Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Kathryn Paige Harden (behavioral geneticist) About this episode Kathryn Paige Harden (Original Sin On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness) is a psychologist, professor, and behavioral geneticist. Kathryn joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why psychology is not a solved problem, studying the essential question of why we do things we don’t want to do, and how her religious upbringing was fundamentally at odds with her desire to study psychology. Kathryn and Dax talk about what living in a culture that embraces the concept of original sin means for our morality, genetic predictors of misdemeanor versus felony behavior, and our active human inclination to break stuff. Kathryn explains her belief that holding each other accountable is not a supernatural condition but a social one, why we can aim to be better in our institutions than in our worst moments, and the scientific fact that there’s no evolution without diversity.
Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/
Head to turbotax.com to find a store location near you and get matched with a TurboTax expert — with real-time updates in the iOS app.
This episode is sponsored by AppleTV. Learn more at: https://tinyurl.com/mr2caw2c
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 25,426 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? Today, we have Catherine Paige Harden. She's a professor of psychology at where we should have gone, University of Texas, Austin, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab. Her previous books include The Genetic Lottery, Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. And her new book, which is so tasty, is called Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Delicious.
0:35 Speaker 01 It's a good one.
0:36 Dax Shepard? Please enjoy Catherine Paige Harden. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete, all-access, live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying, and sprints, all in one place. Watch every race live, only on Apple TV. We get support from Quince.
1:00 Speaker 01 I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.
1:09 Dax Shepard? I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a T-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.
1:32 Speaker 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.
1:50 Dax 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.
1:59 Speaker 01 It's a uniform. 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.
2:18 Dax 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.
2:54 Speaker 02 I brought you something.
2:55 Dax Shepard? Oh, OK.
2:56 Speaker 02 Which is that I brought you the UK copy of the book because it has a much cooler cover.
3:01 Dax Shepard? Oh, I'll say it does. It's reminiscent of Beowulf. It's a boar's face on a woman's head. Tell me more about that.
3:09 Speaker 02 I think they were thinking about how there's a lot of animal research in there.
3:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
3:15 Speaker 02 And also just thinking about in what ways are we animals? You know, in what ways are morality connected to the animal world? Yeah, I sent them a whole mood board and my US publisher was like, all of these look like novels or poetry collections. It doesn't read science on fiction. And then my UK editor was like, let's go.
3:33 Dax Shepard? Let's party.
3:34 Speaker 02 Let's do something weird.
3:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what are the known differences in how UK publishing in the US publishing differs?
3:41 Speaker 02 I don't think I know because this is my first rodeo.
3:44 Dax Shepard? The English are so fascinating, aren't they?
3:46 Speaker 02 Yes, I think they're darker and twistier and more repressed.
3:49 Dax Shepard? Because they're, yes, exactly. The repression begats, more perversion.
3:53 Speaker 02 I totally agree. It's a Freudian analysis of the British culture, but I believe that.
3:59 Dax Shepard? I'm so sneaky.
4:01 Speaker 01 Hi.
4:02 Speaker 02 Hi, hello. It's so nice to meet you.
4:04 Speaker 01 So nice to meet you.
4:04 Speaker 02 Thank you for inviting me. This is such a surreal treat.
4:08 Dax Shepard? So let's start. Did you just fly in from Austin?
4:10 Speaker 02 I did, last night.
4:10 Speaker 01 Ah.
4:11 Dax Shepard? You teach at UT, right?
4:12 Speaker 02 I teach at UT.
4:13 Dax Shepard? Where did you go to undergrad?
4:14 Speaker 02 I went to Furman University, which is... Have you heard of it?
4:18 Speaker 01 I have. My friend's mom went to Furman.
4:20 Speaker 02 Back when it was Baptist, probably.
4:21 Speaker 01 Probably, yes.
4:23 Speaker 02 So it's a small liberal arts school in Greenville, South Carolina. And it was a Baptist college until, I think, like 1995. And then I started in 1999. I'm dating myself here. So it still was private, southern, still very southern Baptist in its inclination.
4:40 Dax Shepard? But you were evangelical, so how does that jive with being Baptist? Did your parents worry?
4:45 Speaker 02 No, it was sort of the general kind of Protestant, conservative, fundamentalist. It wasn't culturally very different than my upbringing. And they give a lot of scholarship money away. So I actually wanted to go to Vanderbilt because I loved Nashville.
4:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:00 Speaker 02 But I didn't get the full ride, and Furman paid for me to go.
5:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:03 Speaker 02 So that's how I ended up at Furman.
5:04 Dax Shepard? What part of Texas did you grow up in?
5:05 Speaker 02 I grew up in Memphis, actually.
5:06 Dax Shepard? Oh, you grew up in Memphis?
5:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:08 Dax Shepard? Oh, you just live in Texas. I got chem...
5:09 Speaker 02 I live in Texas. My dad was a Top Gun pilot.
5:13 Dax Shepard? Oh.
5:13 Speaker 02 So we moved around when I was little. And then he worked for FedEx, and FedEx is in Memphis.
5:18 Speaker 01 Were you suburbs of Memphis?
5:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, like deep exurbs of Mem... Collierville?
5:22 Speaker 01 I lived in Collierville for two years.
5:24 Speaker 02 Are you serious?
5:25 Speaker 01 I did.
5:25 Speaker 02 That's wild. How did you end up in Collierville?
5:29 Speaker 01 Second and third grade, my dad got a job there. And so we went there. My brother was born there. And then we left. My mom hated it.
5:35 Speaker 02 Collierville Elementary School? Did you go to public school?
5:38 Speaker 01 She hated it. I went to, I think it was Miss Zeeman?
5:44 Speaker 02 That's amazing. That's a niche cultural overlap.
5:48 Speaker 01 Yes. I remember our house, compared to the house we had just come from, felt like a mansion.
5:55 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Where were you coming from?
5:57 Speaker 01 I was coming from Georgia, and it was a small, little house. And this felt like a huge house. I mean, I want to go now.
6:07 Speaker 02 Sis, see it as an adult.
6:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:09 Speaker 02 You could zillow it if you remember your address.
6:11 Speaker 01 I could zillow it.
6:12 Dax Shepard? But it's an upscale area. I was just at either a Sprouts or a Food and uh
6:16 Speaker 02 Oh, grocery store.
6:17 Dax Shepard? Remember I did a stop outside of Memphis and one of the gals who was visiting said, you know, this is where Monica lived.
6:23 Speaker 02 That's wild.
6:24 Dax Shepard? It's kind of nice, right?
6:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, we moved there in like the mid eighties. So it was very, very small. It was still its own town. And I think my parents were getting out of the military, transitioning to a job. And they wanted a house where they could raise kids. And so they bought out in Carville. Yeah, so funny.
6:44 Dax Shepard? Okay, so you graduated from there and did you do graduate school somewhere?
6:48 Speaker 02 Yes. So then I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for my PhD, which was lovely. I mean Charlottesville, I don't know if you've been.
6:56 Dax Shepard? Yes.
6:56 Speaker 02 A lovely place and a lovely place to be a graduate student because you can live there even though you are below the poverty line.
7:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
7:04 Speaker 02 You know, I think I made $12,000 a year when I was a graduate student and I still live there and I was very happy.
7:10 Dax Shepard? And the college was famously designed by Jefferson?
7:13 Speaker 02 UVA was Jefferson's academical village. And so he designed the rotunda, which is this Palladian architecture in the middle of campus. And there's still kind of his original architecture down the mall. And then you see from certain places in town, Monticello.
7:32 Dax Shepard? Oh, you can.
7:33 Speaker 02 So it's very Jeffersonianly inflected. It has a kind of pomp to it because of that.
7:38 Dax Shepard? Uh huh. And you got your PhD in?
7:41 Speaker 02 Clinical psychology.
7:43 Dax Shepard? What's the transition from that to then teaching at UT? Did you have stops in other places?
7:47 Speaker 02 So I had an unusual path that I went to my faculty job almost immediately after graduate school. So in order to get a PhD in clinical psych, you do the research part of the graduate work and you do a dissertation. But then you also have to do a year-long clinical internship, which is in a hospital or a VA or a University Counseling Center. It's all direct patient hours. And that gets you the PhD in clinical psychology.
8:14 Dax Shepard? Okay.
8:14 Speaker 02 So I had this one year in Boston, where I worked at McLean Hospital, which is outside of Boston and Belmont. It's where, have you seen or read Girl Interrupted?
8:25 Speaker 01 Oh.
8:25 Speaker 02 Susanna Cason. That's McLean. So it's kind of this storied place in American psychiatric history. So it was this strange year of my life where I went from doing a lot of research and a little clinical work to one year, full-time, inpatient psychiatry, eating disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders.
8:46 Speaker 01 Wow, so intense.
8:47 Dax Shepard? So this hospital, McLean, what reputation is it? Is it like where everyone would show up? Is it that kind of? Is it more private?
8:53 Speaker 02 It looks in some ways like a college campus. And then there are these tunnels that connect the buildings. And they put all the graduate interns in the tunnels. That's where your office is. If you've ever seen the Angelina Jolie movie, there's a lot of scenes in the tunnels. And those do exist. But it is a private hospital. And so you get this interesting mix of people who just ended up there because that's where they went. And people who went there because that's where MIT will refer graduate students if they're having a first psychotic episode. Or people who come from old money in Boston.
9:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like, are there any people going there to rest? That kind of vibe?
9:31 Speaker 02 No.
9:32 Dax Shepard? No.
9:32 Speaker 02 It's really hard to go to a psychiatric hospital to rest.
9:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:35 Speaker 02 No.
9:36 Dax Shepard? Well, rest is in quotes. Like, they would say they're going away to rest, but really, they're having a psychotic episode.
9:41 Speaker 01 The bar's probably pretty. You gotta be showing.
9:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, you still have to be, even self-pay patients, which are a very privileged minority. I mean, and this is true of psychiatric hospitals in every city in America, which is the need is so much higher than the number of beds.
9:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, right.
9:59 Speaker 02 That you really have to be at a level of functioning that's pretty impaired in order to be staying kind of residential or inpatient in a psychiatric hospital.
10:07 Dax Shepard? And did you have any kind of awakening during that clinical work? Where your interest shifted? Or you thought you were gonna do one thing, but this experience clinically changed you?
10:19 Speaker 02 Yes and no. So I knew when I was a college student that I wanted to be a scientist and I wanted to be a professor. And that was my goal. So I knew even on internship that I wasn't gonna stay in full-time clinical care, that I was gonna pivot, try to get a faculty job, start a lab. My primary... Life activity professionally was going to be doing science. I think what working in an inpatient facility impresses upon you is that psychiatry is not a solved problem. There's still a level of distress and impairment that no amount of money and no amount of resources and no amount of being the high functioning Harvard grad student or MIT graduate student can get you out of.
11:04 Speaker 02 So part of my clinical work was in case management, which is, okay, now when someone's leaving hospital, where are they going?
11:11 Dax Shepard? What's the aftercare plane?
11:12 Speaker 02 Who are they living with? Who is going to make sure that they can get to appointment? How are their medication going to be filled? Even for people with resources, that is an incredibly difficult thing to manage. So just as like a lived experience in bad systems hurt us all, even the most privileged among us, it was kind of a radicalizing experience to work in that situation.
11:34 Dax Shepard? Well, it could make you quite pessimistic, I think, that experience.
11:37 Speaker 02 It can, but then you also see people who get better, or even if they don't get healed. Like, there's no healing. You're not going to become not schizophrenic. You're not going to not have bipolar disorder anymore. And that doesn't mean that there isn't ways to help make your life better and less distressed today. So this kind of ruthless pragmatism of, we can't make your brain different totally, but we can make you less distressed in this moment about these hallucinations that you're having.
12:11 Dax Shepard? I guess you would just have, yeah, variable goals as opposed to an oncologist is like, we must beat the cancer. That's the signal of success.
12:20 Speaker 02 There's that line, which is, hope is a discipline. And I do think that working with the most seriously impaired patients in a hospital setting make you realize that you're not hoping for miracles. You're not hoping for overnight transformation. You're having a discipline of what can we do today, given our tools and resources, to make tomorrow better? That is a perspective that I think I've carried into my adult life.
12:44 Dax Shepard? Okay, so your current lab at UT deals with development.
12:49 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:50 Dax Shepard? And so how do we get into that as our focus?
12:53 Speaker 02 Okay, so let's start at the beginning.
12:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
12:55 Speaker 02 So my first job in science, when I was an undergrad at Furman, was a research assistant in a mouse lab. So they studied opioid addiction and withdrawal, and I loved it. It was my first job in science. My previous jobs had been waitress in a diner, retail shop girl, and I wasn't good at any of them. And then now, I just thought, this is amazing. So when I was deciding on graduate school, I wanted to stay thinking about genetics, thinking about the brain, thinking about addiction, antisocial behavior, but not in mice. I didn't want to work with rodents anymore. So I ended up in a clinical psychology program, which is about those same problems, but in people. And then I went to McLean,
13:39 Speaker 02 where I worked with some people who were recovering from substance use disorders, some people with serious mental illness. But I had this one rotation on an eating disorders unit, which was all adolescent girls. And that really solidified my interest in adolescence as this incredibly important period in the lifespan. So then when I started my lab at UT, it was really, how do I pull all of this together? So we're looking at genes, we're looking at the brain, we're looking at addictive behaviors, but how they began in late childhood and adolescence, and what's the kind of nature and nurture of those things? So it was trying to pull together those different threads into one research program.
14:20 Dax Shepard? And would you agree, from 98, did you say, when you started college?
14:23 Speaker 02 I started in 99.
14:24 Dax Shepard? 99, till now, even that statement, nature versus nurture, then was kind of an ironclad dichotomy, which now, no one who's hip to it thinks those are different things in a lot of different ways, which we'll explore. I want to go back to the lab work you were doing on the opioid. I think what might be interesting, because your book is very unique, Original Sin. It's very memoir and academic. There's a lot going on in it. The professor who you were working under, she herself was a recovering cocaine addict.
14:56 Speaker 02 Yes.
14:57 Dax Shepard? And do you think her kind of openness about that? Liberated you for the rest of your life and being not a presentational professor, but someone, no, no, I'm a whole person. I'm not going to pretend.
15:08 Speaker 02 So what's so fascinating is that I didn't know that.
15:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, you didn't know that about her?
15:12 Speaker 02 She hadn't disclosed that to me. I learned that later when I was no longer a student. And then she wrote a memoir of her own. It's called Never Enough. It's very good by Judith Griselle. And how she changed me was how she showed up in the world and in her work every day. So I came from this relatively religiously fundamentalist household. And many of the women that I knew growing up were primarily stay at home moms, didn't work outside the home. So I just hadn't seen many adult women who were running labs and doing research and being professors.
15:52 Speaker 02 And so I happened to get this research assistant job with her as an 18 year old, new baby adult. And I remember she came to the lab the first morning and she was late because it was such a beautiful morning. She decided to bike and she just had this freedom of how she showed up in her everyday life.
16:12 Dax Shepard? She sounds Attic-y already.
16:13 Speaker 02 That really made me be like, what is this? Like, what is this person? Who is this lady? And so I worked for her and then I took a bio psychology class where for our final, she would just give us names of drugs and we had to draw where in the brain and what neurochemical systems they were. And so I really learned this very intellectual approach to understanding addiction from someone who had lived experience, but I didn't know that at the time. And then when I finally got to know her a little bit as a person later on, I was like, no wonder I thought you were so cool when I was 18.
16:53 Dax Shepard? Prior to that, I'm sure what you learned in your day to day life as a kid in Memphis in an evangelical home is like, addiction is a failure of willpower and morality. It's a character flaw, whereas this laboratory was demonstrating, oh, when you give these mice opiates, their brains immediately adapt, requiring a larger dosage. They are absolutely incapable of not becoming addicted to it because that's how the thing functions in their head. Like, I think that would have been very illuminating as far as what you had been told.
17:25 Speaker 02 It's totally paradigm shifting. I think that if you're raised and you think that Drug use is a sin and that the answer to sin is prayer, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, atonement, that addicts deserve to be punished in order to punish the sin out of them, which, as we know, that's not very effective. And on the one hand, all of those things can be very powerful for people who want to change their lives. A spiritual practice, a relationship to a higher power. And at the same time, that's not the whole story.
18:05 Speaker 02 Addiction doesn't exist on some metaphysical plane that's free-floating away from our bodies and our brains. Yeah. And it's also not even a uniquely human phenomenon. And so I think to go from a very moralizing perspective on addiction to understanding it as a natural phenomenon, this is something that we can make happen in mice, and this is something that we can manipulate in mice by injecting things into their brains. That is a fundamentally different way of seeing the relationship between the body and behavior. And also a different perspective on what needs to be done if you don't want people to be addicted to opioids. It offers a new lens of a path forward. Yeah.
