Adam Mosseri Returns (Head of Instagram)

Adam Mosseri (Instagram, Facebook, Fortune’s 40 Under 40) is the CEO/Head of Instagram at Meta. Adam joins the Armchair Expert to discuss being the suit in a family of artists and designers, how we build up emotional affinities for particular brands, and why his approach to design is based in problem solving. Adam and Dax talk about using intelligent technology to evaluate safety at scale, how the Instagram algorithm actually works, and the arms race of the ability to detect when something was made by AI. Adam explains the process of rolling out new features and dealing with mistakes, the implications of how power has been shifting from institutions to individuals, and his prediction that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Miniature Mouse.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Hi there.

• 0:08Dax Shepard?

  I'm usually Miniature Mouse because our guest has almost mouse in their name.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 0:13Dax Shepard?

  Adam Mosseri.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:15Dax Shepard?

  Mosseri.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, it sounds, it sounds like a European version of mouse.

• 0:21Dax Shepard?

  Like an erudite mouse.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:23Dax Shepard?

  Um, Adam is the current CEO of Instagram.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 0:26Dax Shepard?

  And, um, he's willing to talk about all the things that are scary in, in a very fearless way, and I admire it. And I thought this was a great, great conversation.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  So did I.

• 0:36Dax Shepard?

  Please enjoy Adam Mosseri. We get support from Quince.

• 0:41Speaker 01

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• 0:50Dax Shepard?

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• 1:12Speaker 01

  $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories, they skip the middlemen, and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 1:30Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:39Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 1:41Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.

• 1:59Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is supported by Dell. Ready to upgrade your PC? The Dell Top Tech Event is here. And you can skip the research because independent tech experts already did it. Dell has laptops, desktops, and monitors that have been tested, reviewed, and named a winner by the publishers you trust. So instead of spending hours researching, you get a shortlist that's already proven.

• 2:44Dax Shepard?

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• 3:48Dax Shepard?

  He has it lovely in here, right? I'm gonna make a little room for you.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  It's like a glow up. Oh, yeah, we try.

• 3:54Dax Shepard?

  We hated it at first.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Because you got used to the old way.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that had a special juju.

• 3:59Dax Shepard?

  How long are you in town?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Just the day.

• 4:02Dax Shepard?

  Just a couple hours?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got a couple of things and then it's Nico, my 10-year-old's birthday.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Oh, happy birthday.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  I gotta get back for Buster.

• 4:09Dax Shepard?

  The 21st.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Buster's. 21st is his birthday, yeah.

• 4:11Dax Shepard?

  You can tolerate Dave and Buster's?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  I put earplugs in.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I was gonna say. We have a mutual friend, Eric, who kept wanting to do playdates there with. Our daughters and last time I went, I was like, I don't know what's up with my sensory system, but it's way too much.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It's wildly overstimulating.

• 4:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's too much. It makes me feel like I'm getting attacked.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  My eight year old wanted to go for his birthday. This was November. And my wife signed up. She's like, cool. We'll take the whole class, 25 kids.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  And she's like, and we'll got him like no other parents.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  She's ambitious.

• 4:43Dax Shepard?

  Talk about ambitious.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  She's insane. It ended up being like five adults because a couple of parents did come. And we rented a bus. She's a genius. She got them all yellow vests.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  To like label them.

• 4:55Dax Shepard?

  That wouldn't have flown at my birthday party. Like, Mom, we look like dorks, the crossing guards.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Ace is a good age.

• 5:00Dax Shepard?

  They thought it was cool.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  They were just like, I don't care.

• 5:02Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they didn't even think about it.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I made them like, I was counting them, you know, off like one, two, three. I'm like, what number are you? He's like, oh, no.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 5:09Dax Shepard?

  This is an eight year old birthday party?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Wow, you guys.

• 5:12Dax Shepard?

  They're 10, seven and four, but now they're 11, eight?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  They're 10, eight and five now.

• 5:17Dax Shepard?

  Five.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  The bruiser is five. He'll be six soon.

• 5:19Dax Shepard?

  And what are the names again?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Nico, Blaze and Elio.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Cute. Really great.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  They are wonderful and they also are just exhausting. The youngest one is like a brute.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Really?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He plays soccer with his brothers. They don't take it easy on him. They just beat him. And then he goes and plays soccer with his own age. I took him to his older brother's soccer game and he's like, oh, I scored a goal. I was like, oh, cool. How many goals did you score? He goes, I scored 15.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  And I was like, he's clearly lying. He's five. So I called his mom and she's like, oh, no, he definitely scored.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  No way.

• 5:53Dax Shepard?

  I tell that all the time on here, which is like, I thought I was so weak and so bad at skateboarding because my brother's five years older than me. And then I got to school and I was like, hold on a second. I think I might be strong.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Someone told me recently, I don't know if this is true, but they told me that a disproportionate number of successful athletes are little siblings.

• 6:09Dax Shepard?

  I mean, that would make sense because you're competing with somebody so.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  And you immediately want to, it's like as soon as they do it, you want to do it, even if you're way too young for it.

• 6:17Dax Shepard?

  Chris and I ended up on a trip and it was with all strangers. I didn't know anyone. And when we got to the airport, you were there.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:23Dax Shepard?

  And I really felt like, oh, well, fucking thank God, Adam's here. I know Adam. And I really, really loved him as a guest.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:32Dax Shepard?

  Like, I do remember being charmed by you like crazy.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I was really new to the role, because it must have been 2019, 2020?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 6:38Dax Shepard?

  That you were on?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  That I was on.

• 6:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Maybe 2019. It was a long time ago.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  So I was new to the role, so I was still trying to figure out what was what, but I remember having a lot of fun. We hadn't seen each other in years before that trip.

• 6:49Dax Shepard?

  Right. Yeah. And you know, I was watching, of course, some interviews with you prior to your arrival. I just wanted to start with a little bit of compassion. You have a hard job to talk about. Because you're really at the forefront of like a lot of things people are concerned about. It's AI, it's social media, it's politics, it's deep fakes. It's like everywhere you're going, you're pretty much being asked.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  All those things.

• 7:13Dax Shepard?

  He handles it so well.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we are at the intersection of a lot of contentious things. And so it is tricky. Before I worked on Instagram, I worked on Facebook for a long time. And I remember a really long time ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago now, I just felt like, and we talked about this at the company, that we weren't participating in the conversation. And there was all these conversations happening about tech, about social media. And so my position was like, look, we gotta participate.

• 7:38Dax Shepard?

  Whether we want to or not.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can put our heads in the sand, but this conversation is happening.

• 7:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  We might as well participate. And so I'm going to get out there and I'm going to start talking to people. I don't want to start traveling. I showed up a lot on Twitter because that's where all the journalists were. I was clear internally. I was like, look, I'm going to do this and hopefully it'll work. And at some point it won't. I'll say something silly and everyone will hate me and I'll stop.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  That's what happens. Yeah.

• 8:01Dax Shepard?

  That was the, uh, the game plan?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  But it would be better for having done it for a couple of years before I get destroyed.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Wait, can I say before we get too far that Adam said something very nice about us on Instagram. Did you see this?

• 8:13Dax Shepard?

  He did his wrap up of podcasts he likes.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  But I misread the question.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I know. I laughed so hard. Someone sent it to me and was like, you're his favorite food or whatever the question was.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  It's like, what's your favorite food? And I don't know why I had podcasts on the brain. Maybe the next question was about podcasts. So I rattled off a couple of pods I love. And then everyone like, the comms team was like, what's wrong?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I laughed so hard.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  I just do them between meetings on Fridays. It's not like a production.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Dax Shepard?

  Right, it's not very well thought out.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  It doesn't need to be, that's okay. I thought it was very funny and flattering.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  To be your favorite food.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  I was like, oh god, that's not the best.

• 8:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what do we taste like? Are we salty, are we sweet?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Cherry.

• 8:56Dax Shepard?

  Savory?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Burger and chili dog.

• 8:58Dax Shepard?

  I think we're savory, I like to think.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I do too, I do too.

• 9:01Dax Shepard?

  There's some sweet stuff out there, I dabble in it.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Well, maybe there's some relish.

• 9:05Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  On the hot dog.

• 9:07Dax Shepard?

  There's some garnish.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  You really laid on the emphasis on the relish.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Relish, I think relish came up yesterday, or garnish did.

• 9:13Dax Shepard?

  Garnish, a gritty garnish.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you didn't like that and I thought it was pretty impressive.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  But I said I'd sleep on it and I like it now.

• 9:19Dax Shepard?

  Anyways, I'm just really sympathetic because not only you have to go out and talk about these issues and so often you're being asked to be clairvoyant. That's really what people want to know. It's like, well, in one year, what will AI be doing? In two years, what's it gonna be? What will Instagram be in this iteration? And it's like, you don't know any better than anyone else. I go to these conferences, the fucking people who are designing this shit, they don't know. Most of the good ones will admit that, like, nobody knows what the timeline is. They don't know what the ceiling of its aptitude is. No one knows, but we need you to know.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that is a tension and I do think some of us in this industry really pride ourselves on being able to put pen to paper on what's gonna happen. And I tend to find that that sometimes feels like false precision and it's a little bit more driven by our own wanting to be able to do that and to be, you know, prescient. But I think it's as good to always be honest about what you know and you don't. And then to also qualify things, not in a way to couch, but to be like, look, I think this is probably what's gonna happen and why. But if this other thing happens, maybe we're gonna go left instead of right. The world's changing more and more quickly. It's full of nuance, it's all gray. You have to embrace that ambiguity and that uncertainty, otherwise I feel like it's gonna bite you.

• 10:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now I also wanna, this is the value of having spent a weekend with you. This wasn't clear to me the first time we interviewed you, which I know that you come from a design background. But it didn't set in. And as I spent time with you, you're very much an artist and a designer. That's what you have wanted to do, set out to do. That is who you are. It's almost weird you're in this role in some way.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a little weird. I mean, so I romanticize the specialist, the amazing architect, or the amazing graphic designer, or the amazing machine learning, or NEI engineer. But it's just not my shape. I'm not great at anything. I just have a lot of range. That's my strength.

• 11:14Dax Shepard?

  Generalist?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a generalist, for sure.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  You need that.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  And so for me, it's been important, and this happened maybe when I was right around 30, to embrace that about myself. Before 30, I was always trying to be a designer. I'm the son of an architect. My mom's an architect. My brother's a musician, my sister's a designer, so I'm like surrounded by, I'm the suit.

• 11:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you guys are like a squid and the whale family. They're like a New York kind of intellectual artistic.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So I do think it's a bit ironic that you've ended up where you've ended up.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Can you tell people what your role is, just in case?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I lead the Instagram team. So I'm the head of Instagram at Meta. I also support the Threads app as well.

• 11:52Dax Shepard?

  We're gonna get into how much I made fun of you. Ooh. My running bit with him for three days was making fun of Threads.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  He did, but it wasn't as bad as the fact that my wife has not installed it.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Gotta keep you humble.

• 12:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, she's at an age, I'm sure, I'm done with the new, that's how I felt about TikTok. I'm like, no, I'm gonna sit that out. I can't do it.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's got what she uses and what she doesn't, and she does not care about my world at all. It's great.

• 12:16Dax Shepard?

  But you do have the title of CEO of Instagram, yeah?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we say head of Instagram.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Isn't that funny? They do, all the tech companies, they have their own fingerprint on what they call people. It's very specific. I find the world's very interesting.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  That's a very nice, interesting is what my mom would say, when she's like, oh, he's interesting. We are particular and odd in our own special ways, for sure. I will acknowledge that.

• 12:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and obviously, there's enough social science to back up the fact that cultures are really important at organizations. But I think if you're at a certain threshold of intelligence, a lot of it sounds condescending.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:50Dax Shepard?

  That's what triggers me, when it's like, I'm mopping up the toilet, and you're calling me a partner.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:55Dax Shepard?

  Buddy.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  I'll keep you in the context. For us, it's a little bit like Instagram is not its own company. It's part of a bigger company and there's pros and cons to that, but there's a lot of pros for us. Like people move back and forth between the teams. We're built on top of the same safety systems, the same ad system, et cetera. And so we try to make sure we use language that embraces the fact that it's a part of a bigger company, not its own company.

• 13:17Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  So that's the inside baseball on this language bit. Also, just because it's important for people to know. Like, I don't want people to be surprised that Instagram is owned by Meta. Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp and these other things.

• 13:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. It's also very fascinating how much public opinion can vary within the offshoots of still the same company. I grew up working for General Motors and that had that as well.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:41Dax Shepard?

