Carter Sherman (on the sex recession)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Episode Summary

Episode Title: Carter Sherman on the Sex Recession
Release Date: July 30, 2025
Host: Armchair Umbrella (Dax Shepard)
Guest: Carter Sherman, Award-Winning and Emmy-Nominated Reporter
Book Discussed: The Second Coming Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard welcomes Carter Sherman, an award-winning and Emmy-nominated reporter. Carter delves deep into her latest work, The Second Coming Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, exploring the phenomenon known as the "sex recession" among Generation Z. This comprehensive discussion sheds light on the declining sexual activity in young adults and the multifaceted factors contributing to this trend.

---

Guest Background

Carter Sherman brings a wealth of experience to the conversation, with over six and a half years at Vice News covering gender and sexuality before joining The Guardian in 2023. Her anthropological insights, combined with her personal experiences and academic background, provide a nuanced perspective on the evolving sexual landscape of young people today.

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Understanding the Sex Recession

Carter introduces the concept of the "sex recession," highlighting significant statistical declines in sexual activity among Gen Z:

• California Study (2013-2019):

  • [19:58] Sexual inactivity among 18-29-year-olds rose from 22% to 38%.

• University of Chicago Study:

  • [19:58] Increased sexual dormancy from 7-8% to 19-20% within a decade.

Carter emphasizes that this trend is not merely about decreased casual sex but a broader decline in all forms of sexual activity, surpassing even previous generations like the Greatest Generation.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [21:19]:
"I think a lot of people attribute it to smartphones, which makes sense. We see a lot of changes in trends around 2010, which is when people start getting smartphones and social media."

---

Factors Affecting Gen Z Sexuality

1. Social Media and Digital Engagement

• Digital Intimacy vs. Physical Connection:

  • [22:28] There’s a shift towards maintaining friendships and relationships online, reducing face-to-face interactions essential for intimate connections.

• Comparing and Despairing Phenomenon:

  • [48:35] Social media fosters an environment where individuals constantly compare themselves to others, leading to decreased self-esteem and increased anxiety.

Notable Quote:
Dax Shepard at [23:07]:
"The gravity from the higher like fills up the chamber and then gravity drains it. Then you close the door there."

2. Mental Health Issues

• Correlation Between Mental Health Decline and Sexual Activity:
  • [21:43] The rise in mental health struggles among young people is closely linked to decreased sexual activity.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [24:10]:
"Pursuing sex is hard. You have to open yourself up and be vulnerable."

3. Sex Education

• Abstinence-Only Education Impact:

  • [44:54] Federally funded abstinence-only sex education lacks comprehensive information, leading to misconceptions and fear surrounding sexual activity.

• Sexual Risk Avoidance:

  • [45:40] The federal government's approach to sex education prioritizes risk avoidance over practical knowledge, leaving students ill-equipped to handle sexual relationships healthily.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [44:47]:
"We call it sexual risk avoidance. That's what the federal government calls it. And they're still funding like hundreds of millions of dollars into this every year."

4. Political Influences

• MeToo Movement:

  • [26:00] Raised awareness about sexual violence but did not lead to sufficient institutional changes, resulting in increased anxiety among young people about vulnerability and consent.

• Roe v. Wade Overturn:

  • [66:04] The reversal has heightened anxiety around pregnancy and contraception, influencing decisions to delay or avoid sexual activity.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [27:58]:
"MeToo didn't really make as much of a difference as people might think that it did. It raised awareness, but it didn't result in institutional change to give young people the tools to seek accountability or help."

5. Vulnerability and Fear of Intimacy

• Fear of Rejection and Vulnerability:
  • [23:53] Young people are increasingly hesitant to pursue sexual relationships due to fears of rejection and vulnerability, often using the internet as a shield to avoid potential emotional harm.

Notable Quote:
Dax Shepard at [24:03]:
"I think it's apex vulnerability. Reject me or accept me. It's that literal."

---

Gender Perspectives

1. Young Women

• Fear of Inexperience:

  • [30:53] Young women fear confessing sexual inexperience, which can lead to feelings of inadequacy and increased anxiety around sexual encounters.

• Victimization Concerns:

  • [16:18] Discussions often center around young women feeling used or taken advantage of, impacting their willingness to engage in casual sex.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [30:36]:
"Women often come to the conversation with things to say, whereas young men took longer to articulate their views."

2. Young Men

• Performance Anxiety:

  • [30:52] Young men grapple with pressures to perform sexually, leading to fears about their abilities and increased self-consciousness.

• Involuntary Celibacy and Incels:

  • [50:14] The rise of incel ideology, fueled by perceived disparities in sexual opportunities, contributes to frustration and entitlement among young men.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [50:49]:
"Incels are men who are involuntarily celibate and they are angry about it. Angry about it."

---

Political and Educational Systems' Role

Carter elaborates on how political decisions and educational policies directly shape personal sexual choices:

• Title IX and Institutional Responses to Sexual Assault:

  • [63:07] Title IX aims to eradicate sex discrimination in education but has undergone significant changes, affecting how sexual assault cases are handled on campuses.

• Sexual Conservatism and Pronatalism:

  • [45:35] There's a movement pushing for more traditional sexual norms, promoting sex primarily within marriage for procreation, influenced by right-wing ideologies.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [40:47]:
"I think the changes in sex are always political. If we understand this is about my function in society, it's about my community and surviving in my community."

---

Anecdotal Evidence and Studies

Carter shares her methodology in researching the sex recession, including interviewing over 100 young individuals across various political spectrums:

• Sourcing Participants:

  • [27:20] Reached out to college sex ed groups, Reddit, TikTok, and conservative organizations to gather diverse perspectives.

• Interview Insights:

  • [30:14] Young women often have predefined ideas about sex influenced by inadequate sex education, while young men express frustrations related to incel ideologies and fear of harassment accusations.

Notable Quote:
Carter Sherman at [33:20]:
"If we had been born 10 years later, we would have fit right in."

---

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling exploration of the declining sexual activity among Gen Z, attributing it to a confluence of digital engagement, mental health challenges, flawed sex education, and political influences. Carter Sherman emphasizes the importance of fostering genuine connections and resilience among young people, advocating for nuanced discussions that transcend political binaries. The conversation underscores that while technology and societal pressures play significant roles, the core of the issue lies in the fundamental human need for intimacy and connection, which remains unfulfilled in the modern landscape.

Final Thought from Carter Sherman:
[73:43]
"I think what we need is a third study that looks at how political affiliation impacts the frequency of with which you fake orgasms."

---

This episode serves as an essential conversation starter for understanding the intricate dynamics affecting Gen Z's sexual lives, urging listeners to consider the broader societal and political factors at play.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Randall Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi. Really good. Today we have Carter Sherman. She is an award winning and Emmy nominated reporter. She has a book out now called the Second Coming Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future.

[Monica Padman]

This was fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We keep hearing about this quote sex recession among Gen Z folks and she has written an entire book about it and it's fascinating.

[Monica Padman]

We get to learn.

[Dax Shepard]

Please enjoy. Carter Sherman. We are supported by Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode. We're we could all use an escape these days and the best way to do it audible. With over 1 million titles in their selection, there's more to imagine with Audible. We are supported by JCPenney. You know that moment when someone compliments your outfit and asks where you got it?

[Monica Padman]

Oh man. One of the best feelings.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Actually, JCPenney has got hidden gems for every age, everybody and every budget. We actually just got some stuff from JCPenney.com I am wearing right now a pair of Levi's 501s. And you know, that's my favorite pants. And they had the color I've been searching for. And I got a really kickass Levi's jacket too.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Exper.

[Carter Sherman]

We had a whole conversation, entire interview.

[Dax Shepard]

On what topic?

[Monica Padman]

We had a whole interview about fashion. Yeah, that was really in depth.

[Carter Sherman]

I am an expert on fashion.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. For how long?

[Carter Sherman]

My entire life. I came out of the womb born very stylish.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you live in New York?

[Carter Sherman]

I do live in New York.

[Dax Shepard]

And where are you from originally?

[Carter Sherman]

Seattle.

[Dax Shepard]

What part of Seattle?

[Carter Sherman]

Laurelhurst. 15 minutes north of Capitol Hill.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay, great. I've been blackout drunk many times on Capitol Hill.

[Carter Sherman]

Oh, my gosh. Congratulations.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I've gone to gaswork parks and drank 40s. I've gone to the troll bridge and drank 40s.

[Carter Sherman]

I have also done those things.

[Monica Padman]

I was gonna ask. Yeah, you've been drunk a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's standard biz up there.

[Carter Sherman]

Well, when you're 16 and you're living in Seattle, the only places to get drunk are generally outdoors at parks.

[Monica Padman]

Even with all the rain.

[Carter Sherman]

I think the rain is something we made up to keep people out of Seattle. Wow. Because it rains maybe every day, but not all day.

[Dax Shepard]

The misleading thing is, yeah, it rains often, but for a very short amount of time. And it's not like a heavy downpour like when it rains in Michigan, it's a flood. You know, it's fucking cats and dogs.

[Carter Sherman]

We love a drizzle.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, Kind of Hawaii then. Hawaii has that without the water, the rain kind of every day. But quick.

[Carter Sherman]

I don't want to claim that we're as great as Hawaii.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. I don't want to oversell the tourism attraction.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that is one upside of global warming is that potentially it will be. They tell me that LA is going to get tropical.

[Monica Padman]

You know, it hailed the other day while we were recording.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, when we had that downpour.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

It apparently was hailing. That doesn't happen here.

[Dax Shepard]

What did mom and dad do in Seattle?

[Carter Sherman]

My mom worked in and around healthcare. Not providing it, but insurance, Administrative stuff. Yeah. Pharmaceuticals. My dad did what I think at the time would have been called E commerce, but it's now just commerce. Basically, early on the trend of helping companies sell things online. So basically, office jobs for both of these people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Okay, and what drew you to journalism? First of all, how do we get Carter as someone who named a girl Lincoln? I feel like I can relate to your question.

[Carter Sherman]

I appreciate the presidential connection. Thank you for that. Was it after the president?

[Dax Shepard]

No, it was after my 1967 Lincoln Continental, which, ironically, Kennedy was killed in. So you could make another presidential connections. Oh, my gosh, yes.

[Carter Sherman]

All flattering connections.

[Monica Padman]

I thought you were asking, was it after his death. Oh, and that was, like, quite some time.

[Dax Shepard]

No, she was born in 1883.

[Monica Padman]

Was it pre or post the president?

[Carter Sherman]

It was so recently after the murder that you really just had to honor the great man's words.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

Carter. Honestly, it was after a woman my parents knew. I've been told that Carter is actually a common name for women in the South.

[Monica Padman]

I can see.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you got June Carter, famously.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's a last name.

[Carter Sherman]

I have to spend a lot of time telling people it's Carter Sherman is the last name. I will pick up the phone or call somebody, and then they'll answer and I'll start speaking. And there's always like, a breath where I can tell that they're recalibrating that I'm a woman.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that happened to Monica.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. I walked in and I was like, oh, there's a nice woman here. I like that. I'm happy about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Monica said, you know, our guest is a woman. I said, yeah, because I researched her. But yes, obviously, when I saw on the schedule, Carter, I thought we were talking to Jimmy Carter.

[Carter Sherman]

It truly happens at least twice a week, I would say. I think it's kind of helpful sometimes. Cause sometimes I'm like, I wonder if people get back back to me because they think I'm a man.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Carter Sherman]

Or like, if I got further along in job application processes, and this would be other men. Who knows? Women can be sexist.

[Dax Shepard]

I way rather call a woman back than a man. I think most people would prefer to call.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it depends on what you're calling them for. I mean, for jobs, oil change.

[Dax Shepard]

You probably.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know, maybe Carter is great at oil.

[Carter Sherman]

In addition to being a fashion expert, I am a mechanic in my Spare time.

[Dax Shepard]

My God, you're a polymath.

[Carter Sherman]

That's what I've always said.

[Dax Shepard]

So how did you find your way to journalism?

[Carter Sherman]

Well, I loved reading and writing mostly because I couldn't do it until I was kind of old. I couldn't read and write till I was in second grade. They put me in a bunch of remedial reading classes.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't learn to read till fifth grade.

[Carter Sherman]

Oh, okay. Well, now I feel terrible.

[Dax Shepard]

You are a genius compared to my reading.

[Monica Padman]

You came up at a time they probably knew about learning disabilities.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Whereas you. They did not.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What was your learning disability?

[Carter Sherman]

I didn't really have one. I think I was just unmotivated. I also had a speech impediment for a long time, so I couldn't say my Rs, which is great for the name. Carter.

[Dax Shepard]

How would you pronounce Carter?

[Carter Sherman]

Carter.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, how cool.

[Dax Shepard]

So you sound like you're from Boston.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes. I also got that all the time. And so I think that also contributed. My parents have been like, we were a little worried that you were stupid.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. You gotta wonder.

[Carter Sherman]

So then I started being able to read, and I really liked reading. And when I was in sixth grade, we went to Bend, Oregon on vacation.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Carter Sherman]

And I ran out of books because I read too many things. And my parents had a copy of the Saturday edition of the New York Times. So it was the only thing I could read for, like a week. And I loved it. I still remember the stories.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you like the economy of information.

[Carter Sherman]

And also just you get this window into other people's lives. Otherwise, these people are not going to be welcoming strangers into their homes and explaining very intimate details about how they came to be who they are. And so I really love this idea that you could go out and talk to all kinds of strangers and then go home and write about it. And yes, very economic language that hopefully people would consume and be broadened by.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a great point to hone in on, which is you must have had your own desire to have access to talk to people about things that normally you wouldn't get to talk to them about. That must have been an appealing part of it.

[Carter Sherman]

I think so.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I'll have an excuse to enter any conversation on a topic I want, because that's the job.

[Carter Sherman]

Exactly. And you guys are probably also nosy.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Extremely nosy. When I babysat, I went through people's stuff.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we choose the word curious.

[Carter Sherman]

Oh, I'm so sorry.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Please take that.

[Carter Sherman]

Two sides of the same coin.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. In fact, when we've had babysitters, I can only extend them as much character leeway as I would give myself. So when we've had babysitter, I'm like, well, they're definitely going through everything I have.

[Monica Padman]

What you think? What if they're reading your journals?

[Dax Shepard]

Then they're reading the journals. I still need a babysitter.

[Carter Sherman]

Would you put out bait to test if they're going through things?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm someone who's at great peace with the things that are unavoidable that happen. I was nosy. I can only assume this person's so much better than me. And you were nosy. And you have a lot of integrity. You just said you went through people's shit too.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, I didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I thought you said you did.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no, no, no, I didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Carter did.

[Carter Sherman]

I did.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you did. When you babysit.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta see what's going on.

[Monica Padman]

I was a very trusted babysitter.

[Dax Shepard]

She actually can't admit babysat for us for a while.

[Carter Sherman]

That's how it's.

[Dax Shepard]

She knows that we'll reverse engineer her gifts.

[Carter Sherman]

I appreciate your ability to keep yourself a locked vault here when you.

[Dax Shepard]

She's completely full of. She went through everyone's stuff. All the journals. She knows the journals frontward and backward. Okay, so what school did you end? You ended up in a sorority at a school.

[Carter Sherman]

I did end up in a sorority. I went to Northwestern.