18:50 Speaker 01 When you were like coming home and talking to your parents about the things you were learning and stuff, how did that go?
18:57 Speaker 02 Oh, that's such an interesting question. I don't have very clear memories of this, except for two interactions that I had with family members, when I told them, this isn't a passing phase. I'm going to go to graduate school. I really want to make psychology and genetics and science my life. And one of my family members said, I think psychology keeps people from Jesus. Another one said, oh, I was afraid you were going to say that. So there really was a sense of... This way of seeing the world and this endeavor is dissonant, maybe in ways that we haven't fully articulated to ourselves, maybe couldn't necessarily fully articulate to you from our worldview.
19:42 Speaker 02 And I do think psychology is kind of a radical science. I mean, you are an anthropologist. Anthropology, if you study it, you see the world differently for the rest of your life.
19:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, absolutely.
19:54 Speaker 02 And I think psychology does the same thing. I teach intro psych at UT, and we introduce it as psych is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. And if you just think about that as a phrase, the scientific study of the mind and behavior, it really is a paradigm that changes the way that you see the world and can be inconsistent with how other people see behavior, especially bad behavior. Yeah, blame. Yes. When you're in a blaming mindset, you're in this judge's mindset, then everything that you see is filtered through that lens, and that prevents you from seeing clearly.
20:31 Dax Shepard? Or disgust, like that's a very powerful one, too.
20:33 Speaker 02 Yes, disgust, too.
20:34 Dax Shepard? OK, so your book starts off, you about to take a trip with your boyfriend to go do LSD in the desert in West Texas. You're gonna have your kids go to Dad's house for the weekend. And we quickly learn that, you know, you'd done LSD once before, and that your boyfriend was like, let's not fuck till after. We're coming hard for a professor. I'm like, oh, this is already juicy and fun. And then also just kind of brave. How do you get liberated to write? I admire it, and I think it's fantastic. But you're also a professor. I'm like, does it cross your mind while you're writing?
21:09 Speaker 02 100%. I have 1,000 students in my intro psych class right now. And this is not usually the parts of my life that I share with them. So there's a couple of things here. One is, I wanted to write something that felt different on the page than many social scientists, psychologists, academic philosophers write. There's a lot of great nonfiction that are written by other professors. And Those books can be awesome. And also, there is a kind of continuity of tone and voice across them. As a writer, I kind of just wanted to see if I could pull something off that was a little bit different.
21:51 Dax Shepard? I love it. You're starting off, as we already talked about, as a kind of what we might call recovering Christian. So you have a lot of your own stuff going on.
21:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:59 Dax Shepard? So tell us about the acid trip and how it kind of informed you to write this.
22:03 Speaker 02 The other thing is, the book is called Original Sin. And that name, that phrase, "original sin," we get from Saint Augustine in the Church, who came up with this idea that Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. And that original defiance of God is inherited over generation to generation, such that what you inherit could not just predispose you, but actually condemn you, damn you, make it inevitable that you're going to behave in ways that are amoral or immoral.
22:37 Dax Shepard? To the degree that his conclusion was, yes, infants are sinful.
22:41 Speaker 02 Infants are sinful. Infants deserve to go to hell.
22:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
22:44 Speaker 02 And that thing that you inherited, even though it wasn't your fault, it's your burden. It doesn't get you off the hook. It doesn't make you less damnable. It makes you more damnable. That theme, that idea, I think, is carried through now. Even if we're not Christian, even if we were never raised in that tradition, even if we've never heard of Augustine, we live in a culture that's shaped by these ideas about, what does it mean to have a body that seems sometimes at odds with what you want that body to do? And what does it mean to be morally responsible, responsible to each other? If we have cells and we have amygdala, we can also study that from the perspective of scientists.
23:28 Speaker 02 There's a content warning to those of you who don't like scripture being quoted, but there's this line in the Bible book, Romans, Paul's letter to the Romans, where Paul writes, "The things I don't want to do, I keep on doing. And the things I do want to do, I don't do." And I think that captures such a fundamental human experience. Oh, yes. Things I don't want to do, I keep on doing. So we can think about, why do humans do things that they don't want to do? That's a fundamental problem. And we can come at that from an objective perspective, as scientists, as philosophers, as scholars.
24:11 Speaker 02 But the reason why that question is pressing is because we all have lived that experience internally. We haven't a subjective experience.
24:19 Dax Shepard? Anyone who's looked in a food pantry has experienced that. What I should do and there's what I want to do.
24:24 Speaker 02 Exactly. So I didn't want to write a book that is about this tension between the objective and the subjective and only have the objective perspective in there and not have any of the, well, what is it like to be a person? Yeah, it's inherent in the topic. That are messy. Yeah. And then the last thing is Augustine's most famous book is his Confessions. It's a memoir. And I thought, well, if he can do it, and that can be a book of ideas, why can't we have a memoir that's also a serious book of ideas? So that was my goal.
24:55 Dax Shepard? And his intellectual adversary was, what, how do you say?
24:58 Speaker 02 I think it's Pelagius, but some people say Pelagius.
25:01 Dax Shepard? So Pelagius was coming from the opposite point of view, and this was a grand debate in Christianity, right?
25:05 Speaker 02 This was the grand debate. So I went to Christian school my whole life, and no one ever told me that the doctrine of original sin, this idea that you inherit Adam's sin, is something that was invented 400 years after the birth of Christ. So we have had, at this point, centuries of Christians who understand a relationship between the body and morality. And then Augustine comes along and is like, actually, no, you inherit sin. You inherit physically. That's why he was so anti-sex, as he thought, well, there's no possibility of having good sex because every time you procreate, you physically pass on this.
25:42 Dax Shepard? You transmit.
25:43 Speaker 02 You transmit it to the next generation. And his big adversary, Pelagius, was like, what are you talking about? So they're from opposite ends of the British Empire. Pelagius is British, Augustine is from North Africa. And Pelagius says, if something's inherited, it can't be sin. It's either nature or it's morality.
26:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the framing is if it's nature, that's not choice.
26:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:09 Dax Shepard? And only choice is sinful, right?
26:10 Speaker 02 It had to be an act of will in order to be sin. And if you think about this... Dynamic of someone saying, "You inherit a body that's bad, and your nature just makes you more punishable." Or if something is of the body, in the body, nature, then it's not an act of will, it's not morality, we can't hold each other morally responsible for it at all. You see that dynamic everywhere in contemporary culture. Every conversation we have about weight, about sex, about drugs, about addiction, you see these two perspectives. And they don't say, "I'm siding with this third, fourth, fifth century church father," when they do it, it's secularized.
26:55 Speaker 02 I think it's interesting to think about, how did those ideas still influence how we respond to the science? And also, is there another option?
27:02 Dax Shepard? Well, I was just gonna say.
27:03 Speaker 02 Why are we stuck with the only two options that were given to us nearly two millennia ago at this point?
27:09 Dax Shepard? Well, and I think when people hear those two options laid out, they will be drawn to one or the other. And I think what is interesting is, as you go through different examples, I will guarantee that you will flip-flop a lot. At first, I would go, "No, that's horseshit," right? So that's my knee-jerk. But then, weirdly, as we understand behavior and genetics' role in behavior, again, on a big spectrum, that's also true. We do inherit things. Whether I'm gonna label them sin or not is not really relevant, but lo and behold, you do inherit quite a bit. That has nothing to do with your will or choice. And so in some weird ways, we do inherit.
27:46 Speaker 01 That's not positive to you. That can be negative.
27:49 Dax Shepard? As we'll uncover. But let's go back to the acid trip, because you're having a lovely time. And Travis, okay, now he's your husband.
27:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, we got married.
27:57 Dax Shepard? Okay, congratulations. But Travis has a terrible trip.
27:59 Speaker 02 He does.
28:00 Dax Shepard? And he is caught in a hallucination where he has crashed the car, he has killed you, and he is to blame.
28:06 Speaker 02 Yes, it was awful.
28:08 Dax Shepard? I've been with someone on a terrible trip.
28:09 Speaker 02 That's horrible, and you were also tripping? And I was also, and I had come out of it a little bit, but you know, if you're still tripping a little bit, you're not the best companion if someone's having a very bad trip. Oh, my God. You know, there's a contagion there. So I think there's several things about this story. One is, this is a reason why you should not do psychedelic drugs unless you have really trusted people to process the experience afterward with. I don't necessarily say that in the book so explicitly, but this turned into a piece of art in terms of the book and growth for him, in part because he could talk about it with me and his friends and his parents and his therapist. And like, we could really integrate that into our experience.
28:53 Dax Shepard? Yes.
28:53 Speaker 02 So I think we're learning more and more that psychedelics can be really powerful tools for growth and discovery. But it's not just like, insert drug, output growth. There needs to be some processing and human interaction and attachment that helps you make that experience coherent and learn from it. It was this horrific time in which he was absolutely convinced that he had done something wrong. He was absolutely convinced that there was no way he could have not done it every time the loop was played. And he was absolutely convinced that he was totally guilty of doing it, that he was totally on the hook for this action.
29:37 Speaker 02 And so it was, in so many ways, the lived experience of this Christian doctrine of original sin, which is, there's no way for this to have gone any other way, and you are 100% damnable. You're guilty for doing it. I didn't know this at the time. My mind wasn't going like, okay, I understand why this experience is so intellectually and personally meaningful to me. It's his trip, why am I writing about it? And it took a while to really articulate, what does this experience have to teach me? Why can I not forget about this?
30:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
30:15 Speaker 02 And that was the connection. It was in that moment that felt so true. This thing that I've completely dismissed as like a relic of my Christian childhood. Is it true? Are we on the hook for things that we can't change? What does it mean to be on the hook for things we can't change? And that's where the book goes from there.
30:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think it opens the door to a really compelling thought process, which is blame in itself. You give the example of Oedipus, who's sexed with his mom and kills his father, and then gouges his own eyes out.
30:47 Speaker 02 Yes.
30:48 Dax Shepard? And he gouges his own eyes out even though he's not to blame. He didn't know. There's also this juicy debate about is blame relevant if the person had no idea? There are schools of thought that yes, they are. And there are schools that no. So let's talk about blame a little bit.
31:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. So complicated. So just what is blame? Part of blame is an emotion. Blame is this feeling of I'm outraged and I'm entitled to be outraged. Or I'm resentful and I'm entitled to be resentful because you've done something that violates some moral norms, some social norms, some legal norm. The philosopher Peter Strassen, who's working in the middle of the 20th century, called this the reactive attitudes. And basically argued, I think convincingly, that there is no human life without other people mattering to you in a way that makes you sometimes really pissed off at them because they have hurt you in some way.
31:46 Speaker 02 So the blame is this idea of I am entitled to have these reactive attitudes to you. I'm even entitled maybe to make you suffer or want other people to make you suffer because you've done this bad thing. Part of the journey that I took in writing this book, I actually wrote this book, I wrote a draft of it, and I sent it to my editor. And she was like, this book reads like you figured out what you were thinking as you were writing it. So now that you figured that out, can you please rewrite it? So then I took it apart and I had to rewrite it. And so part of my journey in this book is really thinking about what is the difference between blame and accountability? And I think blame is you've done something bad. You're bad.
32:31 Speaker 02 I'm entitled to treat you like you're bad. I'm entitled to feel. Outrage and resentment at you. Does accountability have to be that? And that was a big intellectual growth and personal growth for me over writing the book. It's trying to pull those ideas apart in my brain.
32:48 Dax Shepard? Because on one hand, we think that blame is warranted when a decision was an option and you picked one or the other. You picked wrong, so you deserve blame.
32:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:58 Dax Shepard? But we're very forgiving if you had no choice. You weren't aware of a choice. We don't seem to blame there. But then back to the biblical framing. If you sin, regardless of you knew it was a sin or not, it's a sin.
33:10 Speaker 02 You're still blame worthy.
33:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so it's like we already have kind of two radically opposed.
33:14 Speaker 02 There's a lot of different ideas that we can realize are contradictory in our collective sort of cultural unconscious that are pulling on our intuitions in different ways.
33:28 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. You can now watch complete all access live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying and sprints, all in one place. I will be consuming all of those things, Monica.
33:48 Speaker 01 I know you will.
33:49 Dax Shepard? I kill for Friday to start watching practice one, following it on a sprint weekend. Oh, my gosh, two races. And this season brings a ton of new energy to the sport. New teams like Cadillac and Audi just joining the grid. New drivers stepping into major seats. Lando Norris defending his first World Drivers Championship. And all eyes on Lewis Hamilton in his second season with Ferrari and a brand new circuit in Madrid. Plus, a new US home for Formula One. You can watch every race live only on Apple TV. Watch on Apple devices, Android devices, smart TVs, streaming devices, gaming consoles, or on the web at tv.apple.com. All part of one Apple TV subscription alongside hundreds of exclusive shows and movies.
34:31 Dax Shepard? Watch the Formula One Japanese Grand Prix live on Sunday, March 29th at 1 a.m. Eastern, or watch race replays on demand anytime only on Apple TV, the new US home of F1. 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.
35:14 Dax Shepard? Allstate North America Insurance Co. and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Intuit TurboTax. April 15th is coming up fast. And if you're like most people, you're probably dreading the whole tax thing. You know the old way, sitting in some waiting room for hours or sending over your tax docs and waiting and waiting for any kind of update. You want something modern and tech forward, but you also want that human connection. And this year brings a major upgrade. Intuit TurboTax now has in-person locations nationwide. You can walk into a tech-enabled TurboTax location near you and meet face-to-face with a real tax expert. Drop off your documents in the store and see them uploaded to your TurboTax app instantly. Just like that, you're done.
36:00 Dax Shepard? Your new TurboTax expert stays back and works tirelessly to get you every dollar you deserve while you get real-time notifications as you go about your day. Honestly, it feels like someone finally figured out what we've all been wanting. It's not some sterile tax office from 1987. And it's not just an app where you're on your own. It's both. The human expertise with smart, modern tech. You drop off your stuff, go about your day, and get real-time updates as your expert works through everything. That's the upgrade. Head to TurboTax.com to find a store location near you and get matched with a TurboTax expert with real-time updates and iOS app. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter.
36:44 Dax Shepard? You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that, too.
36:55 Speaker 01 That's where your AG1 routine earns its spot. It's not fixing your sleep or your alarm time. It's giving your body what it needs so the dark mornings don't tank you before you even start. One scoop, cold water every morning before anything else.
37:07 Dax Shepard? AG1 Next Gen has 75 plus ingredients, vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics, superfoods, backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials. Key nutrient levels improved with three months of consistent use.
37:22 Speaker 01 That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.
37:26 Dax Shepard? It's an easy, everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know, mm, I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.
37:36 Speaker 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.
37:43 Dax Shepard? Yes. Go to drinkag1.com/dax and for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/dax. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Armchair Experts sent you.
38:13 Dax Shepard? I think we should maybe attempt to define sin as we'll be using it.
38:18 Speaker 02 So I think we can define sin in two different ways. I think it's been defined in two different ways in church history. And then also it corresponds to these kind of two different notions of blame that we've been talking about. So one is, sin is... Doing something that you ought not to have done. There is some rule in your society, that's a moral rule, that's a legal rule, that's a social rule, that says thou ought not kill someone, thou ought not have sex with someone that's not your spouse, and you do it anyway. And usually, breaking rules comes with some sort of censure or punishment. And it has to be an active choice or no?
39:01 Speaker 02 And it just has to be an act, either way.
39:04 Dax Shepard? You say your favorite definition of it is from Francis Spofford?
39:08 Speaker 02 Yes.
39:08 Dax Shepard? Definition, uppercase sin is the human propensity to fuck things up. It's our active inclination to break stuff. Stuff here includes moods, promises, relationships we care about, and our own well-being, and other people's.
39:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:21 Dax Shepard? So I think that's a lovely thing for us to think about.
39:24 Speaker 02 And I think it gets to, one, it's not just like there's some authority that's telling you what not to do. When you violate a norm, you are hurting people. Often, you're hurting people you care about or people who care about you. And so that tendency to fuck up your relationships because you're doing things that you shouldn't be doing because the rule is there to protect the relationship or to protect the community. I think that's a really good way to think about sin. What's interesting about that definition is he says it's the tendency to do that. And I think this is where we can kind of have two definitions of sin. Is sin the action, the doing it? Or is sin the tendency to do it? Right.
40:08 Speaker 02 Which could be governed by all sorts of things. And I think in the Augustine tradition of you inherit sin, you're not inheriting doing something, you're inheriting a tendency The want to do it. to do something. When you're thinking about, are you to blame for what you've done? And then the choice comes in. But sometimes we blame people for even wanting to do something, you know, for being prone to do something.
40:31 Dax Shepard? We've even had criminal cases where someone was thinking about cannibalism, and that became a court case. Where do we delineate between thinking of something and?
40:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:39 Dax Shepard? Okay, so that's all of your kind of personal journey. But then your professional journey, which predates this book, which is heavily involved in the book, is that you publish a paper that talks about a certain aggregate of genes that you have discovered that overlap with really increased outcomes of addiction, aggressive behavior, eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, a whole bevy of different behaviors that seem to be linked by some grouping of genes.
41:09 Speaker 02 Yes. So my lab is in what the field is known as behavioral and psychiatric genetics. So what we're interested in doing is discovering certain parts of the genome, certain parts of your DNA sequence that differ between people that increase your likelihood of developing a certain mental disorder, mental illness, and/or behaving in a certain way. And this is a method, kind of a general enterprise, that is shared across lots of labs, across lots of countries, most of whom have nothing to do with anything that we would consider moral behavior. And the way these studies work is you're basically gutting DNA from millions of people.
41:53 Dax Shepard? God bless Scandinavians, right? Let's give them a shout out.
41:55 Speaker 02 Scandinavians, Iceland, UK Biobank, which is in the UK, and then 23andMe customers. So it's a lot of people that are white, British, 60-year-olds who've been into a tube and given the British government so much information about their lives.
42:12 Dax Shepard? And also in Scandinavia, their medical records are public, although the identity is obscured, so you can do these enormous epidemiological studies.
42:19 Speaker 02 And they link across medical records, criminal legal system involvement records.
42:24 Speaker 01 They don't do that in China?
42:26 Dax Shepard? Well, if they do, they're not.
42:27 Speaker 02 They wouldn't have the data to us.
42:29 Speaker 01 They're not sharing, but they're probably doing it.
42:31 Dax Shepard? But how they infamously debunked these vaccine autism connection claims was they were able to look at a group of 3 million kids who had been vaccinated, and then a million that had not, and they could immediately show there's no difference.
42:44 Speaker 02 There's no difference there.
42:46 Dax Shepard? So that's where it's like this huge benefit.
42:47 Speaker 02 You have these huge data sets, and you're basically... Going through and you're saying, where do people differ in their DNA? And are those differences correlated with whatever behavior that I'm interested in? So what we were really interested in, in my group, was what's known as conduct disorder, which is this diagnosis that's given to children if they are persistently breaking rules, aggressing against other people, maybe aggressing against animals. And there just wasn't the data on that in enough people. So our strategy was basically to say, what other behaviors do we think are caused by
43:27 Speaker 02 the same genes because of family studies, because of adoption studies, for which we do have enough data on huge numbers of people? Let's pull as much data as we can on all these different behaviors and kind of triangulate across them to be like, what genes are associated with all of them? So we were looking at ADHD symptoms in childhood. We were looking at sexual behavior, age for sexual intercourse, and number of sexual partners. The UK Biobank, if you say that you've had more than 99 sexual partners, it gives you a follow-up question, which is, are you sure?
44:06 Dax Shepard? Wow, that's very cultural.
44:08 Speaker 02 Are you sure? Are you sure that you've had more than 99 sexual partners? Have you ever smoked pot? Have you ever smoked a cigarette? Are you engaged in problematic alcohol use? So you drink to the point that it's a problem in your life? And do you describe yourself as a risk taker? And none of these are serious antisocial behavior, like having sex at a slightly younger age, or like being a little bit more hyperactive. Most people wouldn't even consider that necessarily sinful behavior. But what all those things have in common is someone in our society, maybe not your group, but someone in our society thinks that's bad behavior. And you did it anyways. You had sex even though in 1960s England, it maybe wasn't that acceptable.
44:53 Dax Shepard? Is that like misdemeanor sin?
44:54 Speaker 02 Misdemeanor, that's a great word. And what's interesting is that if you identify genes that are associated with these misdemeanors that are consistently associated with all of them. You end up with a set of genes that also predict felonies.
45:09 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
45:10 Speaker 02 Like, literally predict your likelihood of ever being arrested, of ever pulling a knife or gun on someone, of engaging in much more serious antisocial behavior. It also predicts if you've ever attempted suicide. So it also predicts kind of this harmful disinhibition against the self.
45:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and in this paper, you established that this group, the people who share this cluster of genes, are twice as likely to be arrested.
45:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:36 Dax Shepard? So that's a pretty significant finding.
45:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
45:38 Dax Shepard? And I'll add, too, it's not the case of 1 in 1 million versus 2 in 1 million. This is like 20% versus 40%.
45:46 Speaker 02 Many Americans have a lot of interactions with the criminal legal system. But yeah, so it's not destiny, right? It's not 100%. It's not all genetic. This probably goes without saying, but no geneticist believes really in genetic determinism. This is not a set of genes that fate you to be arrested, but it is a very significant increase in risk, and it's a significant increase in your risk of developing an addictive disorder, too. And this is tricky to think through. How should this information, if at all, affect our judgments of the moral blameworthiness and the legal responsibility that are attached ordinarily to these behaviors?
46:29 Dax Shepard? Well, I think the adoption studies are really interesting. That's another great resource, right, to establish a genetic predisposition to some of those behaviors. So tell us about what we discovered.
46:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, so again, this is thank goodness for the Northern European countries that have these registries. Although there are some good adoption studies in the United States, too. My colleague Janay Niederheiser runs one of them. So what you're looking at is children who've been given up for adoption at birth or very near birth and raised by adoptive parents in a closed adoption, where they're not having contact with the biological parent. Does the characteristic of the biological mother or father, or both, predict something about the child's outcome, regardless of the adoptive parent that they were? And what these studies show you is that it's always nature and nurture. So if you're adopted into a family where they have substance use problems,
47:23 Speaker 02 you're more likely to have substance use problems. But if your biological parents were... Addicted to substances or had ever committed a violent crime, you are more likely to develop those same things.
47:37 Dax Shepard? Three times more likely.
47:38 Speaker 02 Even if you never met them, even if you're raised by other people. And those odds ratios can change, you know, and for some things it's as high as three. Sometimes it's one and a half times more likely. These are people that you've never met, that never raised you, and it still is affecting your behavior.
47:55 Dax Shepard? I like this line, "Adopted children who never lived with their biological parents are three times more likely to abuse drugs if biological parents abuse drugs." Identical twins are similar in their drug abuse as they are in their body mass index or coronary artery disease.
48:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, wow.
48:11 Dax Shepard? Isn't that telling?
48:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there was a great paper published in 2015 by Tinko Polderman and Nature Genetics, where they looked at 50 years of twin studies and aggregating across all of those twins, how similar are identical twins, how similar are fraternal twins, what psychiatric traits look like. They look almost identical to cardiovascular traits. I find that a really interesting comparison for our intuitions because we are now so used to thinking, of course, your body weight is nature, of course, it's nurture, of course, it's gene environment interactions. Of course, you have some agency, but also a limited amount of it. At least that's your experience of it. And your set point that you inherited from your parents
48:55 Speaker 02 that maybe got cannibalized really early in your life, all make a difference. We can do that so easily when it comes to weight. Why do we have such a hard time doing that with becoming addictive to alcohol or drugs?
49:08 Dax Shepard? On a scale, addiction, we can kind of get there. Violence, we don't want.
49:14 Speaker 02 We don't want to go. We don't want to let anyone off the hook for that. Because violence has a clear victim other than the person doing the behavior. So addiction can hurt other people, but the primary victim is the person using. And so when we're asked to make sense of the science.
49:36 Speaker 02 And we tend towards a kind of Pelagianism of it's either biological nature or moral. And we're asked to choose. For body weight, we can be like, okay, let's reclassify this as biological instead of moral. With addiction, there's like, I don't know. But then as soon as it's obviously a moral issue, because there's nothing that gets closer to the heart of what humans think immoral behavior is than hurting another person deliberately.
50:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
50:04 Speaker 02 And then we're saying, we're not going to be able to reclassify this as not moral. And also, you have to take seriously that there's a biological element of it, but that doesn't mean that some people are born bad. That's such a mindfuck, I think, for Americans, to keep all of that in their heads at the same time.
50:20 Dax Shepard? Yes. They're all a part of this aggregate of genes you have identified.
50:26 Speaker 02 It's not just me. This is such a team science effort. My former graduate student just is an author on the paper that I just finished. And if he's listening to this, he's probably like, it was me doing all this. I'm the one in the trenches. But I think a really great example is just one gene. And one gene in isolation has a tiny effect, but I think it's illustrative anyway. It's this CADM2. It's a cell adhesion molecule gene. And if you look at what it's associated with, it's associated with having sex with more people and putting more salt in your food and smoking cigarettes and becoming addicted to alcohol.
51:04 Dax Shepard? I don't need to take the genetic test. I clearly have this.
51:05 Speaker 02 And what is it associated with? It's associated with doing things that bring you short-term pleasure, but you might have a voice in the back of your head saying, it's not a good idea, that have potential negative consequences. That really troubles our sense of who we are, to think that a gene could be involved in that.
51:24 Dax Shepard? It threatens our agency.
51:25 Speaker 02 Why do I do the things I don't want to do?
51:27 Dax Shepard? But I think it would be a great time to educate people on. I think the colloquial understanding of genes is a little too simple, which is, we like to think there's, they found the gene, the BRCA gene. And there are a handful of these genes, but there are 3 billion genes.
51:43 Speaker 02 Well, there's probably not 3 billion genes.
51:45 Dax Shepard? How many genes are there?
51:46 Speaker 02 Well, I think we're estimating there's 20,000 genes.
51:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. I'm sorry.
51:50 Speaker 02 There's many base carries.
51:52 Dax Shepard? There's three billion ACGT on the DNA string.
51:55 Speaker 02 Yes. Humans have way fewer genes than we thought that we were gonna have. That was one of the big surprises of the Human Genome Project. It was like, we're so complex. We're gonna have more genes than anyone. There's species of apples, I think, that have more genes than we do. And part of it is because there's a lot of our DNA sequence that used to be called junk DNA that regulates how the genes are read. And that seems to be where a lot of the action is in human uniqueness. Not what are the ingredients, but when are the ingredients combined? So, yes, you're totally right. People think of the gene for. Nearly every psychological characteristic is what we call massively polygenic.
52:37 Speaker 02 So, poly means many, genetic gene, which means that it's influenced by thousands and thousands and thousands of genetic variants, of genetic differences between people that are scattered throughout the gene, hundreds of genes, maybe thousands of genes. And each of these genetic differences makes the tiniest little bit of an influence. So, for height, there's not one gene for height unless you have like Marfan's or dwarfism. Most people are taller or shorter because you got a thousand slightly height-increasing genetic variants that increase your height by a millimeter. But you got so many of them that you ended up a tall person rather than a short person.
53:21 Speaker 02 In my first book that came out five years ago, I write about this NBA player who happened to sit on a plane next to a geneticist. And the geneticist was like, why are you so tall? You're seven and a half feet tall. And he was like, I don't know. And so, they genotyped him. He didn't have any gigantism. There's no weird, rare thing going on. What it was is, there's the gene that makes you a little bit taller than your siblings. And he just had six standard deviations above the mean in all of these tiny... If you're flipping the genetic coin, it just came up heads like a thousand times in a row, and that's why he's so tall. Everything we're talking about when we're talking about addiction potential or likelihood statistically to be arrested for a crime.
54:06 Speaker 02 There's no crime gene, there's no addiction gene, just like there's really no obesity gene. There's lots of genetic differences. And so there's a distribution. But then every distribution, there's someone who ends up on the tails of that distribution. And that's where we see really big differences in their likelihood of developing one of these disorders.
54:28 Dax Shepard? Is AI going to completely make these correlations come rapid pace? Like, you must be using AI to go through all this DNA info.
54:37 Speaker 02 So one of the big challenges now is we can find genes now that we have many people more rapidly than we can figure out what the heck they're doing.
54:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
54:46 Speaker 02 There's still ambiguity sometime as to like which gene this genetic variant is. Because it's located next to this one and this one. What do we know about that? And then how do these combine to affect protein, to affect cells in which part of the brain?
55:01 Dax Shepard? I guess, I mean, in that it's a pattern recognition machine. I feel like they'll be coming hot and fast.
55:07 Speaker 02 I'm very low confidence about my predictions for AI. Because I feel like the whole field is moving more rapidly than I'm comfortable prognosticating about. But it's done amazing things with protein folding problems, which are also really complex. And so how is our knowledge of the genome and the sheer amount of data that's available, plus the advances in AI, where are we going to be in 10 years? I think where we are now would have felt like science fiction 10 years ago. So I'm hopeful that AI will be particularly helpful in this. Okay, we have a gene and then we have an outcome 25 years later, which is being arrested. What is it doing in the body and the brain?
55:50 Dax Shepard? Well, now would be a great time to introduce the fact that this group of genes you and your colleagues have identified are most active in utero.
55:58 Speaker 02 There's this idea that you sometimes get in psychiatry that some disorders are neurodevelopmental disorders. So you'll hear that autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder or schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder. And I'm always like, what disorder is not neuro and not developmental? Like, everything is neurodevelopmental.
56:19 Speaker 02 And when we're looking at this collection of genes that predict misdemeanors, but also predict more serious antisocial offending and more serious substance use disorders, we can look with reference data sets and be like, okay, well, where in the body and when in development are these genes most turned on, most expressed? And it seems to be in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. So in utero, prenatal development is when these genes are most specifically active. That fits also with what we know from the animal literature on preterm birth,
57:03 Speaker 02 which disrupts brain development in utero, is associated with elevated risks of aggressive behavior in animals. Children who are born preterm are at elevated risk for ADHD and conduct problems. There's something about pregnancy and your brain being grown when you're being cooked. That seems to be really important. So much pressure. And I think, again, part of the reason we struggle to make sense of this is we're so used to thinking about adult behaviors as choices. But the person doing that choosing was created by a developmental process that begins in utero and that all of the luck of who they came home from the hospital to is there.
57:45 Speaker 02 But that genetic luck starts affecting their brain development even before they come home from the hospital.
57:50 Dax Shepard? And then we get into the juicy philosophical element of this, which is we have come to have appropriate toleration for someone with ADHD, for someone with autism, and these are neural developmental conditions that started in utero. It would hold that we would have that same level of compassion and understanding for the other ones that developed in neuro, which would be addiction and these other behaviors. But then philosophically, we have an interesting line between all of these.
58:20 Speaker 02 Yes. People's intuitions about what does it mean if you can show that someone's behavior is linked to their early genetic and environmental luck? How should that affect how we treat them? Those intuitions are really unstable, depending on what the behavior is. So if that behavior is... Weight, we're like, well, there's nothing wrong with being heavier or skinnier. If that behavior is sexual orientation, we're like, of course. This is a difference between people. When it comes to addiction, I think we're kind of all over the place, actually, as a culture. But then, as soon as there's harm to another person and there's violence, you're, wait.
59:02 Speaker 02 So they might have inherited a predisposition to violence? And that's supposed to make me more compassionate of them?
59:09 Speaker 01 This is very Sapolsky, "Determined," that book. I was just thinking about this the other day. I think I'm a determinist. I really do.
59:17 Speaker 02 Really? That's interesting.
59:18 Dax Shepard? Before you got in here, we were both saying we love Sapolsky, but we don't like determinism.
59:21 Speaker 01 You don't? Knowing all this?
59:24 Speaker 02 I don't know if I'm a determinist, like, in the academic philosophy sense. So, an academic philosopher would say, a determinist and an incompatibleist is someone who says, "Everything we do is determined by causal factors. Our agency is an illusion. And having the freedom necessary for moral responsibility is incompatible with what we know about the determinist universe." I would say that, I don't know if the universe is a determinist universe or not. That seems like a physics question that's beyond my pay grade. I don't know if we have free will in the way that a lot of philosophers.
1:00:06 Speaker 02 But I think that the practice of holding each other responsible is really baked into being human.
1:00:13 Dax Shepard? A social primate.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:14 Speaker 02 We are a social primate. I think Sapolsky would carry it to, we're not free. So therefore, blame is never appropriate. Punishment is never appropriate. It's as useless to be mad at your husband who cheated on you as it is to be mad at the sky for raining. Whereas I think, I don't know if we live in a determinist world. I don't know if we have free will, but we're all on this planet and we still have to make decisions about how we treat each other.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:45 Speaker 02 And I think holding each other accountable is not a supernatural condition, but a social one.
1:00:50 Dax Shepard? Do you want to hear my two arguments against it? Number one, I think because although I agree, we could look back in time at any behavior we observed, we could look back and we could know every single thing that added up to that behavior. That is knowable. If we knew the location of every atom in the universe, we could see exactly why this effect occurred. That gives you the illusion that we would somehow be able to predict what happens next. But my argument is until you can predict, till you have data, till you have scientifically proven a prediction's possible, bullshit. Because just because you can see how things landed here does not mean you can look forward and predict the future, which would mean it's not deterministic.