  Cadillac is such a different vibe than Chevrolet.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  A house of brands.

• 13:44Dax Shepard?

  Saturn is your progressive, younger consumer. It's all General Motors or the fucking motors are coming out of the same plant, but it is just kind of shocking how many different opinions.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Well, we build up emotional affinity for these different brands. I'm trying to think of a good example. In the world of like soda and drinks, how many different companies does Coke own? And you might be anti-Coke and pro, I forget which water is theirs.

• 14:06Dax Shepard?

  Sure, Smart Water. I don't know that that's it.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I'm gonna get yelled at. Dasani? Dasani. I was just trying to say that. I think it's Dasani.

• 14:12Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, there are some people, yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I hope it's Dasani.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:14Dax Shepard?

  I think there might even be like a big war between Aquafina and Dasani.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  I hate Dasani.

• 14:17Dax Shepard?

  Like, those are the camps. Yeah, and I think they're both Coca-Cola, but Rob will look it up.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Dasani is very salty.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  I'm saying it. Oh, unless they're salty for us.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Throw in shitty.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I'm serious. There's salt in it.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Electrolytes?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  No, I do love electrolytes.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Dasani is Coke, Aquafina is Pepsi.

• 14:34Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well, that's a legit battle.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, that's real.

• 14:38Dax Shepard?

  That's shocking that I love Aquafina, that that's my pick.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I know.

• 14:41Dax Shepard?

  Because I bleed diet Coke.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  See, again, as you're saying, we're proving your point.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  I got through college on Diet Coke. Choir just did a pod on them recently, actually.

• 14:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they did?

• 14:49Speaker 02

  I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm excited to, because those two guys are really smart. They also have different recipes for different countries, though, which I think is interesting.

• 14:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Coke in Mexico tastes pretty different than Coke in the US, for instance.

• 14:59Dax Shepard?

  And that supposedly is due to whether it's cane sugar or high fructose, but I don't know. I don't.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 15:04Dax Shepard?

  Get sued by either Mexico or the US.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  It's like the country of Mexico. Who's Jack Shepard?

• 15:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so all to say, I'm gonna ask you all those similar questions.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Great.

• 15:16Dax Shepard?

  And they probably will have a tiny bit different bent coming from us. But before that, I just want to double back on the design fact. As I watched you interact with people, and I had to assess from afar what I think your skillset is, is you have a very, very intuitive aesthetic that you trust deeply. And you're a great challenger of people in hierarchies. And with some kind of savvy that has allowed you to still exist, so.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Without getting crushed.

• 15:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yes.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  It'll happen eventually.

• 15:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, again, like you being in public, this could be the day.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, here we go. Microphone's right here.

• 15:54Dax Shepard?

  Good place to end. You're holding the loaded weapon.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  If I'm gonna go down, this is a great place to have.

• 15:59Dax Shepard?

  Can you agree with that assessment at all?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll take the compliment. Design is about problem solving at a fundamental level. And I think you can apply problem solving to any industry, right? So you're trying to identify what are you trying to get done? What are the different options? What are the trade offs? These are pretty standard patterns that you can apply elsewhere. And so that's the kind of structured thinking that I have to do in my job, even though I'm not designing anything anymore, even though I would like to. That lends itself to being comfortable in debate because you can have a position and a reason for that idea, and you're comfortable articulating that reason.

• 16:35Dax Shepard?

  And is that personal to you, obviously, right? It's a function. You're arguing how functional this is.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Exactly, but that's the thing that designers, and I'm not an exception, when I was a designer, often struggle with, is divorcing your sense of self-worth from the worth of your work. And critique is like a whole part of design where you're gonna go and you're gonna show your stuff, and people are gonna rip it apart. And you have to embrace the signal and understand that it's not an attack on you. It's a way to support you by improving the work itself. And I didn't learn that properly because I didn't go to design school, really. I learned that from a handful of young designers who went to proper design school, who joined Facebook in their early years, who brought that culture to Facebook. And I learned a lot from them.

• 17:19Dax Shepard?

  Am I wrong that you had a couple of defining moments in your career where you did challenge Mark on something specifically?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, a couple of things, yeah.

• 17:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what were the things?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  So, OK, a couple of different ones. I'm trying to think which ones I may have told you about, but I might just share other things I'm not supposed to share. Well, look, I think careers are often defined by a few major decisions, which may be informed or uninformed. And for me, there were a couple. The first one was, I was a design director at Facebook. I was managing a bunch of designers. And there was this project that became the Facebook phone. And all the PM leadership ended up leaving the company for different reasons, some personal, some professional. So it was this giant crater where the leadership was in what we call product management, or the PMs. And I just declared myself the PM, which you can't do anymore. You have to interview because that's a reasonable thing to do to have a job.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  But this was, you know, a long time ago, probably 13 years ago. And, yeah, Mark definitely told me not to do it. Mark was like, no, you're a designer. You shouldn't do that. But I did it. He was nice about it. About six weeks later, it was late on a Friday, I was at the office. He was complimenting me, but he said, you're doing a lot better in this role than I thought you were.

• 18:29Dax Shepard?

  It is very Mark way of complimenting someone.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, which is great, which I took the signal. So there's been a couple of instances like that over the years, some with Mark and disagreeing with him, some otherwise, where you make these decisions. And I wasn't doing it because I thought it was a good career decision. I was doing it because I was working on the project that was in need, and I just was trying to fill that need. But I got lucky, because like I said before, I'm a generalist, and PMs are basically generalists. You work with the designers, the engineers, the comms people, the lawyers, the policy people.

• 19:00Dax Shepard?

  You're a translator, no? You have to be able to speak each person's language well enough to bridge all these communication gaps.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You're a bridge across everybody. If somebody doesn't know something on your team that they should know, it's probably on you.

• 19:12Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And so my career... For a couple of reasons, but this was probably the main one, started taking off because I was in a role that matched my skills much better. I was a middle of the pack designer. I made up for it with sheer work, like hours. Abundance. Yeah, in terms of like raw talent, middle of the pack is maybe even a little generous. And so I did well, but by sheer force of will. And then when I kept working hard, but my role embraced my strengths and weaknesses, then things started to accelerate.

• 19:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so my guess, my first question is, how are you guys? Let's just leave what's on the app alone for one second. And just how have you guys been able to utilize AI in the running of the product?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  So a couple of different things. So one thing that we've been doing for a long time is, and this is controversial, is we rank content. We try to show you the content we think you're the most interested at the top. And we've been using different forms of AI for that for many, many years. Another thing we do with AI for many years, or forms of it, is we try and classify content. So it could be something positive, like is this about a certain topic that you're interested in? Or it could be negative. Does this violate our community guidelines that therefore shouldn't be on the platform?

• 20:27Dax Shepard?

  And that the AI is sifting through all that material and trying to put those in buckets?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Because there's, however you want to count it, tens, hundreds, even millions or billions of things uploaded a day, we can't have people review all of it. So we use technology to look at content at scale. And to be clear, and this is changing, but historically, I've said this before, people are better at nuance and technology is better at scale. And so we've had to focus on things that are less nuanced, like what our rules are, because technology hasn't been as good at understanding nuance historically.

• 21:01Dax Shepard?

  And humans are so crafty at quickly figuring out what is triggering the safety net.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's very adversarial because one challenge we have is spammers who are constantly trying to work around all of our safety protections. You'll have bots, for instance, but bots that don't post every second 24 hours a day. They pretend to go to sleep, they pretend to go to work, they're inconsistent, they add spelling mistakes.

• 21:23Dax Shepard?

  What's the Japanese word for imperfection?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  I don't know it.

• 21:26Dax Shepard?

  The second day in a row, you can't get it.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Wabi-sabi.

• 21:28Dax Shepard?

  That was wabi-sabi, but it's not.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  It's wabi-sabi, but it's not. It's the one that has the gold that you piece together.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a specific art form.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Where they take broken ceramics and they put it back together with gold lining.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Correct. And it's like the imperfections, really, the beauty.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  That stuff is beautiful.

• 21:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and it has a name, and we're all supposed to know it. It's applicable.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  There's a word that's not as helpful in Japanese for Instagrammable, which I learned when I was there recently, which was instabaya.

• 21:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really? You mean it's like so aesthetically pleasing for posting?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  I'm like torn on how I feel about that.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  What's happening to us now, though, is we're building AI products that are more natively AI into the product, into the app. I say product, that's Silicon Valley speak for like the apps. But the other thing that's happening to us is we are also getting really disrupted ourselves. Like how we build, how we write code, how we do research, how we analyze data is changing really quickly.

• 22:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  And so we are also having to reinvent how we do what we do, which I think some people outside of the industry don't realize because they're like, oh, tech is just gonna keep doing tech. It's very different.

• 22:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  And it's gonna get a lot more different over the next year or two. And so I can tell you some of the things that we're doing now, but honestly, I think it's all changing really fast.

• 22:44Dax Shepard?

  People are very right to be concerned because the power of these products is enormous. We've never seen this before, right? So it is the most powerful thing. So it does deserve the most amount of scrutiny. But also, nothing operates perfectly. Everything is iterations built on previous mistakes and correcting those mistakes. So the notion that, again, people are gonna be able to be clairvoyants, even like when I listen to that rabbit hole about YouTube and its algorithm of increasing engagement, everyone had great intentions. No one really could foresee, oh, it's gonna radicalize people. They didn't think, oh, well, what will be more exciting is more and more radical content, and it starts at Jordan Peterson, and then you're a white nationalist. I'm sympathetic to that, to some degree. Now, it has to be immediately corrected.

• 23:28Dax Shepard?

  The moment that's discovered, all hands on deck to fix that problem. But again, there is probably, like what you're saying, is this illusion that because you guys are creating the product, that you're not also victims of it all as well. No one's really immune to the challenges. Of this AI growth.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  We're not even doing it at all. I mean, I would say two different things. One on the industry and the scrutiny and the size is not only is it big and important and obviously a lot of power in the hands of a small number of companies. It also grew really quickly. There are other industries that are equally important, but they took decades or centuries to get to their scale. I don't know, railroad, the automotive industry.

• 24:09Dax Shepard?

  The power sector.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Electricity, exactly.

• 24:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  It was 10, 20 years from not a thing to a big deal. Yeah. And so that's tough because society doesn't have time to really adapt or consider it or get comfortable with it. Laws take much longer to happen as well. So we're dealing with that now as a sort of a backlog of incoming compliance work.

• 24:28Dax Shepard?

  And the second they understand the tech to legislate, it's gone.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But on the second thing, an app like Instagram, you make a lot of decisions as the team running it and you have a lot of responsibility. But what you are mostly doing in some ways is designing a system that has rules. You could almost think about it as like a city, right? You know, it's like, hey, where are the roads? What are the speed limits? Where are the traffic lights? But then people fill it and they decide what to do. I'm not trying to pass the buck. That doesn't mean that you don't have responsibility as the planner, but that responsibility is different. It's indirect. You have to set healthy incentives. You have to, in our case, moderate content effectively. And even outside of the world of really high scrutiny areas, the decisions you make about the design of Instagram will affect the vibe, how it feels.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Is it more positive or is it negative? Is it more about debate? Is it more about visual expression?

• 25:21Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And you're right. It's a great point as the city, because it's like, yes, we'll install these traffic lights at all these intersections. And then people will blow red lights and they'll drive drunk and it's questionable whether now the city's responsible. The light was hung. So it is really tricky to figure out where the culpability lies.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look, I just think the responsibilities. Are shared and they're just different. We have to understand how the system works. We have to set healthy guidelines and rules. We have to enforce those rules effectively and consistently and appropriately. But people could just decide not to open up Instagram tomorrow. Or they could decide to try to abuse the hell out of it tomorrow.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  But there is an acknowledgement, right? That it's so hard to not open up Instagram. And I mean, good job, you know? But it's built to get you to keep pressing it. But I guess if we're doing the metaphor about the city, it's like, okay, we hung the light, but we know everyone runs that light. And oh, well?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think running the light is using Instagram. I think running the light is like posting something that's against their rules. But yes, obviously, we are interested in creating something that people are going to use more. We think if you use it more, on average, it's a sign that it's valuable to you in some way.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  But there's well spent time and there's time poorly spent. We're not ignorant to that fact. So we try not to use tactics that make you use Instagram or convince you to use Instagram that it's going to make you regret using it later. And we try to focus more on ones that you're going to be more excited about how you felt about the product later. So we do things like, we don't just look at how many things you like or how much time you spend. We have these like worth your time surveys where, actually, we do a lot of these where we'll ask you, was this thing worth your time? And we see are people's answers to that question trending up or trending down over time? So it's a balance of different types of goals.

