Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Carter Sherman (on the sex recession) About this episode Carter Sherman (The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future) is an Emmy Award-nominated reporter covering reproductive health and justice. Carter joins the Armchair Expert to discuss being a nosy babysitter, writing an early piece on the sex lives of millennial girls, and covering reproductive health during the 2024 election. Carter and Dax talk about her explanation behind the trend of elective celibacy, how she was able to elicit honest feedback from young people about their sex lives, and the societal consequences of exclusively abstinence-only sex education. Carter explains why we need a study that tracks how political affiliation correlates to faked orgasms, that me too wasn’t likely the direct cause of the sex recession, and whether or not we should want younger generations to have more sex.
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Transcript 26,834 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Randall Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.
0:06 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:07 Dax Shepard? Hi. Really good. Today we have Carter Sherman. She is an award-winning and Emmy-nominated reporter. She has a book out now called The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future.
0:23 Speaker 01 This was fun.
0:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we keep hearing about this, quote, "sex recession" among Gen Z folks, and she has written an entire book about it, and it's fascinating.
0:31 Speaker 01 We get to learn.
0:32 Dax Shepard? Please enjoy Carter Sherman. We are supported by Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode. We could all use an escape these days, and the best way to do it, Audible. With over 1 million titles in their selection, there's more to imagine with Audible. We get support from Quince.
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2:39 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about how November is basically survival mode? Between the holidays, the travel, the hosting, the cooking, the everything. Sleep is the one thing keeping me from completely unraveling.
2:49 Dax Shepard? It really is the foundation. And I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.
3:00 Speaker 01 That was me before Helix. I took their sleep quiz, which is so fast. It took me like two minutes. And they matched me to a mattress that actually fits how I sleep. Not a guess, not a firm or soft coin flip. It's a real match. I have a midnight mattress and I really like it. I was noticing it because I actually had to sleep in one of my other beds.
3:18 Dax Shepard? Okay.
3:18 Speaker 01 Recently.
3:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
3:19 Speaker 01 That doesn't have a Helix mattress on it. And I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.
3:23 Dax Shepard? Temperature was all over the map.
3:24 Speaker 01 It was a mess.
3:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
3:25 Speaker 01 I need a new one.
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4:23 Speaker 02 We had a whole conversation.
4:25 Dax Shepard? Oh, on what topic?
4:26 Speaker 01 We had a whole interview about fashion.
4:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:29 Speaker 01 And it was really in-depth.
4:31 Speaker 02 I am an expert on fashion.
4:34 Dax Shepard? Okay, for how long?
4:36 Speaker 02 My entire life.
4:36 Speaker 01 Wow.
4:37 Speaker 02 Came out of the womb, very stylish.
4:40 Dax Shepard? Do you live in New York?
4:41 Speaker 02 I do live in New York.
4:41 Dax Shepard? And where are you from originally?
4:43 Speaker 02 Seattle.
4:43 Dax Shepard? What part of Seattle?
4:44 Speaker 02 Laurelhurst, 15 minutes north of Capitol Hill.
4:47 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay, great. I've been blackout drunk many times on Capitol Hill.
4:50 Speaker 02 Oh, my gosh, congratulations.
4:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I've gone to Gasworks Parks and drank 40s. I've gone to the Troll Bridge and drank 40s.
4:58 Speaker 02 I have also done those things.
4:59 Speaker 01 I was gonna ask, yeah, have you been drunk a lot there?
5:02 Dax Shepard? I think it's standard biz up there.
5:04 Speaker 02 Well, when you're 16 and you're living in Seattle, the only places to get drunk are generally outdoors at parks.
5:10 Speaker 01 Even with all the rain?
5:11 Speaker 02 I think the rain is something we made up to keep people out of Seattle.
5:14 Speaker 01 Wow.
5:15 Speaker 02 Because it rains maybe every day, but not all day.
5:17 Dax Shepard? The misleading thing is, yeah, it rains often, but for a very short amount of time, and it's not like a heavy downpour. Like, when it rains in Michigan, it's a flood, you know, it's fucking cats and dogs.
5:27 Speaker 02 We love a drizzle.
5:29 Speaker 01 Okay, it's kind of Hawaii, then. Hawaii has that.
5:32 Dax Shepard? Without the warm.
5:33 Speaker 01 Like, rain kind of every day, but quick.
5:35 Speaker 02 I don't want to claim that we're as great as Hawaii.
5:37 Speaker 01 Okay.
5:38 Dax Shepard? You're not there yet.
5:39 Speaker 01 You're very humble.
5:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't want to oversell the tourism attraction here.
5:41 Dax Shepard? Well, that is one upside of global warming, is that potentially it will be. They tell me that LA is gonna get tropical.
5:47 Speaker 01 Do you know it hailed the other day while we were recording?
5:50 Dax Shepard? Oh, when we had that downpour?
5:52 Speaker 01 Yes, it apparently was hailing. That doesn't happen here.
5:56 Dax Shepard? What did Mom and Dad do in Seattle?
5:57 Speaker 02 My mom worked in and around healthcare, not providing it, but insurance.
6:02 Dax Shepard? Administrative stuff.
6:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, pharmaceuticals. My dad did... What I think at the time would have been called e-commerce, but is now just commerce. Basically, early on, the trend of helping companies sell things online. So basically, office jobs for both of these people.
6:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, okay. And what drew you to journalism? First of all, how do we get Carter? As someone who named a girl Lincoln, I feel like I can relate to your parents.
6:23 Speaker 02 I appreciate the presidential connection. Thank you for that. Was it after the president?
6:27 Dax Shepard? No, it was after my 1967 Lincoln Continental. Which ironically Kennedy was killed in, so you could make another presidential connection.
6:35 Speaker 02 Oh, my gosh, yes. All flattering connections here.
6:37 Speaker 01 I thought you were asking, was it after his death? And that was like, quite some time.
6:43 Dax Shepard? No, she was born in 1883.
6:46 Speaker 01 Was it pre or post the president?
6:48 Speaker 02 It was so recently after the murder that you really just had to honor the great man's works.
6:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
6:53 Speaker 02 Carter, honestly, it was after a woman my parents knew. I've been told that Carter is actually a common name for women in the South.
6:59 Dax Shepard? Well, you got June Carter famously.
7:02 Speaker 02 Yes, well, I have to spend a lot of time telling people it's Carter Sherman. Sherman is the last name. I'll pick up the phone or call somebody, and then they'll answer and I'll start speaking. And there's always like a breath where I can tell that they're recalibrating that I'm a woman.
7:15 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
7:16 Dax Shepard? Well, that happened to Monica.
7:17 Speaker 01 Yes, I walked in and I was like, oh, there's a nice woman here. I like that. I'm happy about that.
7:22 Dax Shepard? Monica said, you know, our guest is a woman. I said, yeah, because I researched her. But yes, obviously, when I saw on the schedule Carter, I thought we were talking to Jimmy Carter.
7:30 Speaker 02 It truly happens at least twice a week, I would say. I think it's kind of helpful sometimes because sometimes I'm like, I wonder if people get back to me because they think I'm a man.
7:39 Speaker 01 Oh, that's interesting.
7:40 Speaker 02 Or like if I got further along in job application processes.
7:43 Dax Shepard? And this would be other men?
7:45 Speaker 02 Who knows? Women can be sexist.
7:47 Dax Shepard? I'd way rather call a woman back than a man. I think most people probably would prefer to call a woman back than a man.
7:52 Speaker 01 Well, it depends on what you're calling them for. I mean, for jobs.
7:56 Dax Shepard? Oil change, you probably.
7:58 Speaker 01 I don't know. Maybe Carter is great at oil change.
8:01 Speaker 02 In addition to being a fashion expert, I am a mechanic in my spare time.
8:04 Dax Shepard? My God, you're a polymath.
8:06 Speaker 02 That's what I've always said.
8:07 Dax Shepard? So how did you find your way to journalism?
8:10 Speaker 02 Well, I loved reading and writing. Mostly because I couldn't do it until I was kind of old. I couldn't read and write till I was in second grade. They put me in a bunch of remedial reading classes.
8:19 Speaker 01 Stacks as well.
8:20 Dax Shepard? I didn't learn to read till fifth grade.
8:21 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. Well, now I feel terrible.
8:23 Dax Shepard? And you were a genius compared to my reading.
8:26 Speaker 01 You came up at a time they probably knew about learning disabilities.
8:29 Speaker 02 Yes.
8:30 Speaker 01 Whereas you, they did not.
8:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what was your learning disability experience?
8:34 Speaker 02 I didn't really have one. I think I was just unmotivated. I also had a speech impediment for a long time. So I couldn't say my Rs, which is great for the name Carter.
8:42 Dax Shepard? How would you pronounce Carter?
8:43 Speaker 02 Carter.
8:44 Speaker 01 Oh, how cute.
8:45 Dax Shepard? So you sound like you're from Boston.
8:46 Speaker 02 Yes, I also got that all the time.
8:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
8:48 Speaker 02 And so I think that also contributed. My parents have been like, we were a little worried that you were stupid.
8:53 Speaker 01 Sure, you got to wonder.
8:55 Speaker 02 So then I started being able to read, and I really liked reading. And when I was in sixth grade, we went to Bend, Oregon on vacation.
9:02 Dax Shepard? Sure.
9:02 Speaker 02 And I ran out of books because I read too many things. And my parents had a copy of the Saturday edition of the New York Times. So it was the only thing I could read for like a week. And I loved it. I still remember the stories.
9:14 Dax Shepard? Because you like the economy of information?
9:16 Speaker 02 And also just you get this window into other people's lives. Otherwise, these people are not going to be welcoming strangers into their homes and explaining very intimate details about how they came to be who they are. And so I really love this idea that you could go out and talk to all kinds of strangers and then go home and write about it. And yes, very economic language that hopefully people would consume and be broadened by.
9:37 Dax Shepard? That's a great point to hone in on, which is you must have had your own desire to have access to talk to people about things that normally you wouldn't get to talk to them about. That must have been an appealing part of it.
9:49 Speaker 02 I think so.
9:50 Dax Shepard? Like, I'll have an excuse to enter any conversation on a topic I want because that's the job.
9:54 Speaker 02 Exactly. And you guys are probably also nosy.
9:56 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
9:58 Dax Shepard? Extremely nosy. When I babysat, I went through people's stuff.
10:01 Speaker 01 We choose the word curious.
10:03 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm so sorry.
10:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, please take that back.
10:06 Speaker 02 Two sides of this coin.
10:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, in fact, when we've had babysitters, I can only extend them as much character.
10:12 Speaker 01 Leeway.
10:13 Dax Shepard? As I would give myself. So when we've had babysitters, I'm like, well, they're definitely going through everything I have.
10:17 Speaker 01 What? You think? What if they're reading your journals?
10:20 Dax Shepard? Then they're reading the journals. I still need a babysitter.
10:23 Speaker 02 Would you put out bait to test if they're going through things?
10:26 Dax Shepard? I'm someone who's at great peace with the things that are unavoidable that happen. I was nosey. I can only assume this person's so much better than me. And you were nosey and you have a lot of integrity. You just said you went through people's shit too.
10:37 Speaker 01 No, no, I didn't.
10:38 Dax Shepard? Oh, I thought you said you did.
10:39 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no, no, I didn't.
10:41 Dax Shepard? Carter did.
10:42 Speaker 02 I did, yeah.
10:43 Speaker 01 You did when you babysat?
10:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
10:45 Speaker 01 You're kind.
10:46 Dax Shepard? You gotta see what's going on.
10:48 Speaker 01 I was a very trusted babysitter.
10:50 Dax Shepard? She actually can't admit to it because she babysat for us for a while.
10:53 Speaker 01 That's how it starts.
10:54 Dax Shepard? And she knows that we'll reverse engineer her guilt.
10:57 Speaker 02 I appreciate your ability to keep yourself a locked vault here when you do.
11:00 Dax Shepard? She's completely full of shit. She went through everyone's stuff.
11:03 Speaker 01 And I read all the journals. No, I did not.
11:06 Dax Shepard? She knows the journals, front word and backward. Okay, so what school did you end up in? You ended up in a sorority at a school.
11:09 Speaker 02 I did end up in a sorority. I went to Northwestern.
11:12 Speaker 01 When did you graduate?
11:13 Speaker 02 2016.
11:14 Speaker 01 You're much younger than me. Okay.
11:15 Dax Shepard? She's five years younger than you.
11:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have a lot of Northwesterner friends, but they're all my age.
11:20 Speaker 02 Well, it's also if you just have that four-year gap, then there's no overlap. Yeah.
11:24 Speaker 01 I heard it's just the best school ever.
11:26 Speaker 02 I really liked it. I think it's a very pre-professional school. They're very much not like, oh, learn and grow and find out who you are. They're very much learn a trade and go into it.
11:35 Dax Shepard? That's pretty sage advice.
11:36 Speaker 02 It's not bad, as it turns out. It worked out for me. At Northwestern, it's usually become a journalist or become a consultant.
11:42 Dax Shepard? Ah, okay. Or an actor.
11:44 Speaker 02 Fair number of actors, that's true.
11:45 Dax Shepard? So weirdly, in 2013, you're there and you're in a sorority and a writer for the New York Times is doing a piece on the sex lives of millennials.
11:55 Speaker 02 Millennial girls.
11:56 Dax Shepard? Which, at that time, of course, I remember this moral panic, but I wouldn't have remembered the exact dates. But this is at kind of the height of the moral panic, that millennials are engaged in hookup culture.
12:07 Speaker 02 Right.
12:07 Dax Shepard? Do you remember that prevailing fear?
12:09 Speaker 01 Not really.
12:10 Dax Shepard? I remember when I was here and I was like, this is horseshit. People have been fucking as much as they can. They couldn't have upped it.
12:15 Speaker 01 They were scared that instead of being in a relationship... Relationship that everyone was just hooking up.
12:20 Dax Shepard? I think even deeper indifference was their fear. That people would be having sex with indifference.
12:25 Speaker 01 Oh, got it.
12:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, that there was no personal connection going on, no interest in personal connection. And also, there was a lot of fear that the sex itself was bad, that people were not having orgasms. Because evidently, there was an assumption that you have to have a personal connection to have an orgasm.
12:38 Speaker 01 Oh, I see.
12:39 Dax Shepard? Right, right, right, right.
12:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
12:41 Dax Shepard? Of course, you don't need a personal connection for orgasm. Also, if you're in a relationship where communication has been established, your odds go up. I think both things are true. Yeah, when you meet a fucking dumb dumb at a bar and you're getting plowed. I don't know if we're getting to all the stages of what your favorite warm up is.
12:55 Speaker 02 You haven't presented the proper diagrams.
12:57 Dax Shepard? You're just hoping you get lucky.
12:58 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:59 Dax Shepard? Like, I hope this dude does it the way I like to do it.
13:01 Speaker 02 And usually, the dude gets lucky and the woman does not.
13:04 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes, conventionally.
13:05 Speaker 01 We just had an episode come out today about sex. We had a sex educator on, Shan.
13:11 Dax Shepard? Sexologist.
13:12 Speaker 01 On Google, it says educator.
13:14 Dax Shepard? Okay. I just like the term sexologist, certified sexologist. It sounds like a mixologist.
13:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, but anyway, she was teaching us about orgasms and how to increase your odds, basically.
13:24 Speaker 02 What did she say?
13:25 Speaker 01 Oh, so many things. She taught us how to squirt.
13:28 Speaker 02 Okay.
13:29 Dax Shepard? If that's something you're.
13:30 Speaker 01 If that's something anyone's intrigued by.
13:32 Speaker 02 I'm intrigued.
13:33 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. Positions, a lot about foreplay and how people obviously are very different and what they need and seek out and creating those environments.
13:42 Dax Shepard? You want to hear the worst news? Women like chore play. When their male partner does chores, their horniness goes up dramatically. And it's like, when you're a dude, you're like, that's the least. I'll rub your legs, I'll give you a massage, I'll kiss your neck.
13:55 Speaker 01 They want you to make the kids lunch.
13:57 Dax Shepard? Fucking sweep the floor? That's what we gotta do.
14:01 Speaker 02 In like a maid's outfit?
14:03 Dax Shepard? No, it's not a role play thing. It is an act of service. And that endears women to their partners.
14:10 Speaker 02 Okay, I get that. I also think that maybe speaks to how low the bar is as far as men doing chores. I will say that I do not get turned on by chore play because my husband does a bunch of the chores normally.
14:22 Speaker 01 Right, it's not extra.
14:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, he actually probably does most of the chores. So maybe I should do chore play for him.
14:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, oh, he might like that.
14:29 Dax Shepard? If you've noticed, he's not so horny for you. Why don't you try a little tour?
14:32 Speaker 01 Do a little dishes.
14:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
14:34 Dax Shepard? I got a little distracted, actually, by this story. The fact that you are an aspiring journalist being interviewed by a journalist for something. I went into like my anthropological background, which is you have such an impact on the people you're studying. The notion you're even getting anything out of it, other than the person has assessed they want to make you happy. So much of the social sciences is that.
14:56 Speaker 01 It's hard to get objective.
14:57 Speaker 02 You're changing the environment by being in it?
14:59 Dax Shepard? Dramatically. And you think you're observing something, but you're really observing a performance of the thing and they're incentivized one way or another to present. This is very interesting.
15:09 Speaker 02 I remember feeling that way because the way that she did the interview was not just we were sitting down and we were talking, is that she came to the sorority house while some of us were getting ready to go out to a party at a frat house. Because she wanted to observe us getting ready and see how we dressed and what we thought about. Not in a creepy way, but she wanted to know why we wore what we wore.
15:28 Dax Shepard? You had a theory to announce to her, which is you can either go boobs out or legs out. You want to be available, but not a sure thing.
15:35 Speaker 02 There was a strategy. She wasn't wrong to ask.
15:38 Dax Shepard? Yes, but even in that, you just think, did you really have a strategy? Or you felt comfortable this way? And then when asked, you're kind of now forced to have an overarching theory on why you do what you do, which people just generally don't. So you kind of make one up on the spot.
15:52 Speaker 02 I definitely had a strategy.
15:54 Dax Shepard? You did?
