. Like money, what makes a greenback valuable? It's just a piece of paper. It's you know that other people will accept it. Why do they accept it? Because they know that still other people will accept. Everyone knows that everyone knows it has value. That's what gives it value. Conversely, when that common knowledge disappears, which it can, you get hyperinflation and it really can become worthless. And there are other examples, political protests, crashes, bubbles.

• 23:30Dax Shepard?

  You say this is why autocrats hate any public demonstration. Because what it's letting everyone else know is you're not alone in this assessment of our leader.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Not only are you not alone. But in addition, everyone knows you're not alone.

• 23:44Dax Shepard?

  So now it buffets your confidence to also speak up.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. Now you have safety in numbers, you coordinate. And the coordination is kind of the magic word in the book. Because what common knowledge is necessary for is coordination. People doing things on the same page that benefit them both. Without common knowledge, you might know and she might know. But if you don't know, she knows you know, then you still might miscoordinate. So for example, just even something like a rendezvous, ending up at the same place at the same time. Let's say you both want to get together for a coffee. Your cellphone goes dead. Well, you can't just guess she likes to go to Starbucks. Because she might think, well, he likes to go to Pete's. And you say, OK, well, she knows I want to go to Pete's. So she's going to go to Pete's. But then you think, no, no, no. She knows that I know that she likes to go to Starbucks. So she's going to go Starbucks after all. And it's just going to be 50/50.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  The reason we evolved language is that it generates common knowledge. And as soon as you say, hey, let's meet at Starbucks, that puts it into it. You don't have to go through the layers. Right. You know, there are lots of cases like that. So going back to the public protest. Why do autocrats fear public protest? Why is freedom of assembly one of the fundamental rights? No dictatorship can control an entire population if the population stands up and opposes them altogether. I quote the scene from the movie Gandhi, where the character, maybe in real life, he told a British officer, eventually you'll leave because 100,000 Englishmen cannot control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate. That was Gandhi's big insight. But what it depends on, what will make 350 million Indians refuse to cooperate?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Well, one of them can't just refuse to cooperate. Because if everyone else is, you'll be a voice in the wilderness. A public protest where you see everyone, and you see everyone seeing everyone, you realize the moment is now. Or if it's a public article that goes viral that everyone's read. I recount the joke from the Soviet era. A lot of great jokes from the Soviet era. Because it was one of the ways in which they generated common knowledge amongst themselves beneath the notice of the government of the Communist Party. But a man's handing out leaflets in Red Square. And of course, the KGB arrest him, take him back to headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him, what is the meaning of this? And he says, what's there to say? It's so obvious. It's a joke about common knowledge, namely by handing out the blank leaflets.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  He was like the little boy in the emperor's new clothes. He was conveying the information of people who accepted it.

• 26:06Dax Shepard?

  That we're not allowed to speak freely.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And that we all know that there is something to protest, that there's a basis for our grievances. In a case of life imitating a joke, Putin's forces have arrested people for carrying blank signs.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 26:21Dax Shepard?

  You put a passage in your book from Sapiens, from Yuval's book. And I was so glad to see that because I was already starting to think in terms of that book in that that book's kind of proprietary offering, at least on a really pop level, was we have been able to congregate peacefully because we believe in stories. And I think that's an incredibly salient argument. And I would argue your book actually then breaks down the mechanisms by which story does travel or how we buy into story. But you do make some distinctions between common knowledge and say, story just broadly.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I name check Yuval Noah Harari. The way he puts it is that human life depends on fictions, fictions like the government, the church, corporations.

• 27:10Dax Shepard?

  They're not real.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  I think it's a really important insight, so I don't disagree with him. What I say is that I would put it differently. They're not exactly fictions. There really is such a thing as Microsoft.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Now, it's not stuff. It's not a particular building. Likewise, the US government or Harvard University. But they're real, even though they're not stuff. But what they are is they depend on common knowledge. What makes a leader a leader? Well, I mean, he's got the guns, but you know, as we said, no government can control all of its subjects. What gives someone power is everyone recognizes that he has power. What makes currency useful is that everyone treats it as if it's useful and knows that everyone else treats it as useful.

• 27:47Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  What makes a corporation is there is a public document, a charter. There can be headquarters, but not necessarily. But everyone acts as if the company exists and that makes the company exist. So it's common knowledge. Is the way I would put it, rather than a fiction. Or conventions. A convention is a way of doing things that makes everyone better off and that exists thanks to common knowledge. A convention like driving on the right.

• 28:14Dax Shepard?

  We were there with the coffee analogy, so let's do it there, which is you and I want to meet for coffee. We both know we have different spots. We think through who's more probable to concede to that spot. But then we might have a pre-existing convention, which might be ladies first.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:30Dax Shepard?

  Right? Like, I believe in ladies first. Or we have a convention that we go every other time.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 28:37Dax Shepard?

  Right? So in place of saying something out loud and making explicitly common knowledge, we could have a covenant that would function as that.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Some sort of ritual.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. And conventions basically solve coordination problems. So, for example, what day do you stay home and read the paper instead of going to work? Sunday. Why Sunday? Well, it doesn't have to be Sunday, but as long as everyone agrees it's the same day, then it can work. Because you don't want half the people showing up to work, but then the other half staying home, and then on Thursday, it's the other way around. It wouldn't work very well if everyone picked their own day.

• 29:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  If everyone picks the same day.

• 29:10Dax Shepard?

  Productivity's only going down by one seventh.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And different cultures have different conventions. So in Judaism, it's Saturday, which is the Sabbath. In Christianity, it was Sunday. Now, of course, both days, we call it the weekend. It doesn't matter which days they are.

• 29:24Dax Shepard?

  Let's hope the Muslims can get Friday, so we can have a full three-day.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Three-day weekend.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Would be really good.

• 29:31Dax Shepard?

  Someone's gonna claim Friday.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  A wedding ceremony, when do you stop treating someone as available? A coming-of-age ceremony, like a bar mitzvah?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  It's true. We all just decide, once these two people stand in front of a whole group, there's an end at that point.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Everyone treats them as committed to each other.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  And crucially, it's another common knowledge generator. Like a public protest, like blurring something out, namely. They're up there, everyone's watching, and everyone is watching everyone watching. And it's also ratified by a ring that everyone can see. So a lot of things from your Anthro 101 curriculum, why do these cultures do these weird things? Seems to make no sense. Well, it kind of makes no sense that they're doing it that way, but it does make sense that they're doing it some way, and they all agree on what that way is.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 30:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  And so a lot of cultural conventions, starting with language. So why does the word coffee mean coffee? Why does the word desk mean desk? Very few words are automatopiac. It's not like they sound like what they're representing. They're conventions, but that's good enough. As long as everyone knows that the sound coffee means the concept coffee, then I can order a coffee and I can expect to get it. And we do that 50,000 times with every one of the words in the English language. Every one of them is a convention that works because of common knowledge.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 30:52Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  I love matching pajamas. I'm literally going to be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate, be cozy.

• 31:27Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone, too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  I have a bunch of different pajama sets. One of my favorite is the organic cotton sleep long sleeve set.

• 31:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay, tell me more.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So comfortable, very chic, too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multi-purpose this and look super cute.

• 31:57Dax Shepard?

  Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  All the nostalgia, none of the discomfort. Shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select Armchair Expert in the dropdown menu that follows. If you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.

• 32:26Dax Shepard?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Every family has that one holiday tradition nobody actually enjoys, but everyone keeps doing because stopping it would feel like a federal offense. For me, it was a specific meal situation that I will not name because my family listens. But at some point, you have to ask yourself, am I doing this because I love it or because I'm afraid of what happens if I don't?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yes, and that question applies to so much more than the holidays. I think a lot of us carry these invisible rules about how we're supposed to spend the holidays, who we're supposed to see, what it's supposed to look like. And when you start unpacking that with a therapist, you realize half of your stress is coming from rules you didn't even write.

• 33:05Dax Shepard?

  This is where BetterHelp can be a great resource during the holidays. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, which means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recs.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I just love therapy. I've been avoiding it recently, or not avoiding it, but I was like, oh, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy, I haven't canceled, canceled, canceled. But then I-

• 33:32Dax Shepard?

  You start feeling it.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, because then I had it this past weekend and I was like, oh, my God. And just thank God, thank God for her. Yeah.

• 33:40Dax Shepard?

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• 34:24Dax Shepard?

  who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

• 34:29Speaker 04

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• 35:09Speaker 04

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• 35:27Dax Shepard?

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

• 36:09Speaker 01

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• 36:10Dax Shepard?

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• 36:21Dax Shepard?

  Are you a frustrated, non-practicing linguist? All throughout your book, someone might easily think you are a linguist more than a psychologist.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I'm a psychologist by training and by occupation, but I am fascinated by language.

• 36:33Dax Shepard?

  There's so many clues into our psychology, right?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. So I wrote an earlier book, which is what spawned this book called The Stuff of Thought, Language as a Window into Human Nature. And that book had a chapter called Games People Play on why we don't just say what we mean. Why is there so much beating around the bush and euphemism and shilly-shallying and weasel words? And that's what eventually led to when everyone knows that everyone knows. Cause the answer that I came up with, I'll just give some examples.

• 37:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I love the Netflix and chill.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  You want to come up for Netflix and chill? Most people know nowadays that doesn't mean you want to come up to just stream a movie and relax.

• 37:08Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Chill's gonna involve some romance, probably.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Romance itself is the euphemism.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 37:15Dax Shepard?

  Eventually we'll get down to the F-word, I guess.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's happening? Why can't we just say it?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  It used to be for a century, the cliche was, would you like to come up and see my etchings?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Sexual come-ons are often veiled. Notice it's not even a case of plausible deniability. If he says, you want to come up for Netflix and chill, you know, she's a grown woman. She knows what he means.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Still, that's better than, you want to come up and have sex. Better in the sense that it is more comfortable, more considerate. If she turns it down.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  It's less painful.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 37:46Dax Shepard?

  What I was reading, which is so fascinating is there's plausibility of misunderstanding built into it, which is she knows, he knows Netflix and chill, but she could not be hip to that term. That's like one safety net we give both people.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  The real safety net is she could think, he may think that I'm ignorant to that term. And he could think. She might think that I think that she's ignorant to the term. It's not so plausible that either one doubts that the other one knows. I mean, they're grownups. Yeah. In fact, I did a study that when you ask people to witness dialogues and you say, it could be a threat, could be a come on, could be a bribe. Does the hearer know what the speaker is up to? Even with indirect weasel words, hints, the listener knows what the speaker is up to. But the difference is the listener doesn't know that the speaker knows that the listener knows. And the speaker doesn't know that the listener knows that he knows. And so there's no common knowledge. And I think that more plausibly, because grownups know how to interpret language. It doesn't pass the giggle test.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And why does it still work? I argue that the reason that it works is it gives you deniability of common knowledge. You don't know that the other person knows that you know, even though you do know. And it's the common knowledge that's the basis for friendships, for sexual relationships, for romance.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  It feels like anything that has vulnerability attached to it.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, a boss and a supervisor.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  To friends. What makes friends friends? It's not like you sign a contract. Do you think that we're friends? And why do you think you're friends? Because, you know, I think that you think that we're friends.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And that's what a social relationship is. And blurting something out changes the common knowledge and therefore changes the relationship. When you want to not change a relationship, but you still have information that you want to slip through, that's when you use politeness, euphemism.

• 39:33Dax Shepard?

  Finishing up Netflix and Chill. What I thought was fascinating was the sentence that was, "They can maintain a platonic relationship in the wake of Netflix and Chill, but I'd like to come upstairs and have sex with you." We cannot participate in this illusion that it's platonic anymore.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. Permanently changes the nature of the relationship. You know, as we sometimes say, some things once said can't be unsaid. And the reason I claim is where they're said, they generate common knowledge. Common knowledge is what determines your relationship.

• 39:59Dax Shepard?