• 27:11Dax Shepard?

  It's funny too, because yes, I'm critical of that and then, but when I turn the lens back on to us, I go like, I don't feel guilty that people would listen to our show six hours a week. We put out six hours of content a week. I would want them to listen to all six hours. That would be my dream, you know, because I think what we're doing is good. It's tricky because I believe in it and I'm not really too concerned with how much times people are spending or quote wasting on this, which I believe in. It's a little hard for me to then be critical of someone else that has a creative endeavor that they also want people to consume.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  It's tricky, but I think you can do both. I think the scrutiny is merited because the importance is there. And I think there are responsibilities. I just think that evaluating how we do is not the same as evaluating how a person behaves. It's a platform. There's lots of people. What you control and what you don't is different. What's appropriate for you to do and not do is different. Like, I don't think you want a tech company in Silicon Valley deciding this topic is the most important topic today, or this news event is the most important news event today, and we're pushing that out.

• 28:09Dax Shepard?

  Or a dancing video is irrelevant and a waste of everyone's time.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. But you also don't want us to be agnostic. I really don't think that you can pretend that we're neutral. We make decisions, those affect how people use their product, what they see, and therefore there's responsibilities that come along with those decisions.

• 28:25Dax Shepard?

  Have you guys ever approached this with the Danny Kahneman framing of thinking of multiple selves? And for a shortcut, we'll call one the experiential self and one the narrative self. So one is the you that lays in bed at night and evaluates your day, evaluates where you are in this broader story of your life. Am I reaching my goals? Am I the family member I want to be? And that's your narrative self. And then the experiential self is like, ooh, boobs, horsepower, right? Like, that's instantly the experience itself is a self you have that you're servicing. And I can almost think of your, was this useful to your time? As being like, trying to strike a balance between that narrative self and the experiential.

• 29:09Dax Shepard?

  Well, the experiential is good, but also it doesn't give you a hangover from having used it.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  I talk about the tension as your first order preferences and your second order preferences.

• 29:18Dax Shepard?

  There's also Kahneman.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like chocolate. It tastes good. That's a first order preference. I also want to be healthy, and I want to eat healthy.

• 29:25Dax Shepard?

  You don't want diabetes.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I want to not want the chocolate. And so that's a second order preference. And I think one of the things that the industry needs to be honest about and struggles with is that we optimize for things that we can measure. And it's much easier to measure your first order preferences than your second order preferences. Did you like this thing in the next 500 milliseconds? It's pretty easy for us to tell.

• 29:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Did you talk about it with a friend that night at the dinner? Or did you feel good about it the next day when you thought about it?

• 29:55Dax Shepard?

  Did you go to the GoFundMe page and donate money to that cause you were made aware of on there?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  You can measure these things. It's just more difficult. I have found in my time in this industry, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between how easy something is to measure and how important it is. But there is a strong correlation between how easy something is to measure and how much we optimize for it. Not out of any malicious intent, but just because.

• 30:17Dax Shepard?

  That's what's available.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  That's what's available. So what I have to do is always push the teams to get more creative about trying to understand these second order preferences or this narrative self so that we can actually lean into it. Like, that's why I really love the D R algo stuff. Have you guys seen this yet?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  No, what's that?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  That's actually not the external name. This is how I say it. It's called your algorithm. Two years ago, there was a meme on threads where people were writing letters to the algorithm, making requests.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Stop showing my high school friend's kids photos. Like, I do not care. Like, that kind of stuff. And so that inspired this. And then the tech got to the place where we could do it. So it's only in the reels tab right now. But if you go to the reels tab in the top right, on the U S, there's these little sliders with these hearts. And it will tell you what we think you're interested in. And then you can make edits and you can say, I actually want to see these things. I don't want to see these other topics.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Wait, where is it? Where's the reels tab? E.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  It's the second tab. Just click on the little.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Oh, that, at the bottom. Oh, boy. Okay.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're gonna do it live. All right. This is great. All right. So do you see in the top right a little icon?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yep. Wait, up top there? The hearts?

• 31:26Speaker 02

  With the hearts, yeah, yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Okay. Click it.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  I love that we're doing this live.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Your algorithm.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:33Dax Shepard?

  Does it know you? What does it say?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  It says lately you've been into.

• 31:36Dax Shepard?

  Fashion.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Lately, you've been into award show glamour.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Sweat sessions and culinary indulgences. It's pretty good.

• 31:48Dax Shepard?

  What are sweat sessions?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, what is that?

• 31:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Like workouts.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Workouts. I do get served a lot. Lot of workout.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  We think you're into them.

• 31:55Dax Shepard?

  Her narrative self knows she's supposed to be working out more. So it's already servicing your narrative.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  But you can see there's a list of.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says what you want to see more of. Based on activities summarized by AI. Golden Globes, fashion, luxury, fashion, fashion.

• 32:08Dax Shepard?

  Monica fashion.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Apple Podcasts, Los Angeles food scene. Okay.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Beauty, comedy, food, fitness, motivation. Golden Globes, pretty good.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  But now let's say we're wrong. Let's say you're not into sweat sessions.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  You can actually press that and move that to the, I don't want to see this thing.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  What you want to see less of.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  So you can get your hands in there and you can change it. Because also sometimes we might be misreading a signal. Like you don't really want to see it, but you can't stop looking at it.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And another thing is sometimes your interests can change. Like this is a tragic example, but one that I have a friend who went through, which is she got pregnant. And she was going deep on the nesting thing. And her Instagram got all about all this baby gear. Tragically, she lost the pregnancy.

• 32:48Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  How horrible is it that she's opening up Instagram and we're pummeling her with baby stuff?

• 32:53Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  So that was one of the inspirations for this, which is she should be able to go in and be like, nothing about nurseries.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  And so by allowing you to get in there and not only see what we think you're interested in, but you just tell us yes and no. That then hopefully allows people to express their second order preferences or the narrative self. Now again, not anyone's going to do it.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  But one way to learn about these things is just ask. So we pick up on your interests, we learn from them and we adapt. But we don't understand quite as literally as people think we do what you're interested in. For instance, we don't understand that that's a joke about race from a black comic.

• 33:31Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  It's not nuanced.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  The way it works is an approach we call embeddings. But basically the way you can think about it is you can take any video and map it into a space. It's not two dimensional, but imagine it's a giant two dimensional map. There's no borders or boundaries or labels. It's just a bunch of videos on a big board. Similar videos end up in similar places on the board.

• 33:53Dax Shepard?

  They concentrate in little areas.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Because the way the technology works is similar things end up in similar places. And so then if you like one video, whatever it is, we look and find videos. Near it in that space.

• 34:05Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  And show you those videos. What allows us to do the your algorithm work is now we can embed topics into the same map as the videos.

• 34:15Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  And so we can be like, oh, okay, cool. Like you said, you're into men's vintage fashion. That's here. Let's find the videos near here. You said you don't want to see, you know, bikini videos.

• 34:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  That topic is here. It won't show you any videos that are near it.

• 34:31Dax Shepard?

  Right, right. So you're given at a low side, basically.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah. We couldn't do that effectively even two years ago. That's actually how a lot of ranking works is we're like, all right, you like this thing. What is similar to it? We'll show it to you. People think it's like, oh, you know, I'm into surfing. And it's like, two years ago, it would have just been this giant number. I wouldn't have been able to tell you what it means. Now I can say, oh, that's pretty close to surfing.

• 34:53Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Or to like skater culture or whatever it is.

• 34:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:58Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking the pockets of your jeans before doing laundry? Classic oversight. That mystery clunking in the dryer? Yeah, that was your lip balm's final moments. And somehow there's always one random receipt in there to dissolve into confetti. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North America Insurance Co. and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by HubSpot.

• 35:40Dax Shepard?

  Did you know that most businesses, Monica, only use 20% of their data?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out.

• 35:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, or paying for a coffee that's one-fifth full.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yuck.

• 35:51Dax Shepard?

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• 36:17Dax Shepard?

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• 36:33Speaker 01

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• 36:46Dax Shepard?

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• 37:00Speaker 01

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• 37:04Dax Shepard?

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

• 37:14Speaker 01

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

• 37:21Dax Shepard?

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• 38:05Dax Shepard?

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• 38:57Speaker 02

  I appreciate you reading your algorithm out loud, brother. That took some bravery.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Thank you. I didn't know it was coming. It's good. Is there a way to add? So I see you can drag, but can you like type in?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Whatever you want.

• 39:08Dax Shepard?

  Things that are getting you angry on a regular basis. Figure out what words are associated with that anger and block them out.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  That's called hidden words. Yeah, you can do that. You can do that for comments too. And you can also do that for your messages.

• 39:19Dax Shepard?

  I like that one a lot.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  It's just people, they like to be angry. This isn't your issue, but I don't see people wanting to get rid of that because they want it.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  I think it depends. So for politics specifically, this research is a bit out of date. We say research, it's usually surveys. We found that there was a small percentage of people who really wanted more politics. But most people were like, I kind of want to see less politics. That's again, this tension between the narrative self and what was the other self?

• 39:50Dax Shepard?

  Experience.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Experience yourself.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Is they like saw it, they clicked on it. We think they like it, but they don't. Their narrative self or their second order preference was like, I just need a break.

• 39:58Dax Shepard?

  They don't feel good. They know they don't feel good afterwards.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And most people with these surveys were in that bucket. There's a very loud, call it five or 10% of people. I forget what the number is specifically. So a meaningful minority, but minority that are like all in. It also varies by platform, like threads has way more politics than Instagram does. Not because it ranks for politics, but because you make these other decisions about how the app works. Threads is designed around back and forth conversation. That's better for debate. That's going to mean topics like politics are better served.

• 40:32Dax Shepard?

  And would I be right to say threads is also encouraging you to share? Thoughts, not necessarily images.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Instagram is about sharing a creative object, a visual creativity, videos, photos. Threads is about perspectives, your hot takes. And you're gonna have a lot of takes on what's going on in politics. So the percentage of threads that is politics is way higher than the percentage of Instagram.

• 40:54Dax Shepard?

  That's concerning to me. I don't know if it's doing anyone an ego, but whatever, I don't get to decide. Okay, now let's talk about AI-generated content.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a very uncontroversial.

• 41:05Dax Shepard?

  That I'm sure you have a perfect.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  You really put yourself out in the fire. I'm impressed.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Well, you gotta talk about these things. I would way rather that everything that is in your mind that you're worried about or that someone's watching is thinking about, we talk about, than to sweep anything underneath the rug.

• 41:20Dax Shepard?

  And I hope people have an appetite to, we're not sharing, we're doing the best we can to monitor and see as it evolves. I hope there's some appetite for that and some latitude for that because that's the reality of how this is kind of unfolding. So I have a lot of questions about it. One is, we should start by defining it, right? Because here's what's tricky. You were asked during this Bloomberg thing, could you label everything that was AI-generated? That would be helpful for all of us. And you're like, yes, we agree. We did that. And what we were doing is it'll read anything you do on Photoshop or Adobe as being AI-generated. So it's like, where is this line? If someone uses some Photoshop to brush up a pimple on their face in the video,

• 42:04Dax Shepard?

  that's now AI. Where are we drawing the line? So maybe we should just kind of define it.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Like most complicated issues, the edges are much easier to define. So there's clearly, you used a film camera and it took a light and those photons hit a piece of film and like you captured a moment and it's not perfect, but it's authentic capture of a moment in reality. And then there's, I went to some AI model and I came up with an idea and I expressed that as words and then out came this crazy video of a hippo and a two-two doing a backflip.

• 42:35Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And that clearly never ever happened. So that's purely synthetic content and then what I would call maybe captured content. I actually think most content's in the middle. So like with all of our phones today. When you capture, it's doing a lot of photo processing. Some of it's using AI, some of it's not. It's trying to make sure you are not wildly backlit. So if the sky is bright in front of you, it might use AI to brighten you up and darken the sky. So it looks more like you would perceive it as opposed to a film camera where you would never be able to see the person.

• 43:03Dax Shepard?

  AI is doing color correction like crazy.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  All sorts of stuff. Sometimes in some of the default cameras, it's doing skin smoothing. It's doing things that are a little bit more contentious.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Really?

• 43:12Speaker 02

  There's lots of work to try to make sure lighting works properly for different skin colors, which is another interesting thing.

• 43:18Dax Shepard?

