Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau & Luke Malone (on child sexual abuse prevention)

Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau (One in Five) is a leading prevention researcher and Luke Malone is an Emmy-nominated journalist. Elizabeth and Luke join Armchair Expert to discuss the staggering prevalence of child sexual abuse, why this subject is so difficult to talk about publicly, and how a reluctant interview became a long collaboration. Elizabeth, Luke, and Dax talk about the difference between pedophilia and offending, why so much child sexual abuse happens at the hands of other kids, and how the current justice system often fails both victims and young offenders. Elizabeth and Luke explain why prevention should be treated as a public health issue, how shame prevents people from seeking help before harm happens, and why compassion and accountability have to exist together. Sign up now in the app or at grubhub.com/plus/golddays to unlock exclusive Gold Days deals. Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Today, we have Dr. Elizabeth Laterno and Luke Malone on. If ever there were a cause for a trigger warning, this would be the episode. We are going to get deep into what could only be described as an epidemic of child sexual abuse. One in five kids, hence the title of their book that they collaborated on called One in Five. Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis and What We Can Do to Stop It. Dr. Elizabeth Laterno is the director of MOORE, M-O-O-R-E, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which is a center focused on child sexual abuse prevention.

• 0:51Dax Shepard?

  So we have like one of the most foremost experts imaginable. Incredible origin story, how these two ended up working together. She was going to get interviewed by Luke and was reluctant to do so. And it's turned into a long collaboration for both of them. And Luke is an Emmy nominated journalist who has reported on sexual abuse for 15 years. So he is so dedicated to this topic. And there's so much stuff you would not have imagined otherwise. It's a very revealing episode. I learned so much in this episode.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  But also, just so people aren't like, I would, I just would never listen to it. There's like good, they're trying to make a lot of progress and the goal is to end this and it can be done.

• 1:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, they have a lot, a lot of solutions and a lot of understanding of all the different ways this expresses itself. So please enjoy Dr. Elizabeth Laterno and Luke Malone. We get support from Quince.

• 1:46Speaker 01

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• 1:55Dax Shepard?

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• 2:17Speaker 01

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• 2:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 2:44Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 2:46Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46Speaker 01

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• 3:04Dax Shepard?

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

• 3:40Speaker 01

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• 3:52Dax Shepard?

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• 4:06Speaker 01

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• 4:10Dax Shepard?

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

• 4:21Speaker 01

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• 4:28Dax Shepard?

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• 5:10Speaker 01

  It's a little chilly out today. It is. It's not very light. Uh-uh, I know. I don't like it.

• 5:15Dax Shepard?

  Where do y'all live? Baltimore. Baltimore.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Oh, so you get a lot of it.

• 5:18Dax Shepard?

  Johns Hopkins, you gotta be there, yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Johns Hopkins, your favorite.

• 5:24Dax Shepard?

  I hate that name. Do other people express their frustration with the double plural?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  It was his grandmother's last name, so you know.

• 5:31Dax Shepard?

  It's been explained to me.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  People do that to their kids.

• 5:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  They do.

• 5:35Dax Shepard?

  But two plurals, it's hard.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  It's terrible. It's not alliterative. It's awful. It's terrible to say.

• 5:41Dax Shepard?

  But that's a tiny grievance. So much good work.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  You know, you could pick at some other things as well. It's not an unblemished history.

• 5:47Dax Shepard?

  Sure, antitrust issues, but the amount of...

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I mean, you know.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Look, no one's perfect.

• 5:52Dax Shepard?

  No one's perfect.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  When you have that kind of wealth, there's original sin somewhere.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  But if you can do something good with it, we'll take it.

• 5:59Dax Shepard?

  So Elizabeth, where are you from originally?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  I grew up in Ohio.

• 6:03Dax Shepard?

  What part of Ohio? Sandusky?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Mentor.

• 6:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I did a movie in Mentor, Ohio.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Oh, did you really? Yeah.

• 6:09Dax Shepard?

  Home of Garfield? No, who? What president?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  That sounds right. If there's quizzes, I'm not gonna pass.

• 6:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  You should always clarify if you're talking about Garfield.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  The cat. I thought the cat. So it has a very Ohio vibe to the cat, but yeah, I think you're right about that. But yeah, no, I grew up there.

• 6:26Dax Shepard?

  Love Cedar Point?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Went to Cedar Point a billion times.

• 6:29Dax Shepard?

  Did you ever go in a matching outfit with a boyfriend or a girlfriend?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  I have never done that, nor will I. But my mother, there were five of us, three boys, she made the boys wear matching outfits in all of our pictures. And at one point, bought all of us tracksuits that matched.

• 6:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Also something I have not... Repeat.

• 6:48Dax Shepard?

  Heal from entirely?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  We're getting into the really big wounds early.

• 6:56Dax Shepard?

  I feel like I have a kind of a good sense of who mom is already just from that tiny little nugget.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  She loves her family.

• 7:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I have a great family. I got lucky.

• 7:05Dax Shepard?

  And then Luke, where are you from?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Sydney, Australia.

• 7:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay. Never heard of it. Where is that at?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Just around the corner, down the road, you know, yeah.

• 7:12Dax Shepard?

  How did you end up here?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  I came to New York specifically in 2012 to do my masters in journalism at Columbia.

• 7:17Dax Shepard?

  And am I right in that you guys formed this kind of partnership in that you wanted to interview Elizabeth? And you did not really want to be interviewed by him?

• 7:26Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  I had no problem being interviewed by you.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Don't lie on the record right now.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  I was sick when he was coming down. I had the flu. I literally went and found a colleague who had a couch, who's like my one psychiatrist colleague. So of course he had a couch in his office to lay down, but he was coming from New York to Baltimore and I didn't want to disappoint. But I was legit ill. It had nothing to do personally.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Thank God you didn't.

• 7:48Dax Shepard?

  And what position did you hold at that time in 2000? What year would this have been?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  2012, 2013?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, associate professor.

• 7:56Dax Shepard?

  In the School of Medicine?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Department of Mental Health in the School of Public Health in the University of John Hopkins.

• 8:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay, what's your PhD in?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Clinical psychology, but I've been a grant funded researcher my entire career.

• 8:08Dax Shepard?

  But you're a professor too, or no?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you do it all. Yeah.

• 8:11Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so when you were reaching out to Elizabeth, what topic were you hoping to interview her on?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Well, I was kind of doing a story about a group of young self identified, non offending pedophiles.

• 8:20Dax Shepard?

  Let's really take a minute.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, slow that down.

• 8:23Dax Shepard?

  Young, self identifying, non

• 8:26Speaker 03

  offending.

• 8:27Dax Shepard?

  offending

• 8:28Speaker 03

  pedophiles.

• 8:29Dax Shepard?

  pedophiles.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  And the kind of non offending part was important to them and still is because I feel like people assume the pedophile, it means you've abused a child or you're about to abuse a child. And this was a bunch of kids who, and they were very young. They were kind of like 17, 18, 19, 20. Who realised this about themselves, didn't want to act. At the time, there was no support for them. And so they'd formed this kind of hodgepodge support group for themselves to figure out, how do we reckon with this, like now and going forward?

• 8:52Dax Shepard?

  Really quick, how did you stumble upon that group of guys?

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Part of Columbia was doing like a thesis. It was literally about my grad thesis. I'd been a journalist in Australia for six, seven years. I'm terrible with years, but for a while. And I wanted to become a serious journalist. So I came here, went to Columbia. Literally, it was just a thesis idea. It kind of came to me one day. I was reading about the Jerry Sandusky sentencing. And I was like, huh, Jerry wasn't born like a seven-year-old child molester. I wonder what happened before then to get here?

• 9:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  And then I started interviewing a bunch of guys who were in their 50s, 60s, 70s, who were attracted to kids, didn't want to sexually offend against kids.

• 9:24Dax Shepard?

  But again, how'd you even find those people? That could be your interest, but where does one start finding them?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, online in a very official channel, like nothing too shady. But there's a group called Virtuous Pedophiles, which I think is a terrible name.

• 9:36Dax Shepard?

  It needs a rebrand.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, rebrand.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  I've bought it up a couple of times and like I haven't spoken to them for that group for a while. But I was like, guys, and they're like, oh, but we want to communicate that we're like, I'm like, it doesn't matter.

• 9:44Dax Shepard?

  Talk about an oxymoron, we can add that to the list.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  It's just no one wants to see that word. That's why this topic is tough.

• 9:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Branding's 80% of it. So the Virtuous Pedophile, for very good reason, they couldn't have members who were below the age of 18. So it was 18 and above. And again, most of the guys were like 40, 50, 60, 70. So I spoke to a bunch of them, interviewed them, and I was like, ugh, no matter how virtuous you are, if you're like a 50-year-old who says, I'm sexually attracted to eight-year-old children, it is so icky. I understand the reason, it's too much of a hurdle for a reader to get over.

• 10:15Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  But then also, I think intellectually, they've had decades to figure it out. Like what this means for them and their lives. And so I want to speak to younger kids who are kind of, A, that people might have a tiny bit more possibility for empathy toward, and also kids who are going through it right now.

• 10:29Dax Shepard?

  What was the podcast, Monica?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Tart and Feathered, that's him.

• 10:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:33Dax Shepard?

  You're the one who did that.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  So this was like a thesis project and it became a print piece and This American Life podcast out of that.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Really in-

• 10:39Dax Shepard?

  Incredible episode. That was.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Thanks. Everyone's done a bunch of stuff in this room, but it's wild to think. Came out in 2014. I used to kind of resist. I was like, oh, God, this is defining my life. But it's kind of lovely to do something that people are still talking about 12 years later, which is sweet.

• 10:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I will say this is gonna be one of the most challenging episodes for people to listen to and to find compassion for, and I hope we do a fair and good job. We have a history a little bit. We had a clinically diagnosed sociopath that came on.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Patrick G A G N E?

• 11:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have long set on here, and I'm a victim of sexual abuse, but I have long set on here. I do feel bad if you are afflicted with pedophilia. I didn't pick not being attracted to kids. I just am not. And I don't think anyone would pick this. So just out of the gates, I'm so grateful. That's not something I have to fight the urge of. What kind of work were you doing that Luke would reach out to you on this topic?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  So I've been working on child sexual abuse prevention, policy and practice since grad school. So I'm at the 38 year mark. It's what I've spent my entire career doing.

• 11:46Dax Shepard?

  That's a daunting endeavor. I guess I feel like I need a tiny bit of explanation how you could have been pulled to that. And stayed.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Staying was super easy. I don't have an origin story that involves surviving child sexual abuse. I went to grad school for clinical psychology doctoral program. Definitely didn't feel like I belonged there. And I had a teacher I wanted to impress, and she handed out paper topics and I got pedophilia. Her husband was also there and that was his area and also sex offending. Those are two different things. People who have sexual attraction to children and people who offend against children are often two separate groups. But anyway, so I just killed myself writing the best term paper I possibly could to prove to this faculty member and to me that I belonged in this doctoral program.

• 12:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  And she saw and she liked it. And she said, hey, do you mind if I share this with my husband? And she did. And then I started working in his lab. And early on, he invited me to kind of co-lead a group that was for men who had already offended. They'd served time in prison and they'd come back into their communities. This was in Maine, by the way. And they were refusing to acknowledge what they had done. And part of treatment for people who sexually offend, particularly for adults and at that time in particular, you had to stand up and say what you did, what you did wrong. It was very much modeled on AA meetings, actually.

• 13:05Dax Shepard?

  Meaning they were mandated to some kind of self-help group?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Not self-help, this was treatment with a therapist. The therapist said, you have to stand up and say what you did wrong and all of the different things. They were not doing that, so they were in another group for deniers. And that's the group that my professor led. And so I got to be in this group. And it was in a smallish room with like six or seven guys. And I learned a couple of things. And one thing I learned is that these were not three-headed monsters from some other planet. These were people. And some of them felt deep remorse for the harm they had caused to children. And others were assholes that you would never want to know, period. But they were people first. And I also learned that I could hear these stories and work with them and leave it at

• 13:51Speaker 02

  the office and go home and have my life. And there are not a lot of people that can do that with this particular population. So I got into it, really, literally, almost by accident. But staying, it's a small group of clinicians and researchers that focus on perpetration, whether it's working with people who have already offended, or in my case now, really shifting to preventing both victimization and perpetration and just prevention writ large, which is a lot of different ways you can prevent child sexual abuse. But the field is populated with really wonderful people. And they just kind of wrapped their arms around me and kept me in.

• 14:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I can't imagine it attracts a ton of candidates.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so back to you, Luke. When you reached out to Elizabeth, you were hoping to, what, find out what kind of treatment was in existence or what kind of modalities existed?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. So these were kids who, and they were kids, very young adults, who wanted help and there was just no help available. And Elizabeth had just founded the Mothermore Centre for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, now called MORE. And it was all fascinating. And also they gave me some backbone as a journalist. And I got this group of kids, I need to give it some kind of context. And I was very wary about being seen as some kind of pedophile advocate.

• 15:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Which has followed me through over the years. I wouldn't call myself that, but I'm more comfortable with it now. But I was very wary because it was the first time I'd kind of done this dance. The thing that you both discussed, every time the kind of pedophilia has come up on the show... There is this idea, and you've mentioned it yourselves, like murder is more palatable.

• 15:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  And pedophiles, you could murder a child, not great. But obviously.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Would not recommend.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Would not recommend. Somehow that's more palatable than sexually engaging with a kid. There's something so icky. And also, I think luckily, I myself, I'm in this group, people who aren't attracted to kids. And thank God I'm not, that'd be, like you said, such a horrible thing to deal with. It's such a huge jump for anybody to think like, oh, I could see myself doing that. I don't have kids, but I have friends with kids and sometimes a little shits. And you're like, oh, my God, I could strangle you. I've got quote marks here. I think the jump to hitting a kid, we were hit as kids. I was born in eighty one.

• 15:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, violence seems more, we've all lost our temper and thrown things.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can have empathy for parents who do that, who snap, in the same way that you don't have empathy for someone who sexually abuses a kid.

• 15:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  That's hard for you to say, because you don't want to kind of excuse behavior or minimize behavior.

• 16:00Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I know.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  But you want empathy, I mean, not maybe for the person, but the situation, you'll stand back and look, but how could this have been prevented or changed?

• 16:07Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think we would apply the Sapolsky kind of lens, which is like to feel morally superior is not really worthwhile. Taking dangerous people out of our community is essential and has to be done. But to do it without the moral high ground and the judgment and the punitive desire to make people suffer because of it, I think is the highest road we could probably take.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's very human. And just to step back for a second, I'm sorry that happened to you.

• 16:33Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay, thank you. I feel weird receiving sympathy for it.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Well, let's talk about that.

• 16:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know, maybe that's common or maybe it's uncommon.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  I don't know, but I feel like it's worth acknowledging that this is painful, that a lot of people, a lot of your listeners are going to have experienced themselves. And I would never say to empathize with the behavior at all, or with somebody who has caused harm. But there's people out there who haven't caused harm that I think we really need to focus a lot more attention on.

• 17:03Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes. Well, I did learn some stuff in researching your work, which was a little bit illuminating. I mean, I guess I've had this fear that this person that molested me maybe had gone on and victimized a bunch of people. And I never prevented that, right? That's maybe a bit of guilt I've had. But then in reading some stuff today from. From you, I'm like, maybe he never did that again. He was probably seventeen, I was probably nine-ish, somewhere in there.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:34Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, oh, that had never even occurred to me. So, we should lay out what the kind of numbers are, because it's really important. And your book, One in Five, really tells us right out of the gates.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:44Dax Shepard?

  So, one in five kids will experience some sexual abuse?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Some form of sexual abuse or attempted sexual abuse, online or offline. So, this is kind of the first, what we call prevalent statistic, that combines both online and offline victimization.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  And these are reported?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  No, we would never rely on reporting.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Okay, I was gonna say like that's.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Because so few get reported.

• 18:04Dax Shepard?

  That would make it a hundred percent.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  That's why I got, that's why I got confused.

• 18:07Dax Shepard?

  Eighty percent's unreported.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's huge.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Subsequent additions are one in two.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  So, my colleague and friend, David Finkelhor, has done several prevalent surveys across the years, where you get a nationally representative sample, a large sample of adults, reporting back on what happened to them. He's also surveyed kids, ten to seventeen, large samples. And you ask them questions about things that have happened to them, and you can develop a much more accurate sense of how prevalent is this than if you rely on reports to law enforcement or to child protective services, which are usually the more extreme versions.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  But it's still someone is saying verbally that it happened to them.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Self-report, yeah, so these are self-report surveys, yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Still, I would say probably, there's more than that. I bet a lot of people still have never said it.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Self-report surveys can give you a pretty good sense. So, certainly, there will be people who are never gonna admit. One thing that's remarkable to me about self-report surveys, and we do these as well, these prevalent surveys, where we're asking people, have you engaged in these behaviors against a child?

• 19:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Is how many people will acknowledge illegal and stigmatized behaviors? And ridiculously, but it's true, being a survivor can carry some stigma still.

• 19:13Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  But people, if they feel safe, if they feel like you're not gonna report them, because it's anonymous and confidential, folks will reveal things. If you ask it in the right way also. Like, if I ask you, have you raped somebody today or in the past? They won't say it. But if you use behaviorally specific language, you get really good data on all kinds of behaviors.

• 19:32Dax Shepard?

  So, one in five currently. Historically, do we have any sense that anyone did that caliber of work in the 80s to know what it was then? It's on the decline.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is in many ways. So again, David Finkelhor, he's been in the field since the 70s.

• 19:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Just brilliant and wonderful and someone I very much love and respect. He was doing surveys, the US was actually doing surveys back in the 80s and 90s. And one thing that was really surprising with the earliest surveys was how common it was. It did seem to be increasing over time, but then starting around early 1990s, 1992, we saw real declines in sexual abuse against children, like on the order of 60% decline. So really, really, really good news. Too many children still being sexually abused, but really good news.

• 20:17Dax Shepard?

  What do we attribute that to? I can just guess anecdotally what the 80s spike was.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:23Dax Shepard?

  Total lack of supervision. You had both parents now in the workforce and/or increasing divorce rates. My case, single mother working her ass off and we were just free to roam.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Less supervision, yeah.

• 20:35Dax Shepard?

  There was really not a lot of supervision.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  And stigma was probably higher maybe then.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Or just ignorance. I mean, I think a lot of people didn't really know how bad it was for kids, honestly.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  I think one thing that we talk about in the book that really helped start the decline was bringing it out of the shadows. So having more people talk about it and we're grateful for this opportunity along the same way. But second wave feminists, when they were working on really to bring rape out of the shadows, they brought child sexual abuse with it. Child sexual abuse is not the same thing as adult rape. It's not solely or perhaps even mostly a gender-based violence kind of thing. But lots of people who were raped as adults were sexually abused as children. It's a risk factor for future sexual victimization to have been sexually victimized as a child. And that helped and then self-help groups for survivors, for parents, started being kind of a separate force. And that also further brought it out of the shadows.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  So just talking about it, then the research showing the kind of damage that can occur, it does not. You are not destined to a miserable life if you have survived child sexual abuse. And I want to be careful to say that.

• 21:42Dax Shepard?

  Although the statistics are terrible.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's a risk factor for almost every bad thing you can experience.

• 21:47Dax Shepard?

  You have like a 70% chance of addiction. I mean, there's some startling.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  It is absolutely a risk factor, but I just would never want to suggest that someone is doomed. Yeah. Because that also is not true. But we do want to know what are the real sequelae, the consequences, and they're terrible. And they don't stop with addiction. There's mental health consequences like PTSD. There's physical health like cancer. We've done economic analyses and shown that survivors earn less over the course of their lives.

• 22:15Dax Shepard?

  Should they drop out of school more?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Less academic achievement, less employment, and then higher risk of future victimization, both physical and sexual.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  And if they have mental health problems and physical health problems, they can't hold down jobs. You know what I mean?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  So it sounds like something crazy, but even though I was kind of shocked in this book about the idea that like cancer and hypertension and heart attacks could all be kind of linked back to cardiovascular problems, all linked back to CSA, which is even if someone has been kind of like working from a different perspective in this for many years, still shocked that that's the case.

• 22:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so we'll be using CSA, it's worth noting, right now. We'll be using CSA a lot, and that's.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Child sexual abuse. There's also childhood sexual violence, which is another term that folks use as well.

• 22:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so of this one in five, again, I think this will be shocking for a lot of people. What percentage is happening adults to children versus children to children?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  It's a good question, and it is shocking. So in the United States, when you ask people on these surveys, did this happen to you? And then follow up with who did it? What David Finkelhor's research has shown, and others in other countries, but this is a US-specific statistic, so I want to be precise. It's about 70% are other kids, under the age of 18, usually a few years older. When you shift to online, and I do want to back up for one second, we've seen dramatic declines, and they've kind of stabilized. And so we need to figure out how do we get further down, reducing child sexual abuse. That's mostly hands-on. So of course, before 2010, you didn't even have tech-facilitated abuse, so it could only go up because it launched roughly with the internet. Although there are some

• 23:46Speaker 02

  data that suggests that tech-facilitated abuse is also starting to level out. We can start getting some declines there, too.

• 23:51Dax Shepard?

  Can I ask, to get nitty-gritty, what constitutes? Online sexual abuse, is that like coercing a child to share nude photos or something?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one, there's all kinds, there's coerced and non-consensual image sharing. So we share images, kids share images. It's kind of normative in the context of a dating relationship or romantic relationship. But non-consensual sharing of those, when adult is asking kids for nude images, that's facilitated abuse and exploitation. When adults share child sexual abuse materials between themselves, or upload them, or create them, all of that is technology facilitated abuse. There's grooming, where an adult may reach out, either pretending to be a child themselves, or not. Kids want attention, and they want attention from adults. And they're also kind of good at detecting. They have much better skills than I do, for sure. So there's all of those things, and there's not bright lines between online and offline,

• 24:42Speaker 02

  or in real life, they usually co-occur.

• 24:45Dax Shepard?

  I hate to point this out, but yeah, that is one of the saddest subtexts of all this, is that the predators are really good at spotting who's vulnerable. And the kids that are vulnerable already were dealt a shit hand.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:58Dax Shepard?

  And this is kind of the reward for that shit hand.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  It's so true.

• 25:02Dax Shepard?

  You're kind of obviously vulnerable.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  We've got some data that we've just collected and just started analyzing about abuse in the context of K through 12, school settings, and kids who have intellectual development disabilities, kids who identify as LGBTQ, queer kids, experience far higher rates of abuse than kids who don't. So people are very good at identifying vulnerable kids.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Kids are vulnerable, just as being-

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Any kid can be abused, and then there are groups of kids that are, yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  But there's one more percentage, well, I think it's useful to kind of draw out. The 70% is at the hands of other kids, usually a few years older. And then like 90% of child sex abuse is at the hands of known entities.

• 25:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's huge.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  I think we've moved past stranger danger, but there's still that kind of like echo hangover of stranger danger. And there are people who do it, there are strangers, there are people who groom kids, there are kind of predators. But even online, which was even further shocking, on even online, it mirrors a little bit more. It's not 70%, I know the percentage.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  No, it's more like 60% are unknown to the child, and 40% are known. And again, those numbers vary depending on the country. So there's a little more stranger danger, you know, the Australian accessing live images of a child in the Philippines. But it's still mostly the people in your life.

• 26:08Dax Shepard?

  So 90%, you know the person, and then 70%, it's not an adult. The 70%

• 26:15Dax Shepard?

  Feels like something we could address successfully.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:20Dax Shepard?

  More than the adult that this is a pattern of the behavior.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, the person who wants to go out and find somebody like you said.

• 26:26Dax Shepard?

  And has probably got well-worn skill set for that and a lot of other things. Now, I'm really curious how we define it when it is both parties are under 18. What about the two nine-year-old boys showing each other their penises? Or what about these consensual, certainly sexual activity, but there's really no age gap? Or there's one-year age gap? Like, where do we draw this line to call it abuse?

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Well, it's so funny you said two nine-year-olds because I got a call from a lawyer in Texas once saying, so I have a nine-year-old client who's been charged with child sexual abuse by the local prosecutor because he was skinny dipping with some other kids who were, you know, within one or two years. He was the oldest, but it was like a nine-year-old and an eight-year-old and a six-year-old who are all friends. So in our country, fairly uniquely, there are states that don't have lower ages for criminal culpability. And when we think about sex, we kind of automatically add years to a kid so they're no longer a kid. If a child does something sexual, they stop being a child and they become an adult and they are treated like an adult, as if they should have known better. At the same time, we don't give kids education about sex ed.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  We often hide that on purpose. Kids who get sex education don't learn that touching a younger kid's penis is off limits. They learn not to hit or punch or kick a younger kid. But they don't learn that penises and vaginas are off limits. And they figure it out eventually. By about age 15, kids understand much younger kids are off limits. To come back to arrest data, you see this increase from 12 to 13 to 14-year-old of arrests for sexual behavior against younger kids. And then it drops and you're like, oh, the penny drops. They figure it out. But we don't tell them that. I mean, that's one of our prevention programs is to work with kids in schools before they've made any of these mistakes. Give them the information, skills, tools, and knowledge to say, hey, by the way, younger kids, not okay, ever.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Even if they're walking around naked or playing with you or seem to be doing something sexual with you, absolutely not. They're not small adults. The kids don't have some kind of... Knowledge about a lot of things that are okay and not okay, until they gain some life experience, or we teach them that.

• 28:31Dax Shepard?

  But again, I'm wondering, like, the scenario where it's two 10-year-old boys, it's consensual.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  It's normative sex play.

• 28:38Dax Shepard?

  One parent finds out and is somehow shamed by it.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  We all have experienced being young and

• 28:44Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  like silly things with your friends. And I think some people, yeah, it's so hard.

• 28:50Dax Shepard?

  Where do we differentiate?

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Children should be a protected class of people. They're vulnerable by definition, and they're vulnerable no matter what they've done. So I would like to see more protections. Some kids are gonna need help. They may need therapy, they and their family, for engaging in harmful and/or illegal behaviors. But I think we also need to do a better job of recognizing that sex play between close-in-age peers is normative. When it is mutually desired, it's not harmful. And we have laws that criminalize that as well. And so kids get caught up in a justice system that treats them, again, as if they were a 35-year-old predator, when they're not. Some kids do cause harm. I definitely don't want to minimize a nine-year-old who was sexually abused by a 17-year-old.

• 29:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. I had lots of little boys showing me their penises, but that was something much, much different.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  No, that is, and that is very different. And that 17-year-old is not a 35-year-old and probably knew he was causing harm or what he was doing was wrong and may not have known the degree, is unlikely to have known the real degree of harm that that kind of behavior causes. And there should be separate strategies. And there are, there's really good evidence-based treatment programs for kids who have caused harm, where they're very unlikely to do it ever again.

• 29:58Dax Shepard?

  This blew my mind, this was in your TED Talk. So of the minors who are arrested and convicted of a sexual abuse case, what percentage of them do it again?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Less than 3%. I can't say "do it again." Less than 3% are ever arrested or convicted again.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 30:23Dax Shepard?

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• 31:04Dax Shepard?

  Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, Incorporated, an Allstate affiliate. This episode is supported by Dell. Ready to upgrade your PC? The Dell Top Tech Event is here. And you can skip the research because independent tech experts already did it. Dell has laptops, desktops, and monitors that have been tested, reviewed, and named a winner by the publishers you trust. So instead of spending hours researching, you get a shortlist that's already proven. Take the Dell XPS 13 laptop, built for those who want better. Whether you're studying, working, or just getting things done, its thin and light design makes it easy to take anywhere.

• 31:47Dax Shepard?

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• 32:22Dax Shepard?

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• 33:07Dax Shepard?

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• 33:28Dax Shepard?

  This episode is supported by Helix.

• 33:31Speaker 01

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• 33:41Dax Shepard?

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

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• 34:02Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 34:03Speaker 01

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• 34:13Dax Shepard?

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• 34:33Speaker 01

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• 34:40Dax Shepard?

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• 34:59Dax Shepard?

  That cannot be said for the adult.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Well, so there's a lot to unpack there. Sexual recidivism rates for adults who have been convicted of sex crimes against children are less than 10%.

• 35:09Dax Shepard?

  Oh, so that's low, too?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  It's still very low.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  That is not the narrative.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  It is not the narrative.

• 35:13Dax Shepard?

  But do we believe that?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  A lot of people don't. The kid numbers are based on research by my friend and colleague, Michael Caldwell, who looked at data across over 30,000 cases. So if it was 10 cases and one kid had reoffended, I would not be comfortable saying it's that, right? But when it's 30,000 cases, and then I was involved in a research project that included, oh my gosh, I forget the exact number, but maybe like 120,000 adult cases. The data are, in my opinion, incontrovertible. When you get to hundreds of thousands of cases that have been followed from first offense to 20 years later, 25 years later, and you're seeing a 10% recidivism rate among adults and less than a 3% recidivism.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  I think with kids, the consequences are really severe if you get adjudicated for this. And it's a pretty clear message, don't ever do this again. I think we could give them that message before they do it. But it makes sense to me that with kids, they don't do it again because now it is indisputable. They get it. This was wrong. This was harmful to that person that I did it to. It was harmful to me. I don't ever want to be in prison again. I don't ever want to have this happen again.

• 36:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so tell us about the current standard for what happens when a kid is convicted.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  So it varies. And it varies within state. It certainly varies between countries. A lot of times, it never gets reported and nothing ever happens. And that's not helpful to either person. You go through juvenile court, it's called an adjudication, but it's essentially the same thing as a conviction. It can vary. You could get probation. In some states, you can be given an opportunity to go through treatment and have your record wiped clean. You can get five years in prison. You can be put on a sex offender registry for the rest of your life and have that go up on the internet, which nine and eight-year-olds have, and so have seventeen-year-olds. It is highly variable. What we know is that prison is not a helpful consequence for kids. It's harmful. Registration and notification are very harmful for kids. It just ruins our lives.

• 37:14Dax Shepard?

  You have to confront the trade-offs. So it's like, OK, we send them to prison for five years. There is a 98% chance they weren't ever going to do it again anyways.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 37:21Dax Shepard?

  But now their time in prison is going to up their chance of criminality outside of sexual abuse.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:28Dax Shepard?

  Maybe three standard deviations. So it's like, we're trying to weigh these, right?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, prison generally makes kids worse.

• 37:37Dax Shepard?

  It's not a fertile environment for growth.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  It is not a safe, stable, nurturing environment for children.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  And they're often abused in prison, too. So the very thing we're trying, reporting to try and prevent, we're like, OK, throw them aside. They've done something bad. They're fucked. So it doesn't really matter what happens to them. And if you're the person who's victimized by that person, absolutely sure. But I don't know, if you're worried about kids being abused and you're kind of putting often very young kids or like seventeen-year-olds in with much more sexually dangerous thirty-five-year-olds.

• 38:00Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  It's not going to end well.

• 38:02Dax Shepard?

  There's also this, I don't know if it's true or not or alleged, but prisoners seem to deal with sexual abuse inmates in a certain way. Or at least that's the stereotype I've heard, that they're often...

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Oh, they punish.

• 38:13Dax Shepard?

  They punish.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. I got to do some research at Fort Leavenworth Military Complex in Kansas, and it's the oldest prison in the United States. So I was doing this research in 2000. And they still had skeleton keys for some of the doors. It's a maximum-security military prison, and the cells go many levels down below ground. And a lot of the people that came in with sex crimes had to be put in protective solitary confinement. And again, not a lot of people are going to care or feel much empathy or may be glad. You know, you did this to somebody, so now it's being done to you. That's fair.

• 38:45Dax Shepard?

  OK, so there's multiple different groups we need to address. So one, and I think this is the one we're... Currently on, which is there's going to be a big, big chunk of kids who may do this in their childhood abusing other kid who are not pedophiles. They were confused from a lot of issues.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  You can be impulsive. You can be around other delinquent kids doing all kinds of bad things. You can be bored. You can think you had consent because who teaches kids what consent is? How do you get it? How do you give it? How long does it last?

• 39:12Dax Shepard?

  Half the time the kid is in freeze mode. How are they to interpret that frozen state?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Oh, exactly, right?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  For adults.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  No, yeah. So this is a very difficult thing to talk about. So I want to preface this carefully. Most kids who survive child sexual abuse will never go on to cause harm to another child. They're at greater risk of doing so. So kids who have sexually abused other kids, uh, caused sexual harm, harmful sexual behavior are more likely to have experienced sexual abuse themselves. This is less true for adults. The further you get away from something that's happened to you, the less impact it has on you. But for kids, it's still pretty true.

• 39:48Dax Shepard?

  I hate the statistic. I believe it, but I hate it.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  I know, and I hate saying it.

• 39:51Dax Shepard?

  An added benefit of having it molested is people are going to be more suspicious of you. You know, it's like insult to injury. We had this one time. Monica read this data years ago. And I'm like, oh, I hate that fucking statistic. I don't want someone to think, because I'm very vocal about it.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  But that's what we're saying. It's not the majority. It's still tiny.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  But I did, I sat in front of my computer today going, you don't have to say it. You don't have to say it. There's so much you could talk about. There's 300 pages. You could leave that out altogether.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  But it's important.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Well, it is because again, you want to throw the book at a kid. Well, what if that kid was also victimized? So we're going to put him in prison for five years? How does that make sense?

• 40:24Speaker 03

  And they're often like repeating the behavior that they were abused themselves.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Or just exposed to developmentally inappropriate material, which now we have the world wide web and access to legal pornography, but that's not developmentally appropriate for kids. And we have no guardrails, no age verification. And then we're like, okay, have all this, but don't do anything stupid. So there's all kinds of pathways for a kid to go down that path.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  We use pseudonyms in the book for a lot of the people. Connor was a great example of this because he was young. He was 11, 20 first started in 13 when he was caught. And he was sexually abusing a younger relative. But first of all, it was just kind of play. It was like, show me your penis. It got more than that, certainly. I don't want to minimize it. But then he was put into some kind of residential facility for some other unrelated, non-sexual behavior. And some kid in there tried to rape him, penetrative rape. When he got out of that residential facility, a weekend release, he tried to rape or did rape his younger relative. It doesn't minimize what the effect on the younger relative was, but like, there's a clear path between, in this one instance, and that there are things around this, but I think it does happen with relative frequency. And then he was sucked into the system, first of all juvenile prison,

• 41:25Speaker 03

  but then he was sucked into the adult system, where he was sexually assaulted within prisons. His story may seem like an outlier, but this happens to kids in the US all the time.

• 41:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's terrible that the initial trauma begats more and more.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  But doesn't always, and usually does not go on to increase for, for perpetration at all.

• 41:45Dax Shepard?

  So there's this group.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:46Dax Shepard?

  Now there is another group. We're not going to label those pedophiles, correct?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  You know, some kids hit puberty, 14, 15, and some of them are attracted to younger children, and so they have pedophilia.

• 41:58Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but most kids who are offending don't.

• 42:01Dax Shepard?

  Right, I'm just saying of this number, which is 70%, which is huge.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  It's a little higher for hands-on than it is for online. So, you know, somewhere around 40, 50, 60, depends on the type of online offense, like non-consensual image sharing.

• 42:13Dax Shepard?

  Good luck.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Huge, right? Like, it's just huge, exactly.

• 42:16Dax Shepard?

  Yes, but I just want to be clear, when we're breaking apart, in my mind, from what I read, it seems to me that there is a group of kids that are impulsive, or they're this, or they're exploring, and they make a mistake, but they're not going to go on into adulthood with an attraction to children.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Right, they age out of it.

• 42:30Dax Shepard?

  Right, so they're not pedophiles, in that sense, even if they have perhaps participated in something we would label pedophilia. And then there's another group that are pedophiles. They are attracted to children, and they're going to remain attracted to children for their life, probably.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 42:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so that group, of course, on the compassion ladder, which is harder and harder to have, now we're getting into something that's probably quite hard for people to have compassion for. Do we have any sense of that huge number, 70%? Which percentage of those are whatever we call on the DSM, that condition?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  We're doing a ton of research on this, so we've just completed nationally representative prevalent surveys of perpetration behavior in five countries. And we're still analyzing, number crunching all those data. But somewhere between 1 and 4% of adult males 18 and older will either have sexual fantasies about children or engage Engage sexually with a child with or without fantasy. So again, people engage sexually with children without having strong sexual attraction to children. So it's somewhere between one and 4% of adults. In terms of how many people actually have pedophilic disorder or pedophilia. We don't have a good sense of prevalence of that. Based on what we do know is probably maybe less than 1% of the population.

• 43:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what I'm going for is the approach and modality to help deal with the huge number of youths that are doing this, that are not pedophiles, is not going to be the same approach we have to apply to the pedophiles. This is going to be a completely different approach.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  You need different approaches for sure. But teenagers who recognize that they have sexual attraction to children, like the group that Luke met and introduced me to, were kids who had sexual attraction to children who did not want to act on it. And for them, some of the similar things, like here's what would happen to the child if you did act on it. Here's the consequences. Getting that information out for both groups.

• 44:16Dax Shepard?

  I guess my point is you don't need a strategy for the kid who grows out of it at 17.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  No, for life, right, exactly.

• 44:21Dax Shepard?

  To your point, when they turn 15 and they start recognizing, oh, they're too young and blah, blah, blah. They don't need an ongoing life strategy.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right.

• 44:28Dax Shepard?

  So now we got to talk about for these kids that are going to need an ongoing life strategy. First of all, just them identifying feels completely new. And I'm so grateful, like the kid that was in your doc, that they would admit that and that they would attempt to address it the same way I have to address my addiction to alcohol. It's really new and novel. And I'm just wondering how this wave has even started. It almost seems unimaginable and quite brave of them, really. To self-diagnose and admit this.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  I agree, but I think they don't have much choice in a sense. Because in speaking with Adam and people over the years, so many kids probably commit suicide because they don't see a way out. They don't see a way to not harm a kid. Or they don't see a way to live in any way that's sexually fulfilling, certainly. And I don't want to break it down too much, but there is like a distinction. I mean, it's kind of like you can slice this pie down to like just fill it away.

• 45:19Dax Shepard?

  Now, we're drawing arbitrary lines up here, I acknowledge that.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  But even with this group, people attracted to kids, the terminology they use is age of attraction. Do you have an age of attraction to kids aged 4 to 12, 4 to 8, whatever the case may be? It can be gendered, it can be age, but also it can be... A fixed attraction, I'm only attracted to kids. And even Adam, who's not, told me like, oh, those poor sons of bitches. So he's like a young self-described pedophile who's like, oh, those guys have no hope.

• 45:43Dax Shepard?

  Because he has other attractions.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  He's got that kind of weaker peer age attraction.

• 45:48Dax Shepard?

  There's one question I want to ask that is an ugly question, but I know many, many people have this thought. And I personally do have this thought. If you can admit that the only sexual cessation you'll ever experience is with a child, why don't those people take a medical approach to stopping hormonally their sexuality, period? If you can first admit it'll never be something I can explore, why wouldn't you shut it down hormonally?

• 46:18Speaker 03

  A chemical castration?

• 46:20Dax Shepard?

  Uh, chemical castration, testosterone blockers, something to turn you off as a sexual being.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  People do. So there's a great study, the first, we call it a double-blind placebo randomized clinical trial.

• 46:32Dax Shepard?

  The gold standard.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Thank you, the gold standard. A colleague of mine, Christopher Rum, led this. He's a psychiatrist at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. And he ran it and some people who have that attraction can manage it. And so they can go through life without offending and can manage it. There are people who feel like they are gonna offend and they want help. They had guys driving 500 kilometers to come get this munch shot or whatever it was.

• 46:55Dax Shepard?

  The chemical castration.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it does, it dampens down everything. So if you have attraction to adults, that's gonna go down as well. But there are people who do want that and making that available through your general practitioner would be great.

• 47:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  A point worth making is that it is really hard to not have sex with your desired object. It's really, really, really hard.

• 47:16Dax Shepard?

  We have a lot of machinery to drive us.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Exactly, right? And I think a lot of people could use help at least some of the time. And a lot of people are not gonna need help all of the time. And we've had people tell us this, who have sexual attraction to children, who have used the interventions that we use. And we get feedback from them and they're like, if I could just have someone that I trusted to say, take my computer. I'm in a bad place right now. Can you just hang on to this for the next 24 hours? And then I'll be okay and you get over that urge because sexual urges. Just do wax and wane and to have strategies for folks who are at risk to be able to ask for help, but asking for that kind of help is just almost impossible.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  I think it's what you said like about having it available. I think often time we talk about chemical castration, it's like, oh, can we identify who's a pedophile or going to be a pedophile and chemically castrate them as if it's kind of imposed upon them. Having chemical castration, all kind of medications to like dampen sexual drive as an option that people can get somehow. Cause no one's going to sign up to be a chemical castration forcefully.

• 48:11Dax Shepard?

  No, I'm not in favor of the state identifying pedophiles. I'm asking the question of the people that are not offending pedophiles who have a desire to never offend. Don't they want the assistance or is that not appealing to them?

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Some of them do.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I don't think it's easy to get. Also to go to your GP.

• 48:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  I want some medication.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:29Dax Shepard?

  Even if you said, I want zero sexual desire. Most GPs are going to be like, that's not a healthy.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Can we speak to your therapist about that one? Cause there is a hurdle to talk about this, even to your doctor, to a therapist. And that is a real hurdle because of, you know, to meditate of reporting, which is a very real, but very good thing, but kind of can have these, wouldn't say side effects, have these effects of people who do have these attractions, don't feel comfortable seeking therapeutic help.

• 48:51Dax Shepard?

  I would imagine anyone is afraid of being arrested just for acknowledging that's the desire, even if you've not acted on it.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And some people are, and so it makes it very hard to seek out treatment. We have a online intervention that's free and anonymous and there's no human. It's self-help entirely. And we've had one and a half million people go visit that website since 2020. We launched it in 2020.

• 49:15Dax Shepard?

  One and a half million?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  One and a half million. And 50,000 have gone into one of the sessions. There's like five modules, but there's no person. So there's no risk of mandatory reporting. And it's for people with sexual attraction to children who want help to not offend it, or also who want help to live a healthy, happy life and be able to manage this.

• 49:33Dax Shepard?

  Do they function at all? Like a other 12 step program? Like, is there a group therapy dynamic?

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Well, this is a self-help intervention. So it's just fully, you go through the stuff all on your own. There's interventions where there's a therapist to work with you, usually with cognitive behavior therapy strategies. There are self-help groups like the group that Luke mentioned. There's many more options now than there ever were. And they're still available pretty much exclusively in high income countries and not available in very many other.

• 50:01Dax Shepard?

  I could not admire anyone more than admitting and self reporting that. I mean, I truly, I can't imagine anything braver. Cause again, we know they're the most detested group.

• 50:16Dax Shepard?

  To your point, you'd rather hang out with a murderer.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:18Dax Shepard?

  And you know that going in and you've seen the shows and the movies. And so I can't think of anything braver.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And to just like, oh, I'm broke. I mean, like the mental hurdles you have to jump to be like, God, I'm like this.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  When that penny drops, it's a bad day.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  I cannot, I can truly not imagine having to reconcile that. But when they're in therapy, is the goal of the therapy to have them become more attracted to adults?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  We've learned that that's not a winning.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Gay conversion therapy.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  New illegal in the United States.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  But I remember like some of the research when I first reached out to you back in 2012, 2013. A lot of the research and it's got to start somewhere. It was just like, oh, we know the little people who go on to offend sexually against kids. Are like left-handed, have a high IQ, have been hit in the head with a baseball at some stage. And I'm like, this sounds real suspect to me. But I remember I think I brought that up to you and you're like, and also it was kind of about, there's some previous studies. And correct me if I get this wildly wrong, but basically you do things like show people maybe C-SAM, like formerly known as child pornography. And then kind of encourage them just before they orgasm to switch it to peer appropriate stuff, which is very much hardcore conversion.

• 51:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  And that's true, right?

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  You didn't do it.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  People were doing what they thought might work and changing someone's sexual interests doesn't work. So then figuring out skills, tools and knowledge to manage. Who can I reach out to, who might be safe to talk to, who I can go to in a moment of need. And again, letting people know, making sure they understand that if you do give into this, this causes real harm. Here is the damage and also here's what you can expect if you get caught. But then also, you know, not just avoiding harm, but then how do you give people goals to strive for? Living a healthy, happy life. And so on our online intervention, we interviewed people who have made it to their 30s, 40s, 50s without offending. We have these little snippets of real discussions with people. You don't have to offend. There's nothing that says you have to offend.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  You can get through this, find whatever it takes. Here's what helped me.

• 52:17Dax Shepard?

  It's crazy, the parallel between addiction treatment because you come to the program to quit drinking and only the first couple of steps are about drinking. And then the rest of the program is teaching you how to live a sober life. Quitting is day one there. So now what's the rest of it? The rest of it is like learning to live a sober individual and conduct yourself in a way that'll keep you sober. It's how to live life, not how to quit drinking.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, not how to avoid alcohol, but how to find other things that are so appealing and attractive and wonderful that you want to do them.

• 52:49Dax Shepard?

  Yes. One of your main pushes is to have a bit of a paradigm shift in how we think of this and taking it out of the criminal sphere and putting it more into the public health crisis framing.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  What I think and what I would say my field believes is that we need prevention, healing and justice. You have to criminalize these behaviors, right? You don't have to treat children like criminals, but you have to criminalize sexual abuse. And for a long time it wasn't. When I lived in South Carolina for 18 years, when I first got there, there was a state senator who was talking to a reporter, so on purpose, and saying, well, incest is something that happens in the family and should just be dealt with in the family. Now, hopefully today you wouldn't see that, but we see politicians.

• 53:33Dax Shepard?

  What was that Roy guy?

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, that's exactly who I was thinking about. And folks rose to his defense. Well, you know, she was 15. I'm like, he was in his 30s and he was, you know, a prosecutor or whatever he was, and she had no power in this at all.

• 53:49Dax Shepard?

  I can't believe anyone voted for that.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  I know, and defended him. I think I heard the defense, well, Mary was 15 when she had Jesus. And you're like, ah, no. We're not saying don't have justice, don't have consequences.

• 54:03Dax Shepard?

  But I'd like to throw one figure in. We're spending $5.8 billion a year to incarcerate pedophiles.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  People who sexually offend.

• 54:10Dax Shepard?

  Sexual offenders. $5.8 billion is being sent downriver at the end of the river.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 54:14Dax Shepard?

  And $3 million is spent to prevent it by the government at whatever time the statistic came out.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  That statistic is exactly right right now. That's it. Well, yeah, but it's probably 5.8 by now.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  We did the paper, so that's why I'm like.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I remember, right, I did. I was gonna let it slide.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  No, I know, I know.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  I was gonna let him have the 5.4 million.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  I gotta be the dick. Thank you, thank you, yeah, yeah, tariffs, etc.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we fight tooth and nail for that $3 million. There's $3 million that the federal government gives for child sexual abuse prevention research. I was up on the hill on Thursday. Thankfully, we have bipartisan support to kind of keep that money in. But we're trying to grow it. We're like, this affects one in five children, and we're putting $3 million into the research on how to prevent it?

• 54:56Dax Shepard?

  Also, even if you're just fiscally minded, you don't give a fuck about victims, and you're fiscally minded, we should invest in reducing the $5.4 billion, not corrected for inflation, that we're spending to incarcerate sexual offenders. Like, why on earth wouldn't we try to prevent it? Because it'll save us money.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  And it's not just incarceration. We have an economics paper that shows that it's close to $9.3 billion that we can see in cost to the US economy, directly attributable to child sexual abuse. There's a moral argument, there's a child rights argument, and there's an economic argument to saying, it's so much better if we prevent it, it's so much less expensive if we prevent this from happening in the first place. And then you don't need treatment, you don't need law enforcement as much as you once did. And it's still very, very difficult to squeeze those dollars out of the hands of politicians. It's just hard.

• 55:45Dax Shepard?

  What is Help Wanted?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Help Wanted is a prevention intervention that we developed at Moore. It is for people who are attracted to children, who want help to not offend and to live a healthy life. It's online. We launched it in 2020. We developed it in collaboration with law enforcement, survivors and victims advocates, therapists, preventionists, and some other researchers. It is designed to be a tool that is safe and easy and free to access for people who want help and need help. 1.5 million people have visited the webpage. 50,000 people have gone into one or more of the modules. We just completed a randomized controlled trial evaluation. We're still crunching the numbers. I wish I could give them to you right now, but we just ended data collection in December,

• 56:31Speaker 02

  and we're still working through all the numbers. Facebook Meta and Google send people there who appear to be searching online for CSAM. It is a resource. We've adapted it with support from Google for Spanish-speaking populations and adapted it specifically for Mexico, but we're hoping that it can serve most of Latin America and welcome the idea of adapting this intervention for other languages, other contexts, where there's really not anything else especially.

• 56:56Dax Shepard?

  We haven't addressed gender. How does gender play into all these statistics? As far as both the group that perhaps committed a sexual assault and then grew out of that versus the group that is lifetime pedophiles, how are those gendered?

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Not purely, but it's a majority of men.

• 57:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Young men and men. That's true of all criminal behavior. There's very few crimes that are kind of women-dominated. I've spoken to young women who are sexually attracted to kids, and it is a rarity, and everyone's kind of like weirdly, not excited is not the right word, but just like, ooh. But in terms of why that is, it's kind of like a million-dollar question for a criminologist. And maybe it's easier to describe in terms of extreme physical violence, because men are socially conditioned to be more kind of aggressive and things like that. In terms of why that happens, in terms of being attracted to kids, I wouldn't even begin to know what the answer to that is.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Well, there's a couple of things. For one, for people who are attracted to prepubescent children, you get much less gender, because they are less gendered, right? Like, a 10-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl look a lot alike.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  And the younger you go, the less gender. It really becomes more about age than gender and innocence, or different things attract different people. And then there are certainly women who offend against boys, whether or not they have pedophilia. You see this a lot in schools. So where you see women getting convicted of sex crimes is their teachers. Yeah. These are people, and there's also male teachers as well, who aren't attracted to children, didn't go into teaching in order to find victims. But when you spend your whole workday surrounded by kids, that's a risk factor. So educators, people that work with kids after school, people that are in charge of kids in different settings.

• 58:31Dax Shepard?

  Youth counselors.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, so you have stray sexual thoughts going across your brain all the time. And if you're working with the kids all the time, those are going to collide. Maybe you're particularly immature, or maybe you're going through... Mental health or substance abuse issues or financial problems. And it's just more enjoyable to be in the company of a child who accepts you kind of unconditionally than adults do. And then you start to feel like you have a special relationship with this one child. And maybe this child's a little more mature and maybe this will actually help this child. And you go down this pathway that no one saw coming, including you. And this does happen where people drift into good people engaging in bad behavior. And there's a lot of steps there that you could intervene.

• 59:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Right? There's a lot of steps.

• 59:13Dax Shepard?

  Well, I would just imagine like 90% of affairs don't start out with what's up? Let's go fuck in this hotel. It's text.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 59:19Dax Shepard?

  It's a lot of texts. And then there's a picture. Like, I think the boundary you've drawn keeps moving.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  It keeps moving.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  I wonder with female teachers specifically, whether we see that overrepresented in terms of your gender question is because we kind of maybe miss the science or don't read them. If you have like a male teacher, you can tell they're focusing on a student, a young male student. I think people have their little kind of antennas up. But if it's a female teacher, I don't know, we make jokes about female.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, like you got lucky. My god, it makes me crazy. I do also just want to say that for boys that have been victimized, they're much more likely to have been victimized by a woman. So it's still a minority, but it's not nearly the same level of a minority. Like, there's some studies that show like a 50/50 split.

• 59:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 59:58Speaker 02

  So I don't think there's a huge group of undetected women out there that are offending, but it is not zero. And we overlook boys who are victims and we overlook women who are offenders. And that doesn't serve us very well.

• 1:00:11Dax Shepard?

  No, it's not good.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Is there anything, like, Blame, an episode of Radio Lab, where this guy had surgery on his brain and basically then he became a pedophile?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  He didn't become a pedophile, he became somebody that was offending sexually.

• 1:00:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so he had a corridor cut in his brain to stop the electrical storm that was causing the epilepsy. And they warned him he might have a shift in your personality. And what it did is it shut down the circuitry that's going between, basically, your frontal lobe.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Disinhibition.

• 1:00:41Dax Shepard?

  Disinhibition, and there's no correction for it. And so his started, like you're saying, it started with just, he started watching pornography more. And then he started watching more extreme pornography. The dosage was having to change and go up like an addiction. There's a knock at the door. Or in Homeland Security's there all of a sudden.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  But he isn't a pedophile because he didn't. Why did you correct me on that?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and apologies.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  No, I want to be corrected. I just need to know.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Blunted rude.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  So I'm doing this right.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Pedophilia is a strong sexual attraction to children. And there are people who have, and I'm not this kind of doctor, so let me be clear about that, too. But there are people that have medical conditions that are disinhibiting. And it's sort of broadly disinhibiting. And so it's not that you have sexual attraction to children per se. You don't have the inhibitions to just not reach out and do something or see something.

• 1:01:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he was eating more. He wanted to have sex with his wife more. It was all of the reward system, just without any regulator on it.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  So where that's a different thing.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  So pedophilia really looks like it's something that you're born with. You've become aware of it when you hit puberty and start having sexual interests towards other people. There are a few conditions that seem to also drive illegal harmful behavior that are separate from what you're generally sexually attracted to.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:53Dax Shepard?

  So you guys interviewed 30 non-acting adults who were sexually interested in children. And I'm curious, what kind of consistent themes did you keep seeing?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  That they were desperate for help. And they were desperate for help in their teens when they were most vulnerable. Because the only message you get is the Larry Nassar, the Jerry Sandusky, the Jeffrey Epstein, that you are going to be a horrible person, you're going to offend, you're going to offend 100 times, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's the only message that they get. And it is so stigmatized and so horrible, most can't go to your mom and talk. Adam did, but it took him years. One of the characters, real people in our book. They wish there had been something like Help Wanted. So we did that study in service of figuring out what we needed to do, what kind of interventions were needed to give people a place that they could go to learn more and to get some help, even if it's just reading and interacting with some video elements of the intervention, the Help Wanted intervention.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  They really wanted help. They wished that there were people they could talk to without being afraid of being outed or being arrested.

• 1:02:55Dax Shepard?

  Even if you didn't think you were going to get arrested, I would be afraid they're going to put me on a sex offender list or a watch list.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Right, which is arguably worse than being arrested. Or also just... That you're gonna have a therapist who's horrified by you. This awful fear of negative social reactions is a real thing also. So those were the things that came out again and again and again, that there was a real need and a desire. And one thing we haven't talked about is when Luke came and interviewed me, he had met these young people who were kind of white knuckling it on their own to not offend and to figure out how to get help between themselves that was safe. I wanted to do prevention, but I really thought it was gonna be to go out and find people and convince them to come get help. It had not ever occurred to me at this point in my career that there were people seeking help so that they wouldn't offend. That was a complete game changer for me.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Thanks, but yeah, and something else is kind of the theme that are kind of interesting to me is that, because there were thirty, thirty-nine people for the help wanted?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Uh, I can't remember.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but through my reporting, which was separate, I've spoken to like one hundred, two hundred men and women who have a sexual interest towards kids. And in addition to all this, it's just how uniform it is. Maybe there's like two or three outliers who don't follow this theme, but across the board, everybody kind of, they reach puberty, they start becoming sexual beings, they're kind of like, I'm sexually interested in that ten-year-old or eight-year-old. They start kind of growing up, that age kind of stays the same, or maybe goes down a little bit, and then when they hit like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they're like, oh shit, what the fuck?

• 1:04:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, my software is not updating.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, I'm a pedophile. And then they kind of fall into like depression and comorbid things like alcohol and drug abuse before they kind of even get to the stage where Adam and Co. are trying to look for help, and they're doing that all by themselves.

• 1:04:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they gotta go through the whole journey of basically bottoming out before they're gonna ask for help.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:37Dax Shepard?

  You have to be so desperate to ask for help.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  I was so wary at the beginning to make sure we weren't, wanna conflate pedophilia with homosexuality or even heterosexuality. It's a different category, certainly, but it seems to follow the same thing. It happens at the same ages, they kind of come to the same realization, more or less at the same time, and it's innate. Many people who offend, and we can get to that in a little bit, I don't know how much time we have, but who offend who aren't pedophiles, like situational offenders, and that's something we should put a pin in, because that's really interesting. For this category of people who have pedophilic disorder, it's an innate thing that they have no control over. And that's why I'm like, ugh, I don't wanna always talk about pedophiles when we talk about child sexual abuse, because there's many other facets to it, but it's the one that's kind of maybe the most interesting and novel, like an audience, because it's the most demonized and frankly, the grossest.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  And the scariest.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  And the scariest, how do we stop them?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  There's no control, how would you stop it?

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:05:29Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 1:06:12Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.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?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:06:35Dax 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 10pm to 7am.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:07:03Dax 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.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:22Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:07:32Dax Shepard?

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• 1:07:56Speaker 05

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• 1:08:36Speaker 05

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• 1:08:54Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:05Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:09:09Speaker 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.

• 1:09:25Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 1:09:27Speaker 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.

• 1:09:40Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 1:09:41Speaker 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.

• 1:09:54Dax 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?

• 1:09:59Speaker 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.

• 1:10:19Dax Shepard?

  But if you accept that this is 1% of the population, you have to acknowledge there's 3 million people out there. So your options are either to hate and vilify them and have no understanding and watch them continue to have the amount of victims that they have. Or you can go, wow, this is a real thing that we're going to have to, as uncomfortable as it is, have some treatment for and some safety in acknowledging that they have it. That's incumbent upon us to kind of evolve into that. If we want there to be less child sexual victims, that's the only thing we can do.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100% agree. We wrote a book on a similar topic, but it's worth noting, there are many people who have a block who just can't get there because they have lived experience. But in my experience, and it's all anecdotal, of course, but some of the people have been most supportive of my work. And I work specifically on this, people who have a sexual attraction to kids who don't know what's and the people who support the most are survivors. They've written to me independently, kind of like DM'd or emailed saying like, oh, you know, I don't hate my abuser. I am still very troubled by what he or she did, but at least gives me some kind of context to feel like it wasn't my fault or the circumstances coming a bit broader than just me and even my abuser. And I think sometimes a lot of people with very good intentions assume what survivors want or need. Any talk about empathy towards people's attraction is just like, how dare you? You're kind of minimizing the experience of survivors.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  And that comes from people maybe who don't have lived experience.

• 1:11:43Dax Shepard?

  They're advocating. I've been in this situation. I'll make pedophile jokes. And I've been yelled at and I'm like, you don't get to tell me how I feel about it. It happened to me and I- I do think that joke's funny and you who didn't experience don't get to tell me what's right or wrong for me to find funny. But I weirdly was just in this situation. I have to tread delicately, but a family situation. And my children are aware of it because we talk about this stuff really openly. My kids know I was molested. They knew who else in the family was. And my daughter asked, would you beat him up if you saw him? This person who did it to a family member. And I said, I'm so grateful. I've never seen him. Cause I would and it would be gruesome and I know it wouldn't help anything.

• 1:12:28Dax Shepard?

  And I also know something happened to him.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Dax Shepard?

  And so that's how I feel and I'm both a survivor of it and have loved ones who have survived. So yeah, I know my instincts aren't the right ones. Like I have both those feelings. I would both want to hurt him and I know it would not do anything good. And he would not learn a lesson and I don't think I know fully what happened to him that led him to that. That's my position on it.

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  I think it's pretty human. I mean, we discussed this even briefly yesterday. Like I'm very much against the death penalty ideologically.

• 1:12:59Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  I don't need to get too far into it, but someone I went to grad school with was murdered horrifically. I believe in the difficulty for that guy.

• 1:13:04Dax Shepard?

  Exactly.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Like I would want to see him in like the most horrific of ways. I imagine there's people listening, thinking like, oh, who are these two people defending pedophiles? Sure, maybe to some degree, but like I get it because I want this guy to be ripped to shreds.

• 1:13:15Dax Shepard?

  But for the person asking that, you're not defending them for the joy of defending them.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Dax Shepard?

  You're defending them in hopes of reducing the amount of victims there are.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Dax Shepard?

  You really need to understand that point.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Thirty eight years. What I want to do is end child sexual abuse and it is uncomfortable. And you don't only have to focus and we don't only focus on providing solutions for people at risk of offending. You can provide solutions to a lot of things, to technology, to the way schools are built, the situational prevention strategies. You can work with parents and other guardians to make them more capable guardians to reduce risk and these things work. You don't only have to focus on people with sexual attraction to children, with pedophilia, or people who are at risk of offending because they're surrounded by kids all day and we need to do more about reducing those risks or focusing on kids. Kids who are at risk because they're young and dumb and they don't know the rules yet. There are dozens and dozens of ways that we can prevent child sexual abuse.

• 1:14:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so I love that. That was in the book. It's like the onus of all this was put on the shoulders of kids in the eighties with these videos, which is like you need to identify, report. It was all up to the nine year old to recognize the behavior of the kid in the car or the man in the car. What is it? Resist?

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Recognize, resist, or report.

• 1:14:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's the kids' responsibility. What the fuck are all the adults doing?

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  There we are still. We may be beyond stranger danger, kind of, but we are not beyond that. That is still what most kids get exposed to in schools.

• 1:14:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay, so let's do the pinned thing and then I want to do the child sexual abuse prevention matrix. I just want to touch on.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Good, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so we put a pin in situational.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  You have kids who kind of have problem sexual behavior and harmful sexual behavior, pedophilic disorder, adults with pedophilic disorder, and then you have a barely big proportion.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  Half or more.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we imagine half or more, who are situational offenders. And these are people who have no pre-existing attraction towards kids. But if you drop them into a situation and maybe they have drug and alcohol problems, compulsivity problems, immaturity, similar to the teachers. And think of like a stepdad or a boyfriend who moves into the house, the mom's working, there's like the thirteen year old daughter, he may sexually offend against that kid. Causes the same amount of harm regardless of where it all comes from, obviously. But you take him out of that situation, he's not attracted to kids.

• 1:15:23Dax Shepard?

  He's not going to go out of his way to find that or reproduce that situation.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  So I think we focus on pedophilia for very good reason, but there's this maybe majority of people who are sexually offending who just have nothing to do with that side of things.

• 1:15:34Dax Shepard?

  That's weirdly more scary than all of them.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  But maybe there's actually the interventions, and maybe you can speak to this, interventions are maybe a little bit kind of clearer. Just to go back a little bit about kids, a lot of kids offend, I'm thinking of the shifting boundaries thing that I was thinking in twenty twelve. Kids abusing kids often at school because that's when they're hanging out together, right? And so they did this study where they went into schools and asked the kids, like, what does this happen? And they're like, oh, it happens in dark stairwells, between classes, locker rooms, in the playgrounds when there's no parental or teacher supervision. And they're like, okay, well, how about we post teachers in the darkened stairwells, we put posters in the locker rooms, we cut down the hedges? And they saw like an insane decline, like fifty percent decline in this kind of behavior. Something that really kind of drives me crazy about all of this is that that program also had randomized controlled trials, beautifully done, great success. And then it was, as far as I'm aware, just kind of parked.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  So we have things that currently exist.

• 1:16:23Dax Shepard?

  At work.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  That work and have been proven to work and that everyone would kind of get behind because it's about kids, victimizing kids and it's easy enough to do because it's in school.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  And cheap.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  And cheap. They found out if they did that curriculum about consent and stuff like that. And it kind of was as effective, it was just the curriculum or just the situational interventions, like putting in some light bulbs, but we just don't do it. That's confounding.

• 1:16:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we underestimate what context creatures we are.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  That's such a good way to put it. I love that.

• 1:16:48Dax Shepard?

  We all behave in different ways in all the contexts we are. This is like Buddhism, all roads, all roads lead back to Buddhism.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  They do. I mean, I think people are just like, ah, it's too big of a problem. And just put them away or kill them or put them away. With the foster care system too, we've talked about that, like, oh, it's just too hard. It's like, there are things, there's little things, but everyone just is overwhelmed by the bigness of the topic.

• 1:17:14Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think the more complicated, obviously, a problem is, the more inclined you are for a very quick and easy solution. You're incentivized in some way, right? Okay, so what, talk about the child sexual abuse prevention matrix.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  This is where we talk all about the solutions. We're the first generation to have dozens of solutions.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  One thing maybe quickly goes into your point before about the complexity, and it's true, like it's complex, but there's been certain public health problems that are as complex that we've addressed pretty well. And we look at like road and vehicle safety and this relates directly to the matrix. William Haddon Jr. was a public health physician. It was tasked with, when they first had the US Highway Whatever Act. He was, okay, let's do a little matrix and figure out, we know all these vehicle accidents happen, people die, people get maimed. Let's look what happens before, during and after a crash. And whether it's like human focused or situational focused and do like a little grid, a little matrix and be like, oh, having super shiny chrome dashboards of blind people when the sun hits it, maybe we should address that. People careening through their windshields, let's put in a little seatbelt.

• 1:18:10Dax Shepard?

  Safety glass.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  It's so multifaceted. And then there's kind of things at a higher social level in terms of laws and stuff around speeding and drinking and driving. It took a little while, but again, we saw huge declines in something that people previously thought was inevitable.

• 1:18:22Dax Shepard?

  We gotta get around, this is the cost of doing business.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  People were resistant, like when they put in seatbelts, people were cutting them out of their cut.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Child safety car seats. Folks hate those things. I used them. My mom used them. She hated them.

• 1:18:33Dax Shepard?

  We never used them. I'm teasing that would be such a headline.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  Here's where I say I'm a mandated reporter.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  So you can apply a similar public health approach. It's worked for other things to child sex abuse. And that's where the matrix kind of comes into play.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  We didn't invent this idea. A lot of people have taken it from roadway safety to child injury, to child abuse and neglect writ large, to even child sexual abuse. But I think what makes ours unique is that we really applied it to child sexual abuse specifically and looking at, all right, well before abuse has happened, what can you do? Well, you can go into schools and teach kids to recognize, resist, or report. That does not hurt kids. It's just not gonna really move the needle. But you can also then teach kids, hey, how about not doing these behaviors? Here's how we avoid engaging in these behaviors. And that does shift the needle.

• 1:19:21Dax Shepard?

  You introduced this idea and the idea is the only thing that could happen to you in this scenario is that you would be a victim. You're not even suggesting like, guess what? You might also victimize someone.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:31Dax Shepard?

  That's a completely different thought. No kid probably has prior to when they do it.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  No one walks around thinking I'm an offender. And no parent thinks my kid's at risk of engaging in harmful sexual behaviors. And so we're just blind to the people that we love that they would do these things. But kids do, and they're at risk for a lot of reasons that we've already talked about. You can go way upstream with school-based and camp-based and sports-based programs that give kids information, but that also give adults information like, hey, when you're surrounded by kids, you might have some sexual thoughts. Here's why we don't act on those thoughts. Here's what we could do instead. And also all the situational prevention programming. So policies and codes of conduct, you know, for educators, for scout leaders. These things work.

• 1:20:11Dax Shepard?

  They've implemented them like Boys and Girls Club?

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and the Boy Scouts now, Scouting America, I think they're called, have been implementing these for decades. And we have a study led by my friend and colleague, Luciana Sidney-Maitin, that shows a 31% decline of sexual abuse victimization in the context of participating in one of the big six US youth-serving organizations. Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs. America, the Y and four H. Wow. Thirty-one percent decline in a recent decade compared to the decade before it. Because they have been doing these things and honing these strategies. Boys and Girls Clubs of America hired an architect, Les Nichols, to help them figure out, how do we make space safer? So this space is super dangerous. There's no windows.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  There's hidden cameras everywhere, so we're all being victimized.

• 1:21:02Dax Shepard?

  There's a large male across.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  There's a large, there's a large, there's a large male. But put windows in interior doors. So that if I'm going to be alone with a kid, I'm observable and interruptible. Or make them open the door, or improve line of sight. Cut back on the hedges, but inside, maybe don't have a bookcase in between where the security staff is or the entry staff is and where the kids and other adults are congregating. These kinds of strategies really work. It's really, really exciting. And online, we could be doing the same damn thing, is making it safe by design and really reducing the risk to kids, both of experiencing harm and of engaging in harm. And lots of organizations are being thoughtful about how to help kids think through, do you really want to send that nude picture? Do you really want to open that nude picture? Let's take a beat, figure this out.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  There's some creative stuff happening and a lot more needs to happen to make sure kids are safe online and we have good age verification. And then there's norms, you know, like that norm of, well, incest happens in the family, so it should stay in the family. That's not a norm anymore. That is a shift that has happened. Not sexualizing kids in advertising would probably be a good thing.

• 1:22:07Dax Shepard?

  Just fun fact, Noah Hawley, the incredible writer of Fargo and so many other shows, his mother started this whole bringing incest into the light.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Oh, that's fantastic.

• 1:22:19Dax Shepard?

  In the seventies, yeah. Her publisher was like, we'll put it out, but how many people have been a victim of incest? Like, who's going to read this book? And then all of a sudden, it was hugely successful. And that's when people started going like, oh, this is a significant.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  Well, and when you think about teaching kids to recognize, resist, and report, what, report their dad? Are you kidding me? So my friend Michael Sito is really working on, because that's a big gap. We don't have enough youth-focused prevention programs. We have some, which is great, but we don't have enough. We couldn't find any programs that really focus. On how to keep kids safe in families. And again, you don't do it by saying, hey, stepdad, you might be a sex offender in waiting that you don't even know. How do you reach out to families? Blended families are at increased risk for sexual and physical abusive kids. I do know most blended families don't engage in sexual abuse against their unrelated minors. But we see in blended families where the male has biological or adoptive children and stepchildren. The stepchildren are at much higher risk. So there's something very protective about being a dad.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  It's especially protective if you're involved in your kids' lives early on and often. So when you are really involved in caregiving as a father, that reduces the likelihood that you're going to engage in any kind of sexual or physical harm. So another kind of societal level lever that we could press and reduce child sexual abuse at scale is to encourage caretaking by dads. Like to really encourage that, to make that normative.

• 1:23:43Dax Shepard?

  It's almost counterintuitive.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Right? People think of the tattoo guy in the room as dangerous.

• 1:23:46Dax Shepard?

  Keep him away.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  And no, we need dads involved in kids. And of course, kids need them as well. But it is protective against offending against your own child. And my guess is it's also protective against offending against children, period. You change enough diapers and bandage enough knees and put kids to bed.

• 1:24:01Dax Shepard?

  I can't tell you how many men I've heard around say like, oh, yeah, I used to be able to go to strip clubs. And now I have a daughter that age. And I realize, oh, my God, I'm disgusted by that's someone's daughter. Like, it took that experience to go like.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we all develop empathy when we're kind of there, right?

• 1:24:16Dax Shepard?

  The Matrix, there's a lot of different known things.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  There's so many things. And you can do it well before any offending is happening. We could have made the Internet impossible to share naked pictures of adults with kids. We could have made that. We didn't. That was a choice. We need to retrofit it now, which is just so asinine. It just makes me crazy. Then there's what can you do at the point where abuse is more imminent? And this is where people have risk factors, like people who work with kids day in, day out, people who have sexual attraction to children, people who have started looking at more and more extreme pornography, people who are online a lot and who are online with pornography a lot. That's a risk group. We need strategies that can work with them that they feel safe going to, right? So if you say, hey, you're a potential sex offender. Let me help you. You're going to get no takers. But if you say, hey, you've got to figure out a way

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  to make this safe and appealing and to give hope to people. People want to think that there's hope. And so to say, you know what? We're gonna help you, you got this. Here's some strategies for doing this.

• 1:25:13Dax Shepard?

  You point out something so obvious on the surface but could get missed is if the only approach to it is with the criminal justice system. What you're acknowledging is you're only gonna get involved once the abuse has happened.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  It's too late.

• 1:25:25Dax Shepard?

  That's what you're funding. Five point four billion dollars just on the incarceration. God knows the investigation, the different police departments, the different task force. You're acknowledging you're only getting involved after abuse has happened. Why would we wait to that point?

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  So much of it is just gonna have to change the public's opinion on this because I do think so many people think like, well, why would we put money towards those people, those monsters? It's just reshaping like we're not, we're trying to stop. We can end it.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Exactly, we could end it. This is a behavior. It does not have to happen. You were reminding me of a stat earlier about policies that focus on people who have already offended, like registration and notification. You have to have a conviction usually to even have those apply to you.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  And that only covers like 5% of all detected crimes. And so even if public notification, civil commitment, registration, excuse me, as well, were 100% successful, which they're not, but that's kind of very complex, you're still only kind of addressing 5% of the issue. So again, it's so tricky because I remember being in a room doing some talk years ago and I was full of law enforcement and I could tell they were like, who is this motherfucker to tell us what is going on here? And I could tell, I was like, oh, I'm not surrounded by friendly researchers and like a lowly journalist.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  They're not always friendly.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I remember just kind of realizing it. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a really long hour talk. And so I just said, look, I can tell there's some like weird tension in the room, a bunch of law enforcement, I'm sure that's kind of what I said to you guys, like, at the end of the day, we all wanna prevent child sex abuse. We may have like quite a different ideas of how to get there, but we all wanna kind of land on the same spot.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  Same goal.

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Dax Shepard?

  And also to be fair to those people, it's too much to ask those people to be the ones to be compassionate because they're the ones dealing with the down river end result. So it's like you're asking a cop to be compassionate to addiction? Fuck that, half the stuff he deals with is from addicts. That's not even the right person. They're like the least likely person that's gonna find empathy is the person cleaning up the mess.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we do see people. So Simon Bailey was the head of, I can't remember his exact title. He's from the UK and he was high up the food chain in law enforcement. He's the first person that said, "We cannot arrest our way out of this." And when you have someone from that group who says, "We have to do prevention," that is a powerful ally. We have to have criminal justice, but if 95% of sex crimes are committed by somebody with no prior conviction...

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  That was one, pre-conviction, excuse me, yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, then criminal justice is handling 5% of this and that's not enough. Like, we could do more. So we need criminal justice. We need services for people who do survive, for children and for adults who've survived child sexual abuse. And we've got to invest in prevention. Early, pre-abuse, when abuse might be more imminent. There's some really cool stuff where people who are putting in search terms that seem like they're looking for child sexual abuse materials. Now there's these great interventions that he, with a warning, that say, "Hey, this is illegal, harmful," but that also include a "get help." And here's where you can go to get help.

• 1:28:16Dax Shepard?

  This is Tooters, who does a program, Ashton, that helps redirect.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Thorn. And they do amazing work. So they're great partners of more and we really love Thorn. They started out where if somebody was searching online for CCM or appeared to be through some algorithm of search terms, the thing that would pop up would be a map. And the map had a pin in it and the pin was where you were. And they said, "We know where you are." And this terrified people. Right. And terror is a good deterrent for about five minutes. Yeah. And then it goes away and you can't keep terrorizing people. Yep. So then they and others, our friends at Lucy Faithful and Internet Watch Foundation, have done some really creative things where it's like, "This is harmful and you can get caught. Also, here's where to go to help." And two things happened. One, people who are just starting down the road to search for this more extreme content that involves children, stop searching for it.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  A large group of them go, "Whoa, I was at the abyss."

• 1:29:07Dax Shepard?

  I'm not anonymous. Back to the hedges.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, or like, "This could have caused some harm to me and them and I don't want to do that." And they go back to looking at legal adult pornography. And then some smaller percentage of people click on that. "Here's where you go get help." Or interact with the little chatbot that's like, "How can I help you not do this?" So there are some creative strategies. And then there's post-abuse, which is another place you can and should act. Of treatments for kids who have been victimized, trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy, validated across dozens of randomized controlled trials, really helps kids and their parents navigate the after, yeah, the fallout. There's great interventions for kids who have already caused harm, really excellent randomized controlled trial evaluations. I led one of those. There's another one that I would say is even better because it's a lot less expensive. And then there's even interventions for adults who have offended.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  The best intervention really seems to be for a guy coming out of prison is surrounding them, you know, with a parole officer who knows what he did and other people who knew what he did, but are going to help him find stable housing, employment, and pro-social relationships. And those are the three keys to staying on the straight and narrow.

• 1:30:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  Not all of it will work. There will be people who reoffend.

• 1:30:13Dax Shepard?

  Yep.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  Whether they have pedophilia or not, there will be people who reoffend. There are psychopaths who just take what they want and they don't care.

• 1:30:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  But most people are not going to reoffend, and most of them could use some support.

• 1:30:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well, one in five in this country equals 60 million Americans, so that's an enormous group. Even if you go down 30%, that's 9 million people. If you could prevent 9 million people with any strategy, god, it's worth pursuing.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  We would put more than $3 million into it.

• 1:30:39Dax Shepard?

  Well, you guys, Luke, Elizabeth, this has been very, very illuminating, and I'm couldn't be more grateful. I mean, I gotta applaud you, Luke. You at least have the force field of academia and research, so you can pursue this without a terrible risk to your own professional life.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  There's actually pretty significant risks.

• 1:30:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay. But I'd imagine as a journalist, you are not going to get tenure, and you're not going to be free. So I do think you're taking on a lot of risks to make this your pursuit, and I'm grateful for it.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Thank you, yeah. I feel lucky, especially working with Elizabeth for the past five to six years on this book. It's been a wild ride.

• 1:31:14Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm so glad you agreed to get interviewed by him in 2012.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Uh, me too.

• 1:31:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  It's been nothing but joy since then, it really has. And we're so glad that you agreed to interview us.

• 1:31:24Dax Shepard?

  Of course, and the book is one in five, Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis, and what we can do to stop it. I'm reading upside down, and I'm dyslexic, so.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  You did it.

• 1:31:38Dax Shepard?

  I really got through it. You guys, this has been a delight. It's not a fun topic, but somehow you guys made it.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  It's meaningful.

• 1:31:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, enjoyable. So, good luck with everything and keep at it, please. Thank you.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, guys.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, and thanks for sharing.

• 1:31:50Speaker 06

  Armchair expert, buddy makes mistakes all the time. Thank God Monica's here, she's gonna let him have the facts.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Okay, I was supposed to tell us, oh, sorry.

• 1:32:01Dax Shepard?

  Just one bite.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  No, you take your time.

• 1:32:05Dax Shepard?

  We don't have time. Time is of the essence.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  No, time is on our side.

• 1:32:10Dax Shepard?

  Explain time is of the essence to me.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Okay, um, okay, time is of the essence. I mean, it is of the essence of life. It's basically the, the, the kernel for which life. It's the, literally the essence of life. But I don't understand it in terms of like.

• 1:32:33Dax Shepard?

  Now.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Dax Shepard?

  The immediacy.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  But maybe it's because time, it's, it's gone. We just lost, it's, it's going, it's. We already lost.

• 1:32:43Dax Shepard?

  It's one of many sayings that I of course know what the meaning is, but if I really think of it literally, I don't know why it means what it means.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, time is now. That's actually true.

• 1:32:54Dax Shepard?

  But essence is like, when something has the essence of.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Right. This is probably old timey.

• 1:33:01Dax Shepard?

  That's, I think essence might have meant something different.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  I think so. Speaking of time is of the essence.

• 1:33:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I have a lot to say on time of the essence, but you start.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I was just gonna tell a story about last week or last fact check that I didn't get to, but I don't have to, but it is a poop.

• 1:33:19Dax Shepard?

  Tell me.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  It is poopy.

• 1:33:20Dax Shepard?

  Oh yeah, I wanna hear.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I almost talk it again. I got so close.

• 1:33:28Dax Shepard?

  Paint the picture, pretend you're on Armchair Anonymous.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Listen.

• 1:33:31Dax Shepard?

  What backstory do I need?

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  So, this is really why I'm bringing it up, because I was at a friend's house.

• 1:33:37Dax Shepard?

  Okay, what time of day?

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Um, evening, like, um.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  I guess I got to the friend's house around five. I was fine.

• 1:33:46Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  You know, everything was fine.

• 1:33:48Dax Shepard?

  Did you eat at the friend's house?

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Uh huh, but pizza, cheese pizza.

• 1:33:52Dax Shepard?

  Cheese pizza, no problem.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  No problem.

• 1:33:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  It wasn't that. Um, ate that, started playing mahjong.

• 1:33:59Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Okay, you know, you play multiple games of mahjong.

• 1:34:04Dax Shepard?

  I don't know, but now.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, so I'm teaching you that in when you go to play mahjong, you'll play like multiple games. Like sometimes they're just twenty minutes or whatever.

• 1:34:13Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  So you play the first game and it's fine. Everything's great.

• 1:34:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  We start the second game and I'm like, hmm, I feel.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  As Jess would say, skittily do.

• 1:34:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 1:34:26Dax Shepard?

  And out of ten, we're at a two point five?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fine. And I was also like, I think this will pass. Like this is fine.

• 1:34:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Sometimes it passes.

• 1:34:34Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  And um, then it was just like, it would pop, you know, would pop. It would pop back up, the cramping.

• 1:34:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay, not like a turtle.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  No, not, not a turtle.

• 1:34:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  The cramp would come into play.

• 1:34:49Dax Shepard?

  Like a little.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and I was like, okay, okay, so it's not really passing yet.

• 1:34:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Um, and then I, I was like, okay.

• 1:34:59Dax Shepard?

  And each round of pops, little more intense?

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Dax Shepard?

  But holding steady.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  But it was okay.

• 1:35:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Now, at this point, I did, I was like, okay. I am going to need to evacuate soon-ish.

• 1:35:13Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:35:15Dax Shepard?

  Are you trying to hurry the game along at all at this point?

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  I mean, you can't really because you're like waiting on other people, but sort of, I'm like, your turn.

• 1:35:22Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh, yes, I get a little bossy.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  And we're playing with a kid too.

• 1:35:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  I know, so um.

• 1:35:28Dax Shepard?

  You're like, fucking go on there and shit my pants, Tommy.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  I know. This is where I feel like I haven't made no growth in life, right?

• 1:35:37Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Cause there are, they live in a house, there are bathrooms.

• 1:35:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you could've just.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  I could have.

• 1:35:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  But I, not only could I not do it, I couldn't even say. These are close friends.

• 1:35:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  I couldn't even say, like, oh my god, like, I'm in trouble.

• 1:35:55Dax Shepard?

  Intestinally speaking.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  And also, they're like fun and funny.

• 1:36:01Dax Shepard?

  They have a kid, too, so they're dealing with Pooty all the time.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  They themselves have evacs.

• 1:36:06Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:36:07Dax Shepard?

  They're in a safe space.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  I know, but like, my brain goes into like a different mode. Also, like, I was just evaluating where the bathrooms were, and I was like, I can't.

• 1:36:19Dax Shepard?

  They're too close to them.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  The options were a guest bath.

• 1:36:24Dax Shepard?

  Did it crush your mind to go like, I gotta run to Starbucks real quick, because I didn't even want anything?

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  I just really, I need a coffee right now.

• 1:36:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just gotta go to Starbucks right this second.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  That is something, uh, like, that is something crazy I would do.

• 1:36:35Dax Shepard?

  A solution you would entertain, yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  Um, I think there's a bathroom in, in the master, in the primary bedroom. Okay?

• 1:36:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  And a one in the kind of like, living room, basically.

• 1:36:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fuck, okay.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so, I couldn't be like, can I use restroom in your room? That feels a little strange. Without giving all the information.

• 1:37:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, also, I'd imagine, because when I've been in this situation, you're not talking about also just taking a normal.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:37:11Dax Shepard?

  Customary.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I knew, I was like, this is not gonna be good.

• 1:37:14Dax Shepard?

  It's gonna be bad, you're gonna have to open windows and light things on fire.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  And, and I don't know about the volume.

• 1:37:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:37:21Dax Shepard?

  Or the noise, maybe even?

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  That's what I mean.

• 1:37:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh, oh, the volume, not, that could mean two things, yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:37:28Dax Shepard?

  Like the payload and.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  I meant the noise, but yes, okay, so, anywho, I'm like, it's, you know, it's starting to ramp up, we're still playing, we're still playing, thank god, you know, my friend wins, it's like, I've never been so happy for.

• 1:37:42Dax Shepard?

  To lose.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  To not win, yeah, it's like, just let this be over, you know? And, um, and then, and then she was like, do we have another game in us?

• 1:37:52Dax Shepard?

  And you're sweating bullets, you're like, I don't think so.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did, I said, I, I think I'm tired.

• 1:37:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you lied to your friend.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I lied. I said, I think I'm tired, and everyone's like, oh, no, that's totally fine, and, and I was like, we're recording tomorrow.

• 1:38:08Dax Shepard?

  I wanna play again, please, Miss Monica. It's all I wanna do. I live for that. I get bullied at school. This is the only-

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  Oh my god. And then I immediately just shit everywhere. Um, no. I said, "Yeah, you know, we're recording tomorrow."

• 1:38:25Dax Shepard?

  Lie?

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  No, we were, but-

• 1:38:27Dax Shepard?

  At noon?

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because then they said, "Oh, what time?" And I was like, "Oh, fuck."

• 1:38:31Dax Shepard?

  There's a problem lying, it immediately begets more lies.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  I know, but I did say, I was like, like, ten, which, which is, I think, maybe was, or we had something at ten or something.

• 1:38:40Dax Shepard?

  Pitch, probably.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was like, which I know isn't early, like, I did, but also we're talk, I was like, "I gotta go." Like, enough of this chit chat. So then I was like, "Yeah, bye," you know, just getting up, not really helping put anything away.

• 1:38:56Dax Shepard?

  Now, really quick, do any of these people listen to the show?

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I have a sense this is gonna get back to them, yeah.

• 1:39:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  So, um-

• 1:39:05Dax Shepard?

  I know what they're gonna say.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:39:07Dax Shepard?

  I can tell you right now. You're gonna get a call.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Dax Shepard?

  And so I say hello.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Hello? Hey!

• 1:39:12Dax Shepard?

  Oh my gosh, I just heard Sally told me to listen to the fact check that you told the Majan story. And I went, "Monica, you can totally go in our bathroom, in our, in our primary bedroom."

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  I just, I felt like I was so embarrassed. I just couldn't. I couldn't.

• 1:39:28Dax Shepard?

  But you should know, we would be honored-

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:39:30Dax Shepard?

  If you-

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  It was not because you didn't create an environment that I, I couldn't do. It was, it's me, it's a me issue.

• 1:39:37Dax Shepard?

  Okay, well, just so you know.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:39:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you have full access.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Thanks. I probably still won't.

• 1:39:43Dax Shepard?

  All right. Okay.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  And you're right, that's exactly how it would go. Um-

• 1:39:48Dax Shepard?

  So you get in the car.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Get in the car, and I'm like-

• 1:39:50Dax Shepard?

  How far away do they live?

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Twenty minutes.

• 1:39:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh!

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "I can do it. Like, I can do it. I have no option, I can do it." But then I did think, like, you know, as I'm driving, I was like, "Oh my, I don't know, I don't know."

• 1:40:02Dax Shepard?

  And you weren't wearing a skirt this time, either.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  No, I was wearing jeans, new jeans.

• 1:40:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  So I was like, "Okay," and I had a, I had a sweatshirt in the back of my car.

• 1:40:11Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  So I was like, "Okay, maybe I, like, pull over, pull down my pants."

• 1:40:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Put the sweatshirt on the seat.

• 1:40:19Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Poop in the sweatshirt.

• 1:40:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow, you were considering that?

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a barrier. I didn't, I don't want the sweatshirt, so it was fine.

• 1:40:26Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  So I was like, "Poop in the sweatshirt, that'll be a barrier," you know, and kind of a dipe, sort of.

• 1:40:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  I had to make the decision. I'm either gonna do that-

• 1:40:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Or I'm just gonna keep going, you know?

• 1:40:38Dax Shepard?

  And stopping at a gas station?

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:40:40Dax Shepard?

  Going straight to a gas station is not an option.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 1:40:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  I didn't feel like I knew where they were. I'd be driving. It was just not gonna happen, okay?

• 1:40:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  That was just like, but the sweatshirt was kinda in the back and I was like kinda leaning like, oh, okay. No, whatever, I'm going, full for- force. So I was speeding.

• 1:40:57Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow, good.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Um, and I, I made it. I made it. I made it.

• 1:41:03Dax Shepard?

  How?

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  It was so close.

• 1:41:04Dax Shepard?

  It was so close. And as you're running in your house, do you use that toilet right at your doorway? Or do you need to go upstairs because it's gonna be emotional?

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's.

• 1:41:12Dax Shepard?

  Cause you're gonna take clothes off and stuff.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  So that is what was crazy is I knew, I was like, I just, it's right there. There's a bathroom right by my door. I, I can just do that.

• 1:41:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  And of course, I get in there and I go all the way upstairs. I'm like, like a glutton for punishment. I go all the way upstairs to my bathroom.

• 1:41:29Dax Shepard?

  Muscle memory.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:41:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  And then, um, I evacuated.

• 1:41:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wonderful. Was it, you must have loved that moment though. Cause you had been so, you'd gone through so much. It was such a trial.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Dax Shepard?

  So the relief was.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  The relief of making it was, so it was, but it was also like, it was a little pain, like,

• 1:41:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  It, I didn't feel good, I guess. Cause like.

• 1:41:56Dax Shepard?

  As it turns out.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Cause it, yeah. And then, not to be so graphic, I mean, whatever, we're already here.

• 1:42:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Um, I had, there was a tiny, tiny bit of blood.

• 1:42:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Um, which then I realized, I was like, oh, I'm starting my period.

• 1:42:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay, which sometimes gurgles your.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like, so this is all making sense. And why like the cramps, I don't know. Like sometimes you can't tell what cramp is what. It's all affecting everything. It's a mess, you know?

• 1:42:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Anyway, um.

• 1:42:31Dax Shepard?

  Let's go.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  So, it was, it was annoying because I was like, I. I don't, like, after, I didn't feel sprightly, like, I still felt kinda crampy.

• 1:42:42Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  And bad.

• 1:42:45Dax Shepard?

  Cause of the period.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  I think, yeah.

• 1:42:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I would love an internist to explain to us why the period all of a sudden fucks up your GI. Those things are very separate.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:42:53Dax Shepard?

  Systems, but, but this is consistent.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  So, that happened.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  So, yeah, well, congrats that you got home, yeah.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  I know. I was like, this is gonna happen to me again, but then I had to take responsibility. I was like, look, I, in this case.

• 1:43:10Dax Shepard?

  You could've handled it better.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Prevented this.

• 1:43:12Dax Shepard?

  I also think, now that this is twice.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:43:16Dax Shepard?

  In, in, in two years.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  No, don't finish that sentence. Don't.

• 1:43:21Dax Shepard?

  Well, I don't think you know where I'm going with this. But, so we're averaging once a year now. It is time to have a trash bag in your car.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  No!

• 1:43:31Dax Shepard?

  That's nothing. You keep it in the back pocket of the seat.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Well, how do you poop in that?

• 1:43:37Speaker 06

  You can get a little toilet seat that has a trash bag attached to it.

• 1:43:40Dax Shepard?

  Also an option, but I think people would see that in her backseat if she ever gave someone a ride.

• 1:43:45Speaker 06

  Vinnie's got one, I would say it's for a kid.

• 1:43:47Dax Shepard?

  Why use Vinnie's?

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  It's for my friend's kid.

• 1:43:49Dax Shepard?

  Vinnie's outgrowing his.

• 1:43:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I can give you one.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Ew, listen, no, this is what I was afraid you'd say.

• 1:43:54Dax Shepard?

  But a trash bag, a big guy, a 55 gallon trash bag, cause then that's your sweatshirt idea, but way more protection. There's no seepage. And, and then it's already in a trash bag, so great, you throw it in the.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  No, but you'd have to lay it down, right?

• 1:44:10Dax Shepard?

  Or, no, open it up.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  But then how, that feels hard to do.

• 1:44:14Dax Shepard?

  No, not those 50, think about the mouth of a 55 gallon trash can. It's this big around.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  So you're saying I pull over to do this? This isn't while I'm driving, like, the first time?

• 1:44:23Dax Shepard?

  Right, no, you would probably wanna pull to the shoulder of the road.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Listen, no, this is what I was afraid you were gonna say. I don't wanna manifest, this isn't a new thing of mine. This isn't a pattern. No, it is not. Do not say that. That's never happening to me again.

• 1:44:37Dax Shepard?

  Dear Monica's got a new thing.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  This is my hubris because I was too embarrassed to go number two in my friend's house.

• 1:44:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  Like, that's my issue that I need to work through.

• 1:44:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  But I don't see-

• 1:44:53Dax Shepard?

  It costs you nothing to throw it in there. That's all I'm saying. You know, I don't think you're, I don't think you're-

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  I'm telling the universe-

• 1:44:59Dax Shepard?

  Manifesting-

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Nope, I am. I'm telling the universe, like, okay, well-

• 1:45:03Dax Shepard?

  I'm making a different argument. So often when you prepare for something, then it won't ever happen. Because you've wasted the time, then you're like, oh my God, there's all this stuff, and then it never happened again. That's more, to me, that's the more common pattern. It's like, I bought this thing to deal with this thing, and then it never happened again.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:45:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Now, would you have gone to the bathroom in your friend's house?

• 1:45:27Dax Shepard?

  I'd have gone at their house. Then I would have gone at a gas station. I'd have gone to Starbucks. And sincerely-

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:31Dax Shepard?

  And I have history to prove this. I would have pulled over and went on the shoulder of the road before I went in my car. I'm not gonna use it as a porta potty. I would rather do it into the grass or weeds on the side of the road.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  We're different in that way.

• 1:45:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I, I would, I, I feel at least, there's something about me being alone that, that is the highest priority in those moments.

• 1:45:55Dax Shepard?

  Hmm, uh-huh. Yeah, you want your privacy.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, the car, it is just me in there.

• 1:46:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but also, it was dark out.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Dax Shepard?

  Inside of the road in some woods.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:46:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, alright.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  Plus, I could get murdered like that, like-

• 1:46:12Dax Shepard?

  No one wants to fuck with a girl spraying.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  I don't know, there's some kinky murderers out there.

• 1:46:18Dax Shepard?

  Fuck this.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  I think they might like it.

• 1:46:20Dax Shepard?

  Well, you're, now you've really gotten to the most niche murderer imaginable.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  They're out there looking for girls like me.

• 1:46:27Dax Shepard?

  The dookie killer.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:46:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Has a great ring to it, that someone's definitely taken that.

• 1:46:32Dax Shepard?

  He waits around porta potties, and he waits till he hears harness happening, and then he-

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Probably for real.

• 1:46:38Dax Shepard?

  And then he, ah, he gets overcome with the, the hunger.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  You like when people poop?

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, a lot. But I'm also not a killer.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  I know, but-

• 1:46:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, nothing could possibly make me happier. If I was driving down the road and I looked to my right, I was like, oh, there's Monica's car. And then I was like, oh, there's Monica in the bushes.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:46:57Dax Shepard?

  I mean, the amount of joy that would give me, you really can't imagine.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  I can't do it.

• 1:47:01Dax Shepard?

  Couldn't be measured.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  Anyway, so I just wanted to be vulnerable-

• 1:47:04Dax Shepard?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  And say that that time is of the essence.

• 1:47:10Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

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

• 1:47:46Speaker 06

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

• 1:48:22Dax Shepard?

  I no longer want to say my thing because there's no way to top that.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Wait, of course.

• 1:48:27Dax Shepard?

  No, just time. We're talking about time. Someone, one of our guests, I wish I could remember. I have a hunch it was Angela Duckworth.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:36Dax Shepard?

  Because she has such phenomenal taste.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Dax Shepard?

  Someone told me to buy this book, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:48:43Dax Shepard?

  A physicist.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:48:45Dax Shepard?

  And it's been sitting in my nightstand for a few years.

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:48:48Dax Shepard?

  And then I moved nightstands. I got a different nightstand against my wall. But I got one, and then so it reemerged. And then I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leaf through this. I find it mind-blowing.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:49:00Dax Shepard?

  It's so mind-blowing.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:49:02Dax Shepard?

  I just wanted to add the two concepts that they start the book with, which is... Our understanding of time is as flawed as our understanding of the earth being flat at one point.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:49:15Dax Shepard?

  And if you think about like, it's just kind of unimaginable. We're on a sphere.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:49:20Dax Shepard?

  The fact that anyone ever, and he points this out, both of these discoveries happened before we could ever test or measure this, this realization. But yes, the earth being round is like, you can't conceive of that.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Dax Shepard?

  And then second was that the sun doesn't revolve around us.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:49:38Dax Shepard?

  You can't figure that out from our perspective, but both were figured out before we could actually test that. So time, we, we have as flawed of a, a sense of what time is. So just, there's three elements. I'm just gonna say the first one that I find to be so fascinating. So time is moving faster on a mountaintop.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:50:00Dax Shepard?

  Than it is at sea level.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  What? How?

• 1:50:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So if you are in Denver.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:50:06Dax Shepard?

  The time is moving faster than it is at the ski hill 20 miles away at elevation.

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:50:14Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Like the perception of time or actual time?

• 1:50:17Dax Shepard?

  If you have two atomically paired clocks, you know, that measure to the bazillionth of a second.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:50:23Dax Shepard?

  And you sync those here in LA and then I send you to Mount Wilson with one of those watches. And you're up there for a while. When you return, um, your time will have, be further along than mine. And also to the degree that your head is living in a, in a faster time than your feet.

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:50:48Dax Shepard?

  And this has all been measured. We, we can do, we have the technology. What's incredible is that Einstein figured this out at like 23 years old without any way to know that this was the case. And so the, what it says is, well, what's true time? Is it the time that was happening at elevation or was it at sea level? And the truth is, there is no real time.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:10Dax Shepard?

  You only have two times that are relative to one another. The example is to say like, what's a true statement? Point eight British pounds equals one dollar versus one dollar equals point, those, neither of them have an intrinsic value. We, they're only related to each other. That's their value. And that there is no same time. Happening anywhere in the universe. Every single location has its own time. That's only relative to other locations.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  I hate it here.

• 1:51:42Dax Shepard?

  And then it gets into, so our first premise is like, oh, there's such thing as time that we can measure. Well, no, you can only measure at your location in space. So the number one definition we have of time is like, well, that we know that's not true. And then the next one is that it's sequential or that there's an order. But there's a past and a present.

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. Is this like time is stacked?

• 1:52:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, yeah, so the example is like cause and effect. And it said in the universe and they do really good dumb analogies. It's like if you could imagine something was filmed, anything was really filmed. You can't tell depending on which direction, whether we watch it forward or backward.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  But what do you mean? Sorry, explain a little.

• 1:52:24Dax Shepard?

  Like if you filmed, it's gotta be with something without heat. Like if I filmed a ball rolling and stopping.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:52:35Dax Shepard?

  It's just you can view, you can view anything backwards. In your mind, it'll tell you that was the beginning. When really it was the end of the video.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, you're saying like, okay, if you like rewind.

• 1:52:52Dax Shepard?

  You can watch it backwards or forward.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  Right, but because you're starting it, you're saying.

• 1:52:57Dax Shepard?

  An objective outsider can't tell what was first. The only thing that, the only thing in the universe that we can observe, that we know definitively had a beginning and an end is heat can warm cold.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:16Dax Shepard?

  But cold can never create heat.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Warm cold.

• 1:53:20Dax Shepard?

  So you have like this body of water. It's 100 degrees. You have this body of water. It's 50 degrees. If we film those interacting and this, this temperature goes up. We can establish the order of events. Because you'll never inject cold water into hot water and make it hotter.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Oh, make it hotter, yeah.

• 1:53:39Dax Shepard?

  Law of thermodynamics.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  But you make it colder, you are affecting it. If you add cold water into something hot.

• 1:53:45Dax Shepard?

  Yes, but you can't make anything hotter with cold water.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:49Dax Shepard?

  It's, it only has one direction. You can make cold water warmer with hot water. You cannot make hot water hotter with cold water.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:59Dax Shepard?

  That can't happen. That's like a

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 1:54:02Dax Shepard?

  Immovable law of the universe. So unless something has a heat transfer, there's no order. There's no way to know the order.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:54:13Dax Shepard?

  I'm in that chapter right now. I'm gonna, they're gonna land the plane. I'm gonna be able to say more about it. But I just was, that whole, that your head's experiencing time differently than your feet is bonkers.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  God. Uh, yeah.

• 1:54:25Dax Shepard?

  So what's happening is mass, the earth, is warping time. You can think of it as a body going into a tub and displacing water.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:54:35Dax Shepard?

  So earth itself is warping time. So the closer you get to that mass, the center of that mass, which is why sea level, you're closer to the center of the mass than you are on a mountain top.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:54:46Dax Shepard?

  The closer you get to the center of the mass, the slower time is going. This is why I finally now understand why there's no time in a black hole. It's just like infinite mass. So time just slows down.

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  What is the dead center of the earth?

• 1:54:59Dax Shepard?

  Like, what's it made of?

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  No, like on, or on this planet.

• 1:55:03Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  What is the dead center?

• 1:55:05Dax Shepard?

  Well, it would be inside the sphere.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  So it's in the, it's up, up?

• 1:55:10Dax Shepard?

  No, like here's earth.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:11Dax Shepard?

  In the dead middle of it. We, as I say, we drilled, um, 5,000 miles into the earth. We'd be at the center of the earth.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:20Dax Shepard?

  That's where time's moving the slowest.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  Well, the equator is going around the center.

• 1:55:24Dax Shepard?

  Well, we've arbitrarily drawn that line.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:55:27Dax Shepard?

  Based on it's where the sun is most directly hitting. That's how we picked that line as the equator.

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  I thought it was the center.

• 1:55:35Dax Shepard?

  Look, it's a ball, right?

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:37Dax Shepard?

  And we, and we, and we decided to go here, make this zero, and make the prime meridian zero.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:42Dax Shepard?

  And then that way we can graph everything out. But imagine those lines stay still and we just rotate earth. We could have picked zero as going through Antarctica.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:52Dax Shepard?

  That's just how we've constructed our maps and our, our.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I guess I'm asking, like, in the ball.

• 1:55:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:55:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  So the center of the earth is here.

• 1:56:01Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  So where is that?

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  Where is that in Earth? Where is it?

• 1:56:08Dax Shepard?

  Well, kind of everywhere. If you're talking about the center, you could draw a straight line out from the center to any spot on the outside sphere. There's a direct line from you and I right now to the center of the Earth. And any point on the Earth, there's a direct line to the center of the Earth.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. It's scrambly.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  It's so.

• 1:56:28Dax Shepard?

  Anyways, I have a weird hunch that at the end of this book, should I fully understand it? Which I might not be. Well, it's a dense book. Like I said to Eric, you should read this book. And he's like, are you listening to it? And I'm like, no, I don't think this book can be listened to. I think you need to reread some paragraphs over and over again. But I have a bizarre hunch or optimism that at the end of this, I'm gonna have a new grasp on spirituality.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I like that.

• 1:56:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like I think if, I think if, if I can really deconstruct or understand how time is not the thing I think it is, that might open the door to a lot of new possibilities and thoughts.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I started Project Kill Mary. I rented it. And I was watching, you know, 45 minutes. And I was like, yeah, I don't believe in any of this.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  This is fully made up. This life is made up. This is made up. How can it be? How can this be?

• 1:57:33Dax Shepard?

  Like Planet Earth, what's happening here? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Guys.

• 1:57:37Dax Shepard?

  It's a miracle.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  It is not real. We are not real.

• 1:57:42Dax Shepard?

  We're not real.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  None of this is real. I really started to feel like, kind of crazy, like, oh, oh, my God.

• 1:57:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, yeah, in the same sense, I'd imagine if you're like the first person to have the concept of the Earth not being flat explained to you, it's very destabilizing. You're like, wow, my perspective can be that flawed.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:05Dax Shepard?

  Or they go, oh, guess what? No, no, we're just spinning this. You know, sun's over there and we're just, we're going around it in a year and we're just spinning all day.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Dax Shepard?

  That's destabilizing. Like, well, everything I know is is wrong, and that's a scary thought.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  I know, but when you think, when you like really, really think about the story, the story of the world.

• 1:58:27Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm. You mean Earth or the universe?

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I mean, well, one begets the other, I guess, but like even just the Earth. Okay, and the evolution of all of us, everything.

• 1:58:46Dax Shepard?

  From single cell to us.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  It's like, no.

• 1:58:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  That is not real.

• 1:58:53Dax Shepard?

  I feel you. I have, I have a, I have a healthy, I think that's why it's very easy for people to believe in religion because.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  Yes, because at least it's an explanation.

• 1:59:02Dax Shepard?

  Preposterous that all this happened by chance.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  I really was getting in my head and I was like, this is not like, I'm gonna vapor, like, this is not.

• 1:59:12Dax Shepard?

  It's, yeah, you felt untethered, maybe. Dangerous.

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little, it was a little unsettling, um.

• 1:59:20Dax Shepard?

  Did you make it through or you did forty five and then you paused?

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  Well, I had to leave, so I'm gonna go back, finish it. He hasn't even met, but he's like just now meeting, I assume, The Rock, yeah.

• 1:59:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's such a cute movie.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like it's right, he's, God, my God, is he so charming. It's just him, it's just him.

• 1:59:37Dax Shepard?

  Very few people can do that.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  He's just so fucking charming. Anywho, um, yeah, that's, yeah, interesting that you brought that up because I've been also in my head about, you know, life and reality and none of, it's like none of it, it's nothing.

• 1:59:52Dax Shepard?

  And then again, we come back to the same conclusion, we always do, which is like, and who cares? So if we found out it was a simulation, then what? Well, I keep living this life that I'm living. Uh, I still have goals and hopes and I'm looking forward to things. It's like, okay, oh, it's all fake. Well, I'm gonna continue on. I'm not gonna, what, like, if I found out it was a simulation, well, I guess then I'm gonna kill myself.

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:00:13Dax Shepard?

  Right. Like, you're like, oh, just keep enjoying the simulation.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  I know, but it's like.

• 2:00:17Dax Shepard?

  Does it matter?

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Even apart from it being a simulation, even that was getting like, even that can't be real. Nothing, like, what?

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  It's scare, like, it is scary once you really start thinking about. Space and time and.

• 2:00:35Dax Shepard?

  It it helps you see how easy it would be to go crazy.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was starting, I was like, I could, I could really, really go crazy. If I really started delving into some of this stuff, it's just maybe not healthy for me.

• 2:00:49Dax Shepard?

  That was my early twenties. I had like two or three years in my early twenties.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  That's how old I am too.

• 2:00:54Dax Shepard?

  I really, yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I had um two years in my early twenties where I I was, I felt like I was on the path to to becoming crazy.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Going nuts.

• 2:01:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Dax Shepard?

  And I was kind of swirling with these kind of thoughts. My challenging nature, my openness to reject what is believed or known.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Dax Shepard?

  Which I whatever, I I I I trend high on that spectrum. I thought, oh, you're in danger. If you don't accept these things, you're in danger of floating off.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:24Dax Shepard?

  Into an abyss.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Dax Shepard?

  Of uncertainty.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's how people go nuts.

• 2:01:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think I was right on the precipice.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  Well, I'm I'm gonna try to stay away. I'd rather not go crazy.

• 2:01:36Dax Shepard?

  No, yeah.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  You know, I have this house.

• 2:01:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you want to stay there.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  It might be because of it. I don't know. Okay, I want to stop talking about this. It's making me a little freaked out.

• 2:01:45Dax Shepard?

  I showed, did I tell you I showed Linkin Dances with Wolves last Sunday?

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  I, yeah, you said you guys had started it and I was very impressed because it is, to me, although I was in high school, one of the most boring movies I've ever seen, but I would like to rewatch because maybe I just wasn't in the headspace.

• 2:02:04Dax Shepard?

  I love it. It won Best Picture.

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  Well, of course, I know. It's like a renowned film.

• 2:02:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes, but again, it's always nice to be reminded of what people lived like for so long.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  If they even did.

• 2:02:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, just out on the frontier with like a book of matches and a rifle and like, you know.

• 2:02:26Dax Shepard?

  It's just wild how what we dealt with and and Eric was going, fuck. I mean, how were they alive? Like, how did they just exist and not go fuck this? And I said, and it's my theory on life, which is like, because whatever their situation was, it was incrementally better than the previous generation. So maybe they had tin cups now instead of no cups.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  They felt lucky.

• 2:02:50Dax Shepard?

  They had some inventions that made them feel lucky.

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:54Dax Shepard?

  Luckier than the previous group.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:56Dax Shepard?

  And then you got to wonder what it does to like the group psychology when we do pinnacle.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:03:05Dax Shepard?

  We're not there yet, obviously, but there is a pinnacle.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  I know. I'm getting, again, like, we're maybe getting close, especially with AI. It's starting to feel like, oh, my God, we might be at the end of of this experiment.

• 2:03:22Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm. What a privilege to be there at the.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  No, I don't know. I even I even have like, OK, so, because obviously in the movie, the earth is not.

• 2:03:32Dax Shepard?

  Turned to shit.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like not viable for much longer. And I was like, OK, so if that happens, like, would I just die, I guess? Like, I would probably try to, I had to, I was like thinking this, you're like, OK, when would I die? Like, at what point would I make the call?

• 2:03:49Dax Shepard?

  You're like someone with a terminal condition that has to decide when they take the solution.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  Healthy for me to be thinking like this. I just know me. Like, I don't think this is good for my brain anxiety wise.

• 2:04:00Dax Shepard?

  No, no, no. For you, it's not great.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  But I I'm it's I'm too far.

• 2:04:05Dax Shepard?

  I'm such, that's what it is. I'm such a novelty addict.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 2:04:09Dax Shepard?

  That I'm like, yeah, it could be, it could be bad, it could be good. It'll be new.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  It'll.

• 2:04:15Dax Shepard?

  And that that to me is exciting. Or to me, what makes it worth it? I'm like, yeah, I don't know what's about to happen, but something's gonna happen and I'm gonna witness it.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  Well, you'll be dead.

• 2:04:29Dax Shepard?

  Well, we don't, we don't know which way it's gonna go.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  I don't wanna have to go to move to another planet and stuff and like take this spaceship like that's it looks so miserable.

• 2:04:40Dax Shepard?

  It could be fun.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  No, it looks really miserable.

• 2:04:42Dax Shepard?

  What if it's Delta One to yeah, there we go to Alpha Centauri.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  I do like that.

• 2:04:47Dax Shepard?

  All right. And then they have on the plane, they have like cocktails.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  No, they don't. Their food is bad and their drink, they don't even have Hendrick's Gin.

• 2:04:56Dax Shepard?

  You could maybe bring your own Hendrick's Gin.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  Oh, anyway, okay. Well, this got really intense.

• 2:05:03Dax Shepard?

  Want to do some facts?

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do some facts.

• 2:05:06Dax Shepard?

  This was an eye opening episode, man.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  This was a serious episode.

• 2:05:10Dax Shepard?

  I have found myself repeating the two most jaw dropping bits of data that came out in this. Have you been telling anybody about this stuff?

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  Well, which which are the two for you?

• 2:05:21Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's 70% of the cases are from other children. That's wild. And then the other one that blew my mind is that like 50% of them are situational and not someone who has like permanent pedophilia.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:34Dax Shepard?

  Which that is somehow scarier.

• 2:05:37Speaker 01

  Well, not to me because again, and like, I think this is sort of the point they were making like those people, it's like the difference between a murderer and a psychopath. Like a psychopath can't control it. Like it is a real urge. It is driven in the brain somehow. And a murderer could not murder, given a different circumstance or the right tools or you know, whatever.

• 2:06:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that was a part of a, I'm pretty sure a Gladwell episode. It was like, it was about first order thinking, second order thinking, what are all the, all these things that happen like some alarming percentage of murders are people reacting in situations. They're not premeditated. They're not like someone's gonna off someone for money. It's like those are very low percentages. It's people interacting in life who become overwhelmed and yeah.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's why I think it's not as scary because I guess that's like the whole point of what Elizabeth and Luke are doing. It's trying to like mainly. Avoid that.

• 2:06:41Dax Shepard?

  You can't imagine a future where it's like, oh, it becomes so fine to self identify as this and that people know when they're pretty young, it's sounding like. And then get treatment for those people. So it wouldn't be like, oh, well, if you could take all those people out of, not take them out of the population, but identify them, get them help, the problem would be over. It wouldn't be over. I mean, let's just even ignore the adolescents that are doing it because theirs is mostly situational.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:07Dax Shepard?

  But the other people who it's like, they've never had that urge before and then they don't have it again. You can't even, they don't even know to be treating that.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but it's kind of like, that's what we should all be doing is just like reminding people of the consequences of these types of things.

• 2:07:23Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, like, I, I think a lot of people who've been raped when they're young, they're not a, they're not always pedophiles, they're rapists. You know what I mean? Like, that's a power thing. That's a, there's, there's a lot more to it.

• 2:07:44Dax Shepard?

  Victims would age up with them is what you're saying to some degree.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, well, I guess I just mean like, it doesn't mean just because somebody's had, yeah, just obviously, that's the whole point. But like, I think if a rape-

• 2:07:56Dax Shepard?

  Situational scares me more because you can't see it coming, I guess. You have no awareness that you're capable of that.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:03Dax Shepard?

  And that is like inherently less treatable or addressable.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  Well, sort of, because it's like, everyone's kind of capable of anything and you just like, learn to not do bad shit.

• 2:08:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm just saying, all, all those people that did that knew that that jail time could await them. Like, there's no one that's, like, he's talking, she's talking about the teachers that are in these situations. Like, no one's unaware of, A, the social stigmatism and the legal issue with it. And yet they do it. So I don't think deterrence-

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Well, but I think, I think they were arguing, that was the whole point, kind of, is like-

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  It's not like, yes, it's, they know, but it's remind, it's like, hey, this is about to happen to you if you go down this path. This is like intervention and things like that.

• 2:08:56Dax Shepard?

  Well, the kids, yeah, like the kids who's pre-funnel cortex, they need to understand like there's really bad outcomes for the victims that you probably wouldn't even have seen as a victim till we explain it to you that they're a victim and then they're gonna have the, then it's like, oh my god, it's that. I'm talking more the adults that are in these situations where it happens once or it happens and they don't repeat it. Um, sure, I guess the solution for that would be people in jobs that interact with youth need to have some classes that say, hey, this could happen or, you know, this has happened to many people who are not pedophiles.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 2:09:31Dax Shepard?

  So you need to have, you know.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  Like, everyone's kind of in danger of this, so watch out.

• 2:09:35Dax Shepard?

  That's what I'm saying. It's easier to address a tiny percentage of the population that is identified with the condition than it is like, every human being that deals with kids needs to be warned that other people weren't like that and did that is, feels more daunting. It took a long time for me to articulate that.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, yeah, I still, I still personally am more afraid of the, um, the like, condition, but, but I see what you mean. Okay, what are the chances of addiction if you've been sexually abused as a child? Uh, this is from PubMed, and so it's using, it's using some numbers that I don't really understand. It says, "In multivariable analysis for men, first occurrence of physical and sexual abuse as a child was significantly associated with more substance use consequences, adjusted mean increase in," and then this is what they're using, like some sort of system, "in DUC. Um, 2.5 for ages less than 13."

• 2:10:32Dax Shepard?

  2.5 times more likely?

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  That's what I'm not understa, that's what I don't know.

• 2:10:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, we don't know what the metric is.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  3.3 for ages 13 to 17.

• 2:10:41Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  Compared to those with no abuse. Oh. Point oh oh one with no abuse.

• 2:10:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, so.

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:51Dax Shepard?

  Many multiples.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  A lot more, a lot.

• 2:10:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can tell you that my mother, when she was in her CASA program.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:59Dax Shepard?

  She was getting, taking state sanctioned classes. They said you had an eighty percent chance of becoming an addict if you'd been sexually abused.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, horrible.

• 2:11:12Dax Shepard?

  And I went ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Dax Shepard?

  It is funny, we're, we're, of course, and understandably, we're so obsessed with finding out why things happen, right? We feel safer if we understand why things happen. It's just like we have this endless desire to point to causality of, say, addiction. It's like, in my case, is it that thing? Is it that I'm eighth generation through the haunchels, fucking full-blown addict? Is it some other bit of nurture? You know? And then, who cares? You know? For me, I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, I guess who cares?

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, no, the reason to care is, is not really once it's happened. It's like, oh, my God, like, if this happens to some, like, don't do this to people, basically.

• 2:12:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it points out the importance of preventing it.

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:12:09Dax Shepard?

  For sure. Uh, but just like when you, when you're already an addict and you start looking back on why you might be an addict.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:15Dax Shepard?

  To some degree, it's like, you'll never know the percentage. We won't, I won't know what part was nurture and what part was nature. And it doesn't really matter, I've been left this way and.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good to figure out what triggers the addiction.

• 2:12:29Dax Shepard?

  Surely.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  But, yeah, this other stuff.

• 2:12:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it doesn't matter.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  Okay, uh, Roy Moore is the politician in Alabama.

• 2:12:40Dax Shepard?

  There's so many offensive things about him. It's not just the repeated child.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Horrifying.

• 2:12:46Dax Shepard?

  It's, um, him also like trotting to town on a horse in a like howdy-doody costume. I mean, what a character.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  The horse's name was Sassy.

• 2:12:55Dax Shepard?

  Ugh, yeah, I bet he named his horse Sassy.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Oh, Garfield, the president, is from or born in Orange Township, now Moreland Hills, Ohio.

• 2:13:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:13:08Speaker 01

  Okay, she was from Mentor, Ohio.

• 2:13:10Dax Shepard?

  Mentor, yeah, that's where the museum is.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Hmm, are the Boy Scouts called Scouting America? Yes.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Um, Noah Hawley's mother came up. Louise Armstrong is her name.

• 2:13:21Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, she had a book in ninety seven, in seventy-nine called Kiss Daddy Goodnight.

• 2:13:26Dax Shepard?

  Shhh, rough title.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  Regarding child abuse.

• 2:13:30Dax Shepard?

  Oof.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Um, let me just make sure I got them all. That's it.

• 2:13:35Dax Shepard?

  That's it.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:37Dax Shepard?

  All right, love you.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  Love you.