  This just proves that we figure out how to operate in nuance, even though everyone's so opposed to it and you're so drawn to everything that's definitive. We have all these mechanisms, like we want to be able to speak in nuance. Maybe I just advanced on you, but also I can act like it was a joke and it's a silly word I use. We have figured out how to dance in that murky nuance.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  A lot of our mental life is thinking about what the other person thinks about what we think about what they think. And a lot of fiction, a lot of movies, a lot of novels are driven by the viewer or the reader trying to get into the characters' heads while they're trying to get into other characters' heads. Sometimes also trying to get into the author's head, like a mystery. The whole point of it is like a workout of the mental muscles that you use in recursive mentalizing. That is to say, thinking about other people, thinking about other people, thinking. That's kind of what makes mysteries so engaging.

• 40:55Dax Shepard?

  Yes, we're drawn to that. We know that that's an important thing to understand. Okay, so if direct speech is the quickest way to common knowledge, and then in the absence of that, we can have conventions, ladies first every other time. Talk to us about focal points and how those get brought in to bridge this.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a focal point or common salience is when you don't have common knowledge. Let's say you're incommunicado, your cellphone goes dead, you just haven't been able to meet and agree on things. You don't have a convention that is some rule that you can fall back on, then what do you do? So this goes back to probably the first discussion of common knowledge from a brilliant man named Thomas Schelling. He said, imagine a couple gets separated in New York. This was in 1960, so cellphones were yet to be invented. How might they find each other? As we talked about before, they can't try to get into each other's heads about where they're likely to go. But he said a good solution would be they both go to the clock at Grand Central Station at noon. Not because necessarily it was convenient, not where they got separated,

• 41:57Speaker 02

  but if anything is going to pop into someone's mind, that would be just because it sticks out.

• 42:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  You are trying to think of what's going on in other people's heads.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  While knowing they're doing the same thing. And pop-out salience, conspicuity is a solution to that problem. Now, the thing is, it's not just in this somewhat contrived case of being separated, but there are lots of cases where focal points solve human problems. So an example is two people are bargaining. Now, when you bargain, you know, let's say you're bickering with a car dealer. There's a range of prices where you can make a profit. There's a range of prices that you're willing to pay the car is worth. And you both want to come to any agreement rather than walking away. Because you really do want the car, you're willing to pay for it. He wants to sell it to you. How do you decide on a price? So what people often do is they split the difference. Or they settle on a round number.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  As Schelling put it, the salesman who says that his rock bottom price on the car is $37,062 is pleading to be relieved of $7,062. Uh huh, yeah, yeah. So a round number, splitting the difference is a focal point. That makes a difference in international relations. Sometimes wars have been ended when a diplomat or mediator suggests some focal point that they agree on. So for example, the Bosnian war was ended by Richard Holbrook. When he said Bosnia hurts the Govana, we're going to divide it so that it's 51% Bosnians and Croats, 49% Serbs. Where do those numbers come from? Well, if Bosnians felt that a country called Bosnia has got to be majority Bosnia, and

• 43:29Speaker 02

  there are all those Serbs there, and they're going to fight and kill if they're worried about their interests, the 51-49 was a way of satisfying the idea it's got to be majority Bosnia without too much ethnic cleansing. And there are other focal points like that in international relations that could make a difference, including a really important one, which we're now seeing threatened, is lines on a map. Going back to our discussion of progress from earlier in the conversation, one of the things I wrote about my previous books was the fact that there are fewer wars since World War II than there were in the centuries before. In particular, the great powers didn't go to war with each other. Why? Well, one reason is the world decided to freeze the borders on the map. Even if they were illogical, even if they ran in the middle through territories, they separated ethnic groups. The lines are there.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  If we accept them, it prevents endless bickering and sometimes invasions and sometimes ethnic cleansings. They may be illogical, but the fact that they're there makes them focal points and it's at least something that we can agree on. You're kind of going on something, anything, instead of the debate would be endless as to where the line should be. Yes. I can see those lines, you can see those lines, I know you can see those lines.

• 44:37Dax Shepard?

  You grew up seeing those lines.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  You grew up seeing those lines, exactly.

• 44:39Dax Shepard?

  You already accepted these lines for some period.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Or sometimes, here's another example. The reason that the 1967 lines won't work is that a lot of the Jewish areas of Jerusalem expanded into what used to be Jordan.

• 44:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  And so it wouldn't make sense to lop them off. But then, another focal point is, okay, so for every few percentage points of old Jordan that we allow Israel to keep permanently, there has to be the same number of percentage points carved out of the old Israel that will be in a new Palestinian state. And this is all part of the good old days when people actually talked about a two-state solution and US presidents tried to get the two sides to agree on it. That's the way the agreement would have worked. Again, it doesn't necessarily make any sense. Who's to say that what Israel had in 1949 is the right amount of territory? There's no answer to the question, what's the right amount of territory? There is an answer to the question, can everyone see a certain division of territory and know that the other guy sees it? So again, you've got a focal point, going back to your question.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Why is gerrymandering allowed in this country? If it's the antithesis of that, it's like, you can just move the lines anytime you want.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  That's a good point. I hadn't thought to make the connection. But yeah, one of the reasons that gerrymandering is considered outrageous.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Is that it is not a focal point, it's done expediently.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  It is done to maximize the number of representatives that the side doing the gerrymandering can claim.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:57Dax Shepard?

  I want to talk about how these concepts apply to a few different categories, and then I want to save a tiny bit of time to throw you into the lion's den of popular issues we deal with that I love watching you navigate. But how do these focal points affect the stock market?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  A lot of economic phenomena, in particular, ones that aren't just predictable from boring supply and demand and investment. You buy a stock because they're building a factory, they'll make widgets, people will buy the widgets, they'll make a profit, you get a share of the profit. Or they'll plant seeds for a forest, the forest will grow, they cut down the wood, it's wood. They sell the wood, they make a profit. That's kind of the way you think economies should go, but of course, it's not the way the stock market goes.

• 46:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it started that way, but it didn't take long to.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  No, because the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, he likened it to a beauty contest, but not a standard beauty contest like the old Miss Rheingold ads that ran in American magazines for many years, where there were six faces and you picked the prettiest. Here, he imagined there were six faces, it doesn't matter how many. But the prize goes to the person who picks the face that the most other people pick. Oh, wow. And all of them are picking the face that they think the most other people will pick. So he says to solve that, you can't just look at beauty. You've got to get in the heads of other people. He said speculative investing is kind of like that. You're picking the stock that you think other people are going to pick, increasing demand in the future and driving the price up above and beyond its actual productive value.

• 47:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, without almost any acknowledgement of whether the company itself is destined for bigger profits or not. That's not really the goal. You're incentivized to sell your stock for more, even if the company collapses.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. As long as you could find, as investment analysts put it, a greater fool.

• 47:37Dax Shepard?

  A greater fool.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  And so you get phenomena like meme stocks where some influencer who just has a following. There's a guy named Roaring Kitty.

• 47:46Dax Shepard?

  Who's the game stock?

• 47:47Speaker 02

  So this is a moribund business, bricks and mortar video games.

• 47:50Dax Shepard?

  Failing, losing money.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  He talks it up on his social media feed. Then everyone buys it because they know that all these people are following this feed and they're going to want to buy it up. And so it goes through the roof. Oh, wow.

• 48:02Dax Shepard?

  So there's such a variety of personal power over shaping common knowledge.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  If someone is public.

• 48:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Like what a disproportionate amount of sway over common knowledge certain people have.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  And they know that it can be too much power. And that's why you get the chairman of the Fed or other economic czars having to watch their words very carefully. So Alan Greenspan famously said, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If you think I've been clear, you've misunderstood what I said. Because he knew that any little hint that he gave of, say, the economy getting better, getting worse, veering toward recession.

• 48:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, for the last six years, it's been, is he going to lower the interest rate? So any adjective he uses could send a huge surge in the stock market.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  So I quote Alfred Kahn, who was Jimmy Carter's inflation zeal. And he said, the president has told me, you know, I've never used the word depression because using the word can actually make it happen. So I agree, I won't use the word depression. But you know, we're in danger of having the worst banana in 50 years.

• 49:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, Super Bowl ads, these are fascinating. It didn't even occur to me that public and private knowledge are at play in what products people advertise. So just talk about the power of the Super Bowl.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Well, here I owe a lot to a political scientist named Michael Chua here in Los Angeles at UCLA, who wrote a book, kind of a predecessor to my When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, called Rational Ritual, where he talked about the Super Bowl phenomenon. The phenomenon is, there are products that can't succeed until lots of people adopt them, but why would people adopt them unless lots of other people adopt them?

• 49:42Dax Shepard?

  Like, they'll only work at scale.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Introducing a new credit card, like when the Discover card was introduced. It was a really good credit card. There were cash back bonuses and good terms. The thing is, why would you get a Discover card if you didn't think any vendors were going to accept it? And why would a vendor accept a new card if they didn't think a lot of customers would have it? Yes. Or the best example from Chua is the Apple Macintosh computer. 1984, everyone was using IBM PCs, and I grew up on that kind of computer. They had 24 rows of 80 characters, and you had to memorize commands like runder, colon, dot, foo bar, slash.

• 50:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  And if you get one character wrong, it jokes. You had to remember where you kept all your files. They were pain, and that's why personal computers didn't take off. Well, Steve Jobs supposedly stole an idea from Xerox, which is the WIMP computer, Windows Icons Menu Pointing Device, like a mouse.

• 50:34Dax Shepard?

  What an acronym for that.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's clearly a better way for ordinary people to use a computer. The problem is, who's going to buy a Macintosh until they knew that enough other people were buying Macintosh? Because then you might be an orphan, there may not be tech support, the price is going to stay high.

• 50:50Dax Shepard?

  No software designed for it.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  No software, no peripherals, no consumables. So Apple, they tried it originally with Lisa, and it flopped. They then had the stroke of genius. What if we advertise it on an ad that everyone will talk about on the Super Bowl? Where the Super Bowl is something that everyone watches and everyone knows that everyone watches. It's almost like a holy day on the calendar.

• 51:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  So they hired Ridley Scott of Alien and Blade Runner fame. And he directed the most expensive and probably famous commercial in the history of television, the 1984 ad, where it capitalized on the fact that that year, 1984, was of course the name of Orwell's famous novel. So you had a kind of dystopian scene from 1984 of these sackcloth clad drudges filing in. Everything was black and white and there was a corporate guy issuing drivel. And then intercut, there was a scene of an athletic young woman in a tank top and red shorts, carrying a mallet, running and you go back and forth between the corporate meeting and the lemon. And she bursts into the room, she hammer throws the mallet onto the screen. It explodes in a fireball.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  And then creeping up on the screen, it's on January 20th, Apple will introduce the Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. That was the ad, ran exactly once.

• 52:06Dax Shepard?

  Nothing about the product.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Nothing about the product.

• 52:08Dax Shepard?

  Didn't explain Windows, didn't explain the mouse.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  But what it did is it kind of cut the knot. So now, since everyone knew that the Macintosh was a big thing, they could take a chance at buying one and they wouldn't have to be an early adopter. Likewise with the Discover card. Now, this can also work for other products that depend on these kind of network effects, other people adopting them.

• 52:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that they have cachet or some kind of perceived, the brand has value or prestige.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Sneakers are sneakers, but sometimes people think, I wear Nikes as opposed to Adidas. What generates that feeling? Well, if you advertise it in public where other people know what a Nike wearer is like or what a Bud drinker is like, then they're likelier to identify with a product. And so what Schwein showed, so this isn't just a story. Showed that for products that depend on network effects, websites where you go to the website only if enough other people are going to it, tech standards, things with brand loyalty that people consume in public like beer and sneakers.

• 53:07Dax Shepard?