1:01:32 Dax Shepard? Secondly, with this amazing dude on, Neil Theis, teaching us about self-organizing complex systems, and all self-organizing complex systems, of which we are one, they have to have divergence in them or they collapse. And divergence is innately non-deterministic. So there cannot be a system without divergence in it.
1:01:49 Speaker 02 So you're not a determinist and I'm not a, we need freedom in order to hold each other responsible. So we have two objections.
1:01:57 Speaker 01 Okay, I'm not like a full, I'm not like I'm determined to pick up this cup right now and now I'm doing that. It's not that everything's already decided, but I can recognize it's easy for me to sit here and say, we have to keep that person accountable who behaved this way, when I'm not behaving that way, even though I wasn't gonna behave that way.
1:02:19 Dax Shepard? You're not battling the desire.
1:02:20 Speaker 01 Exactly. And if I was given the exact same situation genetics, I would be behaving that way. No one's better than, and I don't know that we're making choices so much as living out.
1:02:35 Speaker 02 Living out a program or living out a process.
1:02:38 Speaker 01 That our genes have given us.
1:02:39 Dax Shepard? I think we're living on a very probabilistic situation. We have a very high probability of doing certain things, which I agree with.
1:02:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think that number's very high, actually.
1:02:49 Dax Shepard? For people who are listening who are already jumping to, well, no one's gonna be held accountable. I want to make clear about Sapolsky's argument, indetermined, and your argument as well, I think by the time we get to the end of the book is. There is a huge difference between removing people who are dangerous from hurting other people. No one is arguing for no accounting.
1:03:07 Speaker 02 Just letting them go.
1:03:07 Dax Shepard? Yes. The argument is you can take people and remove them from other people so that everyone's safe without blame and without hatred and without being punitive. Many of the people in this country, and in this book, it shocked me to read it, like 60% of Americans believe in hell. So if you believe in the notion of hell, 60% of us do, God believes you should be punished. So of course, our criminal system should involve punishment and pain and suffering and atonement. And so that's the division you and I, and I think Monica would all like to see, which is probably you would have done the same thing in the same environment with the same genes. You're not better than anyone. So let's remove them and make everyone safe and make everyone accountable,
1:03:51 Dax Shepard? but without any of the blame, hatred and moral righteousness.
1:03:55 Speaker 02 The hatred. I mean, I think in particular, the sense of you've done this and therefore you deserve to be scorned. You deserve to be exiled. I'm entitled to be elated and happy and feel pleasure at seeing you suffer.
1:04:10 Dax Shepard? Talk about that study you were talking about when people get shocked.
1:04:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:13 Dax Shepard? Please walk us through that.
1:04:15 Speaker 02 Most typically developing humans, they come in and they show empathy at another person's distress very early in life. Like if a baby hears another baby cry, they will start to cry. It's a really innately aversive thing to see a fellow human suffer. Again, we are a social primate.
1:04:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:04:35 Speaker 02 So ordinarily, if you see another person being electrocuted, you see in the person who's observing that, patterns of electrical activity in parts of the brain that ordinarily respond to being pained yourself, right? Like I'm feeling your pain. Unless the person being shocked is first portrayed as being a wrongdoer in some way. They've violated a moral norm.
1:04:58 Dax Shepard? And so they've hooked people's brain up to a presumably an FMRI and they're gonna watch someone get shocked. And if it's a quote, "good guy" that gets shocked, you're gonna see empathy and discomfort.
1:05:08 Speaker 02 And then if you see someone being hurt that was first portrayed as a wrongdoer, then you see brain activity that's more characteristic of pleasure. Dopaminergic areas.
1:05:20 Speaker 02 And that, I think, is telling us multiple interesting things. The first is that, why do we feel pleasure at certain activities? Why do we have dopamine when we have sex and eat sugar and drink water? And interact with people who like us? And experience ourselves being esteemed and watch someone else suffer? That's indicative of how evolutionarily old and necessary to the survival of humans this consequences to violating the social rules is. And this is where also I think differ from Sapolsky is I don't think we're going to reason ourself out of that. Oh, no. Like, I think it's baked into the sauce. I think that telling people that they're going to lay aside their retributive urges
1:06:05 Speaker 02 is like people advocating for total sexual abstinence and becoming a monk. Some people can do it, but not most people. And it's going to go really against the grain of our nature.
1:06:19 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:06:25 Dax Shepard? This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace. And I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours, but at some point you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything
1:07:06 Dax Shepard? you need to go from, "I've been working on this," to "Here it is, come find me." All in one place, no code, no stitching together a bunch of different tools. So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Head to Squarespace.com/dax for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff. But there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left.
1:07:51 Dax Shepard? What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working. Not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly is different. It's already right there inside your email, your docs, your browser. You don't go to it. It's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important? It flags what doesn't add up before it leaves your hands. It knows your style, your workflows, and it just backs you up without getting in the way. A thought partner that's already up to speed at your service, not after your job. So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.
1:08:35 Dax Shepard? We get support from Skims. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.
1:08:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, but the girls who get it, they get it.
1:08:47 Dax Shepard? Okay, but for those of us who are clearly not girls, walk me through it.
1:08:50 Speaker 01 Well, you know how much I love my Skims fleece joggers because the plush fleece is so soft. It's cozy. It's really comfortable without feeling too heavy. Well, I went to friend them and she would not stop talking about how comfy they were. She almost didn't give them back to me, which was upsetting, but I'm a girl's girl, so I let her have it.
1:09:08 Dax Shepard? Great, great, great.
1:09:09 Speaker 01 So the sleep sets are awesome because they are very soft and comfortable, but they're cute. If I'm in my sleep set, I feel fine about going down the street to pick up my food. I'm still looking cute, but I'm comfy and I'm cozy.
1:09:22 Dax Shepard? Roger.
1:09:23 Speaker 01 A really fun thing to do is if you're going on vacation with your girlfriends to get matching Skims pajamas. I've done this with Callie and it is so fun. First of all, the pics are so cute, but also it's just fun and friendship.
1:09:36 Dax Shepard? So a girl's girl is looking out for your friends with better loungewear. I get it. Am I one of your girls now?
1:09:41 Speaker 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.
1:09:55 Dax Shepard? We get support from our sponsor Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Gleepran. Foundo is a once-daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.
1:10:21 Speaker 04 Foundo should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundo is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundo if you're allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills, and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundo with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once-daily Foundo is available by prescription only
1:11:03 Speaker 04 in 0.8mg, 2.5mg, 5.5mg, 9mg, 14.5mg, and 17.2mg tablets. Learn more at foundo.lilly.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.
1:11:24 Speaker 02 On the other side, all of our ingrained pleasures can be hijacked and we can feed them really empty calorie versions of it, right? It's like I'm evolved to like sugar and someone can offer me Skittles. And I think a lot of our culture is basically like the empty calorie version of that retributive pleasure.
1:11:45 Dax Shepard? Well, again, we evolved to overconsume because when we found something in bloom, we were smart to overconsume, get some fat reserves, because we would go long periods without. So now we live in a time of abundance where we have to imply morals on top of it.
1:12:00 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:12:00 Dax Shepard? I felt this so acutely last week, and I was aware of it. I'm watching the new Game of Thrones show, A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms. Have you watched it?
1:12:08 Speaker 02 No.
1:12:09 Dax Shepard? Did you watch the first Game of Thrones? Okay, so then you've already experienced this in Game of Thrones, which is there's a battle scene and there's a guy we fucking hate. And there was a moment where our hero was making the bad guy suffer. And we were watching it with two friends and me and the other guy were going, "Let's go, boys!" Like, the elation of,
1:12:30 Speaker 02 Yes, yes.
1:12:31 Dax Shepard? "Make this motherfucker pay" was so visceral and I was aware of it. I'm like, "Look at this thing." But then again, if you think evolutionarily, someone who is a threat to the group, is a threat to the group, so if they are eliminated, there should be elation. The big threat to the group is gone.
1:12:46 Speaker 02 There's other studies where it's like, at what point in time will children pay tokens or give up stickers or pay their money in order to see someone who's been portrayed as taking a ball away from a child, see them hit with a club?
1:13:00 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 And it's like, by the time they're, I think, five, they're like, "Here are my stickers." You know, people pay to see those movies. So there's something so fundamental there with that retributive instinct. And then the question is, what do we do with that? Are we going to give ourselves all the Skittles we want because it feels really good? How do we recognize that that has evolved for a reason? Exactly as you say, because we're social animals that are trying to enforce cooperative norms. There's no cooperative system that doesn't have enforcement. Without leaning into that, so that primal retributive urge is the only thing that's like running the show.
1:13:41 Speaker 02 And if you have a theology that says, "Justice is making people suffer eternally, in torment, in a lake of fire." And then you have this dopaminergic response to seeing a wrongdoer suffer and you let both of those run the show.
1:13:57 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:13:57 Speaker 02 You know, I think you end up with the system that we have now, which is, not just how do we protect people from themselves so that they can't do any more harm? How do we protect other people from them? But how do we make them hurt?
1:14:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:14:10 Speaker 02 Maximally. And not everywhere in the world does that. We have examples of doing differently and those are really instructive. And what if we keep the impulse behind the pleasure, which is we need to keep each other safe, without just doubling down on this juice of retribution?
1:14:28 Dax Shepard? I agree with you. We're always gonna have to step over our evolutionary bias. We're gonna have to... Constantly confront these things that were serving us at one time, but now don't serve us. And we gotta have tools in place. And I think that's weirdly the great tension of living in this modern world.
1:14:46 Speaker 02 But also the great opportunity. I mean, I think that humans' superpower is our ability to flexibly decide how to live with each other. I mean, back to the anthropological perspective, there are so many different ways that we have ordered our lives and ordered, what are we gonna do about the fact that we are messy imperfect people who have to live with other messy imperfect people? There's a lot of ingenuity and creativity that I also think is baked into being human. And so that's really encouraging to like, okay, well, what is the reimagining that people are doing or that we could do around this?
1:15:23 Dax Shepard? Because our systems are aspirational, they're what we hope to act as a collective conscious.
1:15:28 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:15:29 Dax Shepard? They should be virtuous.
1:15:30 Speaker 02 We can aim to be better in our institutions than we are in our worst moments.
1:15:35 Dax Shepard? That's right. And so when we evaluate some of our current institutions, they're operating very, however you'd say.
1:15:44 Speaker 02 Retributively.
1:15:45 Dax Shepard? Retributively.
1:15:47 Speaker 02 I love that you also, I also read things and I never hear them pronounced. And then I had to talk about the book and I'm like, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
1:15:55 Dax Shepard? Oh, I want to talk about, well, first of all, I would urge people to go watch, you gave a lecture to, I think it was at college. And it just was, I feel like made directly for me because you break down Hank Williams Jr.'s family tradition.
1:16:08 Speaker 02 Oh, Brain Bar. It's like an ideas festival in Hungary. And there were so many young people there just going to hear talks.
1:16:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I loved it. And in there, you talk about, again, to counter the determinist point of view, what an ingenious study. I can't believe they have the technology to do this. But they have done studies where they make a dozen genetically identical rats. Will you talk about that?
1:16:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there's so many different approaches to this, where you're looking at genetically identical animals.
1:16:39 Speaker 02 Who were raised in identical conditions and then seeing, this is, I think, back to your fundamental unpredictability of complex systems. If you have the same nature and the same nurture, to the extent that we can measure, does that mean you're necessarily going to act in the exact same way? And the answer is no. Your behavior will be similar, but it won't be identical. So some of this is looking at inbred mice, where they're basically in a controlled breeding population, they're all very, very genetically similar. There's also studies of armadillos, because armadillos always give birth to four identical quadruplet armadillos. Wow. And then there's what is known as clonal fish, who are genetically highly homogeneous. Oh, I won't leave out this one. There's also studies of cloned pets.
1:17:24 Speaker 02 So in Texas, there was a study of, there was a couple that was very attached to their pet bull. And so they had him cloned, Chance and Second Chance. So all of these are genetically identical. So in all of these studies, you're looking at, if you have the same genotype, and if you were raised in a similar or identical environment, are you behaving in the exact same way? So Chance was a very docile bull. Second Chance gored his owners, I think, twice.
1:17:54 Dax Shepard? Maybe even more. When they were doing this American Life episode, they were interviewing him, I think, for the third time in the hospital where he had been gored the owner. And he said he's not giving up on him. But Chance is a little different, because Chance came to them late.
1:18:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. And they don't know the initial.
1:18:09 Dax Shepard? But the rats, when you put them together, that's fascinating.
1:18:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. So in this case, it's mice. What they did is they have inbred mice, so they're all genetically very similar. And then they raised them in identical cages with identical food and identical handling, identical temperatures. And then at a certain point, they put them all together in these big mouse vivariums. And see what happens. And there's digital sensors everywhere so they can see, you know, which mouse is moving where, when. And what you see is the emergence of mouse personality. Individual differences in which mice are dominating the exits and the access to food, which ones are moving around a lot, which ones are aggressing,
1:18:53 Speaker 02 which ones are very inhibited and don't want to come out when it's light. And you can explain it with genotype. And you can't explain it with the cages that they were raised in. There's an unpredictable individuality to behavior. That's neither one of those. And there's no way at a certain point for humans to have the same environment because we are each other's environments. As soon as they got in a social group, there was no way for every mouse to have the same thing because they had each other. And these initial tiny differences in how that first interaction went. And that could be initially chance, but then life builds on chance.
1:19:36 Speaker 02 There's a path dependence to those initial things. My colleague at UT also does these studies where he has mice in a vivarium and they establish a dominance hierarchy. And then he plucks the alpha mouse out and sees the power scramble that happens. And one thing that makes the alpha mouse is he pisses everywhere. He's like constantly peeing all the time. And so you see immediately genes involved in drinking water. So that like it make pee, like get turned on within minutes of this. And so the plasticity of the nervous system to respond to social cues is amazing. And that's a mouse. Think about how much more complicated it is than a person.
1:20:18 Speaker 02 Sometimes what I tell my students is that if you're looking at a tapestry, if you're looking at a piece of fabric, like you would never ask, which is more important, the threads that go this way or this way? Right? They're woven together and that is what constitutes the fabric. It is nature and nurture being woven together. And the interface for that is often the epigenome that constitutes the developing person.
1:20:41 Speaker 01 When we talk about how we can maybe make some changes where we still have accountability, but maybe not this really punitive nature behind it, don't you think in order to do that, everyone has to see this as an issue?
1:20:55 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:20:56 Speaker 01 And I don't think they do. I don't think people are upset that people are punitive. Some of us are, but I think people like that there's-
1:21:06 Dax Shepard? Well, they were designed to, as we, you know.
1:21:08 Speaker 01 Right. So like, I don't see how, how to-
1:21:11 Speaker 02 That's such a good question. And honestly, I think it's such an important question now. What we're living through politically, where people are being hurt on the streets, and then other people are cheering for it. What is that other than identifying with the punisher? Identifying with the person that's like, "I'm bringing the pain", and then inventing a class of wrongdoers to justify it? I think we're used to thinking of their sins and then we get punished for our sins. But I've come to think of it as retribution can also be a sin in that it is another really primitive aspect of our biology
1:21:52 Speaker 02 that gives us pleasure, that we can indulge in and overindulge in, and indulge in regardless of how much it's hurting other people. Gosh, I wish I had a good answer for that question. How do you convince people that it's a problem to want to hurt-
1:22:07 Speaker 01 Other people or yourself?
1:22:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:22:09 Speaker 01 It's tough.
1:22:10 Dax Shepard? In that lecture, you were asked this, it turned over to the audience a bunch, and most people were along the same path. And I think probably a lot of people listening will have this thought, which is, okay, if we've identified this suite of genes, and we're entering into an era where either gene editing is more realistic, perhaps the epigenome, they're erasing chunks of it. In mice, you have people who are about to do IVF can look at the embryo. I think people will be curious to know what you think about embracing these genes or wanting to eliminate these genes.
1:22:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have so many thoughts about this. I'm so glad you asked this question. Okay, so the first thing is, going back to, all of these behaviors are, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases- Massively polygenic. So they're influenced by thousands upon thousands of tiny genetic variants that have a tiny effect. And the implication of that for gene editing is that we're not going to be gene editing a twentieth of your genome to make you slightly less risk-taking. So I think the applications for CRISPR-Cas9, which is our technology for gene editing, is going to be monogenic disorders. Like you have sickle cell.
1:23:24 Speaker 02 Brenner syndrome is an example of serious antisocial behavior caused by one gene. The technological question that we're going to have to grapple with is not going to be gene editing, it's going to be genetic selection. And so that's a technique in which people create IVF embryos. They might do this because they have fertility challenges and they were going to do IVF anyways, but increasingly, there's marketing doing this electively. So you could conceive the old-fashioned way, but you choose to conceive by creating a lot of IVF embryos. And then genetically testing those embryos, there's what people already test embryos for. Is there an aneuploidy, like Down syndrome or Trisomy 18?