15:54 Speaker 02 I did. Because this was also probably the era of people dressing like they were going to go business casual to the club. Do you remember that? Like the big chunky necklaces and like the peplum skirts.
16:05 Speaker 01 That was not happening at my college.
16:07 Speaker 02 Really?
16:08 Dax Shepard? Would that be normcore? Am I picturing the right thing?
16:11 Speaker 01 That's more Seinfeld outfits.
16:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's actually cool. This was not cool. This was just a very random aberration for a few years there.
16:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:20 Speaker 02 Gen Z makes fun of millennials a lot for this, and they're right to do so.
16:23 Dax Shepard? So you got suspicious during it, no?
16:26 Speaker 02 I did.
16:27 Dax Shepard? Tell me about that.
16:28 Speaker 02 I felt like she was trying to get us to talk about being victims of hookup culture.
16:34 Speaker 01 Oh.
16:34 Speaker 02 Or to talk about how we felt used by... These men in fraternities. Because I think she came with the assumption that we were being used by them. Which I don't think is totally off base. It's just if you're trying to talk to people about the landscape of their sexual lives, coming in with a very narrow agenda is not actually very helpful.
16:54 Dax Shepard? Well, almost a binary proposition. Either you guys are getting victimized or not. As if it's not traveling in both directions and radically different outcomes.
17:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't think she thought it was bad that we were having sex.
17:06 Dax Shepard? Right, well, she wrote for the New York Times.
17:07 Speaker 02 Yes, and she, I think, identifies as a feminist and was very pro us having that kind of autonomy. She was worried that we were being taken advantage of, that our willingness to have sex was being weaponized against us. And I don't think she was totally off base on that. It just felt kind of icky for her to come in there and to feel like she really wanted us to say specific things. And when we were saying, you know, we're not necessarily having that much sex. I had a boyfriend at the time, and so I wasn't sleeping with any of these guys and frats. She sort of deflated. She just wasn't that interested in hearing the narrative.
17:39 Dax Shepard? It's really interesting how different roads can all end up leading to. Yeah, so that wasn't her goal, and she thought you should be empowered. But the subtext is, no, it's still very dismissive, and you guys are the weaker, vulnerable group that's getting preyed on by men. And then, so the natural outcome is like, you shouldn't be giving them. Like, you can have an expressed moral, and then it can somehow still lead to the exact same point the other side is trying to make.
18:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's the irony there. It did not feel empowering in the moment to be in that room. And I feel very knives out for this woman. I'm so sorry, Peggy.
18:16 Dax Shepard? Oh, no, no, you do a good job in your book of saying, "It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was gonna be when I read it." It definitely is a product of its time and context, which is, this is the big fear. Hookup culture is ruining young girls and presumably boys.
18:29 Speaker 02 There was another book about boys.
18:31 Speaker 01 Who is it?
18:31 Speaker 02 Peggy Orenstein.
18:32 Speaker 01 We've had her on.
18:33 Dax Shepard? We have?
18:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, many, many, many years ago, but we have indeed had Peggy.
18:37 Dax Shepard? Wow, do you remember what?
18:38 Speaker 01 I think it was about boys and sex, actually.
18:41 Speaker 02 It came out after me, too, which was what, 2017?
18:45 Dax Shepard? February 2020, she came on. The COVID years are blurry. We're doing them all over Zoom. She was in person.
18:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:52 Dax Shepard? Rob? Sorry, sorry, sorry.
18:54 Speaker 01 We're cutting that, Rob.
18:55 Dax Shepard? Thanks for helping, Rob.
18:56 Speaker 01 Anyway, when you said Peggy, I was like, hmm.
18:58 Speaker 02 She's entitled to her opinion.
19:00 Speaker 01 Of course.
19:00 Speaker 02 Generally a good journalist. It is interesting, as a journalist now, writing this book, because I was trying to be very cognizant of not making people feel like I was taking what they were saying and twisting it to fit my narrative.
19:10 Dax Shepard? Right, okay, so let's just go through your bona fides, because you write for Guardian?
19:15 Speaker 02 I write for The Guardian.
19:15 Dax Shepard? What is your domain?
19:17 Speaker 02 I cover reproductive health and justice. So I got hired end of 2023, and at that time, as you might remember, we were speeding towards an election that had quite a bit to do with abortion rights. So that was what I was spending a lot of my time doing.
19:30 Dax Shepard? So you write on reproductive issues. Now, what led you specifically to this topic? Why were you drawn to this book? Sex and Gen Z.
19:38 Speaker 02 I've been covering sex and gender for a long time, before getting hired at The Guardian. I worked at Vice News for about six and a half years. And there, my work was, generally speaking, gender and sexuality. I got very much in the habit of whenever there would be some kind of news event that would go on in relationship to sex and reproduction and gender, I would call people up and ask them how that impacted their sex life. If there's a restriction on abortion, if there's a restriction on birth control, if there's some new study on porn, I would speak predominantly to young people about their thoughts of this topic. And so, over the course of doing all of those stories, I started to be thinking quite a bit about all of the really generational changes that have gone on within Gen Z's lives. Because they had Roe v. Wade being overturned, they had Me Too,
20:23 Speaker 02 they had the pandemic, they've had the rise of the internet and social media and smartphones, dating apps. And those are all things that you would expect to happen maybe once in a lifetime. But they're getting them back to back to back.
20:35 Dax Shepard? Oh, no, each individual generation is experiencing the amount of change that probably seven generations in the 1800s, 1900s experienced.
20:43 Speaker 02 Right. I grew up as mainstream social media was emerging. And I can tell that it has warped me. And I had some time where Facebook didn't exist, but these kids grew up on Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok. I really wanted to understand what that meant for them and what specifically they thought about it, because I think there's so much moralizing that goes on and so much hand wringing and panicking.
21:05 Dax Shepard? We'd have to just acknowledge that there's a pretty uninterrupted pattern of older generations fearing the changes in the younger generations. That's just a consistent thing that happens. We're certainly doing that nonstop. Well, I'm Gen X, so we were doing it to millennials and now we're doing it to Gen Z. But what got really headlinie was, I think the first one I know about is 2019. There was a California study. We went from 22% of people 18 to 29 hadn't had sex in a year in 2013, and by 2019 it's at 38%. So it's like a very dramatic shift. And there's a University of Chicago study, it's even more dramatic. It goes from 7 to 8% who have no sex to 19 and 20.
21:46 Dax Shepard? So it's like two and a half times more sexual dormancy in a decade. So we all are kind of aware of this, right? That Gen Z is having less sex. What are the common, at the grocery store, explanations? What do you think most people attribute that to?
22:03 Speaker 02 I think a lot of people attribute it to smartphones, which makes sense. We see a lot of changes and trends around 2010, which is when people start getting smartphones and social media at the same time. We see mental health plummeting around that time among young people. So mental health is also a big one that people attribute it to. Right now, there's a lot of chatter around deliberate celibacy and people just opting out of having sex, being quote unquote, "boy sober." So that's for women? That's for women. And then there's also... Incel. Yeah, exactly.
22:33 Dax Shepard? Again, that sounds pseudo-feminist. I think that's pseudo...
22:36 Speaker 02 Incel?
22:37 Dax Shepard? No, no boy.
22:38 Speaker 02 The boy sober thing or celibacy? What I found is that, generally speaking, this is not a thing that is happening among young people. There are some young people who are pursuing celibacy, but... A lot of the women who are opting out of sex are actually in their 50s and 60s.
22:51 Speaker 01 Makes some sense.
22:52 Speaker 02 Which makes some sense.
22:53 Speaker 01 There's like some menopause stuff, probably.
22:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, and you know, it seems like they've probably dated men and made some decisions like, "Not for me," and that's fine.
23:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:01 Speaker 02 So I think those are some of the big explanations that people tend to come up with. Porn often gets cited as a big explanation. Are people replacing in-person sex with pornography?
23:12 Dax Shepard? I've come up with my own theory just watching, and one is they appear to be less engaged digitally and not actually in person. Far more friendships are maintained and friendships are made on the internet. It's not face-to-face, so there's a proximity issue that has to be relevant in it. And then I was even thinking about the ways you can satiate yourself now that didn't exist. You could talk on the phone and have phone sex. This was when I was growing up, and you would do that a few times, and then you're bored of that. But the notion that you can exchange pictures and you can get on FaceTime and you can masturbate together, like, there's a lot of ways to satiate yourself that didn't exist. I think those are the things I was thinking were driving it.
23:52 Speaker 02 The other thing that people brought up to me a lot or worry about a lot is because you have the internet as this mediating force, which is asynchronous, right? During phone sex, you're talking to someone and you have to be responding kind of quickly to keep the mood going, but with the internet, you can be talking across great distances over a long period of time, and you don't necessarily have to be engaging in the same way. What people are worried about is that young people have developed a fear of vulnerability and that they are not willing to put themselves out there in such a way that they could be hurt because they've used the internet as a kind of shield for their entire lives. And then COVID made it worse because then you're trapped inside and you're not able to go through the sort of usual rites of passage that young people go through where
24:33 Speaker 02 they learn how to be hurt and embarrassed and bounce back and develop resilience.
24:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
24:38 Speaker 02 And pursuing sex is hard. You have to open yourself up and be vulnerable.
24:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think it's apex vulnerability. Reject me or accept me. It's that literal.
24:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
24:49 Speaker 02 And so you can see why people go without sex or delay even having sex in the first place.
24:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, how valid do you think that explanation is?
24:57 Speaker 02 I think it is fairly valid, not because young people were saying this to me, but when we talked about the things that they were worried about, it was oftentimes one of the ability. And the longer that they went without sex, I think oftentimes these young people became more worried about bringing that up to a potential partner.
25:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So I had this really illuminating, very anecdotal experience. Monica and I were in New York. We were doing press last year and we both had a makeup artist and she was incredibly attractive woman from Dayton, Ohio. And she'd moved to Brooklyn and I'm like, how is it? Are you having fun? She's like, well, I love Brooklyn, but she's like beating around the bush. And I'm like, the dating? And she's like, yeah, cannot get a date in Brooklyn. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Are you going out to bars? She goes, yeah, I go to bars. And I go, and guys aren't coming up and talking to you or buying you a drink? And she's like, no, zero. And she was beautiful and a career woman, had all the attributes. And I love that going like, that's nuts.
25:53 Speaker 01 She wanted a partner and a date and she was like, it just isn't happening.
25:58 Speaker 02 Well, I think people are much more used to hitting on one another through dating apps now. And so doing it IRL feels foreign in a kind of way. And I don't think anything is wrong with dating apps. A lot of the young people I talked to did not like dating apps, but dating itself can be really torturous regardless of how you do it. The concern is have dating apps replaced people's ability to find one another in person and connect with one another in person.
26:21 Dax Shepard? I'll be very provocative. I worried that this is part of Me Too backlash, that you have guys that are now afraid to approach any woman because any unwanted attention is no good. Everything they've been reading about for the last five years has made them think, no, I don't wanna. Just a fear of approaching women now.
26:41 Speaker 02 I only had one young man bring this up to me where he said, I do worry about catching a case. That's how we put it. A lot of these young men though, think that they are not the type to ever do that. And so because of that, they're like, well, I'm not worried about it because I wouldn't even find myself in a situation where someone would accuse me of that. What I found is that honestly, and I write about this in the book, Me Too didn't really make as much of a difference as people might think that it did. The major thing it did, when I talked to young women, is that they grasped. Much earlier on in their lives that they might have faced some kind of violation. I was actually assaulted in college and it took me kind of a long time to understand that it was like, this was not a bad date. This was someone not listening to me saying no.
27:23 Speaker 02 But these young women knew, they were like, I know I was raped. I know that this happened to me. And the problem with me too, is that what it did is it raised awareness of sexual violence and sexual harassment. But it didn't actually result in institutional change to give young people the tools to seek accountability for that, or even seek help for that. And so you've created a scenario where people are walking around much more aware of their vulnerability, but also much more aware that there's nothing they can do. And that can make your mental health much worse and actually be dangerous for people. Because it is terrible to walk around thinking that the world is a dangerous place, even when it is.
27:59 Dax Shepard? So you talked to more than 100 people. How did you source these people and how do you approach these people?
28:04 Speaker 02 Basically, if I met you and you were under 25, I was probably going to approach you with a microphone. And be like, hey, do you want to talk about sex? I found them four ways. One of them was I reached out to a lot of college anti-sexual assault groups, sex ed groups, LGBTQ plus rights groups. Another way was I was like trall Reddit and TikTok and Twitter, now X. And if people were posting things about sex, I would just reach out and be like, hey, do you want to talk about this?
28:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because all those other sources you just named are very left leaning.
28:35 Speaker 02 Yes.
28:35 Dax Shepard? So how are you going to get the voice of the young conservative woman?
28:39 Speaker 02 The other ways that I would do this is be like, do you have friends? Who will talk to me? You end up going down and down the line. And once you get further enough away, you do get these much more politically mixed groups of people. And I always asked people in interviews, how would they define their political orientation? And so I was really trying very hard to get people who were not just going to be on the left. I did reach out to anti-abortion groups, for example. And I reached out to groups that are pursuing more conservative viewpoints.
29:05 Dax Shepard? And were they as willing to talk to you?
29:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was surprised by that. In part because they feel like they're not being heard in media outlets. And they wanted to say, we exist and we're here and this is what we think about this.
29:15 Speaker 01 We have opinions too.
29:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. What I found among young people who are conservative is that they are very much fueled by this belief that they are countercultural. And there's sort of a bunker mentality that happens that makes them very much want to speak out. Frankly, they're oftentimes even more engaged in activism than people who are on the left in a lot of ways.
29:35 Speaker 01 There is a whole thing happening on Instagram, a burgeoning group that's Pretty far-right women speaking out. I think it's happened post-Trump. They were like, kind of hiding in plain sight. And now they're like, actually, I am conservative. And here are my beliefs. And I feel like that's been a whole thing that's erupted in the past year or so.
29:55 Speaker 02 Well, also, young men, I think, are becoming much more overt. And this was another way I found people. Because I've been doing this for so long, I reached back out to young people who I'd interviewed in the past on both sides of the aisle to be like, would you talk to me again? And usually, they would.
30:08 Dax Shepard? And how do you start that conversation?
30:10 Speaker 02 In the interview?
30:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
30:12 Speaker 02 Well, I would go through all of the biographical details, which I think sort of eased people in. I would ask them about how they would describe their socioeconomic class and how they would describe their racial or ethnic background. And then I would ask them about their experiences with sex ed. Because I found that it was much easier to start talking about their schooling and their opinion of the instruction they received on sex, as opposed to going straight into their sex lives. And then it was sort of a matter from there of figuring out where their boundaries are and how to ask the questions to actually elicit truthful answers or deep answers. And the thing is, a lot of young people had never been asked these questions, and they really wanted to talk about it.
30:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's what friendships are for. You're like, oh, this is this topic that's not allowed to be spoken about in my house, and now I have free reign.
30:55 Speaker 02 But a lot of men had never spoken to their friends about this stuff.
30:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the pressures on a man are, you're supposed to be incredible at this immediately, with zero experience, and then you've got to act to your friends like you're a pro.
31:06 Speaker 02 Right. The women, oftentimes, they like came to the conversation with things to say.
31:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:11 Speaker 02 And the young men, it took longer for them to talk openly about their views or to even articulate their views to themselves. And these were long conversations. At minimum, they were 90 minutes.
31:21 Dax Shepard? What would you say the different fear levels are? Was it universal, like, the young women are afraid of sex and the young men are afraid? Like, I know the young men are terrified they're going to come too fast, they're not going to be good, their dick's not going to be big enough, they won't get hard, they won't stay hard, all this fear wrapped around their performance.
31:37 Speaker 02 Yes.
31:37 Dax Shepard? And I wonder if women are carrying that same or a different flavor of fear around it.
31:43 Speaker 02 I think women were afraid of being inexperienced, particularly if they were inexperienced. This goes back to the vulnerability thing, where they never wanted to confess if they had not had what they felt to be enough sex.
31:53 Dax Shepard? Yes.
31:54 Speaker 02 Which can put you in an awkward position where it's like, if you haven't had sex at all, and you're going to have sex with somebody... Speaking of someone who didn't tell someone when I was losing my virginity, you probably do want to tell them.
32:05 Dax Shepard? We got to
32:05 Speaker 01 I had this experience. I was old, really, really old. No, I was older when I had sex for the first time. That was part of the reason why it took a while because I was like, now it's getting big and it's hanging over me.
32:19 Dax Shepard? My peer group's done it a bunch.
32:21 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
32:22 Speaker 02 I'm starting to feel weirder and weirder about myself.
32:24 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. And what's wrong with me? And also then this is going to require like a huge conversation. And then I did have to have the conversation minutes before. I like waited until clothes are basically off. Yeah, tour play is over. I was like, so I do have to tell you something. And it's horrible that anxiety hanging over. So I get being like, I'm just going to keep kind of pushing this off.
32:46 Speaker 02 Did they take it well?
32:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, they did. There was a very, very nice person. Thank God. I could easily see them being like, oh, God, I didn't really want to be in this position. And I get it.
32:58 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible. With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day.
33:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, and with over a million audiobooks, Audible Originals and more, it's basically impossible to run out of things to listen to. Plus, there's just something about audio storytelling that hits a little different.
33:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it really does, especially Audible Originals that feature performances from celebrities and top voices. It's like watching a movie in your head. Uh, one on my list is Treasure Island.
33:37 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
33:38 Dax Shepard? Uh, which is an Audible original drama. It's A Timeless Tale of Pirates, Lost Treasure, Maps and Mutiny. What more could you need?
33:45 Speaker 01 That sounds really fun. I'm more of a psychological thriller girl.
33:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're dark.
33:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm, I'm dark and I'm broody. And I've been hearing all about the author, Freedom McFadden. And I love that I can listen to her audiobooks on the Audible app when I'm commuting, taking my wogs, as you know, or just like doing laundry and chores.
34:04 Dax Shepard? Well, with Audible, you can find the genres you love and discover new ones. There's more to imagine when you listen. And to make it even better, Audible has a special offer for Armcharries. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.com/dax. That's audible.com/dax.
34:24 Dax Shepard? We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.
