Toby Stuart (on social status)

Toby Stuart (Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World) is an organizational theorist, professor of business administration at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and author. Toby joins the Armchair Expert to discuss attending Harvard Business School before knowing what business school was, the role of sanctioning mechanisms in a social hierarchy, and how circles of status can affect the value of works of art by millions of dollars. Toby and Dax talk about the ‘cool’ experiment he conducted on dating apps, the observation that anything of status plays out in Hollywood or among ten-year-olds, and how the anointing ritual reflects across various social strata. Toby explains why status is unlike most resources in that it can be given away but doesn’t deplete, what distinguishes merit when evaluating a bottle of wine, and implications for those that over-index in the prosperity gospel. 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 Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Today, we have an organizational theorist and distinguished professor of business administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, Toby Stewart. Toby has written a book on one of my very favorite topics. I annoyingly talk about this. The book is called Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World. That was so fascinating, wasn't it?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, really interesting, deep dive into status and what we, how we're impacted by it.

• 0:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was very aware of like the evolutionary benefit of status, but I didn't think, I didn't know about how we use it as a very useful shortcut to identify quality and competency and all these little areas of our lives where we have a very little bit of amount of information and we have to rely on something and ultimately we'll, we'll default to a status and it affects everything as well.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he talks about how AI is gonna

• 1:05Dax Shepard?

  Potentially.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  mix that up a little bit, which is interesting.

• 1:09Dax Shepard?

  It is. Please enjoy Toby Stewart. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that, too.

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• 2:10Speaker 01

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

• 2:17Dax Shepard?

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• 2:44Speaker 01

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• 2:55Dax Shepard?

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

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• 3:15Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 3:16Speaker 01

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• 3:53Dax Shepard?

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• 4:25Dax Shepard?

  Toby Stewart, do you ever get confused for the race car driver Tony Stewart? Are you ever making a reservation and they're excited?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  God, I wish that would happen to me. I'm still waiting for that to happen. Put that idea out there.

• 4:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I will, I will.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Restaurant tears, listen.

• 4:39Dax Shepard?

  Before we even start, you're in the business school at Berkeley. But what was your ride to that? What did you major in?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And he says before we start, meaning we have started.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, sorry.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Just so you know.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, the whole thing was an accident. So I went to a liberal arts college in rural Minnesota because my idea of college was you go somewhere, it's got to be cold, it can't be in a city.

• 5:01Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  It's got to be dark and miserable. And like you sit in the basement of a chapel and read Dante. So I went to a liberal arts college. I thought I was going to be a philosophy major and that turned out to be kind of hard. So I honestly have to admit, I just kind of gave up.

• 5:17Dax Shepard?

  What random hard, what was the roadblock with it?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I think I read the groundwork to the metaphysics of morals. So Immanuel Kant.

• 5:24Dax Shepard?

  Before you walked in, we were literally having a discussion.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  About the categorical imperative. You know what's wild? I asked the other day, GPT-5 to explain the categorical imperative to me in a sonnet written by Joan Didion.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 5:38Dax Shepard?

  What a fun prompt.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And it's batshit, it did it.

• 5:41Dax Shepard?

  It did it.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  As far as I know, Joan Didion's never written.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:44Dax Shepard?

  She's a commentator, yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  A sonnet, but I mean, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's unbelievable and good. I read this passage of the book like 45 times.

• 5:53Dax Shepard?

  And it just wouldn't click?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know, it's philosophy. Does it ever click?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  You know, it's like you could just keep going and you never really feel like you understand in entirety. So I just kept going.

• 6:05Dax Shepard?

  And would you maybe have agreed too, even if you understand it in its entirety, there are different occasions for different ones to make more sense? It's like, we want there to be a unified, one singular philosophy that explains. It doesn't. It's like you're constantly going back between utilitarianism and Kantianism.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Constantly. And I often wonder what would happen if I went back to it at this stage of life. Because the other thing is philosophy, when you try to understand it, but you have no wisdom.

• 6:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  It's a rereading stuff that influenced you when. You're older, if ever the time presents. So anyways, I went to Carlton College. I started in philosophy. I flipped to economics because it was just way easier. I graduated in economics. I was a disaster in junior high, but got my shit together in high school and college. So I did really well and I finished. And at that point, I started to rethink a PhD in philosophy, even though I wasn't a philosophy major. But I thought, that's a big step to take. So maybe I should back up a little bit. You know, we're old, so I'm older than you. This was the career center day. So I walked into the career center and there was this list of companies coming to interview. And it's still kind of the same. But back then, if you graduate from a pretty good college in economics, your choice is,

• 7:12Speaker 02

  do you want to go into banking or consulting or these generalist kinds of roles? And so I got an offer at a consulting firm, but just as I was about to sign on the dotted line, Harvard Business School showed up. So at Harvard Business School, they teach every day a case study and they were interviewing people to write case studies.

• 7:29Dax Shepard?

  Meaning invent them whole stock or synthesize?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  What happens is that you get hired by a faculty. So I was hired by a fellow called David Collis, who's still there. He was developing HBS's first course on corporate strategy. And every day at HBS, you'd teach with a case study. So we needed 20 new cases on corporate strategy. So he would identify this list of companies, contact the executives, get permission to do it, have some sense of what it was going to be about ahead of time, but not full sense. And then we would show up and write the case.

• 7:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  I had this one job offer, which was to go work for a consulting firm, which kind of means make spreadsheets and work really hard. This other one, which was way less hours, and the job was fly around the world and meet corporate executives and take notes and then like learn to ask your own questions. I'm like, ah, A or B?

• 8:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  B. I went there. I didn't even know what a business school was, but I loved my two years there. It was super enlightening.

• 8:22Dax Shepard?

  And you were earning a graduate degree in that process?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  No, my job title was research assistant. I was an employee. To this day, it may be the best job I've ever had. I figured out what a business school was and realized you could do interesting things. And that these people were living these dual lives where they were academics half the time and the other half of the time or third of the Time or whatever, everybody had a different balance, but they were out doing interesting things in the world.

• 8:44Dax Shepard?

  Now, at that time, because what I've been kind of shocked to learn as I've interviewed a lot of different professors from business schools is, say, Adam Grant, he's in the Wharton Business School, but he's an organizational psychologist. So there's all these different disciplines that are pulled into the business school that is a little counterintuitive. Was it always that way or did that develop?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  It's been that way for a long time. It's been that way, I think, since a Ford Foundation report in the 30s or 40s. I mean, I kind of forget the full history of this, but for a long time, business schools have been multidisciplinary. So a lot of it's what you would think. There are people with PhDs in economics, PhDs in finance. They're often econometricians. There are mathematicians in operations research. There are psychologists. There are a handful of sociologists, which is the closest discipline to me.

• 9:29Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's what's interesting. As I'm reading your work, I'm like, this guy feels like a sociologist.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so these days, I would probably be called more like a computational social scientist. But yeah, the way that I think is as a sociologist who's learned a lot of economics and a lot of psychology.

• 9:45Dax Shepard?

  Right. So then you acquired some graduate degrees at some point?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I got a PhD.

• 9:49Dax Shepard?

  In economics?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  My PhD is from Stanford Business School, and it was more in sociology than anything else, but lots of graduate econ courses along the way.

• 9:59Dax Shepard?

  Right. So now, in the course of your career, you taught at University of Chicago, you taught at Harvard, you taught at Columbia, you're now at Berkeley. So this is like a real smorgasbord of the elite institutions.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:10Dax Shepard?

  How would you characterize those different schools?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 10:14Dax Shepard?

  Just because I'm curious.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  What do you want to know? I mean, I'm what to mention. I also spent last year at MIT and thought about moving there, so I've been to a few of the others.

• 10:23Dax Shepard?

  Do they all have really distinct cultures?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  The two most distinct places I've been are the University of Chicago and HBS. So Harvard Business School is this interesting place. It's like on a pole. Everybody thinks of it as Harvard, but it's the actual Applied Business School. So a large fraction of the faculty actually doesn't do much of what I would think of as scientific research. And the University of Chicago Business School is kind of the other pole. That's all focused on basic social science research. And so those two are extreme. So being on the faculty is very different. HBS is a pretty strong culture and a pretty unique place.

• 10:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  But getting an MBA at Chicago or at MIT or at Columbia, like there are differences, but they're not giant differences.

• 11:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Because Berkeley is its own vibe, right? Like, I'm friends with Ken Goldberg, who's a roboticist.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I know Ken.

• 11:09Dax Shepard?

  Do you know Ken?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ken's done this. Yeah.

• 11:12Dax Shepard?

  We fell in love at some conference.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Grip.

• 11:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, grip. He was just saying Berkeley is interesting because you can have the experience you want there, but you got to fight for it. It's not like you show up and they're like, here's how you have a great time. It's like, that's the thing there. And maybe you're drawn to that or you're not.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  I love Berkeley in a different way. So first is it's flat out beautiful. It's ridiculous. It's got eucalyptus trees and redwood trees and palm trees. Views of the water built into the Berkeley hillside. So, I mean, physically, I find the place to be stunning. The faculties are equally excellent at all of these places. There are very minor differences.

• 11:46Dax Shepard?

  Is there an anarchy vibe there, though?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  No, the berserkly kind of culture is mostly gone.

• 11:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  The dudes with the super long beards and the Bergenstocks.

• 11:56Dax Shepard?

  They've retired.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Bergenstocks don't mean what they used to, but like, they're not, they're not around as much.

• 12:00Dax Shepard?

  A professor with the same sweater on for the entire semester.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, there's much less of that now than there used to be. It's very much an entrepreneurial hub now. There are these amazing companies that have been started on the Berkeley campus, like Databricks, for example.

• 12:13Dax Shepard?

  What's that?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  One of the hundred billion dollar valued private AI companies.

• 12:18Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  It's a very, very interesting, very technical database company. But there are lots and lots that have come off the campus. And so there's a lot of that happening and it's definitely different. So compared to everywhere else I've been, it has many fewer resources. And then that has lots of impacts, right? I mean, it just doesn't have the endowment.

• 12:36Dax Shepard?

  Because it's a state school.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  And historically, it didn't raise the money. And there's just something kind of interesting about it, too, which is that at some point, and this kind of gets to some of the things in the book, like, once you make rankings and they matter, then everybody figures out how to manage to the rankings. Yeah. Right. If you're making a film and you know you're up against some kind of critic and you need that critic to annoy the film, you might even have the critic in your mind when you're making the film. So what happened is the business schools, their rankings, the most important one historically, has been business week. And at some point, it was like the salary delta between when you entered and when you graduated became part of this. And then There was also like a rise in tuition at Berkeley.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  That kind of happened and it changed the character of the school as these things were going on. But it used to be a ton of people who would come and it was like historic Berkeley where they had social enterprise focuses and then it sort of evolved into.

• 13:34Dax Shepard?

  They're just too close to Silicon Valley.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then it evolved much more into like Silicon Valley, so anyways.