  Cars, Mercedes.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Cars, yeah, as opposed to things that people consume in private, like batteries, breakfast cereal, underwear. What he showed was that companies are willing to pay more per viewer and more likely to advertise in the Super Bowl. And advertisers charge more per viewer, not just the size of the audience, but the fact that the Event is common knowledge for the Super Bowl for those products as opposed to the products that don't depend on network effects.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  And more recent example, this is decades after Truett published his book, is the year before last, the Super Bowl is sometimes called the Crypto Bowl because so many of the ads were high concept ads for crypto exchanges.

• 53:46Dax Shepard?

  This is 2022?

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Matt Damon with a backdrop of astronauts and mountain climbers and Larry David playing himself at different points in history, rejecting various innovations like fork, like the toilet, like democracy. And the punchline was, they tell him about FTX crypto exchange. He says, nah, I don't think so. And I'm never wrong. The joke being-

• 54:07Dax Shepard?

  He's always wrong.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  He's always wrong.

• 54:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  I mean, the irony was, he was right, because it was FTX, which is the Sam Benjamin Fried exchange. But the idea was, as with the Macintosh, they were not advertising the benefits of crypto, like the government can't confiscate it, it won't be a victim of hyperinflation, you can buy weapons with it. It was simply, don't be left out. Other people are doing it, therefore, they're going to bid up the price. It'll be worth more in a year than it is now. It's a purely speculative investment. And to gin up, again, going back to the Keynesian beauty contest, guessing what other people are going to guess, other people are going to guess, the Super Bowl could do that.

• 54:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I mean, that's my problem with crypto. There's no there there.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Well, they're selling, it feels like being on a team, having a group identity.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Then it's like the Nike sneakers.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  In addition to the bidding up the price.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that happens in politics, too.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. So I talk about that on the American primaries. It's a bizarre custom. It starts off in New Hampshire and Iowa. They're hardly a sample of the United States, but everyone knows they're important because what they do is they generate common knowledge of who has a chance of winning. So let's say there's 10 candidates. Because you can only vote for one, people say, well, I don't want to throw away my vote on who's going to come in, you know, seventh versus eighth.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Even if I think that that person would be the best president, I'll be throwing away my vote. I want to vote for someone who's either going to be number one or number two, so my vote counts. How do they determine that? Well, they try to guess who other people are going to vote for.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  And they're doing the same thing, which is why in the primary season, minor gaffes and indiscretions and things that are utterly meaningless can actually determine who gets nominated and who doesn't. In the case of Biden in 2020, no one knew who the nominee was going to be. Then suddenly- Before the South Carolina primary, Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden. I don't even know how many people have heard of Jim Clyburn. But the media played it up like this was big news. And then that gave Biden the momentum that he needed. Conversely, and I say common knowledge giveth and taketh away in 2024. Everyone knew that Biden was declining. Yeah. And did everyone know that everyone else knew? Well, when he had that ill-fated debate with Trump in which he kept stumbling, the difference wasn't so much the number of people who thought he was impaired.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  That did go up, but only by a little bit. A majority of people already thought he was impaired.

• 56:23Dax Shepard?

  I was saying in January on this show, and I got some heat. I was like, guys, this can't be our candidate. And they were like, shut up, he's doing a great job. And like, I was just too early on the one you can say it out loud.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. But then when it was in that heavily watched debate, then it was common knowledge.

• 56:39Dax Shepard?

  He couldn't deny anymore. Okay, money is fascinating. I like this whole chapter on donating.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 56:46Dax Shepard?

  If you could do a loose hierarchy that this famous rabbi came up with.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Maimonides.

• 56:51Dax Shepard?

  You then studied it in real time, in present day, and it pretty much holds true.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is kind of my earliest encounter with the idea of thinking about thoughts. Because when I was in Jewish Sunday School as a kid, we were taught Maimonides' ladder of righteousness, or charity, depending on how it's translated, where the righteousness of a gift does not just depend on the cash value of the gift, but also on the circumstances of giving, in particular, the states of knowledge of the donor and the recipient. Now, the highest level, to give him credit, was you teach someone a trade, you give them a starter loan, you go into partnership, so he doesn't even need charity in the future.

• 57:27Dax Shepard?

  You fix them, basically.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, you fix them. I think everyone would agree, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Okay. Then the other rungs were the interesting ones. The next one down was double-blind. The rich person puts money into a community chest, goes away, the poor person comes and retrieves it, donor doesn't know the recipient, or vice versa. Level below that. The donor knows the beneficiary but not vice versa. So a rich person leaves cash on the doorstep of a poor person, goes away in the dead of night. Poor person wakes up the next morning, there's the donation. The donor knows the beneficiary but not vice versa. That's not quite as righteous as neither knows the other.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Then one level down from that, the other way around. The recipient knows the donor but not vice versa. So imagine that a rich person walks around with a bunch of coins in his backpack and the poor person picks them out. The donor doesn't know the beneficiary, but the beneficiary does know. That's a little worse. Worst of all is rich person puts money into the hand of the poor person. Common knowledge.

• 58:27Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Now, this is incredible because, as you point out, what's the fucking difference? If the impact is that you save right there. But I know, I am obsessed with the 1800s patrician class. I've read all these biographies. I love Rockefeller because he didn't put his name on anything. Like, Chicago University is his, we don't know that. His research foundation, we don't know that. Whereas Carnegie, he put his name on absolutely everything. And I'm like, yeah, he's better.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we all do that, but why? From the poor person's point of view, you know, who cares?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Why is it bad if the poor person knows?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Well, you're right. And in our studies, people putting themselves in the shoes of the poor person don't care. They just know, the more cash, the better.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Right, if the poor person is picking the money out of the rich person's...

• 59:10Dax Shepard?

  Well, they're just saying the fact that the guy, although he won't know who he helped, he will be observed giving.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Here's our explanation as to why. We verified that people more or less followed Maimonides' intuition. They agree that a common knowledge gift is less righteous than a double-blind gift. That is, the person is more generous, is more likely to donate in the future.

• 59:32Dax Shepard?

  You should give the Curb Your Enthusiasm example.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Rabbi Larry Ben-David, another great Jewish thinker. And actually, he is a great Jewish thinker. So the episode was Larry donates money for the wing of a conservation nonprofit, and it's named after him. Carved in stone, donated by Larry David. And the other wing says donated by anonymous. Now people are starting to gossip, hey, you know who anonymous is?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  It's Ted Danson.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Ted Danson, what a great guy.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  And Larry's really, this is his rivalry, this, I didn't know that you could donate anonymously and people would know about it. I would have taken that option, okay?

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fantastic.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  That captures the paradox, that he got the benefits of the reputation for generosity and the reputation for not caring about reputation.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Even though he did benefit from it.

• 1:00:22Dax Shepard?

  I mean, what we want out of people is hysterical.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:00:25Dax Shepard?

  And it all comes from being like a hundred-member troop of people.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:29Dax Shepard?

  We want them to be benevolent, but egoless.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but sometimes it bites them. You know, there are people who give a ton of money away who aren't saying it, like billionaires, and then people outwardly and publicly hate them and they don't know. Well, they're also giving away a ton of stuff. They're just not really talking about that.

• 1:00:48Dax Shepard?

  Well, there's also the compelling argument and effective altruism, which is by people seeing other donations, it does encourage them to. It's contagious. So you might be doing more good for the cause by owning it.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And ironically, there's another medieval rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Ben Avraham. Contra Maimonides, he argued exactly that. There's a righteousness in publicizing exactly because it'll incentivize others. So Bill Gates, probably the world's biggest philanthropist, he's not anonymous and for a reason, namely, he can cajole, shame his fellow billionaires.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Dax Shepard?

  Also, he's an example of like, look what I did and you will live. You can give away this mass fortune, you'll be just fine.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  And his fellow billionaires would then be keeping up with the bills.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  With the Gateses.

• 1:01:36Dax Shepard?

  No, it's one of the most genius aspects of his already genius foundation.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I talk in the book about how the opposite was Steve Jobs, who was criticized for not giving anything away. Then, in an incident worthy of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, Bono outed him posthumously, said, oh, no, no, he really did give a lot, but he just was not the kind who cared about his reputation. And so I'll said, oh, Jobs, what a great guy.

• 1:01:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, better than Bill Gates.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Like Ted Danson, although Jobs gave away one thousandth of what Gates gave away.

• 1:02:05Dax Shepard?

  And had probably one millionth of the impact because he did it in this also

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Secret way.

• 1:02:10Dax Shepard?

  methodology that yields results.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Right. So anyway, those are some of the paradoxes that I talk about.

• 1:02:16Dax Shepard?

  I want to read the list because in that section, you're quoting somebody.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Oh, the social paradoxes. David Pinnsoft deserves the credit.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  It's just people of means judging other people, though, as you say. The poor person is not judging any of this. They want the money and that's it.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. So we show that in our studies.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  If you take the point of view of the recipient, they don't care. If you take the point of view of a third party observing it, they care.

• 1:02:43Dax Shepard?

  But also you can be poor and hate the rich people.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Well, that's true also.

• 1:02:47Dax Shepard?

  For not giving enough money. Yeah, if they're not getting something from them. This list of phenomena by David Pinnz is great. We try to gain status by not caring about status. We rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else does. We show humility to prove we're better than other people. Fuck, that one is so prevalent right now. We don't care what people think and we want them to think this. We make anonymous donations to get credit for not caring about getting credit.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  That's my monies. That's Larry David, I should say.

• 1:03:18Dax Shepard?

  We briefly defy social norms that people will praise us. I'm the most guilty of that one. I'm like, oh my God, I'm repugnant. Aren't those great?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  They're so good.

• 1:03:27Dax Shepard?

  14 of them, and they were all delicious.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  The hypocrisy.

• 1:03:30Dax Shepard?

  I want to talk about why we cooperate, mutual reciprocity and mutualism.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm glad you brought that up because this is kind of zooming up to really the big picture. What are we talking about here? This isn't just humans, this is any organism. How can one organism benefit another? Well, there's one possibility is that it incurs a cost. And we call that altruism in the technical biological sense. And Richard Dawkins wrote a book, The Selfish Gene, now 50 years old, almost. Classic book. And it's interesting because it raises a puzzle. You'd think that evolution would only select for selfishness. Why should it ever happen that one organism should be nice to another? Most animals aren't, unless they're related. But you do have things where they take turns grooming each other, they share food. And Dawkins had two explanations. One is if they're related, they share genes.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  So any gene that makes you altruistic is helping a copy of itself inside that relative. Or reciprocity, if you trade favors, then everyone could win in the long run. But a lot of good deeds in the animal kingdom aren't altruistic in this technical sense of you pay a cost when you benefit someone else. But in some cases, each one benefits the other. So an oxpecker bird picks

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Ticks off the back of an ox or a zebra. It's good for the oxpecker because they get a meal, all those yummy bugs. It's good for the ox because he's tormented by fewer pests and so everyone wins.

• 1:04:53Dax Shepard?

  There's no sacrifice made on either end.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  I mean, except for the ticks, but we're not worried about that. That's sometimes called mutualism. There are lots of cases, cleaner fish, symbiosis, where everybody wins. And so there, there isn't the same evolutionary paradox because if everyone wins, then of course they can both evolve. There's a different dilemma. And the dilemma isn't motivational, like, oh, is he going to cheat me, exploit me? Is he going to take but not give when it's his turn? Is there going to be treachery? Is there going to be guilt? All that drama, which I think is very real. But in these cases, it's a different problem and that is getting on the same page. It's more of a cognitive problem. And here we go back to our couple rendezvousing, all these other cases where it's good if everyone is on the same page, but how do they get there if each has to know that the first one knows that the second knows that the first one knows ad infinitum?

• 1:05:40Dax Shepard?

  Function's relying on both cooperation and coordination.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Coordination, yes.

• 1:05:45Dax Shepard?

  And this is really solving the coordination issue.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. The book is about coordination. And as with human focal points, like meeting at Grand Central at noon, some animals have evolved without much cognition, thinking, even a brain, they solve the problem with focal points. So I give the example of the annual Great Barrier Reef Sex Festival, as biologists call it.