34:38 Speaker 01 I love matching pajamas. I'm literally going to be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season. Because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate, be cozy.
34:59 Dax Shepard? It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone, too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.
35:09 Speaker 01 I have a bunch of different pajama sets. One of my favorite is the organic cotton sleep long sleeve set.
35:15 Dax Shepard? Okay, tell me more.
35:17 Speaker 01 It is so comfortable, very chic, too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multipurpose this and look super cute.
35:28 Dax Shepard? Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.
35:38 Speaker 01 All the nostalgia, none of the discomfort. Shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select Armchair Expert in the dropdown menu that follows. If you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.
35:57 Dax Shepard? We get support from our sponsor, Lily. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Gleepran. Foundo is a once-daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.
36:23 Speaker 03 Foundo should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundo is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundo if you're allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had majorary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills, and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundo with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once daily Foundo is available by prescription only in 0.8 milligram, 2.5 milligram, 5.5 milligram,
37:08 Speaker 03 9 milligram, 14.5 milligram, and 17.2 milligram tablets. Learn more at foundo.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.
37:20 Dax 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?
38:02 Speaker 01 They never are.
38:03 Dax 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?
38:25 Speaker 01 Which is a fair question.
38:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts, and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.
38:52 Speaker 01 Sleep mode is genius.
38:54 Dax 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.
39:09 Speaker 01 I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.
39:13 Dax Shepard? Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.
39:27 Speaker 02 I was pathologically obsessed with the fact that I was a virgin.
39:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:31 Speaker 02 I felt so bad about it. And I was older than the average, because the average person in the United States loses their virginity at 17. But I was 19. Truly, this crippled my last few years of high school.
39:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
39:41 Speaker 02 Because I was just constantly researching, like, how do I have sex?
39:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
39:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
39:45 Speaker 01 It becomes such a big driver of thought, that you're kind of keeping this secret.
39:50 Speaker 02 I legitimately kept it a secret. I did not tell the person that I had sex with for the first time. And I never did.
39:56 Speaker 01 Do you think he knew?
39:57 Dax Shepard? Let's give him a shout out.
39:59 Speaker 01 Come on out.
40:02 Speaker 02 You brought him. No, I never told him. So if he listens to this podcast.
40:06 Dax Shepard? Can I ask what's going on mentally for you guys? Because again, from our side of the street, it's like, well, y'all can have sex anytime you want, because we're all dying for it, and we're happy to do it.
40:18 Speaker 01 But I couldn't.
40:19 Dax Shepard? What was the narrative when you were believing that that wasn't an option for you, or that it was going to be really hard? Do you remember?
40:27 Speaker 02 I mean, I think in retrospect, I probably could have lost it sooner, had sex with the first time. And I should say, virginity is a construct. I could have had sex for the first time sooner. But I felt so vulnerable about it, that I was really trying to minimize any other kind of vulnerability that would be happening in this scenario.
40:42 Dax Shepard? Yes.
40:42 Speaker 02 So I was like, I'm not gonna sleep with someone who I don't know at all. I'm not gonna sleep with someone who I know a lot, because they're my friend.
40:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:51 Speaker 02 You know, and I was like boxing myself in.
40:53 Dax Shepard? Narrowing your options with every criteria.
40:56 Speaker 02 Yes. There were definitely, looking back, boys at my high school who would have been like, sure. But then we would have had to speak about it. And I couldn't even bring myself to that point.
41:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:06 Dax Shepard? Do you think, because I don't feel like you did, but I know a lot of that historically is this insane pressure we put on daughters, which is, you better be in love, he better love you. Good luck. How someone knows this.
41:20 Speaker 02 In high school.
41:20 Dax Shepard? Loves them in high school. It's gotta be special. It's gotta be perfect.
41:24 Speaker 02 Candles ideally.
41:26 Dax Shepard? Yes.
41:26 Speaker 02 Roses petals.
41:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, music. The boy, you're like, don't get anyone pregnant. You don't give a fuck how the experience is for him. You don't care if they like him back or anything. And so the weight that was put on girl's shoulders, I could imagine being part of the, it's gotta be this, this and this and that. And I just don't think guys are generally doing that.
41:46 Speaker 02 That's very true. I think we have, you brought this up earlier, this idea that men, boys are going to be immediately very good at sex, that they should be really good at obtaining sex all the time.
41:55 Dax Shepard? Yes.
41:56 Speaker 02 And that if they're not obtaining sex, then maybe they should lie about it or shame one another. I, in the book, talk about, there is a sociologist I spoke to who studies virgin shaming, which happens among men who mock one another for having not had sex. And that also feels like shit.
42:11 Speaker 01 And it's a threat to your masculinity. To your identity.
42:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, my status shot up immediately.
42:17 Speaker 02 And did you take out skywriting to let them all know?
42:20 Dax Shepard? I didn't, but uh.
42:21 Speaker 01 Well, girls do that. I mean, that was also part of it. It's like if your friend was having sex, you're gonna know immediately.
42:27 Dax Shepard? And you're gonna call all your friends.
42:29 Speaker 02 Truly, when the last girl in my friend group lost her virginity, she texted me like 10 minutes later.
42:34 Speaker 01 See, yes, yeah.
42:36 Dax Shepard? As the door was closing, they always lose.
42:37 Speaker 02 He might have been in the room still, who knows? And I was just like, I'm gonna die a virgin. I couldn't even be happy for her. I was so upset.
42:46 Dax Shepard? So as you talk to all these people, you started, or maybe you went into it with these buckets, but I would guess as you were talking to these people, you kind of come up with some buckets that you feel like are more representative of the forces that are resulting in this decline. Sociocultural shifts, political?
43:02 Speaker 02 I would say that the changes in sex are always political. I think we like to think of sex as being a personal thing that occurs between two people or more people. But I think the reality is when those two people go into a bedroom to have sex, the terms of the sex have been set in state legislatures, in congress, in courtrooms. The terms of what happens when you walk out if something has gone wrong has been set by politicians. And so part of what I wanted to address in the book is to understand the intersection of politics and sex and to get people to understand how much what they might think is a personal issue is a political one.
43:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, could you give some hard examples of that?
43:38 Speaker 02 Think about sex ed. So I did not know, actually, until reporting this book, that I was.
43:45 Speaker 02 Going into K through 12 school at the same time that the federal government was pouring billions of dollars into absence only sex education. And there was a massive explosion in this kind of funding during George W. Bush's administration. It never really let up, even under Obama and under Biden. And so the sex ed that I received, of course, influenced the way that I was thinking about sex from the very beginning of the time that I could actually be losing my virginity.
44:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's the thing I want to pressure test. So we filed it the way we filed everything we learned at school, which is, oh, that's bullshit. That's what they have to teach you at school. Don't have sex. Obviously, everyone's going to. We certainly took all that with a grain of salt. I don't remember any of us receiving that as like a sermon on the mound. This was legitimate. This felt like, oh, this is what legally the district has to do.
44:29 Speaker 02 But did you feel like you had holes in your knowledge after that?
44:32 Dax Shepard? No, I learned about how to put a condom on, learned about STDs.
44:37 Speaker 02 But so what has happened is that the number of students who actually learned that stuff has gone way down. So there were plenty of young people I talked to who received little to no sex education, or all they were told was basically what they say in Mean Girls, like, don't have sex or you'll get pregnant and die. A lot of people brought up the Mean Girls scene.
44:52 Speaker 01 They did, that's really.
44:54 Dax Shepard? Oh, I bet.
44:54 Speaker 01 Sex ed was a week out of health class for us. It wasn't its own thing. They show a video of a birth. I don't know why that was in there, but you know, we wanted.
45:05 Speaker 02 To scare you.
45:06 Dax Shepard? Potential result of sex.
45:08 Speaker 01 Exactly, and it was horrifying. There weren't any how to's. There were no like, here's how you put on a condom.
45:14 Speaker 02 And I think I got pretty good sex ed in the context of things. I learned about condoms, definitely did not learn how to put one on. And I think we had PowerPoints on STIs. And so all they're doing is pathologizing sex and making it seem like something you should be terrified by. A lot of people, you know, go to religious schools and they're getting sex ed where I talked to one young woman, she went to Catholic school, and she was terrified after she learned about the Virgin Mary that she would just get pregnant through immaculate conception.
45:40 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes.
45:41 Speaker 02 Which sounds silly, because it is.
45:42 Dax Shepard? Although it happened once in Africa.
45:44 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
45:45 Dax Shepard? You know that one?
45:45 Speaker 02 No.
45:46 Dax Shepard? It was so violent. She had blown a guy, then got stabbed in the stomach, somehow got the semen from the stomach, then stabbed in the vagina. She had never had sex and she became pregnant. We had to fact check this.
45:58 Speaker 02 And she lived?
45:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
46:00 Speaker 02 And she had a baby?
46:01 Speaker 01 Like, the semen impregnated her because of the stabbing.
46:04 Dax Shepard? Yes.
46:05 Speaker 01 It's wild.
46:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's the violent version of Virgin Mary.
46:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's only happened that one time.
46:13 Dax Shepard? I got hung up the other day about the fact that Joseph and Mary were married.
46:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:17 Dax Shepard? And I'm like, how was Mary a virgin if they were married? What the fuck is this? But then I deep dove. They were engaged when she became pregnant.
46:26 Speaker 01 I don't mean to laugh. A lot of people really believe that.
46:29 Dax Shepard? And then I wonder if engagement was even a thing. I don't know.
46:32 Speaker 01 So we had a listener, we talk to listeners sometimes on one of our shows, and remember the girl who went to, I think Catholic school, I think? And it was sex ed and everyone passed around a butterfinger. Do you remember this?
46:45 Dax Shepard? Vaguely.
46:45 Speaker 01 And everyone took a bite from the butterfinger and then it was like the person at the end had this like kind of nasty butterfinger and it was supposed to represent if you have sex with multiple people, that's what you're getting. You're getting like this used dick.
46:59 Dax Shepard? Slobby.
47:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:01 Speaker 02 I was told about this thing called the tape game that happens in Texas public schools where they pass around a piece of tape and everybody touches it, right? And then it becomes less sticky and more tacky and linty. And that's the idea, like you're used up, you're gross. And it makes people feel terrible about themselves, even when they reject it. It's still like, these are authority figures in my life. A, not giving me information I need to have sex safely. And B, making me feel really bad about the idea that I would even want sex. And it's so hard to shake that off for people.
47:29 Dax Shepard? But how does it differ? Because obviously abstinence education's been happening forever.
47:34 Speaker 02 Now, we call it sexual risk avoidance. That's what the federal government calls it. And they're still funding like hundreds of millions of dollars into this every year. So as much as abstinence only sex education has been around for a long time, it is becoming a stronger force. And I think people don't necessarily realize that because this is going on at the level of states or school boards. But it's profoundly impactful on these young people. And we also in general have a rising tide of what I call sexual conservatism in the book, which is this movement to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is not straight, that is not married, that is not potentially procreative. Because the other main thing that we're seeing, the impact of politics on sexes with abortion rights and contraception.
48:16 Speaker 02 It's this movement that would make sex more likely to be procreative because you can't access abortion and you can't access hormonal birth control.
48:23 Dax Shepard? That one's tricky because all this data already exists in 2022.
48:27 Speaker 02 Wait, what do you mean all this data?
48:28 Dax Shepard? About the decline in sexual activity.
48:30 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. So, no.
48:31 Dax Shepard? It's like already a well-established.
48:33 Speaker 02 This is a part of it. It's definitely not the explanation for it.
48:36 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay.
48:36 Speaker 02 And the thing is that as that hookup culture narrative was going on that we were talking about earlier, the sex recession, as they call it, that was already starting to go on. Millennials were having less sex than previous generations. So even though we were having this moral panic over hookup culture, in reality, that's not really what was happening. Casual sex was on the decline. All sex was on the decline. The only generation that had less sex than millennials was the greatest generation, who were born in the 1920s. We didn't even need to feel that bad about being virgins. Way more people were virgins.
49:05 Speaker 01 I guess. So, I didn't know. I thought every single person on earth was having sex.
49:10 Dax Shepard? You guys were born in the wrong time.
49:11 Speaker 02 If we'd been born 10 years later, we would have fit right in.
49:14 Speaker 01 Would have been great.
49:15 Dax Shepard? I just remember growing up and my mother pointing out nonstop, "Look at the states who have abstinence sex ed. Look at their teenage pregnancy rate. It's the most correlated thing in the world." Abstinence doesn't work and in fact results almost always in unintentional pregnancy.
49:33 Speaker 02 There are plenty of studies that show that people who go through federally funded, abstinence-only sex ed, they have sex for the first time at the same time as people who don't go through that funding, and they are more likely to do so unsafely.
49:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, they don't know how.
49:47 Speaker 02 Right. And there's plenty of studies that shows that it makes you feel worse about yourself, particularly like among students of color. Those students are oftentimes pathologized in sex ed. There was one study I read where a young black student was asking like, "Why do they just assume that we're all having sex? Why do they assume we're not interested in how to have sex safely?" And it's because of these racist myths around black people's sexuality that just leads these abstinence-only sex educators to discount them completely.
50:13 Dax Shepard? Additionally, the third bucket was social media. As you talk to all these different young people, what were they saying about social media? On one hand, you would think, oh, you hear about, oh, there's apps that can really accelerate the experience to having sex. So you would think at one time you have this very quick access to it for willing participants. But that obviously isn't offsetting this broader thing.
50:36 Speaker 02 It's nuanced. For LGBTQ plus young people, social media has been hugely helpful because it's let them know that there are other people like them out there. And in fact, this is also one of the big changes that we're seeing among Gen Z is. Far more of them are out than previous generations. It's somewhere between, I think, a quarter and a fifth of Gen Z'ers are out in some way. Also, at the same time, is social media has been super helpful for young queer folks, young trans folks. A lot of them hate it. A lot of Gen Z'ers are just like, "This has been terrible for me."
51:06 Speaker 01 Mental health-wise?
51:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, it makes them feel bad about themselves. There's this phenomenon that scientists talk about called comparing and despairing, which is basically like, as you're going through your feed, you're just looking at how everybody's life and body is better than yours. And it just really sends your mental health plummeting.
51:23 Dax Shepard? Well, yeah, as a culture, we up compare instead of down compare. There are many cultures that down compare as a rule of thumb. They're much happier.
51:29 Speaker 02 That means that they're more likely to see themselves as better than others?
51:32 Dax Shepard? They will compare themselves to people that have less than them in any given metric. There are many cultures like that. Ours happens to be an up comparing culture. So we always look above us to compare ourselves. We look at someone richer, hotter, everything.
51:48 Speaker 02 Well, that's a bummer. I didn't know that there was another option.
51:51 Dax Shepard? It's kind of shocking, right? You would be led to think that's just human nature. But in fact, we have a lot of different cultures that down compare as status quo.
51:59 Speaker 02 You know, I appreciated, some of the young men in particular were open with me about the way that they would compare women online. So there was one young man I talked to who was talking about how he would see one girl on social media, and then he'd scroll and see another girl in a bikini on social media. And he was like, "Well, I probably prefer her." It's like, yeah, I mean, you're not wrong to be comparing and despairing. That is a very reasonable way to respond.
52:22 Speaker 01 What's the other option? When you're seeing it all, you're seeing all the options. That's new because of social media.
52:28 Speaker 02 Right, and maybe we're not meant to be taking in everybody's lives like that.
52:31 Speaker 01 Exactly, or having all the options.
52:34 Speaker 02 Or having filters that make everybody look better. This same young man was talking about how every girl he knows has filters on or changes her body when she posts photos on social media. And I asked him, "Well, have you ever done that?" And he said, "Yeah, it made my shoulders look bigger." Because this goes back to like how men should be Yes, exactly. Big, tall, dominant, etc.
52:55 Speaker 02 You don't want someone at seventeen, eighteen to be thinking about all the ways that their body is deficient. Because they're already doing that. You're already in the midst of puberty.
53:02 Dax Shepard? Well, that's the thing. You were in a group of like two hundred people and you had to find your position within there. And you could have landed safely in the middle and you'd be happy. But when you now widen that net out to include the whole world, you're not gonna ever be in the top whatever percent. And your seeming options, the sky's also the limit. It's like you would just go after whoever the hottest person in your town was if you were seeking that. But now you open it up to ten towns. What about, there seems to be this, and there's a lot of data on this, terrible outcome of dating apps where it's basically eight percent of the men have access to ninety-two percent of the women.
53:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, so this, I found very interesting because this is something that fuels incel ideology. And incels are men who are involuntarily celibate and they
53:46 Dax Shepard? Are angry about it.
53:47 Speaker 02 Angry about it, believe they're entitled.
53:50 Dax Shepard? They're entitled to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
53:51 Speaker 02 Entitled to sex.
53:52 Dax Shepard? They don't have to do anything to earn it.
53:53 Speaker 02 No.
53:54 Dax Shepard? No good job, no talking skills. It's just yours.
53:57 Speaker 02 By virtue of being a man. How cool for them. I know, must be nice. So they're angry that women aren't giving them the sex. And part of the reason they think that has been fueled by the rise of social media and dating apps because they do feel like they're not getting as many messages as they think they should be. And it is true that men reach out more and women get more messages. But what if that is just because that's how women have been socialized to respond in dating? That is how the men approach. Right. And so I think that they're discounting that possibility. And it does make men feel bad about themselves. Yes.
54:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Also, from the second Me Too happened, I had two immediate thoughts. One is great. Two is we are going to be in a transition phase that's going to be very fucking painful. Because, okay, men are gonna be less rapey. That's the request.
54:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
54:45 Dax Shepard? Right? Women are gonna have to pursue men. That's also gonna happen. If this dance of mating is going to work, one and/or either people need to pursue. And conventionally and historically, that's not been the case. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is women have to pick up that momentum.
55:03 Speaker 02 Yes.
55:03 Dax Shepard? If we want people to hook up.
55:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, do we want people to hook up? I don't know. Do we think sex is in and of itself a good?
55:09 Dax Shepard? We wouldn't be a species that got here if that wasn't a primary principle. So we haven't transcended being an animal. We haven't transcended all the other creatures on the planet. I think we could say, yeah, that's part of the human experience.