• 13:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so your book, you know, I got a list of different books that are out and I am endlessly fascinated with status. I'm endlessly fascinated from the anthropological sense and I am regularly saying, guys, the full game is status. You're not aware of it, but it is almost the most essential preoccupation we have. And I'm always thinking about it in just our evolution and you definitely get into that, but what's great is you take the chunk that I know on how it served us evolutionarily and then you start marching through time with it and how it now presents itself currently and in so many fascinating ways. But maybe I think we just start with the function of status in a group animal species, one that's not solitary, one that has to get along with a bunch of other members of

• 14:23Dax Shepard?

  the group.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  So I had not read a lot of this stuff when I wrote the book because I came to it from the angle of like, I'm a modern social scientist, I'm at this end of the river and how did this all come to be? That wasn't actually a question that I thought much about. So then I started to read a little evolution anthropology. And so if you go back to primates and Sapolsky's done a lot of this work, the baboon project. So you imagine a group of animals and you have to band together to make it. So nearly every animal species, there's some sort of group or clan structure. And the problem that you have in these structures, right? And this is Hobbes and Leviathan when we're talking about people, but the problems that you have in these structures is if you put a group of animals together and like there's

• 15:05Speaker 02

  no structure and there's no rules and there's no hierarchy and there's no enforcement mechanism and there is a finite amount of resources, we're basically going to beat the shit out of one another to fight over what they're at. So then what do you do? Well, one is you have to organize and the second is it turns out that if you create a hierarchy, it solves the problem of resource allocation, not entirely. Entirely because there's plenty of hand to hand combat in a baboon troop. But the general idea is that the hierarchy becomes a mechanism for allocating resources. And you want high status because if you're at the apex of the hierarchy, the two key resources aren't food or nourishment and mates and you get more of those. But then, once the hierarchy is established, you move into sanctioning mode.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  So if members of a group act in ways that are incompatible with their status in the hierarchy, they're sanctioned, right? So if you take something that's beyond what you're entitled to, given your position, there's a sanctioning mechanism. And it is for that reason that on the evolutionary side of things, we now believe that status antenna, so to speak, like the ability to understand a hierarchy.

• 16:12Dax Shepard?

  To read the status broom.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:14Dax Shepard?

  Is maybe the thing we do best and we don't even know we're doing it.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  But we actually have it, it's like innate because dates all the way back to hierarchy.

• 16:21Dax Shepard?

  Your life depended on it.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:22Dax Shepard?

  Because if you don't play by these rules, the alpha runs you out and then you're on your own to live and you can't make it on your own.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  You can't make it.

• 16:28Dax Shepard?

  Those genes can't even pass on almost anyone that doesn't play ball.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:32Dax Shepard?

  So we're just so implicitly status oriented. What is fun about your book is you start breaking down how that now operates in modern society. Let's explain those some status things that are happening that people might be completely unaware of, like Rembrandt's a great one, and then we can kind of introduce anointers.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  I learned about art when I was writing the book, just because it was kind of fun. So the book is is much broader than the cultural markets, but status is super important and the cultural markets of which Hollywood is certainly one. So your industry and media writ large, status processes are obviously super important in how these markets function. The Rembrandt story was just so interesting to me though. So I became aware of a situation where there's a Rembrandt collector. It's literally in the dude's blood, like his great, great, great, great, great grandfather sat in a Rembrandt portrait. His family's been collecting Rembrandts for however many generations since then. Jan Six is his name. So he's an art dealer, collector, significant figure in the art world.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  So he's flipping through a catalog at Christie's and you learn all these things when you write a book. So the catalog was for an auction that happens during the day. And it turns out, if it's like the big time stuff, you don't auction it in the day, you auction it at night. So he sees a painting in the catalog and something just fires in his brain. He's looking at the painting and the painting is attributed to a disciple of Rembrandt, an unknown disciple, like it's just the circle of Rembrandt. So it looks very much like a Rembrandt painting, but it's nowhere in the history of art.

• 18:06Dax Shepard?

  And they're predicting at that point that this thing's probably going to go for about 18,000 to 25,000 bucks.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when you buy art at auction, there's a range. Things often don't sell because you don't get up to the reserve price, or they sell above the range. But this is what the organizers of the auction think is going to happen when the auction transpires. So the range on this is tight and low. But Jan Six is looking at this and there's a clue in the painting that makes him believe this isn't a circle of Rembrandt painting, this is a Rembrandt. Right. So what if you could buy an actual Rembrandt?

• 18:38Dax Shepard?

  And based on the collar of the portrait, right? The person in the portrait was wearing a certain collar.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  And that collar existed, as far as anyone knew, in portrait art for a short window of time. And that window of time predated when Rembrandt was a star.

• 18:55Dax Shepard?

  So he couldn't have had disciples.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  So he had no disciples yet.

• 18:58Dax Shepard?

  So who would be ripping off Rembrandt prior to Rembrandt being famous?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Exactly, so he didn't have this whole factory that he eventually had of people who were working with him and apprenticing under him. And so Six is like, well, this must be an actual Rembrandt. So he buys it and then it all gets really interesting. There are two things I learned. So one is if it's a Rembrandt, I don't know what it's worth, but like 50 or 100 million dollars.

• 19:22Dax Shepard?

  Well, the previous Rembrandt sale was for a pair of Rembrandts that went for 172 million dollars.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, a big number and it sold the year before. You know, you got a Rembrandt, that is a valuable object. Yeah. But there are a couple of things about it that are really fascinating, if you're interested in status. And it sets up like the whole thought experiment that underlies the book. We have a situation now where there's just one object and the object is a painting. And here's the thing, it is the same painting. We can all agree, there's just one painting. And if you put it in To one, I'm gonna call it an identity state that is a circle of Rembrandt. It's worth 20,000 bucks. But if you take the same painting and you call it a Rembrandt, it's worth 50 to 100 million dollars, but it's the same fucking painting.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:06Dax Shepard?

  There's two layers happening, which is so fascinating, right? The first layer is that Rembrandt. Rembrandt has the ultimate status. So anything he created is gonna have more value. But now we get into the expertise of Six who bought it. Cause his interest in it and his renown now becomes its own little Rembrandt situation in a sense, right?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so now he's got a project on his hands. I still think about this all the time and I just wasn't aware of it. Now Six is kind of on a mission, right? And the mission is to convince the art world that this is a Rembrandt. He can self-anoint it a Rembrandt. I mean, that's what he does, but he owns it and that's not super credible.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  He's a little incentivized. He's got a little bit of an incentive here. So he then has to convince the art world that it's a Rembrandt. And how do you do that? Well, it turns out they're just a handful of people, right? Who are the experts in Rembrandt and they'll stare at it and they'll do all sorts of technical analysis on it. But at the end of the day, it's often a bit of a judgment call.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Who gives these guys the authority to decide that it's a Rembrandt?

• 21:06Dax Shepard?

  And probably of all 10, like some people didn't wanna be involved, but a handful of the really recognized ones kinda go along with this theory to some degree. And I'm sure there would be some critical mass where they could, these five people have nothing to do with Rembrandt, could make an unknown painting a Rembrandt.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And there's even status within that. The people who are deciding whoever's the best at that is gonna probably have the most weight. They're all just eyes looking at a thing.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  So it turns out, I should have written this up in the book, but I didn't. The exact opposite thing also happened, which is there was a Rembrandt in a museum, I forget where, and it was delisted. And it's in some museum and literally the entire traffic of the museum is to see this one painting. And many years later, some small group of people decide, in fact, it isn't.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Michael Lewis is telling us about one that sold for like 270 million dollars to a Saudi guy. And then everyone was like, yeah, it's not even, it's not real.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Probably the 470 million.

• 22:01Dax Shepard?

  400?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  And it's not. Not only conceivably not real, it's like 10% of a Da Vinci. I think it's the Salvador Moody we're talking about. And it's just a hand. The whole thing needed a full restoration. It was in lousy condition. So there's a $470 million paid for a hand, which shows you the value of having the right status.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yes, it's so wild.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So much of it is in the scarcity, right? That's a huge piece of it.

• 22:27Dax Shepard?

  Well, one part that I like, again, I think it's really easy to always look at these things and be very critical of it. But I think there is a function behind this, which is you're trying to make sense of the world at all time. And you are hoping to make decisions that are the best decisions. And you don't know, and you're not an expert on most things. So we absolutely need people with status that we come to trust so that they can help us navigate this world because we don't have the capacity to get brilliant at everything. There is a really good function to it at the foundation, or a logical one.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Which at the end of the day is the core argument in the book, which is it's a spidery thing, social status. Like it impacts so many different dimensions of our lives, but it's never gone away because it also serves a bunch of functions. And the way I would kind of generalize that, I mean, you've had so many interesting people on this show, and I've looked at the names and listened to some of the podcasts. The information problem comes up all the time. What do we do when there's information overload or when we don't have enough information? One of the arguments in the book, which I don't think is very controversial, is that we live in all of these super important, information-poor environments. And I love art, but I want to generalize it way broader than that. So here's an information-poor choice.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  I need to go see a medical specialist because I have a problem. And like, this is a really important thing, or could be. So you have to choose the right doctor, but how do you do that? It's an information-thin environment. And then my other world, so I live a very schizophrenic work life. But at Columbia and HBS and Berkeley, I've run entrepreneurship. And so most of what happens since I've been doing this is the students are interested in venture capital-backed tech entrepreneurship. So you have a startup, but it's not a thing yet. It's like a true startup. And where are you going to? Put your money like it's a very information poor environment. Or you're an employer and you're looking at a resume and you're deciding whether to interview somebody or hire somebody. All you know is what it says on the resume.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  So we live in all of these walks of life in these very information poor environments.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Dating apps.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  That's a huge one.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Don't get me started. I did a dating app project once anyways. Tell us. Are you want to hear that one?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  It's funny, this is literally the first time I've ever maybe talked about this project. So I had a student once and she was off the beaten path a little bit. But I wanted to support her and she shows up. I wasn't expecting this, we had this conversation and she says, I want to study cool.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, I want to study like what it is to be cool and what it means in markets. No one's ever pitched me on that. Yeah, what's the metric?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  We talk about it all the time.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  So I thought it was a cool idea and wanted to be supportive. So we got to talking and somehow we decided one thing we could do is we could maybe figure out who's cool on a dating app. This dates me because this went back quite a while. I had this other idea that I wanted to do, which was ridiculous, but I'll tell you. Yeah. You know, I've never really talked to a doctor about this, but I'm convinced I suffer from seasonal affective disorder.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I have it.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  She's also self diagnosed.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I self diagnosed myself and I definitely have it, so I believe you.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  You guys just have depression, but continue.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  I mean, May Gray and June Boone, get the hell out of here.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I agree, you can't handle it.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  I can't even tell you, yeah, when we're in those months, I'd say half of our conversations are about sad.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  You definitely don't want to be on the beach, you got to be back here.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Fog burning off. So I got OkCupid, you remember those guys? Uh huh. When they were one of the big dating sites, I got them to give me their data, including the click stream. It was of course carefully anonymized. Very ethical. Yeah, very, yeah, exactly. We weren't using it for anyone's selfish purposes, I'll just put it that way. So my idea was because we had like the timing of all searches and all messages back then, I don't know if norms have changed. I mean, they have somewhat literally at the platform level, but back then nearly all messages were originated by men. I think all the data that we had were heterosexual relationships. Yeah. And so I had this idea that men would be more ambitious on sunny days.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 26:27Dax Shepard?

  Wow, what a bizarre thought you had. That's very original.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  I mean, like if it's gonna lift mood, right? And then you're like feeling on top of the world. You know, if I don't crush it today, it's because it's cloudy outside.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 26:38Dax Shepard?

  And you get a built in.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  It could go opposite, though, because you could feel lonely and depressed all day.

• 26:44Dax Shepard?

  As all theories are, it's very ego centric, because mine's the opposite. It's like, oh, when I'm gloomy, I want to self-medicate with the attention of someone else.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Lots of.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so there are many problems with this.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 27:05Dax Shepard?

  This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace, and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours, but at some point, you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built-in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from, I've been working on this, to here it is, come find me.

• 27:50Dax Shepard?

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• 28:11Dax 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.

• 28:56Dax 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 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.

• 29:41Dax Shepard?

  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. 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. At ziprecruiter.com/dax, meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 30:22Dax Shepard?

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• 30:48Speaker 04

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• 31:30Speaker 04

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• 31:51Speaker 02

  It was a terrible idea because I've done this a few times. I get infatuated with the idea, but it doesn't work as an academic project. There's a bunch of problems with this from a scientific perspective, one of which is you choose when to be on a dating site. And so if it's crappy weather out, you have fewer alternatives. And so there you're way more likely.

