THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 23
Dax Shepard1
LISTENINGDEPT.
SLIPPERY
T
he actor, writer, and director Dax
Shepard rounded the corner at
the Hall of Ocean Life at the Amer-
ican Museum of Natural History, where
a twenty-one-thousand-pound fibre-
glass model of a blue whale is perma-
nently suspended from the ceiling.
“Holy smokes!” he said, then paused
and cocked his head. “I’m going to be
honest: I thought it would be a little
bigger.” He gestured toward a walk-
way encircling the exhibit. “Let’s go
lateral with it, and see if we’re more
impressed.”
Shepard began his television career
in 2003, as the rascally sidekick to Ash-
ton Kutcher on the MTV prank show
“Punk’d.” He now stars in “Bless This
Mess,” a sitcom about two New York-
ers attempting to sustain a family farm
in Nebraska, and hosts “Spin the
Wheel,” a new game show co-created
by Justin Timberlake. In early 2018,
Shepard launched “Armchair Expert,”
a podcast in which he and his co-host,
the actress and writer Monica Pad-
man, affably unpack the glory and the
chaos of human behavior. The pair
would be working, an early press re-
lease promised, “in the great tradition
of 16th-century scientists.” “Armchair
Expert” was the most downloaded new
podcast on iTunes in 2018, and it now
averages around a million downloads
an episode. In conversation, Shepard
Hoping to thank the Brooks Broth-
ers saleswoman for her early encourage-
ment, Mr. T. returned to the store. She
wasn’t there, so he conveyed his grati-
tude to a tall, white-haired salesman.
“I’ve been a Brooks customer for more
than forty years, and I never thought
I’d get here,” Mr. T. said, pointing at his
caftan. He elaborated, “These are great
for us guys who are anxious about the
middle third of our body: I feel like I’ve
turned the lights off down there.”
The salesman said, “As long as you’re
comfortable, sir.”
—Henry Alford
is agile, generous, and relaxed. His work
on the podcast, as he sees it, is accept-
ing that people are slippery and com-
plex. “How are we hardwired, and what
tools do we have to transcend that
hardwiring?” he asked. “If it were only
nature, we’d be at 7-Eleven at all times,
foraging for winter.”
Shepard studied anthropology at
U.C.L.A., and he often invokes his
education on the podcast. “The No. 1
thing that people make fun of me about
is how frequently I mention I was an
anthropology major,” he said. “When
we do live shows, someone will raise
their hand to ask a question, and it’ll
be ‘Hey, what did you major in?’”
Shepard, who is forty-four, tall, and
athletic, was wearing a striped sweater
over an “Armchair Expert” T-shirt. He
and Padman have recorded more than
a hundred and fifty episodes, inter-
viewing a mix of celebrities (Will Fer-
rell, Gwyneth Paltrow), intellectuals
(the developmental psychologist Todd
Rose, the evolutionary biologist Bret
Weinstein), and celebrity intellectuals
(Esther Perel, Bill Nye). Even Shep-
ard’s real-life conversations are pep-
pered with facts—“The ratio of a hu-
man’s body-mass index compared with
his penis length is astronomical,” he
said, while passing a diorama of early
man—and each episode of “Armchair
Expert” ends with a calm and thor-
ough fact-check, led by Padman. The
probing, gentle rhythm of their con-
versation sometimes mimics that of a
therapy session. Shepard hopes that
his own vulnerability—he speaks often
and frankly about his sobriety, his ca-
reer, and his marriage to the actress
Kristen Bell, who was his first guest—
will make people feel more comfort-
able disclosing their own fears and
weaknesses.
“A lot of our guests want me to know
that they feel flawed, too,” Shepard
said. He has come to understand that
impulse—our desire to admit to im-
perfection—contextually: “Evolution-
arily and culturally, we live in a man-
ner that’s so different from how we
were designed to live. We used to live
in groups of a hundred people, and the
illusion of perfection couldn’t possibly
be maintained. You saw people shit on
the side of the house; you heard your
aunt and uncle having sex in the nexthut over. Now we live in very private
ways, and we all think that everyone
else has this figured out.” It has been
instructive for Shepard to see how his
peers and his idols manage the diffi-
cult work of being alive. “It confirmed
my suspicion that fame and money
don’t cure any existential ailments,” he
said. “That was the fairy tale that I
bought into. But, if it’s not that, what
is it? I’m endlessly interested in whatworks for people, and what I can copy
or emulate. That’s the A.A. model,” he
added. “Find somebody who has what
you want, and then figure out how they
got what they have.”
Shepard wandered into the Hall of
Human Origins. When it opened, in
1921, it was one of the first museum
exhibits to explore human evolution.
“Oh, my gosh, early hominids! Look
how tiny and cute!” Shepard exclaimed,
walking toward a pair of australopith-
ecines, the furry, bipedal primates that
lived three and a half million years
ago and stood around four feet tall.
Fossils of their footprints suggest that
the male had had his arm curled
around his female companion as they
trekked together through a field of
fresh volcanic ash. “They’re adorable,”
Shepard said. “So sweet.” He moved
on to a diorama of a Neanderthal
campsite. A male wielded a sharpened
stick. “Now, look at this beastly son
of a gun,” Shepard said. His voice was
admiring.
—Amanda Petrusich