55:23 Speaker 02 One of the things I really wanted to do with the book is not say, young people are doing sex wrong. Because I feel like that's how so many of these books approach this topic. What I worry about is if sex is a proxy for connection that people are longing for, and they're not willing to go out and get, or they're not able to go out and get.
55:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I would want both for people.
55:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:40 Dax Shepard? I don't think those are either ors, or they're in opposition to one another.
55:44 Speaker 02 I don't think it's wrong to want young people to have more sex. But to tell you a story, actually, this last weekend, I was at the Jersey Shore. I was there for work. I was following around a group of young people who were trying to convince people at the Jersey Shore to embrace chastity.
55:59 Dax Shepard? Tall order.
56:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, big mission. Especially because it was right after a bunch of New Jersey high schoolers had just had graduation. So a lot of recently graduated seniors were there for their senior week. The chastity thing did not necessarily reverberate with a lot of people.
56:14 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure, sure, yeah.
56:15 Speaker 02 But I was talking to one of the young men who was doing this. And he is 21 years old. He is waiting for marriage, have sex. Fine, live your values. And he was telling me that he doesn't date right now because it's really hard to find people who want to date for marriage at 21, which, again, makes sense.
56:31 Dax Shepard? I bet.
56:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, and he said this thing to me. You know, if you're not dating for marriage, you're dating for heartbreak. And I was thinking about this a lot on the way home. Because I was thinking like, the times I've had my heart broken, I actually learned a lot.
56:40 Dax Shepard? You should absolutely get your heart broken.
56:42 Speaker 02 I agree.
56:43 Dax Shepard? It's a quintessential experience.
56:44 Speaker 02 Yes, you learn the depth of your own emotions. You learn about other people's emotions, so you learn empathy, resilience, because you work through it. And so to the extent that young people are avoiding sex and dating because they're afraid of getting hurt, that I worry about. But on the other hand, it is interesting to think about, like, right now, there's a push by Republicans to get people to have sex because they want people to have babies.
57:04 Dax Shepard? That's right.
57:05 Speaker 02 There can be a way that this push for sex is harnessed in such a way to push for pronatalism and circle back around to right-wing ideology.
57:15 Dax Shepard? Well, I just love how willy-nilly the political spectrum has gotten. It's like now conservatives are pro-sex, now liberals are anti-sex. What is going on? Even in the book, you're saying some of these people who, they are more liberal, but they identify as conservative. We had an expert on that was telling us that nobody has a cohesive political view. It's almost completely irrelevant. You have a declaration of your identity and the party you're associated with and your tribe. But if you go through issue by issue by issue, you will find that people are all over the map. They're on both sides of it, and there's really no cohesion to the political point of view.
57:51 Speaker 02 There's a definite disconnect that's happening right now between partisan identity and actual ideology. Young men in particular are further left on so many issues, including abortion rights, which you would think is a core Republican, right-wing idea, but they're voting conservatively. So the question is, why are you voting conservatively if you are so left?
58:10 Speaker 01 What about the influx of vibrators and toys and stuff that are good? A lot of women, myself included, are like, I'm good.
58:20 Dax Shepard? You can meet your needs.
58:21 Speaker 01 I can meet my needs. I can get the pleasure I seek. It's not intimacy, but I'm not interested in intimacy with anyone unless I like. Like, that's where I think casual sex is also sort of falling apart. Because you can pleasure yourself and get those needs met. And then, in order to have intimacy, you have to like the person. So that middle area does sort of drop off.
58:45 Speaker 02 What's interesting is that masturbation is also falling. What? Yeah. Really? That's so weird. I know, because to your point, masturbation is really free. Yes. You don't need another person to do that. You don't even need a toy to do that.
58:57 Dax Shepard? You don't have to ask them to leave.
58:59 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. And you know how.
59:01 Dax Shepard? There's no awkwardness unless someone walks in or your mom catches wind.
59:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. That's really wild. I was thinking about, is it that people are just masturbating more to porn or what have you? Yeah. And it seems like that is not the only explanation. I was shocked as well.
59:15 Dax Shepard? My explanation is it's not sexual. It's these young boys have grown up in an era where toxic masculinity was a huge headline, Me Too is a huge headline, there's a lot of anger, rightly so, towards men, but men that were in positions of power, and these are teenagers, and so they're kind of taking on a lot of sins of their fathers, and then they're in towns where all the jobs are disappearing. The Democrats and the liberals seem to have a really good game plan for homelessness and for LGBTQ, and they don't ever really announce their game plan for this group of men, which makes up 20% of the voting populace. So they're like, that side doesn't have a plan for me. This guy only cares about me.
1:00:00 Dax Shepard? I don't think that has to be sexually motivated. I just think that's like, oh, this guy doesn't hate me.
1:00:04 Speaker 02 He's not ignoring me, I guess.
1:00:06 Dax Shepard? This group does.
1:00:07 Speaker 02 It's very true that the Democrats have very much not talked about men and talked to young men in the way that Republicans.
1:00:13 Dax Shepard? Unless they were saying the many problems that men present.
1:00:16 Speaker 02 Yes, and I think also Democrats have a problem for themselves where they're unsexy, which is wild, because they're the party of pride parades and so on.
1:00:23 Dax Shepard? This is an unfortunate bit of data I read, and I think the molecule of more or dopamine nation by Anna Lemke. But yeah, liberals have more sexual partners and conservatives have more sex and more orgasms.
1:00:36 Speaker 02 Oh, interesting.
1:00:38 Dax Shepard? And you go, huh, that's a really interesting aspect of this whole thing.
1:00:44 Speaker 02 This does actually make sense because I think we have this idea that people who are single have more sex, but people who are partnered have more sex. Definitely. Yes, because you have a guaranteed source of it.
1:00:52 Dax Shepard? And you have better sex with a partner in general because you've had those communications.
1:00:55 Speaker 02 And Republicans tend to have higher marriage rates. Yes. So if Republicans have... A source of sex, it would make sense that they're having sex more often.
1:01:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, more sex and better sex. Now, growing up as a progressive and a very sex positive person, I'm like, how could that be? That's the group that seems to be terrified of it.
1:01:11 Speaker 01 It's probably self-reported. They're saying we have great sex.
1:01:14 Speaker 02 Also, Republicans are more likely to be men. So you might be over-indexing on the men reporting better sex.
1:01:21 Dax Shepard? No, no, these are women. It was women having orgasms.
1:01:24 Speaker 01 I will say, I think a conservative woman, this is maybe out of school to say, but I think is more likely to say the sex was great even if it wasn't.
1:01:34 Dax Shepard? You're basically dismissing whatever self-reporting that the right gives, entrusting the self-reporting of the left. And I don't think you can do that. You either have to throw out both sides because you don't believe in self-reporting, but I don't think you can say this group lies more than the other.
1:01:50 Speaker 01 It's in support of their values, which is family values. That's different. We have a strong family. We have a happy marriage. These are real things. I mean, I grew up amongst all these people.
1:02:00 Dax Shepard? And the left is incentivized to say their life has turned out perfectly because of their ideals. Both have a huge incentive to confirm their worldview. I don't think any side is unique or has a monopoly on that. You can't believe studies, or you gotta have enough good faith to grant that what they told you is the truth, or we're nowhere.
1:02:16 Speaker 02 I think what we need is a third study that looks at how political affiliation impacts the frequency with which you fake orgasms.
1:02:22 Dax Shepard? And as a liberal, you're suspicious that these women are faking, is what I hear when you say that.
1:02:27 Speaker 02 No, I actually don't know. I would be very curious. I would believe that people fake orgasms for all kinds of reasons, from all kinds of political spectrums.
1:02:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think so too, but I guess the left group, they're saying it's bad.
1:02:40 Speaker 02 I think there is also this misconception that the right is anti-sex. I deliberately chose the term "sexual conservatism" and not "anti-sex" in the book because plenty of right-wing groups are very pro-sex once you're married. Like, there's a very rich tradition of evangelical handbooks on how to have your best sex life ever with your husband.
1:02:58 Speaker 01 That sort of goes to what I was saying. I do think in conservative relationships, there's actually a strong desire to please your partner and be a good...
1:03:09 Speaker 01 Wife, it is embedded, especially in religious cultures. Once you have a partner and you're married, you need to be good at bed.
1:03:17 Speaker 02 Burn up the bed sheets.
1:03:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:19 Dax Shepard? I think that's too dismissive. I think it's dismissive to say, I don't like the outcome because I would want our side to be the ones having more sex and orgasms. So I don't like the outcome of that study. So I'm going to dismiss it or come up with what's really going on in the study. And I think either you believe in social science studies or you don't. When you don't like the results, I don't think you then can start accusing all of the participants as lying.
1:03:42 Speaker 01 But we're constantly poking holes in studies and saying like, oh, we're looking at only this group.
1:03:47 Dax Shepard? But never in a way that I go, the left people didn't lie and the right people lied.
1:03:50 Speaker 01 Well, I don't know who's lying. I don't care. Maybe the left is lying.
1:03:52 Speaker 02 If I had to guess, everybody's lying. Because everybody lies.
1:03:55 Dax Shepard? Yes, everyone's equally a piece of shit and everyone's equally good. No side has a monopoly.
1:04:00 Speaker 02 How often do people really want to be like, yeah, my sex life is shit?
1:04:02 Dax Shepard? It's not relative to anything. If they say, how many times do you have sex with your husband a week? And the person says four, they don't know if the liberals said two or three. They don't know if they have to inflate it to six. Presumably, they're just saying the number.
1:04:12 Speaker 01 The amount of orgasms.
1:04:13 Dax Shepard? Both of those data points. So they're having more sex and they're having more orgasms when they have sex. So if the interviewer asks them, how many orgasms do you have in a week? And the person says three, they would have had to first hear what the liberals had to inflate or deflate.
1:04:27 Speaker 01 I don't think anything's in comparison. From my personal experience, growing up in the South, I do think that there is an incentive that in order to have a good relationship, it requires good sex across the board. I don't know if it's left too. I'm just saying specifically, I recognize that.
1:04:47 Speaker 02 There are studies that also show that Republicans have better mental health.
1:04:50 Speaker 01 Oh, for sure.
1:04:51 Speaker 02 So there might be something to the conservative viewpoint where you just feel more certainty about how the world works and you feel more at peace with how the world works. Also, being a Republican overlaps quite a bit with religion and you might feel better about the world if you feel like God is dictating everything that's happening.
1:05:06 Dax Shepard? Yes, even though every person's finding it impossible to live by that. So they're also taking out all the shame of that. This is very complicated.
1:05:13 Speaker 02 No, we're going to solve this in this conversation. We're fixing it right here, right now.
1:05:17 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:05:18 Dax Shepard? What do you think the impact of Me Too was?
1:05:21 Speaker 02 I don't think it led to the kind of institutional change that people were hoping that it did.
1:05:25 Dax Shepard? But I mean, and the impact of people having sex with one another.
1:05:28 Speaker 02 I don't think it led to the sex recession. The sex recession was already well underway by the time that that was happening.
1:05:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:05:33 Speaker 02 I think it led primarily to people being much more aware of when sex had gone wrong. And I think it led to a great degree of frustration among young people with institutions that they feel like have failed them. On the right, I think there has been a continuing backlash to Me Too that we are still in the midst of and that you can see in the way that they're handling policies like Title IX.
1:05:54 Dax Shepard? Tell me about Title IX.
1:05:55 Speaker 02 Title IX is the law that dictates sex discrimination in education, which is to say, to try to eradicate it. And so it also dictates how schools are supposed to respond to sexual harassment and sexual assault. Because if you're trying to get an education in an environment that is rife with sexual harassment and sexual assault, that is sex discrimination. Since the Obama administration took office, there's been a fight over Title IX and how to handle it and how people who come forward with complaints under Title IX should be treated. So Obama basically expanded the ability of Title IX to deal with sexual assault and harassment in ways that plenty of people on the right said were not giving enough credence
1:06:36 Speaker 02 to the person who was being accused, that they were setting up men to be accused by women who simply regretted consensual sex. And I'm not saying that the Obama rules were above reproach. There's certainly ways to finesse them, but I think it is very interesting that this snowballed around the same time that Me Too was happening. Because throughout the 2010s, we were seeing all of these tales of campus sexual assault and people talking about how bad campus sexual assault was and wanting to fix it. And then you have Me Too happen and you have the Trump administration sweep in. One expert told me the changes by the Trump administration made Title IX basically unusable for survivors. The Biden administration came in, changed the rules very late in the game. The Trump administration has actually reset its own rules through various court changes and just rescinding of guidance.
1:07:20 Speaker 02 And so I think it's really interesting that these are environments where sexual assault is rife. We are seeing a lot of sexual harassment and this is the main place where I think Me Too's backlash and afterlife is playing out. I don't know if that was specific enough to actually help. Yeah, makes sense.
1:07:36 Dax Shepard? How about COVID? That seems self-evident, but what did we find out?
1:07:38 Speaker 02 You know what's interesting is people did not bring up COVID unless they specifically asked about it.
1:07:42 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:07:42 Speaker 02 I think there was sort of a cultural amnesia Yeah. around the fact that we were all locked up. People were really, at the time, aware that they were missing out on a lot of rites of passage. Like, they didn't have prom, they didn't have graduation. A lot of them didn't get sex ed. It moved so much more of life online that is still the way that young people oftentimes operate. It came up in so many different ways, talking to people about the pandemic. There was one young woman who was talking about how during the pandemic, she couldn't see her boyfriend because they both got COVID. He was pressing her to send nudes, so she did. And she felt terrible about it. She still feels terrible about it. And I think that there's a lot of stories where people relocated their sex lives online in ways that they still feel like, maybe that wasn't right for me. Maybe that wasn't the best way for me to handle that.
1:08:25 Speaker 02 We also, for young queer people, it was actually really difficult for them because they were oftentimes trapped at home with people who didn't believe in them or support them. Right, with their families. Yeah.
1:08:36 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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1:11:28 Dax Shepard? Okay, and now Roe v. Wade. What do you think the ripples of that are?
1:11:32 Speaker 02 I think we're definitely still living in this.
1:11:34 Dax Shepard? My first question is, there's 13 states without abortion now. There's 37 with. Do the rates of sexual activity vary? Do we have any data that would say it's gone down in states where the abortion has been taken away?
1:11:47 Speaker 02 I don't think we have state-by-state data. We do know that, I think it's 16% of Gen Z is now more hesitant to date because of Roe v. Wade and the overturning of abortion rights.
1:11:56 Speaker 01 That's mostly women, I assume, or no?
1:11:58 Speaker 02 I don't think there was actually gender data on that. The overturning Roe v. Wade was actually pretty pivotal to me doing this book. I started thinking about doing it in the end of 2021. So the Supreme Court had already taken up the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which would become the case that overturned Roe v. Wade. Everybody who paid attention to reproductive rights, both sides of the abortion debate, knew that Roe v. Wade was on its way out. And so I started being very interested in the ways that this potential future change was impacting young people's sex lives. I started calling around, talked to dozens of people across the country. And what I found is that, in general, people were not thinking about this being a possibility. They didn't think Roe was gonna go.
1:12:37 Dax Shepard? I was guilty of that.
1:12:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, same.
1:12:38 Speaker 02 So they didn't think that they should change anything about their sex life. But I did talk to one young woman in Texas who was telling me that if she couldn't have an abortion, she would stop having sex with her boyfriend. And at the time, Texas was weeks away from implementing a six-week abortion ban. I don't know what happened to her, but I do know that when Roe was overturned, there was this flurry of activism among young people. We saw a run on contraception. We saw Kansas fight to protect abortion rights in a vote that was propelled by young voters. And so after that, I became really interested in the ways that young people were responding to Roe being overturned. And the major thing I found is just extreme anxiety around the possibility of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant and what they would possibly do in that scenario.
1:13:21 Speaker 02 A lot of the young people I talked to felt like they knew how they would get an abortion, because you can still get abortions.
1:13:25 Dax Shepard? Of course, yeah, and you just go to one of the 37 states.
1:13:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can also order abortion pills online. And so they felt like they had a handle on it, but they were just so much more anxious in a way that makes sex not as good. I am personally of the opinion, this is a question I ask people, and I'll ask you guys, if we lived in a matriarchy, so if women were in charge of the world, the way that men are in charge of the world right now, and in our current society, most serial killers are men, 97% or something, do you think if we lived in a matriarchy... Women would make up the vast majority of serial killers.
1:13:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:13:56 Speaker 01 I don't. I think there would be lots of issues. I'm not saying women are perfect at all, and we have our own things that would be horrible. If one gender is ruling everything, I think there's a problem. I don't think they'd be serial killers, though. That's like a testosterone-driven, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I think there would be big issues, but I don't think serial killer would be one.
1:14:18 Speaker 02 Who knows what the answer is, but I think it fundamentally gets to the question of, do you think this is nature or nurture? Do you think it's power that leads a gender right now to be a certain way?
1:14:25 Speaker 01 Oh, power is definitely-
1:14:26 Dax Shepard? One thing all three of us could admit, it's not that simple. So it's definitely some percentage of both, nature, nurture.
1:14:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
1:14:32 Dax Shepard? Reed Sapolsky, our culture is our genetics. We change our, shape of our brain through our culture. You can't really draw this magic line between those two things. And yeah, I think anytime you have a group that's supposed to inherit all of the power and authority and privilege, and then they are left out of the group and seemingly everyone else got the thing that was promised to them, I think you'll see crazy shit happen in the wake of that, male or female.
1:14:57 Speaker 02 That might be what we're living through at this moment.
1:14:59 Dax Shepard? And powerful women cheat, just like powerful men do, and powerful female rulers have done terrible things. I think power is a very corruptive force.
1:15:06 Speaker 01 I don't think women are impervious-
1:15:07 Speaker 02 I do think that women would be serial killers in this circumstance, personally.
1:15:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, women are not impervious to behaving very poorly when they have power.
1:15:15 Speaker 02 I've asked dozens of people this question, and I would say it splits 50/50 the way that people answer.
1:15:19 Dax Shepard? And is it gendered? Because men would be incentivized to say, no, they would kill too.
1:15:23 Speaker 02 Men do tend to say that they would kill too. It's women who sort of flip back and forth, generally speaking.