• 32:10Dax Shepard?

  A lot of variables to weed through.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  She wanted to study cool. We eventually wrote one paper on this. But speaking of status, we did find the Benjamin Button thing, which is that at the time, OkCupid would log profile changes. There were like height thresholds and age thresholds where people would say, get on the site at 43, and two months later, they would be 39.

• 32:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Or they were 5'7" and they were 5'9".

• 32:39Speaker 02

  And if you were above a certain height, you actually would shrink.

• 32:41Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure. Interesting.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Which is conceivable, but not over the time intervals that we look. But if you think about it, it's ground zero for status processes because it is a low-information environment. It's the mating market, which has always been status-based.

• 32:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  And you have a lot of room to probably augment or misrepresent who you actually are. It's a signaling game, and you decide what you're going to signal, what you're going to say about yourself.

• 33:07Dax Shepard?

  God, you know what's crazy is now that you're explaining that whole thing, just... Two nights ago, I have a 10 year old and she came over from school and she was so sad because everyone there knew about a certain K-pop band. And although she knew some of the members, she didn't know all the members and they were talking about a certain dance and she was really sad about it.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 33:25Dax Shepard?

  And she said to Kristen, "I don't even know where to find this information." It was so sweet and so cute. So they had been having the debate for a long time and then I entered the fray. And I said, "Delta, I want to teach you one life lesson right now, which is..." And I gotta have mom back me up. If I have any attribute that I would bet on, it's that I'm cool. I don't think people thought I was hot, they didn't think I was sexy, but I think I've pulled cool off most of my life. And I said, "Here's how cool works." The eight group of kids are talking about the K-pop thing and they go, "You don't know, you don't know that song?" And you go, "Oh, no, never heard it." And what you're signaling to them is, "I haven't heard it, but I don't feel insecure about it because I don't need to fit in that much." And they are feeling the insecurity and they will read that as like, "She's so confident she doesn't even care about being left out."

• 34:08Dax Shepard?

  What's funny and what I didn't work through even further is that status.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  But there's another side of that that I think is super important in the status world, which is that it turns out that high status people, there is definitely stratum in affiliations. And by the way, anything about status plays out either in Hollywood or among 10 year olds.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  They're pretty much the same.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Go to a middle school and everything that happens in the status world is gonna happen there. But one of the things is high status people tend to hang out with high status people. And then that creates this like in the know group where there's information exchange. And in some contexts, that's incredibly valuable information. It might be valuable for determining who's cool. It also might be valuable for determining where a job opening is coming, or a part that you want, or what stock is about to shoot. There are information advantages to having high status because you tend to be around other people who have valuable information.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the rich get richer.

• 35:06Dax Shepard?

  We're gonna get to that, the cumulative, but talk about human credential, because then you introduce anointing. So it's not just the people who have status, but then there's this interesting thing happening, which is people are often ceremonially given status. You give the story of King Solomon being made a king by putting the oil over the head. And this is very literal anointing.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:26Dax Shepard?

  But this exists nonstop for us, the anointing process.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Anointment is this kind of a ritual and the idea is you had a status before. And then there's a discreet jump. So you've been anointed in your business. There's lots of ways to get anointed.

• 35:42Dax Shepard?

  You get in the union, you get in SAG.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  And then there's a whole pyramid all the way up.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Spielberg casts you.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Who's the most important person in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg's assistant or casting agent or whatever. And so it's this whole series of things. And then you win the Academy Award.

• 35:57Dax Shepard?

  You point out, just walking across the stage in a cap and gown. Before you walk across that stage, you have one status. You're not the graduate of this thing. On the other side of the stage, you have official status.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  You have a diploma. You can list yourself as such, but the broader point, which has been a lot of my work and is the thing that I find so interesting about status processes is that status is in constant motion. And when you have a lot of it, which you do.

• 36:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  You give it away all the time. Maybe it's different than winning an Academy Award, but it's the same concept on a micro scale and it happens everywhere all the time.

• 36:30Dax Shepard?

  And I've absorbed it. So you already mentioned Sapolsky was on here. And if I'm an academic and I get pitched to go be on a show and I go, well, fucking Robert Sapolsky was on, this must be a pretty good show because I know he's a genius.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  This is exactly what a publicist does. I should know the podcasting world better than I do.

• 36:47Dax Shepard?

  Right. I don't know that you should, but continue.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  I listened to a whole bunch of these. Super fun and it's super interesting. The job of getting to sit in this room and everyone comes and you get to like choose who you want to listen to. It's ridiculous.

• 36:59Dax Shepard?

  It's ridiculous.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  So I have a publicist helping me. And when we get to that point, lots of book marketing these days is podcasts. She'll say, I interested XYZ.

• 37:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  And having you on the show. And then the first thing she does is lists who else has been.

• 37:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. Bill Gates, Obama.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm nervous.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  But it works. It's funny because it's the other way, too. We try to get high-status people on so that we can say, "We had Brad Pitt on. Don't you want to come on, too?"

• 37:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's just never-ending two-way street.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  So it's in constant motion, and there's another general point that comes out of that. So, status is a funny resource because you give it away, but it doesn't necessarily deplete. Most resources, if you have them and you give them to somebody else, then you no longer have them. Like, you change possession, right? I mean, you had something and then you gave it away, and now you don't. But if you take UCLA, when UCLA graduates a class, they print a whole bunch of degrees. And when they print those degrees, they give status to the graduates. But it isn't like it's depleting their supply.

• 38:02Dax Shepard?

  It's flubber. It's self-generating. It's like, then you have all these people there kind of representing UCLA.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  And then they go out, and now you have like a UCLA grad with this huge podcast, and now that elevates the status of the school. But you see, though, you have to be a little bit careful in selection. Because if UCLA sort of randomly chose people, and there were lots of poor outcomes, things would work a little bit different. There's the hot restaurant in Hollywood. Well, why is it hot? It's because the right people are there. But why are the right people there? Well, because it's the hot restaurant. So you have this virtuous cycle when the high-status interconnect with the high-status.

• 38:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh, then we didn't finish. And I do want you to land that plane because it's a great point. So in this information-poor environment where you need medical help, you're left to do what?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  In the book, I call this "the big shift." So take any product that you have to choose, or service, or thing to attend to. Attention's a huge resource now. There is so much competition for our attention. Because just imagine the amount of social media, and podcasts, and YouTube, and content that's created during the course of this conversation. Like, more than we could consume in 18 lifetimes, is my guess. If you like, you literally added it all up.

• 39:12Dax Shepard?

  What's even crazier in our business... I heard, oh, the attention economy. Now we're in an attention economy. That phrase has been around for 12 years. But to see now, when they list in the trades, Netflix says 261 billion hours consumed. It used to be dollars. The movie did this. Now it is 261 billion hours were spent on this thing. And that's the metric of it. It's so literal now. It's a measurement of attention. That's the win.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  And they have also changed their algorithm to have shows and movies that you can also be splitting your attention. So it's called something.

• 39:50Dax Shepard?

  Two-screen viewing.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you can be watching the show and on your phone at the same time.

• 39:55Dax Shepard?

  It can be too complicated because you've still got to be on Instagram. They're making content specifically for that.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I know.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  What a world.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I know.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Let's go back to the general point. So there are all these contexts. Like I walk into a wine store. I supposedly know something about wine, but I don't. And like at any one bottle, I've got no idea. This old adage, don't judge a book by the cover is kind of dumb because how else are you going to judge the book?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, I walk, I mean, I do this all the time. Like I walk into a bookstore. I love bookstores. I love to read. What am I going to choose? I need a doctor. I have no idea who the good orthopedists are, but I need an orthopedist. Like, how am I going to choose? It just goes on and on and on.

• 40:30Dax Shepard?

  And if the doctor's a Harvard-trained doctor.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 40:34Dax Shepard?

  That feels like a shortcut.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  So that's exactly it. So when you're in these very information poor environments, by the way, I put totally arthouse films into that category. I see them and then afterwards need someone to tell me whether they were good or not.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Right. Totally.

• 40:48Dax Shepard?

  Did we like that?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Like, that was profound, right? Or it wasn't.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  You know, I make that judgment. So somebody else has to tell me. And then I feel good if someone says like, that was time well spent. I mean, The Brutalist is an amazing film.

• 41:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  But what you do then is you evaluate the person or the institution or the organization that's affiliated with the product, rather than evaluating the product itself.

• 41:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  And that's what a signal is. We do this endlessly. And when we do that, we change how markets function. This is a status thing, right? Because what we're often looking for is some kind of pedigree, you know, in whatever context we're in with the producer of the object. And we're making an evaluation based on that pedigree rather than. The actual product or service, right? So I don't know if the orthopedist is good. I know that Harvard Medical School is supposed to be good.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then this phenomenon, the big shift, it compounds. Can you explain how it compounds? Your cumulative advantage example of your daughter's goldfish is really great.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that was a fun one.

• 41:54Dax Shepard?

  Which you bought two identical goldfish, put them in a bowl. One had a little bit of an abnormality on its mouth. So when it ate, some of the food would come out. And then when the food would come out, it would go to snatch it. But the other one would be closer to it and get it.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 42:07Dax Shepard?

  And within a very short time, one of them was enormous.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:11Dax Shepard?

  And one of them stayed the same size. Because the bigger he is, the better he can get the piece of food.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Is my daughter, and she's young at the time, and you don't want a goldfish corpse on your hands.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you don't.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  This is a problem. You don't, you don't want to deal with this problem. And so one of them had this tiny advantage. But because that one got more food, it grew. And with the growth, its advantage increased because it got much larger, much faster. Then it's a totally unfair. It's David versus Goliath at this point. So I literally would sit there at the fish tank. I would put pellets into the fish tank. The fish tank is a glorification of what this is. Like, this was a glass bowl.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  But I would have to sit there, put pellets in it, and then like bop the big one on, on the mouth when it would come up to. And that was the only way to keep the little one alive. The point is, they started the same. One had a tiny little advantage, but that advantage became a giant advantage over time.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  But this is life. This is everything. This is the neighborhood you're born into. This is one person does better on the SAT. It's all around.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  And it's one of the important points in the book. I'm not trying to make strong normative arguments about this. It just is. The consequence of that is that the distribution of status is more skewed than the distribution of merit. And Hollywood is this great example of it because you have like the A-list actors. It's not a giant list. I'm sure everyone on this show has been an amazing actor. But so is the B-list actors. The talent is similar.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  But the rewards and recognition are very dissimilar.

• 43:38Dax Shepard?

  Well, where it's most pronounced is as you gain that status, you now have access to the directors with great status. And once you can play the director game, it's almost bulletproof. Leonardo DiCaprio only works with Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Nolan. His movies are gonna work. These are the three best filmmakers alive. And the status got him into those movies. And so it is a runaway freight train.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  And now we're back to the exact same thing with the podcast where you get Sapolsky on. He's absolutely a super interesting, super accomplished, super recognized academic. Or you get Adam Grant on the show and then anybody would be thrilled to get to be here.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Again, though, on the other side of it, yes, we have a wide range of actors on. We have people who are not as big and flashy and those are some of the best interviews we have. And then I'm sitting here like, this is unfair that people are not clicking on this link. Merit wise, it's actually better than the one we do with the A-listers. But because of the status, those don't get the eyes. It's so weird.

• 44:43Dax Shepard?

  I do want to point out, though, so I think you could hear all this and also think that that's the only force in this dynamic, which is not, because I just watched the Billy Joel two-part documentary. And there's also plenty of cases where the anointers have always hated him. And America didn't give a fuck. Piano Man rocks. I don't really care what they're saying. I can hear it. So merit does break through.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  It absolutely is true that one of the sources of status is merit. Merit's a super complicated concept on itself. The fallacy of the meritocracy and that sort of Horatio Alger sense, and that you could argue there's more of a myth about meritocracy in the contemporary United States than is backed up by the amount of social mobility.