1:24:08 Speaker 02 Is there a monogenic disorder? And then looking at a polygenic score. So this would be your genetically predicted likelihood of that embryo eventually developing a substance use disorder, or eventually scoring very highly on an IQ test. And this is not science fiction. There are ads in the New York subway right now that say, "Have your best baby."
1:24:33 Speaker 03 Thanks.
1:24:34 Speaker 02 And it is an ad for pre-implantation genetic testing of embryos. What I think is really important for people to know about this is, one, these genetic risk scores that we've developed, I've developed, other people have developed, they are not crystal balls. For the reasons we've been talking about, I can say that your probability of something is higher or lower, but that's totally different than, say, like Huntington's disease, where if you have this gene, you're going to get the disorder. So there's a uncertainty around the estimates that I don't think often comes through in the marketing for these techniques.
1:25:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:25:13 Speaker 02 The second thing is, the science is... Most applicable when it's applied to people who are genetically similar to the samples in the original research. And most of those people are Northern Europeans. Right. So, anyone who comes from a different part of the globe, virtue of having less genetic similarity to Norwegians or white British people from the UK, those estimates are going to work much less well, or maybe not at all. And there's no ads on the subway being like, have your best baby only if you're genetically similar to people from Northern Europe. Yeah. Right? Like, that's not part of the advertisement around this.
1:25:55 Speaker 02 And then the third thing is genes don't do just one thing. They're involved in lots of things, and there's no gene for risk-taking. And I have this thought experiment in my book, and I say, imagine if we had some eugenic dictator, and they said, no one gets to reproduce the old-fashioned way. Everyone's going to do IVF-created embryos, polygenic selection. And we are only going to select the embryos that have the least risk-taking genes. And we're going to repeat that so that in every generation, we are only getting the most inhibited, puritanical, not risk-taking, not likely to use substances.
1:26:38 Speaker 02 Separate from a terrible dystopian lack of freedom. Do we actually want to live in a world in which no one has that?
1:26:45 Dax Shepard? Thank you. Your last point is the one that I believe in strongest, which is, the nature of your study is, we have criminal data, we have genetic data. We do not have data of overachieving, writing prowess. These are things that are hard to measure.
1:27:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:27:02 Dax Shepard? So, one that I love is, I grew up learning dyslexia made you twice as likely to end up in jail. But over time, what we've learned is dyslexia also makes you two to three times more likely to be a CEO. Addiction, how many of our writers are addicts? How many of our poets? How many of our musicians?
1:27:19 Speaker 02 We have data on that.
1:27:20 Dax Shepard? We're only looking at the pathological side. This is the inherent problem with the DSM, is we've observed these pathologies. But we're not really shining a light on, well, what's the upside of it?
1:27:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:27:30 Dax Shepard? There might be more upside than there is downside. This is a trade off situation. So we're coming up with, quote, "normal," and we're going to lose all this diversity. And then you will have determinism.
1:27:41 Speaker 02 Variety is necessary to the richness of human experience. And I totally agree with you. I mean, if we look at who is most likely to be a successful entrepreneur by the age of 30? We can see this in the data. It's people who have social privilege, white, men, from middle to upper income families. And then men who experimented with substances and had a little bit too much sex and engaged in low level delinquent behavior when they were teenagers. And what is that? That's risk tolerance. And society needs people who are very aware of risks and potential negative consequences. But we also need people who are willing to go for it and are more risk tolerant. I think that everyone's strength can also be their weakness. But also, everyone's weakness can also be their superpower.
1:28:26 Speaker 01 I mean, there'll be no technological developments. There'll probably be no art. There would be so many things missing.
1:28:33 Dax Shepard? Freeze right here.
1:28:34 Speaker 02 There's another study where they look at people who are very high on genetic risk scores for schizophrenia, which, again, people can select against now in their embryos. If they're not patients with schizophrenia, they're more likely to be artists. They're more likely to be musicians. They're more likely to be in creative professions.
1:28:52 Speaker 01 Oh, God, that's so hard, though.
1:28:54 Speaker 02 If you think about a distribution, and the top 1% is this. But this zone, in the like 75th to 99th zone, are the people who are having so much imagination and openness to new experience. How can you say that gene is a good gene or a bad gene? It's all of the above.
1:29:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:16 Speaker 02 I have a chapter in my book about this. It's called "Variety." And it ends with this observation from Durkheim, who's a founding sociologist. And he had a paper where he said, "Some level of crime is necessary to society because a crimeless society is one in which everyone thinks about things exactly the same and no one has any differences in moral imagination." And if we look back in time, many of the people we now think of as moral pioneers. Were criminalized in their time. So I don't want to underplay. Serious antisocial behavior has costs. It hurts people. But I don't think that we can sin then say, so let's get rid of the genes.
1:30:00 Speaker 02 People can do bad things, but that doesn't mean the genes are bad genes. Because those genes are doing many different things in the human body. Diversity is grist for evolution. There's no evolution without mutation. There's no evolution without diversity.
1:30:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Galileo was a criminal.
1:30:15 Speaker 02 Socrates, Jesus.
1:30:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, a lot of criminals.
1:30:18 Speaker 02 Gandhi.
1:30:19 Dax Shepard? Okay, Original Sin, On the Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Radical book. I do applaud and love how personal and memoir-y it is.
1:30:31 Speaker 02 Thank you for saying that.
1:30:32 Dax Shepard? In addition to being chock full of yummy scientific research.
1:30:35 Speaker 02 I appreciate that.
1:30:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's wonderful. Thank you so much for coming. Everyone, check out Original Sin. I hope you'll come back when you have another book.
1:30:43 Speaker 02 I would love to. Thank you for having me. This was a delight.
1:30:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, good.
1:30:49 Dax Shepard? We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some host eggs.
1:30:57 Speaker 01 Rob brought us coffees today. So nice.
1:31:01 Dax Shepard? Very exciting and nice.
1:31:02 Speaker 01 I agree.
1:31:04 Dax Shepard? Excited by it, and I think it's nice.
1:31:05 Speaker 01 I agree. And because, as you know, are we recording, Rob? As you know, I... Oh, wow, okay.
1:31:15 Dax Shepard? Well, because we talked about it.
1:31:16 Speaker 01 For the listener, Dax is wearing his sunglasses that he just got that he's obsessed with.
1:31:21 Dax Shepard? The aforementioned sunglasses.
1:31:23 Speaker 01 From a previous episode. Go find it if you missed it.
1:31:25 Dax Shepard? Do you ever watch people at like award shows who wear sunglasses and they pull it off? I'm a little jealous of them. I know people would be like, what are you doing? I can't pull it at all. Similar to how you're feeling right now, you know?
1:31:38 Speaker 01 It's not about pulling it off. It's just like, oh, why?
1:31:43 Dax Shepard? Because it's a nice little safety blanket.
1:31:45 Speaker 01 I know.
1:31:46 Dax Shepard? You know? It's like a little armor for people.
1:31:49 Speaker 01 If you started doing it, I think people might be like...
1:31:51 Dax Shepard? He relapsed.
1:31:52 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:31:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that would be like the number one.
1:31:55 Speaker 01 They'd say that first.
1:31:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, this guy's high.
1:31:58 Speaker 01 I'm losing my touch because I hadn't even thought about that. Don't, I don't get any ideas. And then two, I think they'd be like, oh, he has an eye issue.
1:32:07 Dax Shepard? Astye, um, pink eye, glaucoma, macular degeneration. Now, another pair that I have, just look how gorgeous these are. Um, the other pair I have are black frames, but they're kind of a light pink lens. And that, I think I can wear inside because it really kind of looks like a reading glass.
1:32:29 Speaker 01 Okay, and so you're, you're interested in wearing them inside?
1:32:33 Dax Shepard? I don't know what it is about these. I prefer to just be in them.
1:32:38 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:32:39 Dax Shepard? Isn't that something?
1:32:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, cuz I don't think you're the type.
1:32:43 Dax Shepard? I don't like them.
1:32:45 Speaker 01 No, I just don't think you're the type that needs like a shield. You're just not really that type.
1:32:51 Dax Shepard? That's totally.
1:32:53 Speaker 01 You really put yourself out. You're the opposite of someone who's, who's needing a shield.
1:32:57 Dax Shepard? That's fair. Yeah, I think, um, like there are people with a lot, a lot more social anxiety.
1:33:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:33:04 Dax Shepard? But I will say, I've had moments at those things where it's like, either I want to look around in rubber neck.
1:33:10 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:33:11 Dax Shepard? But I don't want to be caught doing that.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 Okay, hold on, put your glasses on.
1:33:14 Dax Shepard? Okay. If they're going, for the listener, they're going back on.
1:33:16 Speaker 01 They're going back on for the listener. Now, I want Dex to look at, like, you're trying to look at somebody, okay? And I'm gonna see if I see what you're doing.
1:33:22 Dax Shepard? I'm also highly lit from the front because of the nature of the studio.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 You're looking that way. Oh, and you're making sexy faces.
1:33:30 Dax Shepard? The old, old yellow chair.
1:33:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, that is a sexy chair.
1:33:33 Dax Shepard? But I thought you couldn't see me.
1:33:34 Speaker 01 I know. I'm moving your mouth.
1:33:37 Dax Shepard? My whole eyebrow.
1:33:38 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:33:38 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:33:39 Speaker 01 So I tend to walk and travel, even when I drove here way back when.
1:33:46 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:33:47 Speaker 01 I don't take to-go cups. I just bring my mug open carry.
1:33:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that you're calling it open carry cuz that is.
1:33:54 Speaker 01 That is what it is. It's illegal if there's alcohol in here, but there's not. It's just tea. Uh, and I saw on Instagram someone writing about people like me who open carry their coffee.
1:34:06 Dax Shepard? They have an opinion about that.
1:34:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, and they said those people have chaotic energies.
1:34:11 Dax Shepard? Mmm.
1:34:13 Speaker 01 And I wonder what you think about that.
1:34:15 Dax Shepard? Well, I bet what they're inferring is that someone has scrambled to leave the house.
1:34:19 Speaker 01 Mmm.
1:34:20 Dax Shepard? And they didn't either have time to transfer it to a to-go.
1:34:24 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:34:25 Dax Shepard? Travel mug. Or they're just like so spaghetti wampus leaving, they don't even know it's in their hand.
1:34:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:31 Dax Shepard? I don't, I don't think I would lead to any of those conclusions, but I see the logic underlying the theory.
1:34:37 Speaker 01 Well, they said um that it, it reads chaotic energy, just truly deeply, I don't give a fuck.
1:34:45 Dax Shepard? So kind of cool as well?
1:34:47 Speaker 01 Well, that, yeah, it ended up being a positive review of these types of people.
1:34:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:34:51 Speaker 01 Me, which I appreciated, but also like, I don't think it means I don't give a fuck. It actually means there's no to-go mugs that are as cute as my mugs.
1:35:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you, you're a mug collector.
1:35:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, connoisseur.
1:35:04 Dax Shepard? A curator of mugs, yeah.
1:35:06 Speaker 01 So it's, it's actually more about that, mixed with rats, rats and water bottles.
1:35:12 Dax Shepard? Now you're afraid to have a clothes.
1:35:14 Speaker 01 And.
1:35:14 Dax Shepard? Clothes carry.
1:35:15 Speaker 01 I just don't think you can ever get those that clean.
1:35:18 Dax Shepard? And I do hate, in fact, this is one, I, I have these little annoying habits as a family member. I think I do a lot of the dishes.
1:35:26 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah.
1:35:27 Dax Shepard? And I, they drink from, my family members drink from certain water bottles.
1:35:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:33 Dax Shepard? That are impossible to clean.
1:35:35 Speaker 01 I know, I, yeah.
1:35:36 Dax Shepard? And, and I do get a little, I will clean like 600 dishes and I will sometimes leave these two or three things. Cause I'm like, they can't be clean, it's, if you want to drink out of this impossible to clean thing, you gotta clean it.
1:35:47 Speaker 01 I'm with you.
1:35:48 Dax Shepard? I get a little stubborn about that. And I should just clean them and most of the time I do just clean them and I like myself more if I just clean them.
1:35:54 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:35:55 Dax Shepard? But I am annoyed when someone makes a choice, it's gonna be harder for me.
1:36:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, I hate that about life.
1:36:02 Dax Shepard? I could make a whole Greek tragedy about the dumb little tiny wars that go on in a house, in a family.
1:36:10 Speaker 01 Silent war.
1:36:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, another one that's going on, which is hysterical is Kristen's very, very conscious of microplastics.
1:36:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:36:18 Dax Shepard? I have surrendered to that they're everywhere, right? Cause I'm not even gonna try. And so there's two different kinds of paper plates. One is covered in a little bit, I would have thought like some kind of a wax. You know the type.
1:36:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I do.
1:36:29 Dax Shepard? And then there's just the raw paper ones.
1:36:31 Speaker 01 The one you're talking about is classic. It's what most people are eating off of.
1:36:36 Dax Shepard? And it is covered, I think, in a thin layer of plastic.
1:36:38 Speaker 01 It has goo.
1:36:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, um, and if you don't use it and you put like a steak on it, all the sauce gets absorbed into the paper.
1:36:46 Speaker 01 If you use a natural kind, yeah.
1:36:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, or anything you would have with moisture. Once you put it on there, it just sucks it out like a sponge. So I can't stand those plates.
1:36:55 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:36:55 Dax Shepard? Uh, if I were having like a piece of toast, fine.
1:36:58 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:36:58 Dax Shepard? But I generally feel like I'm putting something with some moisture.
1:37:01 Speaker 01 Gravy toss.
1:37:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and so there's two different stacks of them.
1:37:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:37:08 Dax Shepard? Basically his and hers.
1:37:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure.
1:37:09 Dax Shepard? And this battle of which one's on top. So it's like, I had seen the paper ones and in my mind, I'm like, none of us like those paper ones except for you. The kids and I like this other one. So I put that on top. And then I noticed, then I came in the cupboard and I noticed there were her big stack of raw ones, my stack of plastic covered ones, and then now a new stack of paper.
1:37:30 Speaker 01 Different kind?
1:37:31 Dax Shepard? No, the ones that were on the bottom, but now we've just added.
1:37:33 Speaker 01 Sandwiched.
1:37:34 Dax Shepard? Kind of like the game you play where you put a hand on top of each other and you're like, and I was like, oh my God, this is hysterical. Look at us like working out this plate thing.
1:37:42 Speaker 01 Uh-huh.
1:37:42 Dax Shepard? In the cabinet.
1:37:43 Speaker 01 I know.
1:37:44 Dax Shepard? Make, make, both making our adjustments. And then I was like, I mean, the solution here is a two-state system, like.
1:37:49 Speaker 01 Two separate stacks.
1:37:51 Dax Shepard? There should be two different stacks, but somehow we've designated one area for stacking the paper plates.
1:37:55 Speaker 01 I have a, I have an, uh, detailed question. It does matter though.
1:37:59 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:59 Speaker 01 Are the plates the same size?
1:38:01 Dax Shepard? They are, which they generally aren't. So that becomes another issue.
1:38:05 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, because if, if they're not the same size, I think Feng Shui.
1:38:10 Dax Shepard? The smaller diameter should go on top.
1:38:12 Speaker 01 Correct.
1:38:13 Dax Shepard? And by the way, we're in an interesting phase right now because somehow they're the same size. But, but traditionally, historically, the plastic covered ones are a little bit smaller.
1:38:22 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
1:38:22 Dax Shepard? And then when I see the bigger ones teetering on top, I'm like, it makes me feel uncomfortable. And then you add in my, um, just wanting to use those plates. But all these hilarious little subtle quiet dramas that are going on in households. Is, is really funny. Or another one is, and I found that this is kind of a common thing that happens in marriages and it tends to also line up gender-wise. I cannot stand the dishwasher. My take on the dishwasher is you have to wash it to put it in the dishwasher. And people are like, no, you don't.
1:38:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, you don't.
1:38:54 Dax Shepard? And then I'm constantly pulling things out of the dishwasher that need to be re-washed, particularly silverware. I'll find a knife and I'm like, someone needed to scrub that before you put it in there. The dishwasher's not gonna scrub. So it's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna clean it, right? And then I mean, they're gonna go put it, bend down and put it in this box that I then have to go later and bend down and pick it out of the box.
1:39:15 Speaker 01 I hear you.
1:39:15 Dax Shepard? Or just put it on the drying rack. To me, there's an extra step.
1:39:19 Speaker 01 I know.
1:39:19 Dax Shepard? And it's this endless battle and everyone, you know, the people that are in the dishwasher camp think they get the dishes clean enough. I don't. It seems like an extra step. I'm like, just wash the damn thing and be done with it.
1:39:30 Speaker 01 Can I, can I input here?