• 1:06:05Dax Shepard?

  Tell me more, I want to plan a trip around this.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, you gotta be there.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  So coral have this problem. They're stuck to the reef. They can't get out and get around. How do they mate? They can release their sperm or eggs into the water and hope for the best. That's really wasteful if you're doing it 24/7. So it'd be best if they could all somehow agree on what day to do it. But it's not enough for one of them to think, hey, January 1st or eclipse or whatever would be a good day. Unless all the others agreed, why would they agree? Now, of course, we're using agree metaphorically here. They don't have brains.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  So there's nothing they can think with. So it's all a question of what evolves that works in practice. What works for them is a fixed number of days after the full moon. Say six days after the full moon, that's when they release the sperm. That's when they release the eggs. And so it's concentrated enough they can find each other.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:06:54Dax Shepard?

  Not to get too in the weeds, but are they responding to the gravity or the light?

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Light.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  And how they plan six days?

• 1:07:01Dax Shepard?

  They hit their stopwatch.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  How do they know what days are?

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Well, there are a bunch of molecular clocks.

• 1:07:04Dax Shepard?

  They have a circadian rhythm like ours.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Exactly, circadian rhythm. And so the full moon is their focal point, their clock at Grand Central, and they solve the coordination problem.

• 1:07:13Dax Shepard?

  Sorry, I'm too distracted by this. But what happens on a cloudy night? Does it fuck up the whole system?

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Good question. I don't know.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Maybe they have more receptors to that.

• 1:07:22Dax Shepard?

  Are they gonna tell cloud?

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  It's off Australia. It's not that much. There's not that much clouds.

• 1:07:25Dax Shepard?

  You have a plus with really clear skies down there.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Or maybe they don't even need clear sky, but just a difference. And maybe just the difference between the night before, or I don't know the answer.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:07:44Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff. But there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left. What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working. Not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, is different. It's already right there, inside your email, your docs, your browser. You don't go to it. It's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important? It flags what doesn't add up before it leaves your hands.

• 1:08:29Dax Shepard?

  It knows your style, your workflows, and it just backs you up without getting in the way. A thought partner that's already up to speed, at your service, not after your job. So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go. From the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com. We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:09:05Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:09:33Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:52Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. We are supported by Walden University. You know that feeling when you've been thinking about making a move, going after the degree, the promotion, the thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to someday? Walden University is built for that moment. For over 50 years, Walden has helped working professionals get the W, the knowledge, the skills, and the confidence to create real change in their careers and communities. Their programs are designed around your life, not the other way around. With Tempo Learning, available in select programs, there are no rigid schedules or set weekly deadlines. You move at your own pace.

• 1:10:36Dax Shepard?

  And Walden's faculty aren't just academics, they're practitioners who bring real world experience into everything they teach. From your first class to career coaching and beyond, Walden is your partner the whole way. Take the first step and learn at a pace that works for you. Visit waldenu.edu. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by CHEV. We get support by Peloton. You know that feeling when you're spiraling over a problem and you just can't figure it out? When that happens to me, I need a change of pace. And I've found that running is the best way. It takes my brain out of the driver's seat, and I come back with a fresh perspective. Running can be freeing and cathartic, and Peloton helps you feel.

• 1:11:21Dax Shepard?

  All of that. And now that feeling fits wherever you need it with the new Peloton Tread Flex. It's movable and foldable, designed to fit your life. So next time you feel stuck, you can go for a run literally anywhere, whether that's in your office, living room, or even the attic. Plus, they have classes with expert instructors and programs to meet you at any level and keep you moving. Let yourself run. Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onepeloton.com.

• 1:11:55Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now I'm throwing you to the wolves.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:11:58Dax Shepard?

  I heard you talking about COVID, and I don't know why this is a bit of a pet project of mine, but I guess as I feel the tension in this country politically, what scares me the most is what seems to be a complete breakdown or failure for either side to acknowledge that the other one has an occasional good point, or that each side can't admit when they error. And I think that's dramatically reduced kind of the reputation of different parties and both sides. And COVID, I think, is a big black mark for my side. And I heard you speaking about it. So what was happening in COVID, do you think?

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  The first thing to keep in mind is that we started out, everyone was ignorant.

• 1:12:38Dax Shepard?

  We're scared and ignorant.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  There's nothing to base anything off.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  It was a new pathogen.

• 1:12:42Dax Shepard?

  We could all be dead in six months.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  We know that pandemics can kill a lot of people, way more than wars. History has been driven by pandemics that we often forget about. Empires can fall. When I was working on Better Angels of Our Nature and plotting trends in violence, I looked at life expectancy over the course of the 20th century. And it goes up, and then there's a big notch in the teens, then it went up again. I said, oh, jeez, that's the tragedy of war, World War I. Wrong. It was the Spanish Flu. Killed way more people than World War I. There's stuff to worry about. No one knew. How was it transmitted? And the problem with, I think, a lot of the public health experts is they overplayed their state of knowledge. They said, first, masks don't matter, then you got to wear a mask. It's spread by droplets,

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  so disinfect surfaces, then it's spread by aerosols, plexiglass barriers went up, the social distancing. Now, it's not immoral to suggest those things in a state of knowledge and say, We don't know, but at this point, we're hedging our bets. The downside is so bad.

• 1:13:43Dax Shepard?

  The worst case is this, so let's prepare for this. We're not sure if that's it, but let's prepare for that.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  And that is the scientific method. You're never certain of anything. You have a degree of credence that goes up or down with the evidence, but you're never certain. And if new evidence comes in and you gotta back off, that doesn't refute science, that is science. Yeah.

• 1:14:00Dax Shepard?

  Gets you closer.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, no one is infallible and no one is omniscient. That's kind of what science is all about. Yes. And I think the experts did not convey that enough. There was too much confidence, which meant that when they changed their mind, it looked like they were flip flopping, they were arbitrary. Also, what they didn't do, and this is something that scientists themselves can't do, is the cost benefit analysis. At its best, the scientists could say, if we have this policy, there'll be many more cases. But how many extra cases are worth, say, keeping a generation out of school for two years? Or all of the depression and anxiety or hit to the economy?

• 1:14:41Dax Shepard?

  Or how inequitable the distribution of who had to go to work and who didn't. If ever there was kind of an elitist policy accidentally, I think it was, that was like, you're essential, why?

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Because I want to get my UPS packages from Amazon.

• 1:14:54Dax Shepard?

  And I want to eat at that restaurant.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:56Dax Shepard?

  But my thinking job should be at home.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are basically two failures there. I devoted a chapter in my previous book, Rationality, to each one of them. One of them is calibrating your degree of confidence in an idea according to the strength of the evidence. Something that's called Bayesian reasoning. And the other is decision making under uncertainty and risk. Namely, given that you're not certain, no one's ever certain, we're not God. Given that there can be mistakes in both directions, there can be false alarms, that can be bad. There can be misses, that can be bad. How do you make the optimal decision, trading off the false alarms and the hits and the misses? And I think the people in charge didn't give enough attention to both of those dilemmas.

• 1:15:37Dax Shepard?

  They're all gonna come with a downside and an upside. It's a trade off, you're trying to do an analysis. But I would add a third category of issue, which was a kind of reckless deplatforming, demonetizing, canceling of anyone who was suggesting otherwise. I don't fault anyone for the approach. Makes total sense to me and I get it. Shutting down opposition.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  You're right. That's another problem. And that's a third problem, which is, given that we are all fallible, given that the only way we've bumbled our way toward any kind of progress is, people say things, other people tell them they're full of crap. If you disable that by saying there's some things you can't say, we might have false beliefs and no way of determining what they are.

• 1:16:21Dax Shepard?

  Somehow, our categorical nature has been most weaponized in that situation where if you were opposed to it, we had a clear distinction for you. You don't believe in science. Lock stop. So this is a fruitless endeavor for me to talk to you about it. That kind of wholesale write-off of people based on some wordage.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And the irony is, the whole thing about science is, it is a way of dealing with human fallibility, human ignorance.

• 1:16:50Dax Shepard?

  It's gotta be open to criticism.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  It's gotta be open to criticism. That's the way it works.

• 1:16:54Dax Shepard?

  It's a quintessential ingredient in the method.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Now, of course, it doesn't mean anyone can believe anything they want, as long as the evidence really does lean very strongly in one direction. But part of human nature that makes science so difficult and alien to a lot of people, including sometimes scientists themselves, is ideally, the idea is, facts don't care about your feelings. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. These are all vital, but these are not the way people naturally think. We naturally think, when it comes to big cosmic questions, why do bad things happen to good people? Why do wars start and revolutions and epidemics? We like to think, in modern times, well, we can answer those questions. We've got scientists, we've got journalists, we've got data specialists, we've got archives, we've got experiments. It's gonna be hard, but we can actually answer those questions. And so you ought to believe

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  only what the evidence points to. For most of human history, thousands of years, none of that existed. You could not find out. Ask, why did a plague happen? We're never gonna know. What's an uplifting myth that brings the people together and inspires us all? And the idea is, no, no, you can't just believe something because it makes you feel good. You believe it only if it's true. And if it's true and it makes you feel bad, you've still gotta believe it. I think that's the right attitude, but it's a deeply weird attitude. We don't naturally think that way.

• 1:18:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So, along those lines, what price do you think academia has paid for being

• 1:18:17Dax Shepard?

  Pretty explicitly left-leaning.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  It's a problem in a number of ways. One of them is just reputation. The confidence that people have in universities has been sinking. As Donald Trump has tried to cripple universities, there's not been enough pushback from the public. I mean, they should be saying, "Hey, these are the guys who are going to be finding cures for Parkinson's disease."

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  And treatments for paralysis.

• 1:18:40Dax Shepard?

  Alzheimer's.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  And Alzheimer's.

• 1:18:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, "Give us clean energy."

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Prosthesis for people who are paralyzed. Kneecapping the institutions that are going to give us that doesn't make any sense. But I think that some of the opposition has been muted, like, "Well, aren't universities just indoctrination camps for woke-ism?" So that's one problem. The other is universities just going about doing their business are going to be led into some errors if some opinions, you can't say that. Because the things that you can't say, well, they might be right. And even if they're not right, this is an argument that goes back to John Stuart Mill and his famous essay on liberty, which kind of made the classic case for free speech. Said the reason that there should be free speech is threefold. One of them is, the other guy might be right. The other is, the

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  truth might be somewhere in between. The third is, even if he's wrong, you'll have better reason to believe what you believe if you can explain why he's wrong. Now, universities have fallen down on those principles. You've got many departments where it's 100% left, and you know, the left isn't right about everything.

• 1:19:42Dax Shepard?

  No, as it turns out, no one is.

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. And you can point to a number of cases where I think academia kind of dug itself into a hole because it did not have people who were expressing another point of view.

• 1:19:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I am a liberal, and I want all those things to happen. And I want our universities to be funded, and I believe in the fourth estate and all those things. But I also think this criticism of elitism is legitimate. It's a realistic issue that I feel like our side's having a real hard time, or my side, I don't know what your side is, grappling with that.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, same side.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  I really struggle with it.

• 1:20:17Dax Shepard?

  Well, just if you're looking from the outside and you go, "These institutions are deeply liberal." We agree on that.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's also a talking point. I think the right is really pushing that talking point hard so that there is this, like... Ew, universities are liberal. I think that's part of the propaganda. It is, right? It's being pushed.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've written about this. I wrote an article called Harvard Derangement Syndrome. How I've been a big critic of Harvard, even though I'm a Harvard professor. They're fine with that.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Which is great.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  Which is great. I'm not just defending my team. I'll identify what the problems of Harvard are. But some of the attacks have been just out to lunch. Yeah, we've got some jargon-spewing leftists in the Department of Romance Languages. But, you know, we have free speech.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, they should be allowed to say what they want to say, too.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  But, you know, what does this have to do with the people who are studying antibiotic resistance or cancer metastasis? Or the mathematicians and cosmologists?