• 45:23Dax Shepard?

  It's true and completely unlikely.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Do we live in any sense in a straight meritocracy where the best and most talented and most deserving win?

• 45:31Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Also, what does it even mean?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  This is the great philosophical point. It's like, what is a meritocracy? Who gets to choose what merit is?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Who's deserving, in quotes.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Who deserves it. And that's where like wine was amazing. Learning about wine in the book, because there are these markets with critics, like the film business, Roger Ebert and the famous film critics, and Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes. The critics are super influential, but wine is this one industry where there was just a guy who, he was like Lord of the Rings. He was the czar of it. He dominated the evaluation of wine. Guy's name's Robert Parker and he had this publication called The Wine Advocate. But what's merit? When you drink a bottle of wine, what constitutes an amazing wine?

• 46:16Dax Shepard?

  I forget the statistic you give, but it's like 98% of people can't tell the taste of the $2,000. You could never just give them a sip of it and they go, that's that. Only the label will tell you.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Well, there's also these fun experiments. So they'll give professional somms, wine tasters, flights of wine. Imagine giving a wine critic 12 small samples of wine. And then people have thought of some clever experiments, like take the same wine and put it into three of the glasses and then see if it's rated the same every time. And so it's one of these areas where sometimes that works out, but not most of the time. So you will have experts disagreeing with themselves on rating a wine in one sitting from the same bottle. What is merit in this world? And it turns out, if you have super high status, so if you're Robert Parker, you get to choose. Because Robert Parker had a taste function. It was different than the taste function that past critics had.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  He liked a certain type or style of wine. Those became the wines that were critically appraised as having the greatest merit.

• 47:19Dax Shepard?

  Just his own personal preference.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  But how did he become him?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  There are ways to get anointed and sometimes it's that you catch a lucky break or you try hard. To go back to the point, there's absolutely merit. On average, there's a positive correlation between having high merit in some context and having high status in that context. It's just the correlations, it's nowhere near one, right?

• 47:38Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right. So you also get into the book, The Four Self-Interpretations of Anointed Status.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:46Dax Shepard?

  I found this pretty interesting. For people who have been anointed and recognize they've been anointed. It happened to you. You got offered to join the board of Yahoo in a hostile takeover by Microsoft. And you were like, why on earth are they offering me this? I've never run a company. And it's because you're a Harvard Business School professor and that's really why. What are the versions people have of being anointed?

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Okay, so now imagine you have high status and I really don't want to be the guy who says, woe is me. You know, you have high status. As a general rule, go back to Sapolsky's Baboons. Because there it's great, right? So you do not want to be at the bottom of the ladder. You'd usually rather be at the top of the ladder, but there are times where it's pretty damn stressful to be the the alpha.

• 48:27Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. One's chimp empire. It's a miserable existence.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. How would one with high status react to it? So I argue there are four responses to this. So one, which was my experience of it, is some version of the imposter syndrome. Because what happens is, particularly if you study this, then you realize that if professionally, say, things go really, really well, you're kind of by definition out over your skis. Because you get these things and you get this recognition, but you didn't really fully earn it. I could retell the story of my career, but there were a lot of lucky breaks and then a lot of things that led to an early bit of good fortune that then is like the fish tank where then the status compounds. And then the upshot of that is you realize that people expect you to be special, but you're maybe just about the same as everybody else in the room.

• 49:15Dax Shepard?

  The person you beat out for this.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Or you're special in this one sliver, but you're not in others.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  And not in others, where you're expected to have discerning judgment, which is the Yahoo story. You have status in one domain. You're a good actor, but why does that make you a good podcaster?

• 49:30Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  It's a very different skill. So why should your status in this walk of life transfer over? But it does. It does all the time. And so one is, I don't deserve it. So now I'm nervous and insecure because I'm in this position that I didn't earn. And that creates a lot of expectations on me that I can't meet because I'm not going to stick the landing every single time. So that's one response to having high status.

• 49:51Dax Shepard?

  And again, I'll just add, after interviewing a thousand people, it's comforting to know that that is by a landslide, the most common reaction. Almost every actor we talked to has dealt with imposter syndrome.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  I have zero surprise hearing that because I think Hollywood is one of the areas where the cumulative advantage process is stronger than it is in other walks of life. Because that, go back to that 20 actors lining up for the first casting call. And one gets it and then boom, their career runs away.

• 50:18Dax Shepard?

  If we're talking to them, something exponential happens.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then they're always public facing. So it's got to be heaps of criticism, no matter what you deal with heaps of criticism. So that's one. A second one is what we kind of call privilege. And one of my Favorite quotes. And so it's normally attributed to Barry Switzer, the football coach. I'm not positive that's the right attribution, but the quote goes, he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Do you remember that one?

• 50:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  And so that's like, I'm up on top of the pecking order. I'm like the high status person.

• 50:50Dax Shepard?

  I hate to say this, but you mean a disproportionate amount of those people.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's the second reaction.

• 50:54Dax Shepard?

  Because if you teach at an elite university.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:57Dax Shepard?

  It is very hard to get in there, but I can make a pretty educated bet on what your childhood was.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Mine.

• 51:03Dax Shepard?

  No, a student that would get into Harvard.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has changed a little over time in fairness. And as I get Berkeley, it's very different, but absolutely. So the second reaction is it's some version of privilege, but I earned what I have. And so then you're less insecure about it.

• 51:16Dax Shepard?

  Your quote is, I deserve it.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  I deserve it.

• 51:18Dax Shepard?

  The reaction is, I deserve it.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  They're delusional about.

• 51:21Dax Shepard?

  You got it on your own.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  The third one is some version of God gave it to me. Depends on the world you live in, but there are worlds where this is still, you know, the prosperity gospel.

• 51:30Dax Shepard?

  In sports, it's over indexed.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  It's very indexed.

• 51:32Dax Shepard?

  Because you do have this seemingly God given talent. It's not like you can work to be six, seven.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Sports is a fun example to talk about, annoying me, but in sports, you see it all the time where it's an extension of preordination. It was God's plan. And so depending on where you are geographically and what belief system you grew up with, the famous example is John Rockefeller, who's the founder of Standard Oil and was probably the richest man.

• 51:56Dax Shepard?

  Chicago University.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  University of Chicago was a major donor. Rockefeller had like 1.5% of US GDP in wealth, but he was very much, God gave it to me.

• 52:08Dax Shepard?

  He put me here to make it so I can redistribute it.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  It's a divine plan. And then the fourth way, which I would argue is probably the best response and the most psychologically healthy response is some form of humility about it, which is there was a lot of luck and a lot of people helped me and I'm grateful. And I should think about that and what I can do to help other people.

• 52:29Dax Shepard?

  To spread this status to as many people as I can. Okay, now we get into an interesting zone and I want to hear what your ultimate conclusion is. So you present this notion of AI. Is this very curious tool for us to potentially move through life without any of this? So lay out how AI could really alleviate us from this inequity of status.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm slightly off the deep end on AI. It's pretty much all I work on now. And I am definitely in the camp that if you stop the progress of AI today, which you won't, because in the history of the world, there's never been an investment at the scale of capital investment in AI today. So it's literally insane. This year, there are four companies, so Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet slash Google, and Amazon, who are projected to spend north of $300 billion on infrastructure buys, not 100% for AI, but largely for AI. That's in 2025. Like, that doesn't count what was spent in 2024, and it doesn't count

• 53:35Speaker 02

  what will be spent in 2026. And it's an extremely incomplete list of spending.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  But, you know, there are so many different ways where it then interfaces with the status system. I'll give you an example. I'm too lazy to shave, so I buy this beard clipper thing, where you just kind of go like, zzzzz. So I had one, and it was starting to maul me. So like, it's time for something new. You should not cut up your face every time you shave. How do you make that choice? How are you gonna buy a beard clipper? What are you gonna do?

• 54:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, status-wise, what you'd normally do, you go like, oh, Nerelco, that's been around forever. My dad used Nerelco. That's gotta be a great product.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  That's not how I would do it. Because I'm like, there's something new. There's probably something new and better than what my dad had. So I'm Googling.

• 54:18Dax Shepard?

  But you would probably have seen one of the people on your makeup tutorials use a certain thing, and they look great, and you trust them, and you go, fuck, that's gotta probably be. So it would be status-driven as well.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, definitely.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  I love these. Okay, so here's what I would do. I would get on Amazon. Nerelco is the only brand that comes to mind.

• 54:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's the only one I know.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  By the way, they should really support this episode. So I would get on Amazon and I would search for this and there'd be like 9,000 choices or something and I'd look at them and I'd be like, what the hell? So now I gotta go over a wire cutter or something like that and I gotta read reviews and then I have to like look at prices.

• 54:53Dax Shepard?

  I hate to admit this, but I'm very price driven. I don't need the most expensive razor out there, but I don't want the cheap ones. I'm gonna go for the high end of the middle one. So many of my decisions are made on what they're charging, which of course, who fucking knows?

• 55:03Speaker 02

  If it means anything, but also I'm just gonna guess that the value of your time is high and the amount of time you waste thinking about which of these like a relevant decision. Right, I mean, it's just all dumb, but there's trillions of dollars of market cap all aimed at you undertaking the search in a particular way and then making this decision. So now move to a world where I have an AI agent, which you do now. You'll soon have amazing personal agents if you choose. So I can't wait for my fully capable AI agent, but Gemini and Chachi, all the AI systems are currently agentic. And so what I did is I went to one of them and I typed in a command. The prompt was, I want a recommendation for a beard trimmer. I don't care about any features. I want you to read reviews. I could give a shit about the brand.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Rule out the cheap options because I'm already cutting myself up and I want you to make a recommendation with one product.

• 55:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't even want three.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  I don't want three. I don't want a choice. I want one product. And then I bought a beard clipper. I just bypassed all of the efforts to influence me. I bypassed Norco's ad budget.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  And so you think about traditional status processes. I instructed my agent not to care.

• 56:12Dax Shepard?

  To, in theory, make a merit-based decision.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  That then raises a question of how the agents work and we're gonna move into a world where everyone's gonna try to manipulate how your agents are working.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  There's gonna be advertising built into these agents where they're prompting specific products.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  So I think that's one way in which we're gonna impact the status system, right? Where there's a lot of these attempts to influence our judgment, where we can outsource the decision to an agentic decision maker that we instruct to have certain criteria or not. And we'll see how that evolves. Like it's not prime time yet, but my guess is it will be one day. But maybe in a more profound way, AI, we know this already from early research, but just hands-on experience. It's an amazing equalizer. If you have a health problem, everybody by this point has typed in symptoms into a chatbot and it's wild. You're normally in this world where you have what we call an information asymmetry, which is you're going to see a doctor because the doctor knows a ton more than you. We're in this world all the time where we're transacting with counterparts who know way more than us.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  That drives how whole markets function and how status dynamics function, but we're removing all of that, or lots of it, not all of it, right? Because now you're armed with, you have a doctor in your pocket and you have a second opinion in your pocket. So that's an important change. But the one that I've been thinking most about is it also takes skill differences and equalizes them in terms of the ability to produce output. Imagine the joyful job of being an admissions officer to any institution that reviews written evaluations today.

• 57:40Dax Shepard?

  You're reading feedback, you're saying?

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Well, you remember like the college essay, for example, or the cover letter when you're writing a resume, or the grant application. Anywhere you submit a written document, the email you write to anybody to ask them to do something for you. I mean, you must get so much shit in the email. I can only imagine what comes in, but now everything's extremely well organized, well-written, because it's all prompted. And so what that does is it takes an information-rich environment and turns it into an information-poor environment.