1:39:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Oh, I gotta add one more grievance.
1:39:33 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:39:33 Dax Shepard? What also happens is in my circle, a lot of the people that prefer the dishwasher, they want it to be full to run it. Cause they don't wanna waste. And that's admirable. But what ends up happening is the things everyone uses a lot end up in there and then you're out of, it's always the bowls are gone, we're out of bowls, and then we're out of fucking silverware. Now I gotta go into the washer and re-wash the whole thing.
1:39:55 Speaker 01 That part, I get.
1:39:56 Dax Shepard? To use.
1:39:57 Speaker 01 I get that.
1:39:57 Dax Shepard? Okay, so I bear all my grievance.
1:39:58 Speaker 01 Now, I want, I wanna weigh in on the dishwasher, cause I have a very, very rare and unique perspective.
1:40:08 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:40:09 Speaker 01 Okay? So I grew up as dishwasher being the, my chore, like loading and unloading.
1:40:15 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:40:16 Speaker 01 And I hated it so much. And I fucking hated the dishwasher and it was my nemesis.
1:40:24 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:40:25 Speaker 01 Then I have lived without a dishwasher.
1:40:29 Dax Shepard? In the last 15 years.
1:40:30 Speaker 01 Yes. And I started to hate myself. Like, I hated not having it. Having to wash every dish was so hard, especially when you're cooking. Cause then you have the big pots and pans and the little dishes. And, and then if you're, if you're cooking for a lot of people, oh my God, that, that I started to just, I would walk into the kitchen after everyone left and I would just look around and I was like, I, I'm walking out.
1:41:00 Dax Shepard? I gotta move out.
1:41:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can't, I'm burning this place down. I don't know what to do. I mean, hours, hours.
1:41:06 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure, sure, sure.
1:41:07 Speaker 01 Um, so now.
1:41:10 Speaker 01 Back full circle. I have my di- I have a dishwasher and I've had one for a month.
1:41:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:41:15 Speaker 01 And I love it.
1:41:17 Dax Shepard? You love it.
1:41:18 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:41:19 Dax Shepard? And you just pitch a bunch of dirty dishes in there?
1:41:21 Speaker 01 I put clean ones in there just for fun.
1:41:23 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay.
1:41:24 Speaker 01 No, I, I, yeah, I use it. I don't mind loading and unloading.
1:41:29 Dax Shepard? Do you wash the stuff before you put it in?
1:41:31 Speaker 01 Rinse. I do, I, you, you have to rinse it.
1:41:33 Dax Shepard? What if there's cheese stuck to like a knife or a fork?
1:41:36 Speaker 01 You gotta get that off, but you just push that off.
1:41:39 Dax Shepard? You can scrub it with a, a, a, a sponge.
1:41:43 Speaker 01 I've never, I, I don't scrub anything with the sponge before it goes in. I do rinse it and sometimes I'll use my hand to like get something hard off of it.
1:41:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:51 Speaker 01 But I don't do any scrubbies.
1:41:53 Dax Shepard? My breakfast every single morning, as you know, is oatmeal. Bob's trusted brands, two scoops of protein. Everything's sticky. Protein is sticky, oatmeal's sticky. If I were to rinse that bowl off, forget it. All that stuff would be stuck to it after the dishwasher. And then the spoon itself is also covered with very sticky stuff between the oatmeal and the protein powder. It's like sticky. So I have to wash it with a scrubby sponge to put it in the dishwasher, but at the point, it's clean.
1:42:20 Speaker 01 Well, hold on. Can you just put it in the sink?
1:42:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:42:24 Speaker 01 Put the hot water a- immediately. Like you finish, you put it in the sink, hot water in the bowl, then you leave, right? So it's sitting.
1:42:32 Dax Shepard? No. Well, first of all, no, then we might have dishes soaking all over. That's unacceptable. You have a bunch of stagnant water. Mosquitoes may lay their eggs in there.
1:42:41 Dax Shepard? It will not just fall out. It, it's gonna require scrubbing, period, because it's that sticky. The, this, it's like a cement.
1:42:48 Speaker 01 Okay, okay.
1:42:49 Dax Shepard? Okay. I'm gonna have another thing. That'll just make me vomit. It's, yeah, it was when you were talking about cooking. So, and I'm recognizing like what a, I'm so terrible.
1:42:59 Speaker 01 It sounds very controlled.
1:42:59 Dax Shepard? I'm sorry, yes, this is like the most type A side of my personality and it's probably terrible. My kink. My proclivity.
1:43:07 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:43:07 Dax Shepard? And I keep waiting for someone to notice now for 20 years and no one's ever noticed. When I cook my big spaghetti dinner, it's involved. There's lots of pots and pans. What I pride myself on is that I'm cleaning while I go. And then by the time I put the stuff on the table, there's no dishes.
1:43:23 Speaker 01 I know.
1:43:23 Dax Shepard? And I'm waiting for someone to clap their hands for me.
1:43:26 Speaker 01 You say it all the time.
1:43:28 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm trying to get my kids and I was like. You can clean while you're cooking and then you don't have this big thing to do. Cause there's all these five minutes downtime when you're cooking, right? I gotta let that simmer for this. Well, that's a great time to clean this.
1:43:40 Speaker 01 Trust me, I know all.
1:43:42 Speaker 03 Natalie and I fight about that all the time.
1:43:43 Dax Shepard? Cleaning while you go?
1:43:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:43:46 Dax Shepard? And you're a what? Clean while you go guy?
1:43:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, cause we're cooking together.
1:43:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:50 Speaker 01 Listen.
1:43:51 Dax Shepard? We should move in together, Rob.
1:43:54 Speaker 01 Everyone wants to be slash tries to be a clean while you go person, okay? Normally if I'm making, like when I make month's giving.
1:44:03 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:44:04 Speaker 01 For most of it, I'm cleaning while I'm going. I'm like, oh my God, this is great. And I don't have any dishes. I don't have any dishes. All of a sudden at the end, when things are.
1:44:12 Dax Shepard? The system breaks down. It backs up.
1:44:14 Speaker 01 All of a sudden you have so much crap and like.
1:44:16 Dax Shepard? There's a logger jam somewhere in the system.
1:44:18 Speaker 01 You can do about it. Then even if you do, even if you clean completely while you go.
1:44:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:44:24 Speaker 01 Then you serve everyone.
1:44:25 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:44:26 Speaker 01 All the dishes that had the food are dirty. All the dishes that people are eating off are dirty. The utensils, it's dirty again. Immediately there's so much to do.
1:44:35 Dax Shepard? There is, but then why add in all of the heavy duty stuff, the cutting board, the knives?
1:44:40 Speaker 01 No, I agree.
1:44:40 Dax Shepard? Scrubbing that you gotta do.
1:44:42 Speaker 01 Cleaning while you go is definitely the way, but you can't and.
1:44:45 Dax Shepard? We're making a meal, pun intended, out of this, but of course now you just, so spaghetti is a great example. I'll watch Kristen warm up a plate of spaghetti bolognese on those raw paper plates. And I'm like, oh my God, how could you do this?
1:45:01 Speaker 01 Well, cause you're worried about the.
1:45:03 Dax Shepard? Absorbent. It's like a sauce.
1:45:06 Speaker 01 Right.
1:45:06 Dax Shepard? And then those things are like thick with saturated spaghetti sauce. It's almost gonna break through the bottom. It's so waterlogged.
1:45:15 Speaker 01 She loves it.
1:45:16 Dax Shepard? She loves it and she's doing just fine. And she did fine before me.
1:45:19 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:45:20 Dax Shepard? And she would do fine after me. You gotta constantly tell yourself this.
1:45:23 Speaker 01 Everyone's so different. I mean, even, cause you put. Your paper plates in the microwave.
1:45:30 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, love it.
1:45:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't put any paper in the microwave.
1:45:34 Dax Shepard? Why?
1:45:34 Speaker 01 I'm against that.
1:45:36 Dax Shepard? Tell me why.
1:45:37 Speaker 01 Um, similar, well, sort of similar to what you're saying, like, then it's like in the plate. And even though it has that goo, I just don't like what ends up happening.
1:45:48 Dax Shepard? Well, you probably shouldn't microwave the kind of paper plates I use, because that's probably when you get a lot of leaching.
1:45:54 Speaker 01 That's also part of it. I'm like, I don't think this paper's supposed to be heated up like this. So I, I heat glass.
1:46:01 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:46:01 Speaker 01 Um, and ceramic.
1:46:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:05 Speaker 01 But everyone's different is all, all I'm saying.
1:46:08 Dax Shepard? Absolutely. And also, like, another thing I'm aware of is like, we all think we don't waste. Or like, we all have a commitment, and, but what I realize is, it's like, it's such specific categories.
1:46:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:21 Dax Shepard? Um, like Kristen's really, really dedicated and great at not wasting.
1:46:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, she cares a lot about that.
1:46:27 Dax Shepard? But then there are these things that I don't waste on, and I realize, oh, she's wasting up a storm. So like,
1:46:34 Dax Shepard? as good as you think you are, there's just stuff you don't even see.
1:46:37 Speaker 01 You would hate living with me. I waste so much. And I don't, I don't care, and I think it's, yeah.
1:46:44 Dax Shepard? You don't have any kind of ethical hangover?
1:46:46 Speaker 01 No, and actually, my parents were just here. I, I am, but I wonder if it's because my parents care a lot about waste.
1:46:54 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, and you're rebelling?
1:46:55 Speaker 01 I think it's their frugality, and like, even so, my mom-
1:46:59 Dax Shepard? That's kind of what I'm stuck with, is the like, trying to get way too many uses out of things.
1:47:03 Speaker 01 Yes, and I, I think I've rebelled, because I'm just like, oh, I didn't, my parents were here when my farm box came.
1:47:11 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:47:11 Speaker 01 I get a farm box once every two weeks.
1:47:13 Dax Shepard? Delivery of produce, right?
1:47:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:14 Dax Shepard? From the farmer's market.
1:47:15 Speaker 01 Uh huh, and it's a one-person box, so there's not like that much stuff in it, but it's exciting, I love it.
1:47:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:47:20 Speaker 01 And it came, and my, my dad was like, oh, cool, and then he was like, What are you gonna do with all this food? And I was like, well, I mean, I cook stuff. And he's like, well, all of it?
1:47:31 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna eat thirty percent of it. What do you mean?
1:47:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:33 Dax Shepard? What do you mean, am I gonna do it? I'm gonna eat a third of it.
1:47:36 Speaker 01 I was like, no, I either like, maybe I'll give it to someone or I'll throw it out. And then they hated that, you know? My mom made spaghetti one day.
1:47:44 Dax Shepard? Really quick, did they hate? Because these are two much different categories. Did they hate that you're wasting your money? Or did they hate that the food's being wasted?
1:47:52 Speaker 01 Both.
1:47:53 Dax Shepard? Both?
1:47:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:54 Dax Shepard? Double whammy.
1:47:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:55 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:47:55 Speaker 01 It's not even like, they're not thinking it through like, oh, wasted food because other kids don't have food. It's not like ethical like that.
1:48:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:48:03 Speaker 01 It's just like, as sort of you would say, like, I'm not a good steward of things coming my way. I'm not like, oh, then how will I use this? Make this last for two weeks or whatever?
1:48:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:48:14 Speaker 01 You know, my mom made spaghetti one night. And then she was like, you know, then they were both obsessed with like, eating the spaghetti. When are we gonna eat the rest of the spaghetti? And when is it? And I was like, we're not gonna eat it. I'm gonna throw it away. Like, enough with this, like, you spending all your brain power on figuring out when to eat the leftover spaghetti on your vacation.
1:48:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle of you two.
1:48:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. They're my parents. They're gonna like, anytime I spend my, like, any money, they're worried.
1:48:47 Dax Shepard? They're probably still worrying about how you're gonna turn out. Like, I don't think a parent can turn that off. It's like, bitch, she turned out. She's thirty-eight. This is who she is. And I know I'll probably be fighting that with my own children. But it's like, at some point, you're like, there's no more, you know, how they're gonna turn out. They're out.
1:49:04 Speaker 01 I know, but it's scary. It's scary when you have these little people walking around and living their lives. And they came out of your body. And they came out of your egg and your sperm. Like, it's too scary. Even, they left this morning.
1:49:20 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:49:20 Speaker 01 And, you know, they were walking, they're just, they're just so funny. They just think everything through so many steps. You know, it's so like... My dad was like, okay, well, the Uber, I guess we'll just walk to the.
1:49:33 Dax Shepard? He's probably worried about how they're gonna get in the gate.
1:49:34 Speaker 01 Exactly. Like, I was like, well, it's fine, cuz we'll just give them the code that calls my phone. He was like, yeah, but you're work, they have to call your phone. I was like, okay, whatever. Just, I guess, do whatever you're gonna do.
1:49:46 Dax Shepard? Walk to the airport, man, just stop.
1:49:48 Speaker 01 I know. It's so, it's so funny. But yeah, so then they walked out of my house and they were walking to the gate.
1:49:55 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:49:56 Speaker 01 And waiting for the Uber there. I heard, you know, he was walking, and I heard somebody else walking up. And I heard him say to my parents, do you live here? And they, and then my dad said, no, our daughter lives here.
1:50:10 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:50:11 Speaker 01 And I was like, oh, that's so cute.
1:50:15 Dax Shepard? That is. But think how funny they looked walking through our neighborhood with rolling bags.
1:50:21 Speaker 01 I know. I know. But like, I thought that was.
1:50:25 Dax Shepard? They really don't look like robbers. They could be carrying television sets out of a house, and I would not think they were robbers.
1:50:31 Speaker 01 They're the opposite of robbers, look wise. They'd be great. In that way, they'd be great robbers.
1:50:38 Dax Shepard? Jewel heists.
1:50:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, it's cute, it's cute to have parents who care about their daughters and their sons.
1:50:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:46 Speaker 01 It's really sweet. But also, I'm like, I'm throwing out the spaghetti. Yeah.
1:50:51 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna throw everything away.
1:50:53 Speaker 01 Speaking of daughters, you wanted to tell me something.
1:50:55 Dax Shepard? Oh, just that I had a dream day with Lincoln. She had the day off of school. And so I said, what, what's, what do you think about going out to the beach?
1:51:06 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:51:06 Dax Shepard? And riding bikes along the strand, the paved bike path.
1:51:11 Speaker 01 Santa Monica?
1:51:11 Dax Shepard? In Santa Monica, which, if you don't live here, I would imagine you'd think, well, people must go out to the beach a lot. You don't. It's very far.
1:51:19 Speaker 01 Unless you live there.
1:51:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's like an hour drive, generally, even though it's 18 miles away. So, yeah, we loaded up the bikes in the truck and we went, and we rode bikes for like, I don't know, six, seven miles.
1:51:31 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:51:32 Dax Shepard? We got to look at some of the fire damage in the Palisades. You can see it from the bike path. And then we went to my very favorite restaurant from when I lived there for 10 years. Uh, Freedom Misto and sat down inside and ordered. I tried to talk her into the pink sauce. She didn't want it, but then my pink sauce came, she had it. And we got a side of pink sauce and we fixed it. But um, yeah, she actually loved it, which is great. Cause most of these things I share with them, that I'm so excited to share with them, they could take it or leave it, you know?
1:52:04 Speaker 01 Ouch.
1:52:05 Dax Shepard? You're also doing this thing and I'm aware of it, but I still do it, which is like, I want them to, I guess it's, I probably, I just want them to be interested in me. As a person independent of, right?
1:52:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:17 Dax Shepard? And so, like when we were getting off at the, uh, of the highway, or right before we got off, I was like, oh, that was my exit for 10 years.
1:52:25 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:52:27 Dax Shepard? Of course she.
1:52:28 Speaker 01 She doesn't care.
1:52:29 Dax Shepard? She's a giver shit. And I was like, even as I'm saying this stuff, I'm like, she doesn't even care.
1:52:34 Speaker 01 Did she say, oh, did she pretend?
1:52:36 Dax Shepard? She like feigns, but I, I know, I know. I've just been trying, like my dad told me he got off an exit, but I wouldn't care. That's just the nature of.
1:52:43 Speaker 01 Is it? Okay. I don't know.
1:52:46 Dax Shepard? Well, so it culminates in, I never, I'm rarely in Santa Monica, but I did live there for a decade. We leave Freedom Misto and of course I always have to drive by my old apartment. I can't go to Santa Monica now. We were in a hurry to beat traffic and I was like, I'm turning, I'm turning right on you, Fred. I gotta, I gotta look at it.
1:53:02 Speaker 01 Wow, okay, okay.
1:53:04 Dax Shepard? Um, so we're driving, I don't even stop. I know better than to stop. Well, I would have liked to have stopped and stared at the building for five minutes. Think all these things, oh, that's where the gang came up my stairwell, that's.