• 1:21:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  The image of the farthest out of the far out, people confuse with the entire university system.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  We talked about this before. He's in Nashville for a little bit, so I was there for the summer. And I got in the cab, and the driver is from Nashville, and he was talking about Nashville. And I said, oh, yeah, but I lived in LA for 15 years. And he was like, oh, I'm sorry. And I was like, if we said that in the reverse, you're elitist. I was like, why do you get to say it? I do think there's this, like, bias that we are so elite. And also, growing up in Georgia, I disagree.

• 1:21:49Dax Shepard?

  Though, I guess I mean, we acknowledge those are the elite institutions. They all result in higher income and a higher socioeconomic standing when you go to these elite universities. And if they're all very liberal, and then our policy in COVID is keeping all the rich, educated people in their house while the uneducated people are working and servicing them, you know, this starts to add up to a pretty legitimate point of view against the

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  But they're not all very liberal. I went to University of Georgia. It's not very liberal at all.

• 1:22:20Dax Shepard?

  But I think there are irrs towards Harvard and Yale.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  At Harvard, in the People's Republic of Cambridge, to the name of a really good neighborhood bar, by the way. A third of the faculty identify themselves as very liberal. Two-thirds don't. I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to push back against the cancel culture and the political correctness and so on. I did a little poll, how many of you would identify as conservative? And I got 60 professors, just in our group, who called themselves conservative, including some pretty famous ones, like George Mankew, who was George W. Bush's economic adviser. I don't think we have as much diversity as we should have. But it is not a monolith.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I didn't get any action on that one.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  There are some cases where a left-wing position was by and large right, and sometimes a right-wing position is by and large right. Markets really are better than a totally planned socialist communist economy.

• 1:23:14Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  History has told us that.

• 1:23:15Dax Shepard?

  The experiment's been run.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Also, if you have assistance for the poor, that is not going to drive you into serfdom, into totalitarianism, if you've got social security. So I think the left won that debate.

• 1:23:28Dax Shepard?

  Gay marriage, we've had a lot.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, the institution of marriage has not fallen apart as a result of gay marriage. And it has not led to people being able to marry their animals or to polygamy.

• 1:23:36Dax Shepard?

  Having black neighbors didn't kill your neighborhood. We've gotten it right a bunch.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but no one's infallible. Kind of expose ourselves to a universe of ideas and find out which ones are good.

• 1:23:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think the fear for me is, I think it's dangerous to think you know better.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Some people know better about some things. The thing is, they've got to prove it. And again, that's the whole thing about science, which people, including scientists themselves, can lose sight of. It's not a priesthood, they're not oracles. They have reasons. Why do you think such and such? Well, I'll show you. These are the experiments and these are the data. When you stop doing that, you're not doing science anymore.

• 1:24:08Dax Shepard?

  All right, last thing, I want to close on this because we're filled with a lot of pessimism surrounding this topic. And you're one of the few voices of very smart people that are saying, don't panic about AI. And the first thing I ever heard you talk about was simply this kind of way we came about, which is a competitive evolutionary framework. Dominance is rewarded, and we outcompeted a lot of things. But we're projecting that onto a machine.

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Dax Shepard?

  So tell me why we shouldn't be as terrified as some people are.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  AI could be abused like any technology could be. Are AI is going to turn us into pets or farm animals or wipe us out either intentionally or by accident? I don't think so. Because humans do those things. We did exterminate a lot of species. We enslaved other people, we conquered. But the thing is, humans are products of natural selection. That is, a process that works by competition. Whichever variant has the most descendants takes over. And so whatever competitive instincts led that to happen are there with us now. In the case of something that is designed by humans, not evolved by natural selection. There's no automatic reason to think that they should want to maximize their power,

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  maximize their well-being, they can pull their own plugs, unless you do something really stupid, like program them to make sure that they can't be turned off or that their own power is maximized. That would be a very stupid thing to build into an AI. Don't do that. There's no reason to think it'll just happen by itself.

• 1:25:36Dax Shepard?

  You refute this notion that because it's smarter, it can make itself smarter ad infinitum. We all kind of believe that it'll make itself smarter on its own, that there's some limit to that.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  Superintelligence or foom after the comic book sound effect of something just taking off. And since it'll happen exponentially, as soon as it passes that threshold, we'll be powerless to stop it. I don't think that intelligence is kind of a stuff that you just have more and more and more and more of. It's a gadget that solves certain problems, can be extended to solve other problems. But you've got to actually come up with new mechanisms for it to become smarter still. Granted, there was a big surprise in how much smarter AI got with scaling. That is, the AI awakening of about 10 years ago, when suddenly we got Siri and Google Translate,

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  and then the large language models, came largely because our ability to crunch numbers got so much more powerful thanks to GPUs, video game chips. Turns out you could re-purpose a video game chip to train an artificial intelligence neural network. So that was a big thing. And the fact that all of us for 20 years have been generating all this text. We've been writing Reddit posts and Facebook posts. So there's all this data to train these things on.

• 1:27:00Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  So that did lead to a big leap, just the sheer scale. But we've kind of run out of web, and you can even tell from the fact that for all the hoopla of GPT-5, it wasn't that different from GPT-4.5. It's not as if it keeps going up exponentially.

• 1:27:14Dax Shepard?

  I already wasn't using it to its capacity. I'll just say that.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Dax Shepard?

  Like, there was a better one. I was like, okay, I think I'm really just using it as Google for the most part.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Right. Well, there's a generational difference. Apparently, older people use it as semantic Google. That is, not just text, but ideas. Younger people, they say, are using it as companion.

• 1:27:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's troubling. But again, I'm on high alert for moral panics, and I feel like they abound everywhere you turn.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:27:38Dax Shepard?

  I lied to you. There was one other word I wanted you to explore a little bit, which is moralism. I just thought this is a good concept to point out because I feel like this is something everyone should police themselves about. Once your argument or your debate has, what I would say, devolved into your lock, sale, assessment of their character, we've got kind of problems. How does it work?

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the better angels of our nature, when I talk about why do people kill and injure and aggress? One category is just sheer exploitation. You make people slaves because before you had machines, that was a labor-saving device. Why do we eat animals? We don't hate the animals. We just like the taste of their flesh. So some amount of aggression is purely practical instrumental, but an awful lot is moral. As I put it, the world has far too much morality. So if you look at what Hitler did, what Stalin did, what Mao did, if you look at most homicides aren't to steal goods like shooting a clerk at a 7-Eleven. Most of it is revenge and honor. A guy disses you, you come back and you shoot him. And you think you're doing the right thing. Most murderers think they are being moral and that they're doing justice.

• 1:28:41Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  Not all, but that's a big category. So one of the reasons is, what is justice? Justice means you punish someone. That's a kind of aggression. It can give you a license to inflict harm on others, thinking you're doing the right thing. And one of the things, going back to when everyone knows that everyone knows, I talk about how common knowledge of a wrongdoer is a great way to form a coalition. That is, if you want to be on the winning side, you want to be part of a big, powerful group, you all agree that someone did something bad, and so you pile on, you mob. That is one of the surefire ways to join a majority coalition. And so sometimes you get phenomena. People have written about it, like Salem Witch Trials.

• 1:29:23Dax Shepard?

  Amanda Knox, recently.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  Amanda Knox, yeah. Where you pick out a victim that everyone can easily-

• 1:29:29Dax Shepard?

  Sacrificial lamb.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Is a terrifying phenomenon.

• 1:29:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, yes. We're all seem to be easily prone to that. Well, Stephen, once again, you've written an incredible book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. It's such an honor to get to chat with you occasionally. I hope we get to do it again.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. It's great fun to talk to you both.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Hi there. This is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica.

• 1:30:02Dax Shepard?

  Can I play the cutest thing?

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:30:04Dax Shepard?

  I came in from recording yesterday. We were recording for many hours.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:09Dax Shepard?

  And I walk into the house and I, I hear this. This is Delta.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  Good job. Good job. Okay.

• 1:30:33Dax Shepard?

  That's Delta learning the theme song of Mom's Car for her dad.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  I heard you asked and she delivered.

• 1:30:42Dax Shepard?

  That was a big-

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  It's very sweet.

• 1:30:45Dax Shepard?

  That was a big eye wellie moment to walk in the house and hear her playing that. Oh, this little fucking girl. What a little lady. What a little lady. We had such a fun day yesterday.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  What'd you guys do?

• 1:30:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, Mom's out of town. Mom was in Utah, I think, on work. And so I made an enormous batch of fresh spaghetti. And we all sat down as a family and ate our spaghetti and shared about our day. And then we watched a little Murders in the, Only Murders in the Building.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm behind, yeah.

• 1:31:27Dax Shepard?

  Then we watched a little Devil Wears Prada.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my favorite of all time.

• 1:31:32Dax Shepard?

  And then we went upstairs and we listened to Immense World and snuggled. And they both went to bed so peacefully.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:31:40Dax Shepard?

  And, oh, it was just the most lovely night. I really love when it's just the three of us sometimes, because I get all the attention.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Dax Shepard?

  And then this morning, I got so much attention.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  You brush your hair?

• 1:31:53Dax Shepard?

  Um, luckily, I didn't have to brush their hair.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  No, did they brush your hair?

• 1:31:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they did not brush my hair. Um, I don't brush my hair, as you know.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  That's one thing you can trick kids into doing is playing with your hair.

• 1:32:07Dax Shepard?

  I should have done that. They were good at snuggling, uh, for sure.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:32:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I didn't, because normally, we all lay together and I'll only get one of them, because Kristen has the other one.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:17Dax Shepard?

  But I had both of them in my nook, and it was heaven.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  That's very nice.

• 1:32:21Dax Shepard?

  And then they were both as excited as I was this morning, because when we woke up, it was raining. I was initially upset because, of course, I didn't take the leaf blower.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  You didn't? After all that?

• 1:32:32Dax Shepard?

  After all that, I thought we had escaped the rain. I thought it had been predicted for the daytime. And I'm like, oh, I said it on the fact check, like, oh, I got away with it.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Dax Shepard?

  Middle of the night, on one of my seven times waking up, I wake up and it's just pouring outside. But then in the morning, I got to open my door and meditate on my bed with the sound of rain. And the girls came in, they were dancing because it was raining, and then we listened to, "I love a rainy night."

• 1:33:00Dax Shepard?

  "I love a rainy night." You don't know that 80s song?

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  Uh, it's a good rain song.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:33:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was lovely.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so I feel like I've had an increase in dandruff.

• 1:33:12Dax Shepard?

  Increase or, or, or arrival? I don't, I don't associate you with having dandruff at all.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  I feel like sometimes I've had it before.

• 1:33:22Dax Shepard?

  Well, you had one of those classic Eric compliments.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Dax Shepard?

  Which is, go ahead and roll that out.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Uh, Amy was braiding my hair, and Eric said, "It's a good thing you don't have dandruff, because you'd really see it on your hair, because it's so dark." And I said, "Yeah, I do have it sometimes." He said, "Well, yeah, I did see one flake, that's why I thought it."

• 1:33:46Dax Shepard?

  That's why I said you don't have any.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. But I do feel like it's increased. And every now and then, I'll just like, "This is gross, I'm not gonna do it right now." But I'll like, stick my fingers in my scalp.

• 1:34:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  My fingernails, and then I'll start just like scratching like crazy.

• 1:34:04Dax Shepard?

  Kind of tearing it all up.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Skin comes out.

• 1:34:08Dax Shepard?

  But you're rea- that's a little different, I think.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Are you sure?

• 1:34:11Dax Shepard?

  Dandruff is just like, you're not even touching it and it's just kinda raining. If you get in there with those long fingernails and start gouging and then s- some skin cells come off, that's...

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  You think that's regs?

• 1:34:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:34:25Dax Shepard?