  That just happened to me. I took a picture with a gal that was working at a restaurant in Detroit that I frequent. As she held it for the selfie and took the picture, I was like, I look 29 in this photo. And she looks much younger. I was like, oh, her go to camera is this augmented.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Oh, because it's like an app or something?

• 43:35Dax Shepard?

  She only takes photos clearly through this app. I looked at it as it came, I was like, well, that's neither of us, but here we go. There's your picture.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  When you do portrait mode, it's recreating the bokeh effect you get from a shallow depth of field from a really wide open lens. And so then it's like, okay, well, if it's using this kind of model or this kind of AI model, what is AI is an interesting question. If I'm doing a spot cleanup for like a pimple, it might be just literally copying pixels or it might be using AI to generate pixels. Do we call that AI? And so I'm not trying to put my hands up in the air and say we can't do anything. I'm just saying the reality of the situation is it is a spectrum.

• 44:12Dax Shepard?

  Hard to define, almost impossible.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  So there's that challenge. And then there's another challenge, which is the models are getting so good that like the work that we do now, and we do work to try to detect things that are automatically generated by AI, will get less and less effective over time as the models get better. Now, our models can get better too, but it's an arms race. And I actually think at this point, we will continue that race, but it might be more practical to essentially mark things that were captured when they are captured by the camera with what's called like a fingerprint and verify that those were actually captured, then verify that things were actually generated. It might be easier to identify what was actually captured by a camera by doing industry wide solutions around some of these interesting technologies. To try and automatically detect what was created with an AI.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  So we're now exploring that. So then you could click on something that you see on social media and it could be like, hey, this was signed by this Sony camera in a way that can't be replicated or forged by AI.

• 45:09Dax Shepard?

  Will they be using like NFT technology to kind of create that?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  There's a couple of different approaches out there. I'm forgetting the name of the one that Adobe's leaned into right now. I was reading about theirs last week or the week before. But basically you work with manufacturers. So whether it's Apple or Google or Samsung or Sony or Canon or whatever. And they actually put, think of it as like a signature in the file that can't be replicated.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Is there a way to just require that whoever creates the content? So instead of you guys having to go in and decipher, that it's like illegal if you create something from AI to not say, like the onus is on the creator, not on you guys. Ads are like that, right? Where you have to say this is an ad?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yes, but then the challenge is enforcement.

• 45:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you have to police it, which puts them in the situation that they're currently in.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  So like ads is a good example. So in the US, there is no law that says you have to mark something as an ad if it's an ad. In Germany, you do. So in Germany, you'll see a lot of creators will just put ad on everything because they're worried if they unintentionally, there's like a liquid death water in the background, they're going to get in trouble. And then the question is, how does the government police it? Because you said illegal. Now, if we had a rule, let's say you have to mark it as AI. The rule doesn't matter unless we enforce it. Back to this traffic light sort of analogy from before. So to enforce it, we need to be able to detect it on our own and say, hey, you didn't label this.

• 46:30Dax Shepard?

  And then again, what percentage are we going to let slide? If it's eight percent synthetic, is it 12% synthetic? When do we enforce? Am I writing a ticket for five over or 15 over?

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I want to give people context to make more informed decisions. So we could maybe show you how likely we think it is to be AI. We don't know for sure, but we think there's a 70% chance. Or we could show you, oh, this was actually signed. So we know this was actually captured because it's signed by this industry standard. I think it'd be better for us to adopt a standard and build our own that works across the whole industry. Because obviously people spend a lot of time on a lot of social networks, not just Instagram. My bias is to not avoid the work, but to do the work that is going to be robust over the long run and then give people information to decide what they want to trust or not.

• 47:14Dax Shepard?

  But again, in this same Bloomberg interview, you said something I think is very profound. And again, I think people in general want everyone else to do the work that's also their work, whether that's your kid's not doing well in school, it's the teacher's fault, but you've not done one bit of homework with your kid. Everyone's always off.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  The homework fights are hard.

• 47:33Dax Shepard?

  Yes, but you said what you do with your own boys. There is some personal responsibility, which is we're maybe not asking the right question. The question we're asking is, is this AI or not? And a better framing of it for your own children, what you tell your children is, is to ask them, who created it? What their incentives are and what they're after. You have to identify that because that's really how you're going to figure all this out.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  I think that's what digital literacy is going to become for our kids is in a world where anybody can create something that looks real, sure, you can be like, does it have a signature or not? Is it like generated by AI or not? But it's still going to become much more important to consider who said it and why they might have said it. And that is something that historically isn't how we think, not just online, but offline, right? We just kind of evaluate what we see based on exactly that, what we see. Exactly, what we believe our eyes.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and of course, we get into the vast spectrum of skepticism that people inherently have. What's funny is we want to not have to do on this platform what we do in real life, which is you're telling me you need $20 because you need a bus ticket back to wherever because your kids. So I'm evaluating, am I getting scammed right now? Is this person genuinely trying to get home? Or are they trying to go get Mad Dog 2020? I have to try to figure that out and I have to do my best to assess their intention. And we're doing it all the time in all of our interpersonal relationships. If a guy's selling you something, you've got to consider the fact, well, they're a salesman who gets paid on units moved. I must keep that in mind when I'm evaluating how effective this product is or not.

• 49:17Dax Shepard?

  And we're going to just have to do that. With the content we see.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then our role, I think, is going to be to give you and make more prominent, because some of this already exists, but it's too hard to get to, more information. This account is based in this country. It was created two days ago, or 20 years ago, or in our case, 15 years ago.

• 49:35Dax Shepard?

  You use yourself in as an example.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so you could be like, okay, Adam, this account is based in the US. It has had no username changes ever. You know, it's been registered for, call it, 13, 14 years.

• 49:46Dax Shepard?

  This is reputation.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And then we could add other things, like this post was recorded with the Sony camera, authenticated by Sony, or this post was created with AI. That might not mean it's a bad post.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Then you just know.

• 49:59Dax Shepard?

  I like, when you said, and I guess this is probably forthcoming, I would be so supportive of this, is your biases. So you are left-leaning, you are right-leaning. You mentioned financial bias, which is incredibly pertinent.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  But then there's even other things over time. And we're talking about step two, now three, four, five. I think it would be interesting to be like, okay, well, this meme or this narrative, where did it come from? Who was the first person who posted about this? That's interesting, not just from a safety perspective, but from a, the value should go to the original creator perspective.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, giving credit to.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Creatives, right? On one hand, it could be like, okay, this is a lie, who started it? But another could be like, this is an amazing dance or bit, who came up with it first? There are all sorts of really interesting things that we can do under this umbrella of surfacing information about what you're seeing, so that you can not just decide whether not to trust it, but decide what it means.

• 50:52Dax Shepard?

  I can tell you the one that scared me. I saw, and this was a breakdown, thank God someone exposed this, but this video that had gone very, very viral. It was a New York City police officer confronting ICE agents, saying, you don't have jurisdiction in this city. I too am upholding the Constitution. It was compelling, it was inspiring, you wanted to take action when you saw it. And it was millions and millions and millions of forwards. And someone had the wherewithal to zoom in on the badge on the shoulder of the cop. And it's not real writing, but I'm telling you, I think I'm quite good at seeing this stuff, as probably all of us think, the literacy competency illusion.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not good at it.

• 51:32Dax Shepard?

  And I was like, oh, now this is what's really fucking dangerous. This is like a super inspirational video that could make you leave your house and go react to something that didn't happen.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  And was designed to be. It's not a coincidence that that thing was sent around. It was designed to be sent around. It was designed to invoke a specific emotion.

• 51:49Dax Shepard?

  And I just think, man, when you start having people responding to atrocities that haven't even happened, that's the scary part, I think.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  There's tons of things that are concerning and there's tons of things that are exciting. Technology has continued to change more and more quickly. And we're just accelerating a lot right now. This has been happening as a trend for a long time. But this last year or two and this next couple of years is a real inflection point in the speed at which technology is changing. And there are lots of things to be excited about. And there's lots of things to be concerned about. And our job as platforms like Instagram is to consider both. In what way can AI give people superpowers? Make you help you remember everything, process immense amounts of information, produce more, be more creative, get people who weren't creative to be creative in the first place. But also, how can it be abused? Where do we have to make sure we're giving people more context

• 52:40Speaker 02

  that we didn't think about having to give people just a year or two ago? Where do we have to be more careful about how it's going to be misused? And then get ahead of that and prevent those misuses from happening in the first place? When invariably something happens that we didn't plan on that's bad, how can we react quickly? It's just the two sides.

• 52:56Dax Shepard?

  This stressful fucking job you've taken on.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, very.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  It is amazing. It is very stressful and it's also really amazing.

• 53:02Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, like the product itself.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  It's not lost on me.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  What's like your personal? High from the job.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  I get to meet amazing people, which for me is really energizing for two reasons. One, I love people. I'm an extrovert. But two, I'm really curious about different industries. I get to go talk to a bunch of different podcasters about how their world works. How does the business work? How does the creative process work? I get to do the same thing in fashion. I get to do the same thing with European footballers.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  You're just exposed to everyone.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  I'm lucky enough that I get to talk to people who are amazing in all these different worlds and all these different countries.

• 53:38Dax Shepard?

  We have the same upside of, same job upside.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:41Dax Shepard?

  Literally.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  That's actually, yeah.

• 53:42Dax Shepard?

  Identical.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That's one of my favorite perks of the job.

• 53:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I keep walking away and it's just like, it's impossible, the amount of people we've got to meet in this one lifetime.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you get to really talk to them.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  In a world where, not lastly me, we have been part of moving the world to shorter and shorter bits of information that are consumed. You all are part of this sort of almost counter trend, which is like, no, we're just gonna talk for an hour or two. And we're gonna go deep.

• 54:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  And people want that.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  I get nervous because even with what we do, so much has changed in the past eight years since when we started, where they knew, like, they would come and you'd have to listen for the whole thing or for most of it. But now, clips are such a huge part of doing podcasts. And I do worry. I'm like, oh no, it's just back to the thing that we were escaping, which is late night.

• 54:31Dax Shepard?

  The antidote.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally.

• 54:33Dax Shepard?

  To the 140 characters.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the five minute fun clip on Late Night, which we love, but the whole point is to have like a real conversation. And now it feels like we're almost reverting back to that.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  I think what's key, and you should tell me if I'm off base here, because this is not your world, not mine, is to not conflate what I see as more of the marketing for the conversation and then the actual conversation. And there might be way more views of the short clips on YouTube and Instagram and elsewhere. But the core of the business, I think, is still the long form, both from a, like, who do you have the deepest connection with as a creative, but also from a business perspective.

• 55:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the real estate to sell is on the long form.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  I think sometimes where I'm like, oh, my God. I mean, I ask so many people. I'm like, oh, did you listen to that? Or let's say they say something about Good Hang and I'm like, oh, did you listen? They're like, I saw clips. I mean, I saw clips is so common.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Totally. And there will be more people who see clips than listen to the whole thing. But if you're growing the group of people who listen to the whole thing by having 10 times as many people do clips, you're still growing your core base.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  I know. It's just hard to compete.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  But if that's shrinking, then it's concerning.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't have that fear. I don't think we're losing listeners to clips. I think we're getting exposed to more people who don't do two hour shows personally.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  The thing I also like about your world is you get to participate with just audio. Obviously, videos become a big deal. This is why this place is so beautiful. But I listen to you guys when I'm on the way to work, when I'm in the car, when I'm working out. I can't do that with Instagram. I can't do that with clips and videos. And so you get to participate in parts of people's lives that things and products and the apps like Instagram don't.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  I agree. That's what I love about it, but I worry that it is changing and moving more into, because our attentions are much shorter, that it's like, oh, I got the gist.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  It's a real worry. I think people underappreciate audio in general, like my whole industry does. Like, I've been trying to push it a little bit, which is most times spent on Instagram is watching videos now. That is half audio, right?

• 56:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  But we're not thinking about that experience nearly as much. What does Instagram sound like is an interesting question.

• 56:46Dax Shepard?

  Because the visual component has just gotten better and better and better and the audio experience is really not.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  And we tend to, I think, think more about what we see than what we hear. But what we hear, I think, can have just as strong an emotional impact.

• 56:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Another thing that I was sympathetic to is, first of all, I think it might shock people to learn. And you do this great example. When you have a crowd of people, it's very easy to demonstrate the reality of this. Because when you first say it, you almost don't believe it. But tell us where people spend time on Instagram.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 57:17Dax Shepard?

  Because you have basically four options, right? You have the feed, you have reels, you have DMs, uh, maybe is there three?

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Stories.

• 57:24Dax Shepard?

  And stories.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Stories is a big one.

• 57:26Dax Shepard?

  Right. So you've got these four columns. Just start maybe at the beginning, what it was and where we're at now.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  People my age, I'm in my 40s, they think of Instagram almost always as a feed of square photos. Cause that's what Instagram was when Instagram launched. But if you look at how people spend their time and even more, if you look at what people do, it's just not the core part of Instagram anymore. People share way more to stories than they do to feed. People, particularly young people, spend way more time in stories than they do in feed. But the thing that people do the most, particularly young people, is actually message is DM. Teens will often and young people will spend more time even in DMs than in some of these other surfaces. And they definitely share way more. And forget about all the text, if you just look at photos and videos sent, there's way more photos and videos sent as DMs than there are posted to stories or feed,

• 58:16Speaker 02

  or even those two combined at this point.

• 58:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you ask everyone in the room, like, put your hand up if you've sent a DM on Instagram in the last day. And 90% of the room puts their hand up. Great, now keep your hand up if you have, if you posted a story.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  I actually did this just this one time at Bloomberg, I made it up. I was like, did you open up Instagram today? Did you send a DM today? Did you post a story today? And it's like a bunch of hands went down. Did you post a feed post today? And it was like.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Every.

• 58:41Dax Shepard?

  Nobody has posted a feed post today.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  I did.

• 58:45Dax Shepard?

  Well, we did, cause we have a schedule.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 58:49Dax Shepard?

  But when you did it that way, it really sank in. And then what I appreciated was you being honest about the fact that we have that data, right? So had we only stuck with feed and we said, no, we're feed only. I wouldn't be on this stage today. We wouldn't be relevant because we see what people want to do. And they would have gone to a place where they could have done that.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:10Dax Shepard?

  And that's just the hard facts of the business. And so what I thought about is we've had very few changes. We went from audio to video and people lost their fucking mind.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:22Dax Shepard?

  And then the other crazy thing was we had, you could do it a week early if you join the subscription. People lost their mind.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Also, when we first went to Spotify, people re- Really freaked out.

• 59:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but all to say, we've only had three or four changes in eight years and it was very difficult. And people were very, very

• 59:39Speaker 02

  It's stressful.

• 59:39Dax Shepard?

  Angry. And so I was thinking like, how you're weathering the outrage and also the frustration, despite what everyone's saying, once they get over the hurdle, they like it.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  This challenge of change management was my first exposure to this sort of controversy in the industry. Where, you know, I was the designer on a new design of the homepage of Facebook in late 2008, early 2009. And like, people lost their minds. I was reading the comments, it was gnarly.

• 1:00:15Dax Shepard?

  Death threats.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  And I'm like 25.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  And again, my self-worth is totally tied up in my work.

• 1:00:21Dax Shepard?

  You're nothing if you're not that.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'm just getting pumped.

• 1:00:25Dax Shepard?

  You ruined it.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just devastated. You learn to accept the fact that, look, if you're gonna spend half an hour an hour using our product a day, the analogy I used to use is like it's a desk. You wrote some letters, you organized some photos, you did some things, and I just came in, I just rearranged your desk.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  You're gonna tell me to F off because I didn't ask for permission. And you think of it as your desk. But the alternative is to become irrelevant. And I don't think that's being bombastic. I'll give Mark a lot of credit on this. Mark's always said that companies usually fail by hitting their goals all the way down. That's about not really defining success properly and also not being willing to make hard decisions. In that case, it's about aiming high. But in this case, it's about being willing to actually do things differently. And I would rather lead Instagram during however long I lead it for, through a bunch of changes, and occasionally go too fast, too far and get backlash, than have it become irrelevant under my watch.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. This is relevant because my phone updated last night.

• 1:01:30Dax Shepard?

  Uh oh.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Do you have the new update?

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Are you just gonna reject that?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I hate it so, I almost, I was like, I'm in a bad mood today. Like, I can't figure out how to I don't like the way it looks. I'm so mad.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  We've pushed too far. We've made mistakes. We've experienced a fair share of slaps for it. We're trying something now that's different that I don't know if it's gonna work or not. But we are trying a version of Instagram that is basically you open it up and it's just stories and then you swipe straight into reels. If and when we launch it, there's gonna be all of the, all of the energy.

• 1:02:01Dax Shepard?

  You should go to Tahiti for two weeks.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  So there'll be no grid posts at all?

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  No, no, no. You can swipe through them too.

• 1:02:06Dax Shepard?

  You'd have to select to be on the feed?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  The feed would just be more video. It'll still support photos, but it'll be full screen, one at a time.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Oh, in shirt, like a TikTok.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  And the reels tab and shorts on YouTube and all of it.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that scares me.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  I know. I don't want you to do that.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I don't know if it's gonna work. When we try new things, we have to be ready to answer questions because people see it. So right now, we are allowing people, not everybody, but we're allowing people in India to opt in. The idea is to manage this, if it's successful, over a year or even two. And keep making the experience better and better and then see how many people opt in. And of the people who do switch, how many people keep it?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  And then when we get to a place where, let's say, the majority of people switch and the majority of them actually also keep it, then we can consider moving everybody else over. That creates a really healthy incentive for us to make it something people want to switch to. But it also takes a long time.

• 1:03:04Dax Shepard?

  It's a trial.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  So we're trying it out.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Is there a way to mass DM? Is there a way to get people like sign up or something where we DM them?

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Channels. You can create a channel, which is basically a broadcast DM where people can sign up. It's basically like a group chat. But instead of having every armchair in a group chat, you could just message all of them and then they can reply to your messages. So you can kind of consume it.

• 1:03:29Dax Shepard?

  But it's not creating a message board?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  No, it's just in DMs.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  I think we should do that and start sending out the episodes.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not for, so you know, understand about that is the number of people who will sign up for that is much smaller than the people who are gonna follow your account. So it's for your most passionate people. And so the content strategy should match that.

• 1:03:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so great. That brings up, it was my grievance the first time we spoke with you and it continues to be my grievance and I need to understand the rationale behind it.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:03:58Dax Shepard?

  Why can I put a link in stories and I can't put a link anywhere else?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, we hate that.

• 1:04:02Dax Shepard?

  Why the fuck can't I put a link in my feed?

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  It's contentious. I get this one every week.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Might be time to buckle. Yeah, well, you know, I have buckled before. If we do links for everybody, everywhere, I think what will happen is there'll be a lot of links posted very quickly and it'll change how Instagram feels significantly and I don't think it'll be for the better. One, you get a lot more scam and spam. Links are the vector for all of that. You get a lot more politics and you get a lot more news because they usually are link and text oriented as opposed to photo and video oriented. And I think we become less differentiated from other platforms like Facebook and I want us to be about creativity. And I think specifically Instagram is about visual creativity. And I think when we do links, we've become more about news and publishers and politics and less about fashion and art and film.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  And so that's the reason. I don't expect that to be remotely. Satisfying. Satisfying. But that is the reason.

• 1:05:03Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Dax, is there anything better than crawling into a perfect bed on a cold fall night? Candlelit, hoodie on, maybe even some rain outside. The dream.

• 1:05:23Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I know, and thanks to Helix, my bed actually lives up to the vibe. All I had to do was take the Helix Sleep Quiz and within two minutes, they matched me to a mattress built for exactly how I sleep. I have a midnight mattress. It also has cooling technology.

• 1:05:42Dax Shepard?

  Ooh.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Which I really.

• 1:05:44Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  I need it.

• 1:05:46Dax Shepard?

  You need it.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp for optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.

• 1:05:55Dax Shepard?

  She is not wrong. I have one too, and it's been such a game changer for sleep. And I love that they make it so easy. Free shipping right to your door. And with their happy with Helix guarantee, you'll get a full 365 nights to try it. A whole year to live in that cozy. They've got over 20 mattress models, so no matter how you sleep, they've got one for you.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  And it's not just us saying it. Helix has been named the most awarded mattress brand by Forbes, Wired, and more. You gotta try it for yourself.

• 1:06:22Dax Shepard?

  Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off sitewide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off sitewide. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 1:06:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 1:07:18Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. We get support from Skims. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:56Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:11Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:24Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:44Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:09:01Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:09:29Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:48Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:10:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, another quick thing I wanted to ask you about is I watch a lot of your two camera posts and they are generally bits of advice for creators.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  On my videos?

• 1:10:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yours. Your comfort level speaking directly to the lens is outstanding. The fact that you're not in show business is incredible because I suffer from that. You get right on that motherfucker and talk directly to lens all the time.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Dax Shepard?

  And you're giving tips to creators. And I was curious, do you have a distinction in your mind between the occasional poster who puts food or their vacation photos up versus someone who's making content?

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:37Dax Shepard?

  What would we call the two groups? There's creators and then what?

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Just average folk.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Users.

• 1:10:41Dax Shepard?

  And what percentage is on the platform? Do you have any sense of that?

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it depends on how you define it, but they're definitely, at the very least, tens of millions of creators. And there's over 3 billion people who use Instagram.

• 1:10:51Dax Shepard?

  So it's a tiny minority.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Dax Shepard?

  But my hunch is because you're servicing them so much, are they the lifeblood of the platform?

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  They are very valuable for the platform. I think that creators, well, a couple of things. One, we would define creators as individuals or groups of people, so not like a company or corporation or a brand that produce original content with the intent to grow. You know, you're trying to get something done. Maybe you're trying to evangelize a cause. Maybe you're trying to get elected. Maybe you're trying to sell some shoes, but there's an intent there to grow. So if you're just posting pictures of your vacations or the occasional hobby, that's cool. But we don't think of you as a creator. You can be creative. That's great. But I believe, and we believe, I should say, that power has been shifting from institutions to individuals across industries for years, and we should be leaning into that.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Athletes are much more relevant relative to the teams that they play for compared to like 10, 20, 30 years ago.

• 1:11:47Dax Shepard?

  Or the fact that these college kids are now incredibly well-paid all through that.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Journalists are building their own brands outside of the publications that they work for. You'll see actors have their Instagrams explode when the new Netflix show gets announced even before it drops. And I think this is because we want to understand the world through the eyes of people, people we admire or trust or look up to, and that's what creators are. And so we think that we should lean in there because that's what people are most interested in. That's who's going to become more and more important over time.

• 1:12:18Dax Shepard?

  This is so obvious, but I didn't think of it until you said it out loud, which is you said, I think it's useful occasionally to pull all the way back and look at the very big picture, which is what the internet, the first iteration gave rise to is prior to the internet, people could not self-publish. The expense was too high, or there were institutions that controlled that. And so the first wave of the internet was really allowing every human to be a publisher. And it's like a big, big concept, and it's been great and fucked this up because not everyone should be publishing. And we're hearing from a lot of people that we wouldn't have otherwise, and they're very helpful.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  We've given a lot of power to everybody.

• 1:12:56Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Very democratized. Everyone wants the democratization of everything. Well, this is what it looks like. And now, the second wave is really producers, production. So before, studios only could afford the Aeroflex camera, that was 250,000. And the film you put in it, that was 35,000, and the processing and all the stuff that went into creating content. It was impossible for someone to do it. That's been changing, but AI is really now the insane breakthrough. Where it's like, your environment could be any location. So what we're now doing is democratizing production, which is a fascinating thought.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, my hope is that the way we participate in this wave will empower human creativity. I think that there's versions of AI that will disintermediate people and displace people in jobs. But there's also versions of AI that can give creative people the ability to do more of what they do so well, and to be more successful. And so my hope is that on Instagram, the ways that we lean into AI with creative tools, and assistance, and the ability to understand your insights, or to understand the patterns for what works and what doesn't, or to recreate or create whatever is in your imagination, will be really empowering. But it's the same construct.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  The internet allowed anybody to publish and reach an audience, because the cost of distributing things went almost to zero. And AI is going to make the cost of producing things go way, way, way down as well. And so you will just see more content.

• 1:14:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Our job is to figure out the right way and the responsible way to manage one of the platforms. And I'm hoping that we can really empower human creativity and how we lean into that. But that's the big question for us over the next couple of years.

• 1:14:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, how have you evolved in terms of monetizing the work of those creators? And how is Instagram generating money for these creators? And how does it compare to, say, a creator on YouTube?

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  So what creators do, and they're not the only people who do this, is they make content. People consume that content, and then we sell ads, obviously, between pieces of content. You could think of it as selling ads against that sort of attention.

• 1:15:08Dax Shepard?

  It's really the old network television model. You get this free Show Seinfeld and you're gonna watch a Clorox commercial.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. Now YouTube has historically been more focused on long form video and they show ads before and during the video and then they give creators a cut. Our videos are shorter, so we don't put ads before, you don't get a pre-roll on Instagram, which is like, you know, you have to watch this. And you don't get ads in the middle of the videos. So there's one challenge, which is who deserves the credit?

• 1:15:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  YouTube is the best in the industry at creator payouts, I think. I mean specifically paying creators directly because the platform can pay them. The fans can pay them or brands can pay them. In terms of the platform paying them, YouTube does the best. Now, what we've done is we've got tests currently in the US, India, Japan and Korea at different times. We've tried to pay creators for creating content. And what we keep finding, particularly with videos, if we pay creators, we're like, hey, if you make this number of posts, we'll pay you this number of dollars. They do create more posts, but the incremental posts that they make are not as good. And they don't hit that many more, so they actually don't drive up the amount of time people use Instagram that much.

• 1:16:14Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, there's really no metric you can decide on that it's not gonna obscure the output because it could either be a number of posts or it could be total views. Well, now total views, I'm incentivized to be provocative. I'm incentivized to be what the algorithm was on YouTube.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  But even if you ignore those challenges, all the tests we have are just burning money. If we invest $10 million in a bonus program, we've never made anywhere near $10 million back. I'd be happy just to break even.

• 1:16:39Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  For me, if we could have this program break even, have the eligibility be clear, so it's obvious how you get to be part of it, because it can't feel like a lotto. And ideally, the payouts aren't embarrassing.

• 1:16:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Then like, then it's a success. People create so much content on their own and the incremental content that people create when we pay them is not that high in quality or quantity on average. I'm sure some people are doing amazing things, that we end up burning most of the money. We're a business. I want to be honest about that. We're not just gonna burn the money. Of course. So we'll continue iterating because that could change, or trying, I should say. But we focus more now on the other ways we can help creators make a living. How can we help with fans paying you directly?

• 1:17:20Dax Shepard?

  Right. I was gonna say, you have a Patreon-ish version existing, right?

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  We have subscriptions, which is. Actually, they're quietly growing and doing well. Where if you have a platform where people are willing to pay for your content, you can do that on Instagram, you can set the price. I think we just cover the cost of running it. We don't actually make money off that. And then the big one, though, is getting paid by brands. Last I checked was years ago. It seemed like it was more than a $15 billion industry a year, which is creators making deals off platform and getting paid by companies to advertise their products.

• 1:17:51Dax Shepard?

  To do a post about a pair of sneakers.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  So we've tried to support that. So we have the Creator Marketplace, where you can have brands and creators find each other and assess each other out. We have ads tools where the ads can then use that creative and run ads with that same creative, with the creator's permission.

• 1:18:08Dax Shepard?

  It's like a system that integrates that perfectly into their...

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  So that the advertiser can find out the value that they're getting from actually paying for this content. We want creators to get paid, but we can't just burn money running checks. So we're trying to find the balance.

• 1:18:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So interesting.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  We're gonna do a hard pivot, I can feel it.

• 1:18:27Dax Shepard?

  You make a prediction, dangerously perhaps. But your 2026 prediction was, "Looking forward to 2026, one significant interesting is that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible."

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a real tension.

• 1:18:40Dax Shepard?

  Tell me about this statement. I think I understand it, but I'm not sure. It's abstract enough that you could deny any implications of the statement.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Dax Shepard?

  In legal terms, this is like real messy language.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I wrote that thing and I was like, I should write more. I wrote this thing and it was like really boring. And then I was like, alright, I should make it less boring. And then I rewrote it and I was like, now it's just purposely controversial. That's annoying. That's just as boring, just different. So then I was like, alright, I should just cut half of the stuff that I don't have any business weighing in on anyway, and I'll focus on the things that I care most about. So I don't know how it turned out, but you read it, so that's cool. Maybe you had to, as your homework for this thing. People think of Instagram's aesthetic, particularly people my age, as these perfect photos, sunsets, skin smoothing, makeup, this whole thing. That is not what is in the cultural zeitgeist today. What works even on Instagram is content that is kind of very purposely counter to that polished aesthetic.

• 1:19:33Dax Shepard?

  Messy.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  Messy, raw. Pimples blurry, not cropped properly. Real, because people just want a little of authenticity in this world where we're inundated with processed, intense information. So I think that there's this interesting thing now where that perfect aesthetic is becoming cheap because it's easy to produce. And so the most savvy creatives across a lot of industries are kind of rebelling against that, not atypical of what happens in different art worlds.

• 1:20:00Dax Shepard?

  Well, as any person in a business, you're looking for a hole in the market and you're trying to fill it. So if everything is perfect and polished, what's available to exploit is this.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  So we're in this moment now, and I don't know how long it'll last, where imperfections are a indication of authenticity. That's one of the reasons why they're working. They're also relatable. And so it's a way of being like, I'm not AI, or I'm not a brand who's trying to sell you something. I'm just a person.

• 1:20:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, fucked up mess.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I curse, I stutter over my words, I make mistakes, just like everybody else. So that's kind of where we are, and you're already starting to see it.

• 1:20:36Dax Shepard?

  AI is going to figure that out, right?

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  It's already recreating it. Like, if you talk to ChatGPT, you hear it take a breath. Ugh. It doesn't need to breathe. That's not a thing. And so you're going to be able to create the illusion of that raw imperfection.

• 1:20:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  It's still starting now.

• 1:20:52Dax Shepard?

  Adam, I called the front desk of the hotel I was staying at in Detroit. Busy, busy, busy, busy. Then I went online and got the actual hard number to the place and called on my phone.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, landline style.

• 1:21:01Dax Shepard?

  It was like, hello, thank you for calling such and such hotel and blah, blah, blah. And it had a bunch of imperfections in the thing. And I was talking for a while. I don't know what clued me in, but I go, hold on, are you a computer? And she's like, I can see why you would ask that. And I was like, oh, yeah. Fuck, dude, this is nuts.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  It's a thing.

• 1:21:26Dax Shepard?

  It's insane.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:27Dax Shepard?

  I talked for a while before I figured out it was a computer.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  But in that world, what's left, I think it's our taste, it's our perspective, it's our opinions that are gonna be the thing that makes some piece of content be interesting or not. But the other question for me is, how can you point the technology at what you want to get done? One way to think about it is like, it is an it, it is an algorithm, it is AI, and it is coming for you. There's another way, which is like, alright, it's a bunch of tools, it doesn't care about me, it's agnostic, but what are the things that I want to do that it can help me do more of, better, faster, stronger, et cetera? And then how do I figure out how to do that? Because it's an interesting tension. On one hand, it's so technical, right? Like, you're talking about these giant foundation models and these data centers with all of these GPUs. Anybody listening to this is

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  already like, I don't care what he said. So on one side, it's so technical. On the other side, it makes things so much more approachable. Like I said before, I'm not great at anything. I used to program. I used to write a lot of code, really bad code. There'll be some engineers now who'll go look up my diffs.

• 1:22:29Dax Shepard?

  Just a thing you'd throw up.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  Just to make it.

• 1:22:30Dax Shepard?

  They eat some poisonous, just like rage, just dunk on me on internal forums.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  I can code again now, because I can work with an AI to program, and I can speak to it in English.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  Because I'm technical enough, I can give it pretty good direction, but it's getting easier and easier. And so a couple of months ago, I started programming, and I was like, alright, this'll be fun. I haven't done this in forever, both my own stuff, but also at work. And the way you did it is you basically had an AI you talked to and you watched it program. That's not how people do it. Well, some people do it, but it's not how I do it now, it's not how a lot of people do it now. Now, I've got like four of them. Now, it's like four engineers, basically, and I talk to each one of them.

• 1:23:09Dax Shepard?

  See who does it better.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  No, I just check back. I do four things in parallel, or I do two things and see who does it better. It's a completely different way of exercising your brain. I'm multitasking aggressively. I've got like four really junior employees that I talk to every 10 minutes.

• 1:23:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, without any civilities.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  I actually do, I say please.

• 1:23:24Dax Shepard?

  Me too.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  I know. It's so weird.

• 1:23:27Dax Shepard?

  And I heard that it's wasting X amount of money.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  It is, I'm sure it's like burning water.

• 1:23:30Dax Shepard?

  Energy a year, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  But like, I do this because I've always said please and thank you to Alexa, because my kids, I don't want to hear me barking orders at any personality.

• 1:23:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  And so it's definitely gotten into my programming.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  It's like, why am I being so, like, ah, I'm sorry, I gave you the wrong instructions the last time. It's like, why am I being a barker?

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  I know, it's so.

• 1:23:49Dax Shepard?

  Being accountable to the computer.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  It's so ridiculous. But I don't think it's limited to programming. I think it's going to make technical things, not just programming. More approachable to a bunch of people because it can bridge. And that's an interesting tension that I'm not sure I know how to make sense of yet.

• 1:24:04Dax Shepard?

  OK, my last thing is threads. So we were on this trip and I was like, what is threads? You're telling me about threads. I'm like, so it's Twitter? I don't know. What are you doing? And I want to say at that time, I was trying to remember because I said it so often. I think you had 300 million subscribers at that time. Is that possible?

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  About 300 million users, yeah.

• 1:24:21Dax Shepard?

  Every morning I'd ask where we were at and stuff.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The goal was to create a place for like the healthy exchange of perspectives of ideas. It started really in reaction to Twitter. We didn't want to be like a kumbaya, super friendly Twitter. People are going to argue. I don't want to pretend otherwise. But we just wanted it to be more open for more types of perspectives, more ideas, a bit more civil. Over the time, it's evolved though, and now it's much more focused on trying to support communities, trying to support just the open exchange of ideas. It's growing. We're doing pretty well here in the US. We're crushing right now in Japan, which is interesting.

• 1:24:58Dax Shepard?

  You're doing a great job of integrating it into Instagram because I see headlines I can't resist, but click on and open threads.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  That's our equivalent of clips. We show little bits of threads in Instagram to raise awareness.

• 1:25:10Dax Shepard?

  And I go.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so we look at two things. We look at how many people use threads or see threads because of its Instagram integration. And then we look at how many people just go on their own.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  And that go on their own is the core business. And there are more people who go because of the...

• 1:25:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you still haven't gotten me to go directly to threads.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  And we might not ever.

• 1:25:27Dax Shepard?

  Who knows?

• 1:25:27Speaker 02

  We haven't even gotten my wife to install it.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Well, we're on threads if our listeners want to...

• 1:25:34Dax Shepard?

  Join the conversation.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  It's follow.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, follow us.

• 1:25:38Dax Shepard?

  What is your evaluation of the ex-Twitter platform?

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  I don't want to underestimate them. I mean, they've gone through a lot of change.

• 1:25:46Dax Shepard?

  Have they grown, shrank, plateaued? What have they done?

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  It's hard to say. Somewhere between plateaued and shrunk a little. But maybe they're growing in some countries and shrinking in others. That's pretty normal for social networks. They obviously laid off, I think, over 90% of their employees. That's kind of scary. It's also impressive. It's very efficient. They've got some good people over there. I just want us to beat them.

• 1:26:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  That's honest and fair, yeah.

• 1:26:10Dax Shepard?

  As I'm watching the Iran stuff and I'm learning, they've shut off all the social media and they've shut off even WhatsApp there.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  We got blocked partially there years ago. We were actually really big in Iran. The government there will block certain social media networks, certain websites, and then they'll shut the whole internet down at times.

• 1:26:27Dax Shepard?

  I wanted to ask just a stupid question. How did they mechanically decide what's on the internet? To me, the internet seems like this huge pipeline that you pull different addresses.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. How do they do it?

• 1:26:40Dax Shepard?

  How do they shut off just some parts of the internet?

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  They work with the internet service providers to block specific domains. So you don't use Instagram by going to instagram.com most likely. But behind the scenes, there is an address, it might be a number, it might be words somewhere.

• 1:26:53Dax Shepard?

  My app goes to there.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Your app goes to there to talk to the servers. And so they'll have the people who provide internet block specific addresses. And then you can play this game of cat and mouse where you can switch your addresses or you can go through a VPN.

• 1:27:06Dax Shepard?

  And what about Starlink? How does that factor in? Obviously, there's no control over Starlink. If you somehow have Starlink, you do have access to everything, yeah?

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, straight from space.

• 1:27:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Crazy. It's the future.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  It's more than half the satellites in orbit.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:27:22Dax Shepard?

  The last two things I pride myself in being able to look at someone and say the exact car that they should own.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you were right.

• 1:27:30Dax Shepard?

  And I spent this time on a cut with Adam and I said, I'm just gonna say it, man, you need a 70s BMW 3.0 CSI. I just need to know what availed you to that advice? Because you went on a search.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  I went on a hunt for a long time on Bringatrailer.com. I don't know, I've never been a car guy. Like, I drive around a Toyota Sienna. Also, like, you can't be like a tech exec in a Porsche. It's like too much of a...

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, stereotype.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  It's just too much of a cliche.

• 1:27:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  I'm saying that out loud as I'm thinking of friends of mine. So I apologize to say this on the record.

• 1:28:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, you used cliche. That was nice. I used douchey.

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like trying to find something that would give me some pleasure that wasn't like crazy, but that also was a little bit, if you know, you know. I drive that thing around. Most people don't even... And look, but every once in a while, someone is like, oh, man. Check out that E9. And they come over and they want to talk.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Wow. What color is it?

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  It's fjord blue. It's like this blue. It's a little bit of a cult.

• 1:28:28Dax Shepard?

  Fjord.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  It's a little bit of a cult pink color from the early 70s.

• 1:28:32Dax Shepard?

  I had said too, blue would be my pick for you. That's my favorite.

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  It's blue all the way through. It's blue on the inside and blue on the outside. It's tiny. It's like a gentleman's coupe.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:41Dax Shepard?

  It's very Art Deco-y. There's a mix of steel and.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  I love that car. So I should, you brought that. I never would have bought it. I would have been just driving the Sienna around.

• 1:28:50Dax Shepard?

  Do your boys like it?

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, particularly Blaze. He calls it the blueberry. He calls it the blueberry.

• 1:28:55Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And then the last thing I find so charming about you is you are a hardcore burning man person. What do you call yourselves? Burners or something?

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  In a past life.

• 1:29:04Dax Shepard?

  What do you mean in a past life?

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  I have kids now. I haven't gotten years.

• 1:29:07Dax Shepard?

  When's the last time you went?

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  I don't know, but I've been more times than I can count. So you're not wrong.

• 1:29:11Dax Shepard?

  Adam's the type that goes, Monica, a week before and fucking builds the enormous contraptions.

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  The build is for me the most fun part. You go and you're like building your camp. You're really making a city in the middle of the desert. By the end of the week, it's like chaos and it gets a little bit too messy for me. I'm getting old. But to get out there and to be using your hands. We built these yurts, which is where we sleep in, or these giant trapeze tents, which is what we hang in, or the kitchen.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:29:38Dax Shepard?

  There's AC.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  We built a shower. We built everything. And then you rip it all down. It's a lot of work.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  But in this world where I'm on glowing rectangles all day, it's kind of nice to be outside with no internet, in the desert with your hands all dirty.

• 1:29:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and fabricating.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well, Adam, I adore you. You'll be back.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:57Dax Shepard?

  That was round two. We'll do round three. We'll be laughing at our naivete in this conversation.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  It will all be irrelevant.

• 1:30:05Dax Shepard?

  In fact, the conversation will happen with our avatars.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  I believe in human creativity.

• 1:30:11Dax Shepard?

  All right. Well, thanks for coming. This was a blast.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. It's so much fun.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  They made some host eggs.

• 1:30:24Dax Shepard?

  Excuse me, I'm just sorting my sides here. I just did a little bit of acting a second ago.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  And how do you feel like you did, sir?

• 1:30:32Dax Shepard?

  Well, it was a cold read. It was my first time reading any of it. You know, there's a scene with my friend Monica.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, looks like she might be doing this role, so we had to do a little self tape.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:30:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  I hope that doesn't happen when I'm on set.

• 1:30:48Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God. I'm glad this happened after the audition.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just put myself on tape for something, but just fun. Now, did it make you think you want to act with me someday?

• 1:30:59Dax Shepard?

  First of all, I have acted with you.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Bless this mess.

• 1:31:04Dax Shepard?

  Bless this mess. Chips, I'm just outside the window.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  You're outside the window, but you weren't in a scene with me. Just paying you.

• 1:31:11Dax Shepard?

  You're right, but definitely bless this mess.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, bless this mess.

• 1:31:16Dax Shepard?

  You are very upset. You're hot. Someone fucked up your farmer's market stand or something.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  It was really easy for me to get into character for that one.

• 1:31:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  That was fun. I forgot about that one.

• 1:31:27Dax Shepard?

  Like a duck to water.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I had forgot to say this on the last fact check, but I'd like to say it here. One thing I left out about my trip to Florida was that I had the time finally to binge Best Dead.

• 1:31:40Dax Shepard?

  And I just want to give a testimonial. Most importantly, the first eight episodes, completely entertaining. I'm entertained. It's sluthy. It's hoodonity. We get an expert.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Dax Shepard?

  Just top notch entertainment.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:31:55Dax Shepard?

  Yes, extremely interesting. Interesting. And then I started episode nine right as I was taking off into the skies, leaving Miami.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Dax Shepard?

  And I know, so you just said you don't like when I cry, but.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  No, I do.

• 1:32:15Dax Shepard?

  That I'm insincere. What did you say?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I know.

• 1:32:18Dax Shepard?

  Do you think I am exploiting it or something?

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  No, I know it's all true to you and it's all, and I want you to cry because it's not good for you to build that up like farts.

• 1:32:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  But, um, because you never did and now you do every day, this is also happening simultaneously, this is happening with Jess.

• 1:32:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I think it's an older male thing.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  I think it is.

• 1:32:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think we've been holding it in for a very long time.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Dax Shepard?

  And then, whatever, well, as all other muscles are atrophying.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Dax Shepard?

  Whatever holds in those tears, they are failing too.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  I know, and I, I think it's very sweet. I'm just around a lot of men who are crying.

• 1:32:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  And sometimes I'm like, wow, do you mean it? Like, but of course you mean it.

• 1:32:58Dax Shepard?

  That's what you said last time too, I know.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  I, of course you mean it, but it's, it's just, it's so weird to be around someone for so long who's ne- who you never see do it that it takes so much.

• 1:33:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  And, and then now it's like, it's like drop of the hat, D O T H.

• 1:33:14Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's not drop of the hat, there are very, there are very specific categories that get me.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:33:19Dax Shepard?

  They're pretty predictable. It's not like someone says like, I just had my first baby and I'm weeping. That's like, you know, no one says like, I lost my aunt and I start weeping.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  No, yeah, no.

• 1:33:29Dax Shepard?

  There's just like, there's categories that I'm now defenseless against.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. It makes sense. It makes sense.

• 1:33:35Dax Shepard?

  To hear someone be totally accountable for their bad behavior.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Dax Shepard?

  I find so moving.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Dax Shepard?

  It's like, it's, it's impossibly moving. So, a- as that's happening, I'm, I'm also a little self-conscious because I'm sitting next to a dude who, right when we got, I sat down, he, he wanted to bond over the fact that we had the same watch.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:33:57Dax Shepard?

  Which I was cool and I gave that some time, but all that let me know is like, he is aware of me. It's not like a, a, a, an invisible object sitting next to him, which is often the case when you fly.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:34:08Dax Shepard?

  He's aware of me.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Dax Shepard?

  So I got.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  You're being perceived.

• 1:34:11Dax Shepard?

  I've got my head, I'm being observed, I think. And then, so I have my headphones on and, and it starts getting, um, it starts getting me. And then I, I, I start welling up. And then there is a point in that episode nine, where now just tears are just streaming down my face. I'm not like audibly doing anything. I just have my eyes closed, I have my headphones on.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Dax Shepard?

  And I'm hoping the dude's not looking at me. And also maybe he isn't. It doesn't matter, there's nothing I can do about it.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:41Dax Shepard?

  And it was just so moving. I was so moved by it. Um, in the, in a very similar way that, that episode we've talked about for years, Blame from, uh, Radiolab.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Dax Shepard?

  Very moved by it. Then there's some score.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Andy, shout out Andy.

• 1:34:56Dax Shepard?

  And then there's a reaction from Elizabeth that then, now I, now I audibly, I do the thing where I start kinda laughing. Cause I'm, I'm clearly crying, crying now. But anyways, I just was really, really, really blown away with that. And I thought ultimately this entertaining thing that was just entertaining for me became very, very poignant. And, um, and, and a wonderful display of why it's worth finding out everyone's point of view in all situations. So it was, it was great. I just wanted to encourage people to listen to it.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Thank you, I really appreciate it. Obviously means a lot to me that you liked it.

• 1:35:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, so, and then I can answer without any, without any spoilers. There's, I guess there's debate. You've since brought me up to speed that there's debate. I a thousand percent believe this person.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I have no, zero, uh, doubt whatsoever.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Yes, there's, but there's, you know, the end of the show has led to a lot of questions for people. A lot of people are skeptical

• 1:35:53Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  of the, um, end and, uh, and a lot of people have said, like, what does Dax think about this? Because, no spoilers, but you have a connection to something that's going on in this.

• 1:36:09Dax Shepard?

  And I hope I'm known as well too. I have a very good bullshit meter.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  I think they were definitely expecting you to be cynical about the end.

• 1:36:20Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  And I, well, it was funny because when I was, you know, we were making it and stuff. I, I think, I told you a little bit, like, oh, this is going on, this is crazy. We're doing this. And I didn't at all think you'd be cynical. But then as soon as people started saying it.

• 1:36:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  I was like, oh no, like, he might, he might hear this and, and. Beyond that team.

• 1:36:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  And, and I got scared.

• 1:36:48Dax Shepard?

  Again, back to, and I can't say it enough upfront first. I absolutely love A Million Little Pieces.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:56Dax Shepard?

  James Fry.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  James Frey. Yeah.

• 1:36:59Dax Shepard?

  I love the book.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Dax Shepard?

  I don't care at all that it was fictional.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:06Dax Shepard?

  I love the book. It's a beautiful book. And then my friend Leonard is almost maybe as good, the follow up. Yeah. And it's just a beautiful story.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Dax Shepard?

  But I also was reading it as Stephen King best said it. He wrote a little op ed about it. Not one person in Recover believed it.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  So weird.

• 1:37:21Dax Shepard?

  That's not the physics of how it all works.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:24Dax Shepard?

  And unless this guy was this one anomaly, which is possible, there are anomalies.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Dax Shepard?

  But we all thought it was bullshit.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Dax Shepard?

  Uh, but I didn't care.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Dax Shepard?

  But yes, if I hear, this is why I hated Hillbilly Elegy. I was wondering, I'm like, this is bullshit. This, this dude's story is, he's overheard it secondhand and hasn't lived any of this.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  The ride that Hillbilly Elegy has taken in my life is wild. You were definitely right about that. I was so wrong.

• 1:37:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So given that track record.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:59Dax Shepard?

  I'm a thousand percent certain, as much as one can be.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Dax Shepard?

  That that person was speaking honestly.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:38:53Dax Shepard?

  com slash DAX plus ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first so you meet the right people faster no wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2 let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles seasonal or otherwise try it for free today at ZipRecruiter.com slash DAX at ZipRecruiter.com slash DAX meet your match on ZipRecruiter

• 1:39:28Dax Shepard?

  well I mean I wish I wish everyone had heard so we could really deconstruct it a little bit but it's just like I think people it's it's much easier when you're afraid of somebody or or someone has wronged you to assume that there was a great deal of calculation happening yeah and because it fits better with the archetype of villain and it fits better with the archetype of bad person and as someone who's just done a lot of inexplicable things yeah fucked up I'm like I just can relate so much like yeah there people could call me about some stuff and I would be just as like I absence of a of an explanation is the other people would be yes like I don't

• 1:40:12Dax Shepard?

  know why at the well you know in my four day blackout that the time I think I got closest to dying it's like you know only later the next day I'm realizing like well clearly I tried to take a motorcycle right because the motorcycle is sitting on its side yeah I have pulled ribs I clearly must have tried to pick that motorcycle for a very long time like I don't I don't know yeah I don't know why where I was gonna go or what I thought I should be doing on a motorcycle or whatever I just you know I don't know yeah I mean I brought you up obviously

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Multiple times at the end. In our episode 10 when we recapped and then we also did two more episodes on Patreon where we took a listener question, voicemails. And then we like answered those and you know, there's a lot of poking holes. Yeah, and you know, I think everyone has their own relationship with what happens in the story. And that's also interesting to me.

• 1:41:12Dax Shepard?

  For the people who don't believe, I'm very compassionate to them.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:16Dax Shepard?

  And sympathetic. My hunch is they have been lied to multiple, multiple, multiple times by an addict or a manipulator or a deceiver.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Dax Shepard?

  And they have lost the willingness.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:29Dax Shepard?

  To trust again. And I get it.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:41:32Dax Shepard?

  You know, there were, I felt that way about my dad in some categories. I was like, I'm not even ever buying back into this thing.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:40Dax Shepard?

  So if you come in with that, yeah.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  And if you have no connection to it whatsoever.

• 1:41:45Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Then you also have all these ideas. And I think that was for me, you know, before knowing you and like Eric.

• 1:41:53Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  I would have been skeptical too. I definitely would have been one of those people. But there have been so many experiences.

• 1:42:03Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  With you that are contradictory in a way that has made me change the way I think about people. In a good way. Like, oh, it's really not black and white. It's not that this person behaves in this way and they don't behave in this way and they, they're this and they're not this. It's like, oh my God, like you, we really can be.

• 1:42:24Dax Shepard?

  We run the gamut.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  All of the things. It has totally changed my perspective on humans. And, and for the better. I mean, I'm so, I'm so. I'm a better person because of it, definitely. It's the idea that I could never.

• 1:42:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Is the part that I don't believe in anymore. Like, I don't believe, for your relapse, when all that was going on, it was so hard for me to compute that that was you still.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Like, how is this person, who I know and love and trust and know wouldn't lie and do, you know, is doing all of it? Like, it's very, and

• 1:43:11Dax Shepard?

  Disorienting.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  It's very disorienting and it's, but what I'm saying, and same with, you know, some stuff with some of our other friends, like, it's helpful, it's helpful to be reminded that we're all capable of all things at all times and it doesn't mean someone's good or bad and it definitely, it's definitely possible to do things that you don't think you'd ever do.

• 1:43:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh yeah, they don't have to be addiction related.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  Everyone has the chance to do something they thought they would never do.

• 1:43:41Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  And it's

• 1:43:43Dax Shepard?

  And everyone knows what it's like to have secrets.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to have regrets. Have regrets and have remorse and, yeah, it's, it's, well, because a lot of people were saying, like, how could the depth of the things that this person was doing, how could they have possibly done that if they had this other thing going on? And I was like, uh, no. I was like, Dax was interviewing, um, big experts.

• 1:44:13Dax Shepard?

  One of the smartest persons we've ever interviewed, in fact. At the lowest point of detox.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like, it's possible. And I understand if their specific relationship with addiction or those people, like, doesn't present that way.

• 1:44:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's the other thing I think that's misleading about people who have a kind of a generic, uh, idea of what an addict is, which is like, Everything the person is before they're fucked up is also carries over to when they're fucked up.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Dax Shepard?

  So it's like, if someone's completely irresponsible sober, guess what? When they, that's gonna get exaggerated when, but if you're incredibly controlling.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Dax Shepard?

  And buttoned up, guess what? My version of addiction looks very much like that. So it's like, there isn't a single version of it. It's like, you just, you carry into it all the things you already are and add that on top of it.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also think what's, um, good about knowing addicts is like, it is helpful. Because, you know, we all just want answer. I mean, this show explores this too. Like, we want answers. The whole time during the show, where the questions are coming up and I'm like, why? Wait, why? Why did this person do this? Why? What? And there, you don't get answers often.

• 1:45:33Dax Shepard?

  We're trying to understand.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's also when that, when that person's done something painful.

• 1:45:39Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  You wanna know why? Like, if someone cheats on someone, they're gonna be like, why? Why? And, and, and with addiction, what I have sort of realized is like, there isn't a why. That's like, an obvious, common question.

• 1:45:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  And I think the reality is, like, you don't get that. You don't get that.

• 1:46:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Often. And it's okay to not get it, but it's, it's practiced. Like, it's, you gotta really find peace.

• 1:46:09Dax Shepard?

  It does imply a strategy, back to what we were saying. It's like, this thing wasn't unfolding in the other person's experience of it.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:17Dax Shepard?

  As much as it was unfolding in Andy and Elizabeth.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:21Dax Shepard?

  There wasn't a game plan. There was a first thing that led to a second thing, that led to a fourth thing, that led to a, and now it's this enormous snowball.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:31Dax Shepard?

  That is quite complex by the end of it.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:35Dax Shepard?

  But like, an initial dumb comment on a thing is like, almost innocuous.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Dax Shepard?

  And then it's maybe I'm commenting, you know?

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  It does grow. It doesn't necessarily require a game plan or a goal in mind from the person. It can be getting away from them just as much as it's getting away from the victim.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm really glad you liked it a lot. And it is.

• 1:46:59Dax Shepard?

  Great job.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Means a lot.

• 1:47:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, to you and Elizabeth and Andy.

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  Thanks, thanks. Yeah, check out Beth's set if you haven't. It's all available on your podcast.

• 1:47:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, now you can really barrel through it. If you're driving back and forth from Key West a lot, couldn't recommend it enough.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  Um, you want to do facts?

• 1:47:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, let's do some facts.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  When was Adam on last? He was on March 12th, 2020. Wow, right at the.

• 1:47:29Dax Shepard?

  Wow, like maybe one of our first.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  He was in person.

• 1:47:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, maybe one of our last.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it came out then. So I'm sure we did it like February.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  February 22nd, 2020 with him.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  So probably one of our last, yeah.

• 1:47:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  Before COVID. Okay.

• 1:47:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Now, are a disproportionate number of professional athletes little siblings? Says yes. Research indicates that a disproportionate number of professional and elite athletes are younger siblings.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  God, the phenomenon often called the little brother effect. That's not.

• 1:48:03Dax Shepard?

  You haven't heard it in a positive light yet, have you?

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  Little brother, energy. Thank you. Studies show that having older siblings to compete with from a young age forces younger children to develop greater skills, tenacity, and physical ability to keep up. The little brother sister effect, growing up, yes, same.

• 1:48:20Dax Shepard?

  Reggie Miller's story is great. His older sister Cheryl Miller is the greatest female basketball player of all time. Reggie Miller became one of the greatest of all time, but he was competing with his sister. And yeah, he talks about how long it took him to be able to beat his sister.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:48:35Dax Shepard?

  I like that one.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that too. Um, okay. Does Coke own Dasani? Yes. The Coca-Cola company owns, licensed, or markets more than 200 brands worldwide as of 2025. A reduction from over 400 in previous years to focus on stronger, high potential products. While known for its flagship soda, the company's portfolio spans thousands of beverage products in cross categories like water, coffee, teas, juices, and dairy. What's the difference between Mexican Coke and US Coke? The primary difference between American and Mexican Coke is the sweetener. Mexican Coke uses cane sugar while American Coke uses high fructose corn syrup. I think that's what you said. Um, also, Mexican Coke is typically packaged in glass bottles.

• 1:49:20Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Um, can't, can't sugy comes up yet again.

• 1:49:25Dax Shepard?

  Still don't have it memorized.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:49:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  Oh, he said, he said creators making deals off platform to do posts is a fifteen billion dollar industry.

• 1:49:34Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Uh, the content creator brand deal industry is a massive, rapidly expanding sector with influencer marketing alone valued at roughly twenty four billion in twenty twenty four and projected to grow significantly.

• 1:49:47Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  How much energy water are we wasting when we say please and thank you to Chat G P T?

• 1:49:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  It really wasn't giving me a very correct answer, and then that was concerning.

• 1:49:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  Cause it didn't want me to, yeah. A recent study found that A I models like Chat G P T use significant amounts of water to stay cool. Every twenty to fifty prompts you type, regardless of their urgency, depth, or silliness, consume the equivalent of half a liter of fresh water.

• 1:50:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  Okay, he said Starlink is more than half the satellites in orbit. As of early twenty twenty six, Starlink satellites account for approximately sixty five percent of all active operational satellites in orbit.

• 1:50:26Dax Shepard?

  And now Bezos is gonna be putting satellites up too, so there's just gonna be like a trillion satellites.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says with over nine thousand four hundred satellites in low orbit.

• 1:50:37Dax Shepard?

  Low orbit, orbit.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Low Earth orbit, L E O.

• 1:50:42Dax Shepard?

  I'm just wondering, like, when they launch a spacecraft up out of low orbit, like, are they dodging those things? Like, how do they plan it? Like, will there not be a point where there's just a net of those fucking things and we can't even exit now?

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:50:56Dax Shepard?

  Cause certainly if you hit one of those going seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour, which is how fast they're going, that's gonna be an ish.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  That's an ish, yeah.

• 1:51:05Dax Shepard?

  That's a big time ish.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  I have it.

• 1:51:07Dax Shepard?

  You, oh, how's it going?

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  It's fine so far. I didn't, I have to have it.

• 1:51:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  It's the only option.

• 1:51:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Um, which is, I mean, that's interesting.

• 1:51:18Dax Shepard?

  I had a thought. I find myself doing this a little bit, and I kind of caught myself doing it. It was like, let's just say, if you hate Elon Musk, it's kind of natural that you would root for him to fail.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:31Dax Shepard?

  You want him to fail, but what you stop, you don't think about is like, I don't know, he's probably got fifty thousand employees. Like Tesla is an American company that's employing 50,000 people. And there are a lot of people would love to see Tesla just go under because they hate him. But you gotta really look at like from a gallant or a.

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  Utilitarian.

• 1:51:53Dax Shepard?

  A utilitarian point of view is like, do you really want 50,000 jobs to go away? Do you really want a big, American, successful company to go under? Do you really want all that tax revenue to go away? Like, that's a lot of damage because you hate one person.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yep.

• 1:52:09Dax Shepard?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  It does make sense.

• 1:52:10Dax Shepard?

  It's like complicated.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  I do think that people with that kind of money just have this unlimited power and then, but if, if they feel it, if their pocketbook feels it or the bottom line feels it, they do adjust. They're still, he's still a businessman at the end of the day. So if everyone stops.

• 1:52:37Dax Shepard?

  But currently the SpaceX, they're talking about SpaceX having an IPO. And they're talking about it being probably the biggest IPO in the history of the stock market. And so even if you took away Tesla, this dude's gonna be the richest guy. He's gonna get richer. That company is wildly successful and Starlink is like. So at that point, you know, you're, he's beyond probably hurting, unfortunately.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:06Dax Shepard?

  And then you're just talking about like these tens of thousands of people that live in Texas that manufacture these cars and then the dealerships and all the mechanics and like, you know, and then just a big, American car company. I found myself really going like, yeah, I guess I haven't been thinking. Cause I'll, I have found myself getting excited when I hear that like their stock went down or something.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:27Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  There are other companies, like there are other huge companies, competing companies that I align with more ideologically. And so I want to support that.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  I just wanna support that more.

• 1:53:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, unfortunately, there's none of the American big three that have gotten their foot in the door on electric. The, he's like, that's the only company that really got its foot in the door globally with electric.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't have that issue because I, I, I do not like Teslas regardless of him.

• 1:54:01Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  If that was a car that I was like, fuck, like, it's a, I love that car. I don't, I feel so nauseous in those cars. Like, I, I, I specifically asked on Uber, like, no Teslas.

• 1:54:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Um, cuz I don't like them. So that's not an issue for me. What is, what's, Kristin has an American electric.

• 1:54:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's a great, that, I, I much prefer that driving experience.

• 1:54:26Dax Shepard?

  I personally do too.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Dax Shepard?

  But I also, um, I want there to be thriving American industry that employs a lot of people. And then I feel like ethically compromised if I let my hatred of one person get in the way of fifty thousand people's livelihood.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I know what you mean, but there's a, all these other people who have jobs at other companies too that are, that those jobs are being threatened with this monopoly being like held, you know, potentially held by him. So it's like, no, I'm probably just gonna like veer off over here and try to put my, my money there.

• 1:55:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  Um, that's just, this is all personal. People get to spend their money how they wanna spend it.

• 1:55:05Dax Shepard?

  That's right, you get to vote with your money.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  You do, you get to do whatever you want.

• 1:55:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well, I would think it was abundantly clear in the interview, but I love Adam.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  I'm impressed that he puts himself out there for, on a hard topic.

• 1:55:19Dax Shepard?

  He's also pretty staggeringly smart.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:22Dax Shepard?

  Like, when I've watched all these other interviews, like, the, the amount of things he has of full comprehension.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:27Dax Shepard?

  That is pretty massive.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Dax Shepard?

  Which I think you have to in that role.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely.

• 1:55:32Dax Shepard?

  Ah.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was great.

• 1:55:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. All right, love you.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  And we're his favorite food.

• 1:55:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right, that's right, that's right.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  And that was like, that was flattering. All right, love you.

• 1:55:40Dax Shepard?

  Love you.