• 58:12Dax Shepard?

  Meaning you don't know if the person you're evaluating or the product you're evaluating used the AI to generate?

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Meaning that the high school student who writes the college essay with assistance of AI?

• 58:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, who knows?

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Did they do it themselves? Did they do it?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I hate that.

• 58:26Dax Shepard?

  We hate that.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  You can't evaluate anymore.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Okay, when people were writing for themselves, there was a great deal of information in what they wrote. Now that's gone. So what's that going to do? I make the argument in the short term, it's going to reinforce the status system because what we're going to then do is we're going to rely on pedigree. We're going to make the big shift. We're going to evaluate the person because the content, we can't evaluate it.

• 58:48Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 58:49Dax Shepard?

  That's kind of what I think about often, is like everyone will present as equal.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Here's the interesting thing, which is it's like a calculator. I don't give a shit if someone can do long division. They don't need to. If I need help from somebody that has to calculate something, I don't give a shit how they do it. Right. I just care that it gets calculated. Longer term, where it gets interesting with respect to status is do we stop caring whether it was the person? Because the robot is just a calculator. We have universal access to it. It's in everyone's pocket and all the time. And what matters isn't what the human does. It's what the combination of the human and the machine does. And I think if that happens, then we actually end up suppressing status differences among us. It's all too early to say, but we think of this as a technology. It's so much more than that. It's going to affect every aspect of life.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  And it's going to kind of really affect what happens in any content production business.

• 59:42Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish. Cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you.

• 1:00:23Dax Shepard?

  So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 1:00:31Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. 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 all of that. And now that feeling fits wherever you need it with the new Peloton Tread Flex. It's moveable. 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.

• 1:01:13Dax Shepard?

  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 TreadFlex at onepeloton.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?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:01:43Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:02:11Dax 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.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:30Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. We get support from SKIMS. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl, and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:50Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:11Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:26Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:39Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Thinking through all the things that are going to happen because of AI, it's just wild. But one thing I think for sure is true, we're going to need a whole new social science because we are about to have some version of these relationships with AI systems, which I think we all will. They won't necessarily be romantic relationships, but you know, it's going to be super weird to have an assistant who actually knows way more about you than any human knows about you.

• 1:04:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's more than you know about you.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  So weird. Even when you talk to it now, like we've talked about this, I'm really scared of it and anti it kind of. But I used it the other day to figure out if my carbon monoxide detector was broken or it was going off. It was such a good answer and I kept asking him more questions and it was so helpful to me. And I felt true relief from the answer. And I was like, thank you so much. And then I was like, I don't need to be doing that. This is a robot. I don't need to be pleasing, thanking it.

• 1:04:54Dax Shepard?

  There's some studies, right, that they operate better when you're nice to them.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  No, but that's bad. That's not good. It shouldn't be a human.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  If it helps you, at some point, OpenAI published what it costs them when people say please and thank you.

• 1:05:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Right? Because it's token consumption. Like you're giving it more information or you're telling it something. It will not do more because you said please, but politeness is expensive. It's like not free from a computational standpoint.

• 1:05:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  I do think it will be profoundly important for the status system in ways it's very hard to anticipate now. But to come back to the point that you were making, and I concur a hundred percent, which is the book, some people read it and interpreted it as being negative on the status system. That isn't what I meant at all. What I meant the book to do was say like, this is a wildly interesting, complicated phenomenon that permeates.

• 1:05:41Dax Shepard?

  We should know how we are.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  And we should know how we are, and we should think about it, and we should think about the ways that it affects our lives. And we should probably change some of our behaviors around it, though I'm not super prescriptive around that. And it's this complicated thing, but that's true of most everything. There's some upsides and some downsides.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  It's also easy, you know, I feel like I have to be the one to point out that it's easy to defend status when you have it. Everyone in this room has some.

• 1:06:06Dax Shepard?

  I had a weird hunch you were gonna say that, like, yes, we're incentivized for me to go like, I don't think we should remove it because that's how we function. And I already kind of anticipated it. I just will say in my defense, when I was a broke UCLA student with no status and was in Anthro, I still thought, oh yeah, this is how we work.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  But you were more likely to say, that's unfair that that person has this. That's not right that that person has this.

• 1:06:30Dax Shepard?

  But that's why I was drawn to Anthro is you don't study it to make a conclusion. You don't say this is how it functions and it's bad or it's good. Like, that's the premise of cultural relativism. It's just, it is what it is. That's what you're there to discover and not really levy a verdict. So I will say, I very much was accepting that that's what we are back then before I had it.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's just like what we say about the sim. We're more likely to believe in that because we have great lives.

• 1:06:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Someone who has a bad life is probably like, I don't think there's a sim.

• 1:06:59Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  My life sucks.

• 1:07:00Dax Shepard?

  Totally agree.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Same situation. If you don't have any status, you're probably not going to be like, yeah, I think this is the way it should be.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  This is really interesting. So let me take it to another just interesting point about status, which is, we need your life and we need people to see your life. I'm going to say it's different for me. So I was born to a reasonably upper middle-class family. I did a stint as a juvenile delinquent for a different reason, but it wasn't because of anything going on at home. I don't think anyways, who knows. I got super lucky. I was loved my whole life by my parents and well. Treated by them and they provided great education, resources, all the things. So when I look at my life, I think I might not have been born on third, but I was born on second. I was super fortunate and the worst decision you can make is to be born poor. You had a different life, but you got here. That's genuine social mobility.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Social mobility and status mobility has to happen for the system to really stay together. And so what you want for the system to function peacefully is for there to be a widespread belief that mobility is possible, because if there isn't, it's a different experience to be at the bottom of the rock. So it's one thing to be down there and think, I'm always going to be here. I have, there is no alternative to this, but it's a very different thing to be here and have prominent examples of status and social mobility. Those kind of glue the system together and so there is mobility. So the wrong read of the book is that the status system is just self perpetuating. The right read of the book is it's partially so.

• 1:08:26Dax Shepard?

  Right. It's like all things, like it needs to be monitored. You need to be aware of it. I got asked to give the speech for the Anthro graduating class and I did. And literally the whole thing was about status. I was like, you love your seats at the Hollywood Bowl, so long as you always look behind you and see how many people you're sitting in front of. But if you're in the fourth row and you obsess about the fact that there's three rows ahead of you, which is how we're designed to think.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna miss this great.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  I mean, that's awesome. And first of all, what a venue.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  Every time I'm in LA, I want to go to Hollywood Bowl.

• 1:08:58Dax Shepard?

  I think it's our best offering.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  It is an amazing place to see a show. So I'm here and I can tell you what's at the Hollywood Bowl tonight and tomorrow.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  I was looking at it and at sections, but this is another great point, which is that there's a phenomenon. So we are born comparers, but then that gives us some discretion about how we feel, right? Because if you're sitting in the fourth row, if you think about it, you can choose who you want to compare yourself to. You can compare yourself to the first row, you can compare yourself to the eighth row.

• 1:09:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  And that's your decision and a life skill is to look at the way that doesn't make you feel bad. But another life skill or another set of choices that you have is there was a book that was written by an interesting Cornell economist called Choosing the Right Pond. Which is that you can choose what status system you enter. Most of the times, maybe not at work, but in other parts of your life.

• 1:09:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you can have status for being able to smoke the most weed.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  If you're a great weed smoker, you should join a weed smoking group.

• 1:09:54Dax Shepard?

  That's the currency in your group.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Let's suppose you can smoke five joints a day, but there is someone else who can smoke 12. You might want to join the group where five is a lot of joints.

• 1:10:04Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Because if you join the group where like everybody else can smoke six or up, you just went to the bottom of the ladder.

• 1:10:12Dax Shepard?

  Now, that is one of the great lies in America, too, is like, we also interview so many people who they grew up in the great neighborhood. We just were interviewing someone, Alicia Silverstone. They went to Hillsboro, but they were just making it. So you're in Hillsboro. You should feel awesome, and you feel poor because you're the poorest in Hillsboro. It's such a relative mindfuck.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Everything is a relative mindfuck.

• 1:10:34Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, and you got to decide, I'm pulling myself out of this.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Essentially, all of us can be miserable by choosing people to compare ourselves to that make us feel bad about ourselves.

• 1:10:46Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Like, we all have the capacity to do that. So one of the interesting things that comes to mind is you have high status, and there are ways in which you get that where they kind of never get taken away from you. And then there are ways in which you get that where you can lose it. You're an actor and you win a Golden Globe, or you win an Academy Award, or you win a Cannes Prize, like a festival prize. You won it, you get to keep it for life, and the status that comes with it is yours. But then you're like a Michelin-starred restaurant.

• 1:11:15Dax Shepard?

  Because they can take those away, right?

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  They take them away. I mean, they do it all the time. It's an annual thing.

• 1:11:19Dax Shepard?

  It's a poor chef.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  So you're like a Michelin-starred restaurant for 2025. You might be a three-star, but you can go to two to one to none. It actually completely changes your life to get a Michelin star if you're a chef. And in some ways, don't feel sorry for them. It's the Nobel Prize of the business, but it puts you on a hamster wheel. It creates an enormous amount of pressure.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one should feel bad for anyone, but there is a stress that comes.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:11:43Dax Shepard?

  People hate when I sound like I'm a right-wing birther person that wants everyone to have kids. But I will say, that's the joy of having a child, is it's the single identity that can't be taken from you.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  It cannot be taken.

• 1:11:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it feels very, very solid and comforting in moments of great fear and panic about the other permeables.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess you're right. That's an identity that can't be taken, but if you're in a position where you're like struggling, that kid.

• 1:12:07Dax Shepard?

  Amplifies your fear.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because you have to take care of this thing.

• 1:12:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but or just in my experience, you're like, all right, but the kid doesn't give a fuck about that. Like, I had directed a movie, it failed, I was on my way home, I was self pity, and I was like, these little girls have no idea what a box office is. They don't give a fuck. They want you to be dad when you get home, and that's number one job. And it pulled me out of the self pity spiral of my other identity, which is successful filmmaker.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  But I mean, like, someone who, like, maybe can't feed their kid. It does have an impact. Yeah, it's just true. I don't know.

• 1:12:42Dax Shepard?

  Well, this has been so much fun, Toby. This has been delightful. Anointed the extraordinary effects of social status in a winner take most world. And I'm just gonna add, if people didn't sense that from the conversation, because the conversation was pretty in depth. It's a very playful book. You're using Taylor Swift as examples.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  I was gonna bring her up.

• 1:13:00Dax Shepard?

  What were you gonna say?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  The people she has opened for her. Immediately, they've jumped all these rungs. She has Heim. Heim must be so good.

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  There are so many interesting status dimensions of the Taylor Swift story. It's incredible. But yeah, the book, it's very much written for a general audience, and it draws on examples from all different walks.

• 1:13:20Dax Shepard?

  They're all fun.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:13:23Dax Shepard?

  No, it's a very playful, fun book. It's not, like, overly academic in any way. Toby, this has been great. I know you're on the fence about writing a book in the first place, but should you write another one? We would love to talk to you again.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Amazing. Now I'm writing another book.

• 1:13:36Dax Shepard?

  All right. Good luck with it.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:13:38Dax Shepard?

  Everyone check out Anointed.

• 1:13:41Dax Shepard?

  Hi there, this is Hermia and Permian. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Wow, we just had a, we had a crazy Armchair Anonymous pop out sim story that had to do-

• 1:13:56Dax Shepard?

  It really hit home for you.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it intersected with my previous life in a very crazy way.

• 1:14:02Dax Shepard?

  Very exciting. Very exciting.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Very exciting. Okay, well, two things.

• 1:14:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  You are about to go to the hospital.

• 1:14:10Dax Shepard?