1:15:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:15:28 Speaker 01 There are cultures that are matriarchal, though. My parents are from Kerala, and that for many years, I don't know that right now it is, but it was a matriarchy. That is not what was happening.
1:15:39 Speaker 02 And it was riddled with female serial killers?
1:15:40 Speaker 01 I'll ask, but I don't remember hearing that there was a lot of serial killing happening.
1:15:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, I would- Love to know more about matriarchies. Someone once said, which I thought was a good answer, she thought if it flipped tomorrow, women would be serial killers. But not if we had had however many years of developing a matriarchy. Yeah, that's interesting.
1:15:59 Dax Shepard? OK, so everything that you learned through talking to all these people and all these patterns you saw emerged, again, you asked me, do I even think sex is good? I do. I don't know if you do.
1:16:07 Speaker 02 I personally like sex. I would be bummed out if I didn't have it again.
1:16:10 Dax Shepard? Do you think we should want the younger generations to be having sex more?
1:16:13 Speaker 02 We should want them to have connection and be open to vulnerability and heartbreak. I think it's important to foster curiosity and empathy among young people. Sex and relationships is one way to do that. As far as reversing the sex recession, it's really hard to know how to do that. The example of Japan, they've been on this train where there's fewer people having sex, fewer people getting married, fewer people having babies for a long time now.
1:16:35 Dax Shepard? And their population is declining.
1:16:37 Speaker 02 Which sparks all of this talk about pronatalism. And they haven't necessarily been able to turn that around. The thing that we do know is that as countries industrialize, fewer people tend to have babies. And so the thing is that as people have more money, more time on their hands, and can make more choices about how to live their life, they might just be making different choices about how to live their lives. Maybe those choices don't encourage or include sex. I just want individuals to feel good about themselves.
1:17:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, me too.
1:17:03 Speaker 02 And so hopefully, if that includes having sex, they're having it. But if more and more people are feeling like, I don't need it.
1:17:10 Dax Shepard? Well, and then we get into the future that's not hard to imagine at all, which is you're gonna have an AI partner and it's gonna fulfill all your needs and then that's it, that's the rap on humans.
1:17:21 Speaker 02 The planet might appreciate it.
1:17:23 Dax Shepard? We had our time.
1:17:25 Speaker 02 It does make me sad to hear from young people who feel like they don't have the possibility of connection in their life, sexual or romantic. And I think that there's a lot of that. With apologies to boomers, it feels so boomer to be like, go and get out there and have real experiences. But I think that there's no substitute for getting out of your phone.
1:17:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's okay to advise. Get out in the world and interact.
1:17:45 Speaker 02 Part of this book, the process of writing it, was just accepting that I was getting older and that I am probably gonna tell young people what I think they should do.
1:17:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, go get drunk.
1:17:53 Speaker 02 This is what we did.
1:17:54 Dax Shepard? Meet some people.
1:17:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:17:55 Dax Shepard? Exchange numbers.
1:17:56 Speaker 02 There was one 19-year-old I interviewed who was absolutely lovely, but he was talking about the 1990s and he called it the late 20th century. And I was just like, I had to mute myself. I was like, you've just knifed me. I want you to know how hurtful that was that just happened.
1:18:12 Dax Shepard? The late 20th century.
1:18:14 Speaker 02 He's not wrong. He's not wrong.
1:18:15 Dax Shepard? Or whenever you're talking about the early 1900s, you'll go like, the turn of the century.
1:18:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:19 Dax Shepard? And I'm sure they'll start saying the turn of the century.
1:18:21 Speaker 02 Oh, my God, no.
1:18:22 Dax Shepard? It is really hard to know when you're just becoming old and when you have an early principled point of view. It gets harder and harder to know.
1:18:29 Speaker 02 Part of what I wanted people to get out of this is this is what they're going through right now. Hopefully, this sparks a thought process on whether or not you're getting old, or this is a principled view.
1:18:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:18:39 Speaker 02 And has more nuanced discussion than just, why aren't these young people fucking? They've got to get out there.
1:18:44 Dax Shepard? What's wrong with them?
1:18:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, pull your boots, what is it? Pull your pants up? No, pull your boots down.
1:18:49 Dax Shepard? Pull your pants down.
1:18:51 Speaker 02 It's also just so hard because it's so entangled with this political push to have sex at this time, that it's very hard to have a message to say like, get out and have sex without it sounding very right wing.
1:19:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm sickened by the notion this topic is politicized to begin with.
1:19:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, they can't, we can't let them take that. But sex is always political, isn't it? That's my stance that I'm building this whole book off of.
1:19:11 Dax Shepard? You mean historically?
1:19:13 Speaker 02 Historically, of course.
1:19:13 Dax Shepard? Hunting and gathering, it's been political.
1:19:15 Speaker 02 Yes, of course. If you hooked up with someone as a cave woman, you're hooking up with a caveman for potentially protection. Maybe you're exchanging sex for the hunting and gathering and protecting of the brood. That is a political calculation if we understand this is about my function in society. This is about my community and surviving in my community.
1:19:34 Dax Shepard? Well, interesting. I think of politics as a bizarre abstraction, a story we came up with, and I think of survival as an intrinsic real thing.
1:19:43 Speaker 02 But doesn't politics determine who survives? Who gets to tell the story of how the survival happened?
1:19:47 Dax Shepard? I'm saying politics were invented as we understand them 1300 years ago or whatever. You know, go to the Greeks 4,000 years ago. That's like a blip in the time we've been here. So when I think of politics as angling for power in an institution.
1:20:02 Dax Shepard? Which involves governance of the people. I don't know if I think it's political. I think it's survival, yeah. They were trying to reproduce and make sure they had a partner that would bring in resources so they survive. Is that political?
1:20:14 Speaker 01 It depends on how you're defining political.
1:20:16 Dax Shepard? Political, yeah.
1:20:17 Speaker 01 Yes, because there's politics in the workplace. That doesn't mean that it's right or left. It's how people are operating to get ahead or survive that situation.
1:20:26 Speaker 02 I think I'm very informed by the 1970s feminist tradition of consciousness raising. Are you guys familiar with this?
1:20:32 Dax Shepard? No.
1:20:32 Speaker 02 Very simple. It was during second wave feminism. You'd have groups of women get together and they would share their personal stories about whatever was going on in their lives. Like, I'm a housewife. My husband doesn't do any chores. No chore play for me.
1:20:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:20:45 Speaker 02 And I feel really unhappy because I want to go to work or my kids have left the house. And the thing that happened is that people were realizing that these stories had commonalities. And they came to realize the personal is political. Like, if something is happening to me and it's happening to you and it's happening to you, even though we're coming from different places here, there is some kind of political core that is driving.
1:21:04 Dax Shepard? Product of a system.
1:21:05 Speaker 02 Yes. And the product of a system is always shaped by politics. For me, I think of politics as like participating in the body politic, which we do all the time regardless of whether we want to or not. We have to understand that we might be thinking we're making a free choice, particularly around sex, but those choices have already been constrained for us by political systems.
1:21:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so I'm with you. And I would define politics and politicizing things as just you're forcing issues into these two binary options of left and right. You've politicized it. It lands on one side or the other of the spectrum. And I don't think sex should be landing on the left or the right.
1:21:40 Speaker 02 I definitely agree with that. I don't want politics to be just about left and right. But the fact of the matter is that the left has an opinion about sex and the right has an opinion about sex. So it's already been politicized for you.
1:21:50 Dax Shepard? Yes. And I'm urging everyone to reject that, if you're on the left or the right.
1:21:53 Speaker 02 Just go out to a bar.
1:21:54 Speaker 01 Just get out there.
1:21:56 Dax Shepard? Pursue your personal desires with it and do not
1:22:01 Dax Shepard? Avail yourself to this stupid architecture that gets mapped onto everything. The fucking pandemic, that's political? What are you talking about? We're gonna survive or not? You gotta pick a side for that? You gotta pick a side for sex? And just object to all of that?
1:22:15 Speaker 02 But that is the point, right? Like, all of it does get politicized, whether or not you want it or not. Like, vaccines are politicized now. Science is politicized.
1:22:21 Dax Shepard? And I'm screaming, I think the anecdote is like, do not fall for that trap. Have your issue, think it through, consult your friends or people you respect. Do not look above you to see what side your party, how they've landed on this issue.
1:22:34 Speaker 02 I feel like we keep on devolving into borderline arguments.
1:22:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I respect you a lot, though, and I love your personality, and I think your book is great.
1:22:41 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:22:42 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:22:42 Speaker 02 I love arguing. I don't know if that's coming through.
1:22:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, me too, me too. I gotta check in, because I enjoy it. I wouldn't want you to not enjoy it.
1:22:47 Speaker 02 No, I grew up in a family where we love to debate and argue. So I'm enjoying this.
1:22:52 Dax Shepard? Okay, good, good, good.
1:22:53 Speaker 02 Okay, so let's say, I was sexually assaulted in college, for example. And this is not to take it to a dark place and be like, and now you can't talk about this.
1:22:59 Dax Shepard? No, no, no, I was molested. I'll hit you with that.
1:23:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I did not go to anybody about it. I didn't seek accountability. I didn't know that Title IX was a thing that could have helped me in that instance. And why was that the case? Why didn't I know that there were resources available for me? The answer to that is that Title IX was shaped by politics. The resources that I could have had at that time were being shaped for me by an institution, or not conveyed to me by an institution. So I was participating in politics, whether or not I wanted it. And if you look at the ways that we handle sexual assault, for example, on college campuses, we've created a system where it is very difficult for survivors to seek redress and to be able to have help and be able to flourish in their lives afterwards. Sexual assault is one of the number one reasons that women leave college.
1:23:45 Speaker 02 But then that affects your entire life. If you don't have an education, you probably can't make as much money. And then that impacts who gets to participate in public life. Because if you are
1:23:53 Dax Shepard? disenfranchised from that experience.
1:23:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, disenfranchised in some way, then that has like a long reverberating effect. And particularly, like, if you're a sexual assault survivor and you get disenfranchised out of public life, Then that is a voice that could have been advocating for sexual assault survivors. We could have had a better system set up for sexual assault survivors if we have more of those people being able to participate and talk openly about it.
1:24:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:24:14 Speaker 02 So it's all of this wave of stuff that just accumulates. I mean, we might just fundamentally disagree, but I wish I could opt out and just make choices for myself, but it's hard to know.
1:24:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's hard to know.
1:24:24 Dax Shepard? But what you shouldn't do is be presented with a quandary and your first thought is to check in with your party and be prescribed the group think of that party. Because, bad news for everyone, they keep flipping. I can point to nine different moments in time where you would have an opposite opinion if you're looking to your party to inform you. You should really be soul searching and determining your values and your ethics and listening to people you admire and not just getting a prescribed plan from the two options. That's not enough options. You're gonna be picking between two bad options.
1:25:00 Speaker 02 I agree with that. I think people should come up with their own values and see how they map on to politics.
1:25:04 Dax Shepard? I really enjoyed this. The book is called The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. Of course, it's well-written. You're a great writer and you do it professionally and it's wonderful and it's very thoughtful and I'm really happy you took the time to do it and I hope a lot of people read it.
1:25:18 Speaker 02 Thank you. Thank you for having me.
1:25:21 Speaker 02 Stay tuned for the fact-check. It's where the party's at.
1:25:28 Speaker 01 We rollin' with the homies?
1:25:32 Dax Shepard? What?
1:25:33 Speaker 01 I'm embarrassed about some, two things.
1:25:35 Dax Shepard? I'm embarrassed about something this morning, too.
1:25:37 Speaker 01 Oh, great. Let's talk about our embarrassedness.
1:25:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's time to cleanse.
1:25:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:25:41 Dax Shepard? Time to repent, to confession.
1:25:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, confession.
1:25:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:45 Speaker 01 Hour. Okay, I'm embarrassed because some people consider my feet very attractive.
1:25:54 Dax Shepard? Eric, yeah.
1:25:55 Speaker 01 One person.
1:25:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, maybe a ton of people, but just specifically Eric.
1:26:00 Speaker 01 He has stated that he loves my feet. I have perfect feet.
1:26:05 Dax Shepard? I also think it's worth explaining why Eric has a foot fetish, which I think he came by it so honestly.
1:26:12 Speaker 01 Explain it.
1:26:13 Dax Shepard? Which is he was a young boy and his father made him work at his shoe shop in downtown LA.
1:26:20 Dax Shepard? Have we ever had him do his whole spiel on here?
1:26:22 Speaker 01 No, we need to do that at some point.
1:26:23 Dax Shepard? We should invite him in at maybe the end of this or next one.
1:26:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so I think he developed like a bit of a foot fetish in that job.
1:26:32 Speaker 01 He had to sell the these shoes and to women and he, of course.
1:26:38 Dax Shepard? He didn't sell any shoes to men. He wouldn't shoot, sell shoes to men.
1:26:41 Speaker 01 So, you know, he came by it honestly, but he knows a lot about feet because of that.
1:26:46 Dax Shepard? Well, he can look at someone's feet and go like five and a half, you know, like he can, he knows.
1:26:51 Speaker 01 And he knows when they're more or less attractive than others. He's seen a lot.
1:26:57 Dax Shepard? He's seen a lot. He's a bit of a, an expert. Yeah, yeah.
1:27:00 Speaker 01 And, and he.
1:27:01 Dax Shepard? It's like if you make love to Warren Beatty and he says, you're the best. That says a lot because there's been tens of thousands of people.
1:27:10 Speaker 01 That's like when that massage therapist gave me a very nice compliment about my body.
1:27:15 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:27:15 Speaker 01 It felt extra good.
1:27:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because he sees.
1:27:19 Speaker 01 He sees bodies for a living.
1:27:20 Dax Shepard? French bodies.
1:27:21 Speaker 01 French bodies. Um, anyway, so I knew I was gonna be seeing Eric and I didn't even think about the fact that I haven't, I've let my feet go a little bit. I haven't got a pedicure in a while.
1:27:36 Dax Shepard? Isn't that normally a, a winter move? Like if one maintains their feet, you probably could skip winter.
1:27:42 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:27:42 Dax Shepard? And then summertime, pick it up.
1:27:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:45 Dax Shepard? Because your toes aren't out a ton in the winter.
1:27:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I just didn't have time to go get my nails done. I didn't want to deal with it.
1:27:52 Dax Shepard? I don't care if you're, you've done your nails or not.
1:27:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:55 Dax Shepard? I wouldn't notice that type of thing.
1:27:57 Speaker 01 Well, I, I got on the plane and I thought, oh shit, I didn't get my, I didn't get the pedicure.
1:28:04 Dax Shepard? But you thought that on the plane?
1:28:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:07 Dax Shepard? You did?
1:28:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:08 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:28:08 Speaker 01 Also mixed with like, I'm gonna be in bathing, like my toes are gonna be out.
1:28:13 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure, sure.
1:28:13 Speaker 01 In general, but also Eric was gonna be here and like, I don't want to ruin the illusion for him.
1:28:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:21 Speaker 01 And, um, and I just remember because. I hope no one can see on the camera.
1:28:27 Dax Shepard? I think you should hold them up.
1:28:28 Speaker 01 No.
1:28:28 Dax Shepard? I show my, um, comb over.
1:28:31 Speaker 01 No, I can't.
1:28:32 Dax Shepard? Okay, you're not ready.
1:28:33 Speaker 01 I'm not ready.
1:28:33 Speaker 04 You did, you did last backtrack, have your shoes off and feet out.
1:28:37 Speaker 01 And you could see them?
1:28:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, on the wide.
1:28:40 Speaker 01 But you couldn't see it close. The problem is, they're just not cut, or, and the paint is all chippy.
1:28:46 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:28:47 Speaker 01 And I have a new scar on my foot. There's a lot going on.
1:28:50 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:28:50 Speaker 01 Okay, don't look. No one look. Everyone turn away. Um.
1:28:55 Dax Shepard? Well, now I am fearing that people are getting a mental image of your foot mangled from like a mulcher. And that also is not the case.
1:29:02 Speaker 01 It's not the case, but it doesn't look good. Doesn't look good, guys.
1:29:05 Dax Shepard? It looks fine. It might not look its best.
1:29:07 Speaker 01 It doesn't look its best, and to me, that means bad.
1:29:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, so yesterday, I, we were in the sauna, Eric was, I ma, I felt like I managed to get by without him noticing.
1:29:18 Dax Shepard? Cause you've been on the boat and stuff a lot.
1:29:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:20 Dax Shepard? They've been out.
1:29:21 Speaker 01 Shoes have been off.
1:29:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:22 Speaker 01 But I don't think he noticed, but then he was sitting above me in the sauna, and I was like, he's gonna notice, and he's gonna puke.
1:29:30 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:29:31 Speaker 01 And cry.
1:29:32 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:29:33 Speaker 01 Cause his prized possession is destroyed.
1:29:35 Dax Shepard? Out of his phone.
1:29:36 Speaker 01 Exactly, and so I said, Eric, don't look at my feet. I know, but I just.
1:29:43 Dax Shepard? That's tactically not the move.
1:29:46 Speaker 01 I wanted to get ahead of it.
1:29:47 Dax Shepard? Like, I didn't look at your feet at all, but if you said to me, don't look at my feet, all, all I would do now is look at your feet.
1:29:54 Speaker 01 Okay, well, you guys could just, you could just do what I asked, and not look at my feet.
1:30:00 Dax Shepard? No, that's not how people's brains work, and if you don't think about spaghetti, the very first thing you do is picture a big plate of spaghetti with red sauce poured all over the noodles. It's involuntary, yeah.
1:30:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, I said, don't look at my feet. I, I haven't, oh, no, no, to be fair to me, that's not what happened. Molly called out somebody else's feet in the sauna as having acute pedicure, and I was like, this is about, this, it's happening. It's all gonna come out, and I gotta get ahead of it, and I said, Eric, I haven't got a pedicure in a long time, don't look at my feet.
1:30:30 Dax Shepard? So even more like, they're messed up, don't like, so it's even more, you wanna see what's going on.
1:30:36 Speaker 01 Anyway.
1:30:36 Dax Shepard? Eric, my, a couple of my toes are hanging on by a thread.