1:53:16 Speaker 01 Maybe that's what they're worried you're gonna start talking about. They're like, I don't wanna know about that.
1:53:21 Dax Shepard? No, but um, we look at the place and, and also, okay, then the, the subversive thing I'm hoping trickles through is like, hey, we didn't always have money.
1:53:31 Speaker 01 Look how far we've come.
1:53:33 Dax Shepard? And look how I lived for a decade.
1:53:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:35 Dax Shepard? And, and you may have to live that way for a decade too, you know? There's some, and that, maybe they won't, whatever.
1:53:43 Speaker 01 We know they won't. We just have to be realistic, right?
1:53:47 Dax Shepard? I don't know. I could definitely see Lincoln having the same pride that I had, which is, I can see her deciding, no, no, no, I wanna have my own place, and she wants the pride of it being her own place and her pay for it.
1:53:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can see that.
1:54:01 Dax Shepard? That's very foreseeable for her.
1:54:02 Speaker 01 I could a hundred percent see that.
1:54:04 Dax Shepard? And in which case, it'll be something similar to the thing we're looking at.
1:54:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, but don't you think, and maybe this is not, maybe this isn't true, I don't know, and there's no way for us to know. But I feel like
1:54:16 Speaker 01 there is a difference when you know at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, you can call your parents and you can get some help. By the way, I have that, I had that.
1:54:27 Dax Shepard? Right, right, right.
1:54:28 Speaker 01 I was working at SoulCycle, I did not, I was making thirty dollars an hour, it was tight, it was hard, but
1:54:34 Dax Shepard? You weren't panicked.
1:54:34 Speaker 01 I wasn't, I, I was, like, I was stressed a lot, but I wasn't, like, deeply in my soul panicked because I knew at the end of the day, one, they could probably help me in a jam.
1:54:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:54:47 Speaker 01 And two, I always go back there if I had to. I could live in their basement if I had to, like, they, they could support me.
1:54:56 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:54:56 Speaker 01 In that way, even though they told me over and over again, not, like, don't depend on that.
1:55:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:55:02 Speaker 01 Like, we, we need, like, you know, they were trying to scare me, it didn't work, it didn't work.
1:55:06 Dax Shepard? Well, why you come back? Well, you're not allowed to come back.
1:55:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:55:09 Dax Shepard? You need to proceed as if you can come back, but of course you can't come back.
1:55:11 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, you know, that, that's a little different, but I agree with you, I think she, I'm sure she'll want
1:55:16 Dax Shepard? She's prideful in the same way I, I'm kinda prideful.
1:55:19 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:55:20 Dax Shepard? Um, so, but yeah, so we're just, and I'm also like, I'm, I'm aware, I'm like, she's just looking at a random building. Like, that building means so much to me, but that is just, there's no difference between that building and the one next door. It's just a building. And she did go, she gave me a like, oh wow, that's, that's pretty, like, cool that that, where you started and where we're at.
1:55:41 Speaker 01 That's nice.
1:55:41 Dax Shepard? That was nice, yeah, yeah.
1:55:42 Speaker 01 And then she, like, looked up on her phone, like, it was a script.
1:55:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I was like, Chat GPT, what to say to your dad when he's trying to feel proud of himself and instill a lesson into you somehow?
1:55:53 Speaker 01 It's also probably, it's different because maybe in Michigan, if you're driving by your old house in Michigan, they probably will feel, they would feel different. It's some, they live here.
1:56:06 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:56:06 Speaker 01 I think that's different, probably.
1:56:09 Dax Shepard? But I do wonder, yes, if we were ever in Michigan, because I very much want to do that. I want to take them on a tour of every place I lived.
1:56:15 Speaker 01 Didn't you already do that?
1:56:17 Dax Shepard? No, I do that. I did that with my dad when he was dying.
1:56:20 Speaker 01 You do that with Aaron.
1:56:21 Dax Shepard? Aaron and I always go back to Milford and we look at his house and my house and our junior high and a couple other places we hung out.
1:56:30 Dax Shepard? And we can sit there forever and just look at it.
1:56:34 Dax Shepard? But um, yeah, no, I drove with my dad around and looked at every single place I lived because I wanted to take pictures of it.
1:56:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56:40 Dax Shepard? Of which I don't know where they are now, but I had this, but I doubt they would be terribly interested, but they would be nice enough to act interested, but.
1:56:48 Speaker 01 I think they'd be much more interested in that.
1:56:51 Dax Shepard? They're just a thing, you know, they're, they're, they're a given. You're not interested at all in them. It's like.
1:56:56 Speaker 01 In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. Obviously, the older you get, you become more and more interested because you start seeing, you start understanding that they're you.
1:57:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:57:06 Speaker 01 That you come from that.
1:57:07 Dax Shepard? Like, would you, I would love to see where Ashok lived.
1:57:11 Speaker 01 That I, that I love.
1:57:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:12 Speaker 01 And I have, I've been there. I, I, when I was little.
1:57:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:16 Speaker 01 Um, we stayed there and like, I love that, like, that that's our family history. That's what I mean. I think part of it's the location.
1:57:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:26 Speaker 01 Obviously, seeing something in India, I mean, that really, like, you grew up in a village.
1:57:31 Dax Shepard? I know, you don't even have to say anything. He's just like, here you go.
1:57:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's cool. But even like, even in Savannah, I feel like we would go by sometimes the first house my mom lived in.
1:57:46 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:57:46 Speaker 01 And I thought, I think that's cool.
1:57:48 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay, good. But I've been increasingly embarrassed about my self-indulgence.
1:57:53 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:57:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and it's pretty self-indulgence, like.
1:57:56 Speaker 01 Well, you can just go by yourself. Maybe you just don't need to bring her.
1:57:58 Dax Shepard? I would have gone without her.
1:57:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:58:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, I go.
1:58:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:02 Dax Shepard? And I generally, what she got spared is I also drive down the alley and I pull into my old spot.
1:58:06 Speaker 01 Oh, you do?
1:58:07 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:58:08 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:58:09 Dax Shepard? Yes, yeah.
1:58:11 Speaker 01 That's funny.
1:58:11 Dax Shepard? You know, I was very superstitious about that apartment. Because again, I lived in it for a decade.
1:58:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:18 Dax Shepard? At the time I left, I had lived in it for more than a third of my life.
1:58:22 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:58:23 Dax Shepard? And we moved so much as kids that like, I came to like, just love how permanent that was.
1:58:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:28 Dax Shepard? And I was so afraid to move into the house here in Los Feliz. I just thought my whole world was gonna unravel.
1:58:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:36 Dax Shepard? And I had this fantasy that I was gonna like, rebuild it in my garage identically.
1:58:42 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:58:43 Dax Shepard? So that I could go like, sit in it and remember the hunger and write in there maybe.
1:58:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:58:48 Dax Shepard? And, and, and I still have so many recurring dreams about that apartment.
1:58:54 Speaker 01 That is weird because we were just talking about.
1:58:59 Dax Shepard? I don't have it with that house.
1:59:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, we were just talking about it with the house where you're just like, I don't care.
1:59:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:03 Speaker 01 I don't care to be back there.
1:59:05 Dax Shepard? Well, I think a lot of it is like, I think where you cement your identity. Like, I cemented so many parts of my identity in that 20 to 30, in that apartment.
1:59:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:19 Dax Shepard? That I still kinda defined myself as.
1:59:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:22 Dax Shepard? And that, I kinda came to this house already baked.
1:59:26 Speaker 01 Sure, interesting.
1:59:28 Dax Shepard? The kids are the new addition there.
1:59:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a huge thing.
1:59:32 Dax Shepard? And the only part I'm nostalgic about is, I was saying when we talked about it, is like, I see pictures of when the kids played there.
1:59:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:38 Dax Shepard? That kinda gets me emotional.
1:59:39 Speaker 01 You know, it's like, so I'm very nostalgic for that house.
1:59:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:59:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:59:45 Speaker 01 Uh, very, like, we did so mu- I mean, I guess so much of all of our relationships were.
1:59:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:59:53 Speaker 01 Built there.
1:59:53 Dax Shepard? The movie room, how many shows we won.
1:59:55 Speaker 01 We watched so many shows. We wa- we played so many games.
2:00:00 Dax Shepard? Yes, at that booth.
2:00:01 Speaker 01 We were outside all the time.
2:00:03 Dax Shepard? It was a very good patio to hang on.
2:00:05 Speaker 01 It was great, and, and yeah, and the, the babies and like, I, I have a lot of nostalgia for that house.
2:00:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:12 Speaker 01 Sometimes when, like, on Halloween, because your sister lives there, on Halloween, we'll, you know, stop by there for candy.
2:00:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:19 Speaker 01 And almost always, the group is always like, god.
2:00:24 Speaker 01 Remember?
2:00:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:00:25 Speaker 01 Like, everyone thought it was just like, God, we were just here all the time.
2:00:29 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
2:00:30 Speaker 01 So, I have, I have some nostalgia for that, but maybe also because it's still in your family, that might make a difference.
2:00:37 Dax Shepard? Yes, it's not gone.
2:00:38 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:00:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's funny, because I, we were, yesterday I had dinner with my parents on Fairfax, and so we were blocks away from Anthony, where Anthony and I lived.
2:00:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:50 Speaker 01 Which I guess I would say, like, I'm trying to think of what I'm the most nostalgic for space-wise.
2:00:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:01:00 Speaker 01 I mean, it's gonna be the apartment I was just in.
2:01:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, for sure.
2:01:03 Speaker 01 Uh, but probably that one on Gardner, the one that Kristen also lived in.
2:01:07 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
2:01:08 Speaker 01 Ten years before that, um, because I, then I think I brought this up recently, like, we did improv practice there, and we played running shows, we had no money, we, so I am nostalgic, but I didn't feel like, oh, let's drive by Gardner, like, I didn't, in fact, I'm kinda like.
2:01:26 Dax Shepard? I don't ever wanna see it.
2:01:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, I kinda just like it in my head, and I don't wanna see that again.
2:01:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:01:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, weird.
2:01:35 Dax Shepard? Uh, last thing I'll add is, I also, in the continuing updates on the movies, I decided to show Lincoln The Prestige. I invited you and your family.
2:01:46 Speaker 01 That's right, great movie.
2:01:48 Dax Shepard? It's better than you remember.
2:01:49 Speaker 01 Wow.
2:01:50 Dax Shepard? It is a flawless movie. It's so fucking good, and, uh, Lincoln was blown away, the end, the twist at the end is so juicy.
2:02:00 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:02:01 Dax Shepard? She was so rattled, that at the end, I looked at her and I said, I have to tell you something, I'm also an identical twin.
2:02:09 Speaker 01 No!
2:02:09 Dax Shepard? And she goes, she screamed, "Oh, Daddy, don't say it!", like, the movie affected her so much. It was just so fun to watch the power of a movie when it's great. She was like, she hated the thought that there were two of me, and she didn't know which one she had had certain memories with.
2:02:24 Speaker 01 Oh, that's funny.
2:02:27 Dax Shepard? And I had to convince her I wasn't a twin.
2:02:28 Speaker 01 See, you had to walk it back.
2:02:30 Dax Shepard? I did, big time.
2:02:31 Speaker 01 Um, okay.
2:02:33 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:02:33 Speaker 01 Let's do some facts.
2:02:34 Dax Shepard? Let's do facts.
2:02:38 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
2:02:44 Dax Shepard? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.
2:03:22 Speaker 01 You know, I love therapy more than anything. Gets me through. Often I'll want to cancel because I'm like, I don't really have anything to talk about. And then I'll go and I have some major revelation.
2:03:34 Dax Shepard? You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds once it's out into the world. You gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.
2:03:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, you do.
2:03:49 Dax Shepard? If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the U.S.? You can still get 10% off your first month. Do yourself a favor and just try it. Future you will be grateful. Visit betterhelp.com/dax to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash DAX.
2:04:23 Speaker 01 Did you have dairy?
2:04:25 Dax Shepard? No, there was some in my salad last night, my little gem salad.
2:04:28 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:04:29 Dax Shepard? At Cara.
2:04:30 Speaker 01 Oh, nice.
2:04:31 Dax Shepard? It had been a minute.
2:04:31 Speaker 01 Nice.
2:04:32 Dax Shepard? I avoided as much of it as I could.
2:04:35 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:04:35 Dax Shepard? And I hated pushing aside that yummy Parmesan. You know, the salad, right?
2:04:39 Speaker 01 The cheese is so good on it.
2:04:40 Dax Shepard? It's phenomenal Parmesan. And I hated. I wish I had asked for no cheese because I hated seeing.
2:04:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:47 Dax Shepard? And I felt like I was wasting money, too.
2:04:49 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
2:04:50 Dax Shepard? Like, oh, this is, where's this going? This is expensive Parmesan.
2:04:52 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:04:53 Dax Shepard? That I'm not eating.
2:04:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, it would be very tempting to see it there and not have it in your bite.
2:04:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had some truffled fries, though.
2:05:02 Speaker 01 That's yummy.
2:05:03 Dax Shepard? That hit the spot.
2:05:04 Speaker 01 Is there parm on that?
2:05:05 Dax Shepard? I think there is a little bit, so you know, it's a little scattywampus.
2:05:10 Speaker 01 Okay, that's okay.
2:05:11 Dax Shepard? I mean, minimally, it's a reduction.
2:05:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:05:13 Dax Shepard? And then someone in the comments suggested I take an enzyme called DOA or DAO.
2:05:19 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:05:19 Dax Shepard? This is a ding ding ding. It was like, hey, there's this enzyme I take before I eat, and it's like a kind of a histamine blocker. And my nose runs after every time I eat. And I was like, mine, too.
2:05:29 Speaker 01 Oh, so does my mom's.
2:05:29 Dax Shepard? So I ordered it, and then it went out to Cara, and then Hannah said to Kristen, "Did you take your enzyme?" And she goes, "No, I forgot it." And I go, "Wait, what enzyme?" And Hannah goes, "I was suggesting that Kristen take DOA or DAO for histamines, so she doesn't get itchy. I've been using it, and I like it." And I was like, "Well, this is crazy."
2:05:51 Speaker 01 That's weird.
2:05:51 Dax Shepard? Because I just heard about it in the comments and ordered it, and it comes tomorrow, and you guys have already hopped up on it.
2:05:56 Speaker 01 That's sim.
2:05:58 Dax Shepard? Sim.
2:05:58 Speaker 01 Very, very sim. Okay, this is for Catherine Paige Harden. So, did I go to Collierville Elementary School? No. I had to ask my mom this.
2:06:09 Dax Shepard? Oh, this is the Memphis period?
2:06:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:06:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
2:06:12 Speaker 01 She said Collierville Elementary, and I said, and I think I said, "Yeah." But I was like, "I don't think that's right." I texted my mom. She said I went to Farmington Elementary.
2:06:22 Dax Shepard? She remembered.
2:06:23 Speaker 01 Nope, she said she had to look it up.
2:06:25 Dax Shepard? Okay, you know, because that's impressive.
2:06:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then I was like, "Oh, yeah, Farmington."
2:06:31 Dax Shepard? Although I have a hunch I'll remember my kid's name. I don't want to say it out loud, but I'll remember the name of my kid's elementary.
2:06:38 Speaker 01 You will.
2:06:39 Dax Shepard? But you were there briefly.
2:06:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was at, I went to five elementary schools.
2:06:45 Dax Shepard? You did? Why? You had only one big move, right?
2:06:49 Speaker 01 Well. First school Peachtree Elementary.
2:06:52 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:06:52 Speaker 01 Classic.
2:06:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:06:54 Speaker 01 Kindergarten first grade. Then we moved to Collierville and went to Farmington
2:06:59 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
2:07:00 Speaker 01 For second and third grade.
2:07:01 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:07:02 Speaker 01 Then we moved back. Oh, sorry, I'm wrong. I went to four elementary schools.
2:07:06 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
2:07:06 Speaker 01 Okay, so we moved back, um, and I went to Berkeley.
2:07:11 Dax Shepard? School of Music?
2:07:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was a savant. Um, I went to Berkeley Lake. Cause we, we rented a house.
2:07:20 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:07:21 Speaker 01 And then we bought a house.
2:07:23 Dax Shepard? There's still the house.
2:07:24 Speaker 01 That is still the house and that, then I went, so then I went to Chattahoochee Elementary my fifth grade.
2:07:30 Dax Shepard? Wow. We don't talk about this.
2:07:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I moved a lot.
2:07:33 Dax Shepard? I feel like this is even more significant than your ethnicity.
2:07:37 Speaker 01 It's all in the stew.
2:07:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:07:39 Speaker 01 It's all in the stew.
2:07:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I mean, you really had to start over.
2:07:43 Speaker 01 I moved a lot.
2:07:44 Dax Shepard? Was there any people from Peachtree in the final elementary?