  Yep, I'm gonna leave after this fact check and head over to the hospital.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Do you want to tell people what's going on?

• 1:14:15Dax Shepard?

  Well, I, um-

• 1:14:18Dax Shepard?

  I guess in order of me realizing I had gone to Beverly Hills and on my way back, there was a ton of traffic. So I was in the car for a while. I was like, really, really had to pee. Then I got home and I could like barely pee.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Dax Shepard?

  What the fuck is going on? So my first thought is like, oh, enlarged prostate. This happens a lot. I read about that. There's some options on the table. You get like Flo Max or one of these things. Um, so that was my first thought. So then I hit my doctor and say like, hey, this is happening. Is this something I have to come in for? Or can I just get like a Flo Max thing? And he said, well, I'd like to rule out that it's not an infection. And I was like, yeah, okay, that makes more sense because this feels a little dicier. So then I have, um, I guess this is Wednesday night.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Thank you, Rob. Rob's telling me to fix my hair.

• 1:15:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you're so good at that.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Dax Shepard?

  Um, I get a crazy fever, chills, and then my body is in a tremendous amount of pain. Wednesday night, like I don't sleep for more than 15 minutes straight because I'm just like everywhere hurts. So then I wake up and I'm like, uh, yeah, I think you're right. This is an infection. He's like, okay, um, I'm not there today, but go in and give a blood sample and a urine sample. So I did that yesterday morning.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Were you able to pee?

• 1:15:34Dax Shepard?

  I can pee, but it's like, it takes forever to get it out. It just barely come out and it hurts. It does not feel good.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Dax Shepard?

  So start the, um, antibiotic yesterday after I gave the things. And then last night, the family has now done their own research and they're like, well, if you have an infection that's entered your bloodstream, that's sepsis.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Dax Shepard?

  And I said, but I feel a lot better than I did yesterday. And they're like, yeah, but even see, it says here, you can feel better, but it doesn't mean you're not. And so I talked them into letting me sleep at home last night.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:08Dax Shepard?

  So that we could finish our day of work today.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:11Dax Shepard?

  And then I had more follow up calls with the doctor. My blood results did since come back.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:17Dax Shepard?

  And I do have a very elevated white blood cell count. So I do have a big infection.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:21Dax Shepard?

  So I am now, after this, I'm gonna scoot over to the hospital and probably get some intravenous.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Antibiotics and then continue the ones you're on, I assume.

• 1:16:31Dax Shepard?

  Well, though I'm sure they'll tell me what the move is at that point.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Interesting. I think this happened to my dad.

• 1:16:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Um, when they were driving back from like Florida or something. And

• 1:16:43Dax Shepard?

  He held his pee or something?

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Like he had to pee and then it was really, really enlarged, like really enlarged and then they had to like, go to the hosp- pivot and go to the hospital and they were like, thank God you came because it was about to burst.

• 1:16:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, so I guess there's something called like prostateitis. Prostateitis, whatever. Which seems like, at least not from the internet, that that's what it might be. But now, now that I've accepted it's an infection and I've accepted all that, I'm now kinda going back and going, oh, this could be related to the original blood blister that they said could be staff. And maybe I just ignored it, maybe now it's

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  It's spread.

• 1:17:27Dax Shepard?

  Other places. So, someone's gonna be like, it's so nice to have healthcare and yes, I'm really grateful I have healthcare.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, um, yeah, so.

• 1:17:37Dax Shepard?

  But I felt betrayed. My feelings were hurt this morning. I thought if this is all from riding my bicycle, which I was trying to do to be a good boy and be extra healthy, to live for a long time for my family, and this all is stemming from there, that feels unfair. You're supposed to get in trouble when you're a bad boy.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  I understand, but also you're, you're focusing on that part instead of the part that's like, someone told you to, and a doctor told you to take antibiotics and you didn't do it.

• 1:18:03Dax Shepard?

  A couple of months ago, yeah. Yeah, because that hot compress worked.

• 1:18:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah, we're good.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Dax Shepard?

  And who knows, maybe they're not related, maybe they are, but there are unique feelings happening in my body, let's just say that. Now I have the very bizarre indigesty feeling, but I had written down so many things I wanted to talk about in the fact check, yeah. Um, do you have one that you want to come out with right away?

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  So I just got back from the funeral, yeah, and it was, um,

• 1:18:30Dax Shepard?

  Can we call it a funeral if you don't bury a body?

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  We cremated.

• 1:18:34Dax Shepard?

  Right, but if it's cremation?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  It's still a funeral.

• 1:18:37Dax Shepard?

  It's still a funeral, okay.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:18:38Dax Shepard?

  I accept that.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  I, it was, there wasn't, it wasn't a burial, but it was, it was a ceremony and a cremation.

• 1:18:45Dax Shepard?

  Cremate, cremating, okay.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  And that was really interesting, like seeing that whole process and like, being put in and the door being closed and the button and. Being pressed and all of that was really.

• 1:18:59Dax Shepard?

  Being pressed.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Someone is designated to turn the knob.

• 1:19:03Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I'm.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Start the cremation process.

• 1:19:05Dax Shepard?

  You guys were present for the cremation?

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I did not know that you could observe.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Dax Shepard?

  You're not watching, though. You can't see.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Well, in, in India, they used to, um, do, that's how cremation was done, like, literally on, like, wood.

• 1:19:21Dax Shepard?

  A pyre of wood.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. But now, obviously not. Now it's like.

• 1:19:25Dax Shepard?

  It's not great for the environment.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Cremation.

• 1:19:27Dax Shepard?

  Filter it.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we, we went in and then there was a whole ritual. There's like a Hindu ritual where there was like putting stuff on.

• 1:19:35Dax Shepard?

  Did you like it?

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  And I, I really did.

• 1:19:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  The whole thing, like, even, I mean, it was, of course, so sad to see her. Um, but she also looked really at peace and, and nice and, but yeah, there was like.

• 1:19:50Dax Shepard?

  So there was a viewing?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Yes, there was a whole thing. There was a viewing, a ceremony. Everyone's, I mean, a lot of people spoke. My dad spoke.

• 1:19:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Which was.

• 1:19:58Dax Shepard?

  He did a great job.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  He did. So he went last because he's the littlest brother.

• 1:20:02Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  And one, his older living brother is in India, so he sent in a video.

• 1:20:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, he kind of started it and was like.

• 1:20:12Dax Shepard?

  You never did answer my question. They were both in the military in India, not here.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes, yes.

• 1:20:17Dax Shepard?

  One was a lieutenant colonel and one was a wingmaster or something.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was the highest level.

• 1:20:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so on the like, what is it? You, obituary? I don't know. They sent something out and it said, you know, it said.

• 1:20:30Dax Shepard?

  Survived by.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Survived by, and it had the brothers and it had like all these prefaces.

• 1:20:36Dax Shepard?

  Accreditations. Master Sergeant Third Decorated.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Dax Shepard?

  And then Ashoke.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  And then just said, Mr. Ashoke Padman. I was like, what a loser. Oh, my God. It really made me laugh. But anyway, you know, and he, he was basically like, she's at the bar and I tried to meet her and I failed miserably. And then, you know, then the second brother goes and also says, and then my dad basically goes and he's like, well. Everyone said everything.

• 1:21:03Dax Shepard?

  Little brother.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Here I am.

• 1:21:06Dax Shepard?

  Once again.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he did say, he, he said, which was, I thought was kind of a ding ding ding, because here, when we have people on who we admire, and we don't really know, we can't really say, there's no words to say it. And we just say like, we're grateful and thank you. He, he just said, I'm just gonna say thank you.

• 1:21:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  So that was really, really sweet.

• 1:21:26Dax Shepard?

  But no one's crying at this thing. Is anyone crying?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  People are crying, yeah.

• 1:21:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay, good.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, people are crying. Yeah, there were all these like Hindu traditions, even though she really wasn't very religious, but I think she wanted some of this stuff, or we decided to do it anyway.

• 1:21:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  And it was, um, it was really cool to, to experience that. I've never experienced.

• 1:21:47Dax Shepard?

  Those traditions don't get here by accident.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Dax Shepard?

  They're, they're, they're useful.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  And in all, in all the speeches, a lot of people would say things about the religion and the, um, you know, the big tenets of it and the god of death. And like, there was just, I was like, I really, I really need to learn more.

• 1:22:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that would be fun.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Another thing that I thought was really beautiful, so she came here in the sixties, um, pre-civil rights. And so if you got to come, they labeled you as either black or Caucasian.

• 1:22:18Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  So Indians were put in the Caucasian category.

• 1:22:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Um, which at the time.

• 1:22:23Dax Shepard?

  That'd upset that Florida coach, acting coach.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  It, correct.

• 1:22:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  But at the time was good for, because it was trees, yeah.

• 1:22:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Anyway, she came and she, um, I didn't really realize the level of genius she was until I'm hearing all these people talk about her and, you know, she was like on another level.

• 1:22:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Statistician, and she went to the University of Chicago, then she was a professor, then she started all these businesses and, you know, all these things. Very, very, very cool person. But yeah, so we're in this little like chapel and, um, I'm looking, you know, people are speaking and I look and I see this like really blowy, flowy, beautiful American flag flying outside. And I was like, yeah, that's, that's right. Like, she did this, you know, she came.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Okay. I just think that's a beautiful.

• 1:23:19Dax Shepard?

  It is. Don't make me cry is what I'm saying.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you were saying it was getting political.

• 1:23:24Dax Shepard?

  No, this is the kind of thing that would really set me off.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 1:23:27Dax Shepard?

  It is what I would want someone to think, that this place with all of its warts is still the most special place.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  It's the most beautiful and this person.

• 1:23:34Dax Shepard?

  For a woman in 1960 to be able to come somewhere and live to all of her potential is the thing we do right.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And it's the most beautiful thing about this country and, and, um, this is the potential here. And she ended up being so successful here and, and being this independent woman here and owning all these homes and doing all this stuff and had, you know, fulfilling her dreams, which ultimately did kind of take her, but you know.

• 1:24:03Dax Shepard?

  But again, better than not your dream taking you.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think she would have felt that way. So it was really, really beautiful and.

• 1:24:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. If I go out in a fireball at like 210 miles an hour at 85, like you just gotta go like, God bless me. And he, that's exactly how he'd want to go.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  I know. And we would have to look at it that way. And you can't judge 82 years based on the last five minutes. Like that is so unfair. But she, and she did like the last text she sent to her daughter, um, was on the boat.

• 1:24:36Dax Shepard?

  Feeling great about it.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. She said, I'm, I'm on the boat. This is exhilarating. This is what I've always dreamed of.

• 1:24:44Dax Shepard?

  As good as you can do.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  It's as good as you can do.

• 1:24:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  So it was really, really lovely. I obviously felt like I wish we had all as a family done this while she was alive. These are the things that like.

• 1:24:55Dax Shepard?

  It should be standard that if you hit like 80, you get a living funeral and maybe you'll be around for another 25, but let's just do it where everyone can see you.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Or let's do it any, let's just get together more, guys. Like make the time. It's really.

• 1:25:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  It's really important. But yeah, it was, it was, it was beautiful. It felt like closure. There was a double rainbow that night.

• 1:25:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or that day after the memorial. And so it was really nice.

• 1:25:22Dax Shepard?

  Good.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then there's all these fun stories about my dad being a rascal, which was always fun.

• 1:25:27Dax Shepard?

  Was he rascally?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Very rascally. Very rascally.

• 1:25:30Dax Shepard?

  I get a rascally sense from him. A little rascal underbelly.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Littlest brother.

• 1:25:35Dax Shepard?

  We're, yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  And I did think of you actually, cause he said, he said, you know, how my uncle Jay said that. He was always trying to live up to my Aunt Lily. And my dad said, and I was always trying to live up to my Uncle Jay.