[Monica Padman]

When did you graduate?

[Carter Sherman]

2016.

[Monica Padman]

You're much younger than me.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, she's five years old.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I have a lot of Northwestern friends, but they're all my age.

[Carter Sherman]

Well, it's also. If you just have that four year gap, then there's no overall.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I heard it's just the best school ever.

[Carter Sherman]

I really liked it. I think it's a very pre. Professional school. They're very much not like, oh, learn and grow and find out who you are. They're very much, learn a trade and go into it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's pretty sage advice.

[Carter Sherman]

It's not bad. It worked out for me at Northwestern. It's usually become a journalist or become a consultant.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Or an actor.

[Carter Sherman]

Fair number of actors. That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

So weirdly, in 2013, you're there, you're in a sorority, and a writer for the New York Times is doing a piece on the sex lives of millennials, Millennial girls, which, at that time, of course, I remember this moral panic, but I wouldn't have remembered the exact dates. But this is at kind of the height of the Moral panic that millennials are engaged in hookup culture.

[Carter Sherman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you remember that prevailing fear?

[Monica Padman]

Not really.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember when I was here and I was like, this is horseshit. People have been fucking as much as they can. They couldn't have upped it.

[Monica Padman]

They were so that instead of being in a relationship that everyone was just hooking up.

[Dax Shepard]

I think even deeper indifference was their fear that people would be having sex with indifference.

[Carter Sherman]

Oh, got it. Yeah. That there was no personal connection going on. No interest in personal connection. And also, there was a lot of fear that the sex itself was bad, that people were not having orgasms, because evidently there was an assumption that you have to have a personal connection to have an orgasm.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I see.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course you don't need a personal connection for orgasm. Also, if you're in a relationship where communication has been established, your odds go up, I think. Yeah. When you meet a fucking dum dum at a bar and you're getting plowed. I don't know if we're getting to all the stages of what your favorite warmup is.

[Carter Sherman]

You haven't presented the proper diagrams. You just get lucky. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I hope this dude does it the way I like to do.

[Carter Sherman]

And usually the dude gets lucky and the woman does not.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes. Conventionally.

[Monica Padman]

We just had an episode come out today about sex. We had a sex educator on Shan.

[Dax Shepard]

Sexologist.

[Monica Padman]

On Google, it says educator.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I just like the term sexologist. Certified sexologist. It sounds like a mixologist.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But anyway, she was teaching us about orgasms and how to increase your odds, basically.

[Carter Sherman]

What did she say?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, so many things. She taught us how to squirt.

[Carter Sherman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

If that's something you're.

[Monica Padman]

If that's something anyone's interested in.

[Carter Sherman]

I'm intrigued.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Exactly. Positions a lot about foreplay and how people obviously are very different in what they need and seek out and creating those environments.

[Dax Shepard]

You want to hear the worst news? Women, like, chore play. Their male partner does chores. Their horniness goes up dramatically. And it's like when you're dude, you're like, that's the least. I'll rub your legs. I'll give you a massage, I'll kiss your neck.

[Monica Padman]

They want you to make the kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Lunge, sweep the floor. That's what we got.

[Carter Sherman]

Just in, like a mate's outfit. Like, just.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it's not a role play thing. It is an act of service. And that endears women to their partners.

[Carter Sherman]

Okay, I get that. I also think that maybe speaks to how low the bar is. As far as men doing chores, I will say that I do not get turned on by chore play because my husband does a bunch of the chores normally.

[Monica Padman]

Right. So it's not extra.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. He actually probably does most of the chores, so maybe I should do chore play for him. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, he might like that.

[Dax Shepard]

If you've noticed he's not so horny for you. Why don't you try a little chore play?

[Monica Padman]

Do a little dishes?

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I got a little distracted, actually, by this story. The fact that you are an aspiring journalist being interviewed by a journalist for something I went into, like, my anthropological background, which is you have such an impact on the people you're studying, the notion you're even getting anything out of it other than the person has assessed they want to make you happy. So much of the social sciences is.

[Monica Padman]

That it's hard to get objective.

[Carter Sherman]

You're changing the environment by being in it dramatically.

[Dax Shepard]

And you think you're observing something, but you're really observing a performance of the thing, and they're incentivized one way or another to present. This is very interesting.

[Carter Sherman]

I remember feeling that way, because the way that she did the interview was not just we were sitting down and we were talking is that she came to the sorority house while some of us were getting ready to go out to a party at a frat house. Cause she wanted to observe us getting ready and see how we dressed and what we thought about. Not in a creepy way, but she wanted to know why we wore what we wore.

[Dax Shepard]

You had a theory to announce to her, which is, you can either go boobs out or legs out. You want to be available, but not a sure thing.

[Carter Sherman]

There was a strategy. She wasn't wrong to ask.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. But even in that, you just think, did you really have a strategy? Or you felt comfortable this way? And then when asked, you're kind of now forced to have an overarching theory on why you do what you do, which people just generally don't. So you kind of make one up on the spot.

[Carter Sherman]

I definitely had a strategy.

[Dax Shepard]

You did?

[Carter Sherman]

I did. Because this was also probably the era of people dressing like they were gonna go business casual to the club. Do you remember that? Like the big, chunky necklaces and, like, the peplum skirts.

[Monica Padman]

That was not happening at my college.

[Carter Sherman]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

Would that be normcore? Am I picturing the right thing?

[Monica Padman]

That's more Seinfeld outfit.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, that's actually cool. This was not cool. This was just a very random aberration for a few Years there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

Gen Z makes fun of millennials a lot for this, and they're right to do so.

[Dax Shepard]

So you got suspicious during it.

[Carter Sherman]

No, I did.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me about that.

[Carter Sherman]

I felt like she was trying to get us to talk about being victims of hookup culture or to talk about how we felt used by these men in fraternities. Because I think she came with the assumption that we were being used by them, which I don't think is totally off base. It's just if you're trying to talk to people about the landscape of their sexual lives, coming in with a very narrow agenda is not actually very helpful to us.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, almost a binary proposition. Either you guys are getting victimized or not, as if it's not traveling in both directions and radically different outcomes.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. I don't think she thought it was bad that we were having sex.

[Dax Shepard]

Right? Well, she wrote for the New York Times.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes. And she, I think, identifies as a feminist and was very pro us having that kind of autonomy. She was worried that we were being taken advantage of, that our willingness to have sex was being weaponized against us. And I don't think she was totally off base on that. It just felt kind of icky for her to come in there and to feel like she really wanted us to say specific things. And when we were saying, you know, we're not necessarily having that much sex. I had a boyfriend at the time, and so I wasn't sleeping with any of these guys and brats, she sort of deflated. She just wasn't that interested in hearing the narrative.

[Dax Shepard]

It's really interesting how different roads can all end up leading to. Yeah. So that wasn't her goal, and she thought you should be empowered. But the subtext is, no, it's still very dismissive. And you guys are the weaker, vulnerable group that's getting preyed on by men. And then, so the natural outcome is like, you shouldn't be giving them. Like, you can have an expressed moral, and then it can somehow still lead to the exact same point the other side is trying to make.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, that's the irony there. It did not feel empowering in the moment to be in that room. And I feel very knives out for this woman. I'm so sorry, Peggy.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you are? No, no. You do a good job in your book of saying it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was gonna be when I read it. It definitely is a product of its time and context, which is, this is the big fear. Hookup culture is ruining young girls and presumably boys.

[Carter Sherman]

There was another book about boys. Who is it? It's Peggy Orenstein.

[Monica Padman]

We've had her on. We have, yeah. Many, many, many years ago. But we have indeed had Peggy.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Do you remember what I think it was about? Boys and sex.

[Carter Sherman]

Actually, it came out after me too. Which was what, 2017, February 2020. She came on.

[Dax Shepard]

The COVID years are blurry. We're doing them all over Zoom.

[Carter Sherman]

She was in person.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, Rob, we're cutting that.

[Dax Shepard]

Thanks for helping, Rob.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, when you said Peggy, I was like, huh?

[Carter Sherman]

She's entitled to her opinion and she's generally a good journalist. It is interesting as a journalist now writing this book, because I was trying to be very cognizant of not making people feel like I was taking what they were saying and twisting it to fit my narrative.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, okay. So let's just go through your bonafides, because you write for Guardian.

[Carter Sherman]

I write for the Guardian.

[Dax Shepard]

What is your domain?

[Carter Sherman]

I cover reproductive health and justice. So I got hired end of 2023, and at that time, as you might remember, we were speeding towards an election that had quite a bit to do with abortion rights. So that was what I was spending a lot of my time doing.

[Dax Shepard]

So you write on reproductive issues now. What led you specifically to this topic? Why were you drawn to this book? Sex and Gen Z. I've been covering.

[Carter Sherman]

Sex and gender for a long time. Before getting hired at the Guardian, I worked at Vice News for about six and a half years. And there my work was generally speaking, gender and sexuality. I got very much in the habit of whenever there would be some kind of news event that would go on in relationship to sex and reproduction of gender, I would call people up and ask them how that impacted their sex life. If there's a restriction on abortion, if there's a restriction on birth control, if there's some new study on porn. I would speak predominantly to young people about their thoughts on this topic. And so over the course of doing all of those stories, I started to be thinking quite a bit about all of the really generational changes that have gone on within Gen Z's lives. Because they had Roe v. Wade being overturned, they had me too. They had the pandemic, They've had the rise of the Internet and social media and smartphones, dating apps. And those are all things that you would expect to happen, maybe one in a lifetime. But they're getting them back to. Back to back.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no. Each individual generation is experiencing the amount of change that probably seven generations in the 18 and 1900s experience.

[Carter Sherman]

Right. I grew up as mainstream social media was emerging. And I can tell that it has warped me. And I had some time where Facebook didn't exist, but these kids grew up on Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok. I really wanted to understand what that meant for them and what specifically they thought about it. Because I think there's so much moralizing that goes on and so much hand wringing and panicking.

[Dax Shepard]

We'd have to just acknowledge that there's a pretty uninterrupted pattern of older generations fearing the changes in the younger generations. That's just a consistent thing that happens. We're certainly doing that non stop. Well, I'm Gen X, so we were doing it to millennials and now we're doing it to Gen Z. But what got really headliney was I think the first one I know about is 2019. There was a California study. We went from 22% of people 18 to 29 hadn't had sex in a year in 2013. And by 2019 it's at 38%. So it's like a very dramatic shift. And there's a University of Chicago study, it's even more dramatic. It goes from 7 to 8% who have no sex to 19 and 20. So it's like two and a half times more sexual dormancy in a decade. So we all are kind of aware of this, right? The Gen Z is having less sex. What are the common at the grocery store explanations? What do you think most people attribute that to?

[Carter Sherman]

I think a lot of people attribute it to smartphones, which makes sense. We see a lot of changes in trends around 2010, which is when people start getting smartphones and social media. At the same time, we see mental health plummeting around that time among young people. So mental health is also a big one that people attribute it to. Right now there's a lot of chatter around deliberate celibacy and people just opting out of having sex being quote, unquote, boy, sober.

[Monica Padman]

So that's for women.

[Carter Sherman]

That's for women.

[Monica Padman]

And then there's also incels sounds pseudo feminist.

[Carter Sherman]

I think that's incels the voiceover thing or celibacy. What I found is that generally speaking, this is not a thing that is happening among young people. There are some young people who are pursuing celibacy, but a lot of the women who are opting out of sex are actually in their 50s and 60s.

[Monica Padman]

Makes some sense.

[Carter Sherman]

Which makes sense.

[Monica Padman]

There's some menopause stuff probably.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. And you know, it seems like they've probably dated Men and made some decisions like not for me. And that's. That's fine.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

So I think those are some of the big explanations that people tend to come up with. Porn often gets cited as a big explanation. Are people replacing in person sex with pornography?

[Dax Shepard]

I've come up with my own theory just watching, and one is they appear to be less engaged digitally and not actually in person. Far more friendships are maintained, and friendships are made on the Internet. It's not face to face. So there's a proximity issue that has to be relevant in it. And then I was even thinking about the ways you. You can satiate yourself now that didn't exist. You could talk on the phone and have phone sex. This was when I was growing up. And you would do that a few times and then you'd bore of that. But the notion that you can exchange pictures and you can get on FaceTime and you can masturbate together, like, there's a lot of ways to satiate yourself that didn't exist. I think those are the things I was thinking were driving it.

[Carter Sherman]

The other thing that people brought up to me a lot or worry about a lot is because you have the Internet as this mediating force, which is asynchronous. Right. During phone sex, you're talking to someone and you have to be responding kind of quickly to keep the mood going. But with the Internet, you can be talking across great distances over a long period of time, and you don't necessarily have to be engaging in the same way. What people are worried about is that young people have developed a fear of vulnerability and that they are not willing to put themselves out there in such a way that they could be hurt because they've used the Internet as a kind of shield for their entire lives. And then Covid made it worse because then you're trapped inside and you're not able to go through the sort of usual rites of passage that young people go through where they learn how to be hurt and embarrassed and bounce back and develop resilience.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Carter Sherman]

And pursuing sex is hard. You have to open yourself up and be vulnerable.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think it's apex vulnerability. Reject me or accept me. It's that literal?

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, yeah. And so you can see why people go without sex or delay even having sex in the first place.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. How valid do you think that explanation is?

[Carter Sherman]

I think it is fairly valid. Not because young people were saying this to me, but when we talked about the things that they were worried about, it was oftentimes vulnerability. And the longer that they went without Sex. I think oftentimes these young people became more worried about bringing that up to a potential partner.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So I had this really illuminating, very anecdotal experience. Monica and I were in New York. We were doing press last year, and we both had a makeup artist. And she was incredibly attractive woman from Dayton in Ohio, and she'd moved to Brooklyn. And I'm like, how is it? Are you having fun? She's like, well, I love Brooklyn. But she's like, beating around the bush. And I'm like, the dating. And she's like, yeah, cannot get a date in Brooklyn. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Are you going out to bars? She goes, yeah, I go to bars. And I go, and guys aren't coming up and talking to you or buying you a drink. And she's like, no, zero. And she was beautiful and a career woman had all the attributes. And I left that going, like, that's nuts.

[Monica Padman]

She wanted a partner and a date. And she was like, it just isn't happening.

[Carter Sherman]

Well, I think people are much more used to hitting on one another through dating apps now. And so doing it IRL feels foreign in a kind of way. And I don't think anything is wrong with dating apps. A lot of the young people I talked to did not like dating apps, but dating itself can be really torturous, regardless of how you do it. The concern is, have dating apps replaced people's ability to find one another in person and connect with one another in person?

[Dax Shepard]

I'll be very provocative. I worried that this is part of MeToo backlash, that you have guys that are now afraid to approach any woman because any unwanted attention's no good. Everything they've been reading about for the last five years has made them think, nah, I don't wanna. Just a fear of approaching women now.

[Carter Sherman]

I only had one young man bring this up to me where he said, I do worry about catching a case. That's how we put it. A lot of these young men, though, think that they are not the type to ever do that. And so because of that, they're like, well, I'm not worried about it, because I wouldn't even find myself in the situation where someone would accuse me of that. What I found is that honestly, and I write about this in the book, Me too. Didn't really make as much of a difference as people might think that it did. The major thing it did when I talked to young women is that they grasped much earlier on in their lives that they might have faced some kind of violation I was actually assaulted in college. And it took me kind of a long time to understand that. It was like, this was not a bad date. This was someone not listening to me saying no. But these young women knew. They were like, I know I was raped. I know that this happened to me. And the problem with me too is that what it did is it raised awareness of sexual violence and sexual harassment, but it didn't actually result in institutional change to give young people the tools to seek accountability for that or even seek help for that. And so you've created a scenario where people are walking around much more aware of their vulnerability, but also much more aware that there's nothing they can do. And that can make your mental health much worse and actually be dangerous. Dangerous for people, because it is terrible to walk around thinking that the world is a dangerous place, even when it is.

[Dax Shepard]

So you talked to more than 100 people. How did you source these people? And how do you approach these people?

[Carter Sherman]

Basically, if I met you and you were under 25, I was probably going to approach you with a microphone and be like, hey, do you want to talk about sex? I found them four ways. One of them was I reached out to a lot of college antisexual assault groups, sex ed groups, LGBTQ rights groups. Another way was I was like, trawl Reddit and TikTok and Twitter now X. And if people were posting things about sex, I would just reach out and be like, hey, do you want to talk about this?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because all those other sources you just named are very left leaning.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So how are you going to get the voice of the young conservative woman?

[Carter Sherman]

The other ways that I would do this is be like, do you have friends who will talk to me? You end up going down and down the line, and once you get further enough away, you do get these. These much more politically mixed groups of people. And I always asked people in interviews, how would they define their political orientation? And so I was really trying very hard to get people who were not just gonna be on the left. I did reach out to anti abortion groups, for example, and I reached out to groups that are pursuing more conservative.

[Dax Shepard]

And were they as willing to talk to you?

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, I was surprised by that in part because they feel like they're not being heard in media outlets and they wanted to say, we exist and we're here and this is what we think about this.

[Monica Padman]

We have opinions too.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. What I found among young people who conservative is that they are very much fueled by this belief that they are countercultural. And there's sort of a bunker mentality that happens that makes them very much want to speak out. Frankly, they're oftentimes even more engaged in activism than people who are on the left in a lot of ways.

[Monica Padman]

There is a whole thing happening on Instagram, a burgeoning group that's pretty far right, women speaking out. I think it's happened post Trump. They were, like, kind of hiding in plain sight, and now they're like, actually, I am conservative, and here are my beliefs. And I feel like that's been a whole thing that's erupted in the past year or so.

[Carter Sherman]

Well, also, young men, I think, are becoming much more overt. And this was another way I found people, because I've been doing this for so long, I reached back out to young people who I'd interviewed in the past on both sides of the aisle to be like, would you talk to me again? And usually they would.

[Dax Shepard]

And how do you start that conversation in the interview?

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, well, I would go through all of the biographical details, which I think sort of ease people in. I would ask them about how they would describe their socioeconomic class and how they would describe their racial or ethnic background. And then I would ask them about their experiences with sex ed, because I found that it was much easier to start talking about their schooling and their opinion of the instruction they received on sex as opposed to going straight into their sex lives. And then it was sort of a matter from there of figuring out where their boundaries are and how to ask the questions to actually elicit truthful answers or deep answers. And the thing is, a lot of young people had never been asked these questions, and they really wanted to talk about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's what friendships are for. You're like, oh, this is this topic that's not allowed to be spoken about in my house. And now I have free reinforcement.

[Carter Sherman]

But a lot of men had never spoken to their friends about this stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the pressures on a man are, you're supposed to be incredible at this immediately with zero experience, and then you've gotta act to your friends like you're a pro.

[Carter Sherman]

Right. So women, oftentimes, they, like, came to the conversation with things to say.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

And the young men, it took longer for them to talk openly about their views or to even articulate their views to themselves. And these were long conversations. At minimum, they were 90 minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

What would you say the different fear levels are? Was it universal? Like, the young women are afraid of sex and the young men are afraid? Like, I know the young men are terrified. They're gonna Come too fast, they're not gonna be good. Their dick's not gonna be big enough. They won't get hard. They won't stay hard. All this fear wrapped around their performance.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And I wonder if women are carrying that same or a different flavor of. Of fear around it.

[Carter Sherman]

I think women were afraid of being inexperienced, particularly if they were inexperienced. This goes back to the vulnerability thing where they never wanted to confess if they had not had what they felt to be enough sex.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Carter Sherman]

Which can put you in an awkward position where it's like, if you haven't had sex at all and you're going to have sex with somebody. Speaking as someone who didn't tell someone when I was losing my virginity, you probably do want to tell them.

[Dax Shepard]

We got to applaud Monica here.

[Carter Sherman]

Experience.

[Monica Padman]

I was. Was old. Really, really old. No, I was older when I had sex for the first time. And that was part of a reason why it took a while, because I was like, now it's getting big and it's hanging over me.

[Dax Shepard]

My peer group's done it a bunch.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Carter Sherman]

I'm starting to feel weirder and weirder about myself.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly. And what's wrong with me? And also then this is going to require, like, a huge conversation. And then I did have to have the conversation minutes before I, like, waited to close.

[Dax Shepard]

Our chore play was over.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, chore play's over. I was like, so. So I do have to tell you something. And it's horrible, that anxiety hanging over. So I get being like, I'm just gonna keep kind of pushing this off.

[Carter Sherman]

Did they take it well?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they did. It was a very, very nice person. Thank God. I could easily see them being like, oh, God, I didn't really want to be in this position, and I get it.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible. With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And with over a million audiobooks, Audible originals and more, it's basically impossible to run out of things to listen to. Plus, there's just something about audio storytelling that hits a little different.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it really does. Especially Audible originals that feature performances from celebrities and top voices. It's like watching a movie in your head. One on my list is Treasure Island.

[Monica Padman]

Aha.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is an Audible original drama. It's a timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure maps, and mutiny. What more could you need?

[Monica Padman]

That sounds really fun. I'm more of a psychological thriller girl.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're dark.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm dark and I'm broody. And I've been hearing all about the author, Freda McFadden, and I love that I can listen to her audiobooks on the Audible app when I'm commuting, taking my walks as you know, or just like doing laundry and chores.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, with Audible you can find the genres you love and discover new ones. There's more to imagine when you listen. And to make it even better, Audible has a special offer for armchairs. Sign up for a free 30 day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.comdax that's audible.comdax how hard is it to kill a planet?

[Carter Sherman]

Maybe all it takes is a little.

[Dax Shepard]

Drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

[Carter Sherman]

When you see what's left, it starts.

[Dax Shepard]

To look like a crime scene.

[Carter Sherman]

Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our tap. And crimes like that, they don't just happen. We call things accidents.

[Monica Padman]

There is no accident. This was 100% preventable.

[Dax Shepard]

They're the result of choices by people.

[Carter Sherman]

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

[Dax Shepard]

These are the stories we need to.

[Carter Sherman]

Be telling about our changes.

[Dax Shepard]

Emerging Planet Stories of scams, murders and.

[Carter Sherman]

Coverups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the.

[Dax Shepard]

Earth or destroy it.

[Carter Sherman]

Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the.

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This is Nick and this is Jack. We're best friends, ex finance guys and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, the Best Idea, bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon turned four turtles into a global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke. Last one. Which cold beverage was so hated by Starbucks they actually ended up acquiring it. Spoiler the Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the Orange Mocha Frappuccino. Join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made. Follow the Best Idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery. And if this podcast lasts longer than 45 minutes, call your doctor. Before the Internet ruled our lives, AOL brought America Online. With email and instant messenger, you got mail. By 2000, AOL was so powerful, powerful it bought media giant Time Warner. This was a deal that was supposed to bring us into the future, revolutionize media. But instead, it became one of the messiest corporate disasters in history. So what went wrong? The dot com crash? Culture clashes? Or something deeper? Business wars gives you a front row seat to the biggest moments in business and how they shape our world. Because when your flight perks disappear, your favorite restaurant chain goes bankrupt, or new tech threatens to reshape everything overnight, you can bet there's a deeper story behind the headlines. Make sure to follow Business wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast. And you can binge all episodes of Business the AOL Time Warner Disaster, early and ad free right now on Wondery plus.

[Carter Sherman]

I to want. I was pathologically obsessed with the fact that I was a virgin. I felt so bad about it. And I was older than the average, because the average person in the United States loses their virginity at 17. But I was 19. Truly, this crippled my last two years of high school because I was just constantly researching, like, how do I have sex?

[Monica Padman]

Such a big driver of thought that you're kind of keeping this secret.

[Carter Sherman]

I legitimately kept it secret. I did not tell the person that I had sex with for the first time, and I never did.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think he knew?

[Dax Shepard]

Let's give him a shout out.

[Carter Sherman]

Ben, come on out. I hope you brought him. No, I never told him. So if he listens to this podcast.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I doubt what's going on mentally for you guys? Cause again, from our side of the street, it's like, well, y' all can have sex anytime you want. Cause we're all dying for it, and we're happy to do it.

[Carter Sherman]

No, I couldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

What was the narrative when you were believing that that wasn't an option for you or that it was gonna be really hard? Do you remember?

[Carter Sherman]

I mean, I think in retrospect, I probably could have lost it sooner or had sex for the first time. And I should say virginity is a construct. I could have had sex for the first time sooner, but I felt so vulnerable about it that I was really trying to minimize any other kind of vulnerability that would be happening in this scenario.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Carter Sherman]

So I was like, I'm not gonna sleep with someone who I don't know at all. I'm not gonna sleep with someone who I know a lot because they're my friend. And I was like boxing myself in.

[Dax Shepard]

Narrowing your options with every criteria.

[Carter Sherman]

There were definitely looking back boys of my high school who would have been like, sure, but then we would have had to speak about it. And I couldn't even bring myself to that one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think? Because I don't feel like you did. But I know a lot of that historically is this insane pressure we put on daughters, which is, you better be in love, he better love you. Good luck. How someone knows if someone loves them in high school, it's gotta be special. It's gotta be perfect.

[Carter Sherman]

Candles, ideally, rose petals. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Music. The boy, you're like, don't get anyone pregnant. You don't give a fuck how the experience is for him. You don't care if they like him back or anything. And so the weight that was put on girl shoulders, I could imagine being part of the. It's got to be this, this and this and that. And I just don't think guys are generally doing that.

[Carter Sherman]

That's very true. I think we have. You brought this up earlier, this idea that men, boys are going to be immediately very good at sex, that they should be really good at obtaining sex all the time. And that if they're not obtaining sex, then maybe they should lie about it or shame one another. I in the book talk about. There was a sociologist I spoke to who studies virgin shaming, which happens among men who mock one another for having not had sex. And that also feels like shit.

[Monica Padman]

And it's a threat to your masculinity. It's your identity.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my status shot up immediately.

[Carter Sherman]

And did you take out skywriting to let them all know?

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't.

[Monica Padman]

But do that. I mean that was also part of it. It's like if your friend was having sex, you're going to know immediately.

[Carter Sherman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're going to call all your friends.

[Carter Sherman]

When the last girl in my friend group lost her virginity, she texted me like 10 minutes later.

[Monica Padman]

See? Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

As the door was closing, like I was leaving.

[Carter Sherman]

It might have been in the room still, who knows? And I was just like, I'm going to die a virgin. I couldn't even be happy for her. I was so upset.

[Dax Shepard]

So as you talk to all these people, you started or maybe you went into it with these buckets, but I would guess as you were talking to these people, you kind of come up with some buckets that you feel like are more representative of the forces that are resulting in this decline. Socio cultural shifts. Political.

[Carter Sherman]

I would say that the changes in sex are always political. I think we like to think of sex as being a personal thing that occurs between two people or more people. But I think the reality is when those two people go into a bedroom to have sex, the terms of the sex have been set in state legislature, in Congress, in courtrooms. The terms of what happens when you walk out if something has gone wrong has been set by politicians. And so part of what I wanted to address in the book is to understand the intersection of politics and sex and to get people to understand how much what they might think is a personal issue is a political one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Could you give some hard examples of that?

[Carter Sherman]

Think about sex ed. Okay. So I did not know actually until reporting this book that I was going into K through 12 school at the same time that the federal government was pouring billions of dollars into absence only sex education. And there was massive explosion in this kind of funding during George W. Bush's administration. It never really let up, even under Obama and under Biden. And so the sex ed that I received, of course influenced the way that I was thinking about sex from the very beginning of the time that I could actually be losing my virginity.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's the thing I want to pressure test. So we filed it the way we filed everything we learned at school, which is, oh, that's bullshit. That's what they have to teach you at school. Don't have sex. Obviously everyone's going to. We certainly took all that with a grain of salt. I don't remember any of us receiving that. Like a sermon on the mound. This was legitimate. This felt like, oh, this is what legally the district has to do.

[Carter Sherman]

But did you feel like you had holes in your knowledge after that?

[Dax Shepard]

No, I learned about how to put a condom on. Learned about STDs.

[Carter Sherman]

But so what has happened is that the number of students who actually learned that stuff has gone way down. So there were plenty of young people I talked to who received little to no sex education. Or all they were told was basically what they say in mean girls, like, don't have sex or you'll get pregnant and die. Yeah. A lot of people brought up the mean girl scene to be. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I bet.

[Monica Padman]

Said was a week out of health class for us. It wasn't its own thing. They show a video of a birth. I don't know why that was in there, but you know, we scare you. Honestly.

[Carter Sherman]

This is a potential.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And it was horrifying. There weren't any how tos. There were no like, here's how you put on a condom.

[Carter Sherman]

And I think I got pretty good Sex ed in the context of things I learned about condoms. Definitely did not learn how to put one on. And I think we had power points on STIs. And so all they're doing is pathologizing sex and making it seem like something you should be terrified by. A lot of people, you know, go to religious schools and they're getting sex ed. Where I talked to one young woman, she went to Catholic school, and she was terrified after she learned about the Virgin Mary that she would just get pregnant through immaculate conception.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Yes.

[Carter Sherman]

Which sounds silly because it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Although it happened once in Africa.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know that one?

[Carter Sherman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

It was so violent. She had blown a guy, then got stabbed in the stomach. Stomach. Somehow got the semen from the stomach, then stabbed in the vagina. She had never had sex and she became pregnant. We had to fact check.

[Monica Padman]

It's real.

[Carter Sherman]

She lived.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

She had a baby like this.

[Monica Padman]

Semen impregnated her because of the stabbing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

It's wild.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's the violent version of Virgin Mary.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think it's only happened that one time. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I got hung up the other day about the fact that Joseph and Mary were married.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm like, how was Mary a virgin if they were married? What the fuck is this? But then I deep dove they were engaged when she became pregnant.

[Monica Padman]

I don't mean to laugh. A lot of people really believe that.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I wonder if engagement was even a thing.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

So we had a listener. We talked to listeners sometimes on one of our shows. And remember the girl who went to, I think, Catholic school, I think, and it was sex ed. And everyone passed around a Butterfinger. Do you remember this?

[Dax Shepard]

Vaguely.

[Monica Padman]

And everyone took a bite from the Butterfinger. And then it was like the person at the end had this kind of nasty Butterfinger. And it was supposed to represent if you have sex with multiple people, that's what you're getting. You're getting like this used dick.