2:07:48 Speaker 01 Uh, no.
2:07:49 Dax Shepard? No?
2:07:49 Speaker 01 Mm-mm.
2:07:50 Dax Shepard? So brand new start in fifth grade?
2:07:52 Speaker 01 Well, no. So, brand new start in fourth grade.
2:07:56 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:07:56 Speaker 01 And then, brand new start again in fifth grade.
2:08:00 Dax Shepard? Okay. Right, so fifth grade, and then you stuck with those kids for junior high and?
2:08:05 Speaker 01 Well, then it was very fun, is then in sixth grade, some people from fourth grade, you know, like then people came back into the fold, which was cool.
2:08:15 Dax Shepard? That would have happened to me had I gone to Milford High and not switched districts.
2:08:19 Speaker 01 Well, you know, that one of my first simest moments was, um, there was a girl in my fourth grade class, Ashley, and she was so popular.
2:08:29 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
2:08:30 Speaker 01 And so cool and pretty, and I wanted to be her pretty badly.
2:08:34 Dax Shepard? Which was really quick, let's pause. When you think about the ability for one to be super cool in fourth grade, it's not even really a thing. Like, I'm looking at fourth graders.
2:08:43 Speaker 01 I know, but like the way they eat lunch and stuff is just cooler.
2:08:46 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:08:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. And she was also really nice.
2:08:49 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:08:49 Speaker 01 But she was cool and pretty. No.
2:08:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah, good for her.
2:08:53 Speaker 01 Her name was Ashley and I was like, kinda trying to, you know, I was like, Trying to be her friend, but you know, um, we weren't really good friends. But I do think I was invited to her birthday party.
2:09:01 Dax Shepard? That's big.
2:09:02 Speaker 01 She had so many Beanie Babies. Um, her, like, her mom was into it.
2:09:07 Dax Shepard? Sure.
2:09:08 Speaker 01 And so she had so many and they were like in cases and stuff, not like fucking Valentino and LaBert. She just like, I rode all over them and stuff. I didn't know what I was doing.
2:09:17 Dax Shepard? Do you think moms in the South were more into Beanie Babies than moms in the North? I, I do for some reason.
2:09:22 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah.
2:09:23 Dax Shepard? Okay, yeah.
2:09:24 Speaker 03 My mom was real into Beanie Babies though, too.
2:09:26 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:09:27 Speaker 03 With my sister.
2:09:29 Speaker 01 Was she like getting them for her and bringing them home like, uh, we got truffles?
2:09:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, they had a whole bin.
2:09:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. I was always trying to get my mom to be like that.
2:09:39 Dax Shepard? Okay, but driven by your sister?
2:09:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
2:09:42 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:09:42 Speaker 01 I know, it's a little, it's a little.
2:09:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like there's women who collect dollars and it's not because they have kids.
2:09:47 Speaker 01 No, no, also, no, the purpose of this is like ultimately to like have a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah.
2:09:55 Dax Shepard? I know, I don't want to comment on that.
2:09:56 Speaker 01 Okay, anyway, so, so then I moved and then I went to fifth grade away from Ashley. And then in sixth, I, I thought about her. And before sixth grade, I was like, oh, like, I wonder if like Ashley will be there, like.
2:10:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:10:15 Speaker 01 And on the ride home, the bus ride home on the first day of school, guess who's on my bus?
2:10:22 Dax Shepard? Ashley.
2:10:24 Speaker 01 And guess why? Her parents got divorced and her mom moved into my neighborhood.
2:10:28 Dax Shepard? Oh, my gosh.
2:10:29 Speaker 01 And we became.
2:10:32 Speaker 01 Best friends.
2:10:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
2:10:34 Speaker 01 Best friends. I, we lived, I mean, I lived at her house, I just, she didn't live at mine. But yeah, get off at her stop. One time, my dad got really mad because we got lost in the neighborhood and he couldn't find us. And he like really panicked and we were, all we were doing was jumping on someone's trampoline. But anyway, um, so we were best friends and, uh, we were best friends for a long time. She was, uh, my cheerleading squad.
2:10:58 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:10:59 Speaker 01 Also a double state champ.
2:11:01 Dax Shepard? Oh, my goodness, okay.
2:11:02 Speaker 01 We still talk, we ta, we texted recently. Yes, I love her. Um, and we were boy crazy and we wrote in each other's diaries.
2:11:09 Dax Shepard? Did she stay like on top of the heap?
2:11:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:11:12 Dax Shepard? Oh, she did.
2:11:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:11:13 Dax Shepard? Some people just.
2:11:13 Speaker 01 And she deserved it. She really deserved it. She's a great, great lady.
2:11:18 Dax Shepard? She's a great leader.
2:11:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, she is. Anyway, um, yeah, I did a lot of moving, so, uh, Farmington. Now, is it pronounced Pelagius or Pelagius? Unfortunately, it's pronounced Pelagius.
2:11:33 Dax Shepard? I don't.
2:11:34 Speaker 01 You didn't like that?
2:11:35 Dax Shepard? I like Pelagius more.
2:11:36 Speaker 01 I know, that's what you said.
2:11:37 Dax Shepard? Oh, I did then. Okay, good, I'm consistent. Sometimes I were, I'm not even consistent.
2:11:41 Speaker 01 And she, cause she was saying Pelagius.
2:11:44 Dax Shepard? That sounds nice, yeah.
2:11:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you were like, yeah, and she was like, I don't know, some people say Pelagius, and you said, I like Pelagius. But it's Pelagius.
2:11:51 Dax Shepard? It's Pelagius.
2:11:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. How many genes do humans have? Remember, we were, we were-
2:11:57 Dax Shepard? I was, I'm so embarrassed still.
2:11:59 Speaker 01 Well-
2:12:00 Dax Shepard? I was talking about individual ACGTs-
2:12:03 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:12:03 Dax Shepard? DNA strand, which is in the billions, but it was only twenty some thousand.
2:12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, she said around twenty thousand. Yes, humans have approximately twenty to twenty-five thousand protein coding genes.
2:12:13 Dax Shepard? Fuck, God, that was human. I mean, what a factor I was off by.
2:12:17 Speaker 01 Um, it's a low number, similar to that of many organisms, which is embarrassing. For us.
2:12:24 Dax Shepard? What I walked away with from this, and I've already been in a couple of conversations, cause it comes up all the time, like, oh, they found the gene for a blank. They found the gene, and I go, you know, I just had this expert on, I was like, almost nothing isn't polygenetic.
2:12:36 Speaker 01 That's right.
2:12:36 Dax Shepard? Almost nothing is one gene.
2:12:38 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:12:39 Dax Shepard? Which is encouraging.
2:12:41 Speaker 01 It is.
2:12:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:12:42 Speaker 01 It's like, it's hard to get some of this stuff.
2:12:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I gave the example she gave about height. It's like two hundred genes that you could be one standard deviation above, and that's gonna result in seven feet tall.
2:12:53 Speaker 01 I know. But there are some, she's like sickle cell.
2:12:57 Dax Shepard? I've had this great curiosity of how people are keep getting taller, like their parents, like, how are they getting so much taller? So many people that I look around, they're, all their kids are always taller than them. Aaron's kid, I think about it all the time. Like, wait, is six-three or four?
2:13:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:13:12 Dax Shepard? And his ex-wife isn't tall, and Aaron's five, he's six foot.
2:13:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:13:17 Dax Shepard? But like, what, where does that come, who had the gene? Well, it wasn't-
2:13:21 Speaker 01 It wasn't that. I know, we're learning so much.
2:13:24 Dax Shepard? The only thing, I'm bummed I didn't have any boys, cause I would like to see, like, would I get a six foot five boy? Because I I exceeded my father. He had exceeded his.
2:13:35 Speaker 01 That's true.
2:13:35 Dax Shepard? Presumably, I might have a weight on my hands.
2:13:38 Speaker 01 Well, the girls will probably be taller than Kristen.
2:13:42 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes. Although Delta's tracking much more Kristen-wise.
2:13:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
2:13:49 Dax Shepard? But bigger than her at her age.
2:13:51 Speaker 01 Right, exactly, yeah. Because like Lincoln's already taller than me, I think, or at least my height.
2:13:58 Dax Shepard? She's probably your height now.
2:14:00 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah. Um, and Delta's getting there.
2:14:03 Dax Shepard? She's getting there. She wants to get there faster.
2:14:06 Speaker 01 I know, it's so cute.
2:14:08 Dax Shepard? Like, she lost a tooth the other day and she was ecstatic. She called me bloody, still actively bleeding, ecstatic. She wants to get rid of those baby teeth. She hates them.
2:14:19 Speaker 01 She did tell, she was like, I lost my, I lost my tooth. And I had known that this was a big deal.
2:14:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:14:25 Speaker 01 And then she brought it up again later. Did I tell you? I was like, yeah.
2:14:28 Dax Shepard? Well, you know, when she went to the dentist and they x-rayed her mouth, she started bawling when he said it's gonna be a while, and she was devastated.
2:14:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:34 Dax Shepard? I don't remember having any thoughts about my teeth. They probably just all fell out really quick, so I.
2:14:39 Speaker 01 I know, I don't remember caring about that. But yeah, I must have been on par. It's hard, it's hard when you're, everyone else is, it's happening and you get worried. Um, oh, another pronunciation, retributively.
2:14:53 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:14:53 Speaker 01 Retributively. Oh, how many times did Second Chance attack his owner?
2:14:58 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:14:59 Speaker 01 I really got a kick out of the fact that his name was Second Chance.
2:15:02 Dax Shepard? Have you?
2:15:04 Speaker 01 The This American Life.
2:15:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:05 Speaker 01 I did a long time ago, but I don't remember it.
2:15:08 Dax Shepard? This American Life for a minute had a video show.
2:15:11 Speaker 01 Hmm.
2:15:12 Dax Shepard? But, um, I watched that.
2:15:14 Speaker 01 Ooh.
2:15:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. Um, it's called, on This American Life, the story is called If By Chance We Meet Again.
2:15:21 Dax Shepard? Hmm. Very nice name.
2:15:23 Speaker 01 Such a good name.
2:15:24 Dax Shepard? So elegant.
2:15:25 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahmin bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seen, more like a pet dog than a bull. They loved him. Kids loved him. He had a long career in movies, on TV, performing at parties. And when he finally died, Ralph and Cindy were devastated. Around that time, scientists at Texas A&M University were looking for animal subjects for a cloning project. They already had some tissue from Chance because they treated him for an illness. So Ralph and Cindy offered up Chance's DNA for the experiment. Second Chance was born. Um, and he was eerily, just like Chance.
2:16:04 Dax Shepard? I'm telling.
2:16:05 Speaker 01 Except he wasn't, which they found out the hard way. Um, but I looked up twice. It was twice, but it was-
2:16:11 Dax Shepard? It was two goings.
2:16:12 Speaker 01 Bad, um-
2:16:13 Dax Shepard? I wonder where we're at now. I mean, that, that story was-
2:16:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:16:16 Dax Shepard? Twelve years ago. I wonder if there's been subsequent-
2:16:18 Speaker 01 Do you think? Wow, yeah.
2:16:20 Dax Shepard? I hope he's old.
2:16:21 Speaker 01 First occurred on the bull's second birthday. I mean, two-year-olds, you know, tantrums.
2:16:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:16:26 Speaker 01 Where Fisher barely escaped and a second, more severe attack happened about a year later, resulting in significant injuries to Fisher, including a fractured spine.
2:16:34 Dax Shepard? Duh, fuck. I can't imagine how terrible it would be to be attacked by a bull.
2:16:39 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
2:16:40 Dax Shepard? The huge horns and that strong neck. You see them pick up cars and stuff when they want. They're, they're insanely strong.
2:16:46 Speaker 01 I don't think the eye thing would necessarily work for them. Maybe.
2:16:50 Dax Shepard? If they were out cold.
2:16:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:16:52 Dax Shepard? I would try to get its horns lodged in the cage.
2:16:54 Speaker 01 Are you gonna put your, do you think the fingers in your butt thing's gonna work?
2:16:58 Dax Shepard? Might as well. I mean, it's free.
2:17:01 Dax Shepard? It was always, always do that as you're so-
2:17:06 Speaker 01 Um, okay, the exact figures on the dyslexia numbers are, yeah, two to five times more likely to be in leadership roles compared to the general pop. It also says dyslexia affects roughly 10 to 15% of the general population. 25 to 35% of entrepreneurs were in the surveys, and 20 to 40% of self-made millionaires show signs of dyslexia.
2:17:31 Dax Shepard? I think increasingly, they're starting to look at if dyslexia is a thing, or if it's just ADHD, by the way. I've read, oh, go ahead.
2:17:38 Speaker 01 Okay, so yeah, people with dyslexia are 2.4 times more likely to drop out of high school without proper intervention. They're also up to three times more likely to be identified with ADHD, as 35 to 45% of those with dyslexia also have ADHD. Boys are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia than girls.
2:17:57 Dax Shepard? Which would be consistent with what our ADHD experts said that boys get. Labeled ADHD at seven or eight years old.
2:18:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:18:05 Dax Shepard? And women at thirty six.
2:18:06 Speaker 01 Right.
2:18:07 Dax Shepard? And so, yeah, that all kind of holds.
2:18:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, that's it. That's it for Catherine Paige Harden.
2:18:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, I liked it because it was a great philosophical question. When I think of it in terms of myself, it, it, without any testing, it would seem I am of one of these packages she's talking about.
2:18:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would, I would agree.
2:18:30 Dax Shepard? And I also have other stuff to offer and it's very interesting.
2:18:34 Speaker 01 Well, you haven't, you know, killed anyone that I know of.
2:18:36 Dax Shepard? I haven't killed anyone, but I have had moments of aggression towards other men.
2:18:41 Speaker 01 Right.
2:18:42 Dax Shepard? Other men have been hurt.
2:18:45 Speaker 01 Sure.
2:18:46 Dax Shepard? By me in battle.
2:18:50 Speaker 01 Rob, have you ever punched someone in the face?
2:18:53 Speaker 03 I don't think so.
2:18:55 Speaker 01 Me either, yet.
2:18:56 Dax Shepard? Yet.
2:18:57 Speaker 01 Not, I'm not ruling it out. It doesn't seem fun. I have to be honest. Like, it doesn't seem even fun. Like, the, like, the, it seemed, first of all, it seems like it hurts really bad to the puncher. Like, to even on my hand, it seems like that would hurt really bad.
2:19:14 Dax Shepard? Yes. Well, you know, I have broke my hand.
2:19:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:19:17 Dax Shepard? And I have missed knuckles that are submerged from it. So, yeah. But I'm, I try to make this case to other, you don't feel anything.
2:19:25 Speaker 01 Oh, right.
2:19:26 Dax Shepard? There's no, there's no pain whatsoever.
2:19:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:19:30 Dax Shepard? The next day, you might feel sore, but that's what's funny is I think when you're a boy, you're so afraid of how much it's gonna hurt. And then come to find out, it doesn't hurt at all. None of it hurts. Your, your brain goes straight to its primitive.
2:19:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:19:44 Dax Shepard? Knows what to do state. The fun isn't the contact, it's the.
2:19:50 Speaker 01 I took someone down.
2:19:51 Dax Shepard? Going to get hurt. That's what it is. Like, oh, I landed, oh, I'm in charge, oh, I'm not gonna get hurt. That's like the elation in a fight is if you're in charge and control.
2:20:03 Speaker 01 Right. But it's also like justice, like, kind of, for, I think, like...
2:20:09 Dax Shepard? Yes, but I think, once it kicks off,
2:20:11 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
2:20:11 Dax Shepard? I think this, all this primitive wiring happens, and it's really just like, "Oh, I have to maintain the upper hand, or I'm gonna get really, really hurt." And so long as you're in control, there is this elation of like, "Oh, I'm gonna get out of this, I'm gonna win this, I'm not gonna get hurt."
2:20:27 Speaker 01 But when people start fights...
2:20:29 Dax Shepard? That's all pride and ego.
2:20:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's like, it, it, it's, it can't be about that, cuz they've decided, right? So like, that is about...
2:20:37 Dax Shepard? For sure, and when I have like, stood up to the dickhead at the bar, I have this, for sure, charge of justice.
2:20:44 Speaker 01 Right, right, right, right.
2:20:45 Dax Shepard? And pride of that I will...
2:20:47 Speaker 01 I'll be the one to handle this.
2:20:48 Dax Shepard? I'll be the one to shut this down. But then, once the action starts, this full other mindset starts.
2:20:55 Speaker 01 Alright, that's it.
2:20:56 Dax Shepard? Crazy note to end it, but I guess it was apropos.
2:20:59 Speaker 01 It was, it was all part of it. I love you.
2:21:02 Dax Shepard? Love you.
Previous Zach Braff Returns Next Armchair Anonymous: Funny Pregnancy Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated