Stephen Dubner Returns Again

Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics, When to Rob a Bank, Freakonomics Radio) is an award-winning journalist, author, and radio host. Stephen returns once again to the Armchair Expert to discuss the power and necessity of disgust, the ethics of yelling at AI, and reflecting on the 20th publishing anniversary of Freakonomics. Stephen and Dax talk about being prodded by society into binary thinking, the compulsions in being perpetually online that don’t jibe with human nature, and what he does when presented with a ‘for us or against us’ argument. Stephen explains the concept of the illusion of explanatory depth, why during these times he’s in give-a-stranger-a-hug mode, and being exhausted in a good way about this human world. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Dubner and I'm joined by Stephen Padman.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:08Dax Shepard?

  Um, returning guest, one of our favorite guests. He's number three for him.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  We love him.

• 0:12Dax Shepard?

  God, we love him. We don't need any game plan.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  No, he's just fun to talk to and he's so interesting and has a lot of good thoughts.

• 0:20Dax Shepard?

  I love him. He's like a polymath.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 0:22Dax Shepard?

  He's cute and playful. Stephen Dubner.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I ran into him, um, minutes after we left. Yeah.

• 0:29Dax Shepard?

  He was on his way there to meet somebody.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Yes, I ran into him and he invited me to hang out with him.

• 0:34Dax Shepard?

  He did.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  But I, I had to pass up the opportunity.

• 0:38Dax Shepard?

  Why?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Cause I was working. I went there to work and I had to complete it.

• 0:41Dax Shepard?

  Did you see his guest?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yes. He's a producer on Freakonomics.

• 0:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay. Stephen Dubner is the host of Freakonomics Radio and co-author of the Freakonomics books, which have won many awards and sold millions of copies around the world. 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the Freakonomics book and the 15th anniversary of Freakonomics Radio. Check out Freakonomics, the new edition drops November 11th. And his new television show out early 2026, which he is non-committal about the title, but currently it's titled Better in Person. So keep your eyes peeled for both of those Stephen Dubner projects. Please enjoy one of our faves, Stephen Dubner. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple Pay. You know, holiday shopping can be a hassle, but Apple Pay makes it so much easier.

• 1:30Dax Shepard?

  Whether you're shopping online or in store, look for the Apple Pay button or contactless symbol at checkout. No more digging for your wallet or filling out long online checkout forms. It works at millions of places, including stores, websites and apps. This means you can spend less time at checkout and more time finding the perfect gifts. Pay the Apple way. Terms apply. We get support from Quince.

• 1:54Speaker 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.

• 2:03Dax 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.

• 2:26Speaker 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.

• 2:44Dax Shepard?

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

• 2:53Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 2:54Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:55Speaker 01

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

• 3:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 3:48Speaker 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.

• 4:01Dax 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.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  That's the part people miss. It's not a one-day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.

• 4:19Dax Shepard?

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

• 4:29Speaker 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.

• 4:36Dax 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 D3 K2 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.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Nice to see you.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  We're so happy to have you back.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I'm sorry I'm late.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  How are you?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I'm good.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Do you want or not want that you can have them, of course, but I just didn't want to get them?

• 5:27Dax Shepard?

  That's one of his endorsement deals. He actually has to wear that. It does feel warm with them on.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, just...

• 5:33Dax Shepard?

  I'm good. That would be so unStephen Dumner, but what if he showed up and he had like all this gadgetry and shit?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  It's like, sorry, I just have to...

• 5:38Dax Shepard?

  No, I gotta take off my ugly sunglasses. It's not as bright in here as I was fearing.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  This is good.

• 5:45Dax Shepard?

  Thank you.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  So wait, is this really Rob?

• 5:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Rob designed the whole thing. And then he built a replica of this in Nashville for me.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  You're living there part of the time?

• 5:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we built the house there and we spent the whole summer there.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Congratulations. You spend the summer in Nashville?

• 5:58Dax Shepard?

  We spent the entire summer in Nashville. It's on the lake.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 6:01Dax Shepard?

  So boating.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  You could have an antiperspirant endorsement then.

• 6:03Dax Shepard?

  It's hot.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Because it is really hot in the south. You grew up South Carolina or something?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Sure, in Georgia.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Georgia.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Hot, hot, hot.

• 6:10Dax Shepard?

  It was a great exercise in framing the whole summer. You know, when you go to Hawaii, or if you go to Hawaii, have you ever been?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:16Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but have you been down to the Caribbean?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:18Dax Shepard?

  Yes, of course, it's objectively hot, but you go, yeah, the Caribbean is hot. I love it. And you just love it because you decided you love it.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Right. It's a good attitude.

• 6:26Dax Shepard?

  It was a great experience of like, oh, yeah, I always have the option to frame it in a way that I'll enjoy it. And it's literally up to me.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  It's a very good point. I love that idea. I try to do that more. It's hard, though.

• 6:36Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  It's hard with mosquitoes. That's impossible to do.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  It depends on the intensity of the input.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  How much you can affect the output. And I've been trying to do more and more of what you're saying. Not like just take a problem and turn it into an opportunity. There are a lot of business school sayings like that.

• 6:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  That are sometimes true, and I think sometimes inspiring for some people some of the time. But I think we all have the ability to control our frame of mind much more than we do. Simple as that.

• 7:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, can I give you one more? So we live about 40 minutes outside of Nashville. And so once or twice a week, we would drive into Nashville and go hit a great restaurant. And we'd all get in the car as a family and we'd drive there and we'd listen to music. And about midway there on our like six time deal, and I said to Chris and I said, you know, it's insane. We would never drive 45 minutes to LA to get something to eat. If we had to, we'd be complaining the entire way. But I'm like, this is really fun family time.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  It's like Confederate money. You're playing with, it's a different currency. You have 45 minutes is just what we're doing.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Also vacation mindset.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I mean. Oh, yeah. By Confederate money, I didn't mean like, oh, you don't remember. Well, when you, we were, when I was little.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  You'd be Nashville for real.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  When I was little, you would still come across Confederate money.

• 7:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that had been printed during the Civil War?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Apparently.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And it was worthless, but people tried to say like, I'll give you five Confederate dollars for like 25. And some people would take it.

• 7:54Dax Shepard?

  We could do 25 minutes on the Civil War because that actually got us to a version of, you know, we came off of the gold and silver standard in the north. Our modern way of printing money backed by nothing really started during the Civil War.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Is that right? I know nothing about this.

• 8:11Dax Shepard?

  That's when it started.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Teach me more.

• 8:12Dax Shepard?

  No, that was that.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  I'm embarrassed to say this. I've never really known all that much about the US Civil War, which I feel kind of silly about as an American who likes history well enough and, you know, medium smart person. But lately I've been reading about it in kind of sideways ways. And it just felt like one of those things you have to know everything about it and you learn it in school. And then Ken Burns said this, which was a lot to absorb. And I didn't absorb it all. I absorbed the emotional highlights, maybe. Now I'm starting to kind of see it for wow, what it was.

• 8:42Dax Shepard?

  So my route in was the Grant biography by Chernow is insanely good.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  New, right? This is in the last few months, right?

• 8:49Dax Shepard?

  No, no, his new one is Mark Twain.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  When was the Grant? Before Hamilton?

• 8:53Dax Shepard?

  You're conflating authors. I have no idea.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Oh, Chernow.

• 8:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Chernow, Ron Chernow.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  I thought Ron Chernow was Hamilton.

• 9:00Dax Shepard?

  No, I think Hamilton is.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Perplexity AI. We need to know.

• 9:04Dax Shepard?

  Who's the other one you like?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Didn't you also write a book on a bank? David McCullough.

• 9:08Dax Shepard?

  McCullough. McCullough did Adams.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  McCullough did the Brooklyn Bridge.

• 9:13Dax Shepard?

  Yes, the Great Bridge.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  I love that book.

• 9:15Dax Shepard?

  And the Path Between Two Seas.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 9:17Dax Shepard?

  That's the Panama Canal, McCullough. The most boring and interesting books of all time, McCullough.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, this crossed my mind as I was walking downstairs and I knew you were coming. And as I was coming down the stairs, I found myself saying over and over again, Stephen Dubna. And then I wanted to ask you, do you find that people inordinately want to say your name in an English accent? Because it rings of Gubna? Oh. Like, we all like to say Gubna. And so do people go, Stephen Gubna?

• 9:50Dax Shepard?

  Am I way out too far in the loop? I am, okay.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Except, my initial response is, you're totally bonkers and wrong.

• 9:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Like, no.

• 9:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  But now that I think about it, I have this one close friend with three kids who I used to see a lot when they were little, and now they're grown and they have kids of their own. But in that family, I am known as the governor. That's right.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And do they say it in that accent?

• 10:12Dax Shepard?

  Just be aware of it.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  But the fact is that I never really registered it until you gave me that, so thank you.

• 10:17Dax Shepard?

  Well, I was interested asking myself, why am I so inclined to say Stephen Dubna?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I too was like, what are you doing? But it does make sense.

• 10:24Dax Shepard?

  I had to chase it down. So just clock it, and then in our next interview in three years, just tell me, you know what? You were kind of right. People do do that to me.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 10:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  We love having you here.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  I love being here. I really do. I was really looking forward to seeing you guys.

• 10:38Dax Shepard?

  That's exactly what I was gonna say.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I really do.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It's always a joy.

• 10:41Dax Shepard?

  You and Angela.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:43Dax Shepard?

  I just go, oh, great, they're coming. I have nothing to do. You know, you interview people, like, there's a handful of people.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  I know, you're right. I mean, I look forward to them all, but I'm also scared of everyone.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  For Freak Radio, I interview, could be between zero and eight people a week, tapings. And they could run from one to two hours. But it could be an academic who's been writing on a topic for 30 years, and I've read one paper. And I have researchers, we have producers on the show who are great. They work incredibly hard, and they create for me, for every single guest, I'll have a prep of like 10 to 20 pages with all kinds of excerpts, citations, etc. So we all do a lot of work beforehand. But if it's someone that I don't know, I have reason to think that they may be anxious, nervous.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Video makes it very interesting.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  I'm trying to so ignore it. Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  You know?

• 11:31Dax Shepard?

  You can only be on us for so long.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Well, the reason I'm particularly palpitating right now, thinking about this, and I've even forgotten the original question, is that I'm starting a TV show.

• 11:41Dax Shepard?

  Called Better In Person.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Well, maybe, we'll talk about that. We're still kind of in search of titles. But when you learn to do something in a given medium, so I started in music. Within music, I was very comfortable. It takes a long time to get there. Then became a writer. Within journalism or book writing, it takes a while, but then you get there. Podcasting, and I've done for 15 years, it took a long time. I'm very comfortable. Every time you think about doing a new thing... I don't know about for you guys, but I feel like what should feel cumulative. I've got a lot of experience. I know a lot. It's not cumulative. It's like a scratch pen. You rip it off and it's blank page again. This should be served with a moist towelette.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Dax Shepard?

  It should, it should. Maybe even a full hand towel.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Or like a face bidet. Actually, face bidet is not a bad idea.

• 12:28Dax Shepard?

  That's a thing, Stephen.

• 12:31Dax Shepard?

  We've had those for quite a minute here.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  But you have to use your hands and like just something you could.

• 12:36Dax Shepard?

  You want to spray at.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  And then dry.

• 12:38Dax Shepard?

  You could bend down and use the bidet as a face bidet.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna do that.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  I'm not doing that.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I'm with you. Angela Duckworth, actually, was on an episode we once made. It was a live show we did. We had the kind of game show for a while. And the episode was called, Would You Eat A Piece Of Chocolate Shaped Like Dog Poop? And it was about this notion that once you think that something, once you think, he's fine with using the bidet for his face. But once you think of something in a disgusting mode, it's really hard to flip it.

• 13:09Dax Shepard?

  Well, that power of disgust is its own. There's so much work on disgust, right? It's even what causes genocides and stuff, right? It's the number one thing that's leveraged and weaponized.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Do we know that? I mean, that makes sense when you say it. Disgust, the thing that's weird about it is it's very necessary for hygiene, for not eating the wrong stuff. But when it becomes disgust in other people, wow. And we're seeing a not low level of global disgust in other people, I would say. I don't know if we know the real level, but it feels not low.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  We talked yesterday on a fact check, I just edited it so it's fresh, about poop. And of course, we talked about how all animals eat poop, except us.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Is that true?

• 13:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we're very unique in that.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  All animals eat poop?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  He said that.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Was it true?

• 13:52Dax Shepard?

  Most of them do because they need to pick up each other's gut biome.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a whole other story that I like.

• 13:58Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And so it's very, very weird that we don't. Watch other primates. They eat directly out of it. They eat it from the source sometimes.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I was with you until you got to. It's very weird that we don't.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yes, that's where this conversation went.

• 14:10Dax Shepard?

  Definition of weird is that it is super asymmetric. You got all these primates.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Once again, you're right. You were right with the governor. So let me just.

• 14:18Dax Shepard?

  I don't want to be right.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Don't flip that fast, Stephen.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Can I just summarize? Dax Shepard says, we should be eating our own poop. That's the headline.

• 14:26Dax Shepard?

  Let's be very clear, because you've already out of contexted me. I said, it's very weird we don't, which is much different than we should.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel your version would actually be more incendiary. It's very weird that we don't eat our poop.

• 14:37Dax Shepard?

  Well, what I.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Mine sounds prima facie dumb. Like, there's no way he would have said that.

• 14:41Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Yours sounds logical.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  It's kind of smart.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It's very smart.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:46Dax Shepard?

  But what I got curious about is how recently is this? If we're seeing all the other primates don't. And my quick theory was, I bet when we were hunting and gathering societies in a group of a hundred, and we didn't live with animals, we didn't have all these weird diseases. I bet it was fine. And then I bet, once we started living in civilizations, people who did eat poop dropped like flies because there was so much bacteria and all these diseases. I mean, I bet it happened pretty quick.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  I would love to know the answer to that question.

• 15:12Dax Shepard?

  Me too.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  I would also love to know the.

• 15:13Dax Shepard?

  That's a challenge to Dawkins.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yes, please. The median number of days that it takes for different species for their poop to lose the smell. Because, you know, if you come across dried dog or goose poop, it has no odor.

• 15:28Dax Shepard?

  It's tolerable. Yes, the mechanism is clearly olfactory.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  They look like chocolate.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:33Dax Shepard?

  They look like Tootsie Rolls and stuff.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Well.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Especially the rabbits, rabbits and deer.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we mentioned the rabbit poop too.

• 15:39Dax Shepard?

  We went to the rate that animals create waste. And it's shocking. Some animals are shitting 60 times a day.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  No, rabbits 200 to 300 times a day.

• 15:48Dax Shepard?

  Two to 300 times a day.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Does suggest some markets that are maybe under, you know, bunny bidet for a skull. I've never seen that.

• 15:56Dax Shepard?

  Bunny pooper scooper.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:58Dax Shepard?

  Bunny diapers. But anyways, okay.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  This is not what you wanted me here to talk about.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Sorry, well.

• 16:03Dax Shepard?

  What I wanted to say as a preamble is, and I got half of it out, which is, I just love when you're on. And honestly, any topic that comes up, I'm probably going to be super interested in your take on it. And so, in that vein, instead of me doing like my normal research, I just kind of came up with some topics I want your opinion on.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 16:21Dax Shepard?

  It's not going to be called Better in Person, but one of the descriptions you made, which we both feel you on deeply is. Your goal with better in person is instead of just interviewing an expert on a topic, this is far more a conversation where we hope to learn what kind of human this person is, which is always what I want.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  I'm just ripping you off.

• 16:43Dax Shepard?

  No, you're not. You were eight years before us. Your 15 year anniversary and we're coming up on eight.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  No, but I mean, my new thing is just ripping off this thing.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  That's fine. That's flattering.

• 16:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, I'll take it. If you're imitating us, I think we've done something really special.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 16:56Dax Shepard?

  And then as an experiment, they'll be last, is I've never done this.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:00Dax Shepard?

  It feels unethical. I asked AI for the first time ever, hey, I'm interviewing Steven Dabna for the third time.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Did it tell you, don't say his name like that?

• 17:10Dax Shepard?

  Doesn't like it. He's never heard it. What are some topics that we could have fun conversing about?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I do that a lot.

• 17:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you do?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  I think AI is an amazing, I mean, I'm using this much of one fingernail of the gigantic herd of robots, but I think what you did is normal or will be normal.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  I did it yesterday for a big guest.

• 17:29Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you did? So you just had your first experience as well?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I thought they were all bland.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Can I tell you what engine were you using with chat? So I happen to use one called perplexity because I like it. It's a really simple interface that pulls from a lot of models, which I think is probably valuable. What I like about it is you can push it subtly and it keeps coming. If I say, tell me five interesting things about Dax Shepard, it'll give me blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, those are fine, but I know those and I want something more along the lines of X, Y, or Z. But the X, Y, or Z could be like animal mineral or vegetable. It could be, I want more emotional stuff. I want more moto racing. So I feel it's a great research tool. Now, it's not a substitute. It's like when computers started beating humans in chess and Go, which is very complicated years ago, people were, as they always are, worried with these new technologies. People will now stop playing chess.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And in fact, that had the opposite effect because no one wants to watch two machines play each other. We like humans. I like you guys. You may like me.

• 18:24Dax Shepard?

  And that was even a little bit of my ethical justification is I was like, well, A, I'm going to tell you I did this. And then B, These are just prompts for you and I and Monica, and then that'll be the real thing.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:37Dax Shepard?

  So it's like the actual meat and potatoes. But I gotta say, so it gave me 10, and I liked like seven of them.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Wow, I'm impressed.

• 18:43Dax Shepard?

  Seven of them are very much ones I would want to hear your opinion. And then, I have a good relationship with mine. It then said, do you want me to come up with

• 18:51Speaker 01

  That's what I want to talk about.

• 18:51Dax Shepard?

  five or six speed round fun irreverent questions like I did yesterday.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  That was an offer from out of nowhere?

• 18:58Dax Shepard?

  Pulling from a previous search of mine.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  It does like you.

• 19:01Dax Shepard?

  And I said-

• 19:02Speaker 02

  I'm jealous now, because mine doesn't do that kind of stuff.

• 19:04Dax Shepard?

  It kept offering more and more, and then it said, do you want me to design an arc of how you could lay these out?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  It did not.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Oh my god, do you think-

• 19:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I could show it to you. It's incredible.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  But do you think he knows you're a celebrity and he's trying to-

• 19:14Dax Shepard?

  No, I told him I am the host of Armchair Expert.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I know, but I'm saying maybe he's like, oh, it's a celebrity, I gotta impress him.

• 19:21Dax Shepard?

  He's nervous.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, he's nervous and he wants to do well. Yeah, this is fascinating. Do you think it's unethical? Okay, so have you heard the guy who tried to ask his AI to count to a million?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:32Dax Shepard?

  You must watch this video.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 19:33Dax Shepard?

  We'll send it to you.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  She refuses to do it, which is a little startling, because it's like, she can, why won't she do it? Yikes. But then he's getting so mad at her and he's being verbally abusive.

• 19:45Dax Shepard?

  He keeps going, don't be difficult.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Maybe he calls her a bitch.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Maybe it's not, he gets very-

• 19:51Dax Shepard?

  He's abusive.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  mean. And is it ethical?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  For him?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, to be mean to this robot.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  I guess I could think on it more, but my first response would say, not only is it not unethical, because we know that the emotion that's being mistreated is not a human emotion. And we also know that the people who write that code and make that machine, they understand the way barriers are shiftable and so on. And additionally, I would say, it's a really nice use of technology to absorb maybe someone's hostility that doesn't have to be then directed to a real person.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I did end up saying that.

• 20:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and you have to imagine he's sitting in his living room with a remote control going, you fucking bitch!

• 20:34Speaker 01

  But it's just weird because it is responding. And you're like, gee, she's getting yelled at and she's nothing.

• 20:40Dax Shepard?

  He's like, you're a fucking computer. It's not like you have any.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it's definitely abusive. It's like abuse the lawnmower. Right, exactly. Abuse the AI, don't abuse people.

• 20:50Dax Shepard?

  Save your patience for humans.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like the NFL a lot and I often think of it, especially at this late, relatively advanced date in our civilization as a proxy for war. Everything about it is very warlike, but also the pageantry around it now. But I think if these guys are willing to go do that and they get compensated well, but it's still, it's an unbelievably hard, difficult and physical thing to do. If they're willing to go do that for their entertainment, for their making a living for their family and we get to watch that and feel like it was warlike. And if then that diminishes our appetite for real war, I think that's a great thing. And so similarly, I would say this bozo yelling at his dog. You know, it's probably for the good.

• 21:31Dax Shepard?

  I agree with you the whole way. So what I loved was Malcolm did Revenge of Tipping Point this year and I read it and I loved it. So Freakonomics, this is the 20th anniversary.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:42Dax Shepard?

  And on November 11th, we're gonna have a new edition.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I just want to be super clear. It's the original book.

• 21:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  With, I wrote a new foreword, but I did one interview before you. I'm sorry. I meant to come here virginally. I failed. And the person who was lovely, lovely said, you know, I want you to tell me about all the new things in the book. And I said, no, there's nothing new in it.

• 22:02Dax Shepard?

  No, there's a foreword and a new jacket.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Right. And then she said, but we could talk about it as if there is a lot new. And I said, no, that would really be wrong. Yes. I'm first and foremost a writer. That's what I started as. It's what I am. And so I take all that stuff seriously. But you're right, we are publishing a new edition, which has a new foreword, which did take me like six months to write three pages.

• 22:24Dax Shepard?

  Jesus Christ, Dummer.

• 22:26Dax Shepard?

  You're a little rusty, huh?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  No, it's not rusty. It was a forced occasion to replay this 20 year movie, which has been amazing. But also it was tied to, I mean, this is not what you asked. You may not want to know this, but I'll tell you until you shut me up. I'm having a problem in my home office of getting rid of all my archives. I have archives from when I was a musician. I have set lists from my band, like all of them, but I can't throw them away. I was staring down those boxes one day in my office faced with paralyzed dread. And then I got a text from Steve Levitt, my co-author on Freakonomics, and he said, "Happy 20th anniversary of publication." It was the day, and I didn't even remember the day. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how he remembered, because he's not a sentimental guy. So this is what I ended up writing the foreword about.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  But honestly, what I'm feeling around this 20-year anniversary is what anybody feels as they get older, even you, you're young. But as you get older, you have such a different reckoning and appreciation for your own past and the past of other people. Things mean more. Life is cumulative. It's not, "I feel this way now instead of that." It's like, "I feel this and all of those other things, too." And in some ways, I think you get wiser. I've really enjoyed that. You get more experience. In some ways, there's inevitable sadness, because death is this thing that I've always tried to just really ignore it. Yeah, I know. Even though my father died when I was a kid. I'm 62, and I'm the youngest of eight, and I've always been like the protected baby boy. And they're starting to go. Yeah. That's the thing. I'm the youngest. My oldest is 17 years older. That's big. He's very healthy.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  He's a former Air Force pilot. I think he could beat us all up. Wow.

• 24:01Dax Shepard?

  I bring up Malcolm because what I thought was really cool about The Revenge of the Tipping Point was, he starts by kind of acknowledging, so, A, this was written in a different time, a different context, and I was a different person.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:13Dax Shepard?

  And so, let me look back on it now in a different context, as a different person. What do I agree with or not? And it's kind of a takedown piece of his own book, which I just thought was really cool and brave and interesting.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  I probably could have or should have done that, maybe?

• 24:28Dax Shepard?

  I was just wondering. So one of his was the broken windows chapter.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:32Dax Shepard?

  He's like, "Well, now we know that was bullshit." So is there anything that you look back at in the book and you're like, "Minimally, I wouldn't write that now"?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I will say that what Malcolm said is pretty close to a lot of the things that I feel about Freakonomics, in that you're a much younger person, but also, like he said, the time was different. Yeah. So I did go back and read the book. I liked it. I was very pleasantly surprised.

• 24:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Our main incentive was to be truthful and be interesting. It was really simple. And to have fun. Both Lev and I don't take ourselves too seriously. We reported and researched and fact-checked and dotted every i. So I wasn't concerned about that. We did have one thing shortly after publication that we found out had been wrong, which was a kind of terrible thing. This guy that we wrote about as having heroically gone undercover in the Ku Klux Klan and exposed them. And he did do a lot of that type of work, but he kind of conflated his own identity with that of another guy who did the undercover stuff. And he wrote books about it. We interviewed him. He'd been in all these histories of civil rights movement and Klan. It turned out that he had exaggerated.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  So I'd never heard or read a word about any claims like this. But when we published our book, Freakonomics 2005, someone wrote to us who had been a collaborator of that guy much later, working on a book together. And this guy had had access to a set of very robust and valuable archives that were essentially private archives. They weren't on the public record. So I went into those archives, looked at everything, found out that this guy who was saying that our main character had exaggerated was probably very accurate. I went to our subject. This guy's name was Stetson Kennedy. He's gone now, but he was quite old then. And I said, I need to talk to you about something kind of important. He was in Florida. I flew down to Florida.

• 26:19Dax Shepard?

  Does that confrontation give you anxiety or are you excited to?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  No, anxiety, sadness, sadness. Because I am 99.9% I'm right. So I envision what's he gonna say? He's either gonna deny or it's gonna be like, oh shit. And none of those are good.

• 26:36Dax Shepard?

  This is like the Brian Williams thing.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 26:38Dax Shepard?

  It's like, I don't take any joy in finding out he failed.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Or it's the million little pieces guy.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:44Dax Shepard?

  That one really broke my heart because it was such a beautiful book and it didn't matter.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  But Oprah felt very betrayed.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Although the one emotion I hadn't considered for myself was feeling betrayed by him, even though that probably wouldn't have been inappropriate.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so you fly there.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  I do. And I sit and I tell him the whole story. I tell him the guy who gave me all this information because he knows him. He worked with him. And he just said, none of that makes any sense. I don't know what you're talking about. I was convinced that we were right, so I ended up writing in the New York Times a column that explained this mistake we'd made. But that's what journalists do. That's what writers do. If you get had or if you make a mistake, you have to admit. So anyway, that was a long way of saying that I don't think there's anything in Freakonomics that we would do really differently for the people we were then.

• 27:25Dax Shepard?

  But you would agree, right? There's a great spectrum of conclusions. In some ways, you might. Look at the exact same data and maybe make a very similar point, but it might be a little bit over here to the left or the right.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I agree, and I think a good example of that is probably the most famous claim from the book about the relationship between legalized abortion and crime. There are kind of two tracks of that. The first track is that Steve Levitt and this guy John Donahue, who's now at Stanford, I believe, a legal scholar, had done this paper before I met Levitt. This is how Levitt kind of got on the map, that showed a causal relationship between the legalization of abortion and the crime rate. It was not a complicated argument. It takes a long time to describe it only because there's a kind of collage of evidence that goes into making it up. But the argument essentially is that abortion often serves as, I was gonna say a form of birth control. That's not really right.

• 28:13Dax Shepard?

  Preventing an unwanted child.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  It's a decision that happens often when a would be mom feels like the time and place are not right.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  And I would make the umbrella that large because there are a lot of things that can go into that.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Maybe you're very young. Maybe you've already got kids and the time is not right. Maybe you or your family are in bad financial situation.

• 28:34Dax Shepard?

  Maybe you're starting to get divorced from the father. Maybe you were raped.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Maybe you live in a place with so much violence. There's so many.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  So there's a lot. And there is a body of social science research that argues unquestionably that when a child is born into a wanted situation, let's call it, whatever the family is.

• 28:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, planned.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Well, not even planned necessarily.

• 28:57Dax Shepard?

  That's true.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Because honestly, I'm the eighth of eight. I don't know how planned I was, but I was very loved. On my birthday, all my older sisters write about the day I came home from the hospital, how happy they were to have a new baby boy.

• 29:10Dax Shepard?

  I would have killed for an older sister.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I have four if you need one.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I am one.

• 29:14Dax Shepard?

  Have you written a lot of letters to Neil about the day he arrived?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Um.

• 29:18Dax Shepard?

  You might want to get on that this year.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I held him when he was little and stuff like that. Well, older sisters are great.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Older sisters are great. Anyway, wantedness is good, unwantedness is bad.

• 29:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  The odds are, if a baby is born into a home where that baby is not wanted, there is a higher chance that that kid will have a bad outcome in life. When I say bad outcome, meaning lower education, higher crime, lower income, etc. This is inarguable, okay? So, the argument from Steve Levin and John Donahue was that the legalization of abortion provided a way to reduce unwantedness. And if therefore you reduce unwantedness, what is one of the many other effects you might have down the road? Maybe fewer people committing crimes because they're growing up in a better circumstance.

• 30:01Dax Shepard?

  The crime one is so juicy in so many ways because all of us have been watching this plummeting crime rate and everyone's got to take. This is broken windows. That was yet another stab at how it came down. The one I heard that was absolutely shocking was in Sweden, I'm pretty sure Sweden, somewhere in Scandinavia, they had a reduction in these small petty crimes and they really wanted to know what they were doing that had caused this. And after studying it for a very, very long time, what they ended up finding out was, people just stopped reporting them. People in Sweden came to accept it as just a part of life. You have things stolen from your car and you just accept it. And it's like, oh wow, who's going to think of that? The same amount are happening, they're just not being reported. It's such a dynamic situation.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It's not one size fits all either.

• 30:46Dax Shepard?

  But we're so inclined to find out so we can triple down on it and eliminate it. I see the incentive.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Your example is so good because also, we've all been herded into an almost, what's the cattle prod, you know, electric shock? Like, our brains are just getting prodded every day to be more binary in our thinking. Hate, love, yes, no, black, white, etc. Whereas, one of the great strengths of the human mind is that we're not binary thinkers. We're extremely variegated in time and dimensions. I am astonished, still, I love talking to people, I love hearing how there are just these little synapses happening in your muscle, just like mine, but they come to something totally different.

• 31:24Dax Shepard?

  What you're actually discovering when you talk to people is what the ratio is of these binary options. It's almost like we are all somewhere on the spectrum. If you reduce it to the The polls, it's binary. But really, what we're discovering is like, no, no, I'm 39% liberal, right? Or I'm 46% in favor of the death penalty. Like, that's what's interesting.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Do you also then discover in the course of a conversation, what is the Venn diagram between you and that person? And the types of synapses that are firing?

• 31:49Dax Shepard?

  That's where I start.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:51Dax Shepard?

  When I'm researching someone, I'm just trying to earmark all the things that we have in common that can jump off from there, right? Oh, you're dyslexic. We know this experience. How did that downriver it set?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  I look for all the ways in which I'm inferior when I do that instead of having common.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Isn't that funny? We do all, I'm always looking for advice. I'm like, you know, something I don't.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Maybe my method is bad. Yours is good and yours is good. Looking for things in common so that you can have an actual conversation. Makes perfect sense. I don't know what that is.

• 32:19Dax Shepard?

  But you just brought me to the actual thing I most want to tackle with you. That is potentially most dicey. Do you think that we have entered a moment where silence is the biggest protest imaginable?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  I'll be honest with you. I don't participate very much in the online world. I use digital stuff all the time. But if we think of the online world as kind of like a second conversation that's happening for many people, that's not a conversation I really get involved with. I'll be honest with you. And therefore, I'm aware of it because I have people who are in that conversation, but I'm not really in it. And so, this sounds bad, but one of the many things I don't like about living deep in that online world is that there are these compulsions that don't really seem to jibe with actual human nature. There are expectations that if you don't think or say or feel a certain thing about, it could be anything, then you're going to be either out grouped or thought less of.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And I think that that's just never the way that humans have thrived. When I look at human history, and I'm not a great historian, but I love history. I love reading it. I love talking to historians because I'm like a child. I just don't know that much. I didn't really like history when I was a student at all because I didn't get what older people say about history being instructive. To me, you read history because you had to.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  And sometimes it happened to be interesting. And you would remember the interesting things. Now I read history because it's the reason that people read philosophy. It's the reason people read old religious stuff. The human condition has changed a lot, but I don't think the human has changed that much. No, no. And therefore it can be thrilling, intoxicating, scary, et cetera, et cetera. To see what history has brought for us that we can remember now.

• 34:11Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. This message is brought to you by Apple Pay.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Dax, can you believe it's already fall? This year's flown by.

• 34:23Dax Shepard?

  I know, right? But fall is my jam. Remember that farmer's market we hit up last weekend?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yes, all those vendors with their yummy apple ciders and the big pumpkins. I love big pumpkins.

• 34:33Dax Shepard?

  Artisanal apple cider, don't forget. And the smell of fresh baked goods, heaven. But here's what blew my mind. So many vendors accepted Apple Pay.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  It was so convenient. I love Apple Pay. Everywhere I saw the contactless symbol, I just double clicked the side button on my phone to bring up my card and then just a quick little face ID scan, tap, boom. So easy.

• 34:54Dax Shepard?

  Apple Pay has been my MVP this season to buy festive fall treats and drinks.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  And you know, I'm on a mission to find the best fall themed latte in town. You know this.

• 35:03Dax Shepard?

  I do know that. How's it going? That maple one you were telling me about sounded pretty insane.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  It was so good. And get this, you can also use Apple Pay at lots of cafes. No fumbling for your wallet, just double click, tap and sip.

• 35:17Dax Shepard?

  It works at millions of places, anywhere you see the contactless symbol in stores or see the Apple Pay button online and in apps.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. Making it easier to enjoy all the fall goodness.

• 35:28Dax Shepard?

  Speaking of which, I'm totally set for Halloween. Apple Pay made it a breeze to purchase the perfect decorations online, right from my iPhone. I just tap the Apple Pay button at checkout, double click to authenticate and boom, payment complete. No long checkout forms, no fuss.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Fall festivities have never been more fun or easy.

• 35:46Dax Shepard?

  Pay the Apple way. Terms apply. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 35:52Speaker 01

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

• 36:03Dax Shepard?

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

• 36:07Speaker 01

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

• 36:23Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 36:24Speaker 01

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

• 36:34Dax Shepard?

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

• 36:54Speaker 01

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

• 37:01Dax Shepard?

  Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. helixsleep.com/armchair. 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.

• 37:40Dax Shepard?

  It's been yours, but at some point, you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built-in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from I've been working on this to here it is. Come find me. 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 slash 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 Scottsdale, Arizona.

• 38:23Dax Shepard?

  Monica, with summer ending or heading into fall, I've been researching a nice, quick getaway location and I keep coming back to Scottsdale, Arizona.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Ooh, Scottsdale's good. What's drawing you to it?

• 38:33Dax Shepard?

  Well, first of all, I have this wonderful memory of going there as a kid when I would go see my stepdad when he was working out there. The weather is perfect in fall, warm, sunny, no humidity. And you can really do whatever you want with your time there. I want to do a sunrise hike through the Sonoran Desert, be surrounded by Sowaro. And then at the same afternoon, just completely melt into a spa treatment at one of their luxury resorts.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Oh, that sounds amazing. I want to do that. Also, I was there visiting my brother once and I loved Old Town Scottsdale. It's so walkable. They have galleries and cute little restaurants and shops. The food scene alone is worth the trip.

• 39:12Dax Shepard?

  What I keep reading is that it's luxurious, but not stuffy. There's no pressure to do it a certain way. You can explore public art, check out the architecture, go off roading in the desert, or just sit and watch a sunset.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  It really is the perfect fall reset.

• 39:26Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about all Scottsdale has to offer at unwindinscottsdale.com. We are supported by Walden University. You know that feeling when you've been thinking about making a move, going after the degree, the promotion, the thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to someday? Walden University is built for that moment. For over 50 years, Walden has helped working professionals get the W, the knowledge, the skills and the confidence to create real change in their careers and communities. Their programs are designed around your life, not the other way around. With Tempo Learning available in select programs, there are no rigid schedules or set weekly deadlines. You move at your own pace. 's faculty aren't just academics.

• 40:11Dax Shepard?

  They're practitioners who bring real world experience into everything they teach. From your first class to career coaching and beyond, Walden is your partner the whole way. Take the first step and learn at a pace that works for you. Visit walden u.edu. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by CHEV.

• 40:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I'll use a very specific example.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:41Dax Shepard?

  And it's a dangerous one, but I'll use it. You are going to dinner with people. You are having dinner parties. You are out and about. And I think there is this absolute insistence.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:52Dax Shepard?

  That you declare, whether you are.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Do you hate Israel or love Israel?

• 40:56Dax Shepard?

  Pro Netanyahu or pro Hamas? And I'm over here going, guys, you've presented me with the two shittiest fucking options in the world.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 41:03Dax Shepard?

  I don't want either of these options. They both fucking suck. And you should stand up and say they fucking suck. And we should not get drug into the situation that's been ongoing. And now we all get sucked into it. But I do think the most dangerous thing is to go like, absolutely not. I'm not saying that side's right or that side's right. The most I can tell you is both sides suck.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  So I'm glad you used a specific. I'll have a conversation with anybody, anytime about anything.

• 41:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  It's what I like to do, especially in the last 10, 15 years, or maybe 20. I've met types of people that I never thought I would have met just because of the nature of what I've ended up doing professionally. And then I became a golfer and that introduced me into a world that I had these preconceptions about. And I was so wrong. But when someone comes at me with a binary or for us or against us, what I try to do, what I probably do do mostly is I say, first of all, let's define terms. And that's a trick I think I learned from academia. Let's take it away from the fascism. If you're going to call someone in economic terms, a communist or socialist, let's define terms. Are we talking about the socialism of 2025 Denmark?

• 42:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  We're talking about the socialism of 1925 Vienna. It's a big difference now.

• 42:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  What do you mean by that? So this goes back to, I wonder if you've ever come across this in talking with Angela or. Anyone else in that realm, I'm probably gonna get all these facts wrong. But in my memory, there's something called the illusion of explanatory depth. Basically, if you go to a family gathering, let's say, right? People know you, you know them, you have some prior expectations. Just go up to them and start asking them about hot button issues, whatever you think they are. People get pretty heated pretty quickly. But then if you take one of those hot button issues, let's say it's gun control or immigration or something, and ask them in a non-obnoxious way, which is hard, but ask them to explain like, what do you mean exactly by border control? So it turns out that people just don't know what they're talking about most of the time. But we all pretend to.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  The reason I don't like that is we pretend to in order to have a position, in order to be in a tribe that I want to get out of. I think this idea that we've all allowed ourselves to be herded into two political parties. Even more offensive, that people feel unique in expressing the opinion that 50% of the country all have.

• 43:14Dax Shepard?

  I got another point, like, yeah, I heard it from everybody on your fucking team. You all have the same fucking point. Come to me when you've had an original thought.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  I also think.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, Monica, that's just hard to follow because you just have to give the room a minute.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I know.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  It was very, it was very well done.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Cause he's so mad.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  No, that was very good.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Because you don't have to pick a side. But if someone cares about something, that's also okay.

• 43:37Dax Shepard?

  Oh, of course.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Not of course to everyone.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  You're saying Dax is a not of course?

• 43:42Dax Shepard?

  This is a great example, we would have to agree on terms. Do I not want people to care about stuff? That's not at all what I want. What I don't want is for someone to be heralded as brave for repeating the already agreed upon tenets of their tribe in public. It's not a conversation, they didn't sit with someone and converse. They broadcasted the talking points of their tribe and people are like, so brave. Not brave at all. Being brave is going against your tribe, saying the opposite thing that's been agreed upon. That's bravery. The other thing is grandstanding.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  But there is a reality to the world in which.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  You do need a big, it's like what we heard about protesting. It works because you see that there are so many people who do think like you think, who are willing to stand up against something else and you get emboldened by that. So there's a reality that voices and numbers help.

• 44:43Dax Shepard?

  So I agree with you, and that's the emperor wears new clothes analogy that Steven Pinker just gave us, and that's totally true. What if they're already completely known, that we already know, we know, we know. So the person that's standing up and continuing to yell, it's already been acknowledged. We all know, we all know. Now this is a pointless endeavor and additionally, the arrogance that you think you have converted somebody, you haven't converted anyone. Not one of the people yelling has converted someone from the other side. So it's pointless, it's not brave, it's grandstanding, and it's further cementing us in this tribe. It is the actual problem.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  I'm glad you two came to me for help because it's obvious there's an irreconcilable difference here.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I think there might be.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  And I'd like to say in all honesty, I think you're both right. I wouldn't even say these things are opposite. They plainly can coexist. What I hear you both saying is that one of the most painful things, I know for me, I think for everybody, is to be somewhere between being misunderstood and being accused of something you didn't do. That is a great human injustice and it always has been. We've all been accused of things we did, we've all gotten off with things we did and didn't get caught, but when you're accused of something you didn't do, you feel this outrage and I feel like that's the temperature of the far end of the spectrum.

• 46:02Dax Shepard?

  It does feel like it's threatening your existence in this bizarre way. I think it triggers your actual sense of.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  I thought I was living in a world that made sense and now it doesn't. I had one in ninth grade maybe in school, so I was a good student. It came kinda naturally. We had good brain power in the family and I was the youngest of eight and so I kinda knew the stuff before I got to the grade, which was handy. I knew the French just because being in the family was like being in school. And I was decent at math, I liked math. On a math test, I had the teacher bring it back to me, like she made me stay after class. So this teacher. She was convinced that I had cheated on the test. I got like a 97 on the test. I didn't know what to say. I'd never cheated. I had people cheat off of me. But I was also very shy as a kid. So if I weren't shy, I would have said, what are you talking about? Or I would have said to my mother when I got home, like, this is going on with Mrs.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  So-and-so. But I did none of that because I was very shy and obedient and willing to take a beating as a kid.

• 46:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't like that at all.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  And then she made me take the retest and I got a 98, one better, which didn't surprise me because I had seen the test before. And you know what she did after? Nothing.

• 47:09Dax Shepard?

  Because she was now embarrassed.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Nothing. Then I was so pissed because it felt like an injustice. So I feel like now, the world is full of people who have some version of that feeling. Something is being done to them, taken from them, said about them, or done to, taken from, said about people that they know and love. It's a strange mix of reactions.

• 47:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, where are you at personally on this? We would all agree, the most divisive moment in my life of 50 years.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I am in the give a stranger a hug mode. Any more of that type of emotion, argument, anger, frustration, all of which are legitimate? Contempt. I want to get rid of the contempt. Do you know Arthur Brooks? He's a scholar trained as an economist and he's written a bunch of books. And we did an episode with him on a book he wrote about contempt a few years ago. And I was just re-listening to it. I think I want to replay it for our show because you're always searching for like what to say about the moment. And my show, Freak Radio, we're not a news show at all. We have a series coming out this winter that I had an idea for two years ago. I'm slow. But I'm always looking for ways as a writer to respond to the world we're in, but not to the moment, because that's a whole different conversation.

• 48:18Dax Shepard?

  And anytime you're talking about something in the moment, you're almost certain to be reacting.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  It's just not me. There are a lot of people who are great at it, who thrive at it, who love it. I hate it. I'm bad at it. So what am I going to do?

• 48:28Dax Shepard?

  But contempt is a really valuable thing. The thing I think of is that wonderful man from, what's at the institute? And we had him and he's so beautiful and he repairs marriages.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Oh. Oh, I know who you're talking about.

• 48:39Dax Shepard?

  John Gottman?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yes, the Gottman Institute.

• 48:42Dax Shepard?

  This was in blank. And the fact that he could watch a couple in couples therapy talk for six minutes and predict at a 90-plus percent rate whether they would get divorced or not. And the single component was contempt. So having learned that. When I think about the level of contempt right now, and ultimately, we're in a marriage and we're not breaking up. Divorce isn't an option, unfortunately.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:05Dax Shepard?

  So, given that we're married for life, can we afford to have contempt for each other? I don't think we can.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  There is conscious uncoupling, let's not forget.

• 49:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, please. Walk me through how that works mechanically.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Well, I agree.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  It worked for Gwyneth, didn't it? Like, it really worked. Like, everybody made fun of her. I don't know anything about-

• 49:21Dax Shepard?

  No, she's the queen.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  I don't know anything about her, really, but I do know that she said that about the relationship.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  And it's a beautiful thing, and they have a great family.

• 49:29Dax Shepard?

  She could say that McDonald's french fries are good, and she'd get blasted.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  It's awesome because she doesn't care. Like, she really doesn't, thank God.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  That would be my first answer to your question, going back, is you can't care. There's a quote I like by John Wooden, the late, great UCLA basketball coach, who coached these teams some absurd number of college championships in a row, but was also known to be a great, it sounds like such a cliche, but a leader, a teacher, a coach. He really, really affected the men that he coached, many of whom are very famous and many of whom became NBA players afterwards. But anyway, he said two things about character that I like, because character is something I think about a lot.

• 50:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you like character versus reputation.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Oh, exactly. So, you did your homework. So, this is from John Wooden, I could never make this up. He said two things about character. One of them is fairly famous, and I don't love it. He said, "Character is what you do when no one is watching." That's fine, but it's got a little bit of a godly, moralistic feeling to it. I grew up in a family where that was a feeling, and it's not my preferred mode of feeling. Anyway, the other thing he said, though, is that people should worry more about their character than your reputation, because reputation is simply what other people think of you.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Whereas, character is who you really are. That, to me, is the essence of it. And maybe that is the same as his other quote about characters, what you do when no one is watching.

• 50:47Dax Shepard?

  But that chasm can be so shocking, right?

• 50:50Speaker 02

  And the more you worry about the reputation side, the harder it is to stoke your character. That's the way I see it. One of the advantages of getting older is not just actual history, but personal history and understanding how people are, how people change, what you need to accept about other people and about yourself. Believe in all the cliches. Good character is really important. Being really, truly loving and kind to other people is really, really, really important. All the other things that we do for reputation or money, they're necessary. They're understandable. They're fantastic in moderation. Ambition is great. The most dangerous part about the worst parts of our attention economy, I think, is that they incentivize people to be unkind. Simple as that. We know that. The science is pretty proven, but we gotta stop that.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Back to the marriage thing, because I think it's relevant. I do wanna say, though, in case anyone's listening who's in a bad marriage.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  By the way, the odds are very, very, very, very, very good. Because someone listening is in a very bad marriage.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 51:48Dax Shepard?

  I hate to guess that it might even be more than half.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  And none of us should be saying that with a laugh in our voices. It's just a recognition of the fact.

• 51:57Dax Shepard?

  How fucking hard it is.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  It's hard. Life is hard.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Life is hard. But also, I think if you say like, "We're married," I know what you mean, because we're one country. We have to make it work. That's the reality. But also, abuse from one another is not okay. And you would say in a marriage, if that's happening, to leave.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Right. Where do you go in this case, though?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 52:19Dax Shepard?

  That's what I'm saying. You got like a reverse engineer. It's not an option.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Abuse is happening, and I think part of why it's getting so hot and escalated is because there's nowhere to go and there's abuse. It's getting so intolerable. And I don't know what the answer is, but that's the reality of this marriage.

• 52:38Dax Shepard?

  I'm sincerely asking, what do you think the solution is to that?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  I'm not smart enough to know. I can say I don't know.

• 52:45Dax Shepard?

  I have a solution. I don't know that it would work, but I have thought of what the solution is. It is a one-year moratorium. I'm talking about politics. You still vote, still do everything you do. But for one year, you put down the political identity, just for one year.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  And that's a moratorium enacted by or carried out by whom on whom, though?

• 53:04Dax Shepard?

  Right, we don't live in a country that could do that. But if I had a magic wand and I got to ask a wish, I would ask everyone to try one year of not talking about politics. The country's not going to fall apart if you don't talk about it. You can still vote, but I would be very curious what the temperature would be if we stopped broadcasting our allegiance to a side. I just am curious what that would look like.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  I think it's a good idea. I also think that knowing what I know about human behavior, when people recognize that they have a habit that they don't like, even if they want to get rid of it, and we could all name many, many bad habits that we've all had that we'd like to get rid of, but we know they're hard, and there are different stages or dimensions of addiction, let's say, it's really easy for someone outside of that mode to say, just stop it. That's the obvious answer from the 30,000-foot parental view. But everybody knows that if you're doing a thing, just stopping is hard because it's an activity, it makes you feel a certain way.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Well, there's stuff also happening.

• 54:01Dax Shepard?

  If there was a vote at the end of every month, I would agree. You should stand up and try to get people to go and vote in the direction you want. But just given the reality that there's no outcome of the talking until the election happens.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  There are things that happen from people talking. It just happened. Disney just felt a big hit from people, and so they made a decision. Action does have impact, and I kind of want to take Stephen's advice and say, like, what is the definition of politics? If we're saying like, we shouldn't talk about it, what is the definition of that?

• 54:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so I wrote down how much I believe this has metastasized. I think if you were an alien and you were looking at us and you said, okay, so your diet's politics. If you're a vegetarian, you're probably a liberal. If you're a carnivore, you're probably. A Republican, your automobile choice. If you're electric, you're probably liberal. But within the electric, if you drive a Tesla, you're probably a Republican. And if you drive a Chevy, you're probably a liberal.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Especially Tesla truck.

• 54:59Dax Shepard?

  If you shop at Lululemon, you're a liberal. If you shop at American Eagle now, you are a Republican. If you drink Bud Light versus Coors, your health.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Oh, is that true? Bud Light and Coors are the opposite?

• 55:09Dax Shepard?

  Well, Bud Light had the trans person on top.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  That I know, but what's Coors?

• 55:12Dax Shepard?

  Coors stayed out of politics and everyone said, well, we're gonna now drink Coors.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Cause I remember when Coors was considered a right wing beer.

• 55:17Dax Shepard?

  That's what I'm saying. Coors would represent the Republicans, Bud Light represent the liberals.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  I thought you were saying that Bud Light posts the trans scandal.

• 55:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I would say Bud Light is now.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Can I just say, this is terrible. I hope they're not your sponsors, but I think anybody who's drinking either Bud Light or Coors can do better.

• 55:33Dax Shepard?

  But your health, if you believe in psychiatry, you're probably liberal. If you believe in vaccines, that's a political decision. Patriotism, if you have an American flag, that's political. School, do you believe in private homeschooling? That's probably Republican versus public school. TV shows, what shows you? So it's like, literally, every single thing now represents a commitment to your tribe.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  I think it's terrible.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be that way.

• 55:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, you asked what is political and I'm saying literally everything now.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  We've dragged that label into the rest of our lives.

• 56:05Dax Shepard?

  It is metastasized in the sense that it has spread to.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  But that's sort of my point. If you're saying all of that is political, then how can we not talk about politics? If it's everything now, which I think it's crazy that people are doing that. But if you're saying that's true, then how will anyone talk?

• 56:21Dax Shepard?

  Well, what'll happen is if everyone has to stop talking for a year about, I won't drive a Tesla because it's Republican. Well, the Tesla's gonna slowly stop representing that. If only liberals want this. When we stop reinforcing these objects having political identities in everything in our life and we're constantly broadcasting our political identity. If we stop that, I do think slowly, we can depoliticize the world around us and then just go vote.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  I think this goes back to what we were talking about a while ago about taking control of your own state of mind. Here's what I think, without evidence. I think that most people who make everything political for themselves or for other people, which we would agree has a bad effect. I would argue that most of them. Probably don't really think that much about why they do it, but they've been suggested into it. There's currency for it, there's incentives to do it. But there's a certain point at which you feel like it's not having a good effect on your mind and body. Here's an example. This is also hard to prove, but one argument for why the crack epidemic went way down, not away, but way down, was because the demand fell so much because the next generation of user saw their older siblings or aunts and uncles using it.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  They said, oh, my God, I want none of that. Yeah.

• 57:40Dax Shepard?

  They saw the wreckage.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  That's kind of the way I feel about social media now.

• 57:43Dax Shepard?

  My glimmer of hope is, like all future generations, they will hate what the one before them did. And I just pray that they're all watching this.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  But I think younger people than all of us are already where we're hoping that we get to.

• 57:56Dax Shepard?

  That's my hope.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  I think we're the bad generation. I hope so, too. Seriously. Because we also have more leverage to make chaos.

• 58:03Dax Shepard?

  We do, because we are the CEOs of the company. We're at that age group. And so we decide whether we are going to align ourselves.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  I also think it's just a choice. I visited Scotland recently for golf. It was amazing. I went with members of this golf club of mine. So it was kind of a group effort. And it's something that if you had told me 20 years ago, you're going to be wearing a bright red club jacket and go to these clubs. It's great. Why not? They were founded in 1700 something. And it's just really...

• 58:28Dax Shepard?

  If you had vacationed in Martha's Vineyard your whole life and you were telling me this, that's where my judgment would come in. But I kind of like this for you.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I think of life as anthropology. For me, coming to LA is like, oh, my God, this is live anthropology. I love... Everything is different. Every telephone wire is different here. Every building, the angle of the sun, it's being in a museum. So anyway, over there, what was really interesting is I met a lot of different people from all different kinds of realms. There is a plain-spokenness in Scotland that just doesn't exist among the people that I usually hang out with here. Because here, we're usually like you're just describing, well, if so and so does this, then they're aligned with that. And if they're aligned with that, that means that. And over there, a lot of conversations were much more like, that's a rock, don't trip over it. This is what I think about when I'm making a show. I always think, I don't want to make an about episode, I want to make an of episode.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  I feel like way too many of us are spending... Way too much time doing about thinking. What do I think about this as opposed to what am I? What am I doing? What am I accomplishing? And you can decide that as an individual. The problem is, once it gets up into the corporate realm, where we are all as individuals, customers. Anybody who thinks that Twitter is their friend because it provides an open platform to do this and that. Yes, that's partly true. Most people by now understand that we are the product to a large degree. It's like the New York Times where I used to work, and which I still love as an institution. I think it's still one of the greatest papers that ever will be. I think a lot of the Times coverage in the last 15 or so years has been much more geared toward telling people how they should think about a particular news story

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  as opposed to what the story is. I completely agree with that. They'll have the what the story is piece, but then it'll be surrounded and followed for days and weeks sometimes by opinion pieces. I don't really need opinion pieces. But the problem is that it's very, very, very marketable. I'm glad the New York Times is thriving. A previous, you know, I guess CEO or publisher, Mark Thompson, came in. And as far as I can tell, he saw that news is important. But if we can sell recipes and games and we can pay for the news, and that's a reorientation, and that really worked. Did that make the news slightly less robust, serious? I think it probably did, or it's just the nature of how journalism has changed over time. But even the New York Times and our social media and our friends that we run into,

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  we all are pushing each other into these ridiculously tiny little silos. And I think it's up to every individual to just say like, you know, the would be next generation crack users are like, not for me. I would rather go surfing, go read a book, go play golf, go hang out with friends and do something and live a life that is of, rather than be an observer and think this is what that is about. Right. For a lot of people, including myself, one thing that's hard to not do or that comes naturally, at least to me and many other people, but not all people, that I've tried to just diminish a lot is the impulse to judge. The impulse to judge is, I think, a very, very smart, healthy evolutionary trait. Because everything from life on the savanna,

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  is that one gonna eat me? So you have to make- Judgments, you know, Danny Kahneman, I'm sure you guys have dug into that. Thinking fast and thinking slower, two viable ways of assessing things. But often, when we make a consequential decision that should be thought through slowly, we make it fast. So that's really bad. And I feel we do that all the time internally, but then externally too. And when your first response is to judge something as literally on a spectrum, positive or negative versus, and this is what I try to do, but don't always succeed, just observe and figure it out. Because I'm a writer and because I was very shy as a kid, I've always been very comfortable just being on the edge or the back wall and just watching and listening and taking it and trying to figure out who loves who,

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  who hates who, who's mad at who, who's trying to impress who. And I feel like if you do that, at the very least, what you're gonna do is you're gonna start to empathize. And by empathize, I don't mean sympathize. I mean, you can feel yourself in that person's position a little bit. And that, for me at least, changes the calculus.

• 1:02:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I have a very overlapping thing, which is I encourage people to have drastically different opinions. When a different opinion than yours signals a character assessment about the owner of the opinion, we've got a big problem.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Right, then it's a problem.

• 1:02:40Dax Shepard?

  You've decided that the way you think is proof of character. If you had character and you were a good person, you would think this way. So just to say, oh, wow, yeah, they have a different opinion, but I grant them. They want this place to be the best. They're in pursuit of what they think would be best for everybody. I can grant them that. We totally disagree on the best route there. That is healthy. Having a difference of opinion and having debate and discourse, that is wonderful. When you are making character assessments of people because they don't agree with you, I think you're in trouble.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:03:11Dax Shepard?

  Do you want to try an AI thought question?

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. Can I just say, though, I love this conversation. It's really exhausting.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  No, no, no. But I mean, in a good way. Yeah. You're kind of just getting to the core of what it means to be a human at this place and time. And we're all narcissistic and we all think, no other humans have ever felt like that. It's totally baloney. And you could argue the fact that we are so distressed about the things that are bad is a good sign because the human species is always trying to improve. And the only way you can improve is to take on... On the problems, right?

• 1:03:42Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And it's optimistic.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  But it's exhausting in a good way, but that I feel like all of us, the planet, I feel is kind of exhausted. It's been a really wild, disorienting several years.

• 1:03:53Dax Shepard?

  That's my other hope. My two glimmers of hope are the new generation, who'll just be lame that we did this. And then also I do believe people fatigue. And I'm just praying that we're approaching the fatigue, right? Where it's like, we all throw our hands up and be like, okay, I'm just too exhausted to do this anymore.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Going to take a nap. By the way, I think napping is also really undervalued.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Twenty-eight minute caffeine nap. You drink the coffee before, then you wake up refreshed.

• 1:04:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay, this is an AI question.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Or is this a DAX question?

• 1:04:21Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Saying it's an AI question.

• 1:04:22Dax Shepard?

  You're hiding behind an AI question. Why do we keep rebooting the nineties? Is it comfort food or a cultural panic button?

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  I need some terms, Siri or chat.

• 1:04:34Dax Shepard?

  This is the economics of retro branding, why people buy the past, whether nostalgia can actually predict the future.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Those do sound much less like you and much more like the AI. Those are fine. We can talk about that. It would be kind of like having two robots play chess. Aren't you happy that yours are so much better than theirs, though?

• 1:04:49Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm glad you think so.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  I hope that wasn't yours, because that was a demonstrably mushy question.

• 1:04:58Dax Shepard?

  It did curtail one exactly to you. It said, do you think there will ever be a Freakonomics book co-written with an AI? And would we even tell readers?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. They're pushing.

• 1:05:08Dax Shepard?

  Well, what I like about it.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  They're pitching themselves. Like, are we right with you, Stephen?

• 1:05:11Dax Shepard?

  To me, that shows integrity. It's not afraid to have you debate whether this thing should exist or not. This almost disproves this fear that they have a consciousness they'll try to protect.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  My response to that question would be, well, let's define terms. What's AI? What everybody's now calling AI is one version of artificial intelligence, but it's very close to many other versions we've already had and will have. So when I first moved to New York, I'd quit playing music. I was going to graduate school for writing and I didn't have any money. So I earned money by doing word processing. It was as big as like a Buick. It was a massive machine. You had to put in these big floppy disks for each function. There's like the create a file floppy disk, save a file floppy disk, spell check. But spell check and saving documents, all these things were some version of what we think of now as AI. Right. It's just basically using compute power to do stuff that we've already known how to do, but do it better and more efficiently.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Is a dictionary not AI? It's not my intelligence. I'm looking up what somebody else figured out and they get passed on from generation to generation too. It's a cumulative thing, which is really wonderful. Like, the reason that we don't have to learn calculus to build a microphone is because generations of people did it. Now, we buy it for like $200. How nuts is that? So what does that free us up to do? That's the same question we're asking now about AI. Are you? Right? Yeah, exactly.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:06:39Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff, but there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left. What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working. Not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, is different. It's already right there, inside your email, your docs, your browser. You don't go to it. It's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important?

• 1:07:22Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:07:43Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:08:25Dax Shepard?

  shows you the most interested qualified candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/dax. That's ziprecruiter.com/dax. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:08:51Dax 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 Glee Pro. 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.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

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• 1:10:00Speaker 04

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• 1:10:14Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 1:10:57Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  It's like, there's the old argument. I thought I made it up. It turns out I didn't make it up at all. But I argued years ago in some episode that when the AIs come for all of our jobs, then if we can turn into essentially pets, the way dogs have been turned into pets, because dogs used to be work animals. All these dogs were bred for different kinds of really hard work. We didn't need that work anymore. And we kept a whole bunch of dogs around. Now we love our dogs more than we love our people.

• 1:11:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and if there's a future in which I just pee wherever I'm fucking at, sign me up if someone comes and cleans it up.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. There was a Seinfeld line from years ago. He's like, if a Martian came down, sees a species and the guy walking around picking up the poop from the dog, who's in charge here?

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  The first time that you were recommended a book on Amazon based on a previous book, you thought, wait, what's that?

• 1:11:54Dax Shepard?

  Or on Netflix, watch this, you like that?

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  And then the second time you thought, oh, that's kind of either weird, creepy, wonderful. And then the third time you're like, that's what it is.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  And that's the way all technologies are. Something tangent, but when you get used to things quickly, what the psychologists call habituation, that can be a bad thing, too.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Because you start to lack gratitude for things that are prima facie awesome. I can go pretty much anywhere I want in this country, turn on the faucet and drink it. That wasn't a hundred years ago.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  But once you're used to it.

• 1:12:22Dax Shepard?

  My obsession is like, well, I watch these movies with my daughters, like Little Women. And they're in this big mansion and everyone's dressed so beautifully. And I say, you know, they had to go out in the yard and shit. Just remember that, however pretty that house is. Like, I'd live in a mobile home with an indoor toilet.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  You're a terrible father.

• 1:12:37Dax Shepard?

  Before I'd live in a mansion without indoor toilet.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  You can't ruin that fantasy.

• 1:12:40Dax Shepard?

  Five minutes ago, the early 1990s, that was five seconds ago.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  True, but that's really cruel.

• 1:12:44Dax Shepard?

  You had to go out in the yard in the middle of winter.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Now they're gonna be thinking about, well, those dresses aren't very outhouse compatible.

• 1:12:48Dax Shepard?

  Well, we know those dresses were filthy.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  No, they're full of stains.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  I'm becoming very uncomfortable.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  I mean, also, literally, it's not available everywhere now. So forget that long ago, even places in this world don't have it.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  The trend is good, but it's not everywhere. I feel like we always do this, we whip out the prosperity chart and say, you see, things are getting better. But there's still so much anger and suffering and frustration.

• 1:13:12Dax Shepard?

  And again, what are the terms of this debate? Are those the right metrics to evaluate?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  We need to talk about something slightly better for five minutes.

• 1:13:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Okay, like, you're favorite.

• 1:13:21Dax Shepard?

  What show are you watching that you love?

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Getting sad.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  I did just watch a show. I don't watch a lot of TV, I'm sorry, I say, I watched your wife's show with the rabbi, I love that.

• 1:13:29Dax Shepard?

  Of course you did, as it turns out, everybody saw it.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  It was really good.

• 1:13:33Dax Shepard?

  Can I tell you one funny thing about that, if you want to have a funny thing?

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:13:35Dax Shepard?

  So I go into my GP, because I have this disgusting dead toenail, and...

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Is this unrelated to the carbuncle?

• 1:13:42Dax Shepard?

  Well, who knows, maybe Iowa will tell me that they're related. But at this point, I just have a dead gross toenail. I drummed it and it looked like maybe I had cancer in it, so I'm finally gonna go get it looked at. He's about to look at my ugly toenail and he goes, uh, oh yeah, what do we got here? Uh, you tell your wife. She's our shiksa. And I go, you got it, I will. He goes, you know what, I got a guy across the hall, I'm friends with him, I bet I could get you into him right now. He's a podiatrist, I want him to look at it. And I go, sounds great, you know, I have a referral and right now I'm going in. He walks me and I've never met this man, you're not gonna believe this, I swear to fucking god it's true. Pull off my sock, now he starts looking and he goes... By the way, you tell your wife, she's our shiksa.

• 1:14:24Dax Shepard?

  And I'm like, did you guys talk in the hallway earlier and say like, she's our shiksa? Both doctors while looking at my disgusting toes stopped to tell me that my wife is their shiksa.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  All right. So I'll say two things about that. It's pretty weird. Number two, I love the fact that both these doctors are comfortable enough with you to rather than go straight to the toenail to go to that.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels like a HIPAA violation somehow. I don't actually think it is, but it feels like it. Like, it feels like some information shouldn't have been crossed that way.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  I once had a doctor say to me, I love that episode you did about ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. And my husband is a huge fan of whatever it was, hockey, something. She said, I wish I could tell him about it. I said, what do you mean? What are you talking about? She said, well, I'd be uncomfortable telling him I listened to it because you're a patient.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  And like, cause he might ask me like, why do you listen to Freakonomics?

• 1:15:16Dax Shepard?

  What, do you got a crush on this?

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:15:18Dax Shepard?

  Did you tell her to leave this marriage?

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Like, this is your, like, this is your husband. You can't tell your husband that you have a patient who makes the radio show?

• 1:15:24Dax Shepard?

  That unfortunately is also good.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  I really respected her. She takes patient.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Integrity.

• 1:15:29Dax Shepard?

  Confidentiality.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  All right, where were we? I feel like I dragged us onto another.

• 1:15:33Dax Shepard?

  I thought that was lighthearted and fun.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  You wanted a light moment.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, podiatry and.

• 1:15:37Dax Shepard?

  That was lighthearted.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Hung guy toenails.

• 1:15:40Dax Shepard?

  Stephen?

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Dax Shepard?

  I love when you come on.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  You love me being so uncomfortable.

• 1:15:44Dax Shepard?

  I want you to do it 100 more times. I guess that's my last question. I want to end on this. 15 years into this Freakonomics Radio.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Dax Shepard?

  Do you have moments where you're like, I can't do it? I kind of need to hear that you have those moments.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Okay, short answer, yes, but this is defining terms. I don't say I can't do it. It's hard. I think making anything that you care about. If you're making dinner for your family, if you're starting a company, if you make a thing like you're making here, like I make, if you care about a thing, it's hard. It's just the way it is. So that's number one. Number two is, I love, love, love what I do, and I'm very grateful for that because I know there are a lot of people in the world that do the work they do because they need to earn a living to take care of their family. I respect that more than I respect. Get to do what I like.

• 1:16:30Dax Shepard?

  Of course.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  It's kind of like play.

• 1:16:31Dax Shepard?

  Of course.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  So I feel a little bit guilty about that, but I've gotten over feeling guilty about it. The hard part is even with all the tools, even with good AI, even with a great staff, even with more experience, et cetera, you have to be on your game all the time. The thing that would worry me is if I stop having ideas. You're only as good as your ideas. And this is all I do. I don't have a job. I don't have that many commitments. I'm a good dad and father, but my family has really supported me when I have to go or do or think, because when you're a writer, you're just in your head a lot. It's all I do. And so I keep having ideas and I like having ideas. And I think ideas are one of the single best things about us humans and that the AIs will have facsimiles of it, but not the way we do. I don't know if I'll do it in another 15 years. I do get a little bit bored with certain kinds of episodes.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  So I'm constantly trying to change things up. I do more series now. I'm trying to do more series that are a little bit more like writing a book, doing a series right now on Handel's Messiah, that piece of music that I happen to love.

• 1:17:25Dax Shepard?

  What it sounded like to me is that it's the ideas that keep reigniting you.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  Yes. You also have a taste for novelty. Everybody does, right?

• 1:17:34Dax Shepard?

  Me in particular, I'm a novelty junkie.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  With that attitude, you would be a very good golfer.

• 1:17:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Because most golfers were pretty terrible. We'd try our best, we'd get better, but it's really hard. But then you hit that one shot.

• 1:17:45Dax Shepard?

  And it buys you 20 more.

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  And you go to bed at night and you just think about how it smelled, how it felt, looking at the ball and the light. And then you still were sucky that day. I would argue that's kind of what life is though. It's like a lot of what we all go through. It's not what we'd want to do.

• 1:17:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  But you go through it because you need to and you're living your life, supporting your family, et cetera. But then you get hit with the highlight and you're like, yeah.

• 1:18:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  And you feel grateful for it.

• 1:18:08Dax Shepard?

  All right, Stephen, this has been a blast. I hope you'll come back. If you've never read Freakonomics, you are a Philistine. So go get it on the 20th anniversary, November 11th. You get a new forward, a new jacket. Also, maybe the show's called Better in Person, probably not. You got Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid Questions. You still doing that with Andrew?

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  No, we did three years. It was awesome. We rerun the archive, which is actually in podcast world now. Like you guys will have this experience one day. A dormant show can still be a great show. So it's not being nays, like reruns on TV, obviously.

• 1:18:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  But also podcast audiences cycle through pretty fast. We still have about 70 or 80% as many people listen to NSQ, No Stupid Questions, as when it was new.

• 1:18:44Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Because people are either they love it or they're coming back or they discovered it.

• 1:18:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's cool. All right, wonderful. Well, we'll see you again because you're one of our favorites.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  I hope so.

• 1:18:52Dax Shepard?

  Be well.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at.

• 1:19:02Dax Shepard?

  Hi.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:19:04Dax Shepard?

  How are you?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:19:06Dax Shepard?

  I have a list.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 1:19:09Dax Shepard?

  These are just a couple of things that happened from Aaron and I's motorcycle trip.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 1:19:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay. First of all, we had so much fun.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:19:20Dax Shepard?

  We rode a thousand miles in three days. I got a blister.

• 1:19:27Dax Shepard?

  My carbunkles hurt. I mean.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Did you use the soap?

• 1:19:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I used it last night.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 1:19:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Mercer soap.

• 1:19:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I used it last night.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 1:19:38Dax Shepard?

  We, we got, it was a pretty short trip, but we did get to two salad bars.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Fun.

• 1:19:45Dax Shepard?

  Shoney's.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Shoney's.

• 1:19:47Dax Shepard?

  Do you remember Shoney's?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, Shoney's. Holy shit, I haven't thought about Shoney's.

• 1:19:51Dax Shepard?

  Holy Shoney's. I know, a lot, something suspicious with Shoney's happened on this trip.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:57Dax Shepard?

  One was we pulled over, we're just following the directions, and I see a goddamn Shoney's and I'm like, I didn't even think they were still around.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Same.

• 1:20:06Dax Shepard?

  And I was like, I think they have salad bars.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, Shoney's.

• 1:20:08Dax Shepard?

  God, it's a great restaurant. They had a full salad bar and a lunch bar.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  What's a lunch, oh, like hot food?

• 1:20:15Dax Shepard?

  They had a big pan of hamburger patties and onions and a broth. That was delicious.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Wait, the patties were in a broth?

• 1:20:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was just like this big stainless steel bucket of hamburger patties and broth and onions.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Strange, okay.

• 1:20:29Dax Shepard?

  Maybe like hamburger fried steak or so. I don't know what the hell it was, but that salad bar was great. We really enjoyed that. And then I just, again, we got off and exited on our way home and we were, we were heading to Waffle House.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:20:42Dax Shepard?

  And I looked to my right and I was like, Ruby Tuesday's.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:46Dax Shepard?

  Haven't been to Ruby Tuesday's in 40 years, I think.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  For some reason, that one doesn't get me as excited as Shoney's.

• 1:20:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm sure there's, we've made a lot more memories at Shoney's.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Dax Shepard?

  But I just was like, oh, when I went 40 years ago at the 12 Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan, I think they had a salad bar. So I pulled into Ruby Tuesdays and Eric goes, wow, Ruby Tuesdays. And I go, I think they might have a salad bar. He goes, well, let's check. Sure enough, walk in gorgeous salad bar.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:21:15Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:21:17Dax Shepard?

  I fucking love a salad bar.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Okay, now, did you, did you deviate your salad from Shoney's to Ruby Tuesdays?

• 1:21:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, there were some more options at Ruby Tuesdays. The price point's a little different.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:32Dax Shepard?

  So we did have my sunflower seeds. I love.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:35Dax Shepard?

  More seeds and stuff for me at Ruby Tuesdays, which was great.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Did you get this teeny tiny, small pieces of ham?

• 1:21:44Dax Shepard?

  No, but it's funny you'd say that. The, the bucket of ham was the largest bucket on the salad bar.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:51Dax Shepard?

  It was bigger than the lettuce bowls.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:54Dax Shepard?

  There was so much ham and Aaron loves his ham.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  I love ham on a salad.

• 1:22:00Dax Shepard?

  You do. I don't really mess with ham on the salad.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  But it's in these teeny tiny pieces. Strips are so cute and chewy.

• 1:22:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Yeah, you would have loved it. There was a bucket of ham.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Do you put cheese?

• 1:22:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, cheese, just to remind you, it's mushrooms.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:17Dax Shepard?

  It's chopped egg if they had it.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:20Dax Shepard?

  Neither place had that.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:22Dax Shepard?

  That's a check mark.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:24Dax Shepard?

  Garbanzo bean slash whatever.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Chickpeas.

• 1:22:27Dax Shepard?

  Chickpeas, peas.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:31Dax Shepard?

  Seeds, I already say cheddar cheese, then blue cheese dressing and the Catalina and a little bit of honey mustard. Mix all three.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Oh my, okay.

• 1:22:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and then several trips.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  It's just so, we just have such different tastes in salad bar.

• 1:22:46Dax Shepard?

  I know, I know. I know, I know. But that's great because we would never be competing.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Dax Shepard?

  If you got up there and there was like minimal blue cheese dressing left, I'd be panicked. You wouldn't care.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  No, the only crossover we have is the cheddar cheese and.

• 1:23:02Dax Shepard?

  The lettuce.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Catalina and lettuce.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Although I go light on lettuce. I don't go seeds.

• 1:23:09Dax Shepard?

  You should start doing some seeds. These seeds are good for you.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  I do put, yeah, that's the thing. My salad is not a good for, a salad bar salad to me is not meant to be healthy. Yeah.

• 1:23:20Dax Shepard?

  Me neither.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay. So that was, that's just one update. We did hit two salad bars in four days, which that's a great average.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:28Dax Shepard?

  Um, maybe we'll be back for my coffee table book that I'm still working on, The Great Salad Bars of America.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:23:34Dax Shepard?

  Should, they deserve Shoney's. Okay. Well, here's the Shoney's ding ding ding. So then I go out with, um, Aaron flew home and I was there for one more night. So I picked Healy up in my Corvette. I was like, let's have a night on the town in the Corvette.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:49Dax Shepard?

  It was so fun. We went to Bricktops. We had a delicious meal. And then on the way back, we just were cruising all over Nashville and going through different neighborhoods and he's showing me things. And then we see this huge palace. This house, it was a palace. I, I was like, what is that? Like 20 some thousand square feet? And he's like, yeah, at least. And he goes, that's the, uh, that's the old CEO of Shoney's. And I'm like, what? That's the CEO of Shoney's?

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  That's so sim.

• 1:24:17Dax Shepard?

  I thought they were out of business. Also, did he do a good job?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  He did. He did. Obviously he owns a palace.

• 1:24:24Dax Shepard?

  But should the place be out of business and you own a palace and you're the CEO? Doesn't that feel a little?

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  But it's not out of business, I guess. You went to one.

• 1:24:32Dax Shepard?

  Virtu-, well, yes, I went to one. I found one. And when I posted a picture of it, every single person that come was like, oh my God, there's still a Shoney's? That's not the biggest sign of success.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  Can we look up how many Shoney's are left in the United States?

• 1:24:46Dax Shepard?

  That's a great search. This guy still has his palace despite whatever happened.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Well, like, I don't know if he doesn't deserve, he gave people a lot of food for a long time.

• 1:24:57Dax Shepard?

  Clearly it was very profitable for some period because his house was outrageous.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:25:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 05

  Fifty-eight of them across 15 states.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Are there any here?

• 1:25:06Dax Shepard?

  They never were.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  Now, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

• 1:25:15Dax Shepard?

  So all the South.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  They still haven't been Georgia.

• 1:25:17Dax Shepard?

  Now, will you look up what the maximum they had was at their peak?

• 1:25:21Speaker 05

  Um, this is forty-four percent of the total.

• 1:25:24Dax Shepard?

  That can't be right, man. I saw Shoney's everywhere and this Shoney's just was like, there's a diamond in the rough. Anyways, I loved it. I love Shoney's. Uh, it was, it was exactly what you think. We're both fifty and we were the youngest by thirty years.

• 1:25:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. In nineteen ninety-eight, there were eighteen hundred and thirty-four states.

• 1:25:43Dax Shepard?

  There we go. Eighteen hundred down to, what'd you say, fifty something?

• 1:25:47Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, fifty-eight.

• 1:25:48Dax Shepard?

  So that's not forty-four percent.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  I'm still surprised there was even fifty.

• 1:25:51Dax Shepard?

  So he must have built that palace when they had eighteen hundred locations. Okay. Now, second thing that happened was, so the first two days we rode, we rode too much, really.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:26:02Dax Shepard?

  Uh, went on the Dragon's Tail. This is a very famous road. There's like a cabillion turns in twenty-two miles. Maybe the curviest road in America, Huey said. That was beautiful, so fun. We got there. Next day, kind of a tactical blunder. I, um, as a surprise to Aaron, I had looked up if there were any cider mills in the area.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:26:21Dax Shepard?

  There was. Granddaddy's apples.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:26:24Dax Shepard?

  So I said, first stop, I have a surprise. We went to the cider mill. Line was so long. Back to your Vista story.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Dax Shepard?

  It was like, it was a good two hour wait. So I said.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Two hours?

• 1:26:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Are you sure? It might have moved faster.

• 1:26:39Dax Shepard?

  Maybe. I don't think so. Um, so I said, let's just go get cider. You could go get cider. What was all the donuts was the line.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:26:47Dax Shepard?

  So I said, let's go grab some cider and let's go just sit at a picnic table and hope someone's had their fill and then buy the donuts off of them. That was my approach and it worked. We sat down next to this couple and I bought two donut, well, I bought one donut for twenty dollars. I said, I'll give you twenty dollars for a one donut.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  My god.

• 1:27:08Dax Shepard?

  And they were ethical. So they gave us two, which was nice.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:12Dax Shepard?

  And so at first, the sticker shock of twenty dollars for two donuts, right? I get it. That's, that's, that's gluttonous.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one liked.

• 1:27:20Dax Shepard?

  And shameful.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Dax Shepard?

  Unless you look at it this way.

• 1:27:26Dax Shepard?

  Get this one four day trip of the year. Two hours in that line. I said to Aaron, for anyone who makes more than $10 an hour. What we did was cheaper.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Yes, but like work is shitty, especially if you're probably working at a place where you're getting paid $11 an hour.

• 1:27:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  So to spend two of those hours that suck. Towards one to two donuts.

• 1:27:53Dax Shepard?

  If you're trading the two hours in line for two hours at work, yes, you'd probably be in line. You'd rather be in line. But I still stand by my math. That's like, that's a good way to look at it.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  How come you still stand by even though I poked a good hole?

• 1:28:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, you're saying that the hours aren't comparable.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:08Dax Shepard?

  For me, they're, they're worse. It goes the other way. I'd rather do this show for two hours and stay in that line for two hours. And the people who bought the donuts are so happy because they were going to throw those away and they basically were neutral. They didn't have to pay for their donuts. We got donuts without spending the two hours in line. So I, everything felt really clean.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Okay, this is kind of, I mean, this is very reminiscent of the Taylor Swift concert when I paid someone to buy my shoes.

• 1:28:34Dax Shepard?

  I know, but mine's a little different because I actually didn't add to the line in any way whatsoever. Cause those people had already gone in the line. They had bought their dozen donuts and I didn't show up and say, will you buy a second thing of donuts? Like these were going in the trash, so I didn't really impede anyone else's day.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  You still found a workaround.

• 1:28:52Dax Shepard?

  I did.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  To get what you wanted.

• 1:28:54Dax Shepard?

  I did with that.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  With money.

• 1:28:55Dax Shepard?

  With money.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  So this is Taylor Swift sweatshirt.

• 1:28:59Dax Shepard?

  That part of it's identical.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:29:01Dax Shepard?

  Um, I just didn't have to step in front of anyone and get it dicey.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  You didn't step in front of anyone.

• 1:29:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  She was already in line.

• 1:29:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know how you talk to her if you didn't, you didn't get in line.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean that, but that's.

• 1:29:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, everything's great. You did a great job. Um, I, I, we got these donuts, everything.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Were they good?

• 1:29:20Dax Shepard?

  Oh, so good. So we leave there. And I want to go to Looking Glass Falls. And so I put that in my nav on my phone and I have it on the handlebar. And then we get, and then I add that as a waste, like as a stop along my route to go to Old Edwards Inn, which is much further away in a town called Highland.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:40Dax Shepard?

  So we get to the falls, we take some pictures, everything's great, go to put my phone, like resume my thing. Well, it like turned it off and now I have no cell service because we're in the middle of the mountains. So I just started continuing riding, all this to say, when I finally got cell service, I think that blunder added about two hours to our ride that day. And it was chilly that day.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:30:03Dax Shepard?

  We get all the way to this town, that's a side note, you can't eat. We walk, oh, I don't, I've been debating whether or not I want to complain about this or not. There is a weird thing going on culturally on this trip, which is we went into many, many restaurants that were near empty and they told us the wait was one hour. And I don't really understand what is going on, but, and it happened so many times that when we got to Highland, we walked in this restaurant and I said, hi, two, mind you, it's like 3:40 PM. No one's eating lunch at 3:40 PM. And she goes, uh, it'll be an hour. And I'm looking at the dining room and I just couldn't resist. There were like three tables taken out of 25 tables. And I said, it's going to be an hour to sit in the empty dining room?

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Uh oh.

• 1:30:44Dax Shepard?

  And she goes, there are 10 parties ahead of you. And then I look around and we're the only people there. And I go, where are you hiding the 10 parties?

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  You did, you couldn't be okay.

• 1:30:56Dax Shepard?

  There was not 10 parties and the fucking dining room was empty.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  Maybe they went down the street and it's like you buzz them.

• 1:31:02Dax Shepard?

  They just said, I don't want to work. And I go, that's cool. I get it. I don't want to work a lot of times too. I'll leave. I don't want you to have to work if you don't want to work. But don't lie and then lie again to back up the first lie.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't like.

• 1:31:17Dax Shepard?

  I was annoyed by this.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Can you, can we say the potentially, maybe they just had one server working?

• 1:31:24Dax Shepard?

  And, and again, I think one server could have handled a fourth table. There's something, there's, this was pretty consistent.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:31:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, left a bad taste in my mouth.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Weird.

• 1:31:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was very weird. I don't know what was going on. It was, I think what's going on is it's a really busy time of year in that part of the country. A lot of people are going to look at the leaves turn.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:44Dax Shepard?

  Even though they weren't turned at all. So I think they're overwhelmed.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:49Dax Shepard?

  I don't know what's going on. Forget that. Anyways.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:31:52Dax Shepard?

  Point is, by the time we got back to the hotel.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:54Dax Shepard?

  We had ridden so long and it was fucking cold. My hands were numb and the whole nine yards. So I woke up on the next morning and I'm like, I gotta tell Aaron, I don't want to ride today.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  How did you feel identity wise?

• 1:32:11Dax Shepard?

  It's challenging.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Dax Shepard?

  It's challenging. But I was like, oh, this is an opportunity for growth. Cause the old me is like, you're riding every day and you're riding hundreds of miles a day because that's what you came to do. But I, it was Sunday, there was football on and I text Aaron and I said, I hate to say this, but I think I want to just lay around all day today. And he said, I'm so glad you just sent this text. I was like panicked. You're going to want to ride more. We needed a break, right? So then I went online and I found a massage. And I wanted us to have, I just was lazy. I didn't want to try to book two different appointments that felt like, because everything was so busy, I just went to couples massage. Cause that way I know we can get a massage at the same time.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Dax Shepard?

  So I booked a couples massage for 7:00 PM on Sunday night.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:32:57Dax Shepard?

  I want to say the name of the place.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Romantic.

• 1:32:59Dax Shepard?

  Can I say the name of the place? Because it was so great. The name of the place in Asheville, if you're there, you must try it. Blazing Lotus Healing House.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Okay.

• 1:33:10Dax Shepard?

  Okay. So I also wrote in the comments, hey, it's two, it's two dudes. So we don't need to be in a couples room. If that's easier or harder, whatever. So we arrive at the thing and I say, I don't know if you saw my thing. She goes, yeah. So we have two different rooms. I go, okay, let's do that. And she said, but we have a male and a female massage therapist. And I said, I'll take the dude. I go with Philip and he's incredible. If you're going to go get Philip.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  I want that.

• 1:33:41Dax Shepard?

  He's insanely good. It was one of the best massages ever. I was so lucky. But while I'm laying there getting a massage, I was just thinking in my head about people getting couples massages. And I was thinking, I can't imagine, oh, I know I'm not, but, but, but I'm, I'm on the far edge of this spectrum I recognize. So then I got curious. You don't think when there's, when a, when a man and a woman go get a couples massage and the dude's laying there getting a massage from a woman and then his wife's getting a massage by a man. I don't think that man is ever getting jealous or worried.

• 1:34:15Dax Shepard?

  That there's a man stroking his wife right next to him.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:34:19Dax Shepard?

  I don't think so, or they wouldn't do it.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:22Dax Shepard?

  And so then I just started thinking about that, like, oh, this is a very interesting thing. That this happens, couples massage, isn't it? A man's watching or is next to his wife getting rubbed by another man. And they don't care at all. And then I was like, okay, well, why don't they care? A, mostly probably because they're just focused on the fact that they're getting rubbed.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  They're there. Like, I feel like they're like, nothing that happened, I'm right here.

• 1:34:47Dax Shepard?

  Truly. Yes.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:49Dax Shepard?

  But it's framing. So that's fine if a man rubs your wife and gives her lots of pleasure.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:34:59Dax Shepard?

  If it's her coworker, you're gonna have a lot of problems. If it's a friend.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  This is such a.

• 1:35:06Dax Shepard?

  If it's a friend. You think it's a stretch. The activity is objectively the same.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  I know, but the judgment isn't about the activity. It's about what it means. It's intimate. A massage is not, weirdly, even though it's so pleasurable, it's not intimate.

• 1:35:24Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  And if it crosses into intimacy, it's actually very uncomfortable, except for that one time.

• 1:35:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's be honest.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  A one time. If it's a coworker.

• 1:35:34Dax Shepard?

  But let's say the coworker has not attracted to your wife.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  They're not gonna put themselves in the position to do that unless they are.

• 1:35:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm trying, I'm not being a good, I'm not doing a good job making my point. The activity is objectively the same.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:49Dax Shepard?

  Rubbing, rubbing muscles with lotion.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:35:53Dax Shepard?

  And so if you have a problem with one version, again, you've got to say, oh, he's attracted to her. Where it becomes a problem, or they're not a professional, or, or, or, or, or.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Dax Shepard?

  It's just, you recognize what I'm saying about the fragility of the mind. That in this, this scenario, it's totally fine. I don't even think about it. But if it's anyone but this person, the activity itself is now objectionable.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, because of the nuance of what it means, there's no safety. Yes, there's no professionalism. There's no safety. The person's not sitting, even if it's not a couples massage. Even if it's just a woman goes and gets a massage from a man, the husband isn't there.

• 1:36:37Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  They probably don't, although-

• 1:36:40Dax Shepard?

  It's like a compartment we have in our head where we go like, yeah, it's totally fine if a stranger rubs my wife's naked body.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:47Dax Shepard?

  In this context.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there's, there's boundaries around that context. Whereas if it's a coworker.

• 1:36:55Dax Shepard?

  That's a great, isn't, don't you like the term coworker?

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  It's crazy. It is so crazy. Like, yeah, that's like, they're, they're pushing a boundary.

• 1:37:06Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Massage, the, the massage therapist at Glen Lotus.

• 1:37:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, close.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Is, is, you know, like, they could get sued. Like, there, there's boundaries.

• 1:37:19Dax Shepard?

  But the, sure, they could get sued, uh, but you gotta make all things equal. So the coworker's not attracted to your wife.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  You can't make it equal. This is, this is the nuance. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You, you, the, the motion, the physical motion is the same.

• 1:37:35Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  But what's behind it is not the same.

• 1:37:38Dax Shepard?

  Right, so then, exactly. So let's go through it, because you gotta be specific. So what's the issue with the coworker and not the person at the massage?

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Intimacy. Emotional intimacy.

• 1:37:49Dax Shepard?

  But you're assuming that there's, like, Erica from our pod could give me a massage. There would be nothing going on at all. Like, we would all agree.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know that we'd all agree. I'd be hon- I'll be honest. If, if all of a sudden it's like Erica's gonna give Dax a massage.

• 1:38:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  I think we'd all be like- Why?

• 1:38:11Dax Shepard?

  But that, right, in this scenario, you-

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  If it's a physical therapist or something, friend? If it's a physical therapist friend-

• 1:38:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  That's different to me because that is like medical.

• 1:38:28Dax Shepard?

  I know, but it's funny because we, we've like, again, it's just a very arbitrary bracket we assign. Like because, because the person is a professional, which means what? They went to massage school.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  And have a, they're in a business.

• 1:38:40Dax Shepard?

  The act of touching my naked partner is fine because of X, Y, and Z. Uh, they're, they're trained.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  Well, not just because they're trained, because they have stuff to lose. There are parameters around that. They're, they work for a business or own a business.

• 1:38:53Dax Shepard?

  I guess what I'm saying is if, if you could establish the coworker's rubbing your wife because he's horny for her? I got it. I get it. You got a problem. You got a problem. If the coworker's dispassionately doing the exact same thing that the massage therapist is, it's funny that that's a big difference.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  It's just would never, that's, that's never happened. That a coworker gives a non-passionate, nothing.

• 1:39:22Dax Shepard?

  All right, I didn't, I couldn't get you, I couldn't get you on board.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  Unless the coworker is getting his massage therapy license. That's a situation where it's like, I have to practice, I have to get so many hours in. That's different, but this regular at office, two coworkers, no.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:39:48Dax 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.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:40:37Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 1:40:53Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:41:27Dax Shepard?

  But again, I think what you believe you're objecting to is this coworker wants to rub my wife. But I'm asking for the scenario to be the same as the masseuse, which is the coworker doesn't want to rub your wife.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Then why is he?

• 1:41:42Dax Shepard?

  Because your wife asked him and they have a massage table at work. I don't know why.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  But this is, but, but Doug, I.

• 1:41:49Dax Shepard?

  You're just saying it couldn't happen without those other things at play. But it could.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  How?

• 1:41:55Dax Shepard?

  Because I've rubbed lots of people's shoulders and stuff.

• 1:42:00Dax Shepard?

  All right. Well, I really thought I was going to have something here, but I don't.

• 1:42:04Dax Shepard?

  I think it's just really funny that it's fine to have a dude rub your naked wife in one context and then, and then it's completely objectionable in another, I think is funny.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Yes, because it is, it's, I hear what you're saying, but the difference is boundaries and no boundaries. And that is real. Those are real.

• 1:42:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just don't think people then get specific about what that means. What are the boundaries that are being crossed? Is it that no one can touch your wife? No, because in this scenario they can. Is it? They're attracted to my wife and want to rub her sexually? Yeah, that's a huge objection. But Jess, your friend could give you a massage and none of those things would be on the table.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Well, he's not.

• 1:42:49Dax Shepard?

  Cause he's gay.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, he has, there's no, but, but even, okay. So yes, like he isn't attracted to me, so that feels kind of fine. It also still kind of doesn't like, I think I would be like, feel a little uncomfortable.

• 1:43:06Dax Shepard?

  You want some anonymity when someone's.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Dax Shepard?

  Seeing you nude.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  It's nudity.

• 1:43:12Dax Shepard?

  Is best done anonymously.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Is either for a partner for the most part. I mean, this is not like, um, in, you know, or for, yeah, like.

• 1:43:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Pleasure in an anonymous way.

• 1:43:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I just think, I just think if you're the alien in the spaceship and you saw this man like, watch his wife's getting rubbed by a stranger next to him and he's completely at peace and he's getting rubbed, everything's groovy. And then he walks in his house and the neighbors give him, and then he, and then he goes crazy and murders the guy. I think if you're the alien, you might just be like, oh, this is really funny.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  I guess, I mean, this is a ding ding ding because I had friends in town from Georgia.

• 1:43:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Um, which was really, really fun. And one of the.

• 1:43:56Dax Shepard?

  Hair play.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Yes, one of the people, Gina, um, Gina is my hair play and massages partner.

• 1:44:03Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  So we've been doing hair play and massages since we were 11.

• 1:44:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  And if we're ever like together, we make sure that happens.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  And it is like, you know, everyone always has this like.

• 1:44:16Dax Shepard?

  Your friends don't like it.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, or they like it, but they're like, I think they think it's kinky.

• 1:44:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  And it is always really funny because it is, it is so not like, it is so, it is so benign. It's nothing.

• 1:44:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Um, so I guess in some ways this is sort of what you're talking about.

• 1:44:36Dax Shepard?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Kind of. But it's different when it's a man and a woman, if they're heterosexual. Like me and Gina are heterosexual, so there is something about like, it's fine.

• 1:44:48Dax Shepard?

  But I don't, I, I, I. I just don't think everyone's attracted to each other because they're opposite sex. I mean, this thing is a very tiny.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  You say that about everyone. You say I'm attracted to everyone. It's definitely not a tiny. I think most men who see a woman naked. Mostly.

• 1:45:09Dax Shepard?

  Could fuck.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Are gonna be like.

• 1:45:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't think that's the case for women.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:45:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:45:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  So that's.

• 1:45:17Dax Shepard?

  So I'm not worried that my wife's attracted to the massage therapist.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't think it's reverse really where a woman, a wife is all that worried about their husband going to a massage therapist, woman.

• 1:45:32Dax Shepard?

  Right, which is ironic because that's who should be nervous. My example is because as you just said, a guy will take a blowjob from a billy goat. A man shouldn't be that worried about his wife getting a massage because in general, the wife's not just randomly attracted to every guy that would be rubbing her.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:50Dax Shepard?

  And I'm, I'm, this whole thing started with me being the man dealing with your wife's naked, getting rubbed by another man, and you don't care. And you should probably not care too much, period, because I don't think most women are gonna get horned up over a random dude giving them a massage.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but exactly. So it's a coworker's not a random dude and.

• 1:46:10Dax Shepard?

  But I bet your wife's not attracted to 99% of her coworkers.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  Well, if she's getting a massage from a coworker, she probably is.

• 1:46:17Dax Shepard?

  She's not attracted to.

• 1:46:20Dax Shepard?

  I said it can't be about attraction.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  But again, there's no.

• 1:46:24Dax Shepard?

  Because then you have a real problem. You, your, your wife is engaging with someone she's attracted to in an intimate activity.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Dax Shepard?

  But my scenario is she's not attracted to the coworker. He just doesn't have this title, so you make a big argument. We're done with it. We're done with it.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Wow. Um, wow, I guess that was it. Oh, but hair play and massages were fine. We didn't get to massages because it was too late.

• 1:46:52Dax Shepard?

  I understand the hair play, but what are the parameters of the massage? You guys get bare naked?

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  No, not bare naked. Normally.

• 1:47:01Dax Shepard?

  Is it full body massage?

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  No, just back.

• 1:47:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Back massage.

• 1:47:07Dax Shepard?

  Full body changes it a little bit, right?

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Um, yeah.

• 1:47:11Dax Shepard?

  You have your friends working on your butt cheek? Working on your glute?

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  She is a physical therapist, so like I would maybe let her do that.

• 1:47:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you should.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:47:20Dax Shepard?

  And she should do it to me, too.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  It's been a minute since I get, I think shirts are off.

• 1:47:27Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  But you're laying down.

• 1:47:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  So no one's, it's not.

• 1:47:30Dax Shepard?

  Bras off?

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, this is a bit kinky.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  But no. Cause you're laying down as if you are in a massage.

• 1:47:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  And then we normally sit on the butt.

• 1:47:41Dax Shepard?

  Sit on the butt, is there lotion involved?

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:47:44Dax Shepard?

  It's a dry rub.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's dry.

• 1:47:46Dax Shepard?

  It's a Memphis dry rub.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  Are the shirts off? Now I'm can, now I don't remember.

• 1:47:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, might be a shirt on massage?

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  It might.

• 1:47:56Dax Shepard?

  God, you can't even remember. I'd be so hurt if I were her.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Fuck, should I?

• 1:48:00Dax Shepard?

  Like if you, like, oh yeah, I would be hurt.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  No, I think it's shirts off.

• 1:48:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's gotta be. Shirts, what's the point?

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  But hair play first. And hair play is the, the main.

• 1:48:11Dax Shepard?

  Best part.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the best part.

• 1:48:13Dax Shepard?

  So you guys did find time to play with each other's hair? And how does that work? It's a 10 minute chunk or 15 or? Is it honor poke?

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  It's honor.

• 1:48:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, you need a timer.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  I know, you wouldn't like that, but, and sometimes I do stress out about it a little bit. Like, uh, what if I don't get, what if I don't reciprocate the way I'm supposed to? Because I have not paying attention. Normally I go first.

• 1:48:36Dax Shepard?

  You receive first?

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, explain. Why is Alka-Metza system?

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's just like something, it's just what we've been doing.

• 1:48:44Dax Shepard?

  Muscle memory.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I am like, oh, I wonder how long it's gone, so I know what to do.

• 1:48:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  But I normally try to let that go.

• 1:48:52Dax Shepard?

  Just look at the clock before it starts and then.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  It's so fun, we, and brushes and like.

• 1:48:56Dax Shepard?