1:30:39 Speaker 01 I mean, kind of. Anyway, he, he said, okay, I won't look. And then a couple of minutes later, he said, Monty.
1:30:46 Dax Shepard? It was more of, if I could speak for him. It definitely was more like, you have a gift.
1:30:51 Speaker 01 I know.
1:30:52 Dax Shepard? Why aren't you a good steward of these toes?
1:30:55 Speaker 01 It was disappointment.
1:30:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I would like to know if his, is it your toes he likes? The whole foot?
1:31:01 Speaker 01 He says it's the whole foot.
1:31:02 Dax Shepard? The whole foot. I wonder if there's certain pieces he more fetishizes than others.
1:31:07 Speaker 01 I wonder too.
1:31:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I wonder if he's honing in on like just a side of your heel? And he's like, oh.
1:31:12 Speaker 01 I mean, I have that when I think about people who I'm attracted to. There are like parts that are random parts. Very random, not the expected parts.
1:31:22 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:31:23 Speaker 01 That I like, like.
1:31:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:31:26 Speaker 01 So anyway, all to say, I'm embarrassed by my feet today.
1:31:31 Dax Shepard? Okay. That was one. Did you say there was two?
1:31:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. My second embarrassment.
1:31:37 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:31:38 Speaker 01 Yesterday, we were playing spades. And people who don't play spades don't know this, but there's, there's a thing you can do where you accidentally play a card you're not supposed to play. And it's called reneging.
1:31:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:31:51 Speaker 01 And it's very bad.
1:31:53 Dax Shepard? It's in a bunch of games. It's certainly in euchre as well.
1:31:55 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:31:57 Speaker 01 And it's very, very, very bad. And it's rare. Like, I, I feel like I haven't done it since I first learned to play.
1:32:06 Dax Shepard? 2020.
1:32:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I did it yesterday during one of the games and it was so embarrassing.
1:32:12 Dax Shepard? First of all, you shouldn't be embarrassed. But secondly, the manner in which it happened was uniquely audacious, which is you trumped clubs and you won. And then you immediately led clubs. Usually when someone renegs, it's like you find out six hands later.
1:32:31 Speaker 01 Right.
1:32:32 Dax Shepard? Right?
1:32:32 Speaker 01 That's why it was so, it was so.
1:32:34 Dax Shepard? Disconnect.
1:32:35 Speaker 01 Right. Like I was, I, I know, I know what happened. There's no reason to explain to the people.
1:32:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:42 Speaker 01 But I was out of something.
1:32:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:45 Speaker 01 And so in my head, that's what you were playing.
1:32:47 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:32:48 Speaker 01 So I was ready immediately to just do that.
1:32:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:52 Speaker 01 And it was, it was not what you played and it was a mistake. Luckily, I would have won that hand anyway, and then I did when we played it back. But still, it was, it was very embarrassing.
1:33:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow. I didn't notice that you-
1:33:06 Speaker 01 I'm taking it hard.
1:33:07 Dax Shepard? I didn't know you took it that hard. Okay, mine is worse than those two, in my opinion. A lot more culpability on my part. So yesterday was a big birthday celebration, Kristen's birthday.
1:33:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:19 Dax Shepard? And there were little things planned throughout the day, but there was a saunaing.
1:33:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:25 Dax Shepard? And then leave for dinner. And at some point in there, when people get in the cold plunge and hot tub, it makes the water go out, and then the water level's too low, and then the thing's really noisy. So I was like, I gotta fill that up with more water. So I went and got a hose and I turned it on as I was getting ready. And I turned it on and I was like, okay, I'm gonna turn it off before we go to dinner. Then I came outside to meditate this morning.
1:33:51 Speaker 01 Oh, oh no.
1:33:53 Dax Shepard? And the hose was still in there.
1:33:55 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
1:33:55 Dax Shepard? Yes, I had been overfilling it all night. I'm so bummed.
1:33:59 Speaker 01 Shoot.
1:34:01 Dax Shepard? I mean, nothing's broken. I just wasted a ton of water. I mean, we're in, we're in a, we're in a sea of too much water currently in Nashville.
1:34:08 Speaker 01 We're not in LA.
1:34:10 Dax Shepard? I just was like, I can't believe you left a hose on for 12 hours. It's longer. I'm, now I'm exaggerating in the reverse. I'm minimizing. It was probably 14 hours.
1:34:20 Speaker 01 It's okay.
1:34:22 Dax Shepard? It's not great.
1:34:23 Speaker 01 Well-
1:34:23 Dax Shepard? That's a rough way from me to start my day, like recognizing I made a big-
1:34:28 Speaker 01 I noticed you were in a little bit of a grumpy mood.
1:34:30 Dax Shepard? I will.
1:34:34 Speaker 01 I did notice that.
1:34:35 Dax Shepard? I don't think I was in a grumpy mood, but maybe it read that way. Well, because I meditated in the night, I journaled and that was a, I was able to kind of steer out of
1:34:45 Speaker 01 Okay, good.
1:34:46 Dax Shepard? The flagellation.
1:34:47 Speaker 01 It's just so funny, like that.
1:34:50 Dax Shepard? To me is a huge failing as a, as a man.
1:34:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, and to me, if I did that, I'd be like, oh no.
1:34:56 Dax Shepard? Of course I did it.
1:34:56 Speaker 01 I mean, I, okay, no, I would be, I would think, oh no. But it's not like I did something bad, it's that I could have burned the, like, I go immediately to like, I could have left a candle on and burned the house down, like, I have the capability of destroying everything.
1:35:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:35:17 Speaker 01 And that scares me.
1:35:18 Dax Shepard? I did have that moment where I was like, okay, well, it's definitely been flowing over the side and is everything rutted out and destroyed underneath, it wasn't.
1:35:27 Speaker 01 Also, it's your house, like, it's one thing if you do it as somebody else's house, I know, it's so scary. Yesterday morning, I went, so, we'll talk about, two days ago, we were, we had a big adventure on the boat, which we'll talk about.
1:35:42 Dax Shepard? Huge.
1:35:43 Speaker 01 But in that adventure, I lost a shirt.
1:35:48 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:35:48 Speaker 01 Okay, and I, so then yesterday morning, I walked over to the boat to see if I could find the shirt.
1:35:56 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:35:57 Speaker 01 Um, and it was closed, the boat was closed.
1:36:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:36:01 Speaker 01 So I got kind of down.
1:36:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you can crawl in there.
1:36:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I got down and I was like, oh, I'll crawl in. And as I started to crawl, and then the whole, you know, the boat was moving.
1:36:12 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:36:13 Speaker 01 And I thought, I don't know enough about boats to do this, like, what if it moves and scrapes something while I'm in there, what if it's not, I don't know about tying, like, what if it's not tied and then I'm floating away and I don't know how to get your boat back?
1:36:30 Dax Shepard? Did you have your phone with you?
1:36:31 Speaker 01 No, and so I panicked and I, I was, and it was mainly, it was like, if I ruin Dax's boat, like, it is, it is the end of our friendship, so I, I didn't look.
1:36:48 Dax Shepard? You know, I wouldn't even really care. If I ruined my boat, I'd hate myself, and if you ruined your, my boat, I would be very quick to be over it. Believe it or not, because I've had friends ruin my motorcycles and I generally take that pretty well. I'm only mad when I fail.
1:37:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it's so scary.
1:37:06 Dax Shepard? Ah, yeah. No, there's nothing worse than breaking someone else's stuff.
1:37:09 Speaker 01 I know. So I, I didn't, I didn't.
1:37:12 Dax Shepard? You just gave up?
1:37:13 Speaker 01 I gave up and I was like, I don't need that shirt.
1:37:14 Dax Shepard? Wha- what shirt is it?
1:37:16 Speaker 01 I found it.
1:37:16 Dax Shepard? You found it? Where is it?
1:37:18 Speaker 01 Um, I found it on the walk back. It had fallen out on the walk back.
1:37:22 Dax Shepard? Well, it was a little scary in Memphis when we exited the boat and that's probably why.
1:37:25 Speaker 01 Exactly. It was a new shirt. It was a vintage shirt I got.
1:37:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So our big adventure, which was, what a day. What a day.
1:37:33 Speaker 01 It was a crazy day.
1:37:35 Dax Shepard? So where we live is on a lake, you can go through locks and go down to the lower river and then you could take that all the way into Nashville. And I want to say that the TWA officers I was dealing with in the break room or office of the restaurant, uh, one of them had said to me like, um, it's, it's 26 miles. Once you've passed the locks.
1:37:59 Speaker 01 Right.
1:38:00 Dax Shepard? So lot to think about there. I, I don't, you know, what are we going to average? How much fuel do we need?
1:38:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:07 Dax Shepard? How long is that going to take? Blah, blah, blah.
1:38:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:10 Dax Shepard? So we, um, and we had to race to the locks because the locks are mostly used by these huge barges.
1:38:18 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:38:19 Dax Shepard? And it takes hours for them to load all the different barges into the locks.
1:38:23 Speaker 01 You might need to tell people about the locks. I had no idea what they were.
1:38:26 Dax Shepard? Okay, great. So locks, um, help connect two bodies of water that are at different elevations. So if you imagine one swimming pool is 20 feet higher than the next swimming pool below it, they build this chamber between the two. And what you do is you open the doors on the higher lake and the back doors are closed. All that water flows into the lock. So it's the same level as the upper lake. Then you close the door of the upper lake.
1:38:54 Speaker 01 You go in and then you close the door.
1:38:55 Dax Shepard? All of the water out of this big ch- chamber.
1:38:58 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:38:59 Dax Shepard? And then when it's all out, they open the doors and you're at sea level or the river, the lower river level. And there's a lock master. All this stuff's new to me. There's a lock master who controls the locks.
1:39:09 Speaker 01 I was glad he was there.
1:39:10 Dax Shepard? You're glad I didn't have to operate the locks.
1:39:12 Speaker 01 No, no, I just wanted some oversight.
1:39:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I didn't hate the oversight either. But again, all of it, I kind of don't know how it works. I just have heard like, oh, you know, you gotta get an appointment with the. So anyways, I got the lock master's number off of the internet and I called and it just like dude answers.
1:39:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:28 Dax Shepard? Really nice guy. And I was like, hey, I want to go through the locks in my Pontus. Yeah, yeah, okay, great. And I said, when should I come? He's like, you can come anytime, but we do have a barge coming in at 11. And that'll be two hours. So basically, the locks are taken for two hours. That wouldn't have worked for our whole scheme. Anyways, we fly across the lake, we get gas, we make it just in time, we go through the locks. The locks are incredible.
1:39:54 Speaker 01 They're very cool.
1:39:55 Dax Shepard? So much cooler than I was expecting. I think I thought we were gonna drop down like 20 feet, maybe. And we dropped down 60 feet.
1:40:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:05 Dax Shepard? We did, we dropped down 60 feet. We did the math. We did the math and we looked it up on the internet. But the locks are 400 feet long and 87 feet wide and 60 feet deep. And if you add all that up, that's 15 million gallons of water.
1:40:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:23 Dax Shepard? What's really cool about the locks we were thinking about is they require almost no electricity. Everything's just gravity's doing everything. The gravity from the higher lake fills up the chamber and then gravity drains it.
1:40:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:35 Dax Shepard? And really, you're just paying for these doors to open and close hydraulically.
1:40:39 Speaker 01 It was really cool. I liked it.
1:40:41 Dax Shepard? You're scared.
1:40:42 Speaker 01 I liked it for a while. Then, as we were getting really low. I did feel very, um, why do I keep forgetting?
1:40:51 Dax Shepard? claustrophobic?
1:40:51 Speaker 01 No, it's the movie. I keep forgetting that. I felt very Final Destination prone, like, okay, so we're so low and what I know is on the opposite side of that door is.
1:41:03 Dax Shepard? 60 foot wall of water.
1:41:04 Speaker 01 Yes. And so if that something got unlatched.
1:41:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:09 Speaker 01 And that door opened.
1:41:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:12 Speaker 01 A 60 foot wall of water is gonna slam onto us.
1:41:15 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:41:16 Speaker 01 Unless we forget, I can't swim. Okay.
1:41:20 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:41:20 Speaker 01 That we know, we think.
1:41:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:22 Speaker 01 Here's what I do know.
1:41:24 Dax Shepard? When you say we, you mean I.
1:41:25 Speaker 01 I said, Les, we forget I can't swim.
1:41:27 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:41:28 Speaker 01 I can't swim.
1:41:29 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:41:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. Even if I could swim, which I might, I think I can swim a little.
1:41:33 Dax Shepard? I still have a, I think I still have a case.
1:41:35 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:41:36 Dax Shepard? Because we don't agree that you can't swim.
1:41:39 Speaker 01 Okay, that's fine.
1:41:40 Dax Shepard? There we go. Okay, I, I knew there was. You're the only one that thinks you can't swim.
1:41:43 Speaker 01 I, here's, okay, I can swim a little bit. Um, I can't, I can't, and I am certain of this, swim up sixty feet of water. I can't. I can't even, I think ten feet I can't do. I can barely do five feet, which is my height.
1:42:02 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:42:03 Speaker 01 So, um, I'm dead, right? Like, I, I am dead, um, in that scenario. And, and, and as soon as that thought entered, I was like, I'm ready to be out of this now. I'd like to be out of, out of this.
1:42:16 Dax Shepard? And then how, how soon were we out of it? Another ten minutes?
1:42:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. So what was your anxiety level out of ten?
1:42:22 Speaker 01 It was like equal parts as we were going down, my anxiety was going up incrementally.
1:42:28 Dax Shepard? It was inversely proportional.
1:42:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, which was cool.
1:42:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. So it drops us out onto this river.
1:42:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:42:36 Dax Shepard? And now we're in the middle of nowhere. It feels like we are in the wild, we're in Siberia. I mean, there's just nothing. And it's a really quaint, it really reminded me of the St. Joseph River in Sturgis, where I used to go canoeing with my pippy. Just the most beautiful scenic boat ride.
1:42:54 Speaker 01 It was nice. It was definitely, uh, so, so there was a girl at the house earlier that morning, um, who lives here.
1:43:02 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:43:03 Speaker 01 And, and you weren't here for this, but she, she was like, what are you guys gonna do today? And, and we were like, oh, we're going into Nashville on the boat. And she was like.
1:43:15 Speaker 01 Oh. Oh, wow. And then like, I mean, she was like, you guys are really in for an adventure. And then I looked at Kristen and Kristen was like, do people not really do that? And she was like, I don't know anyone who's done it.
1:43:30 Dax Shepard? I got the feeling when we went through the lock. Well, clearly there was no one else using the locks other than these barges. I did, when we were in the locks, I was like, nobody does this.
1:43:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:38 Dax Shepard? That lives on the lake, or very few, clearly.
1:43:40 Speaker 01 And then there were no other boats on the river.
1:43:42 Dax Shepard? And then we never saw anyone on the river. Yeah, we were 26 miles on the river and we didn't see anyone.
1:43:46 Speaker 01 So we were definitely doing something novel.
1:43:49 Dax Shepard? But I loved it because you're seeing the back. We saw a naked woman out in our, um, watering her flowers on her deck. Lincoln spotted it.
1:43:57 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:43:58 Dax Shepard? She said, oh, that woman's nudie. And I thought, yeah, she has the freedom to be nudie because nobody does this except for we did it. Then we get into downtown Nashville. I'm like, you know, we got a dock somewhere. And I did look up some places and I had a rough idea of where I thought we could. But I was also nervous it was going to be difficult. It was not. You can just pull, again, nobody's doing this. Pull your boat right up to this dock, right under the pedestrian bridge that leads into Nashville from the stadium. QR code, registered.
1:44:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:28 Dax Shepard? Code to get out of the locked gate. So easy.
1:44:32 Speaker 01 It was easy, yeah.
1:44:33 Dax Shepard? It's easy to stop being astounded by where we're at technologically, but that's incredible.
1:44:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:37 Dax Shepard? And then we went into, we walked into town. It was 350 degrees.
1:44:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:42 Dax Shepard? We walked over to, uh, what I think is one of the best burgers in Nashville.
1:44:47 Speaker 01 It was a good burger.
1:44:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, The One Hotel has an incredible restaurant. We had a wonderful lunch. Everything's right. Went shopping, which I normally hate.
1:44:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, you bought pants.
1:44:57 Dax Shepard? I bought pants and sunglasses. That's the most I've shopped in a decade out in public.
1:45:03 Speaker 01 It was weird to see you shopping.
1:45:04 Dax Shepard? Ding, ding, ding. These pants are one of the things I got.
1:45:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're nice.
1:45:09 Dax Shepard? Perfect day, perfect day. And then we decide we're going to get back on the boat. And then now we decide, I decide we're going to go to single bimini mode and try to make a little time back.
1:45:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:45:19 Dax Shepard? It took about two and a half hours to get there.
1:45:22 Speaker 01 It was, it was a hike.
1:45:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And so we come back again. Everything's hunky dory. I called the lock master. He's like, oh, lower free. It's so easy. I can't believe how easy it is. Now we get into the locks now this time and now we're now we're rising up sixty feet and that takes a bit longer.
1:45:39 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:45:39 Dax Shepard? Quite a bit longer and the entire time we're rising, we're in this cement cylinder.
1:45:45 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:45:45 Dax Shepard? Box.
1:45:46 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:45:47 Dax Shepard? Noticing lightning's picking up over the lake, the clouds are getting pretty dark. We're still a good half hour boat ride to the house once we get.
1:45:58 Speaker 01 Hour.
1:45:59 Dax Shepard? Well.
1:45:59 Speaker 01 Think we had about an hour left.
1:46:01 Dax Shepard? Anyways, by the time we get on the lake, now it's um getting gnarly and not only is it getting gnarly, where the clouds are at, I know if we haul butt and because the the river snakes around, we're gonna be in a different area of all that cloud, like we're incentivized to get through it quickly because we're gonna be on the other side of it. So now we're pinned going forty in a pontoon boat, forty four actually, on a machine, starts crazy downpouring, uh, there's lightning everywhere. Um, I'm only comforted by the fact that there's like ten different jet skiers still out
1:46:43 Dax Shepard? and three or four other people fishing and my hopefully the lightning will hit the rod before it hits my children. Um, it was harrowing.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:46:52 Dax Shepard? From your perspective, what was happening, I was driving.