[Dax Shepard]

Slobby.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

Like, I was told about this thing called the tape game that happens in Texas public schools where they pass around a piece of tape and everybody touches it. Right. And then it becomes less sticky and more tacky and linty. And that's the idea. Like, you're used up, you're gross. And it makes people feel terrible about themselves. Even when they reject it. It's still like, these are authority figures in my life not giving me information. I need to have sex safely. And B, making me feel really bad about the idea that I would even want sex. And it's so hard to shake that off for people.

[Dax Shepard]

But how does it differ? Because obviously abstinence education's been happening forever now.

[Carter Sherman]

We call it sexual risk avoidance. That's what the federal government calls it. And they're still funding like hundreds of millions of dollars into this every year. So as much as absence only sex education has been around for a long time, it is becoming a stronger for. And I think people don't necessarily realize that because this is going on at the level of states or school boards, but it's profoundly impactful on these young people. And we also, in general, have a rising tide of what I call sexual conservatism in the book, which is this movement to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is not straight, that is not married, that is not potentially procreative. Because the other main thing that we're seeing, the impact of politics on sex and with abortion rights and contraception, it's this movement that would make sex more likely to be procreative because you can't access abortion and you can't access hormonal birth control.

[Dax Shepard]

That one's tricky because all this data already exists in 2022.

[Carter Sherman]

Wait, what do you mean all this.

[Dax Shepard]

Data about the decline in sexual activity?

[Carter Sherman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So no, it's like already a well established.

[Carter Sherman]

This is a part of it. It's definitely not the explanation for it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Carter Sherman]

And the thing is that as that hookup culture narrative was going on that we were talking about earlier, the sex recession, as they call it, that was already starting to go. Millennials were having less sex than previous generations. So even though we were having this moral panic over hookup culture, in reality, that's not really what was happening. Casual sex was on the decline. All sex was on the decline. The only generation that had less sex than millennials was the greatest generation who were born in the 1920s. We didn't even need to feel that bad about being virgins. Way more people were virgins than I guess.

[Monica Padman]

So I didn't know. I thought every single person on earth was having sex.

[Dax Shepard]

You guys were born in the wrong time time.

[Carter Sherman]

If we had been born 10 years later, we would have fit right in.

[Monica Padman]

Would have been great.

[Dax Shepard]

I just remember growing up and my mother pointing out, non stop, look at the states who have abstinence sex ed. Look at their teenage pregnancy rate. It's the most correlated thing in the world. Abstinence doesn't work. And in fact results almost always in unintentional pregnancy.

[Carter Sherman]

There are plenty of Studies that show that people who go through federally funded absence only sexual said they have sex for the first time at the same time as people who don't go through that funding. And they are more likely to do so unsafely so to not contraception. Right. And there's plenty of studies that shows that it makes you feel worse about yourself, particularly like among students of color. Those students are oftentimes pathologized in sex ed. There was one study I read where a young black student was asking like, why do they just assume that we're all having sex? Why do they assume we're not interested in how to have sex? Safety. And it's because of these racist myths around black people's sexuality that just leads these absence only sex educators to discount them completely.

[Dax Shepard]

Additionally, the third bucket was social media. As you talked to all these different young people, what were they saying about social media? On one hand you would think, oh, you hear about, well, there's apps that can really accelerate the experience to having sex. So you would think at one time you have this very quick access to it for willing participants. But that obviously isn't offsetting this broader thing.

[Carter Sherman]

It's nuanced For LGBTQ young people. Social media has been hugely helpful because it's let them know that there are other people like them out there. And in fact, this is also one of the big changes that we're seeing among Gen Zs. Far more of them are out than previous generations. It's somewhere between, I think a quarter and a fifth of Gen zers are out in some way. Also, at the same time, social media has been super helpful for young, queer, queer folks, young trans folks. A lot of them hate it. A lot of Gen Zers are just like, this has been terrible for me mental health wise. Yeah, it makes them feel bad about themselves. There's this phenomenon that scientists talk about called comparing and despairing, which is basically like as you're going through your feed, you're just looking at how everybody's life and body is better than yours and it just really sends your mental health plummeting.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, yeah, as a culture we up compare instead of down compare. There are many cultures that down compare. As a rule of thumb, they're much happier.

[Carter Sherman]

That means that they're more likely to see themselves as better.

[Dax Shepard]

They will compare themselves to people that have less than them in any given metric. There are many cultures like that. Ours happens to be an up comparing culture. So we always look above us to compare ourselves. We look at someone richer, hotter, everything.

[Carter Sherman]

Well, that's A bummer. I didn't know that there was another option.

[Dax Shepard]

It's kind of shocking, right? You would be led to think that's just human nature, but in fact we have a lot of different cultures that down compare as status quo.

[Carter Sherman]

You know, I appreciate some of the young men in particular were open with me about the way that they would compare women online. So there was one young man I talked to who was talking about how he would see one girl on social media and then he'd scroll and see another girl in a bikini on social media. And he was like, well, I probably prefer her. It's like, yeah, I mean, you're not wrong to be comparing and despairing. That is a very reasonable way to respond.

[Monica Padman]

What's the other option? When you're seeing it all, you're seeing all the options. That's new because of social media.

[Carter Sherman]

Right. And maybe we're not meant to be taking in everybody's lives like that.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Or having all the options or having.

[Carter Sherman]

Filters that make everybody look better. This same young man was talking about how every girl he knows has filters on or changes her body when she posts photos on social media. And I asked him, well, have you ever done that? And he said, yeah, it made my shoulders look bigger. Because this goes back to like how men should be big, tall, dominant, etc. You don't want someone at 17, 18 to be thinking about all the ways that their body. Body is deficient because they're already doing that. You're already in the midst of puberty.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's the thing. You were in a group of like 200 people and you had to find your position within there and you could have landed safely in the middle and you'd be happy. But when you now widen that net out to include the whole world, you're not going to ever be in the top whatever percent. And your seeming options, the sky's also the limits. Like you would just go after whoever the hottest person in your town was if you were seeking that. But now you open it up to 10 towns. What about there seems to be this. And there's a lot of data on this terrible outcome of the dating apps where it's basically 8% of the men have access to 92% of the women.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. So this I found very interesting because this is something that fuels incel ideology. And incels are men who are involuntarily celibate and they are angry about it. Angry about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Believe they're entitled to it. Yes, yeah, yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

Entitled to sex.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't have to do anything to earn it. No, no good job, no talking skills.

[Carter Sherman]

It's just yours by virtue of being a man.

[Monica Padman]

How cool for them.

[Carter Sherman]

I know. Must be nice. So they're angry that women aren't giving them this sex. And part of the reason they think that has been fueled by the rise of social media and dating apps, because they do feel like they're not getting as many messages as they think they should be. And it is true that men reach out more and women get more messages. But what if that is just because that's how women have been socialized to respond in dating?

[Monica Padman]

That is how the men approach.

[Carter Sherman]

Right. And so I think that they're discounting that possibility. And it does make men feel bad about themselves.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Also, from the second MeToo happened, I had two immediate thoughts. One is great. Two is we are going to be in a transition phase that's gonna be very fucking painful because, okay, men are gonna be less rapey. Hopefully that's the request. Exactly right. Women are gonna have to pursue men. That's also gonna happen if this dance of mating is going to work. One and. Or either people need to pursue. And conventionally and historically, that's not been the case. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is women have to pick up that momentum.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

If we want people to hook up.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. I mean, do we want people to hook up? I don't know. Do we think sex is in and of itself a good.

[Dax Shepard]

We wouldn't be a species that got here if that wasn't a primary principle. Principle. So we haven't transcended being an animal. We haven't transcended all the other creatures on the planet. I think we could say, yeah, that's part of the human experience.

[Carter Sherman]

One of the things I really wanted to do with the book is not say young people are doing sex wrong, because I feel like that's how so many of these books approach this topic. What I worry about is if sex is a proxy for connection that people are longing for and they're not willing to go out and get, or they're not able to go out and get.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I would want both for people.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think those are either ors or they're in opposition to one another.

[Carter Sherman]

I don't think it's wrong to want young people to have more sex. But to tell you a story, actually, this last weekend, I was at the Jersey shore. I was there for work. I was following around a group of young people who were trying to convince people at the Jersey Shore to embrace chastity.

[Dax Shepard]

Tall order.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. Big mission. Especially because it was right after a bunch of New Jersey high schoolers had just had graduation. So a lot of recently graduated seniors were there for their senior. The chastity thing did not necessarily reverberate with a lot of people.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

But I was talking to one of the young men who was doing this and he is 21 years old. He is waiting for marriage to have sex. Fine, live your values. And he was telling me that he doesn't date right now because it's really hard to find people who want to date for marriage at 21. Which again, makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

I bet.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. And he said this thing to me, you know, if you're not dating for marriage, you're dating for heartbreak. And I was thinking about this a lot on the way home because I was thinking like the times I've had my heart broken, I actually learned a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

You should absolutely get your heart.

[Carter Sherman]

I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a quintessential experience.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes. You learn the depth of your own emotions, you learn about other people's emotions. So you learn empathy, resilience because you work through it. And so to the extent that young people are avoiding sex and dating because they're afraid of getting hurt, that I worry about. But on the other hand, it is interesting to think about, like right now there's a push by Republicans to get people to have sex because they want people to have babies.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Carter Sherman]

There can be a way that this push for sex is harnessed in such a way to push for pronatalism and circle back around to right wing ideology.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I just love how willy nilly the political spectrum has gotten. It's like now conservatives are pro sex, now liberals are anti sex. What is going on? Even in the book you're saying some of these people who they are more liberal, but they identify as conservative. We had an expert on that was telling us nobody has a cohesive political view. It's almost completely irrelevant. You have a declaration of your identity and the party you're associated with in your tribe. But if you go through issue by issue by issue, you will find that people are all over the map. They're on both sides of it. And there's really no cohesion to the political point of view.

[Carter Sherman]

There's a definite disconnect that's happening right now between partisan identity and actual ideology. Young men in particular are further left on so many issues, including abortion rights, which you would think is a core Republican right wing idea. Idea but they're voting conservatively. So the question is, why are you voting conservatively if you are so left?

[Monica Padman]

What about the influx of vibrators and toys and stuff that are good? A lot of women, myself included, are like, I'm good.

[Dax Shepard]

You can meet your needs.

[Monica Padman]

I can meet my needs. I can get the pleasure I seek. It's not intimacy, but I'm not interested in intimacy with anyone unless I like them. Like, that's where I think casual sex is also sort of falling. Falling apart, because you can pleasure yourself and get those needs met. And then in order to have intimacy, you have to like the person. So that middle area does sort of drop off.

[Carter Sherman]

What's interesting is that masturbation is also falling. What? Yeah. Really?

[Monica Padman]

That's so weird.

[Carter Sherman]

I know. Because to your point, masturbation is really free. Like, you don't need another person to do that. You don't even need a toy to do that.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't have to ask them to leave.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you know how there's no awkwardness unless someone walks. Walks in, your mom catches wind.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. That's really. Because I was thinking about, is it that people are just masturbating more to porn or what have you? And it seems like that is not the only explanation. I was shocked as well.

[Dax Shepard]

My explanation is it's not sexual. It's. These young boys have grown up in an era where toxic masculinity was a huge headline. Me Too is a huge headline. There's a lot of anger, rightly so, towards men, but men that were in positions of power, and these are teenagers, and so there's. They're kind of taking on a lot of sins of their fathers, and then they're in towns where all the jobs are disappearing. The Democrats and the liberals seem to have a really good game plan for homelessness and for lgbtq, and they don't ever really announce their game plan for this group of men, which makes up 20% of the voting populace. So they're like, that side doesn't have a plan for me. This guy only cares about me. I don't think that has to be sexually motivated. I just think that's like, oh, this guy doesn't hate me.

[Monica Padman]

He's not even boring.

[Dax Shepard]

This group does.

[Carter Sherman]

It's very true that the Democrats have very much not talked about men and talked to young men in the way that Republicans.

[Dax Shepard]

Unless they were saying the many problems that men present.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes. And I think also Democrats have a problem for themselves where they're unsexy, which is wild, because they're the party of pride parades and so on.

[Dax Shepard]

This is an unfortunate bit of data I read and I think the Molecule of More or Dopamine Nation by Anna Lemke. But yeah, liberals have more sexual partners and conservatives have more sex and more orgasms.

[Carter Sherman]

Oh, interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

And you go, huh, that's a really interesting aspect to this whole thing.

[Carter Sherman]

This does actually make sense because I think we have this idea that people who are single have more sex, but people who are partnered have more sex.

[Monica Padman]

Definitely.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. Because you have a guaranteed source of.

[Dax Shepard]

It and you have better sex with a partner in general because you've had those communications.

[Carter Sherman]

And Republicans tend to have higher marriage rates. Yes. So if Republicans have a source of sex, it would make sense that they're having sex more often.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, more sex and better sex. Now, growing up as a progressive in a very sex positive person, I'm like, how could that be? That's the group that seems to be terrified.

[Monica Padman]

Probably self reported, they're saying we have great sex.

[Carter Sherman]

Also Republicans are more likely to be men. So you might be over indexing on the men reporting better sex.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, these are women. It was women having orgasms.

[Monica Padman]

I will say I think a conservative woman. This is maybe out of school to say, but I think is more likely to say the sex was great even if it wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You're basically dismissing whatever self reporting that the right gives and trusting the self reporting of the left. And I don't think you can do that. You either have to throw both sides because you don't believe in self reporting, but I don't think you can say this group lies more than the other.

[Monica Padman]

It's in support of their values, which is family values. Values. That's different. We have a strong family, we have a happy marriage. These are real things. I mean, I grew up amongst all.

[Dax Shepard]

These people and the left is incentivized to say their life has turned out perfectly because of their ideals. Both have a huge incentive to confirm their worldview. I don't think any site is unique or has a monopoly on that. You can't believe studies or you gotta have enough good faith to grant that what they told you is the truth or we're nowhere.

[Carter Sherman]

I think what we need is a third study that looks at how political affiliation impacts the frequency of with which you fake orgasms.

[Dax Shepard]

And as a liberal, you're suspicious that these women are faking is what I hear when you say that.

[Carter Sherman]

No, I actually don't know. I would be very curious. I would believe that people fake orgasms for all kinds of reasons from all kinds of political spectrums.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I think so too. But I guess the left group, they're saying it's bad.

[Carter Sherman]

I think there is also this misconception that the right is anti sex. I deliberately chose the term sexual conservatism and not anti sex in the because plenty of right wing groups are very pro sex. Once you're married, there's a very rich tradition of like evangelical handbooks on how to have your best sex life ever with your husband.

[Monica Padman]

That sort of goes to what I was saying. I do think in conservative relationships there's actually a strong desire to please your partner and be a good wife. It is embedded especially in religious cultures. Once you have a partner and you're married, married, you need to be good in bed.

[Carter Sherman]

Burn up the bed sheets.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think that's too dismissive. I think it's dismissive to say I don't like the outcome because I would want our side to be the ones having more sex and orgasms. So I don't like the outcome of that study, so I'm going to dismiss it or come up with what's really going on in the study. And I think either you believe in social science studies or you don't. When you don't like the results, I don't think you then can start accusing all the participants as lying.

[Monica Padman]

But we're constantly poking holes in studies and saying like, oh, you're looking at only this group.

[Dax Shepard]

But never in a way that I go, the left people didn't lie and the right people lying.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know who's lying. I don't care. Maybe the left is lying.

[Carter Sherman]

If I had to guess. Everybody's lying because everybody lies.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, everyone's equally a piece of shit and everyone's equally good. No side has a monopoly. I don't think.

[Carter Sherman]

Do people really want to be like, yeah, my sex life is shit.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not relative to anything. If they say, how many times do you have sex with your husband a week? And the person says four. They don't know if the liberals said two or three. They don't know if they have to inflate it to six. Presumably they're just saying the number orgasms, both of those data points. So they're having more sex and they're having more orgasms when they have sex. So if the interviewer asks them, how many orgasms do you have in a week? And the person says three, they would have had to first hear what the liberals had to inflate or deflate I.

[Monica Padman]

Don'T think anything's in comparison. From my personal experience growing up in the South, I do think that there is an incentive that in order to have a good relationship, it requires. Requires good sex across the board. I don't know if it's left too. I'm just saying, specifically, I recognize that.

[Carter Sherman]

There are studies that also show that Republicans have better mental health. Oh. So there might be something to the conservative viewpoint where you just feel more certainty about how the world works and you feel more at peace with how the world works. Also, being a Republican overlaps quite a bit with religion. And you might feel better about the world if you feel like God is dictating everything that's happening.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yes. Even though every person's finding it impossible to live by that. So they're also taking on all the shame of that. It's just very complicated.

[Carter Sherman]

No, we're gonna solve dynamic in this conversation. We're fixing it right here, right now.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you think the impact of MeToo was?

[Carter Sherman]

I don't think it led to the kind of institutional change that people were hoping that it did, but, I mean.

[Dax Shepard]

And the impact of people having sex with one another.

[Carter Sherman]

I don't think it led to the sex recession. The sex recession was already well underway by the time that that was happening.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

I think it led primarily to people being much more aware of when sex had gone wrong. And I think it led to a great degree of frustration among young people with institutions that they feel like have failed them on the right. I think there has been a continuing backlash to me, too, that we are still in the midst of and that you can see in the way that they're handling policies like Title ix.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me about Title ix.

[Carter Sherman]

Title IX is the law that dictates sex discrimination in education, which is to say, to try to eradicate it. And so it also dictates how schools are supposed to respond to sexual harassment and sexual. Sexual assault. Because if you're trying to get an education in an environment that is rife with sexual harassment and sexual assault, that is sex discrimination. Since the Obama administration took office, there's been a fight over Title IX and how to handle it and how people who come forward with complaints under Title IX should be treated. So Obama basically expanded the ability of Title IX to deal with sexual assault and harassment in ways that plenty of people on the road. Right. Said were not giving enough credence to the person who was being accused, that they were setting up men to be accused by women who simply regretted consensual Sex. And I'm not saying that the Obama rules were above reproach. There's certainly ways to finesse them. But I think it is very interesting that this snowballed around the same time that MeToo was happening, because throughout the 2010s, we were seeing all of these tales of campus sexual assault and people talking about how bad campus sexual assault was and wanting to fix. And then you have metoo happen and you have the Trump administration sweep in. One expert told me the changes by the Trump administration made Title IX basically unusable for survivors. The Biden administration came in, changed the rules very late in the game. The Trump administration has actually reset its own rules through various court changes and just rescinding of guidance. And so I think it's really interesting that these are environments where sexual assault is rife. We are seeing a lot of sexual harm, harassment. And this is the main place where I think me too's backlash and afterlife is playing out. I don't know if that was specific enough to help.

[Dax Shepard]

How about COVID That seems self evident, but what did we find out?

[Carter Sherman]

You know, what's interesting is people did not bring up Covid unless they specifically asked about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Carter Sherman]

I think there was sort of a cultural amnesia around the fact that we were all locked up. People were really, at the time aware that they were missing out on a lot of rites of passage. Like they didn't have prom, they didn't have graduation. A lot of them didn't get. It moves so much more of life online. That is still the way that young people oftentimes operate. It came up in so many different ways, talking to people about the pandemic. There was one young woman who was talking about how during the pandemic, she couldn't see her boyfriend because they both got Covid. He was pressing her to send nudes. So she did. And she felt terrible about it. She still feels terrible about it. And I think that there's a lot of stories where people relocated their sex lives online in ways that they still feel like maybe that wasn't right for me, maybe that wasn't the best way for me to handle that. We also, for young queer people, it was actually really difficult for them because they were oftentimes trapped at home with people who didn't believe in them or support them.

[Monica Padman]

Right. With their families.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Okay. And now Roe v. Wade. What do you think the ripples of that are?

[Carter Sherman]

I think we're definitely still living in this.

[Dax Shepard]

My first question is there's 13 states without abortion. Now there's 37 with. Do the rates of sexual activity vary? Do we have any data that would say it's gone down in states where the abortion has been taken away?

[Carter Sherman]

I don't think we have state by state data. We do know that I think it's 16% of Gen Z is now more hesitant to date because of Roe v. Wade. Wade in the overturning of abortion rights.

[Monica Padman]

That's mostly women, I assume, or no.

[Carter Sherman]

I don't think there was actually gender data on that. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was actually pretty pivotal to me doing this book. I started thinking about doing it in the end of 2021. So the Supreme Court had already taken up the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which would become the case that overturned Roe v. Wade. Everybody who paid attention to reproductive rights, both sides of the abortion debate, knew that Roe v. Wade was on. And so I started being very interested in the ways that this potential future change was impacting young people's sex lives. I started calling around, talked to dozens of people across the country, and what I found is that in general, people were not thinking about this being a possibility. They didn't think Roe was gonna go.

[Dax Shepard]

I was guilty of that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, same.

[Carter Sherman]

So they didn't think that they should change anything about their sex life. But I did talk to one young woman in Texas who was telling me that if she couldn't have an abortion, she would stop having sex with her boyfriend. And at the time, Texas was weeks away from implementing a six week abortion ban. I don't know what happened to her, but I do know that when Roe was overturned, there was this flurry of activism among young people. We saw a run on contraception. We saw Kansas fight to protect abortion rights and a vote that was propelled by young voters. And so after that, I became really interested in the ways that young people were responding to Roe being overturned. And the major thing I found is just extreme and around the possibility of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant and what they would possibly do in that scenario. A lot of the young people I talked to felt like they knew how they would get an abortion. Because you can still get abortions, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you just go to one of the 37 states.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, you can also order abortion pills online. And so they felt like they had a handle on it, but they were just so much more anxious in a way that makes sex not as good. I am personally of the opinion this is a question I ask people and I'll ask you guys if we lived in a matriarchy. So if women were in charge of the world the way that men are in charge of the world right now, and in our current society, most serial killers are men, 97% or something, do you think if we lived in a matriarchy, women would make up the vast majority of serial killers?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I don't. I think there would be lots of issues. I'm not saying women are perfect at all. And we have our own things. That would be horrible if one gender is ruling everything. I think there's a problem. I don't think they'd be serial killers though. That's like a testosterone driven. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I think there would be big issues, but I don't think serial killer would be one.

[Carter Sherman]

Who knows what the answer is. But I think it fundamentally gets to the question of do you think this is nature or nurture? Do you think it's power that leads Agender right now to be a certain way? Oh, power is.

[Dax Shepard]

I think all three of us could admit it's not that simple. So it's definitely some percentage of both. Nature, nurture.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Reid Sapolsky Our culture is our genetics. We change our shape of our brain through our culture. You can't really draw this magic line between those two things. And yeah, I think anytime you have a group that's supposed to inherit all of the power and authority and privilege and then they are left out of the group and seemingly everyone else got the thing that was promised to them, I think you'll see crazy shit happen in the wake of that. Male or female.

[Carter Sherman]

That might be what we're living for at this moment.

[Dax Shepard]

She just like powerful men do and powerful female rulers have done terrible things. I think power is a very corruptive force.

[Carter Sherman]

I do think that women would be serial killers. This circumstance.

[Monica Padman]

Personally, women are not impervious to behaving very poorly when they have power.

[Carter Sherman]

I've asked dozens of people this question and I would say it splits 50, 50 the way that people answer.

[Dax Shepard]

And is it gendered because men would be incentivized to say no, they would kill too.

[Carter Sherman]

Men do tend to say that they would kill too. It's women who sort of flip back and forth. Generally speaking, yeah, There are cultures that.

[Monica Padman]

Are matriarchal, though my parents are from Kerala and that for many years. I don't know that right now it is. But it was a matriarchy. That is not what it was riddled.

[Carter Sherman]

With female serial killers.

[Monica Padman]

I'll Ask female mass shooters hearing that there was a lot of serial killing happening.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah, I would love to know more about matriarchies, Someone once said, which I thought was a good answer. She thought, if it flipped tomorrow, women would be serial killers. But not if we had had however many years of developing a matriarchy.

[Monica Padman]

That's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so everything that you learned through talking to all these people and all these patterns you saw emerged again, you asked me, do I even think sex is good? I do. I don't know if you do.

[Carter Sherman]

I personally like sex.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

I would be bummed out if I didn't have it again.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think we should want the younger generations to be having sex?

[Carter Sherman]

We should want them to have connection and be open to vulnerability and heartbreak. I think it's important to foster curiosity and empathy among young people. Sex and relationships is one way to do that. As far as reversing the sex recession, it's really hard to know how to do that. The example of Japan, they've been on this train where there's fewer people having sex, fewer people getting married, fewer people having babies for a long time now.

[Dax Shepard]

And their population is declining, which sparks.

[Carter Sherman]

All of this talk about pronatalism. And they haven't necessarily been able to turn that around. The thing that we do know is that as countries industrialize, realize fewer people tend to have babies. And so the thing is that as people have more money, more time on their hands, and can make more choices about how to live their life, they might just be making different choices about how to live their lives. Maybe those choices don't encourage or include sex. I just want individuals to feel good about themselves.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, me too.

[Carter Sherman]

And so, hopefully, if that includes having sex, they're having it. But if more and more people are feeling like I don't need it, well.

[Dax Shepard]

And then we get into the future. That's not hard to imagine at all, which is you're gonna have an AI Part, going to fulfill all your needs, and then that's it. That's the wrap on humans.

[Carter Sherman]

Well, the planet might appreciate it.

[Dax Shepard]

We had our time.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. It does make me sad to hear from young people who feel like they don't have the possibility of connection in their life, sexual or romantic. And I think that there's a lot of that. With apologies to boomers. It feels so boomer to be like, go and get out there and have real experiences. But I think that there's no substitute for getting out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's okay to advise, get out in the world and interact.

[Carter Sherman]

Part of this book, the process of writing it was just accepting that I was getting older and that I am probably gonna tell young people what I think they should do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Go get drunk.

[Monica Padman]

This is what we need.

[Dax Shepard]

Meet some people.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Exchange numbers.

[Carter Sherman]

119 year old I interviewed who was absolutely lovely, but he was talking about the 1990s and he called it the late 20th century. And I was just like. I had to mute myself on the phone. Cause I was like, you've just knifed me. I want you to know how hurtful that was. That just happened.

[Dax Shepard]

The late 20th century.

[Monica Padman]

He's not wrong. He's not wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

Or whenever you're talking about the early 1900, like the turn of the century, and I'm sure they'll start saying the turn of the century.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Carter Sherman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

It is really hard to know when you're just becoming old. And when you have an early, principled point of view, it gets harder and harder to know.

[Carter Sherman]

Part of what I wanted people to get out of this is this is what they're going through right now. Hopefully this sparks a thought process on whether or not you're getting old or. This is a principled view.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

And has more nuanced discussion than just, why aren't these young people fucking? They've got to get out there.

[Dax Shepard]

What's wrong with them?

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. Pull your boots. What is it? Pull your pants up. No. Pull your pants up.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

It's also just so hard because it's so entangled with this political push to have sex at this time that it's very hard to have a message to say like, get out and have sex without it sounding very right wing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm sickened by the notion this topic is politicized to begin with.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They can't.

[Monica Padman]

We can't let them take that.

[Carter Sherman]

But sex is always political, isn't it? That's my stance that I'm building this whole book off of.

[Dax Shepard]

You mean historically? Historically, hunting and gathering, it's been political?

[Carter Sherman]

Yes, of course. If you hooked up with someone as a cave woman, you're hooking up with a caveman for potentially protection. Maybe you're exchanging sex for the hunting and gathering and protecting of the brood. That is a political calculation. If we understand this is about my function in society. This is about my community and surviving in my community.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, interesting. I think of politics as a bizarre abstraction, a story we came up with. And I think of survival as an intrinsic role.

[Carter Sherman]

But doesn't politics determine who survives? Who gets to tell the story of how the survival happened?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm saying politics were invented as we understand them 1300 years ago or whatever. You know, go to the Greeks 4,000 years ago. That's like a blip in the time we've been here. So when I think of politics as angling for power in a institution which involves governance of the people, I don't know if I think it's political. I think survival. Yeah. They were trying to reproduce and make sure they had a partner that would bring in resources, so they survived. Is that political?

[Monica Padman]

It depends on how you're defining political.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Cause there's politics in the workplace. That doesn't mean that it's right or left. It's how people are operating to get ahead or survive that situation.

[Carter Sherman]

I think I'm very informed by the 1970s feminist tradition of consciousness raising. Are you guys familiar with this?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Carter Sherman]

Very simple. It was during second wave feminism. You'd have groups of women get together and they would share their personal stories about whatever was going on in the. Like, I'm a housewife. My husband doesn't do any chores, no chore play for me. And I feel really unhappy because I want to go to work or my kids have left the house. And the thing that happened is that people were realizing that these stories had commonalities, and they came to realize the personal is political. Like, if something is happening to me and it's happening to you and it's happening to you, even though we're coming from different places here, there is some kind of political core that is driving.

[Dax Shepard]

Product of a system.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes. And the product of a system is always shaped by. By politics. For me, I think of politics as like participating in the body politic, which we do all the time, regardless of whether we want to or not. We have to understand that we might be thinking we're making a free choice, particularly around sex, but those choices have already been constrained for us by political systems.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So I'm with you. And I would define politics and politicizing things as just. You're forcing issues into these two binary options of left and right. You've politicized it. It lands on one side or the other of the spectrum. And I don't think sex should be landing on the left or the right.

[Carter Sherman]

I definitely agree with that. I don't want politics to be just about left and right, but the fact of the matter is that the left has an opinion about sex and the right has an opinion about sex. So it's already been politicized for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And I'm urging everyone to reject that if you're on the left or the.

[Carter Sherman]

Right, just go out to a bar.

[Dax Shepard]

Just get out there, pursue your personal desires with it, and do not avail yourself to this stupid architecture that gets mapped onto every everything. The pandemic that's political. What are you talking about? We're going to survive or not. You got to pick a side for that. You got to pick a side for sex. I just object to all of that.

[Carter Sherman]

But that is the point, right? Like, all of it does get politicized, whether or not you want it or not. Like, vaccines are politicized now. Science is politicized.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm screaming. I think the antidote is like, do not fall for that trap. Have your issue, think it through. Consult your friends or people you respect. Do not look above you to see what side your party, how they've landed on this issue.

[Carter Sherman]

Feel like we keep on devolving into borderline arguments.

[Dax Shepard]

I respect you a lot, though, and I love your personality, and I think your book is great.

[Carter Sherman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Carter Sherman]

I love arguing. I don't know if that's coming.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, me too.

[Carter Sherman]

Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

I just check in because I enjoy it, and I wouldn't want you to not enjoy it.

[Carter Sherman]

No. I grew up in a family where we love to debate and argue, so I'm enjoying this.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, good, good, good.

[Carter Sherman]

Okay. So let's say I was sexually Z in college, for example. And this is not to take it to a dark place and be like, and now you can't talk about this.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no. I was molested. I'll hit you with that.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah. So I did not go to anybody about it. I didn't seek accountability. I didn't know that Title IX was a thing that could have helped me in that instance. And why was that the case? Why didn't I know that there were resources available for me? The answer to that is that Title IX was shaped by politics. The resources that I could have had at that time were being shaped for me by an institution or not conveyed to me by an institution. So I was participating in politics whether or not I wanted it. And if you look at the ways that we handle sexual assault, for example, on college campus campuses, we've created a system where it is very difficult for survivors to seek redress and to be able to have help and be able to flourish in their lives afterwards. Sexual assault is one of the number one reasons that women leave college. But then that affects your entire life. If you don't have an education, you probably can't make as much money and Then that impacts who gets to participate in public life. Because if you are disenfranchised from that experience, disenfranchised in some way, then that has a long reverberating effect in particularly if you're a sexual assault survivor and you get disenfranchised out of public public life, then that is a voice that could have been advocating for sexual assault survivors. We could have had a better system set up for sexual assault survivors if we have more of those people being able to participate and talk openly about it. So it's all of this wave of stuff that just accumulates. I mean, we might just fundamentally disagree, but I wish I could opt out and just make choices for myself. But it's hard to know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's hard to know.

[Dax Shepard]

But what you shouldn't do is be presented with a quandary and your first thought is to check in with your party and be prescribed the group think of that party because bad news for everyone, they keep flipping. I can point to nine different moments in time where you would have an opposite opinion. If you're looking to your party to inform you you should really be soul searching and determining your values and your ethics and listening to people you admire and not just getting a prescribed plan from the two options. That's not enough options. You're gonna be picking between two bad options.

[Carter Sherman]

I agree with that. I think people should come up with their own values and see how they map onto politics.

[Dax Shepard]

I really enjoy the book is called the Second Coming Sex and the Next Generation's Fight over its Future. Of course, it's well written, you're a great writer and you do it professionally and it's wonderful and it's very thoughtful and I'm really happy you took the time to do it. And I hope a lot of people read it.

[Carter Sherman]

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Monica Padman]

Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at. We rolling with the homies?

[Dax Shepard]

What?

[Monica Padman]

I'm embarrassed about some two things.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm embarrassed about something this morning too.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, great. Let's talk about our embarrassment.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's time to cleanse.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Time to repent to confession.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, confession hour. Okay. I'm embarrassed because some people consider my feet very attractive.

[Dax Shepard]

Eric? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

One person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, maybe a ton of people. But just specifically Eric.

[Monica Padman]

He has stated that he loves my feet. I have perfect feet.

[Dax Shepard]

I also think it's worth explaining why Eric has a foot fetish. Which I think he came by it. So honestly explain it, which is he was a young boy and his father made him work at his shoe shop in downtown la. Have we ever had him do his whole spiel on here?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we need to do that at some point.

[Dax Shepard]

We should invite him in maybe at the end of this or next one. Yeah. So I think he developed like a bit of a foot fetish in that job.

[Monica Padman]

He had to sell the, these shoes and to women and he, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

He didn't sell any shoes to men. He wouldn't shoot sell shoes.

[Monica Padman]

So you know, he came by it honestly. But he knows a lot about feet because of that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he can look at someone's feet go like five and a half, you know, like he, he knows and he.

[Monica Padman]

Knows when they're more or less attractive than others. He's seen a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

He's seen a lot. He's a bit of an expert.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. And he, it's like if you make.

[Dax Shepard]

Love to Warren Beatty and he says you're the best. That says a lot. Cuz there's been tens of thousands of people.

[Monica Padman]

That's like when that massage therapist gave me a very nice compliment about my body.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

It felt extra good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Cuz he sees, he sees bodies for a living.

[Dax Shepard]

French bodies.

[Monica Padman]

French bodies. Anyway, so I knew I was going to be seeing Eric and I didn't even think about the. That fact. Fact that I haven't, I've let my feet go a little bit. I haven't got a pedicure in a while.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't that normally a winter move? Like if one maintains their feet, you probably could skip winter. Oh, and then summertime pick it up.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because your toes aren't out a ton in the winter.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I just didn't have time to go get my nails done.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to be on the wing. I don't care if you've done your nails or not. I wouldn't notice that type of thing.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I, I got on the plane and I thought, oh shit, I didn't get my. I didn't get the pedicure.

[Dax Shepard]

But you thought that on the plane.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You did.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Also mixed with like I'm gonna be in bathing, like my toes are gonna be out.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure.

[Monica Padman]

In general. But also Eric was gonna be here and like I don't want to ruin the illusion for him.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And, and I just remember because I hope no one can see on the camera.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you should hold them up. No, I show my comb over.

[Monica Padman]

No, I can't.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, you're not ready.

[Monica Padman]

I'm not ready.

[Dax Shepard]

You did last fact check. Have your shoes off. And feet out.

[Monica Padman]

And you could see them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

On the wide, but you couldn't see up close. The problem is they're just not cut and the paint is all chippy. And I have a new scar on my foot. There's a lot going on. Okay, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't look.

[Monica Padman]

No one look. Everyone turn away.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, now I am fearing that people are getting a mental image of your foot mangled from, like, a mulcher. And that also is not the case.

[Monica Padman]

It's not the case, but it doesn't look good. Doesn't look good, guys.

[Dax Shepard]

It looks fine. It might not look its best.

[Monica Padman]

Doesn't look its best. And to me, that means bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So yesterday we were in the sauna. Eric was. I felt like I managed to get by without him noticing.

[Dax Shepard]

Cause you've been on the boat and stuff a lot. Yeah, they've been out.

[Monica Padman]

Shoes have been off.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think he noticed. But then he was sitting above me in the sauna, and I was like, he's gonna notice, and he's gonna puke and cry because his prized possession is.

[Dax Shepard]

And take your name out of his phone.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And so I said, eric, don't look at my feet. I know, but I just.

[Dax Shepard]

That's tactically not the move I wanted.

[Monica Padman]

To get ahead of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I didn't look at your. But if you said to me, don't look at my feet, all I would do now is look at your feet.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, you guys could just. You could just do what I asked and not look at my feet.

[Dax Shepard]

No, that's not how people's brains work, is they don't think about spaghetti. The very first thing you do is picture a big plate of spaghetti with red sauce poured all over the noodles. It's involuntary. Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I said, don't look at my feet. I haven't. Oh, no, no. To be fair to me, that's not what happened. Molly called out somebody else's feet in the sauna as having a cute pedic. I was like, this is about this. It's happening. It's all gonna come out, and I gotta get ahead of it. And I said, eric, I haven't got a pedicure in a long time. Don't look at my feet.

[Dax Shepard]

So even more like they're messed up.

[Carter Sherman]

Don't look.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's even more. You run to see what's going on. Anyway, Eric, a couple of my toes are hanging on by a thread. Don't try and do.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, he said, okay, I won't look. And then A couple minutes later, he said, moni.

[Dax Shepard]

It was more of. If I could speak for him, it definitely was more like, you have a gift.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Why aren't you a good steward of these toes?

[Monica Padman]

It was disappointment.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I would like to know if. Is it your toes? He likes the whole foot.

[Monica Padman]

He says the whole foot.

[Dax Shepard]

The whole foot. I wonder if there's certain pieces he more fetishizes than others.

[Monica Padman]

I wonder, too.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I wonder if he's honing in on, like, just a side of your heel. And he's like, oh.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I have that. When I see. Think about people who I'm attracted to. There are, like, parts that are random parts. Very random. Not the expected parts.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

That I like. Like.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So anyway, all to say, I'm embarrassed by my feet today.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That was one. Did you say there was two?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. My second embarrassment.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yesterday we were playing spades. And people who don't play spades don't know this, but there's a thing you can do where you accidentally play a card you're not supposed to play, and it's called reneging.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it's very.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's in a bunch of games. It's certainly in Euchre as well.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it's very, very, very bad. And it's rare. Like, I. I feel like I haven't done it since I first Learned to play 2020. Yeah. And I did it yesterday during one of the games, and it was so embarrassing.

[Dax Shepard]

First of all, you shouldn't be embarrassed. But secondly, the manner in which it happened was uniquely audacious, which is you trumped clubs and you won, and then you immediately led clubs. Usually when someone renegs, it's like you find out six hands later.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right. That's why it was so. It was so disconnect. Right. Like, I was. I. I know. I know what happened. There's no reason to explain to the people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Um. But I was out of something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so in my head, that's what you were playing. So I was ready immediately to just do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it was a. It was not what you played, and it was a mistake. Luckily, I would have won that hand anyway. And then I did when we played it back. But still, it was. It was very embarrassing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. You. I didn't notice that you. I didn't know you took it that hard. Okay. Mine is worse than those two. In my opinion, a lot more culpability on my part. So yesterday was a big birthday celebration. Kristen's birthday.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And there were little things planned throughout the day, but there was a sauna.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then leave for dinner. And at some point in there, when people get in the cold plunge and hot tub, it makes the water go out, and then the water level's too low, and then the thing's really noisy. So I was like, I gotta fill that up with more water. So I went and got a hose and I turned it on as I was getting ready, and I turned it on, and I was like, okay, I'm going to turn it off before we go to dinner. Then I came outside to meditate this morning.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

And the hose was still in there.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. I had been overfilling it all night. I'm so bummed.

[Monica Padman]

Shoot. And then, I mean, broken.

[Dax Shepard]

I just wasted a ton of water. I mean, we're in just. We're in a sea of too much water. Currently in Nashville.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. We're not in la.

[Dax Shepard]

I just was like, I can't believe you left a hose on for 12 hours. It's longer. I'm. Now I'm exaggerating in the reverse. I'm minimizing. It was probably 14 hours.

[Monica Padman]

It's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not great. Well, that's a rough way from me to start my day. Like, recognizing.

[Monica Padman]

I made a. I noticed you were in a little bit of a grumpy mood.

[Dax Shepard]

I.

[Monica Padman]

Well, okay, I did notice that.

[Dax Shepard]

I, I don't think I was in a grumpy mood, but maybe it read that way because I meditated and then I, I, I journaled, and that was a. I was able to kind of steer out of.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, good. The flagellation, it's just so funny. Like, that, to me, is a huge.

[Dax Shepard]

Failing as a, As a man.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And to me, if I did that, I'd be like, of course I did it. I mean, I. Okay, no, I would be. I would think, oh, no, no. But it's not like I did something bad. It's that I could have burned the house. Like, I go immediately to, like, I could have left a candle on and burned the house down. Like, I have the capability of destroying everything.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Scares me.

[Dax Shepard]

I did have that moment where I was like, okay, well, it's definitely been flowing over the side. And is everything rutted out and destroyed underneath?

[Monica Padman]

It was also, it's your house. Like, it's one thing if you do it at somebody else's house. I know. It's so scary. Yesterday morning, I went, so we'll talk about two days Ago, we were. We had a big adventure on the boat, which we'll talk about.

[Dax Shepard]

Huge.

[Monica Padman]

But in that adventure, I lost a shirt.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. And I. So then yesterday morning, I walked over to the boat to see if I could find the shirt, and it was closed. The boat was closed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So I got kind of down.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you can crawl in there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I got down on it and I was like, oh, I'll crawl in. And as I started to crawl and then the whole, you know, the boat was moving, and I thought, I don't know enough about boats to do this. Like, what if it moves and scrapes something while I'm in there? What if it's not? I don't know about tying. Like, what if it's not? And then I'm floating away and I don't know how to get your boat back.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you have your phone with you?

[Monica Padman]

No. And so I panicked and I. I was. And it was mainly. It was like, if I ruin Dax's boat, like, it is. It is the end of our friendship. So I. I know I wouldn't even.

[Dax Shepard]

Really care if I ruined my boat. I'd hate myself. And if you ruined your. My boat, I would be very quick to be over it, believe it or not, because I've had friends ruin my motorcycles and. And I generally take that pretty well. I'm only mad when I fail.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But it's so scary.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, yeah. No, there's nothing worse than bringing someone else's stuff.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So I. I didn't. I didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You just gave up?

[Monica Padman]

I gave up. And I was like, I don't need that shirt.

[Dax Shepard]

What shirt is it?

[Monica Padman]

I found it.

[Dax Shepard]

You found it? Where is it?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I found it on the walk back. It had fallen out on the walk back.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it was a little sketty and wampus when we exited the boat. And that's probably why.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. It was a new shirt. It. Vintage shirt I got.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. So our big adventure, which was what, a day.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It was a crazy day.

[Dax Shepard]

So where we live is on a lake. You can go through locks and go down to the lower river, and then you could take that all the way into Nashville. And I want to say that the TWA officers I was dealing with in the break room or office of the restaurant, one of them had said to me, like, it's only. It's 26 miles once you've passed the locks.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So lot to think about there. I don't. You know, what are we going to average? How much Fuel do we need?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How long is that going to take? Blah, blah, blah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So we. And we had to race to the locks because the locks are mostly used by these huge barges. Y and it takes hours for them to load all the different barges into the. The locks.

[Monica Padman]

You might need to tell people about the locks. I had no idea what they were.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. So locks help connect two bodies of water that are at different elevations. So if you imagine one swimming pool is 20ft higher than the next swimming pool below it, they build this chamber between the two. And what you do is you open the doors on the higher lake, and the back doors are closed. All that water flows into the lock, so it's the same level as the upper lake. Then you close the door there. The upper lake, you go in all of the water out of this big chamber.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And then when it's all out, they open the doors, and you're at sea level or the river, the lower river level. And there's a lockmaster. All this stuff's new to me. There's a lockmaster who controls the water.

[Monica Padman]

Thank God. I was glad he was there.

[Dax Shepard]

You're glad I didn't have to operate?

[Monica Padman]

No, I just wanted some oversight.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I didn't hate the oversight either. But again, all of it, I kind of don't know how it works. I just have heard, like, oh, you know, you got to get an appointment with the. So I got the lockmaster's number off of the Internet, and I called, and just a dude answers. Really nice guy. And I was like, hey, I want to go through the locks in my pontoon. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. And I said, when should I come? He's like, you can come anytime. But we do have a barge coming in at 11, and that'll be two hours. So basically, the locks are taken for two hours. That wouldn't have worked for our whole scheme. Anyways, we fly across the lake, we get gas, we make it just in time, we go through the locks. The locks are incredible.

[Monica Padman]

They very cool.

[Dax Shepard]

So much cooler than I was expecting. I think I thought we were going to drop down, like, 20ft maybe. And we dropped down 60ft. Yeah, we did. We dropped down 60ft. We did the math. We did the math and we looked it up on the Internet. But the locks are 400ft long and 87ft wide and 60ft deep. And if you add all that up, that's 15 million gallons of water.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What's really cool about the locks we were thinking about is they require almost no electricity. Everything's just gravity's doing everything. The gravity from the higher like fills up the chamber and then gravity drains it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And really you're just paying for these doors to open and close hydraulically.

[Monica Padman]

It was really cool. I liked it. I liked it for a while. Then as it we were going getting really low, I did feel very. Why do I keep claustrophobic? No, it's the movie. I keep forgetting that final. I felt very final destination prone. Like. Okay, so we're so low. And what I know is on the opposite side of that door is 60.

[Dax Shepard]

Foot wall of water.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And so if that something got unlatched and that door opened, a 60 foot wall of water is going to slam onto us. Unless we forget I can't swim. Swim. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

That we know. We think. I.

[Dax Shepard]

And when you.

[Monica Padman]

Here's what I do know.

[Dax Shepard]

When you say we, you mean I. I said les.

[Monica Padman]

We forget. I can't swim. Oh, I can't.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Even if I could swim, which I might. I think I can swim.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I still have a. I think I still have a case.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because we don't agree that you can't swim.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, that's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

There we go.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I. I knew there was. You're the only one that thinks you can't swim.

[Carter Sherman]

I.

[Monica Padman]

Here's Okay, I can swim a lot. Little bit. I can't. I can't. And I am certain of this. Swim up 60ft of water. I can't. I can't even. I think 10ft. I can't do. I can barely do 5ft, which is my height.

[Carter Sherman]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I'm dead. Right. Like I, I am dead in that scenario. And, and, and as soon as that thought entered, I was like, I'm ready to be out of this now. I'd like to be out of, of this.

[Dax Shepard]

And then how. How soon were we out of it? Another ten minutes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was your anxiety level out of 10?

[Monica Padman]

It was like equal parts. As we were going down, my anxiety was going up incrementally.

[Dax Shepard]

It was inversely proportional.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Which was cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. So it drops us out onto this river.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And now we're in the middle of nowhere. It feels like we are in the wild. We're in Siberia. I mean there's just nothing. And it's a really quaint. It really remind of the St. Joseph river in Sturgis where I used to go canoeing with my Pippi. Just the most beautiful scenic boat ride.

[Monica Padman]

It was nice. It was definitely. So there was a girl at the house. Earlier that morning. Who lives here? And you weren't here for this. But she was like, what are you guys gonna do today? And we were like, oh, we're going into Nashville on the boat. And she was like, oh. Oh, wow. And then, like, a minute later, she was like, you guys are really in for an adventure. And then I looked at Kristen, and Kristen was like, do people not really do that? And she's like, I don't know anyone who's done it.

[Dax Shepard]

I got the feeling when we went through the lock. Well, clearly, there was no one else using the locks other than these barges. I did. When we were in the locks. I was like, nobody does this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That lives on the lake. Or very few. Clearly.

[Monica Padman]

And then there were no other boats on the river.

[Dax Shepard]

No. And then we never saw anyone on the river. Yeah. We went 26 miles, and we didn't see anyone.

[Monica Padman]

So we were definitely doing something novel.

[Dax Shepard]

But I loved it. Cause you're seeing the back. We saw a naked woman out in her. Watering her flowers on her deck. Lincoln spotted it.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

She said, oh, that woman's nudie. And I thought, yeah, she has the freedom to be nudie. Cause nobody does this. Except for. We did it. Then we get into downtown Nashville. I'm like, you know, we got a dock somewhere. And I did look up some places, and I had a rough idea of where I thought we could. But I was also nervous. It was gonna be difficult. It was not. You can just. Again, nobody's doing. Pull your boat right up to this dock right under the pedestrian bridge that leads into Nashville from the stadium. QR code registered.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Code to get out of the locked gate. So easy.

[Monica Padman]

It was easy. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's easy to stop being astounded by where we're at technologically, but that's incredible.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then we went into. We walked into town. It was 350 degrees.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

We walked over. Over to what I think is one of the best burgers in Nashville.

[Monica Padman]

It was a good burger.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. The one hotel has an incredible restaurant. We had a wonderful lunch. Everything's great. Went shopping, which I normally hate.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You bought pants?

[Dax Shepard]

I bought pants and sunglasses.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the most I've shopped in a decade out in public.

[Monica Padman]

It was weird to see you shopping.

[Dax Shepard]

Ding, ding, ding. These pants are one of the things that are.

[Monica Padman]

Those are the pants. Yeah, they're nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Perfect day. Perfect day. And then we decide we're gonna get back on the boat. And then now we decide. I decide we're gonna go to single bimini. Mode and try to make a little time back because it took about two and a half hours to get there.

[Monica Padman]

It was a hike.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And so we come back again. Everything's hunky dory. I call the lockmaster. He's like, I'll lower it for you. It's so easy. I can't believe how easy it is now we get into the locks now, this time and now we're rising up 60ft and that takes a bit longer. Quite a bit longer. And the entire time we're rising, we're in this cement cylinder box. Noticing lightning's picking up over the lake. The clouds are getting pretty dark. We're still a good half hour boat ride to the house. Once we get our.

[Monica Padman]

I think we had about an hour.

[Dax Shepard]

Left anyways by the time we get on the the lake. Now it's getting gnarly. And not only is it getting gnarly where the clouds are at, I know if we haul butt and because the, the river snakes around, we're going to be in a different area of all that cloud. Like we're incentivized to get through it quickly because we're going to be on the other side of it. So now we're pinned, going 40 a pontoon boat. 44 actually. What a machine. Starts crazy downpouring. There's lightning everywhere. I'm only comforted by the fact that there's like 10 different jet skiers still out and three or four other people fishing. And I'm like, hopefully the lightning will hit the rod before it hits my children. It was harrowing from your perspective, what was happening? I was driving.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you were driving.

[Dax Shepard]

Rain just blasting in my eyes. It was painful. I had to put a shirt on midway through.

[Monica Padman]

That's what made it was. It hurt. The rain hurt. It wasn't like just regular rain. It felt like hail. And it was hit. It was just hitting everyone's faces. And I was like, why is it? Why? Because we were in the back and we were technically covered. I was like, why am I still. It made no sense. Like it was coming in from the side in the front and the front and the back at one point. So then I got under a towel and I was just like under this towel. But very quickly the towel just becomes a hundred pounds. Right. It's just like weighted water towel on you. But it did help with the hail on the face.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I really did think we were experiencing hail at one point because the raindrops got so big. They were like the size of your eyeballs. Some of them that might have the rain. Huge. And I'm like, gee, are we transitioning to hell right now?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's also cold. At that point.

[Monica Padman]

It was freezing cold. And yeah. I was like, at one point I. It felt like someone was just taking the buckets of water and just pouring it. I was like, why, why.

[Dax Shepard]

Why are my underwear wet?

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. The whole thing is, why is my anus wet? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How does water gotten everywhere?

[Monica Padman]

Like, I just sat in a puddle.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, it was. It was rough and I. I was like, let's just. We're just gonna. We're just gonna.

[Dax Shepard]

I was thinking several different times while I was driving. Yeah, this is a challenge for me.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like, this is painful.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you gotta see it through.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, you just have to imagine it's like a good 35 minutes of that experience before it let up a bit.

[Carter Sherman]

Barely.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But I was thinking, if I know this is serious, what does Monica feel like back then?

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I was. I had mentioned I am aware of lightning. Very aware of it. Because it was a thing like, you know, as you know, I'm sure. But maybe not because you were more adventurous, but it was just always the thing like, don't be. Get out of the water immediately if there's lightning. And also don't be near trees. Don't be near, like, there's all this stuff. And I'm like, oh, my God, we are. We are like primed.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just did the math quickly. What are the options right now?

[Monica Padman]

No, that's ex. I know.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't go to shore. Yeah, we're going to go to some stranger's dock or still be outside with lightning next to now trees, which I don't think is much better. And then we're going to sit there and that storm may stay there for three hours versus half hour of hell, but be out of it. So to me, it was just like, oh, yeah. You have one choice. You just gotta. You gotta pedal down and get through this.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I. I guess. Yeah. I was like, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna breathe through it.

[Dax Shepard]

Kind of immersion therapy for you. You don't need any immersion.

[Monica Padman]

I hate. I hate being cold, for one. I just hate being cold.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You like being hot?

[Monica Padman]

I love being hot. I can stand a. But I can't stand barely any cold.

[Dax Shepard]

Almost no cold.

[Monica Padman]

And I hate being wet in clothes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, sure. Well, I don't think anyone likes.

[Carter Sherman]

No one likes it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I don't think you're unique in.

[Monica Padman]

That no one likes that. There's no way to know people's sensitivity levels. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

It was a great snapshot of personalities because I turned a corner midway through. I was like, this is rough, man. It's freezing. It hurts. I can't see. I have to keep my eyes open and look forward because I'm driving. I'm just getting blasted. And my sunglasses were too wet. I had to, like. I had this gap between the visor of my hat and my sunglasses that I was looking between.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And it was pelting it. But then Eric, Lily, and Lincoln answered the call of the wire. They were like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. You know, he's on top. They have that huge storm. He doesn't have his legs, and he's at the top, and he's just, like, yelling, bring on the storm.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They were dancing at the front of the boat.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

They were spastically having a great time. And I thought, this. I think that's a better approach. So then I stood, and I started dancing while driving. And it did help. Help a ton.

[Monica Padman]

Great.

[Dax Shepard]

And so this snapshot, someone called it out. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but someone said, look, the firstborns are at the front of the boat.

[Monica Padman]

Not me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you are not. Neither was Kristen.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a bad analogy.

[Monica Padman]

And I also. And Molly. So. No. All of us.

[Dax Shepard]

No sense.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Just. Those were up. Those kids were up there.

[Monica Padman]

That's all I. Yeah, it definitely is. Personality. I will say. No one. I mean, I guess we couldn't. But, like, no one was throwing any tantrums.

[Dax Shepard]

No. No one was a stinker.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Everyone was just.

[Dax Shepard]

No, everyone got through it. No one was complaining.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Even Delta, who hated it. She knew complaining wasn't gonna.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone was just like this. We're here.

[Dax Shepard]

We gotta get through.

[Monica Padman]

We gotta get through it.

[Dax Shepard]

We got another 35.

[Monica Padman]

There's no point in. Of waterboarding anything other than just whatever you need to do to get through this.

[Carter Sherman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So, yeah, it's just a funny snapshot of all of our different wiring and our dopamine levels and whatever else.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it was funny because at one point when the. When the towel was so heavy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I was like, is it. Am I. Is it worse? Is it worse under here? Like, I need. So then I poked my head out, and that's when I saw they were dancing and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's cute. And I. I thought for half. Half a second. I was like, should I just do that. But I was like, I can't. Like, I can't.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not in you.

[Monica Padman]

I'd be lying. I wouldn't really be feeling happy. I would just be like, I'm doing it so that people think I'm cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. I think it's that thing that they found out in that study where they're trying to document all the different facial expressions, and they learned you can.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Give yourself emotions with your facial physicality.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I think in that situation, my brain caught up to my body.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but you're more likely. You're already more likely.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm a little more primed for that. Anyways, we got back, we made it.

[Monica Padman]

Safely, and you got us home safely.

[Dax Shepard]

It was an adventure. Oh, my God. It was so fun.

[Monica Padman]

It was a big adventure.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess my question is, you're out of your comfort zone in those situations.

[Monica Padman]

Which ones?

[Dax Shepard]

The boat. The boaty situation.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But is it the kind of thing where you're out of your comfort zone, but when you make it through it, you. Does it feel good or.

[Monica Padman]

That's a good question.

[Dax Shepard]

Like. Cause. And again, I know you and I evaluate life so much differently, but it's like, I am immediately grateful for those situations. They're so memorable. We were all so in something together. There's so much magic that's happening throughout that. And in 30 years, we'll go. Remember when we were coming back from Nashville and that. Right. Like, and they were dancing at the front of the boat, like, that is what it's all about for me.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And maybe I don't know what my fear is. Like, if you're just, like, everything's smooth and honky dory, it just blends into nothingness. And then time moves really quick. So I just. I'm just very activated by those.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair Adventures expert, if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

I think you see, not. I think we've talk. I mean, we know this. Like, you see life as a series of stories.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So for you, you're in it, and you're like, this is a story.

[Carter Sherman]

This.

[Monica Padman]

This is how you operate. Right? Yeah, I don't do that. That.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yet. I. I also have a billion stories.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Like, I don't feel like my life is without that. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

We already have the answer for this.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, let's hear it.

[Dax Shepard]

Because yours, the stories that are impactful for you, the threshold, just way lower. So it's like. And this is what we joke about, like your Seinfeld stories.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like kind of nothing happened. But so many things happen because how you're experiencing it mentally. And then I couldn't get to the store.

[Carter Sherman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, he's like. And then I knew I couldn't go in there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Those things, they're more psychological.

[Dax Shepard]

What I'm suggesting is like me in 60 mile an hour winds, rains with, in my eyes, is you looking at the laundromat not knowing if you're gonna go in there. Cause there's a guy in there pulling his hair. So it's like them.

[Monica Padman]

And yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like when you correct for our level of what arousal we can handle, I bet we're hitting virtually the same point, but it takes a lot more for me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

To feel scared of the woman screaming on the street.

[Monica Padman]

She was scary, right.

[Dax Shepard]

But for me, I almost wouldn't remember that.

[Monica Padman]

I'm never in the moment thinking this is a story. But I am okay with that because I think I am. I am present in the moments. And then later it will come up or something as a story and then that's fun or whatever. But like, I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't crave it.

[Monica Padman]

I don't crave it, but Because I don't have to.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're not evaluating your life by it.

[Monica Padman]

Life is gonna happen whether I'm aware of it or not. There's gonna be stories, there's gonna be things that happen. I personally don't need to instigate. Exactly. I know it'. I know it's coming. I'm not worried. I'm never worried. Like, we don't have anything to talk about. I just know, like I. I'm not ever worried about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not worried. I'll have nothing to talk about. But what I will do is like, if I left here and I hadn't gone through the locks and done the river to Nashville, I'd be very disappointed in myself. I would get back to LA and I'd be like, like, I wanted to try that. I wanted to tackle that. So I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a challenge. That's like a fun little mild. I mean, when I'm acting like I climbed Everest, but it's just, it's unknown and that's exciting. And I would be super disappointed in myself if I didn't do it.

[Monica Padman]

I know. And that's what's so funny. Like, I also have things like that. They're not adventures.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it's the same thing. It's like, oh, God. Like I, I, I was here and I didn't go to this restaurant that I like know is there and I can't. And like I can't go to normally or a store or a walk through something or I don't know. Like. Yes, I have the same thing, but it's very different. They're not adventure based or. They are to me, adventures.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes.

[Monica Padman]

But they're not like yours. They're not high arousal.

[Dax Shepard]

Correct, Correct. Correct.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I am, as you know, reading the Mark Twain book.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And ding, ding, ding. What?

[Monica Padman]

My shirt that I lost is Mark Twain.

[Dax Shepard]

What?

[Monica Padman]

It's a picture of Mark Twain and it's like. Yeah. And it's like a repertory theater. Put on a Mark Twain play. That's what the shirt is.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Well, he was a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. I was thinking about that as we were driving on the river. Cause he's obsessed with the river also. He, Whatever. But this guy, I'm reading this book, he's back and forth to Europe so much in the late 1800s.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You wanna talk about a guy who's like, you think what we, our little jaunt on the lake was crossing the Atlantic in the 1800s multiple times. You have to really be hungry for adventure.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then once you're there, you're traveling in all these crazy ways. You're not getting on a car or anything.