• 1:25:49Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  So, and he said, and I failed miserably. So it's like, yeah, these little brothers are always trying to be their big brother. It's really, really something. But anyway, it was just, I, it was nice.

• 1:26:00Dax Shepard?

  I'm glad it was that.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too. Me too. Me too. And it was, you know, the struggle to get there. It was three hours away from the thing. And I, last night I left late. I got to the hotel at midnight. I had booked the wrong day for the hotel. You know, there's just a lot, but it was worth it.

• 1:26:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh, good.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Dax Shepard?

  Good, good, good. Well, a lot of the things I wrote down have to do with screen grabs I've, I've grabbed.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:26:23Dax Shepard?

  Um, that involve you.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:26:25Dax Shepard?

  As I like to do. I like to scour the comments and find out. Okay. This is a great point someone made.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:26:32Dax Shepard?

  I don't know why I didn't think of it in the, at the time, but when you thought that Matthew Friends had the same father as Matthew Perry.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:26:40Dax Shepard?

  What didn't occur to you is that his dad would have had two Matthews.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  I.

• 1:26:46Dax Shepard?

  So someone wrote, I love that Monica thought Matthew Perry's dad had two sons named Matthew. I didn't, I said, oh, good point. I hadn't thought of that either, but yeah, that'd be insane. Unless he's George Foreman.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  I didn't think about that at all because you never, you think of Matthew Perry and Matt Friend. I haven't heard, yeah, that's embarrassing.

• 1:27:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And then someone else wrote this, the same topic. All caps for some reason. Uh, had to come here to say mom thought Matthew Perry and Matthew Friend were brothers because she probably Googled Matthew, Matt Friend dad. And Matthew Perry is also named Matt and was on Friends.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:27:32Dax Shepard?

  So we.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:27:33Dax Shepard?

  This mystery really sent a lot of ships in different directions.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:37Dax Shepard?

  But minimally, that was funny that both were named Matthew.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I didn't think it through. I just saw it and thought, whoa.

• 1:27:44Dax Shepard?

  That would have been like, it worked the first time. Also, the age gap between these two is 20 plus years.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  And maybe, and to me, it could be different. It was definitely different moms and maybe both moms were really attached to the name.

• 1:27:56Dax Shepard?

  Maybe they insisted on Matthew.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't know.

• 1:27:59Dax Shepard?

  Still, I would have, as the dad would have been like, I. I already have, my son's already gonna be uncomfortable with the fact I'm having another son 30 years later. So maybe if we didn't name him the same thing, he wouldn't feel as replaced.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but maybe the mom is like, that's my dad's name. And I told him on his deathbed that if I had a son, I would name it. And so there's no other.

• 1:28:18Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, it's really easy. It's really easy to do.

• 1:28:26Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  You know, I love therapy more than anything. Gets me through. Often I'll want to cancel because I'm like, I don't really have anything to talk about. And then I'll go and I have some major revelation.

• 1:29:21Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds. Once it's out into the world, you gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 1:29:37Dax Shepard?

  If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Do yourself a favor and just try it. Future you will be grateful. Visit betterhelp.com/dax to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash DAX.

• 1:30:11Dax Shepard?

  So that was my Instagram update.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:30:14Dax Shepard?

  And then the other couple of things I wrote down is, I wonder if Waina is sad about Pips.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Oh, this is an important thing to talk about.

• 1:30:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm not Waina, I'm not playing Pips, so don't feel abandoned by me.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:30:29Dax Shepard?

  But do you think-

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  For people who don't know what's going on.

• 1:30:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Connections was our first love, it's created by Waina and made by her, and now everyone's starting to send around Pips.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and guess what?

• 1:30:41Dax Shepard?

  And I got worried about her.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  I do love Pips.

• 1:30:44Dax Shepard?

  You love Pips, and are you playing Connections as much?

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Yes, so I still, I still do the whole thing.

• 1:30:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great, well, this must take a lot of time.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  It is, but it's a fun morning activity. I do the mini, this is the order I do.

• 1:30:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Mini, Wordle, Strands.

• 1:31:00Dax Shepard?

  Fuck me, wow, three, okay.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Connections.

• 1:31:02Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Pips. So Pips only happens if I have time, and Pips has three, it has easy, medium, hard, so I like to try to do them all.

• 1:31:11Dax Shepard?

  Wow, is this your whole morning?

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  It's a long time in the morning.

• 1:31:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a good, it's better than Instagram.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, it gets my brain moving.

• 1:31:19Dax Shepard?

  And that brings us to the other thing I wrote down.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:22Dax Shepard?

  Is like two public ser- one concern, one, Waina, uh, one, this is a public service announcement. This crossed my mind, for some reason, when I was with Eric and Molly. We were talking about phone use, we had seen a comedian, she was talking about phone use a lot.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:37Dax Shepard?

  And, um, here's what I did think, that's interesting about your phone. Let's say you spend two or three hours on it a day, and you're having fun experiences, you're seeing fun videos and everything. But what occurred to me is like, I don't have a single fun memory of being on my phone, like a specific memory.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  You don't?

• 1:31:56Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  From being on your phone at all, or being on social media?

• 1:32:00Dax Shepard?

  Social media.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:32:01Dax Shepard?

  Like, I can't see an actual ma- I know I've been consuming social media for, on a bad day, two hours a day, and on a good day, none, but- What I know is I have no specific memory of like, oh, that one time I was sitting on the couch just loving Instagram. And I was like, I don't think you can commit them to memory.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:23Dax Shepard?

  They're not real experiences.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Okay, I think you're right, but also.

• 1:32:29Dax Shepard?

  They just go in a void. Like, the proclamation I want to make is no one will ever be on their deathbed reflecting about this great time they had on their phone. I don't even think you can make those memories.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Scrolling and stuff, yeah. I think you can have them texting. I have them.

• 1:32:44Dax Shepard?

  Texting, yeah, that's a relationship.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But I think in the same way, sometimes that happens, like when you sent me the video of the lady pooping. Yeah, pooping in the.

• 1:32:57Dax Shepard?

  But again, that was interactive and that was you and I and that's like.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  So there are.

• 1:33:01Dax Shepard?

  Maintaining a real life friendship.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:33:03Dax Shepard?

  But just the like, oh, and I saw this and I saw this and I saw that and I saw this and I saw this argument and I saw this. I don't think any of those are committed memories. Weirdly, I just, I connected these dots. It was like, yeah, every moment you spend on that will never kind of be reflected on.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Hmm, that's interesting, yeah.

• 1:33:19Dax Shepard?

  It was a waste in the moment and then even worse, it's like a gap in your real life.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's probably very, very true. That's scary. But you know what's funny? And this, I wonder why this is true because it's not connection. But like, I do have days that I think back on fondly of just like watching three hours of cooking videos. Not on Instagram, but still. And I do think of that very fondly. Like, oh, that was so nice. Like, I felt cozy. I mean, to me, that was like watching TV, which fond memories of that, obviously.

• 1:33:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  So I wonder what's different about that.

• 1:34:00Dax Shepard?

  I think just the speed, like the speed, there's too much. Your brain has got to decide they're not going to hold on to this. It's not quintessential for your life.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Dax Shepard?

  And it just knows to dump it.

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Dax Shepard?

  And so it's just kind of these holes, I think, in your memory, which is.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, because maybe with the cooking videos, because I am. Learning about cooking.

• 1:34:23Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh, and you're making a future goal of like, I'll try that dish and I'll serve it to these people. There is something real life impacty about it.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Dax Shepard?

  Whereas just like scrolling is.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Dax Shepard?

  Or if I'm looking at like another thing, I think is like, you're not going to remember any of your like cruising up shopping stuff. Or for me, looking at cars, I'm not going to be like, I remember that time I saw that eighty four Mustang that was done perfectly. And I just loved being on the couch convincing myself I needed to buy it and then talking myself out of it. Like, I just can't imagine that's what's on the deathbed.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  No, it's not, uh, uh, yeah.

• 1:34:58Dax Shepard?

  And not everything has to be for your deathbed, but if you can't even recall it, I don't, I think that's a maybe.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  That's fair. That's fair. That's definitely fair.

• 1:35:06Dax Shepard?

  Last thing is, ah, and I want to know your, so as, as we've discussed, I actually kind of like being embarrassed.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Dax Shepard?

  And we had a moment the other day, they talk about the roller skating.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:19Dax Shepard?

  So, you know, I had the roller skating behind the, the motorcycle with tow ropes.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Yes, the kids.

• 1:35:23Dax Shepard?

  Great.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Dax Shepard?

  And then I thought, oh, even better, I'm going to put a long bar across the back of the four wheeler, which is lower. And then so when we're going downhill and they need to brace so that they don't go too fast, they'll have a nice bar they can hold on to.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:36Dax Shepard?

  This is a huge improvement. So it's got tow ropes and it's got this bar.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:40Dax Shepard?

  And so we go out trial run. It's awesome. I don't know what we did, but maybe the battery died of the speaker we were listening to. So we go back in the house, grab a new speaker. When we come back out and we're just, we're just taking off. And also we'd seen no other cars, right? Well, ten feet after leaving the driveway, Delta decides she's going to shoot the duck, which is a tricky skate move. You're only on one skate and you're crouched all the way down and she rips them on the roller skate.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, she does.

• 1:36:09Dax Shepard?

  She can do them.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10Dax Shepard?

  Well, she ate shit, right? And so she hit, she hit the asphalt. She's laying there screaming. And as soon as I turned to see like, oh boy, how hurt is she?

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:21Dax Shepard?

  Um, I noticed, oh God, there's a car waiting now. So I got a kid in the ground, on the ground, I'm on a four wheeler. Lincoln's in the mix.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh, and then I like, I kinda run over to Delta.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:33Dax Shepard?

  It's okay, tell me where her, you know, and then as I'm looking up, now I got a car on the other side. So we're causing a traffic jam in the neighborhood.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  This is hard, yeah.

• 1:36:39Dax Shepard?

  So I'm immediately super embarrassed.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  You are?

• 1:36:42Dax Shepard?

  As a dad, I'm like, they think what I'm doing is irresponsible and here this kid's hurt. And so I'm now, I'm getting really embarrassed.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  In a bad way.

• 1:36:50Dax Shepard?

  That other people are judging me as a parent. And Lincoln bolted, like, he got the hell out of there, right?

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  He did, she like ran back home?

• 1:36:57Dax Shepard?

  She skated back home. We were very close, we had just pulled out.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:00Dax Shepard?

  She's like, get me out of here, right? And then, so I, I go to Delta, you know, how bad is it? My, you know, I go, okay, I gotta get you out of the road, cause there's, we have a traffic jam now. So I like, pick her up, I put her on the four wheeler. We then make a four point turn, that's embarrassing, and then we finally get away, and then the traffic jam goes away. We get back in the house, I don't know, forty minutes later, Lincoln and I are walking through the yard and she just goes, I go, I go, where the hell did you go? You just kinda bailed. She goes, I was so embarrassed. And I go, how do, how do you think I was feeling? She goes, oh, I know exactly how you're feeling, you were definitely embarrassed that people thought you were a bad dad. I'm like, yes. And then we bonded over, and she said it, she goes, I love being embarrassed though, like ten minutes later, I just love it. And I go, yeah, me too, it feels so unique, doesn't it? Like we were panicked, oh my God, we gotta get out of this road, the whole thing.

• 1:37:45Dax Shepard?

  So we had this really fun time bonding over that we both have that gene, where we kinda love being embarrassed.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Interesting. Does it matter about what? Like, if you're embarrassed that you're a bad dad?

• 1:37:56Dax Shepard?

  You're leading me perfectly to all the zones.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:37:59Dax Shepard?