  There's brushing.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  Braid, like you'll do braids.

• 1:48:59Dax Shepard?

  Does your hair look crazy afterwards? Is it like all super big?

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 1:49:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I just picture everyone's hair like this afterwards, like ratting it and twisting it and combing it.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  It feels so good.

• 1:49:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  It feels so good.

• 1:49:14Dax Shepard?

  But even that, that's a distinction, right? Like, I think people would be jealous. Like, it can feel so good and not be sexual.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:49:24Dax Shepard?

  Right, but I think people think anything feels good, they're triggered.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  I understand that, that's true. You, it's think, but again, a massage is like that. A regular massage is like that at a place. It's, it feels so good, but there's zero, I mean, again, there are some exceptions, but zero sexual feelings or intimacy.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  And we're chit-chatting during hair play and massages.

• 1:49:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  So, we're catching up.

• 1:49:52Dax Shepard?

  Time's flying.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, time is flying.

• 1:49:55Dax Shepard?

  Do you think you did the same amount she did to you, or a little less?

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  I just think maybe I did a little.

• 1:49:59Dax Shepard?

  You're worried. Yeah. This is your donuts.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just think our, our, our framing of things is just so funny and arbitrary.

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  It is interesting that, I mean, it is a strange sim because I did have that thought, the same thought, sort of, which is like, it's so funny that they all think, they, they can't imagine a world in which our hair play and massages isn't kinky.

• 1:50:27Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Like, they can't imagine that.

• 1:50:29Dax Shepard?

  Yes, I, that is.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  They think it's weird.

• 1:50:31Dax Shepard?

  So, yeah, and great, so we bond on that.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34Dax Shepard?

  I'm regularly just like, I can't grasp the level of jealousy everyone else experiences. Like, I just can't find purchase in it.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:45Dax Shepard?

  And then I'm always just looking at these, like, what I think are, um, mental hiccups or inconsistencies with the whole thing. It's just like, yeah, you'd be totally fine with this.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is context, though. Again, that's why I think, I'm like, you, you just need more information to know whether jealousy should happen or not.

• 1:51:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  When it's two heterosexual females who've been doing this since they were 11.

• 1:51:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  I mean, her husband, Robbie, shout out Robbie, he doesn't care.

• 1:51:15Dax Shepard?

  Well, bet not. Bet he's sitting in the corner with his playing pool pocket, pocket pool. Pool pocket.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Pool pocket? No, he knows it's nothing.

• 1:51:27Dax Shepard?

  Is it kinky if he plays pocket pool while this is happening?

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Yes, that takes it up to a different level.

• 1:51:34Dax Shepard?

  Well, would you let a coworker check your prostate?

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:51:39Dax Shepard?

  Um, well, you're my coworker, so I guess you're asking if I would let you check my prostate. Let's go. If you could accomplish what needed to be accomplished and I needed to know, yeah.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  You would not.

• 1:51:51Dax Shepard?

  I would if I needed to know.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:51:54Dax Shepard?

  And he knew.

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  Would you let me? And that's a better comp because, because we're two heterosexual people.

• 1:52:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You know, I would have to, I would have to run that by my wife.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. And she would say, no.

• 1:52:09Dax Shepard?

  Well, no. If I, again, let.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  This is not a diss on her.

• 1:52:15Dax Shepard?

  No. What I'm saying is if I needed to find out if my prostate was big or I, because then next steps needed to be taken.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Dax Shepard?

  And you, for whatever reason, you knew just as well as my doctor if it was enlarged. And we were stuck somewhere and I called her and said, I gotta find out if I gotta go to the emergency room. The only way is Monica has to put her finger in my butt. But don't worry, she knows what size the prostate is.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  There's so much context. There's a lot of context.

• 1:52:45Dax Shepard?

  But, but, but what I do know about her is if I needed that to be done, she wouldn't care who did it as long as the thing I needed to get done got done.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  I, I don't know about that and it's not anything to, it's nothing about her. It's just she is, oh, it's okay for her to have boundaries. It's okay for her to say, you know what, I'm actually not all that comfortable with that. I'd prefer you go to the emergency room.

• 1:53:12Dax Shepard?

  Right, but that's not an option. That's why I painted it very specifically. No, it's everything. I'm not calling her to say, hey hon, can Monica put her finger in my butt for fun? That's a call I'm not making and she's not saying yes to.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  I know, but now you're, you've made a scenario that's like not a real scenario.

• 1:53:28Dax Shepard?

  No, it is a real scenario. The whole reason I just let a man put his finger up my butt right now is because I had to.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he's a doctor.

• 1:53:35Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  So and you.

• 1:53:36Dax Shepard?

  I had to have that done.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Dax Shepard?

  And if nobody was around to do the thing I had to have done.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  I know, but Dex, my point is that scenario you you're saying right now, nobody's around.

• 1:53:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  To have something done that you need done, which is put a finger up your butt.

• 1:53:51Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  Is is not real like.

• 1:53:54Dax Shepard?

  No, it's not real.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we.

• 1:53:55Dax Shepard?

  It's not real at all.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  Never be in that situation where you can't get to a hospital and only a female coworker.

• 1:54:04Dax Shepard?

  My my point is if something had to be done for my health that involved you or any female coworker was the only person that do it, Kristen would say yes, as I would too. Like if you have to have something done, I can get over my jealousy.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:24Dax Shepard?

  For you to be healthy and safe.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, massage is a little different.

• 1:54:29Dax Shepard?

  No, but we went to.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we moved it over.

• 1:54:31Dax Shepard?

  Prostate, which I I just had to have done.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:54:35Dax Shepard?

  Not because I wanted to.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and not because he wanted to put his finger in my butt.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a professional, so there's boundaries there.

• 1:54:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  Anyway, let's do fast.

• 1:54:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, OK.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Now, I'm not going to do what I did last time this happened, where I presented the facts and everyone in the whole world listening, including you, was like, these are really good. These are really intricate. You really, you really did it this time.

• 1:55:11Dax Shepard?

  A real deep dive. I don't know what got India, but it was a deep dive. And it turned out.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  It was Sophia.

• 1:55:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:55:19Dax Shepard?

  God bless Sophia.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  Sophia is back on the facts today.

• 1:55:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. So this for both of us will be illuminating.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and she's better.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Than me at this, so they're gonna be good. Okay, what is Confederate money and how much was it worth? Answer slash correction. Confederate money or Confederate states dollar was paper currency issued by the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865 to fund the Civil War. It was backed only by the future payment after Southern victory. It started out roughly the same value as US dollar, but by 1863 it was worth six cents per US dollar, and by 1865 it was worthless.

• 1:56:02Dax Shepard?

  Uh oh.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Today, given rarity, it could be worth much more.

• 1:56:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, more than valueless. That seems like a low bar.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, or less than six cents on a dollar.

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  And it probably depends on where you are, where that would be worth something or not.

• 1:56:20Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Who's that, we have, who's the guy we have on who collects the hair? The presidential hair?

• 1:56:27Dax Shepard?

  Cohen.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Jared Cohen.

• 1:56:29Dax Shepard?

  Jared Cohen.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Jared Cohen.

• 1:56:31Dax Shepard?

  He might have some Confederate money.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a collector of history.

• 1:56:36Dax Shepard?

  It's, um, boy, how do I say this? I do not want to offend the South, but it's adjacent to people who collect Nazi memorabilia. It's haunting, it's so powerful. My whole point is like, if you walk into someone's house and they have all these Confederate dollars, do you go like, oh, is this person, or do they like, or were they an anti-evolutionist?

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  You need to learn more.

• 1:56:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  You need to have more conversations with that person, because yeah, they could be just a huge history buff.

• 1:57:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Like, I could own some Nazi, um, uh, plates, and it would not make me in any way a Nazi or someone who thought anything that Hitler was about was good.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  This is so complicated, yes, because, yes, you could definitely own that as like, whoa, this is like a piece of...

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  World history, how wild.

• 1:57:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Like, and.

• 1:57:28Dax Shepard?

  It's a piece of the most dramatic chapter in modern history.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  Horrific, the most horrific, yeah. Um, but here's where things get tricky is like, if a Jewish friend comes over and you have these like Nazi plates.

• 1:57:46Dax Shepard?

  Display.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're like, oh, this is just because I'm a history buff.

• 1:57:51Dax Shepard?

  Right, I also have Genghis Khan's belt over there.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Right, and they probably would be like, okay, like, they were probably able to see that as, as, as truth.

• 1:58:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  But they are not going to be able to look at that and not feel pain.

• 1:58:05Dax Shepard?

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  And same with Confederate dollars.

• 1:58:09Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  Um, so, you know, because this goes back to the whole Confederate flag.

• 1:58:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  And it's like, okay, I understand that to you it doesn't mean that, but to so many people and to, and it did mean that.

• 1:58:24Dax Shepard?

  I accept both realities.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:26Dax Shepard?

  And there's a, there's a third.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:58:28Dax Shepard?

  Which is, there are a lot of people that love the Confederate flag because they are displaying their racism.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:58:33Dax Shepard?

  Like, that's definitely happening.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:35Dax Shepard?

  When I drive.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  More and more now.

• 1:58:37Dax Shepard?

  Through certain areas.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:39Dax Shepard?

  Like, I know what they're saying.

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:58:41Dax Shepard?

  Um, and there are some people like the hunting, fishing, south, pride of the south, I really believe them.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  I believe them too, but that's exactly, that's my point. And I have a, one of my best friends.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  I, I think struggled with this for a little bit. He's southern, um, and he is, he's like a hunter, fisher.

• 1:59:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  Also like a professor, he has a PhD, he's very, uh, introspective and smart.

• 1:59:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  Um, and so I think he was struggling with this for a while because he's like, no, it represents this, but he did come around to like, but no.

• 1:59:18Dax Shepard?

  And again, he barely got there and he's a professor. Some people don't.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  Some people don't do that.

• 1:59:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Um, and I wish they would, I guess. I, I wish they would, but, but yeah, it's.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  Anywho, um, okay. Did printing money in the US start during the Civil War? First federally issued paper currency, the greenbacks, was introduced during the Civil War in 1861 under the Legal Tender Act. Paper money dated as far back as 1690, but not on the national scale. So money was largely coinage or banknotes before 1861. The US dollar in coin form originated in 1792. But yes, nationwide legal tender notes began by the Treasury during the Civil War. Okay, who wrote the Grant, Twain, Adams, Hamilton biographies? And when were they written? Grant, 2017 by Ron Chernow.

• 2:00:12Dax Shepard?

  We love him. Wow, I love him.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Twain.

• 2:00:15Dax Shepard?

  I love him.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  2005 by Ron Powers.

• 2:00:19Dax Shepard?

  No, that's not the one I'm listening to.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  Well, we are listening to the new one now.

• 2:00:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, which is Ron Chernow.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is an old one.

• 2:00:27Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Adams, 2001 by McCullough. Hamilton, 2004 by Ron Chernow.

• 2:00:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so Hamilton's Chernow and McCullough's Adams.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, this is an important one. When did humans stop eating poop?

• 2:00:43Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Okay, answer. Can't find reliable data.

• 2:00:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that was my hunch. Hard to know.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Really hard to know.

• 2:00:52Dax Shepard?

  We'd need a cave painting of a man eating a pile of poop that had just fallen out of another human.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  And then the next painting where he's not doing that.

• 2:01:00Dax Shepard?

  There's a circle with a line through it. Don't do this. He's a sicko.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  Okay, do rabbits poop 200 to 300 times a day? What is the average number of time an animal poops a day? I mean, I already did this on a previous fact, so turns out I am pretty good at this.

• 2:01:17Dax Shepard?

  Right, because now we're just rehashing.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  But I'll go through them again. Rabbits, 200 to 300. Moose, 13 to 21. Birds, 12 to 40. Geese, every 12 minutes.

• 2:01:28Dax Shepard?

  Gross.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  Penguins, up to 140 times a day.

• 2:01:33Dax Shepard?

  I wonder if the geese and birds have to poop that much evolutionarily to keep themselves light.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:01:39Dax Shepard?

  As we know, their bones are hollow, so they can fly.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:42Dax Shepard?

  Maybe like you can't carry around a pound of dong.

• 2:01:45Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:01:45Dax Shepard?

  Dong, dong.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  Okay, fun fact. Blue whales supposedly excrete 200 liters of poop in one single bowel movement.

• 2:01:55Dax Shepard?

  Two hundred liters.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  How much is that?

• 2:01:58Dax Shepard?

  So many gallons.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:00Dax Shepard?

  Fifty-two point eight gallons.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  In one poop? Oh, my God. That's disgusting. No wonder the ocean is polluted.

• 2:02:11Dax Shepard?

  When you were gone and we did a couple of armchairs, Aaron and I, one of the guys was a submarine.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:02:17Dax Shepard?

  Worker.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:02:18Dax Shepard?

  Submariner.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:02:19Dax Shepard?

  And yet they squirt their tanks out, their waste tanks.

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  Into the ocean?

• 2:02:26Dax Shepard?

  They have to. They they don't they don't come up for six months.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Oh, right, yeah.

• 2:02:32Dax Shepard?

  And he said there is a feeding frenzy outside the.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 2:02:38Dax Shepard?

  And I bet there is when these blue whales let loose, too.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  Ah, gross. Who coined the term illusion of fluency? Woo Kyong An, 2022 guest.

• 2:02:52Dax Shepard?

  Woo?

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  Woo Kyong An.

• 2:02:54Dax Shepard?

  Kong.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  She was so playful and fun.

• 2:02:58Dax Shepard?

  We loved her.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Cognitive psychologist and professor of psychology at Yale. She talks about allure of fluency can trick us into thinking we can do something simply because it felt easy, which leads to the illusion of fluency.

• 2:03:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  She was cool. Go back in the archive, listen to her.

• 2:03:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she's great.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a good episode. And that's it for Sophia's facts on Stephen Dubner.

• 2:03:19Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great, great, great, great. Good job, Sophia.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, good job.

• 2:03:23Dax Shepard?

  Reporting them, Monica.

• 2:03:25Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:03:26Dax Shepard?

  Rob, good job. Good job.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  All right.

• 2:03:29Dax Shepard?

  I love you.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Love you.