  Now, you know where I get it, which I can't stand it, and I do have a new approach to this. I'll get it in my beard.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:34:32Dax Shepard?

  And I like to itch my beard, cuz I can't get lotion on the beard.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:34:37Dax Shepard?

  I can't penetrate to the skin. I'll just get a bunch of lotion all over the beard hair.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:34:42Dax Shepard?

  But I- what I have been doing is, um, I have a new face oil.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:34:46Dax Shepard?

  And I put it on the tips of my fingers and it'll really go up and through there.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good idea.

• 1:34:50Dax Shepard?

  And I think that's been helping a little bit.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Okay, um, or a gel, like a gel moisturizer would also probably have that same impact.

• 1:35:01Dax Shepard?

  A penetrative...

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, like, for skincare, you should be pressing it in. Press.

• 1:35:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  You don't need to do like a smudgy.

• 1:35:12Dax Shepard?

  Oh, just press.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  You can just press it in.

• 1:35:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I do need to- I do think I need to get my fingers between the hairs.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yes, just cover your- all your fingers.

• 1:35:20Dax Shepard?

  I'm just gonna have all hair.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  But like, like, look, like, I'm pressing on top of hair, right?

• 1:35:25Dax Shepard?

  Well, first you went through it, though.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:28Dax Shepard?

  You didn't just go like this.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm going like this, okay? And then you go, like, go in and out.

• 1:35:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  And I'm touching skin to- it's touching the hair, but there's- the skin is getting impacted.

• 1:35:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  I think you should try that.

• 1:35:41Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Anyway, um, if people notice my dandruff, that is...

• 1:35:46Dax Shepard?

  So be it.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  What's happening these days.

• 1:35:48Dax Shepard?

  You don't have any, but, so if they notice some, they're- they're imagining it. Do you kinda want- you do wanna do it, don't you?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Did you see one came o- a couple came off?

• 1:35:57Dax Shepard?

  But again, none are sticking to your black hair.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Right now, it's not happening, but normally it happens.

• 1:36:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  It's like, this is- this is TV.

• 1:36:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's like when you have a dog who can do a trick until you ask it to do it with other people.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:36:09Dax Shepard?

  Um, and then I went on a hike this morning. I was like, oh, it'd be lovely to go on a hike because it's a- it's a overcast.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:19Dax Shepard?

  And tropical feeling, and I underestimated the humidity.

• 1:36:25Dax Shepard?

  And I do not think I've ever been more drenched on a hike ever. I have my weight vest on and when I got back and took off the weight vest, it was soaked. And then my tank top, I hung up and it actually dripped like I had been in a swimming pool. From where I was hanging.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Well, this is a ding ding ding because we had a guest on yesterday who was quite sweaty.

• 1:36:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yes, who sweat through their shirt onto the couch and then you sat there and then you were quite damp. Afterwards.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  But it was, it was, um, welcome.

• 1:36:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, because he was hot.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Dax Shepard?

  I thought about how hot he was a few times today.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Today, you did?

• 1:37:01Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm. I think that's a real testament to someone's hotness when it's like a day later, you're like.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  You're still thinking about it. Yeah, he was hot.

• 1:37:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Did you think about it at all today?

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Um, not today.

• 1:37:11Dax Shepard?

  Not today.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Not until right now that he's come up. I'm thinking about it now.

• 1:37:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and he's so hot, right?

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he has a very cute face. Some people have very, um.

• 1:37:24Dax Shepard?

  He has a boyish face, I'd say.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it's boyish, but there's also something, it's not all that cookie cutter, but it's very handsome.

• 1:37:35Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Some people have faces like that, like you just kind of want to look at them for a really, really, really, really long time. That's really lucky.

• 1:37:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's almost maybe the definition of attractiveness is you want to look at it for a long time.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that's true.

• 1:37:51Dax Shepard?

  The hot person, did you know, was in a Got Milk ad?

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  I probably have it.

• 1:37:55Dax Shepard?

  Do you have him?

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  I might. I need to go back and look. I, um, somebody DM'd me that it, they're back, like they, he saw, this guy saw a Got Milk ad in Los Angeles on a billboard.

• 1:38:10Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:12Dax Shepard?

  With the milk mustache?

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  So people are listening.

• 1:38:17Dax Shepard?

  I was just telling the girls last night when we were eating spaghetti, I said, you know, I always ate my spaghetti growing up with a huge glass of cold milk.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:25Dax Shepard?

  I don't do it anymore.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  I know. You didn't even drink it in hot one.

• 1:38:28Dax Shepard?

  I have too much chest congestion to drink milk willy nilly. I'll get a little huh.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:38:35Dax Shepard?

  You know?

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Okay, clogged up.

• 1:38:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I would love it, but they thought that was an anthem. They thought that was crazy.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, uh, milk at dinner is a real watershed marker of generations. Uh, uh, my generation had milk with dinner.

• 1:38:52Dax Shepard?

  Constantly.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Constantly, that was common.

• 1:38:54Dax Shepard?

  That's what kids drank.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Yes, that's what you drank.

• 1:38:57Dax Shepard?

  No one drank water. That was not a thing when I was growing up. No one ever had a glass of water with anything.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  I know, and this is why I'm confused, why I'm the only one who's like not attracted to water.

• 1:39:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you haven't gotten with the program.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Well, I try, but it's not in my, it's not how I grew up. And I think you're right. It's not how a lot of people grew up. So how'd they transition?

• 1:39:18Dax Shepard?

  Could you drink more milk? I mean, let's get you more fluids in you. That aren't, you know, wine or, or Moscow Mule.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  I haven't had a Moscow Mule in years. Um, I save my water for right before bed and I drink sixty ounces.

• 1:39:36Dax Shepard?

  You drink sixty ounces right before bed?

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  I drink at least, at least fifty. And it's not ideal. It's not ideal timing, but.

• 1:39:45Dax Shepard?

  That sounds like a terrible plan. And you, do you wake up and pee in the middle of the night?

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  I do have to pee in the night.

• 1:39:50Dax Shepard?

  And it hurts even?

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Doesn't hurt.

• 1:39:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I'm glad we're bringing this up.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:55Dax Shepard?

  I've had more thoughts about, remember you brought up on a fact check about the, the length of the penis could reduce the stream, strength?

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:02Dax Shepard?

  So I was peeing the other day and I was just kind of thinking of the whole thing. And there's so, I mean, the fact that boys think that is so comical. Cause if you really think it all through, all of it, all of it would suggest you're better off with a very quiet stream. Because imagine, if you had a two foot long penis, it would probably be touching the water and you'd hear nothing.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:40:28Dax Shepard?

  Cause it would be falling one inch.

• 1:40:32Dax Shepard?

  The.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  But wouldn't you be holding it up a little bit? Cause like you don't want to touch the water.

• 1:40:36Dax Shepard?

  Sure, you would avoid. This is, I have, I can get in this situation, sitting down sometimes on toilets. And I, and it's always in public. And if I feel the water, I almost die.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Dax Shepard?

  Um, but if you really think it through, if you had a, a real garden hose on you, you'd be peeing like two inches above the water and that would make the least amount of noise. The most amount of noise would be if you peed from a rooftop.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:40:59Dax Shepard?

  So if you had a very tiny, short penis, it would fall farther. It would go through less penis and slow down less. Like everything about a loud stream really screams smaller.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Except, okay.

• 1:41:13Dax Shepard?

  But everybody thinks that people are evaluating their peepee size by their stream.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  But also if, if it's a lot of pee, if it's like so much pee.

• 1:41:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  That would make a louder sound.

• 1:41:27Dax Shepard?

  More pressure.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause the pressure.

• 1:41:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  So maybe that's like, oh, there's so much pee because the penis is so big, but as we know now, that's wrong.

• 1:41:36Dax Shepard?

  And you're getting into prostate health when you're getting into like how, how fast it can come out.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to explain how you boys think problematically.

• 1:41:47Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm saying that it's, it's just a really crazy thing that we deduce that when all signs point to, that would actually mean less penis.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. If someone had a three foot hose, you would never hear it because it would be underwater.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 1:42:05Dax Shepard?

  You would put it in the water and then fill the bowl up.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  That's disgusting.

• 1:42:10Speaker 05

  Factor hole size though, too, then?

• 1:42:13Dax Shepard?

  Eurythrogirth?

• 1:42:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  We discussed that before.

• 1:42:17Dax Shepard?

  Eurythrogirth diameter.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  It's more like how long it has to, I mean, if it's hu, if it's a huge hole.

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  It's like a pencil.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it's a pencil hole and tube.

• 1:42:28Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  And it's, I guess if, then if it's big, it'll still be loud and fast.

• 1:42:34Speaker 05

  Cause the amount coming out.

• 1:42:36Dax Shepard?

  And maybe short, short though. Cause you would expel it so quickly.

• 1:42:40Speaker 05

  It could be a long and girthy hole though. I think.

• 1:42:44Dax Shepard?

  Three second pee though. It'd be like loud as hell and then over.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Bodies are so different. There's, there's so many factors.

• 1:42:51Dax Shepard?

  There are. I just, we, we were really off track with that.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you guys were really off track.

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:43:06Dax Shepard?

  We get support from ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. So I went down this rabbit hole the other day on real holiday jobs that exist and I couldn't stop. Somebody out there is hiring a ham glazer, a professional ham glazer. Another place is hiring a lead elf, implying a whole hierarchy of elves I had never even considered. Here's the thing, these jobs need real skills. People like that are hard to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/dax. Plus ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first,

• 1:43:51Dax Shepard?

  so you meet the right people faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/dax. That's ziprecruiter.com/dax. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:44:19Dax Shepard?

  You had a couple of items on your list from last time.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. But I was about to say something else before we got into penis peeing, maybe.

• 1:44:27Dax Shepard?

  You drinking 50 ounces of water.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Milk. When we were young, the doctor would tell our parents to make us drink milk for calcium. And then I had to go down to skim milk because of my cholesterol.

• 1:44:39Dax Shepard?

  Right, currently.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  No, when I was little.

• 1:44:42Dax Shepard?

  When you were a child?

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:43Dax Shepard?

  Wait, you had a high cholesterol?

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had it my whole life.

• 1:44:46Dax Shepard?

  Check as a kid?

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the whole thing.

• 1:44:48Dax Shepard?

  I don't think my cholesterol was ever checked as a child.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:51Dax Shepard?

  I mean, I almost never went to the doctor unless I was there to get stitches.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  I would do physicals.

• 1:44:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, I didn't do those.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I did. And my cholesterol was high.

• 1:45:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay, sky.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  So I had to go to skim milk.

• 1:45:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:45:07Dax Shepard?

  Were you on a stat in fifth grade?

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  No, but oh, somebody did ask if I could give an update. Someone DM'd me to ask if I could give an update on my GLP-1 journey.

• 1:45:18Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  And my, um, uh, cholesterol. I'm getting, we're getting our blood work done next week.

• 1:45:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  So I'll know more after that. And I will report back.

• 1:45:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. This is actually a ding ding ding. Something I wrote down that I wanted to ask you about is your ethics around the handicap stall.

• 1:45:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Okay, let's say you go in.

• 1:45:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I use it all the time.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  You do?

• 1:45:46Dax Shepard?

  Yes, because unless I see a guy in a wheelchair on my way in.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:49Dax Shepard?

  I absolutely use it. There's more space.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  What if they come in when you're in there?

• 1:45:54Dax Shepard?

  I will be out in one second.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  What if you're pooping?

• 1:45:57Dax Shepard?

  I can only tell you this. I, I'm 50. I always use the handicap stall. And I've never in my life exited and there was a guy in a wheelchair waiting.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:46:07Dax Shepard?

  Which has never happened. Now, if that happened and I, I had made them wait a long time, I'd feel bad. If I made them wait the standard time, I don't think being handicapped means you don't have to wait. Like, anyone that uses a bathroom has to wait. You just need a lot of space to operate the wheelchair. I don't think it's a fast pass to go into the bathroom. That doesn't make any sense to me. Like, you don't, you don't have a, it's not a fast pass. It's a, it's a size thing so you can be accommodated.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  But it's just that there's only one.

• 1:46:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  And most bathrooms have multiple stalls.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  And then one handicap stall. So that's the ethics around it, right?

• 1:46:48Dax Shepard?

  But I would argue, if I walk in and there's a dude in a wheelchair waiting, clearly, I'm not gonna take the handicap stall. He is going to get first up. That's guaranteed.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:01Dax Shepard?

  And if he has to wait like everybody else has to wait for a stall to open up, I don't think there's any ethical dilemma in that.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  No, there's no, there's no ethical dilemma in him having to wait. There's a line.

• 1:47:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:47:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  But it's if there is no line, you came in and there's nobody there.

• 1:47:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  And all the stalls are open.

• 1:47:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  If you go in there, you're taking the one opportunity for him when he comes and also nobody's there, but his stall's taken.

• 1:47:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so. I think what happens is people conflate some things. So like the handicap parking spot is closest to the door because obviously they should have to travel the least amount of distance because it's harder.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:47:44Dax Shepard?

  But there's no rationale for someone that's handicapped shouldn't have to wait for a stall.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it's not, it's not that they don't have to wait.

• 1:47:54Dax Shepard?

  But I do think people think that, like that that thing should stay empty at all times.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:59Dax Shepard?

  In the event that someone that's handicapped comes in so that they can go immediately in. That's, that's not how bathrooms work.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Well, it's just that, okay, if it's a one stall thing, I sort of agree with you. But if there's like five stalls.

• 1:48:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  There are five stalls specifically so that people don't have to wait that long, right? But if everyone went into the handicap stall, that guy would have to wait for so long.

• 1:48:22Dax Shepard?

  But I, again, if he showed up and four people are standing in line to use just the handicap stall.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Dax Shepard?

  Bet my life on the fact everyone's like, oh, go ahead, bro. I'll use the other ones. The most a person would have to wait is for one person to use the bathroom, and I don't think that's a big deal.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  But what if they're pooping and it's so long?

• 1:48:40Dax Shepard?

  If you think you're gonna take a tremendously long dump.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Dax Shepard?

  Um, probably don't use it.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:46Dax Shepard?

  Secondly, glance under. You can see the rest of the bathroom. If you see wheels, pick up the pace, get out of there.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  I don't think anyone's in the middle of their poop and looking under.

• 1:48:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I do. Cause I like to be alone in the bathroom. So if like I hear the door and I'm like, I hate, someone's in there and then I look, like, are they still in here?

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I never look.

• 1:49:09Dax Shepard?

  I could tell you at any moment how many people are in the bathroom when I'm shitting.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Because when I am in, if I'm in the handicap stall.

• 1:49:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  Um, I can't see, like, the door is too far out for me to just like peek. Like, I would have to get up.

• 1:49:24Dax Shepard?

  No, you look under.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  I know what you're saying, but I'm saying the door itself is like here. Like, I'm on the toilet, right? The door is there, leading out.

• 1:49:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  So, and I can't just go like this, like I can't reach, it's the, the bottom is there. Does that make sense?

• 1:49:41Dax Shepard?

  No, cuz it bottoms also next to you. It's not like it goes to the floor and only is open at the door. They're all only coming down.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Oh, not all, and I'm not thi- I'm thinking of a bathroom, I guess that doesn't do that.

• 1:49:52Dax Shepard?

  Like a Foley with a door you can't see out of?

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  You can see under the door.

• 1:49:57Dax Shepard?

  But not the sides.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  But you wouldn't see out the sides, yeah.

• 1:50:00Dax Shepard?

  Okay. A men's bath, I'm thinking of an airport primarily, and it's, it's, it comes down to like the kneecaps.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:50:07Dax Shepard?

  You know, mid, mid cav. And I can see what's happening on the floor of the bathroom. And again, I'm 50, never once have I come out and seen someone in a wheelchair waiting for it. It's just never happened, so it's like, it's very theoretical. Do you use it or what?

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  It's just a fun topic.

• 1:50:27Dax Shepard?

  Oh yeah, I'm just telling you why I don't, I have no guilt using it whatsoever.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Um, I use it some ti- well, I only use it if the stalls are taken.

• 1:50:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  But I often feel bad about it.

• 1:50:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Like, should I just wait till someone comes out and then I'll use one of those? But then I feel awkward if other people are waiting.

• 1:50:50Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  I'm like, I can't, I don't know what to do.

• 1:50:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you should just use it.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  I do, I do end up just using it, but I feel like.

• 1:50:58Dax Shepard?

  I use it because I'm a daddy long legs, and if I have my roll-on bag with me and I go into the normal stall.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:05Dax Shepard?

  I kind of have to leave my bag on the outside, cuz there's not room between my knees and that. So it's like, of course I'm gonna use the bigger ones, like I have my luggage in there.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:51:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's complicated.

• 1:51:17Dax Shepard?

  It is. Rob, do you shit in the, uh, handicap one?

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Or just pee.

• 1:51:21Speaker 05

  If, if it's the only stall open, I won't pick that first, though.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Dax Shepard?

  Those are very ethical.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 1:51:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:28Speaker 05

  But I get what you're saying.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  This came to me cuz I was at a restaurant and I was like, oh, what do I do? These are taken.

• 1:51:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  Do I go in there? I guess I am gonna, but I hate this.

• 1:51:41Dax Shepard?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  And then I, I wonder.

• 1:51:44Dax Shepard?

  Could you glance around the restaurant, see if there's any?

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Was I gonna come out of the bathroom and go do a big glance?

• 1:51:50Dax Shepard?

  A big sweep, okay.

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  That's a little much.

• 1:51:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Excuse me, so sorry to interrupt. Is anyone here in a wheelchair?

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  And if so, do you have to use the bathroom?

• 1:52:03Dax Shepard?

  Anytime. So when do you think you'll be using the bathroom? Because I was thinking of using the stall.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  It's just, it's the rest are taken. I wouldn't normally.

• 1:52:12Dax Shepard?

  I would never do this, but I am gonna have an accident if I don't.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, alright, so you have no issues?

• 1:52:21Dax Shepard?

  I don't. I have a very clean consciousness about that.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:52:25Dax Shepard?

  But hey, maybe one day it'll bite me in the ass. I'll come out and there'll be a guy. And he'll be like, "Thanks, bro. I just shit my pants."

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Right. I don't know why I wrote this. I must have been watching something. But I wrote, "People change physically through a relationship."

• 1:52:42Dax Shepard?

  They sure do.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  I'm trying to make sense of what I wrote, which I think I'm saying.

• 1:52:47Dax Shepard?

  They can get skinnier, they can get bigger, they can get less muscular, more muscular, they can get balder. They can get more hair.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  Correct. So when it changes, are you allowed to say anything? Actually, we don't need to answer this because we talked about this on Mom's Car. When I was on your episode of Mom's Car.

• 1:53:08Dax Shepard?

  We, oh, we were talking about, one of the callers had a husband who got very into weight training.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:15Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh. That's out yesterday.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it's out. Oh, my God. Ding ding ding. My episode of Mom, my, when I guessed it on Mom's Car. We answered that very question, so go check that out.

• 1:53:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. And listen to Delta play the theme song.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So is it gonna replace?

• 1:53:32Dax Shepard?

  No, no, no.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:53:34Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  It should play at the end or something.

• 1:53:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Bob made a video today of everything that's going on. And his version is pretty complex. And so there are other layers that she'll learn.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:53:49Dax Shepard?

  Some of them she won't be able to, as he even said, like, some of them you gotta really span your finger. She just wouldn't have the span. It's gotta be frustrating when you're a little learning piano.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I tried, couldn't do it. Well, I could, but I didn't want to.

• 1:54:03Dax Shepard?

  It's I it's no one wants to.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:54:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  This is the practicing well.

• 1:54:09Dax Shepard?

  You do hear these stories, but those are the phenoms.

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  But that's how you become phenomenal.

• 1:54:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  I think that is a good lesson. Like if this kid doesn't want to practice, I'm not gonna make them because then I they're never gonna be good at it.

• 1:54:25Dax Shepard?

  I meet those so many people who say I'm so glad my generally mom.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:32Dax Shepard?

  Made me take piano. Yeah, forced me to take piano.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  No, I know, but I.

• 1:54:35Dax Shepard?

  Like generally, everyone's grateful that had that experience.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  But this is what this is to me what I think happens. This is my mom. My mom said when I started and I was like, oh, I hate practicing.

• 1:54:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  She was like, I regret, you know, it's always it's always the mom saying, I regret that I didn't get pushed into this and that I didn't wasn't forced to practice and you have to practice.

• 1:54:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  You'll thank me one day.

• 1:55:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And then what happens is if you aren't self motivated to do it, you don't, you're not good.

• 1:55:09Dax Shepard?

  Unless they withhold things you want. Like if they really can enforce the rules.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:17Dax Shepard?

  Then they would. But your mom wasn't willing to.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I had to practice every day and I would just sit.

• 1:55:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, but why can't you play?

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  Miserable and I would and I would just tink. I would I would play, but I hated it. It was like I associated with I associated it with such misery.

• 1:55:34Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  That over time I was like, I don't want to do it.

• 1:55:37Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  And at that point, your mom has to be like, Kay, yeah, I guess you've been practicing for two years and you still hate it.

• 1:55:43Dax Shepard?

  Well, they go, you can't watch TV until.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  You like it?

• 1:55:45Dax Shepard?

  Played. No, because you weren't. The goal isn't to make you like it. The goal is to make you do it.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Well, no, the goal is to make you do it so that.

• 1:55:54Dax Shepard?

  You'll get good.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  It and get good and be self motivated.

• 1:55:57Dax Shepard?

  Probably won't like it until you're good at it. So you can make music and that's very satisfying. It's not gonna be, it's not fun for anybody to suck at something. It's, it's quite unenjoyable to suck at things.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Dax Shepard?

  So like, the premise can't be, well, they gotta like it to do it. Cause no one's really gonna like it, except for these point zero zero one percent of their like born to be a concert pianist. And they're obsessed with it.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think people who are adults who play piano well, um, started liking it early on their own. And maybe they still had to be forced to practice, but probably when they were practicing, they like liked it and were, it was learning things and, and got excited about it at some point.

• 1:56:41Dax Shepard?

  But could you ever play songs?

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I played, I played The Entertainer, I played My Heart Will Go On.

• 1:56:46Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  I played a lot of songs.

• 1:56:48Dax Shepard?

  And you didn't like it, never liked it. Even when you play those songs?

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  I liked, yeah, I did like being able to play them.

• 1:56:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  But I guess this is all to my point. I liked having this skill. I did not like getting to the skill and these skills increase and increase and increase. So I was, it was just never gonna happen.

• 1:57:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  There are, there are other skills that I did work quite hard at.

• 1:57:15Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  It also being very hard, but I wanted to be good at it.

• 1:57:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  I think wanting to be good at it is sort of the key.

• 1:57:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  I think. Um, all right, let's do some facts.

• 1:57:27Dax Shepard?

  Facts.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  So one thing that I didn't say in the episode, but was thinking about, because we talked about like euphemism. And kind of the importance of it and why we do it. And why we sugarcoat or, you know, sidestep or don't say the thing.

• 1:57:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  Cause once you say the thing, it's common knowledge and it's out there and it can, it can change an entire relationship.

• 1:57:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  I was sitting with that after, cause I was like, that's, that's so antithetical to my approach to life. I'm so on it, like I, I'm like, we need to be honest. We need to be saying the things to the people.

• 1:58:14Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  If something's happening, we need to call it out and say it. And I was like, huh.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Maybe not.

• 1:58:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Maybe that is reckless and can um permanently alter a relationship. So it did make me think, standing on this like, I'm honest and I'm gonna say what's true and it's my job to say what's true and my job to call out bad things or whatever.