  So obviously, that's the thing, there are things that I love being embarrassed about, and then there are other things I don't. And so one I'm gonna share with you that I don't like, that I've recently become embarrassed by.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:10Dax Shepard?

  Is I've made the same joke a few places, and it's percolated up because we have mom's car, we have this show, then we have guests that maybe warrant me retelling the story. But, I've told this thing about that I told Kristen, just start meeting me places, cause she's too famous. And I realize I've told it like in three different places.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:28Dax Shepard?

  And by the third time I saw it, I was like, oh, I'd be so embarrassed if I was listening to this show. Like, God, this guy thinks this joke is so good, he just keeps saying it. And when I'm caught recycling a bit, or a joke. I'm really humiliated.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:42Dax Shepard?

  And this has been bubbling up a couple. There's a few I've recycled too many times and I'm on it, listener, and I'm gonna clean it up, cuz it's embarrassing.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:38:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I don't like that.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sorry.

• 1:38:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's my fault.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sorry you feel embarrassed.

• 1:38:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  And I don't mean to.

• 1:39:02Dax Shepard?

  Go ahead.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Feel more embarrassment.

• 1:39:05Dax Shepard?

  You probably cut out a lot of.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  Yes, there are stories that they're just, it's not your, it's not, it's, the only reason it comes up is because it's all recorded, right? Like, in life, people tell the same stories, and you don't think about it because you're not, you're telling it to the same people.

• 1:39:24Dax Shepard?

  Well, also, I would add is I make a point not to retell stories to people that have already heard it, but we're constantly in a situation where three times a week, we're sitting with people we've never met.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:39:34Dax Shepard?

  And then, so now I got a reason to tell this person.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I'm saying.

• 1:39:37Dax Shepard?

  You shouldn't have to sit through it again, or why?

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Well, no, like, so I, that's what I'm saying. In real life, you tell, we all, we all, like, tell stories, the same story to many different people, and no one's gonna quote, catch you.

• 1:39:53Dax Shepard?

  Catch you, yes.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Because it's different people. That is what you're doing. You're telling someone new.

• 1:39:58Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  But the problem is.

• 1:40:00Dax Shepard?

  Everyone else has heard it.

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  This is what happens when we're in such an intimate setting. I think it's easy to forget that there is an audience who has heard this already. So I do, um, there are, there are like, you know, there's a handful of ones that I'm just like, that's always gonna go.

• 1:40:19Dax Shepard?

  We're getting rid of that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  Now, sometimes, I have to leave it.

• 1:40:25Dax Shepard?

  Because it'd be insane that the person followed up with that without the setup.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:40:30Dax Shepard?

  I agree. This is why my defense of it usually.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:34Dax Shepard?

  Like, yeah, I gotta keep telling a certain few stories cuz that's what leads to the other people's stories.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Well, and I have a bit of a solution, cuz sometimes you do this naturally, right? But sometimes you don't, and that's when we get in a pickle. But often naturally, cuz I understand the impetus to tell it, because it also, you're telling it so that the person feels connected to you.

• 1:40:55Dax Shepard?

  And comfortable with whatever their thing is.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. You're relating to them. So. I think you don't have to stop doing that.

• 1:41:03Dax Shepard?

  I know.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  There's something at the end, like then you just say one sentence that's the actual question. So that the story can go. Yeah, the story can then just get chopped.

• 1:41:14Dax Shepard?

  That's good.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  And then it's just the question is clean.

• 1:41:18Dax Shepard?

  I thought you were gonna suggest something different, which I have made a concerted effort to clean up.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:41:23Dax Shepard?

  Which is, a lot of times, well, most of the time I'm telling the story to start the process.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:31Dax Shepard?

  But I am guilty sometimes if they told me the story, they didn't need any prompting. And then I then match them at the end, which we don't need. And I have back.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:41Dax Shepard?

  I've become aware of that.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Dax Shepard?

  And I try now to not go like.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:41:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was also in Iceland.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Well, and again, sometimes it's fine. And if it's.

• 1:41:53Dax Shepard?

  It's not necessary.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  If it's a new story.

• 1:41:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  And it's interesting.

• 1:41:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but both, yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  It's okay. We all, I, that's, I find it very endearing that you're embarrassed by it.

• 1:42:06Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna clean it up. I just want, whoever's flagged it, I'm gonna clean it up.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:42:11Dax Shepard?

  Keep the material fresh as possible.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  Um, I wish I had been a little braver.

• 1:42:17Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Because there have been some times where I've been like, I need to, I do need to tell him that that story has to be removed from. It's gotta go.

• 1:42:28Dax Shepard?

  It's gotta go.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Um, but I didn't, I haven't, I don't wanna be like, so, don't do this, you know? That feels mean or bad or telling people what to do.

• 1:42:39Dax Shepard?

  My mojo.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I just wanna mess with you or get you, make you feel like I'm trying to control things or something like that, right? So I haven't done it. But now, look, we're in a position where you're embarrassed.

• 1:42:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. But um, I hope you feel comforted by the, the notion that I, I'm attempting to be aware.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  No, I know, I know. But you, you had to get there the hard way.

• 1:43:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  And I could have given you any, but maybe you wouldn't, maybe you would have been mad at me if I did it that way.

• 1:43:06Dax Shepard?

  Who knows?

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Who knows? There's no way to.

• 1:43:07Dax Shepard?

  Hard to know. I just know that I gotta, I'm not gonna be telling the one punchline ever again. Unless I'm talking to someone on the steeps of Mongolia and I'm pretty certain they've not heard it.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  You can, well, it's also funny. I was thinking, cause when we had Matt Friend on, who's a huge armcherry.

• 1:43:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Again, like in any other circumstance, most of the people we have on, I don't think listen.

• 1:43:30Dax Shepard?

  They're not, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  These stories are new, but with him, I don't remember what it was, but I remember thinking like,

• 1:43:36Dax Shepard?

  He already knows.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  I know he knows, like, he knows the story. He probably knows how it ends. And that's kind of funny. Anyway, I'm sorry you're embarrassed about that.

• 1:43:45Dax Shepard?

  That's okay. Just something to work on.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  And how, on a scale of one to 10, how embarrassed are you about that versus your carbuncles?

• 1:43:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's interesting. One I'm culpable for and one is just I'm a victim. So like, I shouldn't feel guilty or embarrassed by the carbuncles, but of course, I feel more gross.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:44:04Dax Shepard?

  And I don't like to feel gross to people.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Nobody likes that.

• 1:44:07Dax Shepard?

  No, but just like if I'm teeming with some infection, that's disgusting. And no one wants to be with a septic.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  It's not disgusting.

• 1:44:15Dax Shepard?

  No one wants a septic lover.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Speak for yourself. I don't mind a septic.

• 1:44:21Dax Shepard?

  I guess the right septic lover. I'd take Pitt. Septic.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  As long as it's temporary. Well, no, I don't want to say that in case we have any like long-term septic people listening. It's great. Everyone's attractive.

• 1:44:35Dax Shepard?

  Everyone's great. You're septic or not.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Everyone's great. Um, all right. Well, let's get you to the hospital. So let's move on.

• 1:44:41Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  Okay, some facts for Toby. Um, has Joan Didion written a sonnet? Because he asked AI to write a sonnet.

• 1:44:53Dax Shepard?

  In?

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  In Joan Didion's voice. And he said, but I don't know if she's ever written one. And I don't, she did not write a formal sonnet.

• 1:45:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Based off my research. Five novels, 10 books of nonfiction and a play.

• 1:45:07Dax Shepard?

  Say the name again.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  Joan Didion?

• 1:45:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so what's crazy is someone else I'm reading about.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  She's huge. I'm reading a Joan Didion book right now.

• 1:45:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you are?

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:17Dax Shepard?

  What was I reading right before the Charlie Sheen book that I put down? Can I glance?

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Oh, I know what it is. I think Joan Didion was Bret Easton Ellis's favorite author as an aspiring. Bret Easton Ellis.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  I don't know him.

• 1:45:33Dax Shepard?

  You do Less Than Zero, American Psycho.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Oh, director?

• 1:45:39Dax Shepard?

  Uh, no, novelist.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:45:41Dax Shepard?

  But several of his books have been turned into movies.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:45:44Dax Shepard?

  Uh, he wrote the screenplays for, so he's done both.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:45:47Dax Shepard?

  And he has a book out, maybe it's two years old, called Shards.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:45:52Dax Shepard?

  And it's about growing up, going to one of these fancy private schools in Hollywood.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:45:57Dax Shepard?

  In the eighties. And it's like so juicy with like, um, you know, eighties pop Hollywood.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Dax Shepard?

  Rich kid.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:46:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you would love it. You would love it. But he's talking about her constantly, which is funny because I'm completely unfamiliar with her work.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:46:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what's her seminal?

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  Most famous Joan Didion book, let's see what pops up. Well, I'm reading The White Album. That did pop up. Oh, The Year of Magical Thinking.

• 1:46:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I am aware of that title.

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I guess that's the most popular or whatever. But yeah, she has a ton. She was, she almost won a Pulitzer. She was just like a big icon in the seventies, I think. Like, she was in the scene and, you know. Anyway.

• 1:46:40Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna read something by her. That's my commitment.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really like what I'm reading now.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  I would recommend it. All right, let's see here. Uh, the Rembrandt that was delisted. So several Rembrandt paintings have been demoted, but some of the most well-known include Portrait of a Young Woman. That's a 1632 painting. Once considered a Rembrandt, was downgraded to the worship of Rembrandt.

• 1:47:05Dax Shepard?

  Boo.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, 1970.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  Um, oh, this was such a ding ding ding. I had to like, I had to-

• 1:47:12Dax Shepard?

  You had to put your eyeballs back in your head?

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, they popped out. Now, don't get offended.

• 1:47:17Dax Shepard?

  I won't.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  But the name of the painting is Old Man in an Armchair.

• 1:47:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, this is like a ding ding ding with the Eames chair.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:47:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:26Speaker 01

  And-

• 1:47:26Dax Shepard?

  I'm an old man in an armchair.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Well, you're not old, but you're a man in an armchair. And then like in 20 years, we could, 30 years, we could say you're an old man in an armchair. But I feel like we gotta get this.

• 1:47:38Dax Shepard?

  The painting?

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:40Dax Shepard?

  What is the current value of it?

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  I don't know, but it was demoted.

• 1:47:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that helps.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  So it's not gonna be that expensive. It was bought in 1957 by the National Gallery, and then it was demoted soon after.

• 1:47:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  But we'll take it.

• 1:47:58Dax Shepard?

  The art world is the shadiest world ever. It's such a shady world.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  It's so interesting. Anyway, there's a couple others, but that was the main one. Okay, we talked about like Harvard, and if you can, you can kind of like guess, you know, the type of childhood that most of those kids come from.

• 1:48:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  And, um, so I looked into some of their financial aid. I was just, I got curious about that.

• 1:48:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  I looked at percentage of low-income students at elite colleges.

• 1:48:26Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Low-income students defined as from the bottom 20% of the income distribution consistently make up about 5% of the student body at highly selective institutions.

• 1:48:36Dax Shepard?

  5%.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  That's nothing.

• 1:48:37Dax Shepard?

  That's a-

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  That's not a lot, but not enough.

• 1:48:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Um, it does say in comparison, approximately 40% of students attending all other institutions nationwide were Pell Grant recipients. So-

• 1:48:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 1:48:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's the thing. And then, of course, they don't have the status because of it. It's like, yeah, they're in the UC system, they're in the state colleges. Yeah, and most of these kids who go to these schools, their parents did. It is this revolving door of, uh, of advantage, yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely is. Um, anyway, that was it.

• 1:49:09Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  Not very many facts for Toby, but it was a very interesting conversation. That's it.

• 1:49:13Dax Shepard?

  Thanks, Toby. Love you.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Love you.