[Monica Padman]

You know, know horse.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. All kinds of. And, and yeah. He just was constantly in Europe. I'm like, that's a crazy. Back then, you're making a three month decision to go to Europe.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Molly and I were saying that when we were in the boat, we were like, God, this is like how people got around.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

She was like, yeah, I would just never go anywhere. I was like, yeah, I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Dopamine levels.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, we would go to go to a vintage store.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If there was like a 90 off rose sale on the, on the other.

[Monica Padman]

Side, I'd go three months.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Well, I loved it. I loved it.

[Monica Padman]

Good. Yeah, yeah. It was a fun adventure.

[Dax Shepard]

Want to do some facts?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I do want to say really quick that I did get a huge cut on my finger.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Another cut.

[Monica Padman]

My hands have really taken a beating in this life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're prone to cut those.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I tend to cut those and hurt.

[Dax Shepard]

Your ears. Your ears tend to get. These are your, your Achilles, your fingers and your ears.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it was scary because we, we had a Short amount of time before we had to leave in the morning for the locks because of, as you said, it was closing and we didn't know. So, like, at 9, you know, at 9:30, it was like, we're leaving at 10:15. It.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You know, and so it was like, Kathy, you know, and everyone's, like, running around home alone. Very home alone, get off the door.

[Dax Shepard]

Very home alone vibe. We could have left Delta behind on accident.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly. And I have a little pocket knife on my keychain. It's very cute. It's tiny and adorable.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you bring it through? Carry on.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't. I'm shocked. I was able to. I think it was an accident.

[Dax Shepard]

It was an injury. Your checked bag. We're so sorry. Tsa.

[Monica Padman]

I'm so sorry. So anyway, I had. I was gonna wear an outfit that had. It was new, so it had tags on it. So I used the pocket knife to.

[Dax Shepard]

Cut the tag out.

[Monica Padman]

Cut the tag, and I did a big slice. But then I was very. I was like, oh, my God. Cause we have to go. Like, we had to go, but I.

[Dax Shepard]

Might need to go to the emergency room.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I knew I wasn't gonna need to go to the emergency room, but I did know, like, this is going to be bleeding for a long time, and I'm going to need to put pressure on this. So I have to kind of do a deal with this on the boat.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then you brought a lot of. You brought a lot of Band Aids. In fact, in your purse on the trip, someone need a Band Aid. And you had an entire Band Aid box. You had a full bag of medications.

[Monica Padman]

I basically had a roll of. Of paper towels.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You have a Rite Aid in your bag.

[Monica Padman]

I do. I carry a pharmacy in my bag. Bag. And everyone benefits.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, everyone does. I. I many times have benefited. One other thing, I think I want to say we're having a fun marathon. It kind of happened accidentally.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Link. Everyone gets to pick a night, what movie we watch. And Lincoln picked Mission Impossible the first night.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

I think six. We watched MI6. And all of us were like, this is fucking great.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Really fun.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I think maybe because we'd watched that, it suggested other Tom Cruise. And then we just. Then we started talking about, like, Tom Cruise. No, I know exactly how this happened. And this. And she deserves a lot of credit for this. On that long boat ride, Lily Erica, Molly's daughter, who invented Turkey Christmas magic secret turkey. Very creative young lady.

[Monica Padman]

Very.

[Dax Shepard]

She said, I. I think Tom Cruise should open up Tom Cruise's Cruise.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it's a theme park.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I said, maybe it should be a theme park. Tom Cruise's Cruises. And so the theme park is his entire career, which he. By the way, guys, he has enough movies to make a theme park. There'd be Mission Impossible Ride, Minority Report Ride, so on and so on.

[Monica Padman]

Top Gun. Top Gun.

[Dax Shepard]

Top Gun. What? Days of Thunder ride would be incredible.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. We said Rain Man. Kristen said Rain man could be like the sensory area.

[Dax Shepard]

The sensory area, yeah. It's a good idea. So then Tom Cruise's Cruises became a funny joke. And then also. Then Dalia said you could also do a show about the people that work there called Tom Cruise's Cruise Cruises. Cruise. Cruise members.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise's Cruises. Cruise members.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Crew members.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. No, Cruise members.

[Dax Shepard]

But in pursuit of all the theme park rides, we kind of started digging into his movies. And then all of a sudden, we were like, A Few Good Men was so good.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Was that movie good?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So then we watched A Few Good Men and we were all riveting.

[Monica Padman]

First time I had seen it.

[Dax Shepard]

Was it.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What did you think of that?

[Monica Padman]

I loved it.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it won Best Picture. This isn't a revelation, but. But loved it tonight, maybe. We're talking Rain Man. We're talking. There's so many good options.

[Monica Padman]

There's so many. I think. I really. I think Jerry Maguire.

[Carter Sherman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Jerry Maguire.

[Monica Padman]

The kids will like Jerry Maguire.

[Dax Shepard]

They will. It's a great film.

[Monica Padman]

They're not getting enough love stories. Jerry Maguire is a great love story.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Classic. It was. I was thinking. I was like, my God. Tom Cruise is a part of so many classic lines. Whether he's delivering or not, he is a part of so many.

[Dax Shepard]

You had me at hello.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. You can't handle the truth. Like. Yeah, the Risky Business.

[Dax Shepard]

Whatever he said in that one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he said some famous stuff there. I mean, really. That's just the visual. That's so famous. But he's part of so many iconic film moments.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

More than anyone. Anyway, he's a movie. He's. He's. No.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, he's found out he's a movie star.

[Monica Padman]

He's a movie star.

[Dax Shepard]

We just figured that out on this trip. Yeah. Yeah. If you haven't heard of Tom Cruise, check out some of his work. Easy to find.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah. Let's do some facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so this is for Carter Sherman. Great talk. She studied Gen Z. Sex.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. The Sex Recession.

[Monica Padman]

Gen Z, Yeah. Very interesting. And I like her. She was really cool. Yeah, she was really, really cool.

[Dax Shepard]

And we debated a lot and I had to ask her in the middle. Wait, do you like debate? I should have done it beforehand, right?

[Monica Padman]

She was awesome. Really enjoyed her.

[Dax Shepard]

I really like that first name for Carter.

[Monica Padman]

Me too. Me too. And that's my. One of my facts. Oh, she said it's. She thinks it's a common name in the south where we currently are. So that's a ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Now I have appear and this is the Social Security website.

[Dax Shepard]

They would know.

[Monica Padman]

I guess I can pick names by year. I mean year and state. So what should I pick?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how old was she? Do we think roughly?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's a good question. She was like five years younger than me. So she was.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, Jesus. 92. Search 92.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, and should I. What state should I do? We should do a southern state.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, let's do Mississippi.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Because we don't want to do Tennessee or Georgia. Because it's like skewed. Well, no, it's skewed in our brains. Okay, so 92, the problem's going to be.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you specify female?

[Monica Padman]

Carter, these are a hundred. No, I'm not looking at that. And now I'm just doing Mississippi from 1992. What are the biggest names? Oh, okay, now I'm a little confused because this is top five names by state for a selected birth year. But then this doesn't have of. I'm going to have to go 100. Okay, 92.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Yeah, start way higher.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, I'm sorry.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, the year.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God. Just for that sex book, mon, I wanted to. I to, wanted, want to still.

[Dax Shepard]

No, please don't start at the top.

[Monica Padman]

That could go so fast.

[Dax Shepard]

No, start at the top.

[Monica Padman]

Fine. Okay, number one male name is Christopher in Mississippi. 99. 1992. Female name, Ashley. Tracks.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Ashley Madison.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, how many? Well, we can pick a new state. I want to do a.

[Dax Shepard]

You just did the two.

[Monica Padman]

You want to do more.

[Dax Shepard]

You went from 100 to just giving me the top one and two. I said give me start at 10.

[Monica Padman]

And for a lot of states.

[Dax Shepard]

No, for Mississippi.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but I want to do multiple states. That's what I'm saying.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you're trying to figure out a way to get to 100 now. Now you want to do 10 states. Top 10. Okay. Will you read me a couple more names off of Mississippi?

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Carter Sherman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Christopher and Ashley.

[Monica Padman]

Three male names.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

For Mississippi in 1992. Christopher, James, Michael.

[Dax Shepard]

These are standard.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, Female name Names. Top three. Ashley, Jessica, Britney. Yeah, I know them all.

[Dax Shepard]

Met them. Know them all already.

[Monica Padman]

Met them. Okay, now let's do a different state.

[Dax Shepard]

Georgia.

[Carter Sherman]

Let's do.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, then I want to do Michigan.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And Illinois.

[Monica Padman]

Should I do 1987, my birth year.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Just to make it not one to one relative.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Monica's number one.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Christopher again.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Jessica, Jessica. Female. Then Ashley. Ashley was number one in the old list. Jessica, Ashley, Brittany.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Christopher, Michael, Joshua.

[Dax Shepard]

Joshua.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you know a lot of Joshua's down there?

[Monica Padman]

Joshes. Yeah. Okay, let's do Michigan. When you were born. 1975 with Dax was the first name. Okay. Michigan. 1975. Way back when Dax was coming out of the vagina.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we don't need to talk about Laura LeBeau's vagina. Your mom's.

[Monica Padman]

Your mom's vagina. Okay, top three. Michael. Michael's hitting that top.

[Dax Shepard]

Biblical baby.

[Monica Padman]

Jason.

[Dax Shepard]

That's new.

[Monica Padman]

Christopher.

[Dax Shepard]

Chris. Bangin.

[Monica Padman]

Christopher.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, girls, the name for any season.

[Monica Padman]

I guess so. Top three.

[Dax Shepard]

Amy. Let me guess. Cause it's growing up.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's fun. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Amy, Julie. Amy and Sarah.

[Monica Padman]

Amy's number two. Oh, that was good. Jennifer is number one.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, that's classic too.

[Monica Padman]

And Heather is number three.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I had a stepsister named Heather.

[Monica Padman]

What was the other one you said?

[Dax Shepard]

I said Julie. Amy and Sarah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Sarah is 12 and Julie is 14. So you're pretty good.

[Dax Shepard]

Julie's 14.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Did you know any animals?

[Carter Sherman]

Angeles.

[Dax Shepard]

Carrie.

[Monica Padman]

Carrie's 21. Oh, that's good. These are still like. This is top hundred. You won't even let me say.

[Dax Shepard]

Will you go? Will you do four through ten?

[Monica Padman]

Heronish hair.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's. I. I met so many hero niches. I dated two hair niches before I was even in high school. I wish I dated a hair niche. That sounds beautiful.

[Monica Padman]

It does sound nice. Yeah, I. I was trying to. To quickly go from 100. It was Sharon, Misty.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no. I didn't dance for 100. It's 10. 10, 10. This isn't your opportunity to do 110.

[Monica Padman]

When can I ever do 100? On my birthday.

[Dax Shepard]

You've done 100.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone loves it so much.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone always writes in. It says more 100 plus lists.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, 10. Rebecca, Kimberly, Nicole, Lisa, Melissa, Michelle, Lisa.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm surprised Lisa's not. Not higher.

[Carter Sherman]

Lisa's seven.

[Monica Padman]

That's pretty high. Melissa, Michelle, Angela, Heather, Amy, Jennifer. Okay, now I feel like I kind of want to go back real quick.

[Dax Shepard]

Do what I asked you to do in Georgia.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but I know. I already know, but I want to do top 10.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, 10. 1987, Georgia.

[Dax Shepard]

A lot of lists are top 10.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I don't under. I. I don't actually. It's like, not enough information, but I.

[Dax Shepard]

Think it's the most popular kind of list.

[Monica Padman]

So 10 females, long. Lauren. Yes. Sarah. Yes. Amber. Oh, that one's interesting to me. Heather. Yes. Tiffany, Jennifer. Amanda. Brittany, Ashley. Jessica. Yes. Now, Rob. Let's do Rob. Chicago, Illinois.

[Dax Shepard]

1996.

[Monica Padman]

1986.

[Dax Shepard]

88.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I made you older than you.

[Monica Padman]

I'm gonna do 86 because I'd like you to be. Be older than me. Okay, boys, you're not going to like.

[Dax Shepard]

This, but I do want to add. We've accomplished nothing because our goal was to find out if the names were different in the south, but we have not used any of the same years, so we've really learned nothing. We did Georgia, but we didn't do year.

[Monica Padman]

Carter's year. Okay, I'll go back. Hold on. First, real quick. Christopher, Matthew, Michael, number one. Matthew, number two. Christopher, number three. Robert, number 13.

[Dax Shepard]

13.

[Monica Padman]

That's better than what we have.

[Dax Shepard]

And lucky. Anna Baker's preferred dozen.

[Monica Padman]

That's right. Now the girls. Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, Jessica and Ashley. My God, they really hit the U.S. jessica Chastain.

[Dax Shepard]

The Simpsons. Jessica Simpson took both of them.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, now I'm gonna go back. What did we say her age was? 92. Okay, now Georgia. 92. No, Carter's on here. I think she means more like it's an old Southern name.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that' gap between it's more popular in the south and it's the top. It's in the top 10 in the South.

[Monica Padman]

It's not on the top hundred in Georgia, I guess. Let me look at Tennessee real quick.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's take a little gandy. Well, you can look at a hundred names and.

[Monica Padman]

But Carter would be in Georgia because President Carter's from Georgia, and that's not there. Okay, Tennessee. No, Carter's in Tennessee.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

In the top 100, Dominique makes the list, but no Carter. All right, well, that was really fun.

[Dax Shepard]

That was great.

[Monica Padman]

Do we need to look at any more states?

[Dax Shepard]

No, I think that's.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I do want to.

[Carter Sherman]

Just.

[Monica Padman]

Want to look at California. Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Xavier Salamander.

[Monica Padman]

No, that's where you think you're so funny with California being so weird. Chris, Michael, Tony, Michael, Daniel, Christopher, Jessica.

[Dax Shepard]

Ashley, Stephanie, Michael, Daniel, Lisa.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, I think this is fun. If anyone wants to, like, look for their name, go to the Social Security website. The other fact is that there was a huge sim moment. Because this episode is the same week as Seth's episode. Both of these. Both Seth and Carter went to Northwestern. So this is an accidental Northwestern week.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Congratulations, Northwestern Western week.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Unifile.

[Dax Shepard]

I gotta say, out of all those elite schools, that one's at the top of my interest level.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It feels very artsy.

[Monica Padman]

It is artsy. I think. And then I have a lot of friends who went there. And they're all cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think they're, like. They're super smart, but not snobby about being smart.

[Monica Padman]

My friend Jen who went to Northwestern said. And I'm. I didn't say this. Jen said this. That it's the place you go to and you don't get into, like, yay. Or, like, these ivies. So it's, like, still a very, very good school.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it's not Ivy, so that would line up with what you're talking about.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I went there.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

Zach Braff.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And the last fact is that you're not Zach Braff.

[Dax Shepard]

Although we just had an army cherry. Army cherry tell us that she had a crush on Zach Braff, so that she had no choice but to kind of have a crush on me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I saw.

[Carter Sherman]

That was great.

[Dax Shepard]

That's great.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. That's it.

[Carter Sherman]

All right.

[Dax Shepard]

Love you.

[Carter Sherman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.