• 1:58:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Um, it's worth like, taking a beat.

• 1:58:47Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's, it's not a, a new point I wanna make, but it's, it's crazy to me how many of these longstanding debates are really this kinda quintessential debate between Kantianism and utilitarianism. It's like, that's the Kantian approach. I don't lie cuz I don't lie. The, the, the ends does not justify the means. The means justifies the ends. Like, I do the right thing and the outcome is whatever it is.

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:59:14Dax Shepard?

  And also, no, I, I, I want a certain outcome. So how do I get to the outcome? And it's kinda like, yeah, you could be dead honest and blah, blah, blah and stand on that, but if you start noticing the outcome of that is always bad, whereas I could play with, in this slightly dishonest, nuanced innuendo world.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:35Dax Shepard?

  And save everyone face and keep relationships going. And it's like, okay, well, I just gotta prioritize, what is my goal in life? To maintain my relationships or, or be correct or what, you know?

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Dax Shepard?

  And it's just, I think it's really interesting how many of our, many, many debates just are really that thing. Does the means justify the ends or does it not?

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree.

• 1:59:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  Um, so that was really.

• 1:59:57Dax Shepard?

  Can I say one other school thing he said when we were leaving?

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:00Dax Shepard?

  I hope he would feel comfortable with this. I think he would. But we were, I walked him out to the curb so he could get out of here. And I don't know how we stumbled upon this, but somehow we were just talking about like, home life and family life. And he said, yeah, you know, I just, uh, I gotta remember my, you know, my opinion's not necessarily needed.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  Oh, he said that?

• 2:00:21Dax Shepard?

  Which is my mantra, as you know. I like try to, um, the best version of myself is when I'm saying, your opinion's not needed here. And I don't know why I found that so comforting, that here's one of the smartest people in the world and he knows his opinion's not always needed.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Was he talking about at home?

• 2:00:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like your family life, like.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:00:40Dax Shepard?

  To keep cohesion in your family, you don't always need to say your fucking opinion. But. If this dude can come to that.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:48Dax Shepard?

  Who his opinion probably is.

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:00:51Dax Shepard?

  It probably is.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:00:53Dax Shepard?

  More approaching the correct thing.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  If it's based in fact, that's the fallacy. It's like this smart person's opinion.

• 2:01:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  Is perhaps better than others. It's still an opinion.

• 2:01:07Dax Shepard?

  It's still an opinion, but I do think if there was somehow to do an opinion shootout with Steven Pinker and someone average off the street.

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:14Dax Shepard?

  My hunch is I think his opinion would be correct more often than.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  I, I think that's a, I think that's not.

• 2:01:22Dax Shepard?

  That's a fallacy.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  I think that's a fallacy because depending on what we're talking about.

• 2:01:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  Yes, I think his opinion on, um, elite institutions, something we discussed in the episode. Is very valid because he has experience there and he's done a lot of research there. So like his opinion is based off of facts.

• 2:01:44Dax Shepard?

  And a tremendous amount of history that he really understands.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Yes, but his opinion on whether or not chocolate is a tasty treat is not more or less valid than anyone else's. So you just have to, but like we do that though. We as people are like, oh, this high status person's opinion in general is better.

• 2:02:07Dax Shepard?

  This is the tech bro issue is like they are a genius in this little segment of knowledge. But should they be telling you what supplements to eat?

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:17Dax Shepard?

  Probably not.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:02:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, okay, so he mentions the giggle test. I didn't know what that was. Passing the giggle test refers to making an argument, proposal, or statement that is plausible, reasonable, and factually and emotionally sound enough to be presented with a straight face without eliciting laughter or appearing ridiculous.

• 2:02:38Dax Shepard?

  Ah, the giggle test.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  Giggle test.

• 2:02:42Dax Shepard?

  Well, that didn't pass the giggle test.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:02:45Dax Shepard?

  Is that what people say?

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  But they would be laughing.

• 2:02:48Dax Shepard?

  First they, that someone say their opinion, they go, and then like I go, well, I didn't pass the giggle test.

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  Exact, yeah, you nailed it.

• 2:02:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. Moving on.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  We don't need to, yeah, we don't need to go back, we need to do that again. Did Steve Jobs steal the WIMP computer from Xerox? Um, while Apple leveraged ideas that Steve Jobs and his team saw at Xerox, it is inaccurate to say that Jobs stole WIMP, Windows Icons Menus Pointer, computers from them. The exchange was part of a formal deal, and the Apple team significantly refined and commercialized the technology for a mass audience. Okay, this is fun. So we talk about the Apple ad, the 1984 ad.

• 2:03:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, with the mallet.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  The Apple ad being one of the most famous commercials of all time, or, you know.

• 2:03:31Dax Shepard?

  Iconic.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  Best, yeah. And so I have a list.

• 2:03:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wonderful.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh, in the same batch where people were agreeing that, or are saying they also collected the milk ads, a lot of people had the same outrage I did about Thriller, and that was comforting. Yeah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 2:03:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  Um, okay, I'm gonna do top ten.

• 2:03:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  Okay, number one, Apple, 1984.

• 2:03:58Dax Shepard?

  Really? That gets the number, who, who's this, who compiled this list?

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  This one is from American Marketing Association.

• 2:04:04Dax Shepard?

  A very trusted organization.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  Dot org.

• 2:04:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  We should get shares that say dot org.

• 2:04:12Dax Shepard?

  That'd be such a shitty shirt, don't you?

• 2:04:14Speaker 01

  Why?

• 2:04:14Dax Shepard?

  I mean, with all respect to your feelings, if I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said like, dot com.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  You'd be, no, it's, that, it's, it's a,

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  it's specifically not dot com, it's dot org, that's what's cool about it. And then you're like, what is that? And then you ask, and it's like, oh, trusted, it's really trusted.

• 2:04:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  Just aren't your expert.

• 2:04:33Dax Shepard?

  I'm surprised you're not pitching dot edu, I guess. That a little makes sense for a shirt, because then you're like, I'm a student.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Dot org is our thing.

• 2:04:41Dax Shepard?

  It is our thing, but I, I, I'm not sure that dot org has the reputational excellence that you, I don't know that it really signifies.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  My god.

• 2:04:54Dax Shepard?

  I stand down, I stand down. I just did the thing, I'm proud, I did it, yeah.

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  Shared an opinion that was unnecessary.

• 2:04:59Dax Shepard?

  You're right, you're right.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  Okay, Apple, 1984, directed by Ridley Scott.

• 2:05:05Dax Shepard?

  Where's the beef Wendy's?

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  Nope. Number two Nike Just Do It 1988. Nike's Just Do It, I guess is the first Just Do It

• 2:05:15Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  campaign redefined the brand and athletic marketing. The first commercial featured 80 year old marathoner Walt Ironman Stack jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge, paired with the now iconic slogan, "Just do it." Wow, cool.

• 2:05:32Dax Shepard?

  Good stuff.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Okay, three is Pepsi's Gladiator commercial. That is in 2003.

• 2:05:41Speaker 01

  Cinematic spectacle that brought pop culture to the Super Bowl stage. Set in a Roman Colosseum, the ad featured Beyonce Pink and Britney Spears as gladiators who defied the oppressive emperor played by Enrique Iglesias. The women overthrew the ruler and reclaimed their power, distributing Pepsi to a roaring crowd, all to the beat of Queens, "We Will Rock You."

• 2:06:00Dax Shepard?

  Ah, I kinda wanna watch that one.

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  Me too. For Old Spice. "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." This is 2010. Okay, Old Spice revitalized its image with this humorous, fast-paced ad starring Isaiah Mustafa in just 30 seconds. Mustafa effortlessly transitioned from a shower to a boat to a horse, delivering witty one-liners about masculinity and confidence, all while promoting Old Spice Body Wash. The ad's absurd humor, sharp writing, and charismatic delivery made it a viral sensation.

• 2:06:32Dax Shepard?

  You remember that one, right?

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 2:06:35Dax Shepard?

  Alright, black guy, you can, I can see him on the boat. He's got a full naval getup at the end. He looks like a fisherman, what's a wharf's fisherman?

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  Okay, five Snickers. "You're Not You When You're Hungry." Also, Super Bowl, Betty White. Group of friends plays a rough game of football with one player portrayed by White, performing poorly and getting tackled into the mud. A teammate hands her a Snickers bar and after taking a bite, she transforms into a young man, highlighting the message that hunger can make you act out of character.

• 2:07:08Dax Shepard?

  Make you act like old woman.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:12Dax Shepard?

  Gordon's Fish.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  Gordon's Fish. Six Pepsi. Wow Pepsi.

• 2:07:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  Scary Halloween 2019. Oh Pepsi's Halloween ad delivered a playful jab at its rival Coca-Cola. It featured a Pepsi can dress and a Coca-Cola cape with the tagline, "We wish you a scary Halloween." This tongue-in-cheek visual cleverly framed Coke as the scary choice while reinforcing Pepsi's bold and irreverent brand personality.

• 2:07:39Dax Shepard?

  You know, it's crazy. They had such a good track record and they really shit the bed on that, um, BLM commercial they did. Remember that one?

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  I don't remember.

• 2:07:47Dax Shepard?

  It was like cops and protesters fighting and they decided to just have a Pepsi and everyone got along.

• 2:07:53Dax Shepard?

  You don't remember? There's like a huge misfire.

• 2:07:55Speaker 01

  I don't remember. God.

• 2:07:57Dax Shepard?

  Up there with Bud Light is a real.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  That's not good. Yeah. Okay. Seven Volkswagen Think Small. This is 1960. Okay, I'm not gonna read about that. Oh my God, IKEA. P here.

• 2:08:13Dax Shepard?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  2017. IKEA's print ad pushed boundaries by inviting women to urinate on it. Yes, you read that right. The ad incorporated a pregnancy test.

• 2:08:24Dax Shepard?

  What?

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  If it detected pregnancy, a discount for a baby crib was revealed.

• 2:08:29Dax Shepard?

  Oh my gosh. How could I have never heard that?

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  That's great. 2017. Okay, nine US military. I want you. 1917, 19. These aren't commercials though. I don't love that. Okay, KFC. This is 10. Um, FCK. That's what it's called. FCK. This was 2018. When KFC faced a chicken shortage in the UK, the brand turned a crisis into a moment of humor and transparency. Their print ad featured an empty bucket with the letters FCK replacing the KFC logo, a cheeky acknowledgement of their misstep. That's fun.

• 2:09:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Okay, 11 is McDonald's. I'm loving it.

• 2:09:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Netflix says a joke is 12. Okay, okay.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  Um, oh, coral and their procreation on a full moon. What happens when it's cloudy? Basically, yeah, it, it, it messes it up.

• 2:09:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, it does mess it up. Okay, that's good to know. Makes you wonder if coral can even exist in places with like very consistent cloud. Like England and Michigan, it's fucking gray for eight months.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Well, as long as it's consistent, then it would be fine. But it's, if it's, yeah, you can never know.

• 2:09:37Dax Shepard?

  Like, like we, we had stretches in Michigan, right? Where we'd set these records with the, the sun hadn't broke through for 180 days. So you're looking at like six months of no moon cycle. They can't procreate. That would be problematic. But I guess they're always in tropical locations.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. Oh, one more, sorry. Um, he said Bill Gates is, uh, the biggest philanthropist in the world. He's not. Um, he's a big philanthropist, but Indian industrialist.

• 2:10:09Speaker 01

  Jim, Jamseti, Jamseti Tata holds the title of the world's largest philanthropist of all time, having given a greater amount to charity than.

• 2:10:20Dax Shepard?

  How much has he given?

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  In 2025 list, Tata, Tata has donated 102.4 billion compared to Gates's 75.8 billion in lifetime giving.

• 2:10:31Dax Shepard?

  Whoa. Well, he deserves that credit.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, good job. Yeah.

• 2:10:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  All right, that's it. Love you.