1:46:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, you were driving.
1:46:56 Dax Shepard? Rain just blasting in my eyes.
1:46:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:58 Dax Shepard? It was painful. I had to put a shirt on midway through.
1:47:01 Speaker 01 That's what made it it was it hurt, the rain hurt. Um, it wasn't like just regular rain, it felt like hail and it was hit, it was just hitting at everyone's faces and I was like, why is it, why, because because we were in the back and we were technically covered and I was like, why am I still, it made no sense. Like it was coming in from the side.
1:47:25 Dax Shepard? In the front.
1:47:25 Speaker 01 And the front and the back at one point, so then I got under a towel and I was just like under this towel, but very quickly the towel just becomes a hundred pounds, right? It's just like weighted water towel on you, but it did help with the hail on the face.
1:47:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I really did think we were experiencing hail at one point because the raindrops got so big, they were like the size of your eyeballs, some of them that hit me, the raindrops are huge and I'm like, gee, are we transitioning to hail right now?
1:47:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:55 Dax Shepard? It's also fucking cold at that point.
1:47:58 Speaker 01 Freezing cold.
1:48:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:48:00 Speaker 01 And yeah, I was like, at one point, I it felt like someone was just taking the buckets of water and just pouring it. I was like, why? Why?
1:48:10 Dax Shepard? Why are my underwear wet?
1:48:11 Speaker 01 Exactly. The whole thing is just wet.
1:48:13 Dax Shepard? Why is my anus wet?
1:48:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:15 Dax Shepard? How does water gotten everywhere?
1:48:17 Speaker 01 Like, I just sat in a puddle.
1:48:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:48:19 Speaker 01 Um, anyway, it was, it was rough and I, I was like, let's just, we're just gonna, we're just gonna breathe through it.
1:48:32 Dax Shepard? Several different times while I was driving.
1:48:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:35 Dax Shepard? This is a challenge for me.
1:48:36 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:48:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like this is painful.
1:48:38 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:48:39 Dax Shepard? And you gotta see it through.
1:48:40 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:48:41 Dax Shepard? I mean, you just have to imagine it's like a good thirty-five minutes of that experience. Um, before it let up a bit.
1:48:49 Speaker 01 Barely.
1:48:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Um, but I was thinking, hmm, if I know this is serious, what does Monica feel like back?
1:48:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I was, I had mentioned, I'm aware of lightning. Very aware of it. Um, cause it was a thing, like, you know, as you know, I'm sure, but maybe not because you're more adventurous, but it was just always a thing like, don't be, get out of the water immediately if there's lightning. And also don't be near trees. Don't be near, like, there's all this stuff and I'm like, oh my God, we are, we are like primed.
1:49:30 Dax Shepard? And I just did the math quickly. What are the options right now?
1:49:34 Speaker 01 No, that's, I know.
1:49:35 Dax Shepard? You can't go to shore.
1:49:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:37 Dax Shepard? We're gonna go to some stranger's dock. We're still be outside with lightning next to now trees, which I don't think is much better.
1:49:44 Speaker 01 It's bad.
1:49:44 Dax Shepard? And then we're gonna sit there and that storm may stay there for three hours versus half hour of hell, but be out of it. So it's, to me, it was just like, oh yeah, you have one choice. You just gotta, you gotta pedal down and get through this.
1:49:57 Speaker 01 I know. I, I guess, yeah, I was like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna breathe through it.
1:50:01 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:50:02 Speaker 01 Um, I-
1:50:03 Dax Shepard? Kind of immersion therapy for you.
1:50:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I-
1:50:06 Dax Shepard? You don't need any immersion.
1:50:07 Speaker 01 I hate- I hate being cold for one. I just hate being cold.
1:50:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you like being hot.
1:50:16 Speaker 01 I love being hot. I can stand a lot of heat, but I can't stand barely any cold.
1:50:21 Dax Shepard? Almost no cold.
1:50:22 Speaker 01 And I hate being wet in clothes.
1:50:27 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure. Well, I don't think anyone likes that.
1:50:30 Speaker 01 No one likes that.
1:50:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't think you're unique in that.
1:50:33 Speaker 01 No one likes that. There's no way to know people's sensitivity levels, right?
1:50:39 Dax Shepard? It was a great snapshot of personalities because I turned a corner midway through.
1:50:46 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:50:47 Dax Shepard? I was like, this is rough, man. It's freezing. It hurts. I can't see. I have to keep my eyes open and look forward because I'm driving.
1:50:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:54 Dax Shepard? I'm just getting blasted and my sunglasses were too, I had to like, I had this gap between the visor of my hat and my sunglasses that I was looking between.
1:51:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:03 Dax Shepard? And it was pelting it. But then Eric, Lily and Lincoln.
1:51:08 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:51:09 Dax Shepard? Answered the call of the wild.
1:51:10 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:51:11 Dax Shepard? They were like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. You know, he's on top. They have a huge storm. He doesn't have his legs and he's at the top and he's just like yelling, bring on the storm.
1:51:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:22 Dax Shepard? They were dancing at the front of the boat.
1:51:24 Speaker 01 Yep, they were.
1:51:25 Dax Shepard? Spastically, having a great time. And I thought, this, I think that's a better approach. So then I stood and I started dancing while driving and it did help a ton.
1:51:38 Speaker 01 Great.
1:51:39 Dax Shepard? And so this snapshot, someone called it out. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but someone said, look, the firstborns are at the front of the boat.
1:51:47 Speaker 01 Not me.
1:51:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you are not. Neither was Kristen.
1:51:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:50 Dax Shepard? It's a bad analogy.
1:51:51 Speaker 01 And I also, and Molly. So no, all of us.
1:51:54 Dax Shepard? No sense.
1:51:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:55 Dax Shepard? Just those were up, those kids were up there. That's all.
1:51:57 Speaker 01 I. Yeah, it definitely is personality. I will say, no one, I mean, I guess we couldn't, but like, no one was throwing any tantrums.
1:52:08 Dax Shepard? No, no one was a stinker.
1:52:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, everyone was just like, we're getting through this.
1:52:13 Dax Shepard? No one was complaining.
1:52:14 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:52:15 Dax Shepard? Even Delta, who hated it, she knew complaining wasn't gonna help.
1:52:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, everyone was just like, this, we're here.
1:52:20 Dax Shepard? We gotta get through.
1:52:21 Speaker 01 We gotta get through it.
1:52:22 Dax Shepard? We got another thirty-five minutes.
1:52:23 Speaker 01 There's no point in
1:52:24 Dax Shepard? Of waterboarding.
1:52:25 Speaker 01 Doing anything other than just whatever you need to do.
1:52:29 Dax Shepard? To get through this thing.
1:52:29 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
1:52:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so, yeah, it's just a funny snapshot of all of our different wiring and our dopamine levels and whatever else.
1:52:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was funny, because at one point, when the, when the towel was so heavy.
1:52:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:52:43 Speaker 01 I was like, is it, am I, is it worse? Is it worse under here?
1:52:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:52:50 Speaker 01 So then I poked my head out, and that's when I saw they were dancing and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's cute. And I, I thought for half a second, I was like, should I just do that? But I was like, I can't, like, I can't.
1:53:05 Dax Shepard? It's not in you.
1:53:06 Speaker 01 I'd be lying. I wouldn't really be feeling happy. I would just be like, I'm doing it so that people think I'm cool.
1:53:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, I think it's that thing that they found out in that study where they're trying to document all the different facial expressions, and they learned you can
1:53:23 Speaker 01 I know.
1:53:24 Dax Shepard? Give yourself emotions with your physicality.
1:53:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:27 Dax Shepard? And so, I think in that situation, my brain caught up to my body.
1:53:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, but you're more likely, you're already more likely.
1:53:35 Dax Shepard? I'm a little more primed for that. Anyways, we got back. We made it safely, and
1:53:40 Speaker 01 You got us home safely.
1:53:42 Dax Shepard? It was an adventure.
1:53:42 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:53:43 Dax Shepard? Oh my God, it was so fun.
1:53:44 Speaker 01 It was a big adventure.
1:53:46 Dax Shepard? I guess my question is, you're out of your comfort zone in those situations.
1:53:50 Speaker 01 Which ones?
1:53:51 Dax Shepard? The boat, the boatie situation.
1:53:52 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:53:53 Dax Shepard? But is it the kind of thing where you're out of your comfort zone, but when you make it through it, you've, does it feel good, or?
1:54:03 Speaker 01 Um, that's a good question.
1:54:05 Dax Shepard? Like, cause, and again, I know you and I evaluate life so much differently, but it's like, I am immediately grateful for those situations. They're so memorable. We were all so in something together. There's so, there's so much magic that's happening. Throughout that. And in 30 years, we'll go, remember when we were coming back from Nashville and that, right? Like, and they were dancing at the front of the boat. Like, that is what it's all about, for me.
1:54:31 Speaker 01 Right.
1:54:31 Dax Shepard? And maybe, I don't know what my fear is, like, if you're just, like, everything's smooth and honky-dory, it just blends into nothingness and then time moves really quick. So, I just, I'm just very
1:54:46 Dax Shepard? activated by those.
1:54:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:51 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. A dark night, a quiet house, but inside, danger was lurking.
1:55:01 Speaker 03 Oh, not really. We have Xfinity Shield, so we're not worried.
1:55:05 Speaker 04 What if protecting your home and devices could be drama-free? Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Not available in all areas.
1:55:18 Speaker 01 I think you see, not, I think, we've taught, I mean, we know this. Like, you see life as a series of stories.
1:55:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:55:28 Speaker 01 So, for you,
1:55:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:55:30 Speaker 01 you're in it and you're like, this is a story. This, this is how you operate, right?
1:55:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:55:34 Speaker 01 I don't do that.
1:55:36 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:55:36 Speaker 01 Um, yet, I, I also have a billion stories.
1:55:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:55:44 Speaker 01 Right? Like, I don't feel like my life is without that.
1:55:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we already have the answer for this.
1:55:50 Speaker 01 Okay, let's hear it.
1:55:51 Dax Shepard? Because yours, the stories that are impactful for you, the threshold just way lower. So, it's like, and this is what we joke about, like, your Seinfeld stories.
1:55:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:00 Dax Shepard? It's like, kinda nothing happened, but so many things happen
1:56:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:05 Dax Shepard? because how you're experiencing it mentally. No, I couldn't get to the store.
1:56:09 Speaker 01 Right.
1:56:09 Dax Shepard? You know, he's like, and then I knew I couldn't go in there.
1:56:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:13 Dax Shepard? Those things-
1:56:13 Speaker 01 Psycho, they're more psychological.
1:56:15 Dax Shepard? What I'm suggesting is, like, me and- 60 mile an hour winds, rains with, in my eyes, is you looking at the laundry mat, not knowing if you're gonna go in there because there's a guy in there pulling his hair? So it's like, does that make sense?
1:56:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like when you correct for our level of what arousal we can handle, I bet we're hitting virtually the same point. But it takes a lot more for me
1:56:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:39 Dax Shepard? to feel scared of the woman screaming on the street.
1:56:41 Speaker 01 She was scary.
1:56:42 Dax Shepard? Right, but for me, I almost wouldn't remember that.
1:56:44 Speaker 01 I'm never in the moment thinking, this is a story. But I am okay with that because I think I am, I am present in the moments.
1:56:54 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:56:55 Speaker 01 And then later it will come up or something as a story.
1:57:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:00 Speaker 01 And then that's fun or whatever, but like, I don't, I don't know.
1:57:04 Dax Shepard? So you don't crave it?
1:57:06 Speaker 01 I don't crave it, but I'm not, because I don't have to, like.
1:57:08 Dax Shepard? And you're not evaluating your life by it?
1:57:11 Speaker 01 Life is gonna happen whether I'm aware of it or not. It's, it's, there's gonna be stories, there's gonna be things that happen that it's, it's, I don't, I personally don't need.
1:57:24 Dax Shepard? To instigate.
1:57:25 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:57:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:57:26 Speaker 01 I know it's here, I know it's coming, I'm not worried. I'm never worried like, we don't have anything to talk about. I just know, like, I, I'm not ever worried about that.
1:57:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not worried I'll have nothing to talk about.
1:57:43 Dax Shepard? But what I will do is like, if I left here and I hadn't gone through the locks and done the river to Nashville, I'd be very disappointed in myself. I would get back to LA and I'd be like, I wanted to try that.
1:57:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:57:56 Dax Shepard? I wanted to tackle that. So I'm like, oh yeah, that's a challenge, that's like a fun little mild, I mean, I'm acting like I climbed Everest, but it's just, it's unknown and that's exciting.
1:58:07 Speaker 01 That's very exciting.
1:58:08 Dax Shepard? And I would be super disappointed in myself if I didn't do it.
1:58:12 Speaker 01 I know, and that's what's so funny, like, I also have things like that, they're not adventures.
1:58:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:58:18 Speaker 01 But it's the same thing, it's like, oh god, like. I I I was here and I didn't go to this restaurant that I like know is there and I can't and like I can't go to normally. Or a store or a walk through something or I don't know like
1:58:35 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:58:36 Speaker 01 I have the same thing, but it's very different. They're not adventure based or they are to me adventures.
1:58:41 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes.
1:58:42 Speaker 01 But they're not like yours. They're not high arousal.
1:58:46 Dax Shepard? Correct, correct.
1:58:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:48 Dax Shepard? I am, as you know, reading the Mark Twain book.
1:58:51 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:58:51 Dax Shepard? And.
1:58:52 Speaker 01 Ding ding ding.
1:58:53 Dax Shepard? What?
1:58:54 Speaker 01 My shirt that I lost is Mark Twain.
1:58:58 Dax Shepard? What?
1:58:59 Speaker 01 It's a picture of Mark Twain and it's like, yeah.
1:59:01 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:59:02 Speaker 01 And it's like the rep- a repertory theater put on a Mark Twain play. That's what the shirt is.
1:59:07 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow. Well, he was a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. I was thinking about that as we were driving on the river.
1:59:14 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:59:15 Dax Shepard? Uh, cause he's obsessed with the river. Also, he, whatever. And but this guy, I'm reading this book. He's back and forth to Europe so much in the late 1800s.
1:59:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:27 Dax Shepard? But you want to talk about a guy who's like, you think what we, our little jaunt on the lake was crossing the Atlantic in the 1800s multiple times? You have to really be hungry for adventure.
1:59:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:40 Dax Shepard? And then once you're there, you're traveling all these crazy ways. You're not getting on a car or anything, you know?
1:59:45 Speaker 01 I know, horse.
1:59:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah, all kinds of shit. And, uh, and yeah, he just was constantly in Europe. I'm like, that's a crazy. Back then, you're making a three month decision to go to Europe.
1:59:57 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. Yeah, Molly and I were saying that when we were in the boat. We were like, God, this is like how people got around.
2:00:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:07 Speaker 01 She was like, yeah, I would just never go anywhere. I was like, yeah, I guess.
2:00:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, dopamine levels.
2:00:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:17 Speaker 01 I mean, we would go to go to a vintage store.
2:00:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, if there was like, um, a 90% off rose sale on the, on the other side of.
2:00:26 Speaker 01 I'd go three months.
2:00:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I loved it. I loved it.
2:00:30 Speaker 01 Good, yeah. Yeah, it was a fun adventure.
2:00:33 Dax Shepard? Want to do some facts?
2:00:34 Speaker 01 Well, I do want to say really quick that I did get a huge cut on my finger.
2:00:38 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
2:00:39 Speaker 01 Um.
2:00:41 Dax Shepard? Another cut.
2:00:42 Speaker 01 My hands have really taken a beating in this life.
2:00:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're prone to cut those.
2:00:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I tend to cut.
2:00:49 Dax Shepard? And hurt your ears. Your ears tend to get it. These are your Achilles. Your fingers and your ears.
2:00:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it was scary because we had a short amount of time before we had to leave in the morning. For the locks because of, as you said, it was closing and we didn't know. So like at nine, you know, at nine thirty, it was like, we're leaving at ten fifteen. It was like, ah! You know, and so it was like Kathy, you know, and everyone's like running around home alone, very home alone, get out the door.
2:01:18 Dax Shepard? Very home alone, but we could have left Elta behind on accident.
2:01:20 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. And, um, and I have a little pocket knife on my keychain. It's very cute. It's tiny and adorable.
2:01:31 Dax Shepard? Can you bring it through carry on?
2:01:32 Speaker 01 I, I didn't. I'm shocked I was able to. I think it was an accident.
2:01:37 Dax Shepard? It wasn't in your checked bag? We're so sorry, TSA.
2:01:41 Speaker 01 I'm so sorry. So anyway, I had, I was gonna wear an outfit that had, it was new, so it had tags on it. So I used the pocket knife to.
2:01:53 Dax Shepard? Cut the tag out.
2:01:54 Speaker 01 Cut the tag and I did a big slice. But then I was very, I was like, oh my God, because we have to go, like, we had to go.
2:02:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and you might need to go to the emergency room.
2:02:04 Speaker 01 I know. I knew I wasn't gonna need to go to the emergency room, but I did know, like, this is gonna be bleeding for a long time and I'm gonna need to put pressure on this. So I have to kind of do a, deal with this on the boat.
2:02:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:02:17 Speaker 01 And then.
2:02:18 Dax Shepard? You brought a lot of, you brought a lot of Band-Aids, in fact, in your purse on the trip. Somebody needed a Band-Aid and you had an entire Band-Aid box. You had a full bag of medication.
2:02:26 Speaker 01 I basically had a roll of, of.
2:02:28 Dax Shepard? You have a Rite Aid.
2:02:28 Speaker 01 Paper towels.
2:02:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you have a Rite Aid in your bag.
2:02:31 Speaker 01 I do. I carry a pharmacy in my bag and. Everyone benefits.
2:02:35 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:02:36 Speaker 01 Everyone loves it.
2:02:37 Dax Shepard? I many times have benefited. One other thing I think I want to say, we're having a fun marathon. It kind of happened accidentally.
2:02:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:02:46 Dax Shepard? Link, everyone gets to pick a night, what movie we watch.
2:02:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:02:49 Dax Shepard? And Lincoln picked Mission Impossible the first night.
2:02:52 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:02:53 Dax Shepard? I think Six we watched, MI6.
2:02:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:02:56 Dax Shepard? And all of us were like, this is fucking great.
2:02:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, really fun.
2:03:01 Dax Shepard? And then I think maybe because we'd watched that, it suggested other Tom Cruise. And then we just, then we started talking about like Tom Cruise. No, I know exactly how this happened. And this, and she deserves a lot of credit for this. On that long boat ride, Lily, Erica Malle's daughter, who invented Turkey Christmas.
2:03:19 Speaker 01 A secret turkey.
2:03:20 Dax Shepard? Secret turkey, very creative young lady.
2:03:22 Speaker 01 Very.
2:03:23 Dax Shepard? She said, I think Tom Cruise should open up Tom Cruise's Cruises.
2:03:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's a theme park.
2:03:35 Dax Shepard? And then I said, maybe it should be a theme park. Tom Cruise's Cruises. And so the theme park is his entire career, which he, by the way, guys, he has enough movies to make a theme park. There'd be Mission Impossible Ride, Minority Report Ride, so on and so on.
2:03:51 Speaker 01 Top Gun.
2:03:52 Dax Shepard? Top Gun, what a, Days of Thunder Ride would be incredible.
2:03:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, we said Rain Man, Kristen said Rain Man could be like the sensory area.
2:04:00 Dax Shepard? A sensory area, yeah, it's a good idea. So then Tom Cruise's Cruises became a funny joke. And then also, then Dahlia said, you could also do a show about the people that work there called Tom Cruise's Cruise. Cruise's Crew.
2:04:16 Speaker 01 Members.
2:04:16 Dax Shepard? Cruise Members.
2:04:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:18 Dax Shepard? Tom Cruise's Crew, Tom Cruise's Cruises Cruise Members.
2:04:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:23 Dax Shepard? Crew Members.
2:04:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, no Cruise Members.
2:04:26 Dax Shepard? But in pursuit of all the theme park rides, we kind of started digging into his movies. And then all of a sudden, we were like. Uh, fuck, A Few Good Men was so good.
2:04:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:35 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God, was that movie good.
2:04:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:37 Dax Shepard? So then we watched A Few Good Men and we were all riveted.
2:04:40 Speaker 01 First time I had seen it.
2:04:41 Dax Shepard? Was it?
2:04:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:42 Dax Shepard? What did you think of that?
2:04:43 Speaker 01 I loved it.
2:04:44 Dax Shepard? I mean, it won Best Picture. This isn't a revelation, but.
2:04:46 Speaker 01 Loved it.
2:04:47 Dax Shepard? Tonight, maybe we're talking Rain Man, we're talking, there's so many good options.
2:04:52 Speaker 01 There's so many. I think, I really, I think Jerry Maguire.
2:04:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Jerry Maguire.
2:04:56 Speaker 01 Kids will like Jerry Maguire.
2:04:58 Dax Shepard? They will. It's a great film.
2:04:59 Speaker 01 They're not getting enough love stories. Jerry Maguire is
2:05:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:05:05 Speaker 01 A great love story.
2:05:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Yeah.
2:05:08 Speaker 01 Classic. It was, I was thinking, I was like, my God, Tom Cruise is a part of so many classic lines, whether he's delivering or not. He is a part of so many.
2:05:23 Dax Shepard? You had me at hello.
2:05:24 Speaker 01 Yes, You Can't Handle the Truth, like.
2:05:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:05:27 Speaker 01 The Risky Business.
2:05:29 Dax Shepard? Whatever he said in that one.
2:05:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, he said some famous stuff there. I mean, really, that's just the visual that's so famous, but that, he's part of so many iconic film moments.
2:05:38 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God, yeah.
2:05:39 Speaker 01 More than anyone. Anyway, he's a movie, he's, he's, no, like, he's a movie star. He's a movie star.
2:05:46 Dax Shepard? We just figured that out on this trip.
2:05:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:05:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah. If you haven't heard of Tom Cruise, check out some of his work. Easy to find.
2:05:52 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, let's do some facts.
2:05:53 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:05:54 Speaker 01 Okay, so this is for Carter Sherman. Great talk. She studied Gen Z sex.
2:06:02 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:06:03 Speaker 01 Sex among the Gen Z, yeah. Very interesting. And, um.
2:06:08 Dax Shepard? I liked her a ton.
2:06:09 Speaker 01 She was really cool. Yeah, she was really, really cool.
2:06:11 Dax Shepard? And we debated a lot. And I had to ask her in the middle, wait, do you like debate? I should have done it beforehand.
2:06:16 Speaker 01 Right. She was awesome. Really enjoyed her.
2:06:19 Dax Shepard? I really liked that first name for a woman.
2:06:21 Speaker 01 Carter, me too. Me too. And that's my, one of my facts.
2:06:25 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:06:25 Speaker 01 Um, she said it's, uh, she thinks it's a common name in the South, where we currently are. So that's a ding ding ding.
2:06:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:06:32 Speaker 01 Now, I have a peer, and this is the social security website.
2:06:37 Dax Shepard? They would know.
2:06:37 Speaker 01 I guess. Um, I can pick names by year. I mean, year and state.
2:06:46 Speaker 01 So what should I pick?
2:06:47 Dax Shepard? Well, how old was she, do we think roughly?
2:06:50 Speaker 01 Oh, that's a good question. She was like five years younger than me, so she was thirty-two.
2:06:54 Dax Shepard? Ninety-two, search ninety-two.
2:06:56 Speaker 01 Okay, and should I, what state should I do? We should do a southern state.
2:06:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, let's do Mississippi.
2:07:02 Speaker 01 Okay, because we don't want to do Tennessee or Georgia because it's like skewed.
2:07:06 Dax Shepard? Well, no.
2:07:07 Speaker 01 It's skewed in our brains, okay? Um, so ninety-two.
2:07:12 Dax Shepard? The problem's gonna be, can you specify female, Carter?
2:07:14 Speaker 01 These are a hundred. No, I'm not looking at that. And now I'm just doing Mississippi from nineteen ninety-two. What are the biggest names?
2:07:23 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
2:07:23 Speaker 01 Now, I'm a little confused because this is top five names by state for a selected birth year, but then this doesn't have... I'm gonna have to go a hundred. Okay, ninety-two.
2:07:36 Dax Shepard? No.
2:07:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:07:38 Dax Shepard? Start way higher.
2:07:39 Speaker 01 No, no, I'm sorry.
2:07:40 Dax Shepard? Oh, the year.
2:07:49 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Just for that, I'm starting at a hundred.
2:07:54 Dax Shepard? Textbook Monica.
2:07:55 Speaker 01 I wanted to, I want to still.
2:07:57 Dax Shepard? Please don't.
2:07:59 Speaker 01 Please, I could go so fast.
2:08:01 Dax Shepard? No, start at the top ten.
2:08:02 Speaker 01 Fine. Okay.
2:08:06 Speaker 01 Number one male name is Christopher. In Mississippi, ninety-nine, nineteen ninety-two. Female name, Ashley. Tracks.
2:08:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Ashley Madison.
2:08:16 Speaker 01 Okay, how many, well, we can pick a new state. I want to do a more.
2:08:21 Dax Shepard? You just did the two?
2:08:22 Speaker 01 You want to do more from Mississippi?
2:08:23 Dax Shepard? You went from a hundred to just giving me the top one and two? I said, give, start at ten.
2:08:27 Speaker 01 And for a lot of states?
2:08:28 Dax Shepard? No, for Mississippi.
2:08:29 Speaker 01 I know, but I want to do multiple states, that's what I'm saying.
2:08:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, you're trying to figure out a way to get to a hundred now. Now you want to do ten states, top ten. Okay, will you read me a couple more names off of Mississippi?
2:08:38 Speaker 01 Sure.
2:08:39 Dax Shepard? Thank you.
2:08:39 Speaker 01 Okay, top, top three male names.
2:08:43 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:08:43 Speaker 01 For Mississippi in nineteen ninety-two, Christopher James Michael.
2:08:49 Dax Shepard? These are standard.
2:08:50 Speaker 01 Okay, female names. Top three, Ashley Jessica Brittany. Yeah, I know them all.
2:08:56 Dax Shepard? No, met them, know them all.
2:08:58 Speaker 01 Already met them. Okay, now let's do a different state.
2:09:01 Dax Shepard? Georgia.
2:09:01 Speaker 01 Let's do, okay, then I want to do Michigan.
2:09:03 Dax Shepard? Okay, and Illinois.
2:09:05 Speaker 01 Should I do nineteen eighty-seven, my birth year?
2:09:07 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:09:09 Dax Shepard? Just to make it not one to one relative.
2:09:11 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
2:09:13 Dax Shepard? Monica's number one?
2:09:14 Speaker 01 No.
2:09:16 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:09:16 Speaker 01 Christopher?
2:09:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:09:18 Speaker 01 Again.
2:09:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:09:19 Speaker 01 Jessica, female.
2:09:20 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:09:21 Speaker 01 Then Ashley.
2:09:23 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:09:23 Speaker 01 Ashley was number one in the old list. Jessica, Ashley, Brittany.
2:09:28 Dax Shepard? Wow.
2:09:28 Speaker 01 Christopher, Michael, Joshua.
2:09:30 Dax Shepard? Joshua?
2:09:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:09:32 Dax Shepard? Did you know a lot of Joshuas down there?
2:09:33 Speaker 01 Joshes, yeah. Okay, let's do Michigan, when you were born, nineteen seventy-five.
2:09:38 Dax Shepard? With Dax was the first name.
2:09:39 Speaker 01 Okay, Michigan, nineteen seventy-five, way back when Dax was coming out of the vagina.
2:09:45 Dax Shepard? Well, we don't need to talk about.
2:09:47 Speaker 01 Laura LeBeau's vagina.
2:09:49 Dax Shepard? Your mom's.
2:09:50 Speaker 01 Your mom's vagina. Okay, top three, Michael. Michael's hitting that top.
2:09:57 Dax Shepard? Biblical, baby.
2:09:58 Speaker 01 Jason.
2:09:59 Dax Shepard? That's new.
2:10:00 Speaker 01 Christopher.
2:10:01 Dax Shepard? God, Chris, banging.
2:10:02 Speaker 01 Christopher, okay, girl.
2:10:04 Dax Shepard? A name for any season.
2:10:06 Speaker 01 I guess so. Top three.
2:10:09 Dax Shepard? Oh, Amy, let me guess, because it's growing up.
2:10:11 Speaker 01 That's fun, yeah.
2:10:12 Dax Shepard? Amy, Julie, and Sarah.
2:10:16 Speaker 01 Amy's number two.
2:10:17 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:10:18 Speaker 01 That was good. Jennifer is number one.
2:10:20 Dax Shepard? Sure, that's classic, too.
2:10:22 Speaker 01 And Heather is number three.
2:10:24 Dax Shepard? Oh, I had a stepsister named Heather.
2:10:26 Speaker 01 What was the other one you said?
2:10:27 Dax Shepard? I said Julie, Amy, and Sarah.
2:10:33 Speaker 01 Okay, Sarah is twelve and Julie is fourteen, so you're pretty good.
2:10:37 Dax Shepard? God, Julie's fourteen?
2:10:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, did you know any, um, Angela's?
2:10:41 Dax Shepard? How about Carrie?
2:10:42 Speaker 01 Carrie is twenty-one.
2:10:43 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:10:44 Speaker 01 That's good, these are still like, this is top hundred, you won't even let me say.
2:10:49 Dax Shepard? Will you go, will you do, um, four through ten?
2:10:52 Speaker 01 Harenish, Harry.
2:10:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's, I, I met so many herenishes. I dated two herenishes before I was even in high school. I wish I dated a herenish, that sounds beautiful.
2:11:03 Speaker 01 It does sound nice.
2:11:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:11:05 Speaker 01 I, um, I was trying to quickly go from a hundred, it was Sharon, Misty, Joey, Corny.
2:11:11 Dax Shepard? No, no, no, I didn't dance for a hundred, it's ten, ten. Ten. This isn't your opportunity to do a hundred. Ten.
2:11:15 Speaker 01 When can I ever do a hundred? On my birthday?
2:11:18 Dax Shepard? Um, you've done a hundred.
2:11:19 Speaker 01 Everyone loves it so much.
2:11:21 Dax Shepard? Everyone always writes in, says more hundred plus lists.
2:11:25 Speaker 01 Okay, ten. Rebecca, Kimberly, Nicole, Lisa, Melissa, Michelle.
2:11:30 Dax Shepard? Lisa. I'm surprised Lisa's not higher.
2:11:33 Speaker 01 Lisa's seven. That's pretty high. Melissa, Michelle, Angela, Heather, Amy, Jennifer.
2:11:38 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:11:39 Speaker 01 Now I feel like I kinda wanna go back real quick.
2:11:41 Dax Shepard? And do what I asked you to do in Georgia?
2:11:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:11:43 Dax Shepard? Which is top ten?
2:11:44 Speaker 01 No, but I wanna do top ten.
2:11:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:11:46 Speaker 01 Okay, ten. Nineteen eighty-seven, Georgia.
2:11:49 Dax Shepard? You know, a lot of lists are top ten.
2:11:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't under. I don't actually. It's like not enough information.
2:11:54 Dax Shepard? I think it's the most popular kinda list is top ten.
2:11:57 Speaker 01 So, ten females. Lauren, yes. Sarah, yes. Amber.
2:12:02 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:12:02 Speaker 01 That one's interesting to me. Heather, yes. Tiffany, Jennifer, Amanda, Brittany, Ashley, Jessica. Yes! Now Rob, let's do Rob. Chicago, Illinois.
2:12:16 Dax Shepard? Nineteen ninety-six.
2:12:18 Speaker 01 Nineteen eighty-six?
2:12:19 Dax Shepard? Eighty-eight.
2:12:21 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, I made you.
2:12:22 Dax Shepard? Older than you.
2:12:23 Speaker 01 I'm gonna do eighty-six cuz I'd like you to be older than me. Okay, boys.
2:12:29 Dax Shepard? You're not gonna like this, but I do wanna add we've accomplished nothing because our goal is to find out if the names were different in the South, but we've not used any of the same years. So we've really learned nothing. We did Georgia, but we didn't do the same.
2:12:42 Speaker 01 Her year.
2:12:43 Dax Shepard? Year.
2:12:44 Speaker 01 Carter's year. Okay, I'll go back. Hold on, first, real quick. Christopher, Matthew. Michael, number one. Matthew, number two. Christopher, number three. Robert, number thirteen.
2:12:55 Dax Shepard? Thirteen.
2:12:55 Speaker 01 That's better than what we have. We have nothing.
2:12:58 Dax Shepard? Anna Baker's preferred dozen.
2:13:00 Speaker 01 That's right. Now the girls, Jessica, Ashley, Amanda. Jessica and Ashley, my god, they really hit the US.
2:13:06 Dax Shepard? Jessica Chastain. The Simpsons. Jessica Simpson. Took both of them.
2:13:10 Speaker 01 Okay, now I'm gonna go back. What did we say her age was? Ninety-two? Okay, now Georgia 92, um, no Carter's on here. I think she means more like it's an old southern name.
2:13:26 Dax Shepard? Well, there's a big gap between it's more popular in the south and it's the top, it's in the top 10 in the south.
2:13:31 Speaker 01 It's not on the top 100 in Georgia. I guess, let me look at Tennessee real quick.
2:13:35 Dax Shepard? Let's take a little gandy. Wow, you can look at 100 names and...
2:13:38 Speaker 01 But Carter would be in Georgia because President Carter's from Georgia and that's not there. Okay, Tennessee, no Carter's in Tennessee.
2:13:49 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:13:50 Speaker 01 In the top 100. Dominique makes the list, but no Carter.
2:13:53 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:13:54 Speaker 01 All right, well, that was really fun.
2:13:56 Dax Shepard? That was great.
2:13:57 Speaker 01 Do we need to look at any more states?
2:13:59 Dax Shepard? No, I think that's...
2:13:59 Speaker 01 Oh, I do want to just...
2:14:02 Speaker 01 Just want to look at California. Wow.
2:14:05 Dax Shepard? Xavier.
2:14:06 Speaker 01 Oh, wait, I didn't click... No, that's where you think you're so funny with California being so weird.
2:14:15 Dax Shepard? Chris, Michael, Tony.
2:14:16 Speaker 01 Michael, Daniel, Christopher, Jessica, Ashley, Stephanie.
2:14:20 Dax Shepard? Michael, Daniel, Lisa.
2:14:22 Speaker 01 Okay, well, I think this is fun. If anyone wants to like look for their name, um, go to the social security website. Um, the other fact is that there was a huge Sim moment because this episode is the same week as Seth's episode. Both of these, both Seth and Carter went to Northwestern. So this is an accidental Northwestern week.
2:14:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God, congratulations Northwestern week.
2:14:47 Speaker 01 Yes, unifile.
2:14:50 Dax Shepard? I gotta say, out of all those elite schools, that one's at the top of my interest level.
2:14:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:54 Dax Shepard? It feels very artsy.
2:14:55 Speaker 01 It is artsy, I think, and then I have a lot of friends who went there and they're all cool.
2:15:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think they're like, they're super smart, but not snobby about being smart.
2:15:05 Speaker 01 My friend Jen, who went to Northwestern, said, and I'm, I didn't say this, Jen said this, that it's the place you go to when you don't get into like Yale or like these Ivies. Um, so it's like still a very, very good school.
2:15:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:22 Speaker 01 But it's not Ivy, so that would line up with what you're talking about.
2:15:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I went there.
2:15:26 Speaker 01 What?
2:15:26 Dax Shepard? Sac crap.
2:15:28 Speaker 01 Oh, wow, okay.
2:15:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:31 Speaker 01 And the last fact is that you're not Zach Braff.
2:15:34 Dax Shepard? Although we just had an Army Cherry, Army Cherry, tell us that she had a crush on Zach Braff. So that she had no choice but to kind of have a crush on me.
2:15:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I thought that was great.
2:15:44 Dax Shepard? That's great.
2:15:44 Speaker 01 Okay, that's it.
2:15:45 Dax Shepard? All